I grew up in Saigon, Vietnam. I lived in a place where it can be considered the borderline between the city and the countryside. We didn’t have a distinct suburban area, just city and not-city basically.
Growing up there offered me a lot of unique experiences. I got to enjoy the comfort of living in a city, as well as the fun of having farms, rivers, and lakes nearby.
Life was simple then. I knew all the neighbors’ kids. We would oftentime huddle together to play hide-and-seek and other kids’ games that made our parents lost their voices calling us back for dinner.
It was like that for quite a while. School, then play, then eat, then sleep. I was as careless of boy as I could.
Then I remember that it was first grade when I found out that…
I had some English then, but it was mostly broken. I was pretty competitive, so I hated the fact that I couldn’t understand what people were saying. I asked for help, and people told me to watch English movies. So I did. I watched lots of movies, and I got better. Once I even stumbled on some documentary about space, and that got me hooked into physics all the way until now.
People then asked me about my dreams and goals. No one had ever asked me about that before. So I said that I don’t know. People were unsatisfied. I was unsatisfied.
I thought about being a pro-gamer at first. I thought that it was clever. But then I thought that it was stupid, and that I should do something more practical, something that I enjoy.
It was a lot of control for a 13 years-old with unlimited freedom to not want to become a pro-gamer then. I didn’t have any guidance from anybody either, so my personal journey or struggle started from there.
I’ve had a heart for math and science since forever, and I enjoy helping people around me, so I determined to make improving the world my goals. I told people that I had found my dream, that I wanted to be an Engineer, an innovator that would change the world for the better.
And here I am today, far from where I…
