成功申请到哈佛大学法学院的ESSAY!

Two-Oh-Two-Seven-Two-Six-Five-Six-Two-Three. This string of numbers was the first I learned—to be recited on command for hypothetical firemen, the school nurse during pollen season, or both—and was delivered each time with a rapidity and enthusiasm that only a four-and-a-half-year-old could muster.

As trivial as this recollection may seem, the first three digits of the phone number I remember to this day as a jingle have meaning to me because of the place they represent—Washington, D.C. There, I was born to a mother on whose voice floated the gentle lilt of the West Indies, and a father whose baritone was as spiced with notes of the South as his seriousness was with laughter. The older I grew, the more faces the city showed me.

There was the Washington of polished heels through marble hallways. Of gavels, solemn and resolute, against sounding blocks. Of flag pins on the lapels of honorable gentlemen, and minced black truffle in salads at luncheons held in their honor.

There was also the Washington outside the hallways—outside the walls even. The Washington of handmade signs circling in front of the White House; soft, small hands and large, weathered ones alike, united by some shared belief, holding glowing candles pushed through Dixie cups to save well-meaning fingers from the ire of hot wax poised to fall.

But perhaps most noticeable, most dramatic, and most important to me, was the Washington that was not seen. The Washington, which did not have connections on the Hill, and did not have any real protest movement. The Washington that was promoted from grade to grade, all the way to cap and gown, stage and applause, and functional illiteracy. The Washington that barely had access to supermarkets, much less “power,” but was affected in a very real way by each change to the housing, health care, and criminal justice policies that were drafted, voted on, and enacted with each new session. It was the invisible Washington that emptied the wastepaper baskets and polished the floors of the Washington that legislated, and that raked the leaves and shoveled the snow for the Washington that marched. It was the Washington whose concerns were more vital than ideological. Its concerns were not even political—they were not even “new.” They were, and are, as basic as equal sentencing for equal crimes.

While I never saw this Washington at school, I saw its daughters every Saturday morning—first at a public school for the arts, and then, once school administrators’ congeniality had grown tired and our welcome worn thin, in the basement of a neighborhood church. Inside, forty figures, from seven to seventeen, would become one in the art and wonder of the arabesque and the pas de chat. And while a few of us studied in schools that were clearly preparing us for college, the vast majority of us did not.

Of all the mornings we spent there together, the memory most vivid in my mind is of the one Saturday that we spent neither stretching, at the barre, not en pointe, but rather kneeling on the floor: young girls with neat buns and bright eyes, leaning over newsprint, older ones helping younger ones, ballet slippers stuffed with newspaper to prevent creasing, all eagerly and meticulously spray-painting our light-pink ballet slippers a warm brown. All so that the visual seamlessness, which defines the art—the continuity of line, motion, and appearance from calf, to ankle, to pointed, slippered toe—could belong to the girls in that church basement also.

While I shall never forget the beauty of that moment—the resourcefulness and innocence of the girls on their knees that morning, carefully, faithfully fashioning for themselves slippers that no manufacturer thought to produce, it is my fervent hope that in their eventual maturity, they find their existence recognized; and that when they look to government as citizens, and to schools as parents, as they once looked to merchants as young dancers, they will find that—at last—they have been “seen.” In the same way that a mastery of physics is essential to the design of a bridge that is to stand, I hope to master the law as the instrument with which to help ensure that in my first home—a city of confluence and contrast, adjacency and antithesis—these girls, its daughters, and the similarly forgotten, of all ages, genders, and ethnicities, are remembered.