idealism and reality: a scholarship essay

Quite funny that I only return to this repository at the end of the school year. This is hardly my best -- it was completed in a few hours and one editing cycle (far less effort than deserved, seeing the money involved). It did however form part of a successful application for a scholarship worth $8,000 USD so there may be some merit in it for drawing upon for some future use.

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Over the course of my life, I have developed contrasting sets of ideals and realities. I, like many students, have been frequently exposed to the conflict of idealism versus realism in many ways, from the issue of the theoretical versus the applied in my course of study, to the issue of my aspirations versus my realities when it comes to planning my future life.

Being a cross-migrant who has migrated between Maine and my birth country of Singapore several times, I have often observed such a conflict in the issues related to cultural diffusion and culture clash. The age of five, I just migrated to the United States, and I had yet to know the realities of culture shock, xenophobia or self-segregation. But over the years, I observed in both the United States and Singapore how potentially rich friendships were never built because of a lingering prejudice that believes that superficial differences can never be reconciled; I observed how much cultural wealth remained locked up, unempathized, and unshared because of a failure to build bridges. "East is East, and West is West, and the twain shall never meet," Kipling is often quoted from his famous poem "The Ballad of East and West." I do not fault Kipling for making this remark, for he describes the reality of the world's current inability to deal with multiculturalism. Throughout my life however, the ideals inside me have refused to believe that reality should always be that way.

When I was ten and returned to the Singaporean education system, yet again I faced the conflict of idealism and reality. Many things associated with the United States, from products to expatriate employees to education, enjoy high social prestige, but also great resentment from the population. Until my new friends knew me better, I was taunted with the cry of "American boy," because it was perceived that I had led a luckier life by having a chance to live in the United States. But what had not been known was that I had moved back because of my parents' divorce, where my father – the sole breadwinner – had decided to abandon the family and we were living solely on child support, alone in the United States and without support. We had scraped up financial resources to return to Singapore due to reasons that seem in retrospect, like idealism: my mother would have a better chance of working in Singapore; we could console ourselves with Singapore's new international math scores; we could have the support of our family.

For a few years, this worked, and my mother found a job in her old field of architectural drafting. Eventually however, the reality of the Asian economic recession hit, and she was retrenched after only two years on the job. Unlike what we had anticipated, my mother's extended family was plagued with infighting and had been of limited help to us. In addition, with the reality of the increasing rigidity and streaming procedures in Singapore that threatened to prevent me from going to college, and along with the repressive political climate, my mother was convinced that it was in our best interests to once return again to Maine. In 2007, my mother obtained a job at Bath Iron Works, where a new flow of income relieved the pressure on our family expenses, but at the same time, obscured to financial aid offices the large amount of debt my family had accumulated over the years simply trying to pay living expenses and rent, subsisting solely on food stamps and child support.

The people of South Portland High School have already done a great deal to aid my family in dealing with our financial realities, while the school has also nurtured my ideals through classes from English to French to Government to Economics. Together this has cultivated in me the dual desires to study linguistics and pursue political reform in my birth country of Singapore. Linguistics is a cross discipline that combines the fields of philosophy, neuroscience and psychology, history, multiculturalism, language arts and the acquisition of languages, acoustics, physics, and even calculus. Linguistics especially appeals to me because of the many ways it promises to build bridges between not only academic fields of study and research, but among communities and cultures, by studying cultural and language interactions. Particularly important to me is educating the public about the nature of language, especially when it pertains to issues like cultural interaction and immigration. Yet, a youth's ideals are often checked by his realities. This scholarship would lift a substantial burden off my family, who will struggle to send both me and my sister to college, and this scholarship would in effect, make aspiration a reality. In return, it is my hope that by having the disparity between aspiration and reality rectified, that I will one day have the ability to do the same for others, even cultures. Must ideal be forever separate from reality?

true world history

Subject: AP World History (SPHS) [note: second year of implementation]

Text(s) referred to: Traditions and Encounters, ISBN 0-07-295754-9

Prompt: "Please read the 'Preface' within your book, pages xxix through xli. Respond to the following prompts: 1) Discuss the concept of 'Globalization' [sic] and the desirability to view history through a global perspective. 2) How does the theme of "Traditions" assist you in organizing [sic] 10,000 years of history? 3) How does the theme of "Encounters" assist you in understanding the effects of the interactions of people across time?"

Remarks: My main reason for publishing this is the thoughts and sentiments conveyed in the first and last parts of the essay and which are going to be part of another post that I have wanted to write for some time now. Forgive the Latin-cognate word inflation and the cheesy use of some terms. I had to address the multi-faceted concerns of the prompt, and I tried to make my response to 2) as least clichéd as possible.


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WHEN I WAS YOUNG, I learnt to keep two separate sets of history: One from an American perspective, and the other from a Singaporean perspective.

The first was naturally taught to me directly, supplemented by the appropriate classroom and library literature. The latter was retained from what had been taught to me in Singaporean kindergarten, my heritage that my parents tried to make me remember, as well as the various books that had come from Singapore lay scattered throughout my house. The former enjoyed dominance, and I remember always yearning to discuss the other half of history I had but often had little opportunity to discuss, and found creative ways to weave it into my essays and class discussions, to the dismay of my teachers. Though I enjoyed American history, and lapped up the battles and wars of America's past, somehow, I felt discontent that I always had to conceal one half of a history that was equally pertinent to me yet was paid little attention to. The little attention it did receive seemed to be a patronising or a clichéd perspective; for example Chinese history seemed to be discussed in the context of US imperialism only, or the media seemed to portray that as though the only thing about Asian culture was the stuff to be found in Chinatowns or Asian fast food restaurants.

The reverse happened when I went back to Singapore. Though I enjoyed the reversal for a while, I became discontent at the neglect of much of other aspects of history and the almost propagandistic view of history through a Singaporean lens only, as the American half of history I had learned now was the one being neglected and the one yearning to be expressed. The rich historical sagas of American and European history I had come to enjoy drawing from went mostly untapped. Even in the GCE O-level history syllabus, which would have feature prominent source-based questions (similar to document-based questions) about the role of the United States and other powers in modern world history, the relative powers of the world seemed to be portrayed as belligerent entities that needed to be dealt with, with the focus on their intervention, with their concerns being treated as annoyances that had to be catered to. Rarely were the real cultural backgrounds and contexts of the nations we discussed dealt with, and if so, only tepidly, as though it were a necessary evil.

Experiences like this -- where I could only discuss either one part of history or the other, but not all in their full contexts -- makes me yearn for a cultural "bridge" where I would no longer have to maintain a cultural wall between different sets of history, especially when multiple sets are all pertinent to my own identity. This forms the basis of my own personal desire to see history from a globalised perspective, especially since it is globalism that is partially responsible for my own personal migration history. It makes sense then, to start discussing history from a globalised perspective rather than simply from one local view or other. I can thus truly empathise with the attempt to document the development of all societies from a global perspective, and not simply view it from one society's perspective or other. To do the latter would be myopic and would lead to ignorance of how the human peoples of the world came to their current states in the first place, inhibiting true understanding of the real reasons behind history and the peoples we interact with.

The traditions of the world's societies is one of the elements of history that deserve genuine examination and not haughty condescension. All too often the implicit attitudes in various history texts seem to be, "This is why these peoples act so peculiar," treating outside peoples like an exospecies, where the end result is not really true understanding at all. Furthermore, traditions are not only singly developed by each society, but diffused and exchanged between societies (the theme of encounter) where they often leave their marks on countless cultures and ways of life on people for thousands of years up to the present. Throughout the last 10,000 years of history which the book covers, peoples have sprung from other peoples, amd merged and split; traditions have developed, been passed and exchanged, and later refined. Traditions and the cultural attitudes attached to them have led to actions which have resulted in further new traditions and cultural attitudes. Abjad-based writing, arguably both a tradition and a technology, passed from Egyptians to Phoenicians to the Syriacs to the Turkic peoples to the Uyghurs to the Mongols to the Manchus, where coupled with the influence of Chinese writing, forged the distinct Manchu vertical alphabet. The same tradition spawns both the Latin alphabet used in English, the Arabic alphabet used to write not only Arabic but Persian, Urdu, as well as the Chinese Muslim xiao'erjing script, and also spawned the Devanagari script used to write Sanskrit (which too found it way into China, and the Malay Peninsula and Japan) and its vernacular descendants such as Hindi. A genuine study of the traditions of the world's societies can reveal profound links among peoples and the nature of their interactions; concepts that would otherwise be ignored. It makes sense of the vast history of the past 10,000 years, where the myriad individual histories of seemingly disparate peoples becomes a cohesive chain of events.

Naturally, this is closely linked with the theme of encounter. When I was in elementary school (along with its myopic view of history), a dogma often recited to me, or at least the impression I got, was that peoples were too distant and technology too primitive for any major long-range interaction to take place, save the occasional adventuring Westerner like Marco Polo. It was though the West first initiated the processes that led to the world's current globalisation. I am now only really beginning to reverse the effects of this dogma. Taking this to heart, I would be surprised at the nature, distance and the scale of the interactions that did take place. Often paid little attention to is the significance of the diffusion of ideas between Greece and India on both countries' art and culture during the era following Alexander the Great, as well as the interactions between the Greco-Bactrians (descendants of Alexander's Empire) and the Han Dynasty. A critical, attentive, objective and well-informed study of the nature these encounters -- and the factors that led to them -- is necessary for truly understanding the ramifications of these interactions.