Writer's story (with an ending sloppily thrown together in an effort to turn it in on time... fail, I know... sorry)

While this week’s theme is the telling of our “Writer’s story,” the truth is that I was never really a writer. Looking back, the only work of writing I ever worked on was an incomplete, blown-out retelling of the Hans Christian Andersen’s classic “The Ugly Duckling,” a story spanning twenty-two chapters riddled with long treks across country roads and many, many ducknappings (he was a very popular duckling). Besides this childish attempt at a novel, I never wrote in my childhood.

I was born on September 22, 1994 in the city of Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam. Not the beggar-crawling, crime-filled parts of Vietnam (as it is notoriously known for) or the rice-paddies-as-far-as-the-eye-can-see parts (as it is portrayed in every other vacation guide), but to the Vietnamese middle-class family. In other words, we weren’t taking money baths in marble bathrooms with gold toilet seats, but there was never a day when I was left in want. I grew up watching Power Rangers and American bootlegged tapes of Blues Clues and Barney, reading manga like Doraemon and Case Closed, playing emulator Disney games (a fancier, more technical term for “bootlegged”) like Aladdin and 101 Dalmatians, generally happy and perfectly content against the oppressive backdrop that was the Viet Cong dictatorship.

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And then came ‘The Move’. If you ever had the chance to meet me, the first impression you would have of me would be of my laugh – something I was deprived of for quite some time when I first moved to the U.S. in Washington State. The strange part was that I did not know I was ‘sad’. All I knew was that I was placed into a grade higher than mine (for reasons still unclear to me even today), in a classroom filled with children who alienated me for my unawareness of American culture, living with a critical and demanding aunt. After spending six months there, I moved down to the good ‘ol southern state of Texas. Things did not drastically improve, but for starters people were no longer cold to me at school, and though I was still bullied in my church youth group, I found comfort in only having to meet them on the weekends.

Because of how unhappy I was and my inability to articulate my loneliness during ‘The Move’, I developed two qualities that helped me cope with the situation: the first was observance, the second was a love of reading. When you are a child with a short attention span, being in a room full of people with no one to talk to forces you to find ways to entertain yourself; even today, I am still the first one to notice the scars on people’s bodies, to realize awkward silences and bursting into laughter, to smile at people opening doors for one another. As for reading, the library became my hang out space (how cliché). During my fifth grade year in Washington, I always scuttled off to the library during recess and helped the first graders read. I did not rely as much on the library during my middle school years, though occasionally I still skipped lunch to read… It was comforting.

That brings us until only recently. My enthusiasm for writing and reading was almost nonexistent throughout my high school career as a result of finally finding my niche among the students, hanging out with all my painfully nerdy Asian friends (I love you guys), with the exception of English IV AP in Ms. Parham’s class. With her passion for English Literature, she reminded me what beauty the English language was, how so much thought and emotion can be contained in nothing more than a few strokes of ink on a page, and why I fell in love with reading in the first place. Now, if Ms. Parham was the one who re-ignited my love for writing, Dr. Boyleston was the one who doused it with gasoline. For one reason or another, his class was the first time when I ever felt “Hey, my writing does matter.” Unlike before, when I always dreaded having to reread my essays in fears of how horrible and awkward it would sound, I looked forward to revising and editing my writings. His subtle encouragements gave me a determination to write well that surpassed my passion for the sciences – I no longer wrote because I had to, I wrote because it was the only way I knew how to get better at it.
And I suppose this will be where my story as a writer begins.