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Ana Reyes put off Harvard Law School and spent seven straight days in a pickup truck, blitzing 24 college campuses. Ying Ma came back to her East Oakland home for the first summer since heading to Cornell three years ago - to spend long hours on the phone in her small, bare room.
These two young women have more in common than not. Both are daughters of immigrants, idealistic, politically committed and smart. Reyes is 22, Ma 21.
Both have dedicated months to spreading the word about the November ballot initiative that would radically change affirmative action in California.
So important is the issue to them as women, with their careers still ahead of them, that both have made sacrifices for what they believe in.
But Ying Ma has been working to pass Proposition 209, which would end most public affirmative action programs in California.
And Ana Reyes wants to annihilate the measure, called the California Civil Rights Initiative.
Both women say it's a matter of fairness and equal opportunity - and both say they've never spent so much time on the phone.
How did these two young women, both evidence that the apathy of Generation X is a myth, come to be activists in this cause - but on opposite sides?
This energetic and funny Cornell senior can talk for hours - and does - about why she hates affirmative action for women and racial minorities. But all her words boil down to one core belief:
"I believe that people, if they work hard and believe in themselves and put in the effort, can make a better tomorrow for themselves and society."
She should know. In the 11 years since her family moved from a comfortable life in China to sub-minimum-wage poverty in East Oakland, she's managed to earn better than straight A's, get into UC-Berkeley, UCLA and Cornell, run a college paper, spend a semester studying public policy in Washington, D.C., and work at the Heritage Foundation - and still keep her tennis game in decent shape.
She likes to spend her summers in new places, learning new things. She spent one in New York, another working at the Grand Canyon. But this summer she came home, taking a job with the...