Forty-six.

Enter part one of two, wherein I wax lyrical about having been born this way.

For this week's entry, I'm publishing in full the mandatory two-page personal statement I wrote as part of my application for admission to several law schools sometime in the 2010s. Although I ultimately declined to become a lawyer in favor of building a career in a different industry, I remember doing my best to convince myself back then that the legal profession was the most logical, and therefore inevitable, choice for me and my skill set—obviously, I wasn't successful in deluding myself.

I've only made extremely minor edits to the below by inserting relevant context in parentheses where it's necessary. This is a part of next week's larger entry, so I promise it's not an irrelevant read altogether.

Are you familiar with General Tso’s Chicken? It’s a popular Chinese (American) take-out dish, but there isn’t much authenticity to it—it is largely nonexistent within China.

My biological parents are Chinese immigrants, and for them my birth was symbolic—I was named after Uncle Sam. My ancestry is rooted in Hunan, a province in southern China, where I lived when I was young. Hunan is famed for its fiery spirit, which is reflected in both its cuisine and its people: the food is blisteringly spicy and the region birthed decisive figures like Máo Zédōng and my (actual) ancestor, Zuǒ Zōngtáng—or, General Tso. As I was born in the year of the rooster, I jest that I am General Tso’s Chicken personified. More seriously, I hope to embody throughout my lifetime that Hunanese spirit of transformative drive.

At eighteen, I chose New York for freedom. I wanted to become a real adult, and NYU was the perfect conduit: I lived in the city and not on a campus, I built up my career while pursuing my education, and I was responsible for designing my academic curriculum. We normally must dedicate ourselves to few interests in college, but (the) Gallatin (School at NYU) enabled me to pursue them all and even went further by challenging me to find a common thread.

I found myself returning to music throughout my education, so I decided to test my mettle in the industry. In four years, I progressed from artist management to sync licensing to publishing to marketing because I wanted to be well-rounded, rationalizing that a nuanced understanding of every facet of the industry would only benefit my burgeoning career. I developed my academic coursework in tandem with my internships, supplementing education with experience and highlighting music’s deeper connection to my field of study: because an artist’s music sells best when their audience identifies with their songs, identity is paramount.

To be both broad and specific, I deemed intellectual property the crux of my academic concentration—it was the perfect umbrella for my work. It housed my efforts in music, but it also encompassed my academic interests in various other fields. In addition to learning about the usual patent and trademark disputes, I studied the ephemeral: I considered the transformative impact of musical zeitgeists on public policy, I decried the patenting of the molecular building blocks of life, and I debated ownership—of music, of food, of you, of me.

I eventually arrived at "Ethnocapitalism," my Colloquium. "Ethnocapitalism" is a slight—yet, purposeful—misnomer of a term that I coined to capture the complexities of the relationship between identity and value. Whereas the word has been used to attack ethnically-localized capitalism and justify neoliberal globalization, I employed it to explain how identity filters systemic oppression in capitalist societies and to situate intellectual property within our era of neocolonialism. Informed by (studying) the likes of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Audre Lorde, and Slavoj Žižek, "Ethnocapitalism" is thus my attempt to bridge race, gender, and class in the present to inspire a contextual approach to history and public policy. It is a catalyst for pragmatism: by providing the framework for recognizing the realities of difference, it pushes us to establish a society that truly provides liberty and justice for all.

As the firstborn of my family’s first American generation, I arose where East met West. So, too, did General Tso’s Chicken. But it is marketed to Americans as Chinese without being Chinese, and it is considered by the Chinese to be specifically American. It inhabits both worlds without citizenship, yet it is still tangible, it is popularly consumed, and it is real.

I now understand that the benefits of an interdisciplinary education are infinite, chief of which is the comprehension that everything relates to everything else—nothing exists within a vacuum. Therefore, an interdisciplinary praxis is precursory to achieving justice and resolution.

I hope to begin law school because it is an education uniquely positioned to collate my interests and to enable me to achieve change, be it as a musician’s legal counsel or as a public servant. Just as I exist at the intersection of my identity, so does everyone else at theirs; this makes evident the necessity of interdisciplined leaders, particularly in an age of violent and virulent demagoguery. With my skills and an open mind, I won’t back down—I am no chicken.

This statement was painstakingly condensed into two pages from its original four- to five-page draft, and I remember feeling distressingly constrained. I wasn't yet twenty-five when I wrote it, but I wanted to be ambitious. I wanted to prove that I had genuine interest in becoming a lawyer while remaining honest about my uncertainty with the direction my career would take. What kind of law would I practice, and for whom? These were seminal questions that I couldn't answer without dishonesty because I was just a year out of undergrad, and I didn't want to oversell myself. It's for that reason I ended up removing the sections about my hopes of ascending to the Supreme Court of the United States as its first Asian American (Chief or Associate) Justice, but that really was my goal for a time because I witnessed how transformative court decisions could be.

I chose to frame the essay around General Tso's chicken because I wanted a hook. (In pop music, a "hook" refers to the catchiest parts of a song that are designed to grab listeners; as such, hooks manifest in musical riffs and choruses.) I knew that I needed to stand out to each law school's applications readers because I was but one of many thousands of aspirants, and I wanted to do it in a way that would feel genuine and relevant to my developmental trajectory. I also hoped that my triple entendre about cock would be appreciated for bringing humor and my precocious personality to the readers' admissions process, as I figured reading so many essays would be beyond boring.

In truncating my personal statement, I had to excise the portions referring to my gender and sexuality. Space was limited, and I needed to be strategic—and I wanted to avoid throwing down my identity cards all at once because I was trying to make explicit that I merited admission not because I would fulfill their (un)official diversity quota but because I was cognizant of the ways that my lived experiences and perspective would benefit the student body at large. Besides, I would expound upon the gay angle in a diversity addendum.

I resented segregating my ethnic identity from my sexual orientation, which is a function of my gender, because they're intertwined parts of a whole. I am not one and the other; I'm both at the same time. One informs the other, but I struggled with the categorization I preemptively imposed upon myself—if I was to be (mis)understood, I would at least have it be on my terms.

In 2011, Lady Gaga released a song titled “Born This Way” as the lead single from its eponymous album. It’s a song about our most immutable characteristics, and it was famously divisive for its rather ham-fisted lyricism as she tried to craft a hook around innumerous identities and communities. I watched her sacrifice a certain level of commercial success to stay on message during the years immediately following that album campaign; I choose to believe that she was acting in good faith.

I was born to survive
No matter Black, White, or Beige
Chola or Orient-made

All these years later, what I remember most about the song isn't that it was aggressively pro-LGBTQ—it's that she went out of her way, however awkwardly, to include those of us of Asian descent when such generic empowerment messaging (at the time and now still) usually leaves us out. Perhaps it was more than serendipitous that the album was released in May.

Suffice it to say that May has me thinking about being the Asian person whenever I'm in queer spaces as well as the gay person in Asian social circles. I don't know if I love it or hate it. When I was younger, I was much more fiery about identitarian advocacy; nowadays, I’m a bit more measured in my considerations of the matter. This isn't to say that I've moderated my politics at all, but rather that I've learned to take into account certain realities like the fact that around 7% of the American population is of Asian descent. Despite my many frustrations, it just kind of is what it is.

Why was—is—identity so important to me? Well, it was and it wasn't—it is and it isn't. It's a background context that functions as a rhetorical shorthand for the implied formative experiences that have shaped my worldview and me, as nurture does nature. It's not something I think about during my every waking minute, and yet it affects how I navigate life because it influences how people interact with me.

I suppose that it ultimately comes down to connection. As social creatures, we're drawn to each other, we're undone by one another. Mutual understanding is an accelerant for forming interpersonal relationships, which is the basis for living in society, birds of a feather and the blood of the covenant and whatnot. Thus, discussions about identity are predicated upon a desire to be known and to find common ground.

I didn't ask to be born gay, just as I didn't ask to be born Chinese and all the other fixed traits that make me me. Because the circumstances of birth are just that—circumstantial—it seems to me that they're also an inegalitarian basis for social division. What matters more is, as I once quoted Annie Dillard, how we spend our days, because that's how we spend our lives, our limited time here on this earth. It's the only life I have; I'd like to spend it with the people who are just as understanding and forgiving of the human condition.