![]() ![]() I wanted to write about Chinese culture, history, and society. I had a book inside of me I was convinced of this. I left my job to study creative nonfiction writing 14 months later, folding into storage my blazers and A-line dresses. Leaving corporate America, I assumed, would return the creativity and writing drive that I had lost.Īfter graduating, I thought about writing while working on client presentations, molding my prose into corporate-friendly bullet points and sending out concise, “actionable” emails. ![]() Writing, especially the popular conception of a “starving artist,” did not fit into that framework I spent my first year post-college trying to see if I could repress and extinguish my literary aspirations for a more stable career path. I interpreted part of my inheritance to be the achievement of the upward mobility for which my parents had immigrated. I had always wanted to be a writer, but as the only child of two Chinese immigrants, financial security was a religion in my household. ![]() Escaping into stories that continued the plot of a childhood classic also comforted me as I came to terms with leaving the stability of my career for the instability of pursuing my passion. As the terror of the pandemic appeared in push notifications on my phone, scrolling through fanfictions about Draco and Hermione’s imagined lives after Hogwarts soothed me. I had returned to my parents’ home, logging onto client meetings from my childhood bedroom during the day, losing hours to fanfiction on Archive of our Own (Ao3) at night. When the pandemic erupted, I was in the midst of leaving my lucrative corporate job and transitioning to graduate school. ![]()
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