Flooded Roots

My story is one of movement, of activity and reactivity. 

I think that, like many good stories, it starts from the history of my family and my roots. My family is originally from Sichuan, China. They would move to Tucson, Arizona before I was born: one of the driest deserts in the United States. The home of the Grand Canyon, under the hot, hot sun—that is where I was born.

A couple of years after our acclamation to this desert environment, we moved once again, to Houston, Texas, where I call home. Houston sits on the curve of the Gulf of Mexico, a body of water which connects us to the Atlantic Ocean and the rest of the world. When I first moved there, we were immediately greeted by the BP oil spill, and then later again by floods and hurricanes that damaged our neighborhoods, flooded our land, and meant that we were unable to attend school for months on end because of the lack of access to basic roads. I remember kayaking through the river that used to be my driveway to go places and being locked in our homes during a time before the pandemic. 

I think that these experiences have been incredibly radical, because I think that these are experiences that people shouldn’t have to go through. That’s what has encouraged me to work on climate now, so that others maybe don’t have to face similar experiences, so that their stories can be written in different ways. I think, in the future, it would be really amazing to work on something at the intersection of the US and China and connect these two parts of my background, which I think are very integral to who I am as a person, to my story. I would like to help ensure that people, especially in China, can also share their stories, because I know that for many people, this is not the case, even though all of our stories should be heard, especially in developing countries.