Essay Test: How Much Are You Willing To Risk To Tell A Story?

The following essay was submitted to a highly selective University.

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The red guards hung a barrel of animal waste around the man’s neck. He'd served in the provincial propaganda department, and was the Dean of a college in my hometown, but that was history. Now, he wore a paper hat and collapsed to his knees onstage. After denouncing his revisionist intellectual crimes, the red guards, formerly his students, splashed the filth onto his face. Hundreds in the audience shouted, their fists in the air. Some threw garbage. Among them were his former colleagues and students, all drawing a clear line between themselves and this wicked revisionist. Then there was my mother, watching her father onstage. She was six years old.

A decade later, sirens pierced every corner of China. A quarter of the world’s population sank into a mourning silence for Mao Zedong. My mother was one of 500,000 in my hometown standing in the pouring rain. Yet as the rain saturated her clothes, her red undergarments bled through, staining the white sea of solemnness. The mourners were horrified: the daughter of a revisionist intellectual dared to wear auspicious red at the chairman’s funeral! This soon became a well-known political incident in town. No surprise, she was interrogated. Luckily, thanks to her outstanding crying performance, she was merely criticized. No one needed to know that she only cried because of severe menstrual cramps.

Red Guards on the Cover of an Elementary School Textbook, 1977

When telling these stories around the dinner table, my mother simply smirked them away. She is the strongest woman I have ever seen, a woman who chose not to let her past traumatize her. Instead, she chose to be empowered, to draw conscious conclusions free from the communal brainwashing of her culture. With such a mother, my own childhood was not something other Chinese children would call ordinary. When other students went for extra math tutoring to guarantee top high school placements, my mother took me to meet people. I talked to all of them: the grocery store owner whose land the city forcefully requisitioned; the book merchant with a stunning collection of contraband and banned novels; the disabled homeless man who would buy me candy whenever I talked to him. Listening to these life stories and thinking about the big picture has been a fascinating experience. I gradually learned to observe and understand the world from an independent angle.

Sometimes it is not easy to talk about these stories. The traumatic history of those I love and the adversity and conflict that people face in their lives are stories that haunt me. As my mom once told me however, if it makes you cringe to tell it, then it is exactly the story worth telling, because you become a voice for others, and that’s the best thing a person can do.

I agree with her. A voice for others - that is the best thing I can be, and the power of that remark has never diminished. Since then, the thought of telling stories for the neglected has accompanied me across continents. First to England, and now to the United States.

When I became a staff writer at internship, I quickly probed the Cultural Revolution myth buried deeply in my heart. On a reporting trip across four Chinese cities, I met the founder of the first grassroots Cultural Revolution Museum in my country. He is well known; western media have previously described his difficulties, bowed by immense political pressure. Yet in our discussions he told me politics doesn't bother him; the biggest threat to the museum and the spirit it represents is the money-driven culture that has prevailed in China following its economic development and the local sense that he isn't doing anything practical to benefit the town. This may not have been an interesting angle for certain western media outlets, but it did teach me how a journalist must seek to understand stories within their social context, rather than viewing them through a convenient lens and simply highlighting the conflicting fringe issues through a stereotypical narrative.

Inspired by this realization, I started investigative reporting on the medication plight of Chinese AIDS patients. When I used Weibo, a Chinese version of Twitter, to reach patients who went to Thailand and finally agreed to meet me in person, my account was frozen for eight days. By the time I eventually got it back, my contact information and chat history had been purged.

While I have always been a vocal critic of state censorship, this was the first time I'd been targeted specifically. Other than thinking about the censorship itself, this experience leads me to my very first thoughts about the ethical dilemmas of undercover reporting. In order to reach out to these patients successfully, I never revealed my identity as a journalist. It was only after failing to protect my sources, and even myself, in the face of state censorship that I started feeling ambivalent about my approach. At the same time I also felt a sense of uncertainty about the real boundaries of ethical justification in investigative reporting.

In fact, there are many other things that I was not able to accomplish. Though I have interviewed many valuable sources ,all the officials from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and all representatives of pharmaceutical companies I contacted rejected my interview requests. Moreover, since no one has been able to compile exact statistics on the number of people who have been traveling abroad to receive treatment and medication, there is tremendous difficulty showing the phenomenon from the big picture.

Along with other difficulties I encountered, the investigative experience made me realized my limitation, such as the failure to protect my sources, the inability to meet with difficult sources, perhaps a lack of professional interview techniques, and ambivalence towards ethical dilemmas in investigative reporting. Despite these setbacks however, I firmly believe that this is a story that needs to told and understood within a trans-border context, as AIDS stigmatization and its related issues are problems that all communities around the globe face. Therefore, I hope to incorporate the best of Western journalism, and adapt these skills to the realities of China, through challenging studies at the University of (Parke’s note: School name deleted). With these valuable skillsets, I hope to continue to work on this story in the future, and find ways to tell true stories about today’s ever-changing China and the increasingly integrated world.

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Rate this essay from 1-5 with 5 being the highest mark. What mark did you give it and why?

What intellectual traits does this student convey through this essay?

What personal traits does this student convey through this essay?

Which of the two kinds of traits listed above should be weighed most heavily by an admission committee? Support your answer.

Should students whose first language be held to the same writing standards as native speakers? Support your answer.

Do you think this student had help in writing this essay? Support your answer.

Did this essay teach you something you did not know about China and if so what?

Would you put your personal safety at risk in order to tell an important story? If so what would your story be about?

Do you have any advice about this essay could be improved?

Would you want this student in a class with you?

Would you want this student as a roommate?

Does this student challenge any stereotypes you might have about students from China and if so which ones?

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I would like to thank the student who has let me post her essay here.  The essay has been edited in order to remove some details that would have identified people in ways that could place them in danger, but this student did write every word here on her own.