It's a Mad, Mad, Mad World, Yo
An Old Friend.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/06/26/a_life_reclaimed/
A life reclaimed
Woman's struggles lead her to new hope
By Javier C. Hernandez, Globe Correspondent | June 26, 2007
Kimberly Woo lay on her East Boston kitchen floor weeping. It was 2003, and her boyfriend had just walked out, leaving her with their 18-month-old daughter. Then 19 years old, Woo had dropped out of an elite prep school and was trying to recover from addiction to drugs and alcohol.
Woo could barely afford one month's rent and worried that she once again would be homeless, as she and her boyfriend had been for four months when they first moved to Boston nearly three years before.
"It was hell," she said in an interview yesterday during a break from her job at the downtown Vitamin Shoppe. "I knew single moms had made it, but it just seemed impossible to me."
In the last four years, Woo has turned her life around. Now 23, she is on her way to earning a bachelor's degree on a prestigious scholarship for community college students. She graduated from Bunker Hill Community College with a 4.0 grade-point average this month, with daughter Amarrah watching from the audience.
Boston University, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and Simmons College have all offered her admission, and she is on the waiting list at Harvard. She will find out by Saturday whether she will be admitted to Harvard, her first choice. BU is her second choice.
To professors and fellow students, Woo is a model of persistence and proof that tough circumstances don't necessarily lead to a terrible future.
At Bunker Hill Community College, Woo's stories of hardship have inspired other students, said Lloyd Sheldon Johnson, Woo's former professor and mentor at the school.
"She transforms lives by sharing personal experiences to help students understand their common humanity," said Johnson, a behavioral sciences professor.
Since she was a child in a poor neighborhood of Manchester, N.H., Woo has had high aspirations. She dreamed of attending Harvard and, at 13, won a scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy.
"We were very driven as children, and definitely encouraged to focus on academics," she said.
At Exeter, Woo grew more distant from her parents. She still does not talk to her Chinese- American father, but has reconnected with her mother, a kindergarten teacher.
While she enjoyed the academic rigor of Exeter, she felt excluded from mainstream social life, finding friends instead through drugs and alcohol. From that point, her life "went down a spiraling path of destruction," she said.
"I think I got very confused as to how to find a sense of self- motivation," she said.
During her junior year at the prep school, Woo dropped out and moved in with her boyfriend, beginning a nearly five-year hiatus from academics. The couple moved to Boston, living out of a vacant dorm room at one point, after homeless shelters and hostels turned them down because they were too young.
In 2002, then pregnant, Woo's relationship with her boyfriend began to deteriorate. Left on her own, Woo contacted social service agencies for help with rent while she looked for work. She found a job at a children's literacy organization through AmeriCorps. She eventually won a scholarship to attend a community college from OneFamily Inc., a nonprofit that tries to reduce family homelessness in Massachusetts.
Over the past two years at Bunker Hill, Woo has balanced her studies in sociology with three jobs and raising her child, now 4.
"It's a mix of hugs and cuddles, peanut butter on my suits, tantrums, and other good stuff," she said of motherhood.
This month, Woo became one of 51 recipients of the prestigious Jack Kent Cooke Foundation scholarship, which awards community college students up to $30,000 each year to attend a four-year university.
She is preparing for a life in public service, hoping to one day pursue her dream of finding ways to eliminate family homelessness and domestic violence.
At a recent OneFamily event, an audience of 150 broke into a standing ovation as Woo ended a speech about childcare and welfare, recalled Toni Wiley, executive director of OneFamily.
"Kimmy can take a very complicated subject and break it down in such a way that it's not only clear and easy to understand but also very personal," she said.
Woo said she hopes to empower others facing the obstacles she once had.
"I want to change the world so badly sometimes I have to slow down and remind myself to do the laundry," she said.
Hernandez can be reached at jhernandez@globe.com.
Labels: Exeter, Ghosts of the Past, Kimberly Woo, self-help
