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My Life in Color As Told by a Grapheme-Color Synesthete
Yellow
Yellow will always represent unbridled happiness. Teddy bear picnics. Bike rides through the forest. Kites soaring beneath rays of summer sun. I was adopted from China at the age of nine months. My adoptive family provided the childhood of every little girl’s dreams, filled with water balloon fights, camping trips with cousins, and sleigh rides through tractor-carved paths in the snow. My parents came from a traditional middle-class background with strong ties to the Church and the community. Most of my extended family lived within a five-minute drive, and we celebrated every major occasion together: birthdays, christenings, graduations, anniversaries, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s. Lennoxville’s small size and slow pace provided a comforting and safe sense of routine, as I adapted to life in Canada. Although my family gave me the freedom to define and pursue my own dreams, I sometimes felt distressed by the lack of people who connected with me mentally. As a child, I was an avid reader and researcher, setting goals over school breaks to study math problems or write critical essays, challenging myself to finish a new novel every day for a year in sixth grade, researching dog breeds and preparing a report to persuade my parents to buy a Bichon Frise, memorizing movie scripts and trivia, and organizing family vacations to major amusement park destinations in the United States. My parents never fully understood how an eight-year-old could spend days on Microsoft Word inventing characters and plots, or why my academic needs might be underserved in a high school prizing athleticism. As the eldest in the family, I felt the responsibility of setting a good example for my younger sisters and relied mostly on characters I had read about in books, such as Terry Fox and Harriet Tubman, as my personal inspiration. As I have grown older, I have grown exponentially in my admiration of my parents. As a volunteer firefighter, Church deacon, snow plougher in winter, lawn mower in summer, and director of a retirement home, my father taught me to give without asking for anything in return. My mother sacrificed any personal aspiration to raise me and my sisters, chaperoning our field trips to the zoo, baking for school fundraisers, and escorting us to figure skating, highland dancing, clogging, hip-hop, piano, softball, and theatre classes, sometimes as early as five in the morning. She represents humility, patience, gentleness, and enduring love – my shooting star in a world of darkness.
Black
The black hole, the gravitational pull, the feeling that you cannot escape the inevitable. The window shopper looking in from the cold. The forgotten birthday invitation. The cropped Facebook photo. My house sat on a dead-end in a town of 5,000 people. I would dream of running down the same hill through the same woods. Each dream led somewhere different, but at least it was away from the merry-go-round of happy rituals. The Christmas bazaar on the last week of November. The Friendship Day parade consisting of antique cars and kids riding tricycles down the main road. For a long time, I couldn’t see the other continents; I could only trust Columbus that they existed. I will never forget those years of fighting for the extra percent on an exam and then wanting to trade my entire report card for a coveted spot at the cafeteria table. That day when I Googled “top business schools” and realized that the extra percent will never matter. Because I grew up as an Asian without a Tiger Mom. No one told me there was an academic Olympics. My school did not have enrichment programs, extracurricular activities or test prep centers, and until November of my senior year no one even suggested the Ivy League or Canadian scholarship programs. I hated my unambitious and ethnically homogenous town, my parents who could not afford to send me away for college, and my misinformed teachers, as I imagined myself trapped in the vortex of a birth-marriage-death ritualistic life, where a senior class trip to Europe and Bahamian honeymoon formed the extent of my interaction with a world brimming with opportunity and suffering. The race seemed fixed, and I felt destined to attend the unknown university where my dad worked as a network analyst, with the same kids whose parents lived in perpetual fear of boarding a plane. Then Wharton answered with a scholarship, and black began reflecting the shine of new suits and resume padfolios (I was condescendingly informed of the difference between business formal and business casual at my first case competition). Everyone around you boasts of their sleep deprivation, as they aim for the lush financial cushion of Wall Street. Somehow you thought it would be better at the top and yet you find yourself recoiling under a mask of perfection. Striving to be as unattainable as possible. Because you can never be too accomplished or too thin – you can never give too much or be too much in this larger-than-life world of natural selection. Unless you return at the end of the day to a dark, empty apartment. Fear eats away at your brain as you strive for impossible numbers and rankings, as though your entire self-worth rests on an ill-defined metric. You try to escape into dreams, yet awake in a state of panic. Even surrounded by people, it is possible to feel completely and helplessly alone.
Blue
Blue represents “flow,” getting to a place where you can at once find and lose yourself completely. The rain after the drought. The relaxing seaside stroll. Peace. Serenity. Silence. I have always come here through writing. I remember setting up a library for passing pedestrians at the age of two, before I had learned to spell, determined that I would be an author of books. This fascination with storytelling and rhythm led to countless first chapters. Seldom did I bring a story to completion, but I would establish characters that I could dominate over, learn from, and play with. Through writing, I would live as a fairytale princess with a four-poster canopy bed, search for my long-lost sibling as an orphan in the Soviet Union, escape from slavery through the Underground Railroad, and find love in a dystopian empire. Throughout high school, writing became my best friend. I would write for myself to showcase sides to my personality that everyone else ignored. I feared my work would never be read and consequently that my voice would go unheard. Yet the magic of playing with cadence and verse, creating something out of nothing, was therapeutic and a huge part of what kept me alive. At the end of my high school, I told Jessica Stevens, my English teacher and mentor, that I had decided to go into business. I wasn’t abandoning the arts, I explained, but I needed to see the impact of my work on others. Writing taught me what it meant to cheer for the protagonist and humanize the villain. Now it was time to put those values into practice and be a real mentor and friend. Today, I mainly write for an audience – for newspapers, blogs, magazines or literary journals. I no longer feel pressured to publish a novel. I cannot imagine myself locked in a room editing the same manuscript for a year, in a world with real people to cherish, real places to explore, and real adventures on which to embark. Yet when I lose myself in the periodic daydream, I hope that my life will come full circle and end with a story. The ones that challenge, inspire, and satisfy are the best kind.
White
Antarctica, the Great White Continent, tugs at your heartstrings and shows you a tiny glimpse of eternity. Penguins approach you without fear, and entire islands burst with possibility, as little chicks take their first peek out of the egg and their first steps as lone wanderers. Whales glide gracefully past the bow of your ship, and seals dazzle with their hunting prowess. At the literal ends of the Earth, I felt connected to an ecosystem larger than myself. I fell deeply in love with nature – and the little actions that conserve finite resources, such as remembering to recycle and turn off the lights, became second nature. Through our shipboard education, I learned that 59 countries ratified a treaty to protect Antarctica from hunting, fishing, mining, and pollution until 2041. When speaking with Olle Carlsson and David Fletcher, polar explorers who have traveled to Antarctica over 100 times, I asked if they thought Antarctica would stay protected forever. They replied with the same three words: “I hope so.” As one of the only young people who has observed the effects of climate change at the poles, I felt compelled to speak out, even as a shy girl who used to run at the mere idea of standing in front of a classroom. I began presenting in schools, compiling an anthology that would use art, writing, and poetry to promote behavioral change, and asking questions about the psychology behind environmentalism. How can we integrate the polar regions into science curricula and incorporate sustainability into the humanities? What is the role of environmental art in generating “effect” and how does one measure its impact? I asked every teacher whose class received a book or heard a presentation to think of one project that they could undertake to preserve this forgotten wonderland. As I say in my TEDx talk, “Don’t protect [the planet] because of charts you don’t understand that show the correlation between temperature increases and carbon dioxide emissions. Don’t protect it because you feel guilty after watching Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth… Listen to the chirping of birds, the footsteps of squirrels, and the falling of snowflakes, each individually and exquisitely designed, and you will find yourself transformed as I have been – miraculously, automatically, and effortlessly.” White is the color of innocence and naivety. Whenever I show second graders a video of penguins diving in sequence into the water, I see their tiny eyes widen with an innate love of learning. Hope courses through my body – hope for transforming the psyche of the next generation by showing them the magnificence of the world we have to gain.
Purple
The outcasts. The economically unequal. The socially excluded. Back in Peru after a year has passed, I knock on a makeshift door, calling for Marleny, one of the participants in my business and leadership program. She throws her arms around me, as if to say, “You returned!” The sun descending behind the jagged Andes, we sit on her front porch talking. “How long are you staying?” she asks. “Just one month, to get our microfinance project underway,” I reply in broken Spanish. “My friends are coming later. I’m interning in India for the rest of the summer.” “I would love to travel,” she says wistfully, and I feel my heart break, with hope and sensibility struggling to control my consciousness. The following week, she takes me up a ladder to her one-room house and asks to serve me dinner. We discuss dreams and circumstances, treading sensitively over the subject of the gap in our midst. There are so many unanswered questions, and at times I feel entirely undeserving and inadequate. A few weeks after leaving India, where 3,000 children die every day, I attend career fairs, leaving with bags filled with hair products from L’Oreal, cereal boxes from General Mills, a Dropbox T-shirt, free school supplies, ear buds, and water bottles, all of which now colorfully clutter my dorm room. I try to connect the dots. Between the unemployed woman who welcomes me into her home for two summers as her daughter, teaching me ever so patiently to knit my first hat and scarf, and the heads of state gracing the World Economic Forum with their presence, as security guards try to push away journalists and fans begging for an Instagram picture. Sometimes it’s a game of “Spot the Human.” Purple is the color of royalty and elegance. And yet with all the opportunities come all the responsibilities. To never forget marginalization, pain or dependence on others. To remove yourself from self-selective bubbles of elitism, sleep in the hostel, and look out your window on the train ride. Ultimately, I hope to start a company or a social enterprise that adds economic value to society by creating jobs, empowering women in the workforce, and fostering innovation. If I can encourage the next person to look beyond the Taj Mahal at the women with hunched backs manicuring the lawns for tourists, I will die happy.
Green
Planet Earth. Tasting the ice of an Antarctic glacier, savoring an Argentinean asado, scanning the Parisian skyline from the top of the Eiffel Tower, teaching English in the Spanish countryside, climbing the Teotihuacan pyramids, watching the changing of the London guards, waking up to a Machu Picchu sunrise, basking in the warmth of a Finnish sauna, cruising around the Swedish archipelago, returning to my Communist birth country as a journalist, wishing on pennies by the Trevi Fountain, mounting an elephant’s trunk, clasping a love lock on the railing of the Hohenzollern Bridge. Harmony and balance. Green also represents growth – the unbounded pursuit of knowledge. Sitting in the cozy abode of a Pulitzer Prize winning history professor, tracing the roots of the Great Migration in Philadelphia. Contrasting the architecture of ornate religious buildings: Notre Dame de Paris, Peruvudaiyar Kovil, Westminster’s Abbey, the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, and the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe. Conversing with fellow Penn Humanities Forum Fellows on senior theses ranging from the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the changing landscape of Chinese photography to the social stratification of Afro-descended communities on Nicaragua’s Atlantic Coast. “The world fascinates me,” I say constantly when people ask me to explain the linkage between my activities. How systems interact. How science explains and art inspires. Why companies and countries fail and succeed. How people process thought and emotion. After my seventeenth birthday, I traveled out of the country for the first time - to Madrid and Paris – and I remember returning in amazement. I told my mom, “In Ireland, the school buses are not yellow. In France, they greet with kisses on both cheeks…” From studying deforestation in the Amazon in Finnish science laboratories to listening to the Premier of China forecast future prospects for the BRIC economies in Dalian, travel has broadened my mind and piqued my interest in the potential of human capital – how much we could achieve if we learned from each other.
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Orange
Orange. The social color. The incredible people I have met and stories I have heard. My fellow Leacross Scholars on the Students on Ice expedition, each girl extraordinary in her own way. Alisha, a guinea pig for the educational experiment Minerva, who uses her passion for jewelry to teach vocational skills to Indian women. Selin who conducted research on AIDS vaccines and organized TEDx conferences during high school. Jayden, the most enthusiastic environmental activist you will ever meet, who now attends the United World College in Pune. Alana who showed the impact of introverts by challenging everyone to pay it forward on her birthday through random acts of kindness. Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook. Amy Rosen, President of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship. Anne-Marie Slaughter, former Director of Policy Planning for the US State Department and writer of the powerful article “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” Adam Grant, award-winning professor, author, and consultant. David Solomon, Head of Investment Banking at Goldman Sachs. The public figures I meet at conferences or in university, who inspire me with their candidness and show me facets of the leader I hope to become. My mentors to whom I express eternal gratitude. Stew Friedman, the work/life integration extraordinaire, who inadvertently gave me one of the most challenging leadership experiences of my life. Devesh Kapur, who blows my mind with his knowledge of anything India. Bethany Wiggin, who shares the same enthusiasm for art, literature, and the power of human collaboration to create systemic environmental change. Geoff Green, who maxed out five credit cards on the crazy dream of sending kids to Antarctica and ended up appointed to the Order of Canada. Jarrett Stein, whose passion for improving the health of kids in West Philadelphia through nutrition and business training is positively infectious. Anyone whom I’ve ever considered a friend and with whom I’ve shared the memories behind my smile. Of running down the streets of Times Square, as bright letters dance across billboards and city lights radiate with the allure of a young night. Of double-daring each other to kiss crushes and go topless in sixth grade, feeling completely exposed and rebellious. Of sharing fears and tears after watching the requisite teenage tearjerker. Of reconnecting after years of lost time over a sumptuous meal, with the knowledge that no matter the distance between us, we still share the strands of the past that are building our future.
Red
Love is this electrifying feeling of fullness and sufficiency, which opens up a whole new realm of emotion. There is the adrenaline rush of the initial connection, of finding someone who understands you at your worst and can make you feel beautiful in all your imperfections. Then comes the intensity of the first argument, when you realize how much beauty and goodness you have to lose. And finally that spark which makes you unable to think straight settles into a sensation of trust and permanence, dissolving all your doubts, fears, and excuses. Red evokes the bows on a wedding invitation, the flush of a baby’s chubby cheeks, and all the other hues of the rainbow that matter so acutely, but will never appear on LinkedIn. Love stretches your ability to bleed for another person. It is the rose on a sari, candlelit dinners, 60,000 words bridging 10,000 miles, hand-in-hand walks by sunset, formal dates, birthday cakes, trivial jokes, dried tears, and unstated dreams that course through the core vessels of your heart. Love is the part of life that you lead for more than yourself.
The world is but a canvas to our imagination. -Henry David Thoreau