Word: ashong
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...been at Harvard four years, long enough to make friends, even long enough to find a few people outside his family to whom he can really open up, a rare occurrence for the deeply private Ashong...
Born in the urban tropics of Accra, Ghana's capital, Ashong moved to the United States when he was three. He lived in Cambridge while his father earned a master's degree at the Harvard School of Public Health and in Brooklyn, in a one-bedroom apartment on Lenox Road, close to Kings County Hospital...
When he was eight, Ashong moved to Saudi Arabia and later on, Qatar, while his parents ran pediatric emergency care centers. There, Ashong went to international schools and spent his days among students who spoke four or five languages. His parents made an effort to expose Ashong and his sister to different cultures, and the family traveled all over the globe, from Canada to Thailand...
...with the conclusion of the war, the Ashong family settled in Voorhees, a well-heeled suburb in south New Jersey. The public school he attended there was safe--"It wasn't one of those schools where he had to dodge bullets," his father, Dr. Emmanuel Ashong says with evident relief--but Ashong found that Eastern Senior High had its own traps...
Eastern boasts of its diversity and its high college acceptance rates. But between those two stats lies a strict color line. Ashong and his best friend were the only two black students in Advanced Placement courses, and his parents had to argue with the administration to get him into those classes...