Hometown: Saratoga, CA

Year: Junior

College: Berkeley 

Major: East Asian Languages & Literatures 

Extracurriculars: A Different Drum Dance Company; Groove Dance Company; Club Ultimate Frisbee; Yale College Writing Center, writing partner

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Yvonne Ye graduated from high school in Shanghai and lived there for three years, so on most official records, she’s an international student because she applied from abroad. “Originally,” however, she says she is from California. Yvonne’s hesitations about what her hometown is mirror the conflicting linguistic and cultural choices within her essay, between the city she grew up in and the city that is home to her parents. She writes, “No amount of steamed buns could fill that hole in my soul where my hometown used to be.”

As a college student, however, Yvonne has found that she has had greater opportunities to really understand who she is and where she belongs in “a changing, modernizing world.” As she answers the hometown question, she muses to herself about the evolution of her identity. She thinks college has opened up avenues for expression through conversation and discourse that she did not have access to in high school; earlier, she did not have the vocabulary to express what she was thinking or feeling.

“High School Me was a lot less sure about things. High School Me is very much like College Me—but without all the rough edges sanded off.”

Yvonne’s personal evolution and openness to change is  a parallel to her openness in exploring her interests. She says she was never a theater person. She always said in high school that she would never do theater.

“Guess what I’m involved in now?” She giggles.

As Yvonne speaks and gesticulates in equal parts to explain her answers, she often erupts in quick bouts of laughter between sentences. She tells me the main reason why she chose Yale was that she had heard people say that Yale students were happy.

“When I came to college, I was like, ‘This is what happiness is.’”

This contentment is not, however, isolated to Yvonne’s experience at Yale. She presumes, with unquestioning optimism, that she will keep discovering that her happiness increases at each stage of her life.

Yvonne thought deeply about her favorite memory at Yale, arriving at an answer after a few minutes of sifting between many contenders. During first-year orientation, she was walking along the path between Berkeley College, Trumbull College, and Sterling Memorial Library. As she was walking around, she looked at all the Gothic buildings, the leaves starting to turn, the Harkness bells ringing.

“I remember looking around and being like—I hope I never get used to this. Now I am used to it, but every time I think of that I’m like—yeah.” She exhales and smiles.

Yvonne’s essays include her Common App personal statement and one of her Yale supplemental essays.

ESSAY 1 (COMMON APP):

Personal statement

Some students have a background or story so central to their identity that they believe their application would be incomplete without it. Share this story.

SHANGHAI

I have a curious choice to make every time I pronounce this city’s name, like deciding between two sides of a conflict: Do I speak in the tongue of the town I was born in or in the language of the land I live in?

“SHANG-hai.” I come as a foreigner, accenting the first syllable, twisting the A into the curve of my lips as the word twangs in my mouth. Born and bred in Californian sunshine, I hated this city of haze at first with a simmering fire in my gut that clawed its way into notebooks full of acrid words. A prisoner of my father’s job, I discovered in the next six months that no amount of steamed buns could fill that hole in my soul where my hometown used to be. I burned my first bridges in that flight across the Pacific; left drifting, I struggled to learn how to pronounce the slang of the city like a local, to acclimatize my tongue to the new way names rolled from my lips.

“ShangHA-AI.” But sometimes I defend the besieged stronghold, my adopted city, opening up the soft palate so “ah” comes out in the first syllable before bouncing through the second one. Accents make all the difference in local supermarkets here, where the slightest slip-up in your vowels can expose you as nonnative. But now, that fear doesn’t stop me from chatting with taxi drivers on my way to dance practice anymore; every person I can convince that I’m not foreign-born is a small victory in the uphill battle of learning the language of my parents.

Adjusting to life in China requires more than a tectonic shift of mindset; reality lies in a long war of attrition—a personal ten-year siege of Troy. I did not embrace Shanghai all at once; slowly, haltingly, I accepted truces. Late night strolls weren’t so bad, I admitted, and the new people—friends from Canada, Denmark, New Jersey, and even the sandwich deli lady—were as fascinating and compelling as any Greek or Trojan hero. Through conversations as short as ordering a vegetarian panini or as long as shared plane flights to a forensics competition, they helped me realize that unhappiness has always been a choice. I needed to reassess the values that directed my life, to look around with wonder instead of prejudice. Because even after the war ended and Troy fell, it was rebuilt; and even as I fought air pollution and reckless drivers, idiomatic grammar and my own biases, Shanghai reforged me with the defiance of its people and the steel of its skyscrapers. Wars don’t make people; wars change people.

Two years later, I smile at the shopkeepers I once feared, switching languages as easily as jackets. I make small talk with security guards and savor the rare days of pollution-free air. Now I see the fortune I have to live in an international forum, filled with snapshots of lives across cultures and continents—a place where we can learn from each other even as we laugh, where we sing the cadences of our sentences that pay homage to our countries of origin.

“I live in—Shanghai.” I still wobble between accents, stumbling before the word as I remember where I am. “But I’m originally from California.” Sometimes, my American tongue wins out; others, Chinese rolls from my lips with rich authenticity. Language used to mark the front where my cultures clashed with each other. Now, it opens new paths that lead me off into undiscovered regions, familiar and exotic. This internal war has given me open palms and words in three languages, grounded me in knowing who I am and what I love, and made me ready to adapt to and appreciate the world, wherever the winds blow me.

ESSAY 2 (YALE SUPPLEMENT):
Please reflect on something you would like us to know about you that we might not learn from the rest of your application, or on something about which you would like to say more. You may write about anything—from personal experiences or interests to intellectual pursuits.

Would you look at that, I thought, staring down at the paper.

Plan B actually worked.

I held the very first copy of Confection: A Literary Magazine in my hands, its black-and-white pages still warm from the printer. Handling each sheet gingerly, I scanned the familiar spreads. There was Aaron, grinning cheekily from his double page. Below, Tiffany’s artwork spidered across the margins in graceful lines. I knew each photo, each page, each pica. I had fought with the formatting and font sizes and laid out all the columns and captions, stealing minutes between classes and hours from my sleep to tweak the designs and rearrange the poems yet again. Thirty-two pages slowly emerged from the art and writing that my fellow high schoolers had submitted.

“You can keep the advance copy,” the lady who ran the print center said kindly, and I stammered out a thanks.

Here is a confession: I’d never run a magazine before. Here is another confession: I made it up as I went along.

When the original editor-in-chief unexpectedly abdicated, the literary magazine club fell into my inexperienced hands. I was just beginning my second year at a new school overseas and trying to handle a club that had held only two meetings last year—once to meet each other, and once for the yearbook photo.

That wouldn’t cut it this year, I decided. Writing outside of class wasn’t especially popular among kids who often spoke a different language at home. I wanted to give them the opportunity to see their work in print to spur their continued interest.

There was a slight problem in this otherwise bulletproof plan: no one else in the club knew the mechanics of making a magazine, and not many had the time to learn how to wrangle the layout software into obedience. During first semester, publication stalled as I tried to teach club members about pica blocks while coaxing them to write in their free time.

Once second semester hit the ground, however, the deadline for getting printed loomed ominously close. There simply wasn’t enough time for everyone to reach the fluency in InDesign needed to lay out their own pages before exam season. Thus, plan B came into play—with a single-minded intensity and my typical bulldog tenacity, I threw myself into laying out the entire magazine on my own. Club members contributed material; I wrestled the poems into place, match-made artwork with fiction, and even found a company willing to defray the printing costs in exchange for advertising. In less than a month, the pages grew into the literary magazine that I now held in my hands.

As I headed toward the high school, a slow grin overtook my face. This was a publication made by high schoolers, and high schoolers alone—not a single teacher had a hand in it.

Aaron waved to me from the bleachers. I waved back, holding up the copy of Confection. “Litmag’s out,” I called triumphantly.

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.