“Two Easters ago, we always had baskets waiting for us on the table that my mom made with gifts, and sometimes we’d get clothes, just like little trinkets. I walked in that morning, and my mom said, ‘I got you a toaster’. I know it sounds crazy, but I was so thrilled. It was just the first thing in the morning, I’d gotten dressed up. My mom tells me she got us a toaster, and I was like, ‘Oh my god, I can make toast at home.’ And then my sister came in, and she did not have the same reaction, because it’s a toaster. But I loved it.
“I’ve been skiing recreationally my whole life, and then I started racing on my middle school team. I started really racing, with training, my freshman year of high school, and I went to states my first year. I was getting racing skis and getting more racing boots in my sophomore year. But then I did a study abroad program in Taiwan, and my mom called me while I was abroad. She told me, ‘I have a new job lined up in New York. We might be moving.’
“The school that I thought I was gonna go to this year didn’t have a racing team. And I realized, ‘Wow, I love this sport.’ It physically hurt to think about not skiing, not racing, and it was as much the people on my team as the sport, but also thinking about how I’d struggled my sophomore year season. So I was going all out for my junior year season, realizing that I needed this sport in my life. My mom was like, there’s this sports school that I looked at that has a ski program where you’d be training every day. I was just like, ‘This is what I need for my senior year.’ I need this change in my life, and to be able to really hone in on my sport and do something I love, that’s amazing. Another factor was the research programs, because I’m also very much an academic at heart, so Northwood seemed like a really good mix of everything.
“I was part of a State Department-funded program in Taiwan, the National Security Language Initiative for Youth. It’s about seven weeks in a country that speaks your target language. And my Mandarin teacher recommended it to me. While I was there, I really improved with my Chinese speaking, listening, writing, and reading as well. But the thing I took away from it most is that I will always have a place, wherever I go, where people will appreciate me, and I’ll have a role. I was one of the younger students, but I stepped up into a more of a leadership role with a lot of the organization. It was a truly transformative part of my life, where I was able to truly be myself. In some ways, learning a second language and understanding how it connects with your native language and how your cultures intersect and differ, really allows you to be more in tune with yourself and your own culture. It gives you more freedom to be who you are, even just acknowledging your ability to express yourself in your mother language.
“I was born in California, but we moved when I was pretty young. We moved when I was two, and I’ve lived on the coast of Maine for eight years, up until middle school, and now I’m here for my last year of high school. I always say I have Californian blood. I hate the cold, and I love the beach. I was mostly raised on the coast. We lived on a river that went into the ocean, so we had lots of beach and beach weekends. We had a little town, a bit bigger than Placid and more residential, I guess. But yeah, middle school up till now, we lived in a really rural area, like 20 minutes to the grocery store. So the people and things we have are my sense of home, which apparently includes a toaster.”
As told to Sasha Luhur ’27. Photo by Mr. Michael Aldridge.
