A persuasive and inspiring essay for successful admission to Harvard - 2025

Passing on Identity: How do you hope to share or pass on aspects of your identity to future generations or your community?

The Quiet Art of Inheritance

I used to think identity was a possession—like an heirloom, stored in a velvet-lined box, passed from hand to hand unchanged. Something fixed. Preserved. But that never quite matched my reality. Because when I looked for a singular “me,” I saw instead a mosaic. Ukrainian lullabies and Kendrick Lamar verses. Borscht on the stove and cold McNuggets in the fridge. My mother’s embroidered blouse folded beside a Chromebook. None of it matched. And all of it was mine.

Still, what do you do with an inheritance like that?

This question hounded me for years—especially in the in-between places. The hallway between homeroom and lunch. The backseat of an Uber, quiet after explaining to a driver where I’m "really from.” The moment right after I press “translate” on a group text to understand a joke. Somewhere between "too much" and "not enough" always hung the whisper: Who am I to pass anything on?

But maybe the better question is: How?

I don’t have a flag I want to wave or a sermon to preach. What I have is...a habit. A quiet practice. I notice. I collect. I tell stories.

In practice, this looks like Friday nights in my grandmother’s kitchen, where I scribble down her superstitions in the margins of my calculus homework—never whistle indoors (you’ll lose your money), always give bread with salt (never empty-handed). It's filming her as she folds dough, mumbling incantations half-remembered from childhood. "Don't ask me what it means," she says, "just don't forget how it feels."

It’s also the zines I make—glue-sticked collages of post-Soviet snack wrappers, protest headlines, and snippets of text from Frantz Fanon or Eve Babitz. The covers say things like “Hyphenated Dreams” and “Generations Don’t Translate Perfectly.” I leave them around the community center downtown, where kids like me—who grew up between languages—flip through them, smirk, and say, "Damn. That’s exactly it.”

I understand how this sounds. Romantic, even performative. But it’s not about nostalgia. Honestly, nostalgia frustrates me. It's a filter that softens the jagged parts. And identity—at least the kind I’ve inherited—is full of cracks. That’s the point. It’s in the ruptures that meaning seeps through.

I’m not trying to “preserve culture” like it’s a pickled beet in a jar. I want to complicate it. Question it. Translate it not just between languages, but between times. If my grandmother whispers her memories of breadlines into my left ear, I want to murmur her voice into a future I’ll never see.

And maybe that’s the real work: not guarding identity, but gardening it. Making sure there’s rich soil for it to evolve, cross-pollinate, grow strange new fruit.

I think about this a lot when I volunteer at the library’s youth storytelling program. We sit in a circle—kids from everywhere—and I ask them, “What’s a phrase someone in your family says that no one else understands?” We write them down. We act them out. We giggle. One girl, Zara, says her grandma always yells “Ai, durak!” at squirrels. She has no idea what it means, but it makes her feel home.

That feeling—that flicker of familiarity in the absurd—is what I want to pass on. The sense that your identity doesn’t have to fit a form to be valid. That it can be half-finished, conflicted, worn in some places and brand-new in others—and still be wholly yours.

Some days I still don’t know if I’m doing it “right.” I don’t know if identity is something that can be passed on at all—like trying to hand someone wind cupped in your palms. But maybe the act of trying is the tradition. Maybe identity isn't an object to be inherited. Maybe it’s an impulse. A gesture.

A story whispered in the hallway.

A zine left on a bench.

A word that doesn’t translate—but still makes you feel known.