Pacifica Christian O.C. graduate Rebecca Li will pursue deeply held principles
Rebecca Li dabbled in a range of activities at Pacifica Christian Orange County High School — sports, music, theater, student government, the humanities and sciences — while developing a sense of right and wrong that will take root deep in her bones.
The valedictorian of the small Newport Beach private school is headed to Westmont College, a Christian liberal arts school in Santa Barbara, to study English and pre-law. She wants to defend the people who most need it: the wrongfully incarcerated.
“Being a lawyer at its most organic form is all about justice for everyone,” said Li, who graduated from Pacifica Christian on June 4.
The 2019 film “Just Mercy,” based on the book of the same title by civil rights attorney Bryan Stevenson about his advocacy for the wrongly condemned, nudged a tendency that Li, 18, said was formed growing up in the Christian faith and recently refined in theology class discussions at Pacifica Christian — where she answered questions like, “What do I think about morality? What do I truly believe?”
“I think that’s where my ideas started to form about taking justice and taking it from this abstract concept and applying it to my own life and just seeing how can I really exercise this if it’s something that I believe our world really needs,” she said. “Which I do.”
Honoring this year’s graduating seniors from high schools in Newport Beach, Huntington Beach, Costa Mesa, Fountain Valley, Laguna Beach and other parts of Orange County.
Li, who grew up in Irvine, attended Mariners Christian School before Pacifica Christian. As a member of Pacifica Christian’s third graduating class, she said she had opportunities to help build up a young school.
“As a result, I didn’t feel like I was excluded from trying sports or certain opportunities. Like I was able to try out for my first musical,” she said.
She played on the beach volleyball team, performed as a pianist, cellist and actor, shadowed administrators, learned to code, and earned a 4.58 grade-point average to lead her class of 41 students. Outside of school, she taught Sunday school at Newport’s Liberty Baptist Church. Although she will study the humanities and social studies in college, she also enjoyed Advanced Placement biology.
She admires the dedication of the Pacifica Christian faculty, who went out of their way to engage with students, even sitting with them at lunch. In the spring, as the significance of the coronavirus pandemic began to take shape, teachers moved up the performance of “Fiddler on the Roof” so the students who had worked hard on the production — like Li, who portrayed Tzeitel — could showcase their talents before the imminent switch to online learning. She said she found this touching.
The ceremony took place in the Mariners Church parking lot, where faculty, staff and families watched as Pacifica Christian Orange County’s class of 2020 graduated.
Li is the daughter of Peter and Peggy Li and the younger sister of Christina. Stay-at-home orders were a blessing in disguise that allowed her to spend quality time with her family before heading off to college, she said.
In her graduation speech, she said she hopes the class of 2020 is judged by not just what happened to them, but what happened because of them.
“The history textbooks of the future are still blank. They might contain the name of one of these graduates,” she wrote. “When life came to a screeching stop these past few months, we were provided an opportunity to live with determination, wait in silence, love each other well, exercise our God-given passions, and think carefully.”
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