Graduation & Summer Plans

Man, I am so not made for blogging... anyways I am officially a college graduate! Woohoo :-D Graduation was awesome. I almost skipped All University Commencement since it would mean dragging my busy sister to three ceremonies, but in the end I am so glad I went. We had an awesome student speaker and the US Attorney General, Eric Holder Jr, did an awesome job with our commencement address. The whole theme of commencement was "service" and I left the ceremony thinking... "Fuck finance!! That's for complacent and narrow-minded people who think being a salaryman for a bank is some sort of achievement -- the real glory is in the public sector!!!!"

The Class of 1970 also joined us at All University Commencement. They have a really interesting story, which the NYTimes wrote about.

Courtesy of Cherrylet

Speaking of Cherrylet, graduation also meant my family meeting her family. Bing always complains about how her parents are so weird or whatever, but honestly, her parents are so normal. Then again, Bing comes from this Midwestern "Pleasantville"-like suburbia so I guess she's a lot more sensitive to minor eccentricities. Her parents seemed to like me quite a bit so I was happy with that.

What I was scared of was that my mom or my dad would scare off Bing's parents. Besides being Taiwanese, my parents are also just straight crazy. And I mean this literally. My mom is highly superstitious and in general, shameless; my dad lacks social awareness (I won't go into any details). Plus my mom and dad don't get along so it was really like putting... err.. Sodium and Water together and hoping nothing bad would happen. Fortunately, Bing's parents handled meeting my dysfunctional family very well.

For a graduation gift, my sister is having me travel wherever I want (bougie ass gift). I chose China since I want to improve my Chinese and finally, see the Mainland. Still gotta make plans where I want to go but one place I want to visit for sure is Shanghai. Shanghai has two important people I want to visit: my cousin and my old camp counselor.

My cousin moved out there a few years ago after dropping out of a Chinese literature Ph.D program at Stanford. Now he's become quite successful as a TV/film producer (his latest film). I haven't seen him since I was in middle-school I think so I can't wait to meet up with him again. Plus he's generally considered the biggest B-A of my family

Back in his college days

The other guy I'd like to meet up with is a former camp counselor from this "Chinese Camp" that I attended when I was younger. I know it sounds super lame but it was so fun. Anyways I haven't seen the guy since I was in... 9th grade maybe? It'll be really cool to meet up with him again.

Other places I'm thinking of going: Tibet, Xi'An, GuiLin, and NanNing. I'll be there for 2 weeks in July by myself -- dunno how I'm gonna survive squat toilets and not get robbed....

P.S. We got 2nd in the competition. The guy who had 14 slides for his PowerPoint took first =_=. Still, considering it was out of 22 teams from some of the best undergrad business programs, I feel proud to have placed so high.