Working as a social worker for the past 16 years has convinced me that I want very much to continue in this field. I hope to attain first a B.A. and later a M.S.W. in Social Work. As a profoundly abused child, by the time I became an adolescent, I dreamed of becoming a social worker who could help other children, saving them from horrific situations, helping them to recover, providing the assistance that came too little and too late for myself, coming full circle, arriving home. At first, I had felt that such a career was beyond my grasp because of my lack of self-esteem that accompanied the psychological and especially physical abuse to which I was subjected. As I matured, however, I realized that my unique background afforded me life experience that others did not have. I chose to become a foster parent in 1990. My heart was filled with so much love and caring for this abused and neglected child and providing her with love. My experience as a foster parent has motivated me to work with other abused and/or neglected children as well.
I strongly believe that the combination of love, understanding, and being inspired to self-motivation are the central keys to overcoming any obstacles later in life that, living a healthy and happy life rather than continuing to suffer as an adult as a result of the traumas of childhood. I’ve always struggled mightily to help my children develop their skills, motivation, and willpower to seek their goals, keep dreaming, and to find the strength within themselves to accept success in their life; being adaptable, flexible, and finding the inner dignity and strength to love themselves and open themselves up to authentic love for those around them.
For many years now, as a professional and as a mother, I have used my own cultivation of high degrees of motivation and energy to make a difference in the lives of foster children. And I have been profoundly rewarded insofar that I have had the enormous privilege of being able to make profound changes in these children’s lives for the better. By 1998, I had adopted four foster children, providing them all with a safe and stable place to call home, with profound, unconditional love, seeing to their education, helping them to build self-esteem and to love themselves, their new brothers and sisters, and people in general, to respect older people and to appreciate and make the most of their opportunities for education. My first adopted daughter, who is now in her second year of college, would often tell me that with all my life’s experiences, my next ambition should be to become a professional social worker. She has been my inspiration and motivation to go back to school and pursue my Bachelors’ Degree in Social Work since I am now finishing up my Associates Degree in Sociology. She has always told me that my heart has so much room, and what a great foster/adoptive mother I have been for her; thus, whe has inspired me to not only dream but to put my dream into action. I ask to be accepted to your program so that I can give my all to working hard to achieve my dream while helping needy children to acquire their own foundation for making their own dreams a reality, making a difference in all the lives that I touch. The greatest contribution that I might be able to make to society would be to become a professional social worker with neglected and abused children and their families.
Although I feel proud of my personal success as a foster parent and with the adoption process, I have realized that I am not living up to my potential. At this point, having a degree in social work would allow me to work towards a license and expand my understanding of what I already know. After having worked with neglected children and social services for sixteen years without a social work degree, going back to school to study social work will be highly complementary to my life’s experiences and will build upon what I have learned studying sociology as well.
My mother was seventeen and my father was fifty. He said my mother begin drinking shortly after my sister was born, so that when they found out she was pregnant with me, it was not a happy time. She was already four months along when my father insisted that she use a hanger to abort the fetus. They tried but with no success. In September 1955, I was born against their will. According to my father, neither he nor my mother wanted me; so, when she gave birth, she abandoned me at the hospital and I was taken into foster care from birth until I was four years old. During this time, my father, who is Chinese, moved to San Francisco, California to open a laundry business. Social Service stayed in touch with my father and gave him a couple of options. He was ordered to start paying child support to keep me in foster care; or he could raise me himself. Not wishing to pay for my care, he made the latter decision. One of my first memories is stepping foot in the door and seeing my father with such rage in his eyes. I asked him “who are you?”
For the next six years, I endured intense verbal and physical abuse by my father. On a daily basis, my father would tell me that I was unwanted from conception. He would repeatedly say that I would not amount to anything. He would beat me daily, with different techniques of torture. I had to stand next to his ironing table for hours and every so often, he would hit me with a stick on each side of my head until it was swollen, break open and bleed, and he would then dab iodine on it and watch me squirm as it burned. He would put my hands in boiling hot water while he and my sister would laugh at the blisters it created. One of his more painful methods of torture was pulling my fingernails out with pliers one by one, then dousing them with alcohol. After six years, not one part of my body escaped his physical abuse.
After many years of this, my elementary school finally intervened and contacted Social Services and they determined that my father had been abusing me. I was removed from my father’s care; and, after six months—struggling with my ethnicity, since some social workers considered me Caucasian and others considered me Chinese and this made it most difficult to place me in a appropriate home—I was placed back in my father’s care. Then the abuse escalated since my father thought that I had told on him and got him in trouble. Social Services came for a visit only to see that I had bruises all over my body. They removed me again and placed me in Juvenile Hall for several months, and then, finally, I was placed into foster care.
At the age of thirteen, I ran away, and lived on the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown for several months. The police picked me up late one night and placed me back into Juvenile Hall for another nine months. I was shuffled through the system, becoming a ward of the court, and then placed in a group home. During each transition, I felt perplexed by the seeming illogic of the process; each placement seemed more socially isolating then the last one. I struggled to find explanations for things, and make some sense of my past. It was at this time that I realized that my success would depend upon my ability to make independent decisions and trust my inner strength. And it was at this time that I began to dream of growing up and helping other girls who were in similar kinds of situations.
As an older, non-traditional Chinese student, I look forward to utilizing my life’s experiences as content for papers and my contributions to class discussions. Raised in San Francisco’s Chinatown, I want to return and use my life’s experiences and my multi-lingual and multi-cultural abilities to help the children of Chinese immigrants who have fallen through the cracks. I want to return to the street as savior. I am bold, fearless; and my love for these children fills me with strength. I want so very much to give the balance of my professional life to the children of the streets of Chinatown. Having discovered my tenacity, perseverance, and inner strengths, I look forward to arming myself with a degree from the University of XXXX and enhancing my skills, knowledge, and credibility by attending the finest program in social work in the world. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for your consideration of my application.
