Growing up in a Vietnamese-American household, there were a lot of ingredients I could find in my kitchen that I would come to understand weren’t common across my peers’ households. The flavors and staples of cuisine I would come to use in my own cooking and dining, once I was old enough to learn, weren’t always the same as my friends.
Recently, I moved to a different neighborhood in which there's another girl who shares my name. It was weirdly interesting to me knowing someone with the same name as me, especially predominantly growing up in areas filled with fewer Indian people.
For three years, I have kept a journal. It started as a way to vent all my emotions, a way to organize the chaos in my head, and all I had to do was write. I started to figure out how to cope with situations I struggled to understand.
think it is pretty safe to say most people enjoy fall, even if fall is not your favorite season. There are many reasons to love fall; there's the leaves changing colors, pumpkin carving, hay rides, and of course all the food that comes with the change in temperature. All of the things I mentioned do make fall great but the reason I love fall is because of a cartoon network mini-series that changed my life.
Mom says she always knew she would have daughters. I was her first and I enjoyed three years of silence before she announced your arrival. According to family testimony, I was excited, but looking back this reaction was driven by my loneliness.
Over 2,000 miles. I could only endure it with you three. In August, I had the opportunity to drive from my hometown in Mexico to Rochester, New York, where my brother lives. We were leaving him off to his second year of college, but even if it was the second time around, it still hurt. I love having him around. But that trip was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that connected me closer to my family, where we did things we never thought we would and learned that, overall, love will always keep us together.
Being an artistic creator is such an integral part of my life that it’s become near impossible to imagine who I’d be without it. I’ve dreamed of getting to write stories and fantastical worlds for the past ten years, ever since I learned it was something I could make a genuine career out of- but I am a writer far beyond the moments I sit down in front of a blank page or document.
My favorite reaction I get when I tell someone my mom is deaf is “What’s that like?” and the answer is that I don’t know. I don’t have anything to compare it to; I’ve never known any different. Imagine I went up to you and asked you what it was like to be alive. It’s hard to explain because you don’t know what it’s like to be dead.
In December of my senior year of high school, I made the decision to take a gap year to focus on myself, my writing, and most importantly, who I am apart from being a student. This decision I believe ultimately changed the course of my life, but beyond just my life, it changed the way I view myself and reminded me of the power of choosing me.
This July, Dominic Fike, one of my favorite musical artists, dropped his new album, Sunburn. I listened to this album religiously all summer, and it led me to get really into his other music. I was only a slight fan of his before, but now I’m obsessed.
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