A brief history
Born in China in 2006, landed in Middletown, PA at age three, hopped to Plymouth, MN in 2012, and settled in Mechanicsburg, PA in 2017. Each move added a new lens on life. The timeline below gathers the stops, stumbles, and small wins that turned those miles into the person writing this today.
Some entrance
Moving to Minnesota for 2nd grade introduced me to chess. I joined the school club, quickly fell in love, and even dethroned the long‑time champion at our annual tournament. Over a decade later, my civic artifact essay revisits those four intense years, linking Cold War chess showdowns with the pandemic Wordle craze to show how strategy games mirror American learning—competitive, habitual, dopamine‑driven.
Doing what kids do
Basically what happened was during one summer, I decided to scribble insults on my neighbor’s driveway with charcoal. In my “This I Believe” episode, I look back on that bad choice—from the thrill of big black streaks to the panic when they knocked on our door—plus the surprise gift that came later. It’s a quick story about making a mess, owning up, and how good can grow from it.
Making contributions
After a year of settling in, seventh‑grade me craved a bold debut. Inspired by Shin Lim’s America’s Got Talent run, I dived into magic tricks. It was immediately a hit, forcing me to always keep a deck in my pocket. I even got to perform at the school talent show! Eighth grade brought a different stunt—distributing Geometry Dash to all the student laptops. Pandemic closures ended the spree, yet the bragging rights live on.
Figuring it out
While friends pumped out Drake and Kendrick Lamar, I listened to dark indie and the heavy beats of $uicideboy$ and BONES. I wasn’t sad—I just liked how those songs turned pain into armor. Goth soon followed, and it clicked. My paradigm shift essay tracks goth’s rise from the post-punk corner to the pop stage, tied to frank mental-health talk and genre mixing. Today, those moody sounds help people cope and connect.
Moving on...but not really
Now I'm a rising sophomore at Penn State! Time really does fly. While I'm all grown up, I still got that curious mind. So, every couple of Fridays, I crack open a new intellectual rabbit hole in my passion blog. The posts are short enough to read over coffee yet deep enough to spark debate in your group chat, each pairing a real-world analogy with just enough math or data to keep the skeptics honest.