ABOUT ME | bryce Fan
你好!
My name's Bryce, and I'm currently 17 years old. An incoming senior at Foothill High School, I hail from the quintessential northern California suburb of Pleasanton, California.
I'm a second generation American Born Chinese with a love of food and adventure. My entire life, I guess I've been what my sister dubs a 'banana' — white on the inside, yellow on the outside. Don't get me wrong: my favorite sport is table tennis, I love a good milk tea, and I absolutely adore any hole in the wall Chinese restaurant where you can probably catch the chef smoking outside or walk into a ridiculously neon colored bathroom. But as my generation becomes increasingly westernized, I've realized that my grandparents and their siblings don't have forever to live — and as the only generation left in my family that has stayed truly connected with my family's roots back in the mainland, I'd have to live the rest of my life without understanding where I really came from — and who I really am.
Sure, my story is admittedly cliche — but I think it represents a midlife crisis intrinsic to adolescence. Amidst the grueling college admissions process and senior year, I'm sure many of us reflect and ask ourselves the simple question: who are we, and what do we want to do in life? I'm not really sure what the answer is to that at all.
This summer, I'm traveling to Xiamen, Fujian, China for six weeks with this awesome program called NSLI-Y (National Security Language Initiative for Youth) that grants students around the country full scholarships to study abroad. I hope this trip will give me a better idea of who I am — and a better understanding of the places where my relatives once walked, the food they once ate, and the people they once interacted with. But more importantly, amidst a society changing so much in light of economic liberalization and Westernization, I hope to better understand the most populated nation on Earth — one person and one story at a time.
My name's Bryce, and I'm currently 17 years old. An incoming senior at Foothill High School, I hail from the quintessential northern California suburb of Pleasanton, California.
I'm a second generation American Born Chinese with a love of food and adventure. My entire life, I guess I've been what my sister dubs a 'banana' — white on the inside, yellow on the outside. Don't get me wrong: my favorite sport is table tennis, I love a good milk tea, and I absolutely adore any hole in the wall Chinese restaurant where you can probably catch the chef smoking outside or walk into a ridiculously neon colored bathroom. But as my generation becomes increasingly westernized, I've realized that my grandparents and their siblings don't have forever to live — and as the only generation left in my family that has stayed truly connected with my family's roots back in the mainland, I'd have to live the rest of my life without understanding where I really came from — and who I really am.
Sure, my story is admittedly cliche — but I think it represents a midlife crisis intrinsic to adolescence. Amidst the grueling college admissions process and senior year, I'm sure many of us reflect and ask ourselves the simple question: who are we, and what do we want to do in life? I'm not really sure what the answer is to that at all.
This summer, I'm traveling to Xiamen, Fujian, China for six weeks with this awesome program called NSLI-Y (National Security Language Initiative for Youth) that grants students around the country full scholarships to study abroad. I hope this trip will give me a better idea of who I am — and a better understanding of the places where my relatives once walked, the food they once ate, and the people they once interacted with. But more importantly, amidst a society changing so much in light of economic liberalization and Westernization, I hope to better understand the most populated nation on Earth — one person and one story at a time.