Before our swim meets, my high school coach would often say, “Close your eyes and just imagine.” Imagine crouching low on the starting blocks as you wait for the starting gun. Imagine standing on the winners’ platform with a medal draped around your neck. If it’s possible in your mind, he’d tell us, it’s possible in the pool.

 

It is our ability to dream that puts the impossible within reach. Our hopes, our aspirations, our own narratives — they weave like strands into the very fabric of our life stories and our outlook on the future. It is the power of these life stories that drew me to politics. My mother’s sacrifice to provide her two sons with endless opportunities inspired me to service. Recently, Sen. Barack Obama’s mission to change the way politics is run encouraged me to become involved in politics for the first time. Moreover, my own experience working on Sen. Obama’s campaign showed me that politics have the potential to inspire and empower rather than divide and discourage.

 

My story begins with my mother’s improbable quest to achieve the American Dream. In 1985, she immigrated to the United States from South Korea. She knew little English and had little money. The college degree for which she labored so hard in Korea was useless. So, my mother started over holding onto a simple conviction — that with determination, she would be able to provide her children the opportunities these new shores had to offer. At 29, she enrolled as an undergraduate at the University of Washington and worked the evening shift at a retail jewelry store. When she returned home, more work awaited her. She had a family to take care of and problem sets and papers to work on.

 

As she juggled her many responsibilities, she never failed to read my brother and me stories before tucking us into bed. These weren’t simply fairy tales. She also read us biographies — stories about JFK’s hope for a better America, Abraham Lincoln’s vision for a unified nation, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s fight for a nation healed and restored. And each night as I fell asleep listening to the words of Dr. King, his dream became my own. Just as my mother would go on to receive her Ph.D. and become a professor, she invoked these stories to teach me that with faith and determination, anything is possible.

 

My mother’s example showed me that we must not become complacent with the world as it is, but rather we must envision the world as it should be. During the summer and fall of 2007, I took a leave of absence from college to work for the Obama campaign. As I blogged and edited videos of his daily events, I watched him draw people of all backgrounds. It was their stories that strengthened my faith in Obama’s ability to transform this nation. It was the wife of a war veteran who held signs at rallies so that no other soldier would share her husband’s fate. It was the senior citizen who canvassed for hours in the pouring rain to ensure that his grandchildren would have a better future.