And with this extraordinary moments sneaking into almost every day here, I feel insanely lucky to be in little parts of your life, and to welcome you with open arms into mine. And instead of facing my story, I ran from it. I blamed my country of origin, my family and a run of bad luck. It was a story of loneliness, rejection and depression.
#Tell me the story of your life Patch
I get to hear about falling in love with books in a neighborhood right next to Tufts about having grown up in seven countries and four continents about the time when your family stuck through a rough patch together about the project you started in high school about the time your brother cut your teddy bear’s head open and stuffed a Mars Bar into it about how you became a professor to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War about your mom’s soup about relationships you’ve kept going, and also the ones you’ve lost about going to Hebrew school, learning from you what “schlep” means about growing up in America as a Muslim post 9/11 about being German-Guyanese-Indian-Native American-African American …Īnd in these most extraordinary moments, what we form is connection – laughing about how different we are, being in awe of the vastly diverse stories we’ve brought to campus, and realizing that we stand on much more unlikely common ground than we think. I emigrated halfway across the world to escape my story. I talk about my roommates from boarding school, classmates from high school, colleagues from internships, boys whose hearts I tried not to break, the rabbits and snake (which ate a rabbit) in kindergarten, what the sea at the jetty in Penang, Malaysia smells like …Īnd you know what the best part is? By telling snippets of my life story, I get to hear yours, too. I pull up my favorite corners in the world on Google StreetView, praying that the little robot’s camera will come close to doing lived memories justice. What food is like back home, and how I actually don’t like rice that much. My favourite non-profit in the world, and how its founder (and my mentor) changed my life. My adventures wandering into different lands, discovering lessons and inspiration in various nooks and crannies from Malaysia to Myanmar to Sweden to Georgia (the state). How I attended certain kinds of schools, the people I met there and what I learned. My truly awesome mom, who teaches me every day, on every Skype date, to appreciate the little things. How I bit the big bully on the arm in kindergarten when I was 6. I talk about my family, how all 10 of us (plus a noisy dog who truly believes he’s human) come together at one rowdy dinner table every weeknight. I talk about how I was born in Malaysia, this country shaped like a potato and a dragon, squished in between Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia. And perhaps just a tiny bit satisfying for the secret navel-gazer in me. Talk about myself, seriously? Me? You’re interested in me? Well, I’ve never really done that before.