Book Excerpt #1: “The Beginning”
This is the introduction to the English edition of my upcoming book “Off the Beaten Path.” The Chinese edition will be published in May 2023.
Introduction
In May 2015, I graduated from my boarding school in Birmingham, Alabama, and bid farewell to my beloved friends and teachers at Indian Springs. It has been an incredibly rewarding three years, and Springs will always have a special place in my heart. A few months before my high school graduation, I received a letter of acceptance from Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, a city I had neither heard of nor visited until then. I knew that the university was among the most prestigious in the United States and has an impeccable reputation across all academic disciplines. It is about half an hour from Chicago — a city better known than Birmingham. Its picturesque campus is located on the coast of Lake Michigan, a slightly larger lake than the one in my boarding school. Many of my friends dreamed about attending Northwestern, and I was lucky enough to be the only one accepted from our school that year.
It was a thrilling moment when I learned about my future. Though the sheer euphoria quickly dwindled, the excitement lasted until the end of the summer before I left for Evanston. Of course, I had no idea what awaited me ahead — the incredible adventures and encounters, countless nights of happiness and tears, bliss and distress. Nor had I tried to charter my future path in any way. I was in for a journey of growth and self-discovery, and that was enough to thrill a 19-year-old about to embark on the best four years of his life.
In this book, I will show my journey of these beautiful years in words and pictures. I have not kept a full diary (though I probably should have), so I used a variety of evidence to reveal my thoughts, including personal writings, essays written for particular classes, and select email and letter exchanges with family, friends, and professors. The stories are chronologically divided into four main chapters, each one encompassing one year of my college life. Each chapter comprises subsections under different themes, all substantiated by written records. Each piece of record is accompanied by my commentary or reflection in italics.
In some way, I am attempting to piece together past events into readable and exciting stories like a historian. Like any historian, I also have an objective. Apart from the messages that I hope to convey, I am trying to avoid the tendency of seeing history through the narrow lens of the present: often, when we examine our past, we tend to tell a “single story” based on who we are at the present moment, unintentionally picking things related to our narrative and omitting the rest. The result is one simple, elegant, and often inspiring story for us and others to appreciate.
Such stories are easy to write and read, but they lack a certain complexity inherent in our path of growth. As we go through our formative years, we have multiple paths at any given moment. Each of them would have led us to an entirely different present. Although we are not able to fully explore all the possible options as we go through life, we should be aware of the fact that the path by which we arrive at the present is much more complex than what our “single story” reveals. Our life is much more fascinating than we think. Our thoughts and emotions as we go through these moments of conscious and unconscious decisions are the foremost testaments to our personal growth and self-discovery.
In this book, I hope to show my journey while steering away from the single narrative as much as I can. I hope to show that despite my current interests and goals, I was by no means set to become who I am today from Day One at Northwestern. The journey I took to get here is much more meaningful and fascinating than the destination itself.
*Written from my desk at the Park Evanston, Apt. 1708 on June 3, 2019, 18 days until Commencement.
