To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I suppose it all started sometime on the 27th of December, 1976. The faint note of uncertainty stems not from an inherent inclination towards skepticism, but rather from the comparatively mundane fact that my parents weren't big fans of the western calendar until we immigrated to the States in 1987... but I'm getting ahead of myself. They also weren't in the habit of keeping superfluous records like birth certificates, so the exact date of my birth is anyone's guess. You have to admit the timing is a bit lousy, especially since the commercial parody of Christmas in western society makes the equally dubious dating of my birth less glamorous, if not anti-climatic by comparison.
I grew up in Chilung, Taiwan, a quaint port city approximately 15 miles north east of Taipei. I had a trauma free childhood - no run-ins with school yard bullies or pedophiles. It was great growing up in a pastoral surrounding where time wasn't a precious commodity. I remember in second grade, the craze of the school was catching and breeding lady bugs, though moss snails with iridescent shells came a close second... what can I say, we were easily entertained. Of course, that was before Nintendo and McDonald's invaded the country.
The pace of things picked up a bit when my parents dropped the bomb and informed my sister and I that we were immigrating to the States in the Fall of 1986. So we made the move in February of 1987 and stayed for a while with my aunt in Brooklyn, NY. I remember spending a great deal of time adjusting to life here, you know, essentials like learning the alphabets, watching TV excessively, getting over the novelty of snowflakes, and trying to communicate with hand gestures when my slim English vocabulary and even more precarious command of grammar failed me.
School here was a total breeze even when I couldn't speak a word of English; I was nicely warmed up to the challenge of starting classes here after my 4 and 1/2 year long roasting in the academic pressure cooker of Taiwanese public education. I think it took me a little over a year to achieve fluency, and of course, once I got going, there was no stopping me (note the trite purple prose). I sailed through grade school and most of high school without ever being academically challenged by the material, and when I did, like the fateful moment when I discovered calculus, I'd dismiss it as pedagogical parlor tricks to keep math teachers employed. So I played the role of the overachiever and got my biscuit...
Which as it turns out, came in the shape of an Ivy League school. Yale was definitely a watershed of sorts. It was my first time living away from home, my second time living in a dark, dank basement, and definitely not the last time living with boys lacking maturity. Everyone was super friendly; then, after the second week of classes when people decided they've made enough friends for the next four years, these odd things called cliques appeared.
Intellectually, Yale was the perfect place for me. It was refreshing to be in an environment where you are encouraged to pursue whatever interests you, where being esoteric is the norm, well, except for the legacy students and the jocks... someone has to hold down the grade curve. I sold my soul to the Yale Daily News during sophomore year working as one of the Photography Editors. I should have learned from my stint as Editor in Chief of my high school paper to stay away from the travesty of journalism that all student publications inevitably become... but sizing up the experience retrospectively, I suppose one will always run into hypocritical weasels one time or another in life, so might as well learn to deal with them early.
I ended up double majoring in Art and Literature, which was low on pragmatics, but I didn't go to college with the lofty goal of getting a middle management job after graduation. I discovered and fell in love with intaglio printmaking, gained fluency in Italian, learned to throw around words like semiotics, hermeneutics, and heteroglossia, and finally grew out of my braces, fashion victim wardrobe, and baby fat. But I think learning not to take myself too seriously, except when dealing with flaky people, was probably the most important lesson I picked up from living with Yalies who did. Oh, I also realized that I have a lower than usual dirt tolerance threshold as I often found myself cleaning up after people... oh, all right, so I'm really a compulsive neat freak.
After graduating in 1999, I moved back to Brooklyn and started working. I'm very foggy about my "future plans," but I definitely know the law-business-med school troika will not break into my horizon any time soon. I'm quite fortunate to have the time and the perspective offered by this break away from academia to evaluate and question what it is that I want from life; and in a sense, knowing to ask the questions, and the search itself, are as important as the elusive closure offered by the answer.
Now if I can only do something about those pesky student loans...
