Hello! I'm Alice.
I'm a storytelling and language geek. My passion for stories and languages started a long time ago. I used to listen to audiobooks in the car, and at six, I started recording my own audiobooks of literary classics. From there, I started writing my own stories- I was young and naive, so I began writing novels before I even knew the difference between who and whom.
I worked on several novels throughout my primary and secondary school years, one of which got picked up by OGHMA Creative Media for publication. My young adult fantasy novel, Crowned: Legend of the Three Bears, tells the classic tale of a power struggle between the heirs to a kingdom's throne, but with a humorous twist: the main characters are bears. Perhaps this was my way to light-heartedly represent my somewhat cynical impressions of the nature of people and power.
In my junior high years, I discovered the story of nature and the language of science. Inspired by the almost-magical color-changing abilities of chameleons, I started researching structural color and making various types of nanostructures to study their optical properties. I qualified for the International Science and Engineering Fair twice.
Recently, I picked back up one of my novels that I started back in 2013 about environmental deterioration, outbreaks, and technology-gone-bad from the perspective of teenage characters. Timely, right?
Aside from novels, a lot of my short writing works deal with intersectional identity--like many of my fellow ABCs, I struggled with reconciling my Chinese and American identities growing up. Especially with the current political atmosphere, supporting the Chinese American community is at the top of my priority list--I've been working for United Chinese Americans writing articles and managing social media for a couple of years.
In response to school closure, a friend and I also started an online education community--Buzz Online--with the goal of bringing together global youth leaders in all fields to share their experience and advice to younger kids. I had been teaching Chinese and creative writing for four years, but Buzz had the potential to be so much more than just a youth tutoring program. Our courses are interdisciplinary--I'm currently teaching a course that bridges science and storytelling--and we are more of a community than a system--students brainstorm ideas and start projects together through our community server. Essentially a cross between MasterClass, Reddit, and Shark Tank.
More about my personal life- I've cycled through a lot of different activities and mindsets over the years. Keeping a diary, hyper-planning, meditating, bullet journaling. Violin, piano, ballet, gymnastics, basketball, tennis, cross country, volleyball, badminton, martial arts. You name it.
In the end, the one thing that never changes is my commitment to the intersection of science and art. Unless incapacitated, I probably won't ever stop writing or conducting research. Not quite sure where the intersection will lead me yet, but right now I'm thinking of working in computational creativity.
Let's make Dickens the AI. Email me if you're interested. I'm not kidding.