The first part of my identity is also the most confusing part of my identity for most people, even for friends who have known me for years. It is my name. Or specifically, how to pronounce my surname. It is pronounced, "oh," as if you've just had a realization. 

Ou. Oh!

That is the most confusing part about me, and the rest of my story is quite straightforward.

I was born in Tainan, Taiwan to a single mother who battled thyroid cancer as she was pregnant with me. After giving birth to me, she gave me up for adoption to a Taiwanese couple living in San Francisco. I grew up in Belmont, California. It is a woody and hilly suburbia about half an hour south of San Francisco that is fairly reminiscent of the Shire. I grew up speaking both Mandarin Chinese and English, attended a lot of art lessons and became proficient in acrylics and watercolor, and even ventured into gymnastics at one point. I traveled to Taiwan innumerable times, and so my interest in East Asia (or at least the food of the area) was born.

In high school, I joined the Model United Nations (MUN) club, which has forced me to become a better speaker, writer, researcher, and debater. It is challenging, to stand up in front of fifty people who are all attempting to win the same award as you, and to convince them that what you want is also what they want. As I love a challenge, I combined this with a leadership position in the MUN club and a student ambassadorship at the World Affairs Council of Northern California, turning an advocacy group for renewable energy in East Asia into RenewAsia, a student-founded organization that spread advocacy on various renewable energy sources to high schools in the Bay Area and San Francisco.

One of my friends and colleagues at Model United Nations at UCLA (MUN@UCLA) told me and a friend, "Being friends with Adrienne taught me two things: time management and commitment." To this day, I pride myself on my time management skills, and my utter determination to execute a job that I have committed to, in a manner that lives up to my standards. I am proud of my parents' work ethos, and I try to live up to the paradigm they have presented to me throughout my childhood.

Voltaire concludes Candide with a statement not about the best philosophy for people, but simply with the belief that our actions trump our beliefs. It is far more useful to continually strive to be a better person and to make a better world rather than pontificate about how one's ideology is the best. It is something I try to live up to.

UCLA has given me so much. It has challenged me to become a better student, global scholar, citizen, and person. It has allowed me to gain international experience, as I studied abroad at the University of Cambridge and immersed myself in European culture. I graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor of arts in political science and a minor in classical civilization, but my proudest achievement was becoming someone that I personally liked. After graduating middle school and high school, I realized that I had not yet become that person. It did not come to me until university, and although I have and still do struggle to become someone that is worthy (to compare my journey to Marvel's Thor). No matter how badly I stumble, I know that these struggles are what make me a better person.

After graduating, I moved to Nanjing to teach for UCLA Global Classrooms' flagship school in Nanjing, China. I was the TA for three different professors, and taught a wide variety of subjects ranging from physical geography to history of American popular culture. I engaged in advising students in their extracurricular clubs and hosted weekly film screenings for my pop culture class.

Aside from parsing documents and learning about the legal field, I read and watch Marvel comics and films, enjoy modernist and postmodernist literature, and travel when the opportunity arises. One summer, I traveled across the world from China, through North America and Europe, and stopping in the Gulf before returning to China. I did the math, and I was about three thousand miles short of traveling the distance of the Equator (24,000 miles on the Equator, 21,000 miles traveled). Check out pictures from my life below.

I have many future plans: complete a NaNoWriMo one day, go skydiving, and explore the world. However, my immediate goal is to get my JD degree to become an attorney. 

[updated 01/2020]