It’s baffling. Never have I been asked about the story of my life so frequently – asked to look back at the past two decades or so of my life, and make sense of the curiosities, horrors and adventures that unfolded in the various little corners of the world I wandered into. Over a long lunch at the Dewick dining hall, or when I first meet you and end up striking a conversation that goes on for hours, or during one of those 2am conversations with comfortable pauses … I find that I am asked, again and again, to talk about myself at length, in exchange for wonderful stories of your lives.
Talk about myself, seriously? Me? You’re interested in me? Well, I’ve never really done that before. This is awfully exciting. And nerve-wracking. And perhaps just a tiny bit satisfying for the secret navel-gazer in me.
So I take a deep breath, and start. I talk about how I was born in Malaysia, this country shaped like a potato and a dragon, squished in between Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia. I talk about my family, how all 10 of us (plus a noisy dog who truly believes he’s human) come together at one rowdy dinner table every weeknight. How I bit the big bully on the arm in kindergarten when I was 6. My truly awesome mom, who teaches me every day, on every Skype date, to appreciate the little things. How I attended certain kinds of schools, the people I met there and what I learned. My adventures wandering into different lands, discovering lessons and inspiration in various nooks and crannies from Malaysia to Myanmar to Sweden to Georgia (the state). My favourite non-profit in the world, and how its founder (and my mentor) changed my life. What I did on my gap-eight-months. What food is like back home, and how I actually don’t like rice that much. I pull up my favorite corners in the world on Google StreetView, praying that the little robot’s camera will come close to doing lived memories justice. I talk about my roommates from boarding school, classmates from high school, colleagues from internships, boys whose hearts I tried not to break, the rabbits and snake (which ate a rabbit) in kindergarten, what the sea at the jetty in Penang, Malaysia smells like …
And you know what the best part is? By telling snippets of my life story, I get to hear yours, too. I get to hear about falling in love with books in a neighborhood right next to Tufts; about having grown up in seven countries and four continents; about the time when your family stuck through a rough patch together; about the project you started in high school; about the time your brother cut your teddy bear’s head open and stuffed a Mars Bar into it; about how you became a professor to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War; about your mom’s soup; about relationships you’ve kept going, and also the ones you’ve lost; about going to Hebrew school, learning from you what “schlep” means; about growing up in America as a Muslim post 9/11; about being German-Guyanese-Indian-Native American-African American …
And in these most extraordinary moments, what we form is connection – laughing about how different we are, being in awe of the vastly diverse stories we’ve brought to campus, and realizing that we stand on much more unlikely common ground than we think. And with this extraordinary moments sneaking into almost every day here, I feel insanely lucky to be in little parts of your life, and to welcome you with open arms into mine.