I spent most of my adolescence in Shanghai. The city back then was pillared by plumes of smoke and hills of construction dust. The sky was often gray and going outside without a mask was essentially asking for lung cancer. It was no place to raise a child. But my parents did not let the industrial negativity of the city affect me. They chose to move next to Century Park and take me to camp, frolic, and fish in the little green sanctuary almost every weekend. There I developed an everlasting love for mother nature. During my high school years in Hawaii, I had positively the best time of my life hiking through the boundless Hawaiian jungles and viewing the blue seas from the Koolau’ range. Without my parent’s dedication to give me the most natural of a childhood possible in a gray city like Shanghai back then, I would not have had the appreciation for nature that very few other people have. Thus, whenever I hear the singing of sparrows, the rustling of leaves in the wind, or the trickling of water in the stream, I am brought back to the park that raised me.
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