I suppose everyone has pivotal points in their lives, when an experience with or exposure to something new or different changes their personal course. For me, my first pivotal period was when I read Jane Eyre at the age of 13. This was the first adult piece of literature I had ever read, and it moved me deeply, giving me a new view of the world. It also changed my perspective of how I wanted to live my life. From then on, I decided I wanted to be a writer, to write something that, like Ms. Bronte’s work, would keep moving forward into the hearts and minds of future generations of readers – a romantic concept for a budding romantic mind.

Admittedly, I have not always been on-track to achieve my dream, because my parents have always been pragmatists, thinking that an office job with a steady paycheck is a better life to live than anything else. Thus, after I earned a BA in English from Indiana University, I ended up being a Technical Writer – which was not the kind of writing that moves anyone, even if it does earn a handsome salary.

I changed my job and ended up at the South Bend English Institute (SBEI), a small school that had international students coming from many countries to this obscure nook of the world, this little enclave of Indiana, to learn my language. For the first time in my life, I was meeting people whose lives were not only far different from my own, they were all very fascinating; I felt the same way I did as when I had read Jane Eyre… I was being exposed to new cultures of thinking and feeling, and I was drawn to this new world. I also realized, for the first time, that going beyond the boundaries of my hometown was an accessible venture, since many countries wanted English teachers, and my undergraduate degree was sufficient. So in 1999, I went to teach English in Seoul, Korea.

After returning from Korea, I decided to extend my exposure to Asian culture to China. At SBEI, I had seen Chinese characters for the first time, and I was fascinated with the language. I also had an added impetus for learning: I had become close friends with a Chinese person, and wanted to learn the language and the culture to understand this friend better. So in 2002 I went to Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU) for 1 year to learn Chinese, but after coming home I realized that I deeply missed Beijing – so I went back to BLCU to teach English.

Since 2002, I have lived and taught English in Beijing for 6.5 years, coming home only to earn extra money and also earn my Master of Arts degree in English, with a TESOL concentration.

For the past two years, I taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and it was during this time that I had courses that allowed me to delve deeply into the meanings of literature as a teaching mechanism, and to discuss with students how those meanings have built up our intellectual/emotional schematics of the world. It was during the process of this constant mental communication with well-known writers that my own written observations started to assume more depth.

When it comes to my teaching, one of the things that brings me the greatest joy is to see the growth of expression right before my eyes, as the students’ ability to articulate their own conceptions of literature and the world around them and the meaningful reflections of their own lives and growth expand and become more powerful. And by “powerful”, I do not mean the ability to successfully write an application to Harvard, but the ability to use writing to understand their own perception of the world and the self, and to communicate that to the world and impress it upon other souls, just as Jane Eyre did for me. So, in some way, I have succeeded at some level in fulfilling my childhood dream.

Nevertheless, I still have my ambition to become a published writer. One of my Tsinghua students from these past two years, a boy from Myanmar, gave impetus to my writing with a paper that explained why he liked a particular movie – he was fascinated with the protagonist’s question, “Who am I?” and said it made him think about the uncertainty of identity. After that, I started to examine this question in my own life on a daily basis. After a month of posting reflections on Facebook that paralleled my daily experiences to facets of my identity, I had a discussion with a colleague who urged me to use my energy for a creative endeavor. This was a pivotal conversation, and suddenly my idea for a novel bloomed within a single afternoon. I used Facebook to start posting chapters of my novel, which I have continued to write – and my former Myanmar student has been a mainstay of support for my continued writing, because I have no idea whether I will succeed or fail in the end. But knowing I have someone who supports and encourages me, I refuse to give up on this dream.

So this is my life right now—teaching at Beijing Normal University in the lovely Zhuhai, and writing in my spare time.