Shadow Night Spring 2009.

Shadow Night Spring 2009, my senior weekend mentee asked me to do the honors of being an inspirational speaker for the students. And I'm thinking like...fuck. What the hella am I going to talk about. And so I wrote down all my thoughts, got nervous in front of them, read couple pick up lines instead and then went with what I wrote. Here's how it went:

Living in the homeland for most of my life, I didn’t understand a lot of things when I came here.

I never understood why I grew up differently than my friends.
I never understood why I had a dad who worked 9 hrs a day, 7 days a week, with 4 days off a year.
I never understood why I had a mom who worked under the table washing dishes, cooking in the back of a restaurant, or squeezing frozen yogurt at Ralphs for a very long time
I never understood why I always had to go to work e v e r y single day after school and on the weekends and stay at my dad’s store until we closed before I get to come home and do hw.
I never understood why while my friends had no trouble asking their parents for money, I have to feel guilty every time I “think” of asking my dad for money knowing that for every dollar that I ask, he has to bend down to catch 15 gold fishes for a customer
I never understood why my parents never made it to 1 tennis game in 4 years or why my mom wasn’t like my teammate's moms who switched off bringing snacks for them and the team
I never understood why I had to translate for my parents when sometimes I don’t even understand half of the books that I had to read in school
And I never really understood why there was SO much distance that existed in the little spaces between my mom and I when we sit next to each other at the dinner table
Being a first generation immigrant, I didn’t understand a lot of things.
Because a lot of those things didn’t make sense to me, I worked REALLY hard in school so that I’d have qualifications to apply to college. Most of the time I didn’t know what I was doing and just followed what my friends were doing. So my incentive for coming to college was to become independent and to move out of the house.

Eager to leave the house, I wanted to expand my changes of getting into some sort of college as much as I could so I applied to 12 schools. All the UC’s and NYU and USC. My 1st notification was that I got into UCR. So I’m like alright, UCR, not far enough. Then the rest of the UCs (before Berkeley) followed one by one…

r e j e c t e d
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e v e r y
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So I started being really sad because I know that Berkeley is one of the harder one to get into so I had already expected that there was like a zero to no chance that I’d get in. And so the week before I found out my academic standing, I came to visit my cousin who was attending UC Berkeley at the time so that I can see the campus and so on. And when I came, I fell in love (not with the name, I didn’t even know it was a good school) but with the campus, with the little college town, with public transportation, with the sense of independence. The day that I got home was March 30 and decisions come March 31 and so I was hella bum cuz I wish I never knew how great it was if I wasn’t going to get in. And then the following day, hella nervous to open my email, and had already expected to be a no go, I got into Berkeley.

So I’ve always loved Berkeley right? Love its environment; always had that support net work that I had cuz 4 high school friends came with me and my cousin. But I never felt that sense of belonging like that Berkeley was my home. I’ve never felt like there was no other college campuses that I could have gotten into that would have given me the experiences that I have now UNTIL summer of my freshman year when I was introduced to SASC

My roommate Kim Dam was a Reach! intern, and she kept trying to drag me to meetings but I just wouldn’t do it because I HATED walking to places when I don’t have to. So I never bothered to come out except 1 general meeting. Then during the summer she told me to apply to this SASC SI program to be a mentor, and I’m like alright, I’m here, in the summer, ain’t doing nuttin. And so I did and that’s when my life forever changed.

Before SASC SI, terms like struggle, privilege, hystory, education inequality, access, never occurred to me as problematic before. Not only was I hella blown away by my mentees (you all) and the transformation that they went through in terms of identity, political consciousness wise, but I myself realized how little I knew about how fucked up shit is. Through my involvement with SASC, I was introduced to reach!

Through out my involvement with both organizations, through the issues that I learned from workshop, through the mentees I’ve mentored, through the programs that I’ve put on, and most importantly, through the people that I met within reach! And SASC…the sense of community became the reasons that shaped so much of me to who I am right now, to why I am speaking in front of you today. They were my family. My home away from home. And sometimes they even make me feel more home than my own home does.

They helped me contextualize why my high school experience was SOOO damn different than my friend’s experiences, they helped me justify WHY social welfare and education were the right fit for me as a major. Here’s why:

Before I came to college my dad had told me “Never major in majors like social welfare. Use your education to get you a job that people who don’t go to Berkeley will never be able to get.” So for 2 years of my life I was trying to be a doctor, and then I just felt so miserable in those classes because I was trying so hard but all I can be is average and it makes it twice harder when ur taking a damn hard class and u have no interest in it. It’s like a loose loose situation. So once I finally had the courage to tell my dad that a doctor wasn’t what I wanted to be, then I went with the next best thing, public health, advocating for access to health care, then I couldn’t get in that damn major cuz I couldn’t get a B- in Bio, and then I’m like damn. What the hell am I gunna do now. So During the summer of my senior yr I said fuck it. I’m tired of taking classes I have to take to fulfill my major so I’m just gunna take classes that I wanna take and social welfare happen to allowed that option for me.

I came to college with the goal of gettin a good job at the end of my college career so that I can give my brother things I never had, so my parents don’t have to work 7 days a week, so my sister don’t have to pay all the time when we go out to eat. But college became something else for me. Through the people that I met in reach and sasc, through the things that I learned in side and outside the classroom, college became a place to reflect upon my life and contextualize it, the stage where I became conscious of my surrounding, myself, my community.

So why do I tell you this? I tell you this because
1. A lot of things doesn’t make sense to us when we’re growing up. Our relationship with our parents, the community we live in, the school that we go to. A lot of that doesn’t make sense. Didn’t make sense to me until I came to college. Until I met reach and SASC people. And so coming here really helped me understand myself, my family, and my community more than I would have if I didn’t come to college.

2. When u do come to college, there will be ties where your parents expects you to do this major and that major and there will be times when you struggle to find out what you want to do for the rest of your life cuz that shit is hard! And THAT’S OK. For some ppl college is the way for them to get to their ideal life, a good job, a family. And sometimes for some ppl, college is a path that they take to the next stage of their life and their identity to something else bigger and better.

3. Lastly, your college “experience” doesn’t only have to be at Berkeley. No matter what college you decide to go to, your experience in college and my experience in college will have its similarities and differences in its own way.
But always remember that higher education, any form of higher education is an opportunity for you to not only have a lot of options in life, but also to understand yourselves, your family, your community and to grow as an individual.

And I would like to end this with something that keeps me coming back to Shadow to spaces like Reach and SASC and it’s something that a good friend of mine once said to me:

“We are the makers of magic. We stitch hope and drive into the young minds of today, so that they can become the Dreamweavers of tomorrow. And they too, will be the makers of magic, but of tomorrow’s tomorrow” –Maurice Seaty

Thank you Michelle. This opportunity had allowed me to do a lot of reflection about myself and where I've been since first year of college, and where I am now today, and how I got to the person taht I came to be.