Hometown: Singapore

Year: First-Year

College: Grace Hopper

Major: Philosophy

Extracurriculars: Yale Debate Association;Yale Daily News staff writer

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Ko Lyn Cheang hails from Singapore, but she knew early on that there was more to her future than settling down in her home country. In Singapore, Ko Lyn explains, college education is largely defined by majors, and career opportunities lean heavily toward law and medicine. “Going to a Singaporean university would have been the practical thing to do,” she acknowledges. “But I wanted to chase after my dreams.”

Ko Lyn, who is a philosophy major, says she sees college not as a preprofessional training ground but as a place where she can ask bigger questions about humanity. Her interest in philosophy truly bloomed only after she arrived at Yale, and Ko Lyn hasn’t looked back since, having already declared her major as a rising sophomore.

On weekends, Ko Lyn sometimes travels to other states for debate tournaments with her fellow Yale Debate Association members. During the week, however, she is content to curl up in the library with her readings. Indeed, she wholeheartedly admits that many of her favorite spots on campus are in libraries; she rhapsodizes about the Slavic Reading Room and the circulation-desk hold shelves in Sterling Memorial Library.

“The moment you enter Sterling, the light comes washing down on you through the mosaic, almost like an intimate, spiritual experience,” Ko Lyn says. “It makes you think that the essays you write here are part of a greater project in the pursuit of knowledge.”

Ko Lyn also writes for the Yale Daily News, an experience that allows her to venture outside the restraints of typical student life. She describes journalism as providing her with a window into others’ lives; for instance, one of Ko Lyn’s favorite stories allowed her to interview a former Japanese geisha who is now a language instructor at Yale.

Indeed, since she arrived at Yale, Ko Lyn has been especially impressed and surprised by the general campus attitude toward sharing stories—both people’s receptiveness to others’ stories and their willingness to share their own. She has found her peers at Yale to be curious and open-minded listeners, quick to appreciate the many facets that comprise a person’s life.

Ko Lyn says this tendency toward empathy stands in stark contrast to her experience in Singapore, where, she reflects, people are understood less by the experiences that have shaped them than by their social status or economic power. She believes that cursory, one-dimensional measures like these are appealing because they are simple—but they are also less revealing.

Ko Lyn sees how this disparity comes to bear on the college process, too. She wishes that she could tell her high school self to focus on the storytelling aspect of the college application, especially where the essay is concerned. She urges students to use this space as an opportunity for some “deep soul-searching” and real self-reflection. “You have to distill yourself into a 500-word piece that captures the essence of who you are,” she says. “It’s daunting but rewarding in the end.”

Ko Lyn’s essays include her Common App personal statement and two of her Yale supplemental essays.

ESSAY 1 (COMMON APP):

Personal Statement

Sarong kebaya embroidered with the passionate patois of Peranakan people. Qipao silken as lilting Mandarin. Language is the clothes on your back, the shoes on your feet, but I often feel undressed. My Chinese parents speak Malay as their mother tongue, the vernacular language in this part of Southeast Asia. Singapore, trading post of Asia, pedals language. Here, English  is more valuable than saffron, more coveted than oil. I am proof of its currency, Straits-Chinese girl, who feels more at home reciting Shakespeare’s sonnets than those of Li Bai, who can apprehend Hume and Eliot’s philosophy but struggles to wring meaning from san zi jing, the aphoristic three-word classics that every child in China memorizes by age six.

At four, my parents enlist the help of a Chinese tutor from Urumqi. She wears a silk shawl and knits Chinese idioms into her lilting speech. Singapore’s bilingual policy mandates that every child learn his or her “mother tongue,” or ethnic language, as a way to stay rooted. During those weekly Mandarin lessons, I never felt rooted. Oh Singapore, is this how you feel? Island of 3 million, who needs something to moor her ashore, lest she drift into the South China Sea. The longer I trained my gaze on the Mandarin characters before me, the more they swam like dark tadpoles, eluding my capture.

As a kid, I joked: my mother does not even speak my mother tongue, so how can it be my mother tongue? The joke stops being funny when I fail my first Chinese ting xie, dictation exam, and walk home with tears sizzling like hot oil. As I grow older and learn about the ethnic conflict in Urumqi’s melting pot of Muslim and Han Chinese cultures, I wonder if my Chinese teacher can teach me how to bridge worlds too. Singapore is an island of flotsam, of immigrants like my grandmother jettisoned blindly from their native lands. Even as I master the English language, it feels like a borrowed book in my hand, due for return to someone else’s library. I let English words roll off my tongue like tropical rain falling from a British sky. Heart hammering,  I anticipate when people will call me out—fraud! thief!—and drag me incontinent into the Chinese Room.

At fifteen, I decide to learn Russian. This language, of Northern winters and dramatic personalities, mesmerized me. Russian ignited my imagination in a way my fifteen years of Mandarin never did. Russian’s hard edge chipped against Mandarin’s soft toffee. Where Mandarin feathered like the edge of sleep, Russian bellowed military commands, jolting me wide awake. I plunged into learning, liberated of Mandarin’s ancestral baggage. I owed this new language my heartfelt dedication to learning. The linguistic distinctions were odd but fascinating. Russian gives nouns genders; every word is a person—unique, mutable, inflected to carry new import. In Chinese, words are pebbles of self-contained meaning. Fathoming Mandarin words into sentences was like playing a game of tangram, rearranging characters to form the desired shape. Russian is more like a tango; words fleet-footed, the dance ephemeral. I found a kindred spirit in Russian. Like me, it is evolving. Mandarin now felt like a pair of old beaded slippers.

In Mandarin, we have an idiom for leaving home: lixiangbeijing. When translated literally, it means ‘to leave home with your back facing the well’. To go away from home is to scale the well in which I was born. A frog at the bottom of the well is blissful in its inexperience. I am not one language, not confined to one narrow sect of humanity. My back is to the well; I shed my old beaded slippers and don a traveller’s coat of many colours. The yellow brick road vanishes in my wake. In its place, stretching for miles, is a technicolour sky.

ESSAY 2 (YALE SUPPLEMENT):
Why do these areas appeal to you? (Literature, Anthropology)

Literature and anthropology are telescopes into the past; philosophy, a prism into the mind. I want to ask the hard questions: Do I have free will? Is meaning lost in translation? Is there eternal truth? What is an “I”? Am I my mind, body or something more? Literature is an empathetic account of the past, anthropology a scientific documentation of human lives. I want to find commonality in lives separated by time and space, find meaning within them, partake in the collective memory of humanity, and interrogate what it means to be human.

ESSAY 3 (YALE SUPPLEMENT):
Why does Yale appeal to you?

Passionate about finding solutions to tackle climate change, I admire how Yale, a member of the Global Carbon Pricing Leadership Coalition, spearheads the sustainability movement. In reading about Yale’s discourse on race, discrimination and free speech, I admire and yearn to contribute to the Yale spirit of interrogating the status quo. I am invigorated by the recent Yale Dramat play The Architecture of Rain, unprecedented for its all Asian-American cast. I, too, aspire to bring my Singaporean perspective to Yale’s ongoing conversation—in the art I make, plays I write and in sides of a debate I represent.

From 50 Yale Admission Success Stories: And the Essay That Made Them Happen, edited by the Yale Daily News Staff. Copyright © 2020 by the authors
and reprinted by permission of St. Martin's Publishing Group.