我们父母那一代人正在老去。
他们留给我们的记忆，也许你我还没有抽出时间来整理。
但，你我有所不知的是，他们的事迹现在是优秀文书题材，换来我们下一代的一封封录取通知。
下面三篇文书是来自2021-22申请年度的优秀文书。
三篇的主题都是自己的爷爷奶奶，作者也都是亚裔 Gen-Z。
读完，你会更喜欢哪一篇呢？等读完各位的留言，我的评论会继续！
第一篇：爷爷
Red, orange, purple, gold...I was caught in a riot of shifting colors. I pranced up and down the hill, my palms extended to the moving collage of butterflies that surrounded me. “Would you like to learn how to catch one?” Grandfather asked, holding out a glass jar. “Yes!” I cheered, his huge calloused fingers closing my chubby five-year-old hands around it carefully.
Grandfather put his finger to his lips, and I obliged as I watched him deftly maneuver his net. He caught one marvelous butterfly perched on a flower, and I clutched the open jar in anticipation as he slid the butterfly inside. It quivered and fell to the bottom of the jar, and I gasped. It struggled until its wings, ablaze in a glory of orange and red, quivered to a stop. I watched, wide-eyed, as it stopped moving. “Grandpa! What’s happening?”
My grandfather had always had a collection of butterflies, but that was the first time I saw him catch one. After witnessing the first butterfly die, I begged him to keep them alive; I even secretly let some of them go. Therefore, to compromise, he began carrying a special jar for the days I accompanied him on his outings, a jar to keep the living butterflies. But the creatures we caught always weakened and died after a few days in captivity, no matter how tenderly I fed and cared for them. Grandfather took me aside and explained that the lifespan of an adult butterfly was very short. They were not meant to live forever: their purpose was to flame brilliantly and then fade away. Thus, his art serves as a memory of their beauty, an acknowledgement of nature’s ephemeral splendor.
But nothing could stay the same. I moved to America and as the weekly excursions to the mountainside ended, so did our lessons in nature and science. Although six thousand miles away, I would never forget how my grandpa’s wrinkles creased when he smiled or how he always smelled like mountain flowers.
As I grew older and slowly understood how Grandfather lived his life, I began to follow in his footsteps. He protected nature’s beauty from decay with his art, and in the same way, I tried to protect my relationships, my artwork, and my memories. I surrounded myself with the journals we wrote together, but this time I recorded my own accomplishments, hoping to one day show him what I had done. I recorded everything, from the first time I spent a week away from home to the time I received a gold medal at the top of the podium at the California Tae Kwon Do Competition. I filled my new home in America with the photographs from my childhood and began to create art of my own. Instead of catching butterflies like my grandpa, I began experimenting with butterfly wing art as my way of preserving nature’s beauty. Soon my home in America became a replica of my home in China, filled from wall to wall with pictures and memories.
Nine long years passed before I was reunited with him. The robust man who once chased me up the hillside had developed arthritis, and his thick black hair had turned white. The grandfather I saw now was not the one I knew; we had no hobby and no history in common, and he became another adult, distant and unapproachable. With this, I forgot all about the journals and photos that I had kept and wanted to share with him.
After weeks of avoidance, I gathered my courage and sat with him once again. This time, I carried a large, leather-bound book with me. “Grandfather,” I began, and held out the first of my many journals. These were my early days in America, chronicled through pictures, art, and neatly-printed English. On the last page was a photograph of me and my grandfather, a net in his hand and a jar in mine. As I saw our faces, shining with proud smiles, I began to remember our days on the mountainside, catching butterflies and halting nature’s eventual decay.
My grandfather has weakened over the years, but he is still the wise man who raised me and taught me the value of capturing the beauty of life. Although he has grown old, I have grown up. His legs are weak, but his hands are still as gentle as ever. Therefore, this time, it will be different. This time, I will no longer recollect memories, but create new ones.
第二篇：奶奶
“Don’t do ordinary things with me.”
My grandmother says she is the ordinary one in our family and does all the ordinary things: sewing quilts, making tofu, and growing an expansive vegetable garden in our backyard. When I take an interest in what she does, she shoos me away.
“I cannot teach you anything,” she tells me. “Go to study.”
Despite her attempts to keep me from her “ordinary”, I became fascinated with her forbidden garden. I would peek out the window at her, wishing I could be out there with her. Because she refused to teach me, I had to teach myself. In school, I became zealous in science, learning how flowers were more than just delicate petals, with pistils, stamens, and sepals. When that wasn’t enough, I checked out florist books and made my locker into a miniature library. I thought of one day proving to her that I could be extraordinary while being just like her.
It was the penetration of pests in my grandmother’s garden that let me the chance. The summer in tenth grade, her garden was overrun by slugs, snails, and Japanese beetles. When I sprayed her plants with soapy water and drowned the pests, she looked at me inquisitively, “Where’d you learn that?” I told her all of my botanic hunt. The rest of the summer she would see me waking up early in the morning, checking pests in the garden, and re-spray the plants once every week.
While sharing with my grandmother invoked more joy, my learning in school on plants expands in multitudes. At the environmental rally, I read about increasing soil salinity and heavy metal pollution. In biology class, I learnt the transports of ions in plants. These ideas spurred me to organize a team of young botanists in researching halophytes (salt-tolerant plants) and their potential for bioremediation.
When I explained my grandmother what we just uncovered about halophyte, she blinked at me and asked her question as ordinary, “can I eat them?” Since then, as an edible halophyte, quinoa makes frequent appearances in our kitchen.
My grandmother and I have begun to learn together. She sits by me while I pour over Greek philosophers, Euclidean geometry, and lines of indecipherable code, interspersing my breaks with lessons on a new stitching method. Nights are spent hiding from my mother, reading in flashlight under the covers. Mornings are comical, waking up to my face mashed into a Latin botanical encyclopedia and a vocabulary book under my grandmother’s pillow.
Not only she admits me in her ordinary times, but also it has become our best common ground. At the grocery store, she points excitedly at all the produce and asks me to read the ingredients of every type of dessert we spot. Our favorite are strawberry shortcake and mango pudding.
This summer, we hiked to Point Pelee. It was the first time she had spoken about her family. Her father had died and left her to take care of her younger siblings when she was ten. She never had an education, so she made a living selling shoes on the street to send my mother and aunt to school. “I will never let them do ordinary things with me,” she avowed to herself.
Still, there was so much for me to learn. I wanted for my grandmother to teach me to fold dumplings, to show filial piety, to respect my parents while remaining myself, and to be more Chinese.
“I wish I could give you more than these ordinary things,” she confessed.
Yet, it is these ordinary things that has led me into my learning path, and is now inspiring me to find fulfillment in my life — much like hers, it is in learning.
第三篇：还是爷爷
My Ye-Ye always wears a red baseball cap. I think he likes the vivid color—bright and sanguine, like himself. When Ye-Ye came from China to visit us seven years ago, he brought his red cap with him and every night for six months, it sat on the stairway railing post of my house, waiting to be loyally placed back on Ye-Ye’s head the next morning. He wore the cap everywhere: around the house, where he performed magic tricks with it to make my little brother laugh; to the corner store, where he bought me popsicles before using his hat to wipe the beads of summer sweat off my neck. Today whenever I see a red hat, I think of my Ye-Ye and his baseball cap, and I smile.
Ye-Ye is the Mandarin word for “grandfather.” My Ye-Ye is a simple, ordinary person—not rich, not “successful”—but he is my greatest source of inspiration and I idolize him. Of all the people I know, Ye-Ye has encountered the most hardship and of all the people I know, Ye-Ye is the most joyful. That these two aspects can coexist in one individual is, in my mind, truly remarkable.
Ye-Ye was an orphan. Both his parents died before he was six years old, leaving him and his older brother with no home and no family. When other children gathered to read around stoves at school, Ye-Ye and his brother walked in the bitter cold along railroad tracks, looking for used coal to sell. When other children ran home to loving parents, Ye-Ye and his brother walked along the streets looking for somewhere to sleep.
Eight years later, Ye-Ye walked alone—his brother was dead.
Ye-Ye managed to survive, and in the meanwhile taught himself to read, write, and do arithmetic. Life was a blessing, he told those around him with a smile.
Years later, Ye-Ye’s job sent him to the Gobi Desert, where he and his fellow workers labored for twelve hours a day. The desert wind was merciless; it would snatch their tent in the middle of the night and leave them without supply the next morning. Every year, harsh weather took the lives of some fellow workers.
After eight years, Ye-Ye was transferred back to the city where his wife lay sick in bed. At the end of a twelve-hour workday, Ye-Ye took care of his sick wife and three young children. He sat with the children and told them about the wide, starry desert sky and mysterious desert lives. Life was a blessing, he told them with a smile.
But life was not easy; there was barely enough money to keep the family from starving. Yet, my dad and his sisters loved going with Ye-Ye to the market. He would buy them little luxuries that their mother would never indulge them in: a small bag of sunflower seeds for two cents, a candy each for three cents. Luxuries as they were, Ye-Ye bought them without hesitation. Anything that could put a smile on the children’s faces and a skip in their steps was priceless.
Ye-Ye still goes to the market today. At the age of seventy-eight, he bikes several kilometers each week to buy bags of fresh fruits and vegetables, and then bikes home to share them with his neighbors. He keeps a small patch of strawberries and an apricot tree. When the fruit is ripe, he opens his gate and invites all the children in to pick and eat. He is Ye-Ye to every child in the neighborhood.
I had always thought that I was sensible and self-aware. But nothing has made me stare as hard in the mirror as I did after learning about the cruel past that Ye-Ye had suffered and the cheerful attitude he had kept throughout those years. I thought back to all the times when I had gotten upset. My mom forgot to pick me up from the bus station. My computer crashed the day before an assignment was due. They seemed so trivial and childish, and I felt deeply ashamed of myself.
Now, whenever I encounter an obstacle that seems overwhelming, I think of Ye-Ye; I see him in his red baseball cap, smiling at me. Like a splash of cool water, his smile rouses me from grief, and reminds me how trivial my worries are and how generous life has been. Today I keep a red baseball cap at the railing post at home where Ye-Ye used to put his every night. Whenever I see the cap, I think of my Ye-Ye, smiling in his red baseball cap, and I smile. Yes, Ye-Ye. Life is a blessing.
朋友，我在等着收看您的评论。
• 你这个软广告比较差，你只说了“一封封录取通知。。。”，都是差州大录取吗？亚裔这种文章太多了，不是说写的不好，而是这种题材过度泛滥。AO要看吐了 -ZeroSumGame- 09/15/2022 postreply 06:59:55
• 仔细看看，这都不是州大的 -贾平凸- 09/15/2022 postreply 08:21:48
• 你这样软广告，占便宜，没人敢找你，怕被你这么会算计坑了。光明正大的花钱做广告吧 -ZeroSumGame- 09/15/2022 postreply 08:42:03
• 这话说得有道理 我需要做广告的，可不是文书服务。你想想会是啥。-贾平凸- 09/15/2022 postreply 08:48:05
• 是出国中介啦：） -sept.- 09/15/2022 postreply 10:36:57
• 这类essay是写得很好。不过不太可能加分的。essay不需要写得漂亮。 -avw- 09/15/2022 postreply 07:24:50
• 您说的是麻麻吧 -贾平凸- 09/15/2022 postreply 08:22:26
• 是的，需要表现你自己是个什么样的人。不是作文比赛。 -bobpainting- 09/15/2022 postreply 09:10:46
• 看后感觉1和2不错。3一般。 -bobpainting- 09/15/2022 postreply 09:23:51
• 第二篇写得最好，第三篇不行，而且太长 -avw- 09/15/2022 postreply 07:43:56
• 眼光不错 -贾平凸- 09/15/2022 postreply 08:22:52
• 飞看一下，记得第一篇进了哈佛啊。其实看范文看再多也白搭。文书的主题 是写自己。要真实。要不同-圆西瓜- 09/15/2022 postreply 07:55:26
• 很多人以为进了名校的essays一定好其实未必 -fantasticdream- 09/15/2022 postreply 08:19:29
• 嘿嘿。UCB女孩横扫7所旗舰，她的文书写了人生如做菜 -圆西瓜- 09/15/2022 postreply 08:24:25
• 橫掃藤校了嗎？ -violinpiano- 09/15/2022 postreply 08:28:21
• 只申了一所Y ：） -圆西瓜- 09/15/2022 postreply 08:38:51
• 麻烦您把这篇贴出来欣赏下？ -贾平凸- 09/15/2022 postreply 08:44:14
• 应该不行，我只看过一段。她辅导我家老大写文书来着 -圆西瓜- 09/15/2022 postreply 08:48:02
• 原来是您家私藏啊 -贾平凸- 09/15/2022 postreply 08:50:39
• essay要這麽有用 那早就橫掃了 -violinpiano- 09/15/2022 postreply 08:27:44
• 文书不一定让你横扫，但可以提高你横扫的概率 -贾平凸- 09/15/2022 postreply 08:32:00
• 能提高0.1% -fantasticdream- 09/15/2022 postreply 09:08:24
• 对，一共只有0.1%的横扫概率。给你从0%提高0.1%，你要不要 -贾平凸- 09/16/2022 postreply 06:52:55
• 对，60%的藤生只拿到一藤 他们的Essay就是你说的这样。这样的申请者大约15万人，普通文书质量的录取率，不到8%。拿到2+藤offer的人，文书的质量就不一样了。每年这类文书大约2000-3000左右。这类文书中的录取率，高达50%。拿下满贯的小百人，个个都是好笔头。这类文书的录取率是100%。说到写自己，后两类文书都在闪光地写自己。第一类文书，是在写闪光的自己-贾平凸- 09/15/2022 postreply 08:30:47
• AO 好像要了解申请人是否适合该校，不是要录取祖父母或者评作文比赛。文章像沙拉酱，录取看里面的菜，然后是混和均匀的味道。综合考察，缺一不可，不能光吃酱没有硬通货 -Cambridge617- 09/15/2022 postreply 09:45:21
• 对，stats, ecs 和rec，缺一不可，不过现在这三个都不是稀缺货了，只有essay还是 多数essay好的人，会缺少stats和ecs 中的一两项，就像是Joan Didion这样的好笔头。而stats和ecs好的人，大多又不是好笔头，就是我们身边多数的小中男、女娃们。-贾平凸- 09/16/2022 postreply 06:50:24
• 感人 -品酒- 09/15/2022 postreply 10:30:17
• 不知道，别人的essay怎么会有第三者知道。 -avw-09/15/2022 postreply 10:48:53
• 我老二自己谢绝给父母看因为我们没有申请过大学，只和康嫂讨论修改定稿，同学朋友之间也没有互相看。老大只是在提交的时候让我们坐在旁边看着他按鼠标，没有时间看他和康嫂一起准备的。 -Cambridge617- 09/15/2022 postreply 11:02:43
• 这就是娃们在申请上的通病 不是他们都不听自己父母的，而是大多数的父母真的不大懂申请。大家能懂的，就是人人都很容易懂得的硬通货-贾平凸- 09/16/2022 postreply 06:55:38
• 第二篇的theme很好。但是是不是有点儿牵强？Because she refused to teach me, I had to teach myself. In school, I became zealous in science, learning how flowers were more than just delicate petals, with pistils, stamens, and sepals. -朱珠儿- 09/15/2022 postreply 10:59:54
