EPT
)I'm 18. Vietnamese. Avid gamer. Older brother (1 younger sister). Born and raised around the Dallas, TX area (Plano) in a middle-upper class suburb. All my life I've attended Plano ISD. All my relatives (including my own parents) were refugees of the Vietnam War, so my parents are very much the stereotypical Asians. High expectations, study hard, become doctor, go to Yale. Not in that order.
Little did I know that my elementary school would field 2 of the top 10 ranking students in my class, my middle school 8 of the top 10 (elementary feeds into middle). In elementary school, I was the best of friends (you know, that one guy / group of guys that you barely talk to anymore) with this one girl: Amy. You can Google her. She's all over the interwebs. We were huge academic competitors but still very good friends. She even beat me in the school spelling bee (I couldn't spell "invertebrate." I'm never gonna live that down will I?).
Before we go on, let's just talk about my family a bit. Sorry about the anarchy in organization of this blog. I'm just typing whatever comes to mind. I don't like to admit it, but my parents are very hypocritical. My mom constantly puts pressure on me to perform well academically. She nags a lot. Like, you have no idea. She used to have the online report card for school send her an automated email every time I made anything below a 95. A god damn 95. Thankfully she forgot about it after a semester. I like to pride myself on my anger management, being able to keep calm about 99% of things (lol, not really 99), but I think she really knows how to make me crack. My dad is usually chill about most things, but he gets very worked up over achievements. Where my mom is always nagging and is generally unhappy (?) over a lot of things, when my dad rages, he rages hard. My parents like to team up on me. Whenever I'd a bring a report card home, they'd bitch at me together. At first, I'd just sit there and take it, looking sad and everything. Over time, as I got older I started arguing like most teenagers do over difference in opinion. They're always comparing me to my friends or distant cousins I've never heard of in my life (Asian families are huge. "Your 9999999x removed cousin got into Harvard. Why can't you go to Harvard?" Fuck that. So then when I tell them how I'm better than some other friend of mine or cousin at something, they say don't care. Even for the most stupid things they try to size me up. "[Distant] Uncle X's son is 6 feet tall. It's because you spent too much time playing games and not enough time sleeping (Yes. They really blamed sleep. I slept 10 hours a night everyday when I was younger too. Just because I wouldn't take naps over the weekends). Then there's my sister. I guess you could say she was spoiled from birth. They would always side with her whenever we got in a fight (verbal) and tell me to apologize even for the ones she caused. I mean.. understand that as the older sibling I shouldn't be the one fighting back, but she would cause 70% of the fights. I was the more docile one of us. Although we have fights and arguments, I like to to think we're a pretty close family. We love each other very much, but sometimes we just have to let that buildup go. I'd say I'm involved in an argument only once a week nowadays. Week and a half maybe.
So in middle school, I picked up a whole new group of friends. Even to this day, they're still my best friends. We play games together, we hang out together, we play basketball together, we even take mostly the same classes (not because we want to be with each other, we just have very similar interests). Once we got to high school, I started to stray a bit. I'm pretty sure that's when I snapped from the pressure. In the second half of the 9th grade, I decided I wanted to be a progamer. At least, that's what I told my parents (obviously, they didn't approve). In reality, I just didn't have any motivation. Get good grades, go to a famous university, then.. then what? What do I do? What am I doing with my life? Isn't that most people from TL's dream at one point? My grades took a nose dive. I was pulling pretty much a C, a couple B's, and one A per semester (7 classes/semester). Completely different from the straight A's I had my entire life up to this point. The tension was very high, with an argument over my grades very constantly.
Then, my parents got laid off at beginning of the second semester of my 10th grade year. They had both worked 25 years for IBM as IT Technicians making ~$80,000/yr each and pretty much just like that, they lost their jobs to some random guy working f or much,much less somewhere in China. We've been living off their retirement savings ever since, with my mom helping my aunt manage her shop for minimum wage (undocumented) just to help a bit.
That was when I realized my dream of going pro was likely never to happen. I cut my gaming hours to weekends only and started studying. I've been making A's, maxing out at least 3 classes/semester since then. I've pulled my 3.5 (on a 5.0 scale) GPA to a 4.24 now. 40th percentile to upper 5 percentile with a class of 1400. We're one of the largest graduating classes in the nation every year. Made a 2260 on the SAT last year along with a 34 on my ACT. Asian-level studying. Fear it. However, the C's will follow me wherever I go.
And yet, believe it or not, I'm the guy at the lowest tier of my clique in terms of academic achievements. One guy's going to MIT. One to CalTech. Thankfully, the rest are going to UTD with me because of financial issues. By the way, that Amy girl from my elementary school is our valedictorian. 4.5+ GPA (last time I checked, at least.) She won the ISEF (International Science and Engineering Fair) in 2010 and got to meet Barack motherfuckin' Obama. Not trying to be rude, just putting some emphasis in. Oh yeah, she sat next to the first lady, Michelle Obama at the State of the Union Address. You can only guess what my parents said.
![[image loading]](http://crimeblog.dallasnews.com/assets_c/2010/12/amy-thumb-425x318-101237.jpg)
"Why can't that be you?"
Both Stanford and UT were my picks for universities I wanted to go to. I sent applications to them just because and got accepted to both (Stanford English, UT Pre-Med), but now I've decided on UTD (University of Texas @ Dallas, Biology). Here's when the C's come back to haunt me. I didn't qualify for the AES Scholarship (full ride with a stipend amount based on your SAT / ACT scores) because of them. GPA good enough, rank good enough, extracurricular good enough. All qualify me for the $6000 stipend AES. But the C's fucked me over. My parents refused to pay for all of this. My mom refused to pay $10,000/year to someone that had been in the 40th percentile of my class (to be fair, you have to pretty much have a 4.0 on a 5.0 scale to be in the top 10%). I would have to go to community college and pay on my own.
At this point, I though about joining the army for awhile. I'm ashamed to admit it, but I'm trying to be honest here. I was gonna enlist so the military would pay for my tuition. Not because I'm patriotic, not because I feel the need to contribute to my country, only because I didn't have money. I refused to go to community college. No offense to anyone. Maybe it's the social stigma. I just can't be seen there by the friends I grew up with. 3 of them are in the top 10 of my class, just to give some perspective. While worrying about all this, I even grew some grey/gray hairs. Then, the financial aid letter came in the mail. I would be getting $5000/semester by the Pell Grant and another $5000/semester by the Texas Grant. I was saved. You guys probably have no idea how much of a weight was lifted off my chest when I read the document. My life was not screwed by my own fuck ups,
So I've now learned my lesson. Study. Hopefully I don't fuck myself over again. Thanks for taking the time to read my blog (if anyone does). I hope you enjoyed it. This really helped me vent some of the thoughts going through my head these past couple of months.
![[image loading]](http://d24w6bsrhbeh9d.cloudfront.net/photo/4098919_700b_v1.jpg)
