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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?
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