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(10/15/15 6:08am)
When I was in eighth grade, I had an English teacher named Mrs. Johnson. During the last period of the school day, I would sit in the back corner of her classroom and listen while she led recitations of “Julius Caesar” or discussions of film scenes from “Amadeus.” Everyone in the class loved her. I trusted her not just as a teacher but also as my mentor during times of insecurity. In my mind, her words still speak to me with the same colorful, yet sensitive candor that seemed to listen even to what I didn’t know how to express.
(09/17/15 6:09am)
There’s something special about childhood. It’s a time before you come to a rational awareness of the world around you—when nonsense makes sense, and fresh sensations flood your senses with innumerable possibilities. It’s a season when imagination bears fruit into reality, when your mind can create something out of nothing. Emotions are new, exciting, curious—sometimes scary, but often wonderful.
(09/03/15 4:36am)
Until a few years ago, I thought I knew what it meant to be a good listener. It meant being quick to hear and slow to speak. It meant having a calm demeanor, a warm smile and a steady shoulder on which a friend could cry. It meant commitment and trust. It meant sacrifice. It meant love.
(06/01/15 12:32pm)
Before first grade, I hadn’t thought much about how my words or actions could have the potential to hurt the people around me. I remember during one brisk, cloudy afternoon at my elementary school, everyone in our class had dispersed across the crowded blacktop at recess to play a game of tag. One of my friends, a girl named Melissa, started running after me as soon as she became “it” and grabbed hold of the edge of my jacket. I quickly slipped out of the coat to avoid getting tagged, and soon the two of us were each pulling on a sleeve at either end trying to get the other to let go. Both of us laughed and shuffled our feet in playful nervousness as we watched to see who would yield first.
(02/27/15 10:38am)
Exactly 12 years ago on this day, Feb. 27 2003, the earth lost a human being who could never be replaced. His name was Fred McFeely Rogers, but children around the world knew him simply as Mister Rogers—the soft-spoken, kind-hearted man on TV who lived around the corner of the neighborhood and greeted us every morning with a song and a smile. Clad in one of his iconic, hand-knit cardigans, he’d sit down on his bench and speak to us openly and unassumingly, as if we were guests in his living room. In a time when children’s media was offering little but slapstick humor and casual violence, Mister Rogers revitalized educational programming by creating a safe space for wholesome conversation and teaching. The Neighborhood was an intimate community where children and adults alike were welcome to listen, live and learn without fear or judgment.
(02/13/15 9:53am)
As this year’s tenting season comes to an end, I’m reminded of something that makes Duke particularly unique among top universities in the United States. We live in a nation that takes pride in both our innovative thinkers and our transcendent athletes, but for some reason, colleges here seem to find difficulty in reconciling these two realms of achievement. Rarely does one find an institution that can foster world-class academics and a stellar sports programs without having to compromise one for the other. Indeed, there seems to be a persisting cultural myth in our discourse that assumes the identities of scholar and athlete to be mutually exclusive—as if the mind and the body have to exist as separate entities within our being.
(01/30/15 10:40am)
Over the years, people have adopted numerous metaphors to illustrate the wondrously dynamic nature of the United States Constitution, but among my personal favorites is John Dickinson’s likening of the ideal democratic government to a solar system. Within our galaxy, massive planetary bodies exert their opposing gravitational forces upon each other, such that the consequent interplay between push and pull factors allows each body to stabilize its respective orbital course. In a similar way, conflicting interests in the political realm collide against each other with forces of ideological energy, while simultaneously maintaining balance within the overall system amid the chaos of individually competing ideas. Thus, as participants in democracy, we all become witnesses to a paradox of quasi-divine proportions, in which something is created out of nothing—where a unifying sense of order is somehow forged from a milieu of partisan disorder.
(01/16/15 10:40am)
Over the past few weeks, I’ve felt that something crucial has been missing from our conversations about race. It’s hard to believe that not even two months have elapsed since the grand jury decisions regarding the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner were released. Within such a short time, waves of dissent have ravaged the American conscience with storms of a highly charged racial discourse. Often lost amid this whirlwind of passions, however, is the opportunity for us to discuss the more fundamental issue that is being engaged, but not directly addressed, in our language.
(11/12/14 10:18am)
I don’t usually think much of it, but whenever I meet someone for the first time, I am born again. There’s something special that happens every time our minds put a face and a name together—a unique persona is created from the dust of the unknown. So while I may think that I’m still the same person as before, it’s not necessarily the case—in the mind of the other person, I am reshaped into an image of his or her making. In this way, I am a different person to different people.
(10/29/14 9:24am)
Early in my life I learned what it was like to live in linguistic limbo—where I could understand a language that I couldn’t speak. Growing up in an immigrant household meant that my conversations with family members were generally reciprocated in two tongues—my mom and grandparents would speak to me in Korean, while I would respond in English. At the time, the interchange seemed so natural that I hardly noticed how my voice couldn’t articulate the very sentences my ears so easily comprehended. Still, I felt something special taking form whenever we spoke. We were creating a discourse that was ours alone, a makeshift system of syntax and semantics that bridged the gap that language left behind. Boundaries were broken and chasms were crossed, for language was to us the sharing of souls, not words.
(10/15/14 8:54am)
They say that just by looking at an object you can faintly hear the echoes of its past whispering to you in the present. While studying abroad in London this semester, I’ve spent hours in city museums listening for these voices, gazing through the glass windows at Constable paintings, Handel transcriptions and Shakespeare manuscripts to catch even a murmur of the rich stories they have to tell.
(10/01/14 8:43am)
At some point during my early years in middle school, I lost my voice. It’s hard for me to explain how it happened because I’m reluctant to relive that life I once lived. Why would I ever unearth a corpse that was buried long ago and have its specter haunt me again?
(09/17/14 10:41am)
Sometimes when I’m alone in Perkins worrying about how my paper due the next morning will ever write itself, my mind takes a detour to marvel at the wealth of ideas that must continually be flowing throughout campus. With the combination of renowned professors and inquisitive students found at Duke, it’s no surprise that this University has become the birthplace of numerous innovative questions and solutions.
(09/03/14 10:54am)
As a child, I used to think the trees outside my house grew as high as they did because they were trying to touch the sky. I remember having this in mind one day when I wandered from my backyard and skipped over to a field that lay tucked away from view. Fresh, undisturbed grasses tickled my bare little feet while warm breezes wafted past me like a mother’s whisper as I entered into this private world of mine.
