Please don't think I'm an egotistical slug -- I hate writing about myself, and wouldn't do it unless I had to!
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My formal education began with Chinese classes, once a week, at age four. Each Saturday, I would leave home early with my grandfather to catch the #160 bus into Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside; even though my lessons didn’t start till the afternoon, he wanted to make sure we had enough time after the hour-long bus ride to walk through the streets and have noodles and strong coffee at my favorite Vietnamese restaurant. He was well-known in Chinatown, and I heard countless stories of life in those parts (and others) from his acquaintances over our lunches; in his slow rumble, he would tell me about his community as we walked through Canada’s poorest neighborhood. For those few short years, my grandfather showed me the world he lived in, filled with the people never given their due share in the media or civic life – immigrants, low-income families and victims of the drug trade or mental illness. My parents thought that the only learning I did on those Saturdays happened in a rented church basement with thirty other Chinese children, but it was my grandfather's informal lessons that would be the ones that stayed with me for life.
There weren’t many trips after my grandfather passed away, and I stopped thinking about that community for a long time. When I did finally hear about Chinatown again, it was through news reports that had rewritten the Chinatown of my childhood as a drug-infested war zone. Politicians, police officers and addiction experts argued constantly about what to do with Vancouver’s “drug problem” in the Downtown Eastside, while the residents there rarely held the media spotlight; the predominant opinion in Vancouver was that this was an area to avoid or ignore. To see the state of affairs for myself, I returned to Chinatown on my own after ten years away. The old apartments where my grandfather had played mah-jongg, the butcher’s shops, the grocery stores, and the stretch along East Hastings that the city’s homeless nonetheless call home seemed to have only grown cleaner and quieter. The downtown area’s violent reputation was a fiction, and these people – once neighbors of my grandfather’s – had to live with the consequences of that story.
I know what living under social misconceptions is like. After a complete recovery from an eating disorder, I found that I had to keep convincing prospective employers and schools, families and friends that I am more capable than ever before, simply because I refused to hide my illness. These experiences with social discrimination compelled me to start volunteering for a legal aid society, and change my academic focus to critical theory; since then, my interest in human rights, environmental and health issues have driven all my activities. For example, my graduating essay focuses on the same-sex marriage debate and the use of speech-act theory in Canadian law, I work as a peer educator to help dispel myths surrounding body image, drugs and sexual health, and volunteer with a legal defense fund to give citizens back their rightful say in what happens to their environment. I believe that no one should be judged or denied the chance to have the concerns heard on the basis of irrelevant circumstances, and feel I have a personal investment in enforcing the rights of people caught in such a position.
A legal education at Georgetown University Law Center will provide me both a theoretical understanding of how critical theories are deployed in the law and the practical skills I need to represent the interests of marginalized persons. I’ve made Georgetown my top choice because the law school has everything I was looking for, namely an emphasis on public interest law and critical theory, strong clinical programs, and a location amenable to humanitarian legal work. The skills from my academic training, combined with the knowledge that comes from experience, has given me a firm desire to devote my life to the defence of human rights.
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My formal education began with Chinese classes, once a week, at age four. Each Saturday, I would leave home early with my grandfather to catch the #160 bus into Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside; even though my lessons didn’t start till the afternoon, he wanted to make sure we had enough time after the hour-long bus ride to walk through the streets and have noodles and strong coffee at my favorite Vietnamese restaurant. He was well-known in Chinatown, and I heard countless stories of life in those parts (and others) from his acquaintances over our lunches; in his slow rumble, he would tell me about his community as we walked through Canada’s poorest neighborhood. For those few short years, my grandfather showed me the world he lived in, filled with the people never given their due share in the media or civic life – immigrants, low-income families and victims of the drug trade or mental illness. My parents thought that the only learning I did on those Saturdays happened in a rented church basement with thirty other Chinese children, but it was my grandfather's informal lessons that would be the ones that stayed with me for life.
There weren’t many trips after my grandfather passed away, and I stopped thinking about that community for a long time. When I did finally hear about Chinatown again, it was through news reports that had rewritten the Chinatown of my childhood as a drug-infested war zone. Politicians, police officers and addiction experts argued constantly about what to do with Vancouver’s “drug problem” in the Downtown Eastside, while the residents there rarely held the media spotlight; the predominant opinion in Vancouver was that this was an area to avoid or ignore. To see the state of affairs for myself, I returned to Chinatown on my own after ten years away. The old apartments where my grandfather had played mah-jongg, the butcher’s shops, the grocery stores, and the stretch along East Hastings that the city’s homeless nonetheless call home seemed to have only grown cleaner and quieter. The downtown area’s violent reputation was a fiction, and these people – once neighbors of my grandfather’s – had to live with the consequences of that story.
I know what living under social misconceptions is like. After a complete recovery from an eating disorder, I found that I had to keep convincing prospective employers and schools, families and friends that I am more capable than ever before, simply because I refused to hide my illness. These experiences with social discrimination compelled me to start volunteering for a legal aid society, and change my academic focus to critical theory; since then, my interest in human rights, environmental and health issues have driven all my activities. For example, my graduating essay focuses on the same-sex marriage debate and the use of speech-act theory in Canadian law, I work as a peer educator to help dispel myths surrounding body image, drugs and sexual health, and volunteer with a legal defense fund to give citizens back their rightful say in what happens to their environment. I believe that no one should be judged or denied the chance to have the concerns heard on the basis of irrelevant circumstances, and feel I have a personal investment in enforcing the rights of people caught in such a position.
A legal education at Georgetown University Law Center will provide me both a theoretical understanding of how critical theories are deployed in the law and the practical skills I need to represent the interests of marginalized persons. I’ve made Georgetown my top choice because the law school has everything I was looking for, namely an emphasis on public interest law and critical theory, strong clinical programs, and a location amenable to humanitarian legal work. The skills from my academic training, combined with the knowledge that comes from experience, has given me a firm desire to devote my life to the defence of human rights.
