Meet Malaysian-Born Cassandra Hsiao – Her Essay Got Her Into All 8 Ivy League Uni

Her mother was born in Malaysia, while her father was born Taiwan. She was only a 5-year-old girl when she left Malaysia to the United States. That was 12 years ago in 2005, when Abdullah Ahmad Badawi was the Malaysian Prime Minister. Little did America realize that they are about to get a genius from a country which doesn’t appreciate talents at all.

 

Today, 17-year-old Cassandra Hsiao becomes the “first-generation immigrant” who has accomplished something beyond imagination – accepted into all 8 Ivy League Universities. Hsiao, who resides in Walnut, South California, has offers from Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, Brown, Columbia, Cornell and Penn, leaving her with the most headache of her life.

But the offers didn’t stop there. The Malaysian-born girl also received offers from other top universities like Stanford, John Hopkins, University of Southern California, Northwestern University, New York University, U.C. Berkeley and Amherst, just to name a few. That’s one heck of a list of prestigious colleges to choose from.

 

Growing up in Walnut, Los Angeles, Cassandra is a decorated student at the Orange County School of the Arts (OCSA), who led the school’s magazine as editor-in-chief and became one of two student body presidents. She’s one of two student body presidents, an editor-in-chief of the school’s magazine and active in her community. Her GPA stands at 4.67, while she scored 1540 on her SATs.

She plays many roles – a student journalist, film critic, poet, writer and playwright. From a poem dedicated to Syrian refugees to her interviews with Hollywood stars like Morgan Freeman and (Captain America) Chris Evans, her work has been featured in many publications including, TeenReads, Jet Fuel Review and Los Angeles Times High School Insider.

 

When Cassandra was only 12, she has already interviewed stars Justin Bieber and Ashley Tisdale, and covered the world premiere of Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides at Disneyland. She was apparently selected into the “Scholastic News Kids Press Corps” for 2010-11 due to her writing skills. And it was her essay that has gotten her into all 8 Ivy League Universities today.

Yes, amazingly, it was her essay about learning to speak English that had won the hearts of the American top colleges. She wrote about her family’s unique ways of pronouncing English words back at home in Malaysia (and later in the U.S.), where “snake is snack and there’s no difference between cast and cash.” It got so bad that she was pulled out of class to work with a speech therapist.

 

When she was asked if her choice of college would be affected by environment which could be more hostile than home, she simply shrugs off and said – “Humans are adaptable. I can survive”. While it’s sad that Malaysia has lost a talent to America, her family had certainly made the right choice 12 years ago. Below was her spectacular application essay.

 

In our house, English is not English. Not in the phonetic sense, like short a is for apple, but rather in the pronunciation – in our house, snake is snack. Words do not roll off our tongues correctly – yet I, who was pulled out of class to meet with language specialists, and my mother from Malaysia, who pronounces film as flim, understand each other perfectly.

 

In our house, there is no difference between cast and cash, which was why at a church retreat, people made fun of me for “cashing out demons.” I did not realize the glaring difference between the two Englishes until my teacher corrected my pronunciations of hammock, ladle, and siphon. Classmates laughed because I pronounce accept as except, success as sussess. I was in the Creative Writing conservatory, and yet words failed me when I needed them most.

 

Suddenly, understanding flower is flour wasn’t enough. I rejected the English that had never seemed broken before, a language that had raised me and taught me everything I knew. Everybody else’s parents spoke with accents smarting of Ph.D.s and university teaching positions. So why couldn’t mine?

 

My mother spread her sunbaked hands and said, “This is where I came from,” spinning a tale with the English she had taught herself.

 

When my mother moved from her village to a town in Malaysia, she had to learn a brand new language in middle school: English. In a time when humiliation was encouraged, my mother was defenseless against the cruel words spewing from the teacher, who criticized her paper in front of the class. When she began to cry, the class president stood up and said, “That’s enough.”

 

“Be like that class president,” my mother said with tears in her eyes. The class president took her under her wing and patiently mended my mother’s strands of language. “She stood up for the weak and used her words to fight back.”

 

We were both crying now. My mother asked me to teach her proper English so old white ladies at Target wouldn’t laugh at her pronunciation. It has not been easy. There is a measure of guilt when I sew her letters together. Long vowels, double consonants — I am still learning myself. Sometimes I let the brokenness slide to spare her pride but perhaps I have hurt her more to spare mine.

 

As my mother’s vocabulary began to grow, I mended my own English. Through performing poetry in front of 3000 at my school’s Season Finale event, interviewing people from all walks of life, and writing stories for the stage, I stand against ignorance and become a voice for the homeless, the refugees, the ignored. With my words I fight against jeers pelted at an old Asian street performer on a New York subway. My mother’s eyes are reflected in underprivileged ESL children who have so many stories to tell but do not know how. I fill them with words as they take needle and thread to make a tapestry.

 

In our house, there is beauty in the way we speak to each other. In our house, language is not broken but rather bursting with emotion. We have built a house out of words. There are friendly snakes in the cupboard and snacks in the tank. It is a crooked house. It is a little messy. But this is where we have made our home.

 

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