I've only had one person read over this and she said that it was too negative/gloomy. (Then again, the person was my mom - eep.) Looking over the essay, I guess I could offset the negative paragraphs with a bit more positivity..? Any thoughts? Help would be so incredibly appreciated!
I am.
When I was born with two perfectly intact legs, my father immediately stormed through the entire hospital, cussing and threatening to sue the doctors who had diagnosed his first child as a handicapped infant. As I wailed, barfed, and waddled into childhood, my father steered me from strangers in the playground, gave lectures that put me to sleep, and practiced English with me so that I wouldn't enter first grade with the alienating language of Korean. He was the one who taught me the difference between quarter notes and eighth notes, a difference that figured prominently in the tempo of life, of violin, of music.
I am not.
And then the rhythm stopped. My father began working and it was during his absence that I took a step back and observed him with a rational eye. In those years of childhood, he had never told me good job, good luck, or good night. We had not talked. All his lectures, his lessons, his time with me; they were only one or two seconds of communication which were then imaginatively embellished by a girl who had the idealistic version of what a father should be.
The silence stretched on throughout my high school years and I became discouraged, disheartened, disillusioned. My father came home on the weekends, only to immerse himself in TV and his friends. So I threw myself into my schoolwork and my violin, determined to teach myself the difference between reality and fiction, music and life, quarter notes and eighth notes. I endangered my life to tackle on long conversations with complete strangers in an attempt to convince myself that my inherent reticence was not to blame for the silence between me and my father. I found a dusty old metronome to keep a steady rhythm, accomplished this and that, took time for my siblings, volunteered, traveled, and worked. But all of this failed to compare with the staggering silence in the car whenever my father drove me to school and drove me back home.
One day, I awoke and realized that my father was the most influential person in my life. This realization was not startling. Why did I eschew television? Why did I struggle daily to keep a conversation going in the dinner table? Why was I never late to meetings, a stickler for the values of family, and frugal in money? Because I did what my father did not.
My mother was like Hermes as she wore wings on her feet and delivered messages from father to daughter, from daughter to father. When she saw that the messages became shorter, she finally intervened by relating bits and pieces of my father's story to me.
I am.
Poverty. Suicide. Shame. With nowhere to go, my father immigrated to America in hopes of starting a completely different life than the one that had destroyed his past. I can imagine only too well what his wishes and desires were, because the same have run through my head many times. A closer bond with his spouse, the chance to give his kids the opportunity to chase dreams, and a productive life...
I am my father's daughter.
A few weeks after I realized my own selfishness, my own blindness, my father walked into my room and watched me struggled with the beats of a piece too quick for my small hands. It wasn't until I paused for a few seconds that I remembered what my father had taught me so long ago. The real difference between quarter notes and eighth notes was not a slip of the rhythm, a quickening of beats. It was silence. And my father had never stopped teaching me.
I will probably change the ending because I don't really like it. Please help out a stressed applicant! Thank you so much!
Lois Lee
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