Grace's Bio

Hi, I’m Grace and I’m from Cupertino, California.  It’s a small city about 25 minutes south of Stanford, and home to Apple Headquarters and good food places. My family travels little—we’ve gone to one state, and one country—and I’ll have to admit that it took me until reading TIME magazine in the fourth grade to discover that Asians were a minority in the United States—and so were city streets lined with tech company after tech company. I suppose I barely had to move to get to college, too, but I can say for certain that the Stanford campus is quite unlike my hometown.

For growing up in the heart of the Silicon Valley, I stayed—very strangely—technologically illiterate. I only learned how to turn on the computer in the third grade so I could type my stories on Microsoft Word and print them out in various colors…etc., etc. But to (a younger) me, engineering was something all Cupertino fathers did, and not the children.

The children, instead, applied to school as pre-med biological sciences majors—that was the admirable thing to choose, especially if you weren’t sure of what to do. So I started Stanford as a pre-med and finished the HumBio core…but here I am today, in English 161, with a Creative Writing concentration! A few of my favorite books are Nabokov’s Lolita (I love how Humbert Humbert describes Charlotte as a “weak solution of Marlene Dietrich”), and Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (the number of disciplines he can fit into a single novel is amazing).

In my free time, I enjoy a variety of things: I love the cello, trivia, Arrested Development and Freaks and Geeks (featuring young James Franco, Jason Segel, and Seth Rogen, if you haven’t watched), NYT crossword puzzles (especially the puns), movies, drawing, humorous fashion blogs, and art from the Impressionist period. At home I’ve got three siblings and a big, not-so-friendly German Shepherd, but I think we complement each other well.

As for if it’s possible to write a new story: in some aspects, I think, yes—especially if literature is inseparable from history. Perhaps there are only so many basic themes we can elaborate, twist, or explore, but there are also infinite combinations of subjects we can write about, perspectives we can take, and time periods we can write from (I’m also thinking of that multiverse/parallel worlds theory…just because you haven’t taken a certain path doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist). It’d be difficult to write an entirely original story and have it still be relatable, anyway.