Unity and Diversity

The sun was shining down upon a small middle school in the country side as I stepped out of my mom’s car and saw groups of children staring at me, confused over why I had come to Don Juan Middle School – a place where there were no Asians at all. “What is your name?” someone asked with an angelic smile. “Yes!” I responded foolishly. Suddenly, I heard a cacophony of mocking laughter as everyone kept moving away from me. When the bell rang, I stopped and shed tears. During that lunch, I started to reflect on life, contemplating when I was in Korea. Before I had moved to the U.S., I was a somewhat naïve boy who lived in Bundang, a small city in Korea. Being constantly surrounded by numerous concrete buildings, I found no inspiration and motivation to look for my dream and the purpose of life. However, when I came to America, I valued new multicultural education and diverse campuses. I felt obliged to find my own identity and my fascination with languages and cultures made me aspire to become a diplomat. I strengthened my own identity as a Korean-American by having strong roots in my native culture while being open-minded to unfamiliar cultures. Likewise, two artists, Hetain Patel and Elif Shafak, attempted to overcome cultural barriers and sought to become a bridge among people from different backgrounds. The ability to accept cultural differences and to have a wider perspective regardless of one's language and appearance is essential for me to become a cultural bridge as a diplomat.

Performance artist Hetain Patel asserts the importance of having a strong understanding in one’s own culture and of embracing cultural differences. He first questions us, “How do we decide who we are?” in his TED talk, "Who am I, Think again". His artw...

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...nue to navigate my life.

I currently study linguistics and statistics in depth and couple my education with mastering a number of languages, including Spanish and French. I then hope to continue in a PhD program in linguistics and become a diplomat. There are thousands of languages spoken in our world and an exponentially large number of dialects; each of them represents not just a set of phonetics, but rather a group of people whose culture is deeply and immutably tied to a language and the underlying dialect that ties it all together. I hope to be granted, through the power of language, a glimpse into their culture and overall lives. With my multicultural background and rigorous education in language and culture studies, I aspire to become a bridge among many diverse cultures, to break cultural walls, and to eventually contribute to the globalization of the world.