Riding a foreign wave

It is a truth universally, or in this case, nationally acknowledged that a kid coming from a family in possession of a good fortune must go abroad to study. In retrospect, after 4 years and a half in the faraway island of Great Britain, I ask myself what brought me here. Not the Boeing 777. But Jane Austen.


Part 1: Choosing your sea


I was 16, a young, ordinary Vietnamese girl who went to high school to receive education and to yearn for more. English was a mandatory subject in the curriculum from primary school, and I somehow seemed to be good at that. In fact, I was among the high fliers in a class specialised in English, in a school that had already been known for its good English teaching. So there I was, exposed to the language almost everyday, that ambition to study abroad started to take shape.


Nonetheless, the outward perspective has become so common among Vietnamese students (and parents I hasten to add!) that it is seen as a "tradition" rather than a trend. Kids go to school, learn English and at some point, they go overseas to seek better education. But for me, it was more than that, I am "passionately curious" about foreign cultures, about discovering new experiences. That burning desire drove me to attend a myriad of seminars, exhibitions, talks and tests, that would bring me closer to my goal. 


I kept my options open, any English-speaking country would do, the US, UK, Australia, Singapore etc. With persistance, luck and a bit of grey matter, I managed to get scholarships and offers from quite a few colleges and high schools through taking part in assessment tests of all sorts. So the next question beckoned, where would I go?


Research. Compare. Select. As simple as that. I have to admit I was perhaps a teeny bit meticulous, in that I would devour prospectuses from schools as if they were my favourite novels! My mother would go on complaining about my stockpiling and I would gladly reassure her that they would vanish through recycling once I made my decision. Among the amount of students like me going overseas, I estimate half of them go because it is their parents' wishes. Lucky in my case, it had always been my idea, which made me the leader of the whole process.


Frankly, the more I drew endless comparisons in terms of costs, length, location and other objective factors, the more I knew the decision had to be based solely on my subjective feeling for the place, or "going for true love", in a sense. I had to thank Oxford University Press for holding that reading competition, in which participants had to write down a paragraph or two reflecting on a book of their choice in the series of OUP abridged classic novels. 


It was fate, wasn't it? I had always loved writing and expressing my ideas. And then I met Jane Austen, my first and also primary source of inspiration at the time. Followed were Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, the Bronte sisters, to name a few. Although the books were only the shortened version, my periods of enlightenment just seemed to  grow longer and longer. Until I was awash with questions such as, "what would it feel like?", "what if I could be there?", "what could happen to me?". The key to all of those was finally moulded after a period of imprinting. I would pick the UK. I would become a writer, just like Jane Austen, just like.

View of Llandudno seashore from the Great Orme

So where in Great Britain did I end up? North Wales. Yes, as random as it sounds. Apart from having a scholarship which entitled me to a 40% tuition fee reduction, I just thought to myself after having seen photos of the place, a picturesque location could be a good start for a writer's cultivation. The sea was chosen. And I set sail.