哈佛、耶鲁申请案例和录取流程曝光：被藤校录取的孩子原来是这样的！

If I had it my way, I’d never set foot in a Home Depot ever again.

如果让我自己选择，我再也不会踏进Home Depot家居装修商店了。

Every Ace Hardware, every Lowe’s, every boutique tile place, every obscure little hardware store that only sells Phillips-head screwdrivers smells the same way: dusty. Sawdust,catdust,paint-flake-dust, laminate-dust,ancient-grumpy-cashier-dust.It’s post-apocalyptic,the shuffling shoppers dead-eyed from looking at a thousand identical refrigerators,fluorescent tube lights casting ultramarine pallor over their faces.

每个五金件商店、每个家居装修店、每个精品瓷砖商店、每个不起眼的只卖十字螺丝刀的小五金店，闻起来都一样：满是灰尘的味道。锯屑，猫咪毛发，脱落的油漆粉尘，层压粉尘，古旧的柜子带来的粉尘。这简直是世界末日。来来往往的购物者们在上千个看起来完全相同的冰箱中疲惫地扫视，日光灯照在他们的脸上，泛着青色的苍白。

We kill tigers, you see.

你看，我们能杀死老虎。

“Where are we going?” I’ll ask, and my father will say, “Lowe’s. Hay que matar tigres.” Gotta kill tigers, gotta take side jobs to fill in the gaps where the money doesn’t quite reach. Where others might have taken up Uber, my family started building houses, with me and my brother in tow.

“我们去哪？”我会问，我父亲会回答：“ 家居装修店。Hay que matar tigres（西语：要杀死老虎）。”要杀死老虎，必须要做些副业来填补家庭财政的空白。别人可能选择去当优步司机，而我的爸爸则会拖着我和我的兄弟一起装修房屋。

When we arrived, my parents caught the American dream like Tío Conejo used his rabbit tricksiness to outwit Tío Tigre in the fables: so artfully that they themselves hardly believed they’d pulled it off. We killed tigers in Georgetown and Langley, diplomat townhomes and tasteless McMansions alike. We moved seven times within the same ZIP code, as my parents bought ugly houses and sold them beautiful.

我们刚来美国的时候，我的父母实现了他们的美国梦，就像在寓言中兔子先生用自己的计策击败了老虎先生：如此巧妙，连他们都几乎不相信自己会实现这一梦想。我们在乔治敦和兰利、外交官联排别墅，和没有品味的麦克马斯特都“杀了老虎”。我的父母买下旧房子，装修精美后再售出，我们也因此在一片区域内搬了七次家。

It isn’t much like HGTV. I spent countless hours searching for nonexistent cans of Spackle in the back shelves of Home Depot. My mother laid out carpet samples on the floor and paced around them, forever deliberating between ivory and cream. She’d be on the phone with some hung over subcontractor when she picked me up from art club. I’d sit in an abandoned corner and sketch as they haggled eternally over hardwood pallets at auction. I wouldn’t be surprised if I spent more time under the watchful eye of an orange-aproned paint mixer than a babysitter.

它不像美国家居生活频道HGTV的节目。我花了无数个小时在家居超市的后货架上寻找仿佛不存在的墙粉喷罐。我的母亲把地毯样品铺在地上，走来走去，比较象牙白和奶油白的区别。她从艺术俱乐部接我时，还会一直和一些分包商打电话。当他们在拍卖会上为了一个硬木小床讨价还价时，我就坐在一个不起眼的角落里素描。如果说和一个居家保姆比，我出现在橙围裙的油漆工眼皮子下的时间更长，我也不会觉得奇怪。

All this is to say that construction runs in the veins of the Blancos. My grandfather, after all, came out of nowhere to build a concrete empire on the baked dirt of Maracaibo. The mixers molder now in that hinterland, but the force of his success was what fueled our escape from Venezuela before things got bad.

我们的建筑事业从布兰科斯起步。毕竟，我的祖父就从那里发家，在马拉开波的泥地上建立起一个水泥帝国。祖父的搅拌机留在了那片土壤，但他的成功却让我们得以在委内瑞拉事态恶化前逃了出来。

What use would my grandfather have had for all the sketches I’ve sketched, all the paintings I’ve painted, I wonder? Could my parents paper their clients’ walls with pages from my sketchbook, could they tear up the canvas and use it for insulation? Probably not.

我想，祖父对我的画和我的事业起了什么作用？我的父母能用我速写本的纸涂在顾客的墙上吗，我的画布能给他们用做绝缘材料吗？应该不能。

In art, there’s this fantasy of The Muse reaching down and the lucky artist’s paintbrush dancing with a press of her rosy fingertip. The truth is that I can have the most perfect concept handed to me by the ghost of Gentileschi herself, and I’ll still get in my own way. Perfectionism won’t let me pick a background color for weeks, envy will distract me with foolhardy attempts at others’ success, simple laziness will keep me in bed watching episodes of “Chopped” 15 times.

在艺术界有个传说，说如果得到了缪斯的眷顾，她就会来到艺术家玫瑰色的指尖上，让笔刷翩翩起舞。事实是，真蒂莱斯基（意大利女画家)常常在我身上“显灵”，而我仍然能够展示出自己的风格。我的完美主义不会让我在一个背景色上纠结好几周；眼红别人的成功，我也会分心去鲁莽尝试模仿，而简单的懒惰会使我瘫在床上看“Chopped”节目看15次。

Whenever my still-white canvas stretched blankly into the infinite, I thought about that, about the long nights my parents must have spent thinking about their own parents. About the three hours daily my mother spends commuting to her day job. About my father’s lost stories, the jokes he doesn’t tell because English warps his humor. About the life they left behind in Maracaibo, all so that we could live here. All so that I could come here and be an artist, of all things.

空白的画布常常给人无限联想，每当我看到空画布，我都会想到，我的父母也会在漫漫长夜里想起他们的先辈；会想到我母亲每天大约要花三个小时上下班；会想到记忆深处父亲的故事，和他因为英语不好而讲不出的笑话；会想到他们为了让我们住在美国而放弃了马拉开波的记忆。这一切的一切，都是为了让我能够来到这里，成为一名艺术家。

So it’s not easy moving from concrete to canvas. But I must do it anyway, because the force of my ambition and, well, my talent demand it. Because my family’s risk deserves a risk of my own. A risk that I must fight my indolence and ennui for. A risk that will honor our sacrifice of all these years between two lands. I can’t let all those dusty hours at Home Depot go to waste. Hay que matar tigres.

因此，从“混凝土”过渡到“画布”并不容易。但是无论如何我也必须这样做，为了我的志向和我的天赋，也为了努力不辜负我的家人。因此，我要挑战我的懒惰和疲倦，来弥补我们家族辗转两地而付出的牺牲。我不能让家具店里那些尘土飞扬的时光浪费掉。Hay que matar tigres（西语：要杀死老虎）。