My Family

Warning: This could get dangerously mushy.

My Parents
My Parents
My parents are the most selfless people in the world, there was never anything they wouldn't do for me. My parents didn't have anything in their younger years. Children of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, they shared the fate of millions as their childhoods were stripped from them. Their parents were shipped off to farms, communes and factories in the countryside not to be seen except for a handful of times a year. Left to fend for themselves as their parents toiled hopelessly to achieve Mao's crazed dream, my parents were left to take care of their siblings and themselves. Sadly, my parents' childhoods were not unique in China nor were they uncommon. Eventually, they went to college together, married and in 1986, they had me. And the world skipped a beat. Har har.

In 1989 my parents came to the United States. My father left first to pursue a Master's in Computer Science at the University of Maryland - College Park. A year later, my mother left her job to join him.

On the Californian Coast
On the Californian Coast

Mere months before we were to go to America, my mother was almost a victim in the streets of Beijing in June of 1989 during the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Out in the streets as the troops descended on the city of Beijing, my mother ran into the carnage. She became separated from her bicycle and as she came under fire and dove behind a market stall on the street. There she watched through a hole as armed troops marched by just feet away from her while firing. Later she would return to find her bicycle riddled with bullets. After dawn broke, she finally returned home to my panicked grandparents. Months later, my mother was on a business trip to Romania when their Communist leadership crumbled amidst a torrent of gunfire and revolt and she again returned unscathed. Eventually my family did reunite again after my parents thrust themselves into an unfamiliar land that spoke a language they hardly knew while moving from apartment to apartment, all to give me a better future.

On the Shanghai Waterfront
On the Shanghai Waterfront

My parents left China, their home, to give me a better future. If I could even live half the life my parents did, my life would be complete.

I always found it funny that the only thing that frightens my dad (other than the prospect of me failing school) is snakes, just like Indiana Jones. And aside from my dad, there is of course my mom who is some sort of bullet magnet. My parents are my superheroes.