Lisa Alvarez
It’s PIQ season. I expect this means little to most unless you are a hopeful student applying to the University of California or, someone who, like me, helps those applicants write compelling 350-word mini-essays that are answers to the dreaded Personal Insight Questions, This is some of the most difficult writing you’ll ever do, I tell my students at the Writing Center, community college students who aspire to transfer.
I work with many of these students over the course of the fall and one of my favorites is a young immigrant from China. We have worked together faithfully over the last eight weeks to create his application. He is only 21 but his closely cropped hair is already threaded with white. I’ll call him T, because I’m sure he wouldn’t want to be identified.
At first, T was discouraged by the questions. "I have no special talents or skill, nothing that others do not have. I have not faced many obstacles or barriers or challenges. My life is good," he would insist.
But as we talked, I learned more. How he and his elderly parents immigrated during COVID. How he, an only child, took charge of most everything as he was the only English speaker. How he excelled in his STEM studies through discipline and focus. At the same time he worked a job to keep his family financially stable.
"Write about that," I told him.
“It’s nothing special,” he said. “It is just my duty as a son.”
I told him not all sons, not all children, felt like him, that this loyalty distinguished him.l
Over time, I was successful in persuading him to share his personal and academic accomplishments and he wrote some compelling testimonies. Then, last week, we struggled with the optional question, something to the effect of “Is there anything else the UC should know about you?” The student had been told he should say something here, that to overlook this opportunity would be an oversight that might damage his chances.
“I have nothing else to say,” he almost wailed. Then, “What I really want to say is that this process has taught me that I am not special. That there are many students just like me who are all deserving of going to the University of California. I have heard you working with them in here every week. We should all get in.”
I began typing this into his document as he spoke, rough notes. “Well,” I said, “I think if you started out like that, that it would certainly get the attention of the admission committee.”
He looked thoughtful.
I went on. “But you are special. You have come so far, done so much. You are not an ordinary student.”
“There is one thing I could say,” he said. "I have been thinking about this." Then he proceeded to tell me how his parents used to work in a factory in northeast China. All their lives, he said. Long days. His father on the assembly line, his mother doing custodial work and cooking for the workers. They would take him sometimes and he would play and read books and watch the workers. Long lives, little money. Lives, he told me, that are only about work, not about any future.
“They are still there,” he said, “working. Not living. I think about those workers. I think I would like to do something for them. When I read about the American Revolution and George Washington and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and labor laws, I think I would like to do that, be China’s George Washington.”
I was typing all this down, poorly, quickly, sketching really, his phrases.
"Is that too much?" he asked.
"No," I said. "It's audacious, but it's not too much."
He said more.
I typed.
“Now, review this,” I said, “then revise it. Add the words I left out. I’ll see you next week.”
I saw him this week and read his final PIQ essay. The opening was the same but George Washington was gone. The factory was gone. In its place were platitudes about the transformative power of higher education.l
“What happened?” I asked.
“My father told me I should not say those things. That Trump would not like them. That Trump might find out about my thoughts. That this might make trouble. As his son, I must obey.”
Was there a sigh, a flash of regret? I thought so but could not be certain. He was looking at the computer screen, not at me.
"I understand," I told him. "But all week I have been thinking of those workers."
"Me too," he said.
Lisa Alvarez is a professor of English at Irvine Valley College and co-directs the writers workshops at the Community of Writers in California’s High Sierra. Her work has appeared here and there, including About Place Journal, Air/Light, and Huizache and her collection, Some Final Beauty and Other Stories, will be published in 2025 by University of Nevada Press.