My name is Thomas Edison Eng and I am 11 years old. I am in the sixth grade at Quimby Oak Middle School in San Jose. I love to talk to my dad. I enjoy listening to the stories he tells me about what it was like when he grew up as a little boy in Oakland. The stories are usually told to teach me a lesson about life. The stories are so fascinating that I never forget the main point of the lesson, because I always remember the story.

Of all the lessons about life that my dad has taught me, there is one that stands out in my mind. My dad said he first learned this lesson from his father when he was a boy about my age. As a matter of fact, this is a lesson about life that has been passed down through many generations of the Eng family.

The most important lesson that I learned from my dad is that a person must learn to overcome problems and try not to be afraid to fail. My dad says: “Failure is natural. A person should not get discouraged when they fail. Nobody has ever achieved something great without first having failed. Instead you should always ask yourself why you failed and learn something.”

I was taught that it is only through mistakes that we learn. Only by falling down does a baby learn to walk. It is difficult for me to imagine a world without problems. Problems help shape our character. It is through problems that we learn and grow. If there were no problems in the world, there would be no challenges, and no opportunity to learn and grow.

To illustrate this lesson about life, my dad told me a story about a Chinese farmer who had an apple seed. If the farmer leaves the apple seed alone on a plate, it will just remain there. It will not grow and bear fruit. If the farmer digs a hole and buries it, the seed faces a problem. The seed asks itself: “How can I get sunlight? I am buried. I can’t sleep here. I must get out.” And in its effort to escape, the apple seed grows and branches upward out of the ground to search for sunlight. The sunlight provides nourishment to reveal the beautiful apple tree within.

If the farmer had said, “I don’t want to create problems for the apple seed, I will leave it alone on the plate,” the seed will remain a seed and nothing more. It will not get a chance to express itself and grow. It will not get a chance to reveal the hidden beauty that is within. That is the way children should learn to understand problems. Every problem is there to help a child develop their own character and provide him or her with a chance to blossom as a person.

This story is especially meaningful to me as a young Chinese-American boy, because it encourages me to continue to try whenever I fail. It encourages me to fight on even if I get knocked down. Like my dad once told me: “A loser is not a person who tries and fails. A loser is a person who fails to try.”

I realize that my Chinese ancestors have had to overcome a lot of racial prejudices and hostilities during the California gold rush and the building of the Transcontinental Railroad. Although my Chinese ancestors faced many

obstacles and were knocked down on many occasions, each time they had the courage and determination to get back up on their feet and continue to struggle and fight on. This brave spirit makes me extremely proud to be able to say that I, too, am a Chinese American boy.

In looking back at the lesson taught by this story, I believe that it applies not only to Chinese American children, but to all children growing up. Regardless of whether a child’s skin color is yellow, red, white, brown or black, we all have hidden beauties that make us unique. In tackling problems that we face each day, we learn and grow as people. How we handle the problems we face will teach us a great deal about ourselves and the kind of people we are within.

In the end, no matter what color our skin may be on the outside, we are all very similar on the inside, because we are all children. And as children growing up in America, we all have the same hopes, wishes, and dreams.

Thomas Edison Eng, 11, attends Quimby Oak Middle School in San Jose. His essay won first prize in the grade 6-8 category.