During an early October morning, I did something that changed my life forever.


My mom has a few friends who are Virgos with September birthdays, so one year they decided to have a joined birthday party. The celebration was held in our apartment complex’s function room, and more than one hundred guests arrived. Glass windows surrounded three walls of the expansive room, which were facing the water fountain and cars on the floors below. Groups of people arrived at the party, to chat, to sing, to dance, to drink, and to celebrate another year of their friends’ lives. With many guests staying late into the night, the party was a success, but for even more reason than just attendance. Rather than gifts, my mom and her friends asked people to donate money, so that they could go to Africa and buy books for a school they were close with. At the age of eight, I was able to use the computer to make little information booklets about the school for the party guests. Just being a tiny part of the big plan made me feel really proud. Still, being a selfish child, I couldn’t help but wonder why anyone wouldn’t want presents from that many people for themselves.


A few weeks prior to the party, it was strangely sunny for an early October morning in Hong Kong. With the patio curtains open, rays of bright orange and yellow filled our living room, making the whole house glow. My family was going about their mornings in our usual way: my sister and I eating breakfast, my dad reading the newspaper, and my mom checking her email on the big desktop computer. With a few minutes until my sister and I would enter the elevator to go down to board the school bus, I wandered into my room, without a purpose. Suddenly, the images of the children without shoes or a proper school building flashed through my mind. In an instant, I pulled out my savings envelope.


Around that time, I had just begun to like lots of music. Unlike other kids who wanted to buy games and toys, I always wanted songs on iTunes, and my parents would tell me to save my money to pay them back when they purchased them online with their credit cards. To this day I’m more of a spender than a saver, so I usually only ended up saving about fifty dollars at a time. Unlike the norm, this time, I had saved one hundred dollars, which isn’t much, but seemed like a lot at the time because I could buy a whole music album! But, in that frozen moment, I reached my hand into the envelope and pulled out the single, crisp, crimson red one hundred dollar bill. Blankly, I walked into the living room where my mom still sat at the computer.


Approaching her slowly and cautiously, I was extremely nervous. I hadn’t thought about what I was doing or what to say, but this was still no reason to be nervous; after all, I was just going talking to my own mother. Being so close, my mom immediately recognized my apprehensiveness, and asked what was wrong.



“Nothing,” I quickly replied, keeping my eyes on the bill in my hand. My mom noticed, and gestured to it.

“What’s that for?” she asked. Unexpected tears sprung to my eyes, making me wonder what was going on; I hadn’t felt sad at all.

“Here,” I mumbled in between short breaths, extending my arm to hand her the bill. “I want you to put this with the money for the books.” As soon as I uttered the last word, I started full on sobbing as if the world was about to end. Confused, I knew I wasn’t crying because I wanted to keep the money for myself. Still, I didn’t know why I became so emotional, and my mom was equally as confused. Hesitating, she didn’t take the cash right away, but instead gave a concerned look.

“Why are you crying? You can keep it, really, it’s okay, you don’t have to give it,” she reasoned.

“No, no, I want you to take it!” I insisted. She took the bills and, embracing me, we cried and cried.


As I went to school that day, I still didn’t think it made sense for me to have been crying when nothing was sad, for me. I now realize that just then I had learned what it actually meant to help others. It doesn’t just mean sending money away blankly. It doesn’t mean saying you feel bad for someone and then turning a blind eye. It means having an emotional attachment with something or someone you care about, even if you’ve never experienced it yourself, or never even met the person. In those few minutes in which my mother and I cried, our tears were not those of sadness, because we would be one hundred dollars less. That didn’t even matter. My mother’s tears were tears of immense pride in her daughter, because she witnessed me being selfless in such a big way, for the first time. My tears? Those were tears of the realization of a feeling I had never felt before: empathy. It can be tried and tried to teach in words about the meaning of empathy, but for me it wasn’t until I felt it that I really knew what it was, and because of that experience I hope to forever keep that sense in my heart.