Describe an experience that made you proud

I'd like to talk about the day I bought my mother a washing machine, which sounds like a small thing but is probably the proudest moment I've had so far. It was in January last year, about three weeks before Tet. I'd graduated the previous summer and found a job at a logistics company in Hanoi, and for six months I'd been putting aside two million dong from every pay packet. My mother is fifty-four and sells vegetables at a market in Nam Dinh, and for as long as I can remember she has washed the whole family's clothes by hand in a plastic basin in the yard, even in winter when the water is painfully cold. Whenever my sister and I suggested a machine she'd wave the idea away and say it was a waste of electricity. I took the bus home one Saturday, went straight to an electronics shop with seven and a half million dong in an envelope, and had the machine delivered that afternoon while she was still at the market. When she came through the gate and saw the box, she said, 'Whose is that? Take it back, we can't afford it.' I told her it was already paid for, with money I had earned. She didn't say much after that; she isn't someone who shows her feelings. But she read the instruction booklet twice, and that evening I caught her simply standing there, watching it spin. I felt proud because, for the first time, I was giving something back rather than taking. That machine was the first proof, to her and to myself, that I'd actually grown up.