The Proudest Moment of My Life

Lately I’ve been working on a lot of application essays, and a question that keeps coming up is, “What is your proudest achievement?” This is the story I wish I could tell.

When I was about 8 or 9, my parents often took my family to Taiwanese Association events. These included cookouts, festivals, culture shows, and general happy times with all the other Taiwanese community members. One weekend, the association set up a big cookout at a nearby park. After a while, as the adults mingled and served us shaved ice, a voice shouted, “Let the watermelon contest begin!”

We all turned on our park benches to look at the field event that had been set up. About thirty feet from the park benches stood a chubby man holding a blindfold, facing the crowd. Between the crowd and the chubby man was a watermelon. “If you can walk to the watermelon and stab it, you get to take it home!” he exclaimed as all the kids began to get in line for the challenge. Being the natural competitor and lover of watermelons (still unaware of my allergy to the damn fruits) that I was, I hopped in line.

The first girl was blindfolded and spun around many times. As she began walking toward the watermelon, she veered off course, heading frighteningly toward the crowd with a knife. She got closer and closer to the crowd, still unaware of her ocean of a distance from the watermelon. Finally, the adults let out a collective laugh when she stepped on the rope demarking the boundaries of the field and stopped. The girl took off her blindfold and realized that the watermelon was about fifteen feet to her left.

 

 

Child after child went on like this. A few succeeded in walking right to the melon and stabbing it, but most others walked to the rope and failed. When it got to be my turn, there was only one watermelon left. “I could be a hero for my family! A breadwinner!” I thought as the chubby man spun me round and round.

Finally, I began to walk in what I thought was the direction of the watermelon. I took slow steps. The crowd was silent except for a few peeps and chuckles. I could sense that I was getting close to the park benches. Getting this watermelon’s gonna be so sweet. With the next step, I felt a rope under my feet. No watermelon. I was devastated.

But then I remembered that the watermelon was sitting on the rope. I just wasn’t sure if it was to my left or right. I took a gamble and started following the rope to the left. Sure enough, ten steps later I heard the glorious clunk of a fresh watermelon, and with a smile on my face, stabbed the melon with my knife. Everyone cheered. It was the proudest moment of my life.

I think the moral of this story is when there’s a watermelon on the line, follow the damn line.

Wiffleball is Dangerous

There are a handful of stories I could tell about my 21st birthday. This one is about how a wiffleball nearly ruined mine.

On the afternoon of my 21st birthday, a few of my friends went out onto the beach in Ventnor to play a casual game of wiffleball before heading into Atlantic City. No big deal.

We were cycling through the positions when it finally became my turn to pitch. By then we’d been playing for a while, and the game was just about over. The very first pitch I threw – underhand, mind you – was ripped back at me from 15 feet away and hit me square on the vein above my ankle.

I fell down, grasping my leg. My friends were laughing at my seemingly gross exaggeration. I laughed too, until I took my hand off and saw a giant bruise forming. Somehow, the wiffleball managed to hit in just the right spot to burst the blood vessel and produce a bump about the size of an old Nokia cell phone.

Panicking, I stood up and started walking back to the house. However, every step increased the pressure on my ankle, presumably squirting out more blood from my vein. I hobbled back into the house and tried my best to fix the peculiar issue before it was time to go to Atlantic City. Despite two hours of ice and elevation, I was resigned to limping around the casino with a wiffleball injury for the rest of the night, taking the phrase “injury prone” to the next level.