<p>On last year’s trip to Seattle, we visited a nursing home for former Chinese immigrants. I’d been doing community service in my hometown for a few years, but this experience shed light on what I hadn’t previously realized. A lot of volunteers here could barely understand Mandarin or Cantonese, and most were confused about certain cultural differences that they didn’t understand why sometimes some old ladies got angry with them. Such visits are more of disturbance than help. Are we doing charitable activities for the sake of the activities or those people in need? We often go astray on the road to achieve our version of justice. But no matter how far we go, the initial purpose should stay firm and intact.</p>
<p>What are “former” Chinese immigrants? Are they no longer immigrants? </p>
<p>
This is really condescending. Instead of criticizing these volunteers for generously giving up their free time, why not ask why fluent Mandarin or Cantonese speakers aren’t doing more for their community. </p>
<p>
Did it occur to you that sometimes people just want to be kind, and “achieving justice” is not on their agenda?</p>
<p>Thanks for the critical comments! Great points!</p>
<p>Actually I think your essay shows maturity and makes important points that will stand out from the sea of “look what a saint I am for volunteering with old people/poor people/disabled people/foreign people, I thought I would teach them but instead they taught me!” essays. I know I have definitely done volunteer work where I was way more hindrance than help, even with the best of intentions.</p>
<p>MawkishTREX, do you understand Cantonese or Mandarin yourself? Were you able to help bridge the divide at all? Do you have concrete examples of the cultural differences and how they could be addressed?</p>
<p>I agree with jpheys here, but would also say that the topic of different needs for different communities is a BIG topic. It would be very impressive if you could address it insightfully when you’re in high school, considering (arguably) that entire professions (e.g., medical, criminal justice, etc.,) still grapple with the subject.</p>
<p>However, I wonder: you say this was “on a trip to Seattle”…do you not live in Seattle? If you don’t, then why were you taking a trip up there to help? Why not help in your own community? I mean, if you don’t want to address those sorts of essays, then you don’t have to, but that would be one possible concern.</p>
<p>GMTplus7 criticizes the people being helped as being ungrateful, but I would say: did they ever ask to be served by people who don’t understand their community, language, or culture? Tough issues to address…so just be careful in how you write the essay so you can focus more on what you want to focus on.</p>
<p>It is HOW the OP phrased it that i found condescending. And if it offended me, then it could possibly offend an admissions reader. </p>
<p>Here’s a tip about criticizing people in an essay so u come off as insightful rather than arrogant. First say something nice about the volunteers before you start criticizing them. </p>
<p>
Apparently the nursing home found the presence of the volunteers to be of value; otherwise, it wouldn’t have allowed them to come.</p>
<p>Again, where are all the people who can “understand their community, language, or culture”? Why aren’t they volunteering? I find it troubling that the OP criticizes well-meaning but language-deficient volunteers, but doesn’t criticize fluent speakers for their lack of community involvement. </p>
<p>This would have been a powerful essay if it said something about how
- these eager volunteers come with good intentions
- there was a cultural & communications gap
- how u helped to bridge the gap, therby enabling the volunteers to be more effective
- as a result of your efforts the elderly immigrants were better served and showed their appreciation</p>
<p>or if you were just at the nursing home briefly, discuss how:
- you took the learnings from that trip back to your hometown volunteer venue and became a more sensitive & effective contributor.</p>
<p>Instead all the essay does is criticize. The writer drops in during a visit to Seattle, then appears to be trying to elevate himself by by pointing out the shortcomings of others. The essay mentions no action taken on the part of the writer to improve the situation. Criticism w no action is cheap, and this is what rubs me the wrong way when i read the essay.</p>
<p>GMTplus7,</p>
<p>I don’t think we disagree on the particular points that are needed to make the essay powerful, but I didn’t see MawkishTREX’s opening post as being the entire essay. (If it is, I totally agree with you that it’s missing some critical points.) I definitely nodded along with each of your bullet points to make the essay powerful. I still think that it’s tremendous for a high schooler to have even a preliminary awareness that good intentions are not enough to provide effective service – especially when crossing cultural lines. It’s tremendous for a high schooler to realize that if you serve someone, what <em>they</em> think matters.</p>
<p>I think the biggest issue is focusing on motives of other people (whether accurate or not), takes valuable space away from showing the OP’s best characteristics [selling points].</p>
<p>Thanks guys! All of you! I myself do speak Mandarin in approximately the mother tongue level, if that’s among your concerns, many of which I am addressing here. And this is not the full essay, just the synopsis or outline of the 400 wr-limit essay. You know, just to be safe. The nursing house trip was scheduled on my last year’s leadership program, and I could understand those old people’s concerns because they mentioned them in our conversations. I started to deeply resonate with the ideas in my essay after reading The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. Thanks for all the comments. They are really helpful to me.</p>
<p>@GMTplus7 I think you have made some good points, but I just want to address the “where are the community-internal volunteers?” point. If we are focusing on young people volunteering, it is not uncommon for the generation who grew up in the U.S. to be primarily or only English-speaking. For example, my mother is an immigrant and fluent in three Chinese languages, but all I speak is a little stumbling Mandarin, because she only spoke English to me as a child. I know many children of immigrants who are studying their parents’ languages in school because they did not learn them natively. Immigrants, especially of older generations, often feel a huge pressure to assimilate and therefore cut their children off from their cultural or linguistic heritage in the hopes that it will make their lives easier. If I volunteered with monolingual Mandarin-speakers, it would be a painful reminder of my own deficiencies and of my parents’ decisions that I wish they had not felt the need to make. I could barely communicate with my own grandfather because I could not speak his language.</p>
<p>Also, if there is not a large Asian population in an Asian student’s school/town, such a student may have endured racist bullying or may simply feel out of place, and might want to avoid any activity that draws attention to their Asianness or further pigeonholes them as “the Asian.”</p>
<p>
The point is not why is your Chinese language ability middling, but why aren’t people like your fluent mother volunteering? </p>
<p>That’s the issue Mawkish’s criticism inadvertently raises. The criticism makes the Chinese community look really bad, i.e. the fluent adults are too selfish to contribute within their own community, and the younger generation is culturally incompetent. </p>