GRADE: Senior
HIGH SCHOOL: International High School at Lafayette
BORN: Almaty, Kazakhstan
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: Scholastic Art & Writing Awards: Silver Key
MENTEE’S ANECDOTE: At a cozy coffee shop, Leslie and I started discussing my personal statement for college applications. It was a rainy and miserable day. Anxiety triggered me every time I looked at the 1,000-word essay. The more we sat there, sipping our tea, the easier it was for me to confidently share my thoughts. Not only did Leslie pave a path toward an effective personal statement, she listened, empathized, and helped me polish emotionally raw ideas into a beautiful and solid piece of writing. This day was an integral part of realizing how soulful and sincere my mentor is.
LESLIE PARISEAU
YEARS AS MENTOR: 1
OCCUPATION: Writer/Editor
BORN: Findlay, OH
LIVES: Brooklyn, NY
PUBLICATIONS AND RECOGNITIONS: The New York Times, Saveur, PUNCH, New York magazine, SPRITZ (2016); 2017 James Beard nominee; 2014 Forbes 30 Under 30
MENTOR’S ANECDOTE: On a cold, rainy fall day, Naze and I got to talking about her college essay. We were looking for a solution to writing the essay in a way that might tick college admissions’ boxes while communicating the breadth of her personal journey—and letting her creativity sing. Eventually, I saw Naze recognize how it could come together without sacrificing the passion she’d woven into the piece. Fast-forward several months, and she’s got her pick of colleges, no doubt in part because she’s a killer writer who can make the world listen to what she has to say.
My mom’s strength, passion, and kindness became my main inspiration for writing this piece. Her rush for freedom and feminism became my main definition of Generation F.
It was 11 p.m. in Almaty, Kazakhstan. My mom, fourteen years old, was trying to rub away a smudge on her little sister’s beige satin blouse. She was recalling the memory of her fifth-grade performance in front of a whole school when she wore the same lucky shirt.
Suddenly, a rageful voice from down the hall pierced through the flashback. It was her father. She knew the sequence of events like the back of her hand. First, her mother would nervously walk on eggshells. Then he would start diminishing his wife, my grandmother. It would turn into a fight. It would turn into a standard demonstration of Kazakh male dominance. And, in a while, her mother, anxious and afraid, would run to her, saying, “Please, talk to him, he listens to you!”
And so it went. Legs shaking, my mom went to the kitchen. And though she had dealt with this very situation before, every time was like the first. She never knew what to expect. She would have to choose her words carefully so that this highly sensitive human, this avid drunkard, would finally back away from the edge and just go to sleep. Her father thought himself a philosopher, and alcohol a way to open his chakras. He drank until he reached deep contemplation. She sat in front of him like this. She was strong and resolute, but her childhood happiness had been annihilated by responsibility. She should have been charged only with juvenile cares, anxiousness for tomorrow’s test. Instead, she had to rescue her mother from her father’s rage and battering. The oldest of five, she had to look after four sisters and get them ready for school.
For her entire life, my mother survived while carrying a huge burden. My grandmother, too, carried a burden. Her husband constantly took “breaks” from his duties, disappearing into intoxication to find “enlightenment.” Her simple state of mind was a symbol of stupidity in his eyes. He saw her as the root of all evil. She was closed-minded in his eyes, and his dissatisfaction manifested as dark purple bruises across her face. My mother never understood what my grandmother was guilty of.
My grandmother was a strong woman, but the tradition of patriarchy in Kazakhstan insisted that she had an inability to disagree with men. Like millions of Kazakh women before her, she was punished for his inadequacy and forced to support her family alone. She passed this quiet strength on to my mother, who became even more determined—set on changing the path for her daughters to come.
Where my grandmother frequently gave up, exhausted from her husband’s onslaughts, my mother worked to build a wall to keep this terror at bay. She protected us from experiencing the same violence. Every horrible situation we heard about our relatives—many of which could have been prosecuted by law—was just a scary story. We have never had to see violence, oppression, or neglect. My dad had nothing but love toward my mom and his three daughters. My mom was strict and disciplined because she knew it was best for us. All three of us were raised with love and were encouraged to embrace our individuality. Even when my mother made the brave step to immigrate to the USA when I was only five years old, I tried to remember her as a real, strong woman. My mother violated the age-old Kazakh tradition of patriarchy where women are seen only as a mothers and servants. In fact, my core values are based on her reform and have become the basis for forming my own self-respect as a woman.
When Naze wrote her piece, I thought about what I have done to change so that my kids’ lives (re: Generation F) might be better. At its most essential, it started with leaving where I’m from.
I’m from a small town in rust-belt Ohio. I won’t bother telling you its name because you have never heard of it. I have never met a person in the larger world who has.
But if you are interested in visiting, it can be found by following a county road lined with cornfields and big white grain silos slowly oxidizing from the inside out. Once, a devout woman said she saw Jesus in one of the tankard’s rust stains, and for days cars lined up along the shoulder to catch a glimpse, their passengers peering and nodding at the blood-colored blotches like they knew something blessed had occurred there. Follow the signs advertising once-prosperous, long-shuttered glass factories and sparkplug plants. You’ll know you’ve arrived when you smell the soybeans cooking hot and earthy like boiling beer.
This town sits amid a triangle of train tracks over which slow-moving, graffiti-tagged boxcars whistle at all hours, a lullaby and an alarm clock. Since the railroad ties were laid, kids who live along them have put pennies on the smoldering silver rails, waiting for the CSX line to flatten them into smooth copper ovals. Ghost stories about headless conductors and ladies in white dresses lingering over country crossings have always been recited, eerie warnings to always look both ways.
For decades, nothing has changed. People have left and died, industry has left and died. And yet nothing has changed.
There is a part of my mind imprinted with the geography of this town—its decaying neighborhoods and abandoned grain elevators. It’s the part that reminds me of where I’m from, and yet exists apart from it, so that I might not stay the same—so that I might shift and change and change and change.
SADE ANDRE
YEARS