Stanford Mba sample essay-What_matters_most_to_you

What matters most to you, and why?

By Alan Guo

What I care most is my country – China.

Because “patriotism” is a word easy to be manipulated for other purposes, I would like to avoid it. When I say “country”, what I really mean are the people who live there, and the culture concentrated from its five thousand years of civilization.

If you watched the blockbuster comedy My Big Fat Greek Wedding, you would know Greek kids are taught that every English word has a Greek origin. Similarly, in my childhood I heard so many legends about intelligent ancient Chinese people. I was even told that pizza is Italianated Chinese food, thanks to

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Marco Polo who traveled to China in the 11 century. However, later on I learned a completely different story about Chinese modern history. From British opium to Japanese troupes, from the civil war to the Cultural Revolution, the glorious civilization seems collapsed over night.

The backbone of Chinese history gave me a mixed feeling, and stimulated me to explore and think about my country. Besides reading, my footprints were put on many important historical sites in China. While the Great Wall, the Forbidden City, Dunhuang Frescoes, and the Terracotta Warriors & Horses really made me proud of being a Chinese, the broken pillars in Yuanming Garden[1], and the scary photos in the Memorial Hall of Nanjing Massacre[2] brought me long silence of sadness.

Whenever you can feel someone’s pain, you become conscious that you love and care about her. This theory also applies to our emotions to a country. History was the first thing that let me feel my country’s pain.

Longhai Railway links the west and the east of China. My hometown is in the west, and my

college town, as well as most metropolitan cities, such as Shanghai and Beijing, is in the east. From 1984 to 1999 I traveled on this route for twenty three times, a thousand miles each trip. These tours gave me a unique opportunity to see my country, and witness its changes. While Shanghai was yet another domestic city in 1984, now it shines as a global metropolis, with skyscrapers indistinguishable to New York and Chicago. However, in western China, the landscape along the railway has changed very little in the past 15 years.

While a foreign company has to spend monthly house rental of ten thousand US dollars for an executive in Beijing, a manufacturing worker makes 80 dollars per month in my hometown Chengdu, a provincial capitol in the west, only if she is lucky not being laid off by her state-owned factory. While a Gold-Collar working for a multinational corporate in Shanghai enjoys a 100-buck-a-bottle merlot, a

peasant in Henan Province could sell her blood for much less, with the risk of affecting HIV due to illegal use of contaminated equipments. To some, China is a golden mine now; to others, life there is still tough, or even tougher than 15 years ago. Please don’t get me wrong, I am not talking about how the wealth of society should be distributed; I talk about survival.

The only son of a doctor family, I have always had an easy life, but I do not need to go very far to see hardship of all kinds. I still remember the first time when I had a concept of such hardship. It was a family hiking trip. When we were taking rest we met a man and a kid carrying heavy loads of food. From a chat between my dad and the man, I understood that they were also father and son, but they made a living by transporting food by hand for a hotel on the top of the mountain. I was eight, and the other kid was about same age.

Indeed, reality is an even bigger force that made me care about my country, because it let me feel pain and hardship of real people’s life.

The big picture of today’s China is complicated and somewhat contradictory with itself. It gives people twisted desperation and hope. Desperation always forces people to leave, but hope also urges people to go seeking solutions. In the past century, while Chinese commoners never stopped emigrations,

responsible Chinese intellectuals also never stopped going out seeking the solution for their country. In the early twenties, some went to France, and brought back Marxism, instead of Declaration of The rights of Man and of The Citizen. While I don’t mean to discuss politics here, their effort and sense of

responsibility were admirable. A century later, I see more people going out today, this time to the U.S., with a handful for the sake of China’s hope.

Regarding Chinese students and workers in America as a whole, I have paid great attention to our group behavior, and thought a lot about the sociological and psychological driving force underneath. Based on my observation, I serious doubted that “escaping” from China could let any of us escape from the desperation that we might once feel.

Finally, in the winter of 2000 I could not help putting all these thoughts into an article: Desperation and Hope – Why do we come to the U. S.. I posted it to a Chinese web forum, and in the past two years I have received hundreds of emails from the readers, and the article has been forwarded to hundreds of websites, some of which put it as a headline. Today you can still find dozens of these sites through Google. In the article, I wrote (abbreviated, and translated from Chinese):

Let’s face it: China is far from a perfect country. But only if China has its hope, we will then have ours. And we must proactively become a part of the hope and future of China. I wish 20, 30 years later I will find my fellow overseas Chinese students as the Prime Minister of China, as Chinese industry leaders, and as great scholars in China. If our children no longer have to take TOEFL or GRE to get good education or a promising future, we will then succeed as a generation who has ever struggled in distant lands, and who has the opportunity to shape China’s future. The torch has been passed to us. Both the sacrifice we made for going out of our homeland, and the decision of going back eventually to fulfill our dream, are our destiny.

I was excited that many people were convinced by me that we could not escape, because we could not stop caring our country, where we had our first walk and our first love, where we have connections to the rivers and mountains, and where our families and most friends still live. What is more, if all elites chose to leave, then the hope would fall into vanity again.

Where is the hope? And what does it mean? Considering the complexity of China’s reality, I can’t give a crystal clear answer. But I know the hope is real. I can touch it in construction sites in Shenzhen, a newly developed industrial city from a fishing village; I can see it from a cleaner Lake Tai, saved from deadly pollutions; and I can also hear it from a good-bye phone call before a friend went back China to found his start-up. But most of all, I see the hope from China’s willingness to embrace the world. Joining WTO, hosting 2008 Olympics, and having someone playing in NBA, China started to speak the same language as the rest the world. My country finally made such a decision, a decision of hope.

Yes, only the hope of China could make me care about my country more than ever. And only such hope bestowed me upon the determination of going back.

Looking at China, I see history and reality, glory and pain, culture and people, desperation and hope, and I also see myself a part of all these kaleidoscopic images. I think, what I care most being what I belong to is simply human nature.

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