College Application Essay by Sylvia Wang
At the start of elementary school, I often found myself wondering why I couldn’t understand what many of my friends conversed about, despite our common learning grounds. What was vacation like? What was it like to have aunts, uncles, and cousins? My friends were shocked when I asked them these questions and couldn’t fathom why I had never met any of my relatives. I didn’t have an answer either. It wasn’t until the last few years of elementary school that I could understand my family’s circumstances. When my parents first came to the U.S. for graduate school, they picked up the practice of Falun Gong, a traditional Chinese meditation practice. However, in 1999, only a year before they were due to graduate and return to China, the Chinese government began mass persecution of Falun Gong, sending millions of meditators to prisons where they were tortured, forced into slave labor, and killed. Many became victims of the state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting, allowing international patien