A Required Essay by Lap Gong Leong

The School of General Studies Required Essay By?Lap Gong Leong?

I was born on December 8th, 1996 to a father who had established a respectable career in Hong Kong and Singapore’s venture capital industry. Both my parents had high expectations for me. They expected me to learn Chinese and English and excel in sports and academics. Instead, my life would be a long road of unpredictable ups and downs. In the words of a psychiatrist, my parents were often in an early rush to have me “transformed.”

Having failed to master Cantonese and Mandarin and stuck with middling grades in primary school, my parents were then hit with a difficult diagnosis. I had started to manifest tics that couldn’t be cured by traditional Chinese medicine, chiropractors, or the many specialists I visited.?

My parents were referred to a neurologist who diagnosed me with Tourette’s syndrome and suspected I also had Asperger’s Syndrome. While my family would develop an understanding and kindness towards my disabilities, I could still always sense their disappointment.

By age 11, my family left Hong Kong and resettled in New York. My mother continued to pursue her career in Taiwan and China, visiting as often as she could. My father would stay with me. I spent the next four years in Connecticut boarding schools.?

By the time I entered high school, I thought I was cured of my issues and ready for normal education. I couldn't have been more incorrect. I could handle the academics, however, insecurity and lack of confidence in myself kept me from connecting with other students in the fullest possible way.?

I attended Summit School in Nyack for seven months. After three years of distress, I finally was in a school that had a full continuum of support to help me learn how to navigate and manage my feelings and my issues.

The teachers taught me that my challenges were not inhuman or strange. I finally accepted the importance of allowing other people to help me and to reciprocate their kindness. I graduated high school on time and fully prepared for college.?

After some time, phone canvassing for the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign, I started applying to different CUNY schools. I was accepted to the City College of Technology but felt City Tech was not for me. Then, I registered for classes at BMCC and spent a very difficult first semester there wondering if college was really the right academic environment for me. I then attended NYU as a visiting student.

Despite the intense atmosphere, I enjoyed being at NYU and I appreciated the people who looked out for me there and understood my ambition to complete my bachelor’s degree. Instead of moping, I reapplied to BMCC and fully committed myself to studying the liberal arts. I learned that I needed to trust the good people at the Office of Accessibilities and to continue to seek resources on campus to help me. I learned that the faculty and administration were assets that were meant to help me on my journey. I learned to accept my challenges that will always be with me. I ended up graduating with Honors from BMCC, achieving the Associates of Arts degree, making Dean’s List three times.

BMCC gave me transferable skills that helped me readjust to working life. When campus closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I had moved back to Hong Kong to complete my degree online while living with my family there.?

Before the crackdown in Hong Kong, the sixth election since the handover was to be held on September 6th, 2020, I was busily re-acclimating myself to Hong Kong life. Concerned over the pro-democratic camp’s complacency after winning a stunning victory in last year’s District Council elections, I tried to find any way to volunteer for the upcoming campaign.

Understandably, the major and minor parties were unable or unwilling to hire individuals who could not speak Cantonese. Despite this, I eventually found a small pressure group headed by Gordon Ng Ching Hang who went by the alias Lee Bak Lou. I started to volunteer whatever spare time I had with his campaign. As spring and summer went on, the campaign began to intensify. While at first it seemed people we met were just plain uninterested, a gradual trickle of voters would begin to take our leaflets and inquire as to how a pan-democratic primary would operate.

Perhaps what solidified our petition and furnaced the iron will to vote in such a primary was the National Security Law that was enacted the day before July 1st, the 23rd anniversary of the handover. In what should’ve been a normal and exciting day to raise money for pro democratic causes and create pressure on the parties, the police harassed any pro-democracy campaigners that were perceived to be ill behaved or illicit. I still remember a policeman shooting blanks at an overhead pedestrian crossing simply because he was slighted at the swearing and jeering, he received from crossers by.

As I struggled to navigate myself from chaos to the safety of my brother’s nearby apartment, my brain was only wracked by fear of repercussions of being a pro-democracy lay activist and the hope that a people’s vote could assert a people’s voice. I was born and raised in Hong Kong and yet the environment felt so alien, despite such deep familiarity.

The night before the primary, a Democratic Party activist from Ted Hui’s office contacted me. They wanted an all-hands-on deck approach to set up the primary polling booth in his constituency office and ensure the smooth operation of the voting process. I was ecstatic.?

Unfortunately, the day was racked by several technical and logistical issues. Firstly, a sign broke down, and volunteers spent what seemed like hours trying to fix it. Then, technical problems with the voting software delayed the primary until 11:00 am, forcing us to turn away early voters. With a critical target to hit and millions spent, it seemed that grand incompetency was bedeviling the pro democrats. I then went to another polling station.

Soon, the voters started to trickle in. Then, the trickle turned into a flood. The small office was inundated. Voters and poll workers did their best to socially distance and prevent infections from COVID-19, but people kept huddling up inside to vote. Later, an older pro-democracy activist took me to the Causeway Bay polling station, conveniently near my brother’s home. The spectacle of trying to help gaggles of first time and longtime supporters use a voting app will never leave me. For the first time ever, fellow citizens were exercising their right to choose their favorite politicians to represent them in the next election. For the first time in decades, the pro-democrats were united and centered. For the first time, a superpower couldn’t stop a plea for representation. Unfortunately, this pride was not to last.

604,660 voters cast a valid ballot in a city-wide primary that had seen diners, offices, neighborhood stores, and an old double decker bus made into makeshift polling stations. The admittedly amateurish effort, bedeviled by logistical problems that only come from crowdfunded operations, had still attracted more than 14% of the total electorate, beyond any organizer’s dream.?

Yet, the Chinese Government and its Hong Kong representatives would effectively render such voting useless by christening it an illegal straw poll. They first threatened that such a poll could run afoul of the national security law and soon disqualified all the participating candidates.?

Then, in January 2021, they arrested all 47 participants and 6 organizers including my former boss, who is still in prison to this day. Their crime was to try winning a parliamentary majority, which counted as overthrowing the government. Had we chosen our candidates behind closed doors, we wouldn’t have broken any national security laws and likely cruised to an election victory. Had the Pro-Democrats been less democratic, my friends would be bargaining and negotiating with China rather than being behind bars.?

In many ways, Hong Kong’s crisis gave me a new impetus to seek a path in life to defend economic and political freedom. While I had always been passionate about global affairs, Hong Kong’s conflict wasn’t a polite debate between nationalists demanding respect and sovereignty and federalists defending an act of union. While I prefer unity over division, Hong Kong’s governance crisis was different.

It did not possess that many cloying, self-deferential civic nationalist leaders that espoused our great universities or accentuated the city’s free market dynamism. Pro Chinese politicians, until recently, were not obsessed with deifying Chinese communism or angry about the lack of patriotism in a public they disliked. Upon reflection, the Hong Kong protests was the final split of what was once a single nation. The people who wanted the Joint Declaration and the Basic Law to possess genuine authenticity were finally muzzled and snapped by those who felt “bourgeois democracy” was a destructive and venal distraction from economic, social, and patriotic development.

In John Gray’s essay “The Hayek I Knew”, the former classical liberal lamented on the emotional trauma felt by the Austro-British libertarian economist and his inability to accept the full dissolution of Austria-Hungary. An empire that had been a great deal more civilized (albeit repressive) than the nation-states and statelets that had replaced the resplendent operas and courts in Vienna. Gray would then assert that Hayek’s own fallacy was his near obsession with crafting an economic, legal, and legislative order that can preserve liberty in aspic.?

While I disagree with Gray’s conclusion, I cannot fault F.A Hayek for trying to rebuild classical liberalism in his lifetime. Seeing my home decline and devolve slowly and then rapidly from a deeply imperfect libertarian entrepot to a communist oligarchy has inculcated an even greater thirst for knowledge and learning in me.?

What creates prosperity? Is political liberty and economic technocracy still compatible in the 21st century? Will climate change render all these debates irrelevant as governments and great institutions assume incalculable power in a quest to preserve life on earth??

These are the questions I hope to explore amongst many others that have been brewing in my head for the longest time. I believe Columbia School of General Studies is the right place for me to finish my education because it has the dynamic synthesis of mature students who’ve experienced the world much like I have, a faculty that have produced world-class research that explain the complex phenomena that influence our daily lives, and a community that encourages unique and diverse perspectives. My time in Hong Kong taught me how easy it is for people to embrace tyranny and break their social bonds if it increases their social status and wealth. I hope to study economics with an eye to political economy and equity and its environmental and social consequences.?

I am excited at the prospect of learning important lessons from professors R Glenn Hubbard, Wojciech Kopczuk, and all the other esteemed faculty at GS. In addition to learning and studying, I hope to engage and contribute to the campus culture by writing for one of the many publications. I will contribute deeply to Columbia’s social and cultural life, including playing a role in promoting and raising awareness of Hong Kong’s and Singapore’s cultures. I will bring a diverse perspective to campus through engaging in the Hong Kong Students and Scholars Society and the Singapore Students Association.?

Writing this essay has required a great deal of contemplation and self-learning. I sincerely hope my non-traditional path, my grit, my motivation, my perseverance, and my quest for intellectual collaboration merits entry into this esteemed program.

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[This essay was originally written and submitted as the required essay as part of the application process to the Columbia School of General Studies for the Fall 2021, entering class.]

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[Each week, I join Lap Gong Leong, a colleague in weekly conversation; Lap is an emerging writer and commentator on a wide range of topics including politics, education, film, science fiction, and building a prosperous and free society for all. His analysis and critique aims to break through the logjam of conventional ideas and wisdom, especially as it relates to the careers and lives of individuals with Autism. We are pleased to share the 19th piece of writing from our recent exchanges.

About?Lap Gong Leong: A graduate of?the?Borough of Manhattan Community College?in Liberal Arts,?"I am in the process?of transferring to a four-year university which I expect to be Baruch College, one of the City Colleges of New York. However, the lack of Autistic aids for many individuals, including myself has incentivized me to see entrepreneurial ventures and work for myself."?A resident of NYC, Lap also divides his time between Hong Kong and Singapore.]