David Ticzon/The Cornell Review
When Ying Ma arrived on Cornell campus, she was a conservative in heart and mind, but not yet one in name. Before then, she had lived a life of hardship and daily strife first in the squalor of Communist China and then in the ghettos of Oakland. It was only through sheer hard work, personal responsibility, and the desire to achieve the American Dream that she landed at Cornell, and while here, made her mark as a writer for and President of The Cornell Review.
Oakland, the country’s second most dangerous city according to Ma, was “richly cloaked in racism” and poverty when her family arrived from mainland China. Speaking no English, the Ma family through everything they had into making a new life for themselves in the ghetto of Oakland. Ma, just ten when she arrived, described hearing gunshots outside her home every month, witnessing muggings and beatings in broad daylight, and the daily harassment of Asian-Americans.
In spite of all of this, Ma committed herself to her studies and not only earned her degree in government from Cornell, but went on to obtain a law degree from Stanford. While at Cornell, she joined the Review and quickly became committed to its mission of bring conservative ideas into the liberal campus bubble. Ma’s tenure on the Review was during one of its most productive and infamous periods. Ma told of the time students en masse publicly burned hundreds of copies of Review newspapers, and one student threw a can of ashes that at her, nearly hitting her.
Ma’s speech interwove her life story and reminiscences of her time on the Hill with commentary on the current state of the union. According to Ma, the prevailing welfare state has precluded from the national dialogue the “ability to speak honestly.”
By honestly, Ma is referring to an analysis of urban poverty that focuses on, among other factors, broken families, broken public schools, and government handouts that pervert the free market incentive scheme that Ma and her family operated under in order to pull themselves out of poverty.
“Getting out of poverty is not supposed to be a cake walk,” said Ma.
Ma said that if the country wants the economic equality that she experienced in Communist China, everyone will be equal only in “misery and backwardness.” Instead of more government dependency, Ma argued that more economic growth and opportunities will lift more people out of poverty.
In 2011, Ma authored a memoir entitled Chinese Girl in the Ghetto. She currently works at the Heartland Institute, a conservative and libertarian organization based out of Chicago.
As someone who attended the event I found Ms. Ma to be an inspirational speaker with a gripping story of hard-work and perseverance that everyone should hear. Tremendous thank you to The Cornell Review for having her come to campus!