Allyinspires
Recently got to reflect on and share some of my work in an interview with Voyage LA, one of my favorite local magazines in Los Angeles. It’s an honor to be featured in their “West LA’s Hidden Gems” column- definitely gets me pumped for my upcoming road trip to LA!
I’m attaching the interview below on my site, but you also can read the full article here.
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…I’m back from my week-long and a half trip, which was a cruise on the Royal Caribbean followed by a few days of free-roaming in Florida. With me at UCLA for the past few years, and now in New York, while my sister is a freshman at NYU, we’ve been doing vacations over winter break….
My sister and I realized that we’ve celebrated the past five New Year’s Eves together, which is quite a feat considering we’re four years apart so our schooling is always off by a chapter. Three years ago, we spent New Year’s together at her best friend’s house, empty for the night. I tagged along because when my sister and I are together, at home, we end up going to all each other’s engagements like it’s not really a big deal. The three of us took turns using the massage chair, I listened to their high school woes and felt deep sympathy, we ran around the kitchen island and ate bites of cake with a spoon directly from the box. It was a New Year’s sleepover.
The book I’m reading on this trip is the Hollywood Daughter, a riveting and relatable story about a girl with a Catholic upbringing and her admiration and awe for Ingrid Berman, even though the scandals later in her career. The city of Los Angeles was a great inspiration for my debut poetry collection, LA baby... and so I thoroughly enjoyed this read. Give it a try if it sounds intriguing.
Love,
-A
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…as much as I’d love to write more about Shanghai, and share of the wonderful photos from that summer…I’m sad to say that my phone was stolen from me at a club a few months later and so I lost all but a couple of photos.
I wanted to share a few little memories: the parting cards I wrote to my logistics team at DB Schenker on the last day of my internship (learn more in this video), a lovely tea at the JW Marriott in Shanghai with my ADORABLE baby cousin who is generally antisocial but happily sitting on my lap. (she is ignoring the kind lady who was trying to play with her…that ball of adorable-cuteness)
and a rainy shot on the summer street
now I must go before I start mourning the loss of those photos again
-A
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Each milestone met with a push to the next step while I was hoping for just a congratulations, some form validation.
When I presented to you each accomplishment that I had worked hard to achieve- like carving out each tiny piece in stone- a second later we would be discussing the next step.
But these things I already knew about her. My mother is an ambitious person. My mother is my cheerleader, but one that cheers with tough love. What used to frustrate me, I now anticipate. Her expectations become a friendly challenge for me, and I could count on her eagerness for my next step.
Maybe you can sense that my mother and I might not function in the comforting, in-sync wavelength that I’ve heard about from other girls. I don’t call her about boys, nor about drama. She didn’t teach me about dresses or lipstick. We don’t gush; in many ways we don’t even relate. There are probably many things we don’t know about each other outside of the black and white, the technical.
But in the new year of 2011, we unpackaged all the french door office windows of our new house together: each wood-lined glass pane taken from it’s shipping box, wiped off cleanly, and stacked. We sat on the hardwood floor, in a completely empty house that she had designed and executed construction of in a mere ten months. As I sat there with her, alone in that new and beautiful house, my younger fourteen year-old self knew that I was witnessing something rare and real- the fruition of her hard-earned dream. And that New Years has been the most memorable to date….
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