By Yemas Ly
Winter 2018 Kaplan Award Winner
*Names have been changed to for safety reasons.
Another day, another paper. I clock into the writing center. I sit down. I wait. I didn’t wait long for a student to lock eyes with mine, shyly, and walk ambivalently toward me. I usually skip introductions because it’s more efficient to not waste time for a one-time interaction, but as I skimmed the paper, maybe I should’ve done so. It was a personal statement for a major application and like many applications, there were three prompts: 1) write about research, academic, or related experience, 2) write about how the major contributes to the student’s aspiring profession, and 3) write about how the student was shaped by old or recent hardship. The student looked at me nervously as I hold his life’s manuscript in my left hand and green pen in the other—red is too intense. OK, I thought: How do I painstakingly describe his childhood trauma as miserable as possible?
***
The University of Washington has a politically correct penchant for diversity. The Instructional Center, where I work, is one of few programs the university created to help low-income, first generation, and/or minority students catch up to their privileged wealthier peers. I work as a writing tutor, and these born disadvantaged students comprise the population with whom I have worked for the past three years. I have read a lot of essays, résumés, applications to internships and majors within and outside of business hours, and I’ve realized every single personal statement in which I had to embellish suffering was written by a person of color. Of course, white people suffer too, and I’ve read a few of those as well, but they have much different type of stereotypical ordeal.
I couldn’t decide on which student’s story to talk about in the reflection for this section, as the students’ suffering comes in many forms. Two people tie in first place for having the most tragic life: a Somali girl, who before immigrating here watched several of her friends and family get blown to pieces in that war struck country, and a girl who was raped. But let’s start off mildly. I’ve narrowed down to two people: Mohamed, a second-year student from Ethiopia who flew to Seattle alone when he was eight to live with his brother’s family in order to pursue better educational opportunities while staying at a house in which electricity wasn’t guaranteed every day; and Kyle, a first-year biracial Mexican-Black student born in Yakima who lived in a car and bounced around in the foster care system for a chunk of his adolescence, because his mom is a heroin addict and spent more time shooting up her veins than caring for her children. Persevering through financial obstacles, Mohamed still wanted to pursue studying electrical engineering after failing to get admitted into the major the first time he applied, and Kyle wanted to study public health.
Both are people of color, but I’m sure you’d want to read Mohamed’s story over Kyle’s…tenfold.
***
For a split second my face mirrors his, I’m ambivalent as well: I have to make a decision whether to exploit him or to spare him some dignity.
“So, what’s your major concern?” I ask.
“Um… grammar and stuff like that,” he replies. “Can you check for flow too? And if I answered the questions?”
His personal statement is nice, but disorganized; I could tell English is his second language. He has his narrative jumbled, and it’s hard to pinpoint what he is trying to emphasize. Although there are strong hints of the typical narrative of “starting from the bottom,” I also feel in his writing a conflict of compromising his dignity for uncertain payoff. He came to get help on Monday, and the application for the major is due Friday. He has a couple more days at most to get it as polished as he can. I work three times a week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Because I know that these papers are life changing, I’m prepared to give him as much one-on- one time as he needs. Today is Wednesday.
Mohamed came from Ethiopia. The name of the village or town doesn’t matter, because he knows the country’s name already carries so much weight and agony from poverty and corruption; it was enough. He describes the area in which he lived as “less.” People there had less items, less money, less safety, and less opportunities. Back in his home country, he saw his parents each night for as long as the stars were out, because they left as soon as the sun rose to go to work and returned after it had set. Although his parents worked strenuously to support their children, Mohamed had to juggle school and some under-the-table jobs to help his family survive. At age eight, when the timing was either now or never, his family pinched together enough money to buy a plane ticket for him to fly to the United States, where his brother had made a decent living and where Mohamed could become someone successful.
His brother and his wife live in a cheap apartment in the suburbs of South Seattle. Seattle has a few nonprofit organizations that have affordable housing programs that subsidize rent for low- income people whose wages keep them on the verge of becoming homeless. Although their rent was reduced to a more manageable price, his brother and wife still struggle to keep utilities ongoing. It wasn’t uncommon at the time that Seattle City Light would shut off their power, because his brother, a landscaper, would choose to buy food over paying the bill. Mohamed liked summer not only because it gave him free time to work summer jobs, but also because he didn’t have to wear three layers of long-sleeve shirts as he clutched his blanket at night. Winter nights were the worst.
***
I admit when I first began the job, I was shameless and enforced students to be explicit with their stories. Not because I get a tingling feeling of dominance when I reopen people’s wounds, but
rather because I legitimately thought they had the best chance of getting accepted. I empathized with their pain, but I couldn’t understand the magnitude of it. I wanted them to survive. They are responsible for scoring good grades, and we are devout in refining their writing to appease either them or the admission reviewers; we strive for both, if possible.
And is it really a lie if we embellish reality? In a sense, we are basically using a thesaurus to switch out their words for more dramatic ones. In the rare case where a white lie won’t suffice, I suggest nontruths.
Not only do poor students have less money, but they also have less words than other students. In addition to diving into why they are passionate about what they are applying for—by the way the wrong answer is money—they have to cram in lifelong trauma and explanations for their grades if they are lacking. You really have to make every word count when you have to condense your trauma and aspirations in 500-800 words while nonpoor people have the whole amount to talk about what they have done and will do.
***
As much as the university promotes diversity, it sure loves to pry into people’s lives and base their worth on their pain.
One of my supervisors, Karen, 64, has worked in the writing center for the past 27 years since its initiation as part of the affirmative action laws implemented several decades ago. I discussed with her about this phenomenon, and I was reassured that I wasn’t the only one bothered. She wrote her dissertation about Affirmative Action and used evidence from people of all tiers who are affiliated with the Instructional Center (administration, students, colleagues, etc.). In the three decades that she has worked at the writing center, she’s met thousands of people and papers, and she can say firmly that students feeling the need to showcase their minority-ness is nothing new.
“You’d expect the world would be a lot different after 20 years,” she said, because she published her thesis around 2000 or 2001.
Before she worked there in the ’90s, she left the country to live in Columbia in the ’80s. When she came back, she noticed a shift in writing style. She describes the style in the ‘90s as post- modern, because more people were writing about themselves in defining characteristics objectively. She recalled the writing as terrible, that people strung words together for sentences, and that people were starting to begin their sentences with “As a [insert minority title], I…” More and more people were starting to write in first-person perspective, which was much different than how people wrote when she was in school.
In her dissertation, she quotes the Instructional Center director at that time. The director told her,
“To win an [Equal Opportunity Scholarship], given out at the annual fundraising dinner, students should have a high GPA, but the audience is more likely to part with their money
if they hear a story of great adversity, reminiscent of Ragged Dick. To be recognized, students practically have to ‘go through hell wearing gasoline drenched underwear.’”
The American idiom “rags to riches” originated from the story of Ragged Dick written in 1868 by Horatio Alger, a prolific 19th-century writer who is known for writing about poor boys and “their rise from humble backgrounds to lives of middle-class security and comfort through hard work, determination, courage, and honesty.” This trope narrative “rags to riches” has been infallible in drawing either empathy or pity since then.
Here are the required prompts for 2018 OMA&D Scholarship, which targets students who are eligible to use the Instructional Center and fit the minority criteria. There is less emphasis on persevering through adversity compared to other applications…
Please explain how the OMA&D programs selected have helped to support your
educational experience. (Max: 250 words) 2. Please describe activities in which you are involved in that relate to your academic work,
e.g. internships, undergraduate research projects, co-op work, work study jobs, community involvement, etc. (Max: 250 words) 3. Please share your campus and student activities/ organization(s) involvement and how
they have contributed to your collegiate experience. (Max: 250 words) 4. Please describe your post baccalaureate plans. This may include an advanced degree or
graduate school program or future career plans. (Max: 250 words) 5. Please explain what your current financial resources include (i.e. financial aid, work, loans, additional scholarships, stipends, spouse’s income, etc.) (Max: 250 words) 6. Please share any additional scholarships or community awards received during your
collegiate career. (Max: 250 words) 7. Please describe any hardships, obstacles, or challenges that you had to overcome in
order to achieve a good academic record here at the UW. (Max: 250 words) 8. Please describe your leadership experiences. How would you like to grow your skills as a
leader in the future? (Max: 250 words) 9. Please tell us any additional comments you believe would be useful in evaluating your qualifications for this scholarship or expand on a previous topic. (Max: 250 words)
Joan, mid-40s I assume, has high status in this building and is part of the board that reads these scholarship essays. According to her, these prompts allow students to showcase their perseverance, resilience, ability to overcome adversity…black sheep concepts.
While I think it is nice that there is an option for students to tell their stories, I also think the prompt gives room for students to reduce themselves. It’s one thing to provide personal stories to add context or explain how they came to be, but more often than not, it pushes students to feel the need to let these stories define them.
Joan has once commented that the writing center is the most cynical part of the Instructional Center.
***
In the papers I’ve read, most people of color write about their childhood trauma from lack of basic necessities and nurturing environments, whereas most white students write about their mental illnesses, such as depression. But race politics is a symptom of classism.
This holds true to my solipsistic perspective, because I also have proofread my friends’ applications, who are middle-class people of color, and each didn’t have a problem fitting their experiences and aspirations into the word count limit; I can’t say the same for the people of color coming from low-income households.
I’ve read countless stories of students of color who make the most out of having immigrant parents. The obstacles from being a first-generation college student, witnessing their parents break their backs in their blue-collar jobs, if they’re lucky enough to have jobs, to barely meet their rent payments, and the sacrificing of a childhood because their parents’ American dream is intergenerational—they start it and their kids have to achieve it.
Hard work and the belief of merit through education drive these students to not only provide for themselves, but also for their parents as well.
Last week during one of my shifts, I was speaking with a student named Sam, who I have befriended after helping him with his personal statement for the extremely competitive UW nursing program. I think I’m subconsciously nicer to him, because I’m Vietnamese and my parents and he came into the States the same way. He immigrated here from Vietnam when he was 12 without knowing an English word. Communication plays a big role in his life and was the most challenging obstacle he had to overcome. He is a hard worker; his GPA is 3.8. I joked that he needed to give me his time managing skills, but somehow, the conversation ended with my heart pruning. It happened so passively.
We were talking about cooking. He boasted how he is able to cook dishes while I survive off microwaveable frozen foods. I think I said something like, “I never watched my mom cook as a child.”
He looked at me with surprised wide eyes that then began to lose focus in a few seconds. With calm eyes, he stared at the ceiling. He was having a flashback.
“I needed to learn how to cook because my parents were never home,” he began. “They left early in the morning every day, and they barely make enough money to pay the bills.”
My mood shifted, and I could feel my throat swelling.
He added with a soft voice: “Y’know life was hard… it was really hard. That’s why I work hard. Because I see my parents have a hard life, and I don’t want my family to experience that.”
I couldn’t say much, and I didn’t say much. I was only able to give him a somber nod in solidarity. I knew why he triggered me into a flashback, but I wanted to ignore it, to repress the fact that we share the same story.
***
Being a journalism student as well, I often joke that journalists live 1,000 lives in a lifetime through the reporting process; we augment our world through snippets of amalgamated interviews taking in as many personal experiences we can find. Writing tutors share that honor, but much more intimately. In addition to renovating our perspective on the world topically, we tutors also have annexed a deeper understanding of people at a level much rawer.
While it seems that I have been involved in too many of others’ and my own fumbles with systemic power play, I have only stated working at the writing center in November 2015, which is the same time I joined The UW Daily. So, it has been two years and a few months since I started those jobs and one year since I joined the journalism major, yet I’m already wailing in despair accompanied with guilt, and being resentful, cynical, and burnt out.
There is no answer to whether showcasing people’s pain is “good” or “bad,” and I find my moral compass spinning erratically whenever I clock in. My greatest fear as a journalist is to assume a grandiose God-like role over my sources and that these narratives are published over and over again until the readers roll their eyes and think, “oh, another one,” which defeats our purpose of “giving a voice to the voiceless.” It’s now hard for me to gauge whether I’m helping to improve communities or exploiting them. If you want to help people, you have savior complex; if you don’t, you’re complicit. Majority of readers adopt one of these polarized thoughts, and it’s nearly impossible to be on everyone’s side.
My fear as a journalist is that because the media is so saturated with these trope stories, our work will soon have the same effect as missing people on milk cartons; decades ago the government started issuing missing children on milk cartons and at first, people were engaged and concerned, but as time passed, consumers became accustomed to the picture printed on the left side, and it wasn’t effective anymore.
These stories are like colors in the light spectrum. Different colors are different stories that elicit different degrees of different reactions. When you present colors from the entire spectrum, bringing these colors to showcase in the forefront while also receding the ones before it, you start to see these receding and surfacing colors oscillate faster and faster and because we’re moving all these colors at once, there comes a point when everything turns white. It becomes numb. And it’s hard to undo.
My greatest fear as a human is feeling myself cross over from caring too much to becoming desensitized, which is already in process.
We’re lint rollers with one sheet left.
As journalists, we recollect and relive far more traumas compared to the average non-journalist person. Tutors share the same fate as well. We carry the burden of other people’s trauma as well as our own. I am scornful at how early I’ve burned out, but it makes sense. I’ve been writing strictly hard news about minorities since article one, and being a writing tutor for minorities as well, I’ve collected as much lint these past two years as I should have collected by my mid-20s or 30s.
While I do not wish other journalists and tutors to feel this way, I’m also becoming judgmental about why people choose to take these jobs, because a main requirement is caring about what you write. Yet, I feel alone in this hole of despair. I have tried talking with my journalism peers and my tutor colleagues about this phenomenon, but they look at me with blank eyes as if they don’t think twice or zoom out of what they’re doing. The only person in whom I can confide is Karen although a couple generations separate us. I’ve started to question the authenticity toward some [young] people in this line of work, who claim they want to “make the world a better place” with such offensive glee, because if they do not have the capacity to experience vicarious trauma, deep down, I feel, they don’t really care as they cannot internalize their subjects’ stories through empathy. I wonder if they have ever really thought what a journalist is and who does a journalist work for. There are only two answers: others or themselves, and well, you have to care about others if you’re “doing it for them.”
I’m 21; it’s too early for me to be old and bitter at this point in my career, which hasn’t even started yet.
***
During my first or second year of working at the writing center, I looked over a Chinese American student’s application. She wanted me to focus on the part of the application where students can write about traumatic events that impacted their academic performance. She briefly mentioned that her sister’s death caused her to fail some class. I told her to not gloss over it.
Little by little, she gave more detail as I pried. I could tell that it was tough for her, and I didn’t want to reopen old wounds, but I also didn’t it to seem like she was using her sister being shot to death with ill intent. She started to blink quickly. Maybe, I thought, there needed to be more narrative to show in what ways the death affected her. She was then in tears; blinking the tears away didn’t work.
Oh no. As I tried to console her, I couldn’t help but feel guilt, which was accompanied by the feeling that I was in the wrong. I don’t know whether she was successful in what she was applying for.
But I’m not always like this. I treat every paper as if it were my own, and perhaps, I invest too much of myself into it. It’s hard and draining to make these calls, and I don’t want to do it anymore. I keep forgetting that it’s not my fault if they fail to benefit from the paper as they had hoped.
I’ve met a student opposite of her who came ready with a personal state that screamed “Please end my suffering and SAVE me!” It was for a summer internship for the American Diabetes Association. It was a national thing because the chosen candidates are flown out to a facility, put in subsidized housing, and paid a stipend; it was competitive. The biology student John, a Mexican American, wrote about growing up with his mom and how her diagnosis with diabetes gave him interest about it. I read it. Yes, it had more detail, but the kid didn’t balance or blend well his arguments of being a victim of poverty, a dutiful son, and a minority, and it came off as a list of bad things in his life. I told him he shouldn’t turn that in. We made an outline, and I told him to research more, to become an expert, in whatever concept that pulled him into biology. I wanted his passion to come off as his motivation in the application.
“Google amino acids or whatever,” I said, being ignorant about biology.
He questioned me and thought long about the change. It looked like he did spend a lot of time constructing the saddest version of his life. He said OK and left, because it was around 5 p.m. and that’s when the writing center closes.
He got the internship.
***
The glorification of the poor isn’t a new concept.
Back in 1950 at age 76 or 77, Bertrand Russell, who is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy, writes
“Liberals, however, still continued to idealise the rural poor … Communist intellectuals consider it de rigueur [required by etiquette or current fashion] to pretend to find the proletariat more amiable than other people, while professing a desire to abolish the conditions which, according to them, alone produce good human beings,” from “The Superior Virtue of the Oppressed” in his compilation Unpopular Essays.
He also states, “the stage in which superior virtue is attributed to the oppressed is transient and unstable. It begins only when the oppressors come to have a bad conscience, and this only happens when their power is no longer secure. The idealizing of the victim is useful for a time: if virtue is the greatest of goods, and if subjection makes people virtuous, it is kind to refuse them power, since it would destroy their power.”
He describes the oppressed described as working class, women, or children, and the oppressors as rich, etc.
An offensively simplified summary of the essay is that oppressed people have more virtue than oppressors, because their suffering is romanticized and twisted into something pleasant; they are purer. This variation of gas lighting fools the oppressed into thinking that what causes their pain is not entirely bad and is what gives them power, which in return makes them more likely to be complacent with their position at the bottom of society. There is also a line of thought that
because these oppressors feel guilty for being the reason why such hierarchy exists, they are less virtuous as they have been involved in corruption in some way in order to hold their status. There is blatant hypocrisy in the oppressors awarding actions of resilience in the conditions they are responsible keeping intact. The admiration keeps the oppressed at bay, so the oppressors can remain oppressors.
A quick modern example of that ideology can be exemplified in the ghetto or hood. Living as an oppressed in the ghetto is obviously terrible and unsought for, however, society in general makes the concept of it sexier than it really is by only focusing on big butts, gold chains, and hip- hop lifestyles.
The power dynamic is accompanied by a moral dilemma. While the concept of the oppressed is seen positively in terms of resilience, living as an oppressed is certainly painful. The oppressed have to choose between remaining pure and virtuous or achieving economic gain by sacrificing it.
It is natural that most of the oppressed would sacrifice their virtue for economic gain, more pleasant living, and to eventually become one of the oppressors, because actually living these lifestyles has more immediate consequences that affect their wellbeing.
And we see this happening in modern day in plain sight. These students are trading their virtue for economic gain in form of scholarships and major admissions that lead to well-paying professions, which ultimately raises their status in society. It’s a cycle.
But as you read this section, don’t be surprised. You’ve thought or heard about this concept in different wording, regardless of whether you are poor.
It is inevitable that many times throughout their lives, poor people face the moral dilemma.
Have you ever needed to decide between your dignity and money?
And no doubt you have a fetish for pain, because the narratives kept you reading until the end, and no doubt I have it as well, because I used the ever-appealing minorities’ oppression, or its euphemism “resilience,” to get you here.