On the first day of the new year, 1/1/2020, let me explain what all those locations at the top right corner of my website mean. Those are the places where I have lived for a significant amount of time. As a result, I’ve left out Ithaca, New York and Oxford, England.
Brunei – My bio starts with “Born in Brunei” but I don’t remember it at all. I like to paint an idyllic picture of a toddler walking naked on the beach near the equator. Apparently my mother was already pregnant with me when she made the journey from Taipei, with a stopover in Hong Kong. “You were travelling before you were even born,” my father said.
Taipei, Taiwan – My mother loved Brunei as it was so clean and the government provided nappies and powdered milk but my father was getting bored. Taipei was more exciting. I went to kindergarten and first grade in Taipei. My sister and brother were born there.
Okinawa, Japan – My father left his job as teacher and lecturer in Taipei for a completely new career — translating news from mainland China into English. In those days, the US government was concerned about the spread of communism but couldn’t send reporters to those countries. We moved from our top floor two-bedroom apartment in Taipei to a three bedroom bungalow in a civilian residential area on an American air base in Okinawa. I started elementary school without knowing a word of English.
Durham, North Carolina – The story of how I won a full scholarship to Duke University deserves a separate chapter. My first stop in the USA was Honolulu. Next was Atlanta. Then DC. Then Durham. Entering Duke University campus was entering a fairytale of limestone buildings surrounded by a huge forest. My first roommate was a jock and a sorority girl whose parents helped her settle into our room by wallpapering it with matching bedspreads (for me). While I spoke English with an American accent, I was far from American. Hiding behind a pen name, I wrote an article in the college newspaper called “beautiful people” for I did not feel I belonged. Increasingly, I spent more time in the basement of the music building practising piano than the engineering building pursuing my engineering degree.
Montreal, Canada – As my scholarship covered a year of study abroad, I chose McGill University to overcome my fear of the cold. I befriended overseas Chinese classmates from South East Asia and Hong Kong. We’d meet up for dim sum, mah jong, bridge, and ballroom dancing. I discovered that I loved number theory and combinatorics, the two subjects that led me to pursue operational research in graduate school. I loved living in a cosmopolitan city. I learned to speak English with a French accent, a skill that helped me get through Paris the following summer.
London, UK – After backpacking alone through Greece, Italy, Switzerland, and France, I stopped in London briefly before continuing to New College, Oxford to study 20th century British History for the rest of the summer. Those three days lured me to abandon my plans to pursue graduate school in the USA and find a way to return to London instead. Nowadays I tell people that I’ve spent most of my adult life in London where I went to graduate school and worked for companies that flew me around the world.
Singapore – Four days into my first job as a management consultant in London, my employers flew me to Singapore and put me up in a five star hotel for two-and-a-half months. I learned to scuba dive and wind surf. A year later, I joined an investment bank with a lot more employees. With abundance of colleagues my age, I learned to water ski and cat walk. Invited to organise social dancing classes for my colleagues, I took it to the extreme, sometimes as often as three times a week. Ultimately London beckoned.
Houston, Texas – My new employers in London flew me around to world to collect my work permit in Singapore to enter the USA and receive training in financial engineering in the head office. My first assignment was to model a spread option. I had to learn how to program in C.
Utrecht, The Netherlands – For the first time in my life, I uprooted for love. First I moved to Bussum and then to Utrecht. Learning Dutch was challenging, for I resisted the effort to learn a language spoken by so few. I rationalised that I was already operating well in the two languages most spoken in the world (English and Chinese Mandarin). Why couldn’t I learn a beautiful and useful language like Italian? Without knowing the language well, I felt like I was living in a vacuum. I couldn’t eavesdrop. I couldn’t understand jokes. While those who speak English were eager to switch to accommodate me, not all Dutch people knew English, so I had to learn it.
Maui, Hawaii – a.k.a. one way ticket to paradise, make your vacation your vocation, endless summer. Often the colours of nature were so vivid and beautiful that sometimes I’d pinch myself and wonder whether I was in a movie. In the six years I lived there, I grew accustomed to not wearing socks or long-sleeved clothing or trousers, not checking the weather forecast, but swimming and being outdoors at every opportunity, picking and eating fresh papaya and figs from the trees around my rented cottage, and feeling grateful that I was able to find work and live there.
Boston, Massachussetts – The officer who took my Hawaiian driver’s license in exchange for issuing a Massachusetts card shook her head just like the bank officer and so many other people I’ve had to deal with. “Why are you here?” I had no idea Boston winters would last six months and that it would feel colder than Montreal. When I complained about the cold, I would get the same reaction: “Cold? You haven’t seen the snow in 2015! There was not even a snow day in 2018 or 2019. Cold? You’ve seen nothing yet!” Grudgingly I shopped for a water-resistant long puffer down coat and “snow shoes.” The good news about the long winter is that I get to stay indoors and focus on my writing.
