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By Akemi Kwan
Every weekend up until my freshman year of high school, I accompanied my mom to Chinatown. But rather than entering the enclave’s renowned dumpling restaurants and brightly lit gift shops, we would enter an aged three-story flat with no name: an underground Mahjong casino.
About 20 stairs below a rundown house, through an extra locked door below the stairs, I ate, played and napped alone till late at night, while my mom played Mahjong amid a fog of cigarette smoke. At this mysterious building with rooms locked from the outside, my younger self observed the same racial group and socioeconomic class enter and exit.
I was 12 when I began to realize the low social capital of my family.
Chinatown had exposed me to my mom’s inner circle of waitresses, restaurant cooks and cleaners with blank degrees. Seeing my neighbors, uncles and aunties with the same blue-collar careers, it felt like those professions were the only ones out there for me.
Then, I felt unworthy of pursuing ‘bigger things’ and my future felt un-carvable from the repetitive lifestyles my environment produced. I was scared of being limited to the same blue-collar professions that I saw in the Mahjong casino.
I was always first-generation and low income, but that experience marked the beginning of the realization of this background of mine — like how writing this article marks my acceptance and pride in my identity.
As a child, I followed my single mom around her part-time jobs — whether that be sitting on lounge chairs at Supercuts or waiting hours at dining tables in the multiple restaurants where she waitressed. Until then, I felt embarrassed to host hangouts at my house in fear that people would see family pictures that contained only one parent.
My struggle with school began as soon as I moved to Menlo Park in fifth grade, with a reading score on the state tests that was 400 points below the school’s average. Having to skip recess to retake this assessment, I remember feeling tired of being left out. Though at the time it seemed like just 30 minutes without my friends, I knew that this feeling of being left behind due to my underperformance wouldn’t stop at recess. It would follow me through lunch periods in high school, and eventually into college thereafter.
My time isolated from others in the Mahjong casino pushed me to seek out extracurriculars where I can be hands-on, and build my own community through helping students like myself. Now, I’m dedicated to empowering other first-generation and low-income students with my tutoring business, resume webinars featuring personal templates, and my college and career library workshops where I share with them a curated list of scholarships.
If you are a student in a similar situation reading this, I applaud you for reading this far. You’ve demonstrated your interest in beginning your journey, so now all there is to do is take action. A great way to get started is to throw yourself into situations and learn from your mistakes as I did with the internship I had the summer after my freshman year at an HIV research nonprofit, where I found my interest in public speaking, rather than the actual research itself.
Unfortunately, I realized too late that there was never a reason to be embarrassed about my first-generation and low-income background. The very circumstances I once believed were holding me back from prestigious careers and connection with classmates ultimately fueled my determination to push forward — and to build a network of initiatives that make higher education more accessible for students like me.
Akemi Kwan is a rising senior attending Menlo Atherton High School who was recently awarded the Horatio Alger $10,000 State Scholarship, an award given to 15 impact-driven high school students in every state among over 25,000 applicants. Since her time away from the Mahjong casino, Kwan has gained experience interning at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and now serves as a scholar within Yale’s Women in Economics program.
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Wow ! What wonderful story of success and giving back to the community. Inspiring.