My relationship with my Chinese culture is fragile yet formidable. In desperate attempts to assimilate when I was young, I abandoned fried rice for mac and cheese, chopsticks for forks, and Mandarin for English. As a teen, I could only cling to what seemed like sparse remnants of my ethnicity. During one summer, my father and I ventured into the streets of Shanghai. While we strolled along the Huangpu River, cursing the never-ending swarm of mosquitoes, I marveled at the advancement around us. Here was one of the biggest cities in the world: a fashion hub, an epicenter for innovation, an economic and cultural powerhouse. We walked further, stumbling across the Confucius Temple. With 700-year-old glazed roof tiles and ornately-carved statues while being nestled in the hurried metropolis of urban Shanghai, it was both a time capsule and a refuge. Visitors could write down a desire and attach it to trees or designated boards, hoping that the universe would recognize their yearning. The garden featured leaves waltzing with both archaic paper wishes and ones freshly written by a 16-year-old pleading for wisdom. It was at the centuries-old temple that I realized how much my culture still coursed through my veins. Despite losing much of my Mandarin, I've been working to repair those cracks in college, taking Chinese language courses and engaging with other students who would sympathize with "I can understand it, but reading and writing is a different story." I still can connect with relatives, using new phrases I learned in class that light up their faces. My immigrant parents made sure that we never missed both Lunar New Year and Independence Day. I have grown to be proud of my heritage. I love being Asian-American, experiencing the paradoxical joys of cultural antithesis. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when anti-Asian sentiment was on the rise, the historian within me even began to research Asian heroes whose stories were lost to time, drawing their figures and memorializing their achievements with an Instagram account (asianarchives_). The values I grew up with, that I once shunned but now embrace and practice, serve me -- and others -- well. I serve as a Senior Facilitator for several groups under Give Us the Floor, an organization which strives to build online environments that cultivate discussion, connection, and unity. In one group, there was a member who felt overwhelmed by schoolwork. All of us, as we were all high schoolers, could empathize deeply; how many times had we each stayed up to work on an essay or project? I suggested that we help her with subjects we were best at: I worked with her on world history, while others focused on precalculus and chemistry. We exchanged instructional videos, worksheets, practice questions, and other resources for her determination and hard work. I assigned specific days for each group member to review with her. Together, our group stayed up through the nights, blinking away drowsiness to answer her questions and to send warm words her way. We even exchanged playlist links for motivation. It was incredible to see relative strangers unite over the internet to help a fellow student out. After several months, it was incredibly rewarding to see her screenshot of straight As, the result of her own efforts amplified by a supportive environment. Over time, she was not the only one who acquired a wealth of new information. In China, there is a great emphasis on the value of the community as opposed to the individual. There is strength in numbers, and the experience I shared with my group proved that. All of us realized an important axiom: personal strengths go to waste unless they are utilized to help others. On that sticky summer day, it was at the centuries-old temple I realized I too was like Shanghai: the result of tradition and modernity, never changing yet always evolving.