Please briefly elaborate on an extracurricular activity or work experience of particular significance to you. (Maximum: 175 words)
If I describe to you my life, you’d assume I’m a spy.
After all, I was recruited when I was 11. I receive assignments via email, text, or phone. I infiltrate posh Beverly Hills hotels, liaise with PR’s determining time and location, and relay intel to bosses who sit atop 20-story buildings.
Instead of X-Ray sunglasses, I’m equipped only with a mic and a notepad. I pore over my feature stories and rewrite movie reviews in the dead of night. Like an agent studying files, I spend hours researching the assets and brainstorming unique questions.
Though I’m not setting traps for villains, I do talk with green monsters like the Hulk, Kermit, and Mike Wazowski. I undergo intense training to enter the Scorch Trials, study How to Train Your Dragon, and venture Into The Woods. It all pays off when I acquire exclusive insight into artists’ lives, revealing another facet of depth. I connect with another human and gain invaluable perspective.
Real spy or not--I’m happy with this job. It’s just as cool. (173)
Choose a quote:
Prompt 2: “Translation is the art of bridging cultures. It’s about interpreting the essence of a text, transporting its rhythms and becoming intimate with its meaning… Translation, however, doesn't only occur across languages: mentally putting any idea into words is an act of translation; so is composing a symphony, doing business in the global market, understanding the roots of terrorism. No citizen, especially today, can exist in isolation—that is, untranslated.”
Ilan Stavans, Professor of Latin American and Latino Culture, Amherst College, Robert Croll ’16 and Cedric Duquene ’15, from “Interpreting Terras Irradient,” Amherst Magazine, Spring 2015.
My teacher told us, “If it doesn’t scare you, it’s not worth writing.”
It scared me to write about religion. It scared me to write about heritage. It scared me that only I could write the stories I’ve carried. But in a master class with playwright Octavio Solis, he told me words I will never forget: “Cassandra, you are a poet of the theatre. We need your voice. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
Though it is unorthodox in my community for Asians to enter the arts, it is my responsibility to push for more diversity. Asian Americans deserve the cultural translation to the screen, stage, and page. We are more than a “single story” ethnicity—we do not fit into a beginning, middle, and end.
I reached for translations with artists across the fields—whether it was filming a short at school, performing poetry in front of thousands, or working with theater professionals in Hollywood, Denver, and New York. Through storytelling, I became part of something bigger than me—team member, world builder, rule breaker, emotions explorer.
People in the arts have the biggest capacity for empathy. Artists vie to bear someone else’s suffering on our own shoulders—an act that could destroy the mind by breathing in the potentially toxic world of a character. But I believe artists do it for the same reason people risk everything to conquer the highest mountains—they are somehow trying to alleviate the burden of those who cannot live to the fullest. Art is saying “You are not alone.” It is uniting a room in what makes us human. It is making the audience feel a little less untranslated, because stories provide the most powerful and dangerous thing you could offer someone: hope. (293)