About Me

Born in Chicago a night before Independence Day, my family has always joked that my birth was celebrated by fireworks. Personally, I had always believed that my birth was not really something to be celebrated, only one of the three hundred eighty-five thousand births of that day. In some ways, I was right: I am, after all, only one out of the 7.9 billion people alive. Whether I exist or not, humanity will keep functioning, Earth will keep orbiting the Sun, time will keep ticking.

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Yet in other ways, I could not be more wrong. There will only ever be one of me. No one else can say the exact same things about life that I can truthfully. Moving to Shanghai, my family's home for generations, only six months after my birth, I lived most of my life there, forming bonds that still last to this day. After 11 years of international schools and living in a bilingual environment, my mom and I moved again to Chicago at the start of my sixth grade year to attend University of Chicago Lab. Meanwhile, my father worked full time in China with my younger brother who was just beginning his education. Successfully adapting to my new environment through initial challenges in language, culture, and relationships, I continued my education in the Laboratory schools until now, my sophomore year of high school, while pursing interests such as reading, writing, fencing, video games, and hanging out with friends.

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Through viewing my life as both an insignificant speck of dust among billions and an irreplaceable beam of light, I am able to find the spark that ignites my poems. Writing, especially the flow and tempo of it, has always called to me as a form of expression, whether it be my thoughts, my emotions, or something I've experienced. When introduced to poetry, I was amazer at how freeform it was, how limitless it could be, and how it read and sounded. Therefore, it seemed only natural that I would eventually become attracted enough to write my own poems as a way of self expression.

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For me, poetry is when you take a thought, an emotion, an experience, expanded to the size of a universe, and then condense it into a couple hundred works. And when people read these poems and think, feel, experience what the poet is trying to convey, then poetry truly can change the world.

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