User Profile

I'm 20, from Texas, living in China.

How'd I get here?

The story goes a little something like this...

I grew up a misfit in a small Baptist town in Texas. I wore black and wrote weird stories and drove a car with a doll head stuck to the hood ornament.

All I ever wanted was to get out.
I wanted something more.
I wanted to see the world.
And I'd always had a strange attraction to anything and everything Chinese.

I got out.

I went to college.
But that wasn't far enough.
The second or third day of my freshmen year of college, I met a girl of Chinese descent. I made some remark about how cool it would be to study abroad in China. We dropped by the study abroad office just to check things out. We learned that a program to study in China had just (and I mean JUST) become available.

So I learned some basic Mandarin.
I filled out a lot of paper work.
I wrote scholarship essays until I thought my hands would fall off.
I won a whole lot of scholarship money and next thing I knew, my friend and I were on a plane to Shanghai.

I spent a semester at Nanjing University in Nanjing, China. I danced in Nanjing night clubs and I drank tea in Shanghai and I walked on the Avenue of Eternal Peace in Beijing and I trudged through the muddy alleyways of the Muslim Quarter in Xi'an, and I found my home.

But the semester ended and I boarded a plane back to the States, a plane back to reality.
I wanted nothing more than to come back.
I longed for China, the love of my life.

I thought about China.
I cried for China.
I read about China.
I gave a presentation at an Honors Conference about China.
I wrote a novel about China.
Everything I did, I did for China.

And then, one day, it hit me.
I didn't have to long any longer.
I left everything behind and bought a one-way ticket to Shanghai.

That's the story.
But that's not MY story.
From here on out, THIS, this is my story.

Life is mine again.

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