Our 2024 Scholarship Winner: Vanessa Ngai

Meet Vanessa Ngai, our 2024 Carol Phan Memorial College Scholarship Winner!

Welcome to the “scholarship family”. 🙂

Vanessa is planning to attend U.C. Berkeley majoring in Computer Science.

Congratulations on your winning submission (see below).

We wish you the best of luck in college.

We are looking foward to getting your first semester update this coming Christmas. 🙂

UPDATE October 20, 2024: Vanessa sent us this beautiful thank you card.

YouTube Video

Written Submission

My passion in life is intersectionality—hence the animation “Amalgamate”, meaning to combine. This word encapsulates not only the topic of the video, which is a Chinese folklore story about entangled affairs between spirits, but also the values that make up my identity and my ambitions.

When I was younger, I was always told that art and science were two separate categories—polar opposites. As I grew up, as someone who has significant involvement with both disciplines, I loathed the day that I would have to choose one over the other. However, the more I explored the arts and sciences, the more I realized that I wouldn’t have to. For art and science to be as powerful as they are now, they must be fundamentally linked. For example, for most people, a computer is useless without a graphic interface; similarly, in some art industries (like animation!), technology has become an indispensable tool to aid artists in their craft. My career goals are based on this understanding. In my experience living with my grandparents, many aspects of technology are often complex and difficult for the elderly to understand and use. As this progresses, the digital divide widens and there is a considerable disadvantage to people who have less access to services such as the Internet. In my opinion, it seems that the technology industry is currently focused on rapid innovation and development, and neglects consideration for user experience. I believe that by working in an intersection between art and computer science, I can help make technology more convenient to use not just for the elderly, but also for people with certain disabilities and even for workers in specific industries, such as hospital workers.

Beyond my academic aspirations, I also find intersectionality in my core beliefs and perspectives. Just like many other United States-born people of color, I often question: am I Chinese, or am I American? Of course, logically I knew that I was simultaneously neither and both—I am Chinese American. However, when I return home every day and I can feel my Cantonese getting worse the more time I spend speaking English and Spanish at school, I can’t help but feel that I am somehow “losing” my ethnicity. I began to take initiative in exploring Chinese culture when I entered high school. I did research on Chinese history, learning about the Cultural Revolution that took much of China’s ancient traditions away, and the British colonialism in Hong Kong that made my language scarce. Under the guidance of my grandfather, I studied Chinese poetry and learned how to write in Traditional Chinese (something that I integrated into my animation!). I was beginning to embrace my heritage when the COVID-19 pandemic happened. Suddenly, people that looked like me were attacked, and China was villainized as the country that shut down the world. Sinophobia was at an all-time high, and remnants still remain now. Despite China’s contributions to pop culture, the media rebranded our trends as Japanese or Korean, while China was still shrouded in negative press. For this reason, I decided to create an animation that represented my pride in my heritage as an American-born Chinese. My culture is more than politics—we have a rich artistic history and hundreds of years of traditions that I want to be recognized. I used an ancient Chinese story overlaid with an English song. Both are critical in representing my identity as a Chinese-American, a community that I want to empower through my art.

Drive Safe! Never Forget