{"id":68,"date":"2012-08-28T15:00:17","date_gmt":"2012-08-28T20:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/summysays.wordpress.com\/2012\/08\/28\/introductions\/"},"modified":"2012-08-28T15:00:17","modified_gmt":"2012-08-28T20:00:17","slug":"nice-to-meet-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/artofblogging\/2012\/08\/nice-to-meet-me\/","title":{"rendered":"Nice to Meet Me!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sumz, Samantha, $umdog Millionaire, Summ\u00e9. This is just a sampling of the many creative\u00a0nicknames for me floating around the Internet. But who is the girl behind the oh-so-punny\u00a0Twitter handle @Sum_Dog<\/a> and Tumblr blog (500) Days of Summy<\/a>, and how did she get here?<\/p>\n

First, to clarify, I am a girl. My name is a derivative of my Chinese name, Shui Sum, which\u00a0means \u201cfaith\u201d and \u201cheart\u201d. I have had many written correspondences with people who believed\u00a0Summy is a man; I\u2019m also friends with two different male Summy Lau\u2019s on Facebook.<\/p>\n

I was born in Hong Kong but raised in the suburbs of Chicago. My family and I lived in the same\u00a0modest-sized home for fifteen years. The bottom half was brick; the top half, yellow paneling. My\u00a0brother and I often forgot our keys, so we\u2019d have to sneak in through the front windows or climb\u00a0a tree to get onto the roof. Such were the privileges of growing up in a safe neighborhood. We\u00a0shoveled snow in the winter and raked leaves in the fall, two excruciating chores that I\u2019d come to\u00a0miss dearly when we moved to a condominium halfway through high school. We had a ping-pong\u00a0table in the basement, a wok in the kitchen, and slippers, not shoes, on our feet.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not white, which made growing up in a predominantly-white suburb a uniquely uncomfortable\u00a0experience. I still remember the first day I realized I wasn\u2019t white. I was sitting on the bus between\u00a0my two best friends, Leah and Molly, forming objects in our imaginations from white cloud puffs\u00a0against a blue sky. Robbie Tomal (the Third) called out my name to ask a question.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere are you from?\u201d Everyone turned to watch.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cPark Ridge.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cNo, you\u2019re not,\u201d he said with a smug smile. \u201cWhere are you from?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

I still wasn\u2019t sure what he meant, but his tone bothered me. His question automatically labeled me as foreign. Other. Since preschool, I grew up successfully\u00a0assimilating to everyone else but always being aware of my race. Unlike most of my classmates,\u00a0I dreaded substitute teachers because I knew they\u2019d butcher my official name. While my friends\u00a0were eating Lunchables, I had rice and veggies in my Velcro bag. My mom showed up to school and\u00a0passed out candy to my class for Chinese New Year.<\/p>\n

One of my favorite things to do as a child was read chapter books, especially The Babysitters\u2019 Club<\/em>.\u00a0I believe that my current career interest in reading and writing fiction comes from the time our TV\u00a0broke and we put off buying a new one for months. I\u2019m not sure if we were poor or just lazy, but it\u00a0fostered a love of reading that changed my life. My favorite books are Huckleberry Finn<\/em>, Harry Potter<\/em>\u00a0and Great Expectations<\/em>. What can I say? Something about an adventurous young boy in a coming-of-age story resonates with me.<\/p>\n

I grew up watching The Simpsons, which I believe explains the \u201cMost Sarcastic\u201d senior superlative\u00a0that I won in high school. However, people always tell me that I come across as genuine, so I don\u2019t\u00a0know who to believe.<\/p>\n

My dad is a pastor, physicist, audiologist, and avid fan of model planes. My mom is a social worker\u00a0in Chicago\u2019s Chinatown and yummy cook. My brother is getting his Ph. D in nuclear engineering and\u00a0a Corgi. I use the term \u201cbest friend\u201d too liberally, but my best friend in high school was two years\u00a0younger than me and we went trick-or-treating until I was seventeen. He always wore the same\u00a0mad scientist mask. Now he\u2019s a Yale man.<\/p>\n

Besides my family and friends, traveling abroad has shaped me in a way that no other experience\u00a0has. Three summers ago, I traveled to Mexico City on a missions trip and saw true poverty for the\u00a0first time. We did a lot of home visits to families in the slums, and I couldn\u2019t believe the conditions\u00a0that families lived in, one-room homes with dirt floors and cement walls, in the darkness, with one\u00a0big bed for everyone. Yet they were so happy and grateful just for our presence, buying us fizzy\u00a0drinks and thanking God for their American guests. With its dry climate, blue skies and colorful\u00a0food, I felt at home in Mexico and vowed to someday return.<\/p>\n

The next summer, I lived in Bangkok for seven weeks with the same organization and saw true\u00a0poverty for the second time. I lived with a host \u201cgrandma\u201d, an old woman called Grandma Pensri\u00a0who lived in a slum on the outskirts of Bangkok where the forgotten, elderly poor gathered. All the\u00a0two-room wooden homes were perched atop pitch-black water filled with litter and trash. I took\u00a0bucket showers and counted a hundred insect bites. I listened to the monsoon-season rain slam\u00a0against the corrugated tin roof. I met prostitutes, ladyboys, beggars and monks. I realized that my\u00a0life trajectory, career goals and passions had changed.<\/p>\n

Shortly after returning from Bangkok, I studied abroad in Madrid. I strolled down long and winding\u00a0streets that had existed for hundreds of years. I rode a bike for the first time. I drank wine and\u00a0turned red. I watched the Eiffel Tower sparkle at night, passed on the London Eye because it was\u00a0too expensive, and ate a waffle in Belgium. For a few months, life slowed down.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> \"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sumz, Samantha, $umdog Millionaire, Summ\u00e9. This is just a sampling of the many creative\u00a0nicknames for me floating around the Internet. But who is the girl behind the oh-so-punny\u00a0Twitter handle @Sum_Dog and Tumblr blog (500) Days of Summy, and how did … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a>\"\" Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1012,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/artofblogging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/artofblogging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/artofblogging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/artofblogging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1012"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/artofblogging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/artofblogging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/artofblogging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/artofblogging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/my.dev.vanderbilt.edu\/artofblogging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}