Writing

Before applying to college, I wavered between choosing visual art and creative writing as my second major. Even though I chose the former, I was inevitably drawn back to the latter. What drew me back, slowly but surely, was a book idea. The idea first made its appearance about two years after I had left home for college.

When I was a child, my mother had told me many stories about her childhood. They were about how she had grown up in a village in the mountains, and about Hong Kong during the sixties. These stories were filled with implicit morals and messages. Because she had told them to me so many times, I was able to recite them by thirteen. But by nineteen, I had forgotten them all again.

Even with the idea planted in my head, it would take another two years away from home before I started re-collecting the stories again. Even then, it took another year and a half before I would begin writing in earnest. In the years leading up to, I learned how to write research papers (which, as an engineer, might never have happened) and took some writing courses (one fiction, one non-fiction).

So in the last semester of my five years at Brown, I began writing under the supervision of a professor in the English department, a collaboration which has thankfully outlasted my time at Brown. To best capture the context and character of my mother’s stories, I have decided on a graphic novel format.

This isn’t all to say that this graphic novel is the only venue where I write. It does, however, drive me to read and write more than I otherwise might.