2024: Portrait of a Graduate
Some 7000 miles and 17 years ago, I was born. I don’t know where I was born. I don’t know to whom. I imagine the night I spent swaddled outside the local orphanage was cold. High 30s maybe. Some 7000 miles away a White couple came to adopt me. They filled out file after file after file until the Chinese government finally deemed them fit enough to be parents. And then I flew the 7000 miles here– or really, to the Roaring Fork Valley on the Western Slope. My existence became an extension of a diasporic identity. The first of many.
I’ve told this story often enough. What I haven’t often told is the story of the director who took care of me. The foster family that carried me on their backs for 8 months before I found a home. The caretakers. The many children around me. I have never told the story of the silent supporter. People who have heavily contributed to my being here today. People you’d never know about if I never told this story. People too easy to forget. So I will tell this story in that light. And maybe I can capture what turns a person into who they become.
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The first time I laid eyes on my orphanage director, Shi Paa Ping, I was only a couple months old. The toys at the orphanage were limited, the winter nights cold. There often wasn’t enough milk to go around. She did the absolute most to keep us safe. To get us to foster families or homes. The orphanage put up fliers with my face on it. No one ever responded. In 2019 I went back to my orphanage. I met the very same director from so long ago. I don’t remember a thing from my first 11 months in China– but she does. It was clear from the moment I rounded the corner to see a face 15 years older, that she remembered everything. It was clear she cared: especially when she sat me down on the opposite side of a table covered in food and told me: “Your name, Shi Juishang, Shi is my surname. I gave that to you”.
I’ve spent most of my childhood grappling with what it means to be adopted. It was first the strange comments or glances. Later on, it grew more insidious, kids pulling back the corners of their eyes, kids telling me I must be so smart because I’m Asian. There was the blatant racism but there were also the tensions of when I entered Chinese spaces. I didn’t speak Mandarin, didn’t understand the customs, didn’t honor Chinese culture and yet I was held as though I was the pinnacle of the American Dream. As though any of the cards I was dealt were of my own volition. As a result, I developed a sort of double othering. A banana, Yellow on the outside, White on the inside.
Upon my visit with the orphanage director, this subsided, if only for a moment. She was a sort of surrogate mother for the first 11 months of my life. She is the closest I’ve felt to my roots. When we hugged goodbye I did not feel like an other, like an abandoned or stolen child. I felt just as worthy of planting my feet on China’s ancient soil as her.
About a year and a half after initially being flown home from China our neighbors had a baby girl. Her name– Sarah Gray. As the two of us got older, we started playing together more and more. Poor renditions of “Let it Go” with a drum set and plastic microphone, hours laboring over our spy names, our gadgets or superpowers. I remember the year she got a wooden playset and we pretended to be pirates all summer. We learned to deal with our conflicts, developing off time or code words. We both became better people as we strived for excellence together. She was a rock for me because I knew she cared. I knew she understood me, even when it became clear that the other kids at school didn’t match my tendency for bluntness or honesty. She never took it personally, she never judged me for not being cool. We were not cool together: jumping over the fence between our yards for “second dinner.”
She helped me to hold onto my childishness. She taught me a lot about living in the moment and pursuing what you’re passionate about. She taught me a lot about optimism and hope, especially when it felt like the foundations of my life were beginning to crumble.
My parents got legally divorced in 2019 but they were separated for years before this. At the time, I had no words to describe my experience. I’d march the two flights of stairs between my parents' bedrooms seething. I could not, after already experiencing an abandonment, process the crumbling of my family again. Instead, I grew depressed. I isolated myself as the words to describe my experiences vanished and the sense that no one could truly understand grew stronger. I was so angry, but I didn’t know how to be.
It is around this time that I also moved to Boulder to attend the Watershed school and for a variety of other familial reasons. One summer after our move, my mom and I went up to Shambhala Mountain Center in Red Feather. There I met Leslie Gossett, spiritual instructor and child empath extraordinaire. At first, I pushed her away just like I had with everyone else. I didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to engage. I spent the free time we had outside quite literally kicking rocks. But for once, I wasn’t told to change this. Leslie would watch from the porch of the children's building and simply nod. Simply smile. Eventually I started opening up to her about my sense of isolation. The nagging othering. She offered solace by expressing how special I was. How I couldn’t understand what my peers were going through because I was so mature. At the time, this perspective felt like a final straw to grasp, so I internalized it.
Leslie and I would spend more time together from that point on. I always felt unique and empowered around her. I always felt seen. She was one of the first people where our connection felt as though we both actively chose it. She held me to a standard where I felt capable.
Around the time I started to re-envision my isolation in order for it to be less painful, I met Becky. She first strolled into class to teach the second semester of my Math B class. One of our first interactions was an instance in which she called me a procrastinator and I lost it. I think she drastically underestimated the confidence I had in my identity at the time. Despite this rocky start, I developed a strong rapport with her quickly. It felt as though she actually wanted to understand my experience. It felt as though she actually wanted to help. I grew a little codependent at this point. My relationships with my parents at the time felt more mysterious than anything else. I still wasn’t sure how to make friends, much less keep them. I was lost in the recesses of my own mind with few people interested in joining me or pulling me out. Really, I couldn’t be pulled out because I have centered my individualism, my uniqueness, as the quality of my character.
But Becky kept pushing, often to my chagrin. She’d disagree with me. She’d constantly insist that others felt isolated too. She’d encourage me to look up from my work. To consider others. To better regulate my emotions. Sometimes I’d leave our check-ins feeling more confused or uncomfortable than when I started, but I always went back. I always went back because it was easy to talk to her and deep down, I knew she cared.
Becky has stuck with me through the thick and thin of it. I have a completely different perspective now but I am always happy to experience the new ways she pushes me and I’m excited to feel the transition in our relationship from a mentorship to mutuals.
During the many years Becky and I have spent together, there has also been a variety of other friendships that have emerged and dispersed. These have all made me feel a variety of ways and taught me a variety of things but the most pertinent one which I will speak to you about today is my ever evolving friendship with Scout Sherman. Scout arrived at Watershed around the same time as Becky. We weren’t close at first and I actually got rejected when I asked her out at the end of 6th grade. We were tenuous for several years after that. She’d pass me in the halls and I’d be so mad she didn’t keep her word to stay friends. It wasn’t until our first backpacking trip together that my perspective started to change. I started to see her, not just for her pep or popularity but for the genuine interest and care she brought to the things around her. She also seemed to redevelop an appreciation for my oddities and quirks in friendship.
From there, things flowered naturally. We attended concerts together and had “study” sessions at each other's houses. I finally saw her beyond the oversimplified popular girl trope that always seemed to haunt her. In turn, she started to see me beyond the emo depressed kid. Both our horizons opened, in part due to forced proximity during advisory.
We also learned that we make a great leadership pair. I can organize, delegate, and plan like no one's business. But I struggle to excite or motivate others. To me, the motivation feels so intrinsic that it’s difficult to imagine what it might feel like to not have it. Scout helps with this part. She’s amazing at rallying the troops and getting kids engaged. She knows what’s fun and exciting. She has the dreams and I help make them happen. I have the plans and she helps gather support. Together we balance out a breadth of leadership needs.
Scout has pushed me to be better too. She had consistently pulled me out of my comfort zone in order to try new things. She helped me to rediscover my love for dance, for rolling the windows down when driving, for good music. Scout was a big step towards my eventual abandonment of my internalized individualism. We were both trying new things and learning, but we were doing it together.
The other major person who helped me rethink my isolationist thinking was Jenn. Jenn has transformed my thinking through the vast intricacies of science. During human evolution she had us analyze the finer details of each distinct Homo species until we could accurately describe the ways each of them impacted us today. In Atmospheric Science she broke down a dozen complex weather factors into their small parts before putting them together again, this time in a way we could understand. Even in our Materials class from just last trimester, I was so happy to be around a person who valued the minutiae and its ability to branch near infinitely.
She also taught me a lot about interconnectedness. When constantly asking for new connections across content points in class. When pointing out the fragile ecosystem present at Skalanés. When letting the class run into a tangent because the new train of thought was just too cool to not explore. Through Jenn I learned to elevate the mundane. To think like a scientist and work your way up systematically. To consider how the littlest things could impact the broad picture.
Since this transformation of thinking, which occurred as a result of various people pushing me in the right direction, I’ve made all sorts of new friends and mentors. I’ve made the commitment to surround myself with people who inspire and empower me. People who show up, people who care.
My relationships with the people I’ve mentioned in this presentation have changed drastically since when they first occurred and they will continue to do so. People change, we grow together, we grow apart. But these connections, they are what create the radical and beautiful web that is our world. All of these people have made me feel special. And that saved my life for a long time. But I don’t think feeling special is my goal anymore. I think feeling connected and supported and empowered is the goal.
This presentation wasn’t about me. I know it was supposed to be about me. I know this presentation was theoretically supposed to be a representation of my growth, my ability to produce work, my character. I know this presentation was supposed to be about me:
And yet it isn’t.
I spent the first 14 years of my life clinging to individualism. I was convinced that I could make meaning out of the isolation, the othering. I forbid myself from letting it hurt. I tried to avoid affiliating myself with anyone because to connect with another person is to make yourself vulnerable to manipulation. I tried desperately not to be vulnerable. But to be vulnerable is to be human. And all the moments I’ve come to cherish, the core memories tinted with flecks of gold– they are suspended in the fragility of space. They are a moment of reprieve from the immensity of all this. I hope to continue forward with the belief that any moment may one day be looked back upon with a softened face. I hope to continue to live all in. I hope to continue to elevate moments of the mundane. I hope to continue to lean into our shared humanness– our interconnected natures, our genuine kindness.
I can’t wait to see where this spiral takes me.
I can’t wait to look back and see all those who helped along the way.
Thank you.
