Parents Gave My College Fund To My Cousin, But They Forgot About Grandma's Video Will...
The worst betrayals often come wrapped in good intentions. At least, that's what my parents claimed when they emptied my college fund to send my cousin Jessica to Yale. "We're doing this for the family," they said. "Jessica has such potential." The unspoken part, of course, was that I apparently didn't.
I'm Olivia Chen, twenty-two, and this is the story of how my parents' "good intentions" backfired in the most spectacular way possible. But let me start at the beginning.
Growing up in a Chinese-American family, education was everything. Every achievement, every test score, every academic recognition was carefully measured and compared. My cousin Jessica and I were born just two months apart, and from day one, we were unwitting competitors in an academic Olympics neither of us had signed up for.
Jessica was the "gifted" one. Perfect grades, debate team captain, published research paper at sixteen. I was... different. Good grades, but not exceptional. Captain of the robotics team, but that didn't count as much as debate in my parents' eyes. I spent my weekends in my grandmother's garage, taking apart old computers and building them into something new. "Wasting time," my mother called it. "Playing with toys," my father said.
Only my grandmother - my Nai Nai - seemed to understand. She'd sit in her garage with me, watching as I worked, asking questions about what each part did. "Different minds work in different ways," she'd say in Mandarin, her eyes twinkling. "Some follow the path. Others make their own."
The college fund had been building since I was born. Every red envelope at Chinese New Year, every birthday check, every summer job paycheck - all carefully deposited and saved. By my senior year of high school, it had grown to nearly $80,000. Not enough for four years at an elite private university, but enough for a good state school where I'd been accepted into the computer engineering program.
Then came the call that changed everything.
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