MSTU 5199: Gear Essay

Baguette and milk

    I spent my undergraduate years studying computer science and creative writing. I often had to run between the southwest and northeast corners of CU Boulder, and it was an uphill journey so I tried not to leave anything in one of the classrooms, and hoped best for my torn meniscus. Fortunately, there was no graduation ceremony this year, meaning I didn’t have to become an obvious traitor to any academic department.

Since the adaptation of online courses, It has been my guilty pleasure to watch people failing the guesses of my statements in “Two Truths and a Lie”. I knew people wouldn’t hesitate for a second to eliminate the choice of “I am a romance writer.” Somehow they had a hard time imagining a nerdy coder keeping a passion in the literature world. Now, I am here to explain how lego and a series of Japanese anime figures had helped me constructing my intricate lines of interest.

When I was three years old, my father brought me a box of lego that contained those gigantic pieces that were bigger than my hands at that time. I enjoyed those so much that I asked my parents to buy me the more advanced version which contained much smaller pieces and had a higher age limit. My eyes were actually already on the “Lego Space Shuttle Discovery.” After I finally got what I wanted, I spent two days assembling the pieces under my parents’ supervision as they were afraid that I might accidentally swallow the tiny parts.

Like most Lego collector, I also have a wall of transparent exhibition boxes in my bedroom back home. And right next to my bedroom was my parents’ study. The left side of the study was my father’s bookshelf which held detective stories, Chinese history, quantum physics textbooks, a pile of handouts from his EMBA years, and a bunch of philosophy books which seemed like a baguette to me, long and hard to be chewed on. On the right side was the good stuff — my mother’s collections of romance. The main reason that I liked romance as a kid was that it tended to lead to happy endings. If not, they would be thrown to the side of tragedy. I spent a lot of time in the study, but I was a lazy student. I was only motivated enough to read through the first 10 chapters of “Great Expectations.” Knowing 39 more chapters were waiting for me, I dropped the book and realized Charles Dickens’s writing was baguette to me as well. 

By the time I was in the third grade, Lego couldn’t provide more challenges for me as I understood fully that I would always be able to finish them with the instruction menu. A series of Japanese robot figures called Gunpla then entered my world. Gunpla are model kits representing the vehicles the pilots used in the famous anime series Gundam. Gunpla was the intersection between the mechanical world and the bookshelf. The figures were more complex and precise than Lego toys, and each of them had a background story. Since my parents usually spent so much time at work, I had so much time alone at home after school. I was still playing with some of the toys even when I was in seventh grade, and then I was labeled among those extremely immature and childish students in my middle school. What exactly did it mean by playing with toys for me? I would put different figures and lego pieces together to organize my own stories. For example, I used lego to recreate the military bases in the anime for Gunpla. Then I would stare at those figures with my own stories running through my mind.

Fabricating background stories for anime figures did not lead to my choice of major in undergraduate studies. To be honest, I followed my parents’ route because computer science was their majors, and I didn’t have a passion for any particular major five years ago. However, I was glad I listened to my parents' words before making my choice, “Try computer science, it’s good for your brain even if you don’t like it in the end.” 

I hated computer science in the beginning. C++ was the first language that I needed to learn in the introductory course. I simply could not understand anything. I did not understand how boolean variables work, nor did I see the logic behind loops. The summer of my freshman year cleared the obstacles. I was talking to a former mentor of mine. He suggested I stop treating the commands like English. Instead, he told me to see C++ as a new language, just like when I was learning English for the first time. It was the simplest advice. Yet, it was the best debugging that happened. It debugged every confusion I had towards programming languages.

This brings us to the by-product that the storytelling led — conversation. The conversation about C++ was not a coincidence. As of today, I still believe that I could learn more from a few office hours than from reading a textbook, with the premise of me running into a friendly and generous professor of course. And I sincerely love talking to different people. I was never tired of almost any conversation because I would sometimes imagine a person’s life story and our conversation before I talked to them, and feeling the difference later would bring me more curiosity and excitement. Undeniably, another reason that I would listen to people because I was too lazy to read the books when I was a kid. My father told me to become a good listener if I didn’t want to read the baguette.

My interest in stories also evolved to asking seemingly weird questions which is a switch that can’t be turned off. When I was learning C++, I wondered “What kind of pizza did the people from Bell Labs order when inventing C? Dominos? And what kind of toppings did they choose?”. When I joined the program of instructional technology and media in Teachers College, I wondered “If the dating app Tinder added a page with tutorial videos on how to communicate better with strangers, will Tinder be recognized as an instructional technology?”

The objects that had a significant impact on my intellectual life were Lego and Gunpla model kits. On the other hand, my interest in storytelling softened the intellectual challenges, and it would facilitate the problem-solving process, similar to what milk do to a baguette. 

On a side note, I have also heard questions regarding the cultural changes I experienced after I came to the United States. Numerous professionals asked me whether I thought languages were a barrier for me since Chinese and English are extremely different. Please dip a baguette into a glass of milk and then eat it; I dare say it tastes like YouTiao with soybean milk.