Me and my educational and life experience
I grew up in an average family in Ha Noi, Viet Nam. I was sent to the best public kindergartens and schools where I could access the latest academic programs and English from a very early age. I have had chances to explore dancing, ballet, choir, painting, and legos in extracurricular classes. I had not always been very appreciative of music. I remembered crying in silence many times I played, from the numbness on my thighs, the tingling pain on my fingertips, and the shrillness and 'decadence' of classical music. Despite my vehement protest, I had been brought to extra classes in music. With consistent practice and a sense of anger and bitterness, I was accepted into Hanoi College of Arts with a classical piano recital. I also displayed a painting at the city's exhibition, cast in a NutCracker ballet, and performed with the choir at the Vietnam-Japan Cultural Exchange. I 'excelled' at everything, like my mother so often proudly said, but deep down, I hated my 'luck.' The rebel inside me desperately wanted to pull me out of the old yellow colonial walls of Hanoi College of Arts, a place that I saw as nothing more than my mother's tight fist of control. Where to? I did not know.
My father and blind brother live in Ho Chi Minh City, the only school in the country for blind people. My family gathered once or twice a year–"a retreat." I sometimes forgot what my brother looked like, but I always remembered how well he mimicked the tunes of children's songs with a perfect pitch. What he lacked in vision, he more than made up in hearing and touch.
That got me to think of an idea. I spent the last winter painting and selling calendars to fund blind people. The hardest part was Hanoi's cruelly dry winter, discouraging even the bravest souls from going out and fetching water for the colors. Then came days of cycling around Hanoi to sell the calendars and the ideas of why they were unique and meaningful to the customers, me, and many unknown faces they would never get to know. I got suspicious glances but equally many beaming smiles when they opened the cover. I was so happy that year I got to fund many things for Nguyen Dinh Chieu School for the visually impaired, among which the three violins I believed would cast their black worlds into something a little more colorful through sounds.
I always remember the small reception where the students played their new instruments. Tears of joy, kindness, and peace on their faces, which I will never forget, broke the walls inside my heart for music, and for the first time, I saw how impactful music was to so many souls. I realized how blessed and gifted I was to be under the 'control' of my mother. But more than anything, I knew how my music, something I had so soulfully hated, could be the thing that would rescue the souls of many 'less fortunate' than me in the many meanings of those two words. I used to hate that, thinking of myself as a cursed songbird trapped in a cage, chirping for others' pleasures while I was singing to bring joy and hope to many, and that was the most beautiful thing I had been so fortunately blessed with.
That year, I finished secondary school and passed the exam at Chu Van An National High School for the Gifted. That is the dream school with the lowest acceptance rate in Ha Noi. I was surprised when I received the news that I got into the school because my mock test scores had never met the school's requirements. But I was too stubborn to quit my dream. I did work hard and practiced a lot to pass the exam. Soon, I needed help with the honored subject - Japanese, with its reverse grammar structures and kanji. When I thought that all the subjects of high school scared me, a light glimmered in me. I realized the beauty of math and physics.
On the one hand, the beauty of math can be seen in the harmony, patterns, and structures of numbers and forms – classical ideals of balance and symmetry. I am addicted to three-dimensional geometry, which many friends find hard. Once, I had a ball in my hand, a sphere, the 3-D analog of the circle; luckily, I could expose it clearly on paper, one plane, thanks to my visualization. On the other hand, in the physics world, the entire classical one is so much more complex than what we see, and the energies we can account for are humbling, which makes the beauty more whole and more precise—realizing that I studied hard after my blocked schedule at school and set goals throughout the months. My scores were getting higher and higher. My physics teacher noticed me and appointed me as a physics teaching assistant. It was a new opportunity for me that I had a chance to work with teachers and realize the responsibility to push my classmates to study harder together.