WRITING

During the winter break of 2019, my family went to London, England and Edinburgh, Scotland for a couple weeks. I traversed the rich, complicated English history and visited famous potholes of the past like the London Tower and Windsor Castle. By combining my intrigue with this history and tying in a complex mother daughter relationship, "Misunderstanding of the Last Five Centuries" was born. I worked on the story for about a year and a half on and off and also submitted the story into the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards in November 2020. The story was awarded the highest regional award in the short story category, the Gold Key. From there it was automatically submitted into the national level competition and I am currently awaiting results.

"Open File" is one of my shorter, more spontaneous pieces. Every time I meet with my writing mentor, we do a quick ten minute writing exercise to get the creative juices really circulating. One week's exercise produced a small chunk about this weirdly mysterious, alluring relationship between two girls and their especially tangled past. This piece only took about two to three months to write. I think this short story really helped me develop mood building skills and also become more versatile as a writer. In comparison to the crystal clear plotlines and relationships of the other two stories, "Open File" has a hazier, cloudy tone that was really fun to develop and write around.

"Changing Summers" marked the beginning of a new type of writing for me. To contextualize, I have an older sister I had grown very close to the summer before I wrote this piece. The summer of 2022, she came back home with someone for us to meet: her boyfriend. Busy with her internship and her first love, she was absent for most of the summer, a stark contrast to the summer before where we had spent every day together. A couple months later she was visiting from school for winter break, and she told me she had broken up with her boyfriend because he sexually assaulted her. This piece is my perspective as I watched her cope with the trauma and grief she underwent after they broke up.

My sister is five years older than, naturally creating difficulties in establishing a close relationship with her. "Greenland's Distance to Chile" is a personal essay about how our relationship formed, depicting the specific moments during the pandemic where we suddenly clicked.

Being a pretty devoted, competitive dancer myself I've always noticed a lack or absence of male dancers, especially in the ballet field. "In the Red" is a short screenplay that tells the story of an aspiring teen boy ballet dancer and the environmental, familial, and mental difficulties of pursuing his dreams. At first, I'll be honest I only started this piece to try something new. This is my first screenplay and I would go on to learn so much about perspective and visual clues through the process of writing "In the Red". I worked on this piece on and off for a year. I submitted this screenplay into the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards in November 2020 as well. It was awarded and Honorable Mention, but despite so, it was still super rewarding from a writers point of view.

As I continued to write, I wanted to find ways to combine interesting plotlines and characters with juicy, illustrative writing. "Perishable" was the first story where I started to very consciously and intentionally pick and choose every word I used. It is also an important story of my development as a writer because I started to understand the significance of my culture in my writing. My mentor advised me to self reflect more often, try to identify how my experiences as an Asian girl in southern California have influenced my perspective of the world. Although the story is not centered around conversations of culture, it was very signficant in developing my sense of awareness surroudning my own culture.

Once I learned that one of my close loved ones had been sexually assaulted, I slowly learned more and more about the lasting effects of the trauma. She taught me just how impactful that event was on every aspect of her life, how it changed so much even without her knowing. This essay was written in anger at the world when I had become fed up with the lack of awareness surrounding sexual assault. It felt like writing and researching the topic was all I could in that moment. This one is for my sister.