I live in Pforzheimer House (Pfoho), one of Harvard’s 12 houses, and this semester we’ve started a program called Pfoho Repflections. In the dining hall right after dinner, students give short speeches on any topic that’s personally meaningful to them.
Last week, I had the privilege of delivering a Pfoho repflection. A video and transcript of my speech follow; I hope they provoke some thought and discussion.
Probably my favorite course from my first year at Harvard was a freshman-only seminar called “Multiethnic American Short Stories.” We read and discussed stories by American authors of various ethnic backgrounds: Jhumpa Lahiri, Toni Morrison, Sherman Alexie, Sandra Cisneros, and others. Reading these stories gave me some great perspective, but the highlight of the course was when we had to write our own multiethnic short story: short stories about ethnic groups in America and how they interact. We had to write 4 pages. I started writing and kept going and going and eventually I had 21 pages, which I eventually pared down to 18, but still that was the most engrossed I was in any assignment to date.
I decided to write about themes that weigh on my mind a lot: identity, ethnicity, acceptance, self-discovery. Most of the events in the story didn’t happen to me but the themes and feelings are very autobiographical.
My story is below. Here’s a PDF (all 18 pages) if you’d rather read it that way.