This is my personal works website and you do come here for some information about my professional competence. But if you want a little more insight on who I am, my thoughts, feelings and experiences then I’m offering you that too. I started jotting down a few topics which I’d like to talk about here on the blog, and some of my own experiences which I want to share with you all. Today I’d like to share some stories over the first two decades of my life.
As a kid growing up in a family filled with maternal love, every moment in my memory is warm and sweet. I remember spending lots of time with books, instead of playing outdoors. It is not because I was unsociable or anything else. The truth is, I was totally obsessed with exploring a much bigger and fantastic world through books, rather than playing house. Therefore, I honestly do not have much childhood friends.
Is it a regret? Not really. Compared to the loneliness caused by being the only child in my family, having few friends was not a big deal. Or it might be easier for you to comprehend it in this way – there’re much more excellent people out there for me to meet and make friends with. And I did have had a lot of besties in the parallel universe. The bookshelf in our home was like a rabbit hole for me to escape from all the negative emotions. I gradually felt the distance between me and those kids – when they were asking for toys and candies, I was working hard for books; when they were chasing around or watch TV, I was reading and playing a little ‘movie’ in my head. At that time, some books with beautiful illustrations were expensive, so my mom made a deal with me that if I behaved well in a month, then I would get a chance to pick a book. I have to say that was a very attractive reward! You can guess how well I behaved when I was a little girl.
By the time I started school, I enjoyed it a lot. However, I didn’t have a good beginning. Because I skipped the second year of kindergarten, I knew nothing about Pinyin, which is the Romanization of the Chinese characters based on pronunciation. I unsurprisingly failed the first test and surprisingly I was despised by my class teacher who thought I was stupid. Therefore, no matter how hard I studied or how well I behaved, I had no chance to be rewarded as ‘merit student’ until the last year when we had a new class teacher. Though my mum gave me a lot of support and comfort (she’s always my angle) during those disappointing years, I was still unconfident about myself.
Anyhow, I enjoyed learning, and as lots of kids do, I would go home at the end of the day and tell my mum and dad about what I'd learnt at school. As I got older the creative side of my personality really began to blossom, I get this from my mum. But I also enjoyed science, and this might come from my dad. I did great in my senior high school entrance exam and enrolled in the best one successfully. Honestly, I wasn’t particularly academic in all subjects. Some I excelled at, especially anything creative like Art. And I wasn’t a fan of politics because even from a young age, I decided to run away from party, which might be one of the important reasons pushed me to major in math and science. I didn't care about the low grade; in my head I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and this subject was insignificant to me.
After graduating from high school, it was a huge release and it is the first time for me to feel the real freedom in my life. I CAN CHOOSE MY MAJOR FOR MY OWN LIFE! I clearly know that I don’t want the kind of job which I can see through the rest of my life when I’m only 21. I want a creative and fresh life that is unpredictable every day, otherwise I might be bored. I have decided to be a designer since I was six years old. At that age, I‘ve already started to draw the plan of my dream house with pencil and ruler, pretending I am a real architect (of course I didn’t know the exact word); I had stapled a few pieces of paper into a sketch book to organize my costume design manuscript. I even applied a patent for a helmet design when I was in high school. For a variety of reasons, I majored in Architectural Design, and I've been loving it since the first day of university.
Though it is not an easy major, it is perfect to me. When you are doing the thing you love, you will throw yourself into it. I not only finished all the schoolwork well and efficiently, but also tried to draw nutrients from books and travel – I finished all the books about architecture in the library; I would go out to visit different kinds of building every weekend and holiday; I drew down those brilliant details and interesting form. On a rough calculation, I’ve read about 120 books and travelled to 21 cities in the first three years of college. These numbers surprised myself because I didn’t plan to achieve any goals. Everything just happened out of a passion, which keeps pushing me up to higher education.
