About Me

A SUMMARY OF MY EXISTENCE UP UNTIL NOW

I wrote this for my college application. A pretty nice reflection of my life, I feel.

                By divine decree, I was born into a Chinese Christian family in Malaysia.

                My earliest struggles in life mostly had to do with my extreme timidity, because as a child, I was borderline autistic. I was fortunate, however, because my mother noticed my condition and quickly did her best to pull me out of it before it became too hard to cure. Yet, remnants of it plagued me and actually shaped my personality as I grew.

My intense introversion determined most of my personal interests in life. I had a general dislike for new things, so I mostly didn’t take interest in going outdoors. I usually avoided people, because I was very insecure and had a haunting fear that people would dislike me or see me as strange. As a result, I loved books, movies, and video games, since such things had the power to excite me without putting me at any real risk. Out of this grew my passion for arts and aesthetics and, consequently, my love for stories.

I started to homeschool when my family and I went to live in China for several years; I was about six years old then. Having little knowledge of the education system in China, my mother decided to bring along Alpha Omega’s LIFEPAC homeschool curriculum instead of enrolling me at a school there. As I consider it, it was a very solid, liberal-arts-ish education, which consisted of five subjects: language arts, mathematics, science, history & geography, and Bible. It served to greatly open up my thinking and at the same time inform me much about my own religion.

Homeschooling was rather easy for me because of my love for reading; thus, I had lots of free time, much of which I wisely devoted to the rewarding activity of daydreaming. I spent much time making up my own stories, and by the time I was eight years old, I tried to write my first novel. My love for fiction grew as I played fantasy games and also began to read the Harry Potter books. It was not long before I decided that I wanted to be a filmmaker, and this remained my aspiration for a very, very long time.

I returned from China to Malaysia when I was nine years old. I stopped homeschooling, and was enrolled in a primary school, where I had to be surrounded by people every day, and thus had to learn how to live in a more social environment. I also had the opportunity to study two other languages, Mandarin and Malay. However, frightened of the fierce teachers and stressed out by loads of homework, I returned to homeschooling after merely two years of studying in primary school.

I began going to a homeschool center, and I very quickly lost the disciplined life I had while I was in primary school, and began what I would like to call a “virtual life”. I became addicted to gaming, and I quickly became lost in my fantasy worlds. I also discovered computer animation, and I started to create some of my own amateur works. I put up my works on YouTube and on online forums where people did the same thing. For those few years, I became part of the internet culture.

                A turning point came when I was asked to participate in a play in church. This was something of a breakthrough for me, because I was immensely frightened of going onstage, let alone play a lead character (which I did). Yet I agreed to do it precisely because I was aware of my timidity, which I hoped to overcome. It was a great experience, and after being involved in a few more plays, I joined a drama club.

                The same year I joined the drama club was also the year I left my homeschool center. For an entire year, I studied alone at home. It was a rather lonely year, but as a result it turned out to be the year where I had most time to think and philosophize. A sense of vanity led me to seek the meaning of life, and think about my own beliefs. I sought out numerous articles on the internet that had to do with philosophy. As a result, I secretly became an agnostic, and I relaxed my Christian convictions.

                This didn’t last for long though. By divine providence, I started to hear from several Christian speakers that defended the authority of the Bible and the authenticity of the Christian faith. Many riddles in my heart were thus solved, and I slowly regained my belief in Christianity. My religious awakening came to a climax when I was fifteen, when I heard a sermon that distinguished between true and false Christians. Almost every criterion that the preacher mentioned seemed to put me in the “hypocrites” side. His directness shattered my religious pride, and I was especially cut to the heart when he asked, “Do you desire God? Do you have a passion for God?”

                I was convicted by his question because I knew that my answer was, “No.” Even though I grew up in a Presbyterian church and seemed like a good boy who was even more religious than his peers, I knew deep inside that it wasn’t God that I cared for. I cared for a certain self-image. I cared for a movement that I was involved in. But my heart was cold towards God himself. Realizing this, after the sermon, for the first time I earnestly prayed for God to change my heart.

                This eventually turned out to be the greatest event in my life. Everything changed after that night, because I found the meaning of life. I realized that everything existed for the glory of God, and thus everything I do must be done for the same objective. I managed to put off my gaming addiction. I began to spend more time studying the doctrines and philosophy of Christianity. I learned to stop worrying about whether or not people like me, and instead think about whether or not I love them as myself. I also realized that fields of study were filled with the glory of God. Aesthetics became even more exciting, because God is the ultimate origin and standard of beauty. History became exciting, because it's a grand, glorious story written by God. And time would fail me to tell of linguistics, psychology, the natural sciences, philosophy, mathematics, and many others. Everything changed.

                [Last] year, after graduating from my homeschool curriculum, I spent several months in intense Biblical and theological study. The things I learned were so rich and satisfying that I became saddened when I considered pursuing a career as a filmmaker, because then I would have very little time for such rewarding study. This, coupled with my concern for the churches here in Malaysia, eventually persuaded me to consider going into full-time Christian ministry. Thus, my filmmaking dream finally came to an end, though I usually don’t think of it as such; I would rather say that I have chosen to bring beauty to the world by other means.