[Student Profile]
GPA: 4
SAT/ACT: 1460
Academic focus/Extracurricular activities: model UN, feministic change, club leadership
[Prompt & Essay]
“Help! I’m trapped inside a fortune cookie!”
Of the hundreds of fortunes I have collected over the years, that one is the funniest by far. I come across it every so often as I sift through “the box,” the eyesore that houses almost every fortune I have collected since I was six years old. The box has sat amidst the stacks of books on my nightstand for what feels like forever, perched gaudily in all its glittery, découpaged, bright purple glory. I sift through it when I am in need of reassurance from the universe, pinning my destiny on each soy sauce-stained slip of paper I pull out.
While I find the concept of a fortune gaining sentience inside its confectionary prison hilarious, that one is not my favorite. My favorite one came two summers ago as I was sitting in a booth across from my mother at the local Chinese food place. Crispy orange beef properly dispatched, I grabbed for my cookie and tore into the wrapper to unearth this revelation:
“Happiness is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it.”
I have not understood the meaning of every fortune I have received. Some are mixed metaphors, some are only half-printed, and some just don’t mean very much of anything to me. This one, though, meant something. This one spoke to me.
The conflict came when my father died weeks before my freshman year, and my happiness seemed to die with him. The weeks that followed felt like months, and my only coherent thoughts were devoid of hope and formed between bites of home-cooked meals made by strangers.
My dad used to bring Chinese food home for every special occasion. Takeout has always been something of a luxury in my house, so every last greasy noodle and duck sauce packet was well-earned and consumed as a family. Report cards, birthdays, flute recital “after parties”—all of it was met by my father carrying that big, brown bag in his arms. And, of course, another fortune for the box.
We held the reception for my father’s funeral at a Chinese restaurant. What was once a place of celebration had suddenly become a place of mourning. I don’t recall saving my fortune that day, because I had been dealt one already: “Life isn’t fair.” I no longer felt like the girl who découpaged a purple box to fill with fragile keepsakes from family dinners. Happiness was elusive, and it belonged to those whose fathers were alive.
Eventually, my fatigue placed me at a crossroads, forcing me to decide exactly how elusive my happiness was going to be. I had resigned myself to brokenness because I saw true joy as reserved for the undamaged, but being perpetually unhappy based on the unchangeable, the utterly unfixable, made me feel robbed. I didn’t want to grieve for happiness like I grieved for my father. Happiness, I decided, didn’t just belong to lucky people. It belonged to me.
“Happiness is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it.”
I held the fortune in my palm of my hand, reading it over and over and letting it tug at my insides. Snaked between my fingers was something I had already discovered, a sentiment of freedom that I nurture each day with careful and deliberate devotion. The freedom of joy is something that I grant myself each time I set pen to paper, and with every late night fit of laughter shared among friends. I grant myself joy in cups of tea, in practicing scales, and in ugly purple boxes stuffed with silly words. Most of all, I grant myself joy in the form of unrelenting fortitude that carries me through all of life’s endeavors, one plate of crispy orange beef at a time.