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 patients to find “donors” within weeks in China. To escape persecution, my parents chose to permanently remain in America, becoming high-profile activists for human rights in China.

During the past twenty years, my mother has become a voice for the voiceless. She has devoted every minute of her time outside of work to activism, giving hundreds of talks and accepting numerous interviews on the atrocities in communist China, all of which have jeopardized my family’s chance of returning to China. Vacation days were spent driving hours to give human rights talks, and summer breaks spent flying to Washington D.C., asking members of Congress to take action. I accompanied my mother on many of these trips, and while they weren’t vacations, I truly enjoyed them more than anything an easy day at home could’ve offered me. They were precious moments where I could bond with my mother while making a difference in the world.

I was inspired by my mother and wanted to follow in her footsteps. In 4th grade, I made a poster on the Tiananmen Massacre for history class. My teacher was amazed, and it was all the encouragement I needed to believe that even as a nine-year-old, I could contribute to the efforts of those fighting for justice in China. The following year, I won a prize at History Day L.A.for my project on the Cultural Revolution in China. To me, the ongoing persecution of Falun Gong was similar to the Cultural Revolution; they were both results of the Chinese Communist Party’s intolerance towards independent thinking.

In the past years, I’ve been able to extend my human rights activism beyond school. For almost ten years, I’ve been joining Amnesty International in writing letters to prisoners of conscience, many of which were written in Chinese and mailed to labor camps and prisons in China. When I was fifteen, Visual Artist Guild invited me to perform traditional Chinese music at the 30-year Tiananmen Massacre commemoration. I had been learning pipa, a traditional Chinese lute, and felt honored to perform at such an important event. I met survivors of the Tiananmen Massacre, including Fang Zheng, who lost both of his legs after being run over by a tank, and Jeff Widener, one of the authors of the “Tank Man” photo. It was also my first time being interviewed by media on my stance on human rights in China. I thought, “Wow! My photo and name have been published on the internet, I’m officially a dissident. Just like my parents.”

Being able to contribute to the collective efforts for justice in China, however trivial my actions may be, has been the most rewarding experience of my upbringing. I am extremely fortunate to have been born in the U.S., where I can cherish freedom and the ability to speak out for those who cannot.