Statement of Purpose
MA
English
Koon
Woon
January
12, 2022
Statement of
Purpose
Today, at the age of seventy-two, what can
an advanced degree in English literature do for me? Surely the practical uses
of this advanced degree will be limited. So, I need to ask myself the purpose
of literature itself. For me, literature is the closest thing to a description
and guidebook to the human enterprise. Civilizations rise and fall, people are
displaced, blend together, and people start or abandon different social,
political, and aesthetic enterprises. What is touted in one era may be of
little regard in another. How a people and an empire be measured as great or as
pernicious depends on the point of view. But in its basic premises, literature
for me is more than a sociological or a biological study of humans in groups.
It is a record and sometimes a debate over vying thoughts, insights, and beauty
that capture all aspects of the human enterprise in literary forms, such as
novels, poems, plays, and other works
America, a relatively newcomer on world
stage as an empire and civilization, but no one refutes the fact that it is the
most powerful of nations the world as ever seen. The best descriptions of it is
a democracy, a land of many voices, harmonious as well as cacophonous. Its
spirit has been fair and generous. It has stood up to oppression of many kinds
for itself and for weaker entities. Its reach and projection by land, air, sea,
and space is truly remarkable. And that “policeman of the world” is never
asleep in advocating and defending democracies. Its adversaries ought to
tremble in his boots when he just think of a fleet of aircraft carriers. On the
other hand, power can be misused when its deployment is easier to be unleashed
rather than diplomacy or cooperation It can be like “a bull in a china shop”
breaking fragile things of value without even the conception of it.
I was born in a small village in China
that had no running water or electricity, I was in China as a small boy during
the Korean War and its aftermath when China was not a member of the UN and was
viewed as an enemy of the United States. When famine and bad governmental
policies ravaged China in the late 1950s, no one came to its aid and over 40
million Chinese starved to death. The excuse was simple enough. It was a
Communist country. Then in 1960, I immigrated alone to join my family who was
already in America. This oddity and inconvenience is a result of the
immigration and racial injustices done to the Chinese in this country. One only
needs to look up The Chinese Exclusion Act in US history.
But this is not the reason I want to study
American literature in UNO. I don’t want to embarrass anyone or myself to say
that I had my share of bad luck with mental illness and consequently been
homeless 3 times, locked up in psychiatric hospitals, and relegated to halfway
houses. Nor do I want to complain about living in a tenement for seven years in
a 10’ x 10’ room, wherein I cook, ate, slept, and studied for 7 years, and
wrote an award-winning book of poems that was used as instructional material in
college. And I washed my laundry by hand and hung it to dry in my room. The
reason I want to study American literature is to ground myself better in it and
hopefully contribute something of my own. If America is great, let’s keep it
great.
