Rose Princess Keiko Rakin
By CHRISTOPHER MAKOTO YEE
Newly graduated Rose Princess Keiko Rakin knows what her immediate future holds in store for her.
The Alhambra High School grad is looking to follow in the footsteps of former Vice President Hillary Clinton and former Secretary of State Madeline Albright by attending Wellesley College in the fall. But beyond that? The sky is the limit for Rakin, according to those who have spent any amount of time with her.
Rakin is best known as a trailblazer in the San Gabriel Valley. She joined the Alhambra Unified School District Superintendent’s Student Advisory Council as a sophomore three years ago and has chaired the council for the past two years, gaining a seat on the school board as its student member. However, she may be best known as Alhambra Unified’s first member on the Tournament of Roses Court.
Previously, only girls aged 17-21 living in the Pasadena Area Community College District could apply. But Rakin lived just outside that boundary in Alhambra, so she wrote the Tournament of Roses a letter during her junior year asking that they consider expanding the boundary so that she and girls like her could apply.
“Because I was part of the Student Advisory Council, I got to attend the Rose Court luncheon organized by the Alhambra Chamber of Commerce my sophomore and junior years, and I was extremely impressed,” Rakin said. “The Queen and Court were so eloquent and beautiful, and they had such amazing things to say.”
In her sophomore year of high school, Rakin became a member of the Alhambra Unified School District’s Student Advisory Council, after being sworn in by U.S. Rep. Judy Chu.
Rakin asked Alhambra Unified Superintendent Denise Jaramillo how she could be on the Rose Court, and Jaramillo told her the bad news that Alhambra students couldn’t apply. Never one to take rejection on its face, Rakin wrote her letter, and a year later, the Tournament of Roses notified her that the eligibility area had expanded to include seven zip codes and specifically the ones in Alhambra.
“For most of us, we’re used to living within a box of boundaries,” Jaramillo said. “This was a boundary that I knew for 35 years and thought was entrenched in stone.
“She changed that, didn’t she? For her, the boundary doesn’t exist.”
At heart, Rakin is a writer. She was president of Alhambra High’s writing clubs, and in her sophomore year she founded a nonprofit organization called Young Authors Alliance, which provides free summer camps, workshops, and other resources for youth aged 12-17 to grow as writers.
Rakin plans to take that love of writing and apply it to her passion for human rights, environmental advocacy, and public policy. To do this, her plan for Wellesley is to double-major in creative writing on a pre-law track and peace and justice studies.
“All those things are not only what I’m interested in, but are skills that will be really helpful, especially in a world dominated by AI,” Rakin said. “I think critical thinking and writing skills are going to be more important than ever.”
The ultimate goal, she said, is to become a human rights attorney, which is a cause that her diverse racial background has deeply informed. Rakin is African American on one side of her family and Chinese and Japanese American on the other. She spent her first few formative years in Johannesburg, South Africa, and moved to the U.S. when she was 5 years old.
What that means is she saw civil rights abuses first-hand, even though she was too young to understand what she had seen at the time, and her grandfather and other relatives faced direct discrimination via Japanese American incarceration camps during World War II.
“Coming from a background of people who have struggled a lot, it means so much to me to be able to work really hard and make sure that never happens again,” Rakin said. “My family’s been affected by violations of human rights, and if I can use my privilege provided by my family to get an education, I want to make sure it never happens again.”
Despite her lofty goals, Rakin is still a 17-year-old. She’s writing a science fiction novel. Her favorite movies are “Legally Blonde” and “Erin Brokovich.” She loves the fried rice at Chef G on 4th Thai Street Food and misses Souplantation.
But she’s also hardly a typical teenager. Rakin’s mother helped her aim high with her goals while staying grounded. Her mom would say, “You have these big dreams, and I’m going to help you get there, but let’s talk about the steps you need to take to get there as well as how you can both succeed and be happy and live in the moment along the way,” Rakin said.
And for now, the way to get where she wants to go is to learn. In a world full of misinformation, educating herself about the world and everything it has to offer doesn’t just allow her to grow, it gives her more tools to make a difference for people.
For Jaramillo, who has seen Rakin grow into a strong role model for all of Alhambra Unified, the San Gabriel Valley, and beyond, she strongly suspects that the list of notable Wellesley alums will one day mention Clinton, Albright, and Rakin in the same breath.
“Whatever she wants her future to be, she will write it,” Jaramillo said. “Her passion and commitment are to advocacy, to opening doors for people who don’t have them open.
“The future I see for our Keiko is whatever she wants, and knowing where her heart and passions are, that will be advocating for and making the world a better and fairer place for everyone.”