Watch out, China, I’m coming back.

While I love my job at TMZ and am thoroughly enjoying my new life in Los Angeles, in September I will be leaving for China to carry out my proposed Fulbright research project for ten months. In what may be seen as a complete opposite track from my current career route of Miss Universe/Hollywood/TMZ, I will be researching the education of underprivileged children in rural China, specifically analyzing and documenting the stories of selected individuals who have overcome adversity in their lives and become successful in their endeavors.

I’m really excited. Not only because I now have the opportunity to go back to Dalian and reacquaint myself with the city that raised me, but more importantly, I feel like I now have the chance to actually make a difference. Not that I don’t think covering Lindsay Lohan’s probation violation hearings is important (I am not being sarcastic), but this is just something that I have always wanted to do.

I’ve included the personal statement I that submitted to Fulbright with my grant proposal in this post (after the jump). This Fulbright is important to me for many reasons; this is one of them.

PERSONAL STATEMENT

I still remember the day that the reporters came to my elementary school to interview me for a segment on the “Dalian Evening News.” The reporter asked, “You could have kept the money and bought whatever you wanted, why did you choose to donate the 100RMB to impoverished, disaster-stricken elementary schools?” I said, “I was inspired by Uncle Lei Feng, and I wanted to see poor children be happy and go to school just like me!”

It was my very first paycheck; I earned it from appearing as a minor role in the television series “Lei Feng’s Death Concerns Me,” a show about the heroic soldier in China who is famous for his philanthropy. I played a sick child from a poor village that receives help from the main character, who does good deeds in honor of Lei Feng’s death. While filming on location in rural areas around Liaoning Province, I gained a brief glimpse into the lives of people living in poverty-stricken conditions. It broke my heart to see kids my age without access to the resources I had. When I heard about the flood near Dalian that destroyed many schools and homes, I joined the disaster-relief effort. One hundred RMB may not be much money today, but to me, at the age of seven, it seemed enough to save an entire elementary and send all the students back to school.

As I grew older I realized my contribution could not have done much to help the disaster relief, but I continued with my efforts to help, in the little ways that I knew how. I participated in food and clothing drives, and maintained a relationship with a pen pal from a rural school outside the city. However, our correspondence faded away in the fourth grade when I moved to the United States with my mother. I left behind my old life as I adapted to my new one in Ohio and sometimes struggled with the changes I was going through. Adjusting to my new life turned out to be more difficult than I originally thought. The language barrier prevented me from understanding the teachers and my peers at school, and the difficulty of picking up the social norms led to many embarrassing situations. I also found myself with two older step siblings and a new stepfather after I had grown accustomed to being the only child. It took a few years, but in high school I finally found my place again and felt as confident as I once had as a kid in China.

One day after graduating from high school, my mother gave me a letter to read. The letter was from a student in Liaoning, who had been receiving financial support from my parents for the past six years through a non-profit organization that financially assists students in rural China. After graduating at the top of her class in her village, this student is now attending Liaoning University, which according to her letter was a dream she never thought would come true because of her family’s financial background. I reflected back on my own life; growing up in the suburbs, going to high school and then moving on to higher education seemed to be such a natural process that I had forgotten how privileged I really was.  Now that I am older, I want to do more to help. I want to conduct research into the education of underprivileged students in China, because it will allow me to make the difference I have always wanted to in these students’ lives. Through sharing my research results, I hope to inspire and encourage underprivileged students to aspire to their true potential. I also want to learn more about my heritage and work toward reaching my future goals. Gaining more insight into Chinese society will benefit me as I work toward my law degree in international law, so I can focus my career on Sino-US relations and help cultivate a better relationship between the two nations in which I was raised.

During the summer of 2008 I went back to China with my parents and met with the student they have been helping for all these years. When I gave her a new backpack, she cried. To others, it was just a backpack; to her and me, it represented the hopes and dreams of outstanding, underprivileged students everywhere, waiting to be realized.

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