"I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well."
I popped into the world in Dallas Presbyterian Hospital on November 3rd of 1978. It's interesting having a November third birthday, because it is election day every four years. In fact, I was barely able to vote on my eighteenth birthday.
For a while, I lived in Costa Rica. I don't remember much about it, but I'm told it was a pretty nice place. With the dollar going strong, we got a very good exchange rate and our money went a long way. When I was three, my family moved to Spain.
In Spain I lived in a few different places. Utrera was a small town in southern Spain. I went to preschool and first grade there. It was a real small-town atmomsphere, and we went out to the country-side with our church for lots of picnics. Back in those days, television was only on for certain hours during the day, and we only had one channel. So I read a lot.
Then we lived in Seville for a while, a larger city still in southern Spain. I had some good friends there, through which I got into computers, attempted to "run for fun" (which I found to be an oxymoron), and met kids in other barrios. It was easy to become a sort of celebrity because I was an American, but I tried to downplay that. I homeschooled for second grade, then I went to a real school for third through fifth grade. I had the same teacher for those three years. She was strict and a good teacher. In third grade I wouldn't do my homework; instead, I'd go outside and play soccer with the neighborhood kids. But the teacher noticed and she set me straight. The learning style in Spain is a lot of memorization, a lot of recall. I think that's where I learned to have a very short term memory, and a mathematical mind. My brother got a younger teacher who had different ideas about teaching, more creative and innovative. Somehow, fate has always played us like that. I think that's why we're so different in our ways of thinking. But it's a pleasant contrast.
After Seville, we moved to Madrid, the capital of Spain. We actually lived in a suburb called Coslada. For one year I went to a Spanish school but it was an experimental school for new teaching methods, and since we were zoned for it I couldn't switch to another school. So my parents put me in an American school. Sometimes I wish I could have stayed in Spanish school, but it was a needed change. In Madrid I learned about big city life: riding long distances in the car, walking around by myself, and riding the bus and metro. In this way I built some of my teenage independence. I also started playing volleyball at the city sports facilities and eventually landed on the city boys' team. We got to travel to other cities and play against other teams. It was something I could take pride in, and I had good friends on the team. I also started playing ping pong during lunch at school everyday, in the school chapel. I really enjoy ping pong, because it's not a physically challenging sport like soccer; it's more of a delicate game of accuracy and detail.
My dad got a job offer back in California, so we left Madrid a year earlier than planned. Due to a pleasant year spent there before, we moved back to the young, ambitious city of Brea. First, though, I must explain the feeling of finally living in the United States. Having spent most of my life in Spain, my only channel to the US was books, video tapes, and my parents. So it was the Holy Grail of living locations. I knew that my roots lay in the US, and I was eager to live there for myself. With the final move to Brea, the fantasy land was suddenly my home. Reading this myself, I don't think words do it justice. Whereas in Spain, I knew I was going to move within the next four years, finally I was settled in a place where I could bank on things that I could return to years later.
Back to life: I enrolled at Brea Olinda High School (BOHS) at the beginning of my sophomore year. I was a little behind classes-wise for my intelligence, so I took two sciences, and a summer school of math to catch myself up. I also read a lot my sophomore year. But joining the Academic Decathlon/Kiwanis Bowl was the greatest experience of at my high school. After graduation, I joked that the only reason I went to high school was to be on the Decathlon team. I built strong comraderies with many of the members of the team, and a strong spirit built on mutual friendship helped us make a strong showing in Division 2, which included overall team medal both years I participated. Junior year was my first year in a physics class, the subject I had anticipated since junior high. I think the reason for that is because of my romantic notion of wanting to be a rocket scientist, just because everybody said "It doesn't take a rocket scientist..." After a while, I came to be more enamored by particle physics, but recently I have returned to more of an interest in NASA and space exploration. In about March I got my driver's license, started driving to school in the family van. I also spent a lot of time in the school's career center as part of Peer Tutoring, an organization I presided over as a senior. I went into my senior year with a very stereotypical "seniorish" attitude: the freshmen-are-mud, seniors-belong-on-Olympus thing. And it wasn't bad; I think I was just living it up because I was all too aware of the fact that we'd all be on the bottom of the food chain next year. I really enjoyed my senior year, and strengthened a lot of friendships that still last today. The whole college application process was very fun for me (except for having to write the essays). I think the idea of having a schedule to follow appealed to me; and I like filling out forms. In fact, I like doing mindless, repetitive jobs because it usually means I'm procrastinating instead of doing something meaningful that I probably should be doing. When I was accepted, I found out to my relief that I didn't have to take any AP tests, because my college didn't accept them. So from April till June, I coasted in all of my AP classes. Graduation seemed very small, an unfitting culmination to four years of hard work (three in my case at BOHS). But my family went out afterwards to the Mongolian barbacue, so that made the whole thing worthwhile.
The summer before college, I spent about a month looking for a job, and finally ended up working at Knott's Berry Farm for two months. A horribly monotonous job, but I think that everything is what you make of it. So it wasn't too bad for me. I even got a raise for the last two weeks! (because minimum wage was increased fifteen cents.)
So in June I finished my first year at the California Institute of Technology, surrounded by nerds. I attempted to learn curl, div and grad. I watched several hours of anime every weekend. I joined the Robinson/Downs Telescopes Users group. I went to the Palomar observatory and got a behind-the-scenes tour. I took a semester of Chinese at the local community college. I played table-tennis for credit (all three quarters!). And I finished in June with a nifty 3.1 GPA, while all of my high school friends are coming home for the summer with 4.0's. Doh. This summer I worked as a cashier at Homebase, a big home improvement warehouse. My first retail job, and about as exciting as last summer's job. But then again, it's whatever I make of it.
Next I finished a sophomore year Caltech. I took many astronomy classes. I furthured my study of Chinese language, and attended a lecture class on Chinese history. Rumor has it that my home was the Pasadena City College parking garage, but the truth is I lived in a little apartment on the east side of PCC with two roommates from Caltech. I went to a couple of concerts in Hollywood, and I increased the size of my record collection at Canterbury Records. I spent many lovely weekends with Shirley, attending performances of Taiko drumming, the flying brothers Karamazov and going to see As You Like It. My summer was spent working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories in Pasadena, CA under the direction of Bonnie J. Buratti, and hanging out with friends back in Brea over the weekends. Out of this experience came two papers on solar system satellites, many hours of pleasure reading, and an intimate knowledge of my 3-cup rice cooker.
Junior year at Caltech I began to concentrate on a major I could live with: optics/electrical engineering. While AMa 95 sets had me down, APh 23 couldn't have been funner. I spent two semesters this year studying Chinese, and capped that with a summer in Beijing studying for two months as the Amasa Bishop Study Abroad Scholar. I made some great friends there, and it has inspired me to look east (or west, from California) for my future. My roommate for the year was Matt Bergeron, and we lived in Page 208. We could often be found doing homework in the wee hours of the morning. Shirley spent second semester at the University of Stirling in Scotland, a biting little experience in being apart. However during spring break I took a little trip over to visit her, and added Scotland to my list of countries.
In my senior year of Caltech, I lived in 202 Marks House. Marks is a clean-cut house that still has personality: Daniel, Andrew, Ginny, Ameera, Chuck, James... all made me feel welcome to live there. I took several mind-expanding classes as a senior; it's true that the higher level classes are more fun. APh 183 with prof McGill was a blast, with a field trip to Hughes Research Labs in Malibu capping off third term. Chinese family, friends, and culture by Dr. James Lee taught me new ways of thinking about Chinese literature and exposed me to new trends in family relations in modern-day China. I spent Wednesday nights up late with the Ph106 homework group (Dan Daly, Michael Hochberg, Michael Massey, Thuomas Holmberg, Doug Lanman) pounding out problem sets. I tried to take in more of Pasadena by riding around on my new bike, and spent more time with Shirley thanks to the trusty-rusty Volvo. Towards the end of the year I took up playing Innebandy (floor hockey) in Brown Gym on Monday nights.
Looking for a job after graduation, my father connected me with Dr. Douglas at Biola, who recruits teachers for the CRIS Elementary School in Tianjin, China. In August I met up with Michael Yuen, Adam Morgan and Julie Wong, my fellow teachers. In November, Shirley came to join us just as Michael left for another school. We spent a year pouring out English into Chinese kids in grade 1 through six. I took first grade, Shirley took second and we shared fifth. Tianjin was just a residential city, not nearly as fun as Beijing. The pay was low, but you can do a lot more on $330 / month in China than you can in the United States. Over spring break we took a trip to visit Shirley's friend Leonard in Manila, the Philippines; we spent two weeks with Shirley's relatives in Taiwan; and we met up with Julie Newcomb in Hong Kong, taking a nearly 24 hour train-ride back to Beijing for a few days of sightseeing. Overall we made wonderful friends, gained valuable insight into teaching and our own career interests, and polished up our spoken Chinese.
I returned home in mid-June and settled into my parents' house. I found a job at a new Borders Bookstore in La Habra, and took a long-term substitute teaching position at Brea Olinda High School. The subbing job ended and I became a regular on-call sub, working about three days a week. In the evenings, I tutored at Laurel School and the high school library, or I was completing a couple of economics classes at Fullerton College to satisfy entrance requirements for grad school. The summer of 2003 saw me and Aaron take an airplane down to San Jose, Costa Rica and backpack our way back up to Los Angeles, passing through Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico.
In September I started studying towards my MA at the Center for Chinese Studies of the University of Michgan, Ann Arbor.
So that's about where I am right now... any questions? e-mail me: micah@earthling.net