Welcome to Version 6 of my personal website. It is almost seven years old now. It started out as a blog, and then morphed into a collection of excerpts, images, links and other odds and ends. It has undergone many redesigns, from soft sky-and-sand to bold black-and-gold. For a time, at that age when everything in the world seems possible, I tried to use this space to promote myself as a writer of popular fantasy. Since then I have absorbed more knowledge and become more aware of my own ignorance. In my attempts to apply my writing skills in more meaningful ways, I've been exploring other forms of writing, including personal essays, research articles, and realistic fiction.
One person goes through so many dreams in one lifetime. In my early childhood, I dreamed of becoming a princess. Slightly later, when the Harry Potter series grew popular, I hoped sincerely that a letter from the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry would arrive for me on my eleventh birthday. Of course, none of these dreams came true - not literally - but what remains is an eagerness to go beyond the mundane and the familiar.
The first six years of my formal schooling were spent at Nanyang Primary School in Singapore, where I received a bilingual education in English and Mandarin Chinese. After graduating, I went to Nanyang Girls' High School, a private, all-girls school. Each year we were ranked and sorted according to how well we did on exams, so I was always grouped with students who were similar to me.
A huge turning point in my life came at age fourteen, when my family moved to Vancouver, B.C., Canada. There, I attended and graduated from Magee Secondary School. At this public, co-ed school in a very ethnically diverse city, I met all kinds of people that I had never encountered before, and I learned important lessons in compassion.
Now, at the time of writing, I am in the middle of my third year at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, U.S.A., studying English and Comparative Literature, with a minor in French. Where I will go in the future, I do not know, but I remain open and hopeful.
In the most ideal one of the many possible futures spreading before me, I see myself in the world of academia, teaching, doing research, and continuing to write.
(Last updated January 9, 2011. Photo credit goes to my younger brother, Daniel, who is cultivating a passion for photography.)
