This is probably going to be my most personal blog post in quite a bit. I’m going to explain why I am the way I am, and what made the way I am today. People who know me, know me to be a shy, quiet person, with very strong opinions on some subjects, and a love of Korean culture.
Let me give you a bit about my background… (btw I’m not worried about privacy here).
I was born in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, China in 1988, the year of the dragon. I’m not full Chinese – my mother is Manchu, and my dad is full Han Chinese, thus I consider myself a “mix” even though Manchu’s look like Chinese and speak Mandarin Chinese.
My hometown is Manchuria, an area invaded by the Japanese during WWII around the same time they occupied Korea.
When I was four years old, in 1992, China was still very poor, and only started to become more capitalist. My family was poor, and we immigrated to Canada to seek a better life. My dad was already there attending Queen’s University, so we settled in Kingston, ON at first.
After my dad graduated, we moved to Orillia, ON, a small city in central Ontario about 2 hours north of Toronto (why my parents chose to move there remains a mystery to me). Even there, my dad had to work long hours to make ends meet for our family (my brother was born in Orillia). We started out in a small apartment, and then gradually saved up enough money to purchase our own home.
I lived in Orillia for 12 years, until I was 18. Orillia is a small, quiet waterfront city of 30,000 people, and there were no Asian people there, so it was always hard for me to make friends. Being shy and introverted, I was always a loner with a few close group of friends in elementary and high school. I tried to fit in more in high school by playing on the local football team and hockey teams, but it just wasn’t meant for me. An anecdote of just how shy I was back then; I would often hide in the bathrooms before classes started just so I wouldn’t have to mingle with students in the hallway. I hated making small talk (and still do) with people.
Plus, high school was too easy. My high school life consisted of: playing guitar, playing Magic cards, and playing video games. My mom often tried to hide my guitar and my computer away from me and forced me to study math books instead, thinking that I didn’t do any homework (I actually finished all my homework in class). During high school, I worked several menial jobs like being a dishwasher, cashier, YMCA supervisor, skating arena cleaner, waiter, etc. It was tedious but it taught me the value of money. I had only a small group of friends in high school, all white (no Asian kids in my city), and all male (I was terrible with girls back then).
When I was 18, I decided to move to the big city in Canada, which was Toronto, to attend university at the University of Toronto, the biggest and most prestigious university in Canada. I majored in Computer Science because I had been designing websites and hacking games a lot in my high school days, and it was a natural fit.
In my first year, I stayed at a dorm roomed with a Korean roommate. He introduced me to Korean culture and to Korean church where I attended for a year and made some Korean friends. This was my first introduction to Korea. After only half a semester, I moved out to live with my dad. My parents you see, work in different places. For some odd reason my parents chose to stay in the small city of Orillia, and my Mom works there, but my Dad has a job in Toronto, and thus my Mom essentially lives by herself during the weekdays, and my Dad commutes back and forth between Orillia and Toronto (a 1.5hr drive) every weekend. They have been doing this for the past 15 years, and they are too secure in their jobs to think about moving. Anyways, since my Dad owns a place in Toronto, I mostly lived there during my university years.
UofT is one of the top schools in computer science, but it was absolutely brutal in marking assignments. How good a lecture was completely depended on the professor teaching it, and some courses I passed based on luck and last minute classmate help only. Even though I felt more at home with more Asians (UofT is roughly 40% Asian), every night I had to study in the library or in the computer lab to finish programming assignments, and thus had no spare time to socialize.
In addition, I was still quite introverted and it was still hard for me to make friends outside of my computer science classmates. One incident happening during university which changed my personality forever. I met a girl in my FLC (first year learning community) which was quite helpful to me to make friends in freshman year given my shy personality. Basically all my friends in Toronto I met during frosh week and my time in FLC. Anyways, that girl was friendly at first, but then after a few months she started getting really annoyed with me for some reason, and I had no idea why, and ultimately my pestering caused her to become quite rude and hostile to me. She was ultimately a bitch, but at the time I was a pretty innocent guy, so it changed my views on how people react to me. From then on, I didn’t care as much about the reactions people have towards me, whereas before I was trying to make everyone happy with me. I never did reconcile with that girl, but its fine because it taught me a lesson. Life isn’t all roses.
I originally wanted to do a double major in commerce and computer science (this was also when I did Commerce Toastmasters which improved my public speaking), but ended up doing a double major in Economics when some of the CS courses became way too unforgiving. I was quite good at Economics and my 80s/90s in those courses helped bring up my GPA. During this time I worked as a caller for the UofT Alumni and some co-op jobs to help pay for my tuition. Also, I took a full semester of Chinese and practiced on QQ and made some Chinese friends on there in order to raise my Chinese level back up from years of growing up in a non Chinese environment.
After I took a great internship opportunity (called PEY) for engineers and worked for the Canadian government for one year, I realized that I had to move to the United States in order to escape the cold boredom of Canada and also the high taxes and low wages. I became more politically conservative and also started investing in stocks around this time. And Silicon Valley was where I wanted to be. So I applied for a bunch of California jobs before I graduated.
Luckily, one company gave me an offer! If it wasn’t for them, I would have been in Taiwan on an AIESEC internship (AIESEC was another club I joined in my last year of university). So I ended up in the heart of San Francisco, where I’ve always wanted to be. This was one of the highlights of my life as I could finally tell my family I was going to be making good salary, especially since my dad didn’t think I was going to amount to anything, as my parents didn’t have high expectations for me (my brother was always the favorite), but I proved them wrong. Why did my father always look down on me? Especially since my Dad was also a programmer, and I had been doing websites since I was 12 proved that I had engineer blood in me, you would think he would have had more trust in me.
I was the youngest engineer in the company I joined, so I only had one other friend who was slightly older than me but still Chinese American, but we got along well due to our similar personalities and interests. He remains a good friend to this day.
San Francisco had much better weather, much better technology, and even more diverse people than Toronto, but it was no easier for me to make friends. People here were just too quirky for me, and I found myself wanting to be more and more Asian, towards my roots. Although I had some Chinese friends in university, here in SF, there were more Koreans than Chinese, so most of my friends ended up being Korean. And I really accepted Korean culture, since my college roommate was Korean, I had attended Korean church with him before, and Korea is very close to my birthplace in Manchuria.
I had also found that I enjoyed Korean food more than Chinese food, and that I was more attracted to Korean girls than Chinese girls. This must be some kind of genetic thing, as I can’t really explain it. When I went to Korea last year, the culture was completely different, everyone was more conformist and hung out in groups, it was more about being together than being individual kind of thinking, and I felt much more at ease, like I belonged more there.
So where to next? It seems that my thinking has become more and more Asian, and less and less American, so it seems inevitable that my next step be to move to Korea (where most of my friends are) and live there a year or two, just to confirm my suspicions that where I belonged all along was… back where I came from. But this isn’t easy, as I didn’t want to be an English teacher, nor do I want to work as an engineer in Korea for long hours and low salary. But I hope that there is a way I can be happy and find what I’m looking for over there. I’m 26 years old now, and it’s about time I finally find a place to settle down.
To be sure about my love for Korea, here’s a video I recorded while in Seoul for submission to the 3 minute Korea video contest:
httpv://youtu.be/mkA6p2vV0nY
…and some good news!! My Korean language learning website has been converted to WordPress mainly because of WP’s built in sorting/searching functionality and support for plugins for SEO and Facebook commenting. Check it out here: http://tmk.blueisme.com
