600-word version: “You deserve the name Lego; you were the Lego block between me and the other girls.” She said to me on the breakfast table one day. I felt as though I had been asked out by the cutest boy in school while gasping for breath yawning and trying to rub the wax off of my d..

“Stereotyped beliefs have the power to become self-fulfilling prophesies for behavior.” - From Men and Women in Interaction, Reconsidering the Differences by Elizabeth Aries, Professor of Psychology, Amherst College The Lady Her icy hands grabbed my arms once again. Halting at the sp..

428-word version: Although most of us take the subway for two reasons, one, to save money on gas, and two, to save time from traffic, I take the subway for one reason, to save myself from the microscopic view of my “sheltered” world and to deliver myself to the “unsheltered&rdquo..

763-word version: Through the gaps in the gloomy clouds, the dark-blue rain drops fall on me. As if the rain can read my mind, it flows with the saddened flow of my tears. "Here! Here!" I beckon with my hands to the paramedics and lead them into my house. And my sister, the ‘Slee..

814-word version: Just as I returned to Seoul for summer vacation in 2006, sorrow pervaded all my senses. As my parents came to meet me at the airport, I saw my uncle’s ominous visage overlapping behind my parents’. That was the year my uncle died of lung cancer at the age of 55. He di..

453-word version: In October 2007, the House of Representatives in the United States unanimously approved the measure calling for apology from Japan to surviving victims, especially those known as “comfort women,” of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Pacific War, but in the summer..