“I was an orphan since I was born, up to the age of eight. Those years really defined who I am as a person today. One of the main things that really stuck with me would be how my foster father treated me towards certain things. To add context, each orphan is assigned to a family—I call them foster—who are meant to take care of the orphan until he or she is adopted. My foster dad lived in a very stereotypical world where men had to be manly and women would be servants. He had high expectations for me, which often made me question, “What the h’ll?” One time in particular, I remember getting home from school with the realization that I had a math test and I ended up getting an A-, and my father had thrown a huge fit, where he was non-stop cussing me out, and calling me gross names. “What the h’ll are you doing? I did not raise you to be this way!”  It frustrated me as I was extremely proud of myself for achieving such a grade, and for him to yell at me and call me a plethora of rude names really diminished me. To add onto that, I’m such a people pleaser, and for someone to say something so negative made me question my abilities and my intelligence. I was terrified; the punishment my foster parents would make me go through contained not feeding me for the night—but I stole food anyway—and would put me in a separate room while the rest of the family ate. Their punishments ended up becoming physical where it would leave permanent damages not only physically but mentally as well. There’s a saying that I live by where it goes something along the lines of, ‘What you experience during your youth sticks with you.’ I would take the roughest courses, and was told that I needed to be the best of the best, and expectations were through the roof. To this day, I still take harder classes that are challenging during my (now) senior year. I still put a lot of pressure on myself to exceed those expectations that were expected when I was in China,” Sr. Jack Reynolds said.