Confessions of a Cat-holic (30)

The audience seemed to be distracted by my face no matter what I said or did. The potential discredit of my performances had been my greatest worry and pain.

That was what I wrote to all the top colleges, including Yale, Duke, Chicago, Columbia, Brown, and Cornell. I ended up getting into all of them except Yale. But guess what, I was later raped by a Yalie, because he claimed that my entries to all the top colleges were just a result of my seductive looks and that I did not deserve a scholarship because I was just a girl with an above average appearance, and nothing else. Okay, thank you Yale. Thank you for raping me, because I was nothing else but a hole with two boobs, nevermind the brain. All the pretty girls should all get ready to be fucked by a Yalie. Why? Because they deserved to be fucked.

Could you guess my intentions of writing this essay despite the fact that I was only a beginner of guzheng? Who was laughing in the sea of audience during my performance? Only colleges who cared enough would know. That very person later became my roommate at Columbia in my first year of college. Out of all the colleges that had accepted me, I chose Columbia because Clara Chui did not get into any other colleges except Columbia and Columbia made it clear enough to give her a package to make sure she could attend too. You could call it fate, but I wouldn't say it was serendipity again. Small world was not so small. I would like to believe that it was providence.

This was what I wrote to Cornell, a school which I wanted to get in the most.

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Tell us how you define life.

Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene suggests we are merely survival machines, the short-lived combinations of immortal genes. I am generally enamored of such scientific viewpoints, as they make the question of what life is go away and let me concentrate on what I like. However, reading Camus' philosophical fiction the Stranger or the Outsider, I confronted the two basic possibilities: the search for meaning is sensible or it is futile. Specifically addressing natural phenomena, Camus makes the claims that scientific inquiry and reasoning can never account for reality. He asserts that human existence is not a special case among natural phenomena, and that it cannot be explained rationally.

While I agree with Camus that one should never lose sight of one's gut feelings, the "flesh", I remain committed to the beauty of the intellect. I like theories. I like mathematical figures. As an enthusiastic scholar, I aspire both to be reasonable and to stay passionate about every aspect of life. I want to be like Richard Bach's Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Unlike the rest of the flock, he is not concerned with preying but with flying at great speed. Though he is occasionally put to test, he resists remaining ordinary and eventally succeeds in lifting himself out of ignorance as a creature of excellence, intelligence and skill. To me, human existence is not merely about the maintenance of basic life but also the achievement of breakthroughs in human activities.

No book conveys the meaning of life, but every book may contain some clue. Reading these books with their widely differing views of human existence, I feel that no one can truly explain life. Nonetheless, I want to stick to my own dream of flying higher and seeing further. I do not think invention and discovery are meaningless, because my gut likes it, and I do not always need to question my gut.

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Now, who was that strange outsider who aimed to fly higher and see further? Who had endless passion in flying at great speed instead of coping with life like Jonathan Livingston Seagull? Colleges like Cornell, Brown and Columbia, even UPenn would know. Yes, like many people described, I did everything out of purpose. That was my purpose of applying to America. That was my purpose of spending endless nights editing my essays. That was my purpose of showing not telling what it was like to be in my situations. That was my purpose of writing out my angers, my frustrations and my hatred towards a first generation new immigrant from the shantytowns of Wanchai, who knew nothing but putting me down so that she could look better.

I liked green, I liked the Hong Kong Green Invention Fair where I was nominated to be the master of ceremony. I even had a monthly donation to Greenpeace. I wished everyone go green and use his creativity to make Hong Kong a better place.