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Overview

  • 2 references
  • Fluent in Chinese (Simplified), English
  • 32, Male
  • Member since 2013
  • Student
  • Undergrad LLB in Law
  • No hometown listed
  • Profile 100% complete

About Me

CURRENT MISSION

Get published! Become a ubermensch!

ABOUT ME

I think it's a cool idea to build a library. But something of a different library. You know, instead of filling it with books, fill it with people's life stories. Everyone is free to contribute - after all, who better to author the adventure of your existence than yourself. One day, everyone will have their story written in this library. And that's quite cool.

Because it's sort of a anchor to bind you to this earth. The years will change, and many things will be forgotten, but now you have a physical keepsake that remains unchanging. Perhaps a thousand years from now, someone will open the book and read it. And in this library your tale will be chronicled, bearing witness to the fact that you once existed, that you had a body, a brain, thoughts, desires, dreams and fears.

So we cannot perhaps live forever, but even we, the mere mortals, can partake in a slice of immortality. And to steal fire from the gods, that's what I wanna do :)

PHILOSOPHY

Leave philosophy to the philosophers. A rerun of Quentin Tarantino, a good hearty wheat beer, and cheesecake is my life philosophy.

Oh, that and "for everything there is a time, a place for every purpose under Heaven". Peace.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

Never stayed at people's yet, but found this platform to be a good place to find interesting events.

Interests

Here is my US uni app essay. Says it all.

PAINTED WALLS AND STORIED WINDOWS

One

Life begins in a dreamlike form. Memories, yet to develop its opaque density, tremble in the protoplasm of the mind, its dimensions gently lifting through the weaves of the conscious and the unconscious. The ink-drops fall; sounds, sights, smells, touches, tastes; imprints and impressions indelibly seared into the tabula rasa of our consciousness. Then night comes, and the terrors of the imagination take flight; shadow fears with no names or origins. Masks, mirrors, panels, smoke that trails off into the silence.

Nine

I did not have names for these thoughts I had, but then, life for me has never been the lucid rationality of some people’s lives. Without chronology, my childhood was a collage of pictures and emotions of varying wavelengths and saturation. In them, there were more dreams than reality. Sense-data, transmitted by the objective electrical impulses of the synapses, were somehow unfolded, transformed and idealized into subjective truths in my endless illusion. Mathematics was a lie, and science was a collection of incomplete facts given by approximation and compromise.
Poetry was real. Language was real to me. From the works of Dahl, Tolkien, Frost and many others, I saw and regarded many wonderful places and things. And the writers spoke to me softly, whispering quietly to me beautiful truths, truths beyond human comprehension. Love, Death Creation… The little me thought I knew so much, and contempt was sweet.

Fifteen

Literature became my choice. The reason was simple. But as I started pursuing it in earnest, it disappointed and disenchanted me. What, I thought, was the meaning of a comma? And its position, roughly two thumbs (give and take depending on the font) from the run-on line, what does that signify? The neatly cobbled paths to Ms Honey’s cottage were soon excavated; the construction took over. By the time they had finished nearly four years later, I saw in this mental horizon a city of mirrored high-rises, and people that spoke an alien language: sibilance, assonance, onomatopoeia. I could not find the roads that diverged from the yellowed wood anymore.

Eighteen

I came to understand science and appreciate its explanatory superiority. I came also to realize the foolish naivety of a younger, over-imaginative mind, and its subsequent fruitless forays into the ivory towers of high academic culture. In the end, I accepted that art was a necessary but erroneous descriptor of reality, and it belonged with rest of the subjective and metaphysical – religion, ontology, in the pages of history.

Twenty

But how does one live with this notion? How can one live with the prolonged belief that one is simply an agglomeration of molecules, a serendipitous combination of chemicals? In a godless world with man in its center, there comes the question every man must answer: why does one exist?
And one day it hit me. Maybe we had all been asking the wrong question.
Maybe, if we dropped the science and the arts and just looked around us, we will see that the bird still chirps and the hippopotamus still rolls, that when you push it, the box will move. Perhaps if you removed the equations and literary terms and just stopped for a moment, you will see the same unformed images of childhood rushing back to you, the indolent but forgotten imprints and impressions; Death and Love and Laws and Axioms somehow rolled into one, into the phantasmagoric chambers of brains, with its painted walls and storied windows. In the end, arts and sciences does not matter anymore, because when you give yourself over to the illusion, only the joy of living will remain.

I know, major lyrical waxing. But there is more than that. Putting it simply, if you are interesting, I would love to meet you. I am pretty much interested in everything.

  • arts
  • culture
  • writing
  • books
  • literature
  • poetry
  • cooking
  • beer
  • running
  • outdoor activities
  • boxing
  • history
  • law
  • mathematics
  • religion
  • science

Music, Movies, and Books

Everything by Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan. Amadeus, La vita e Bella, everything by Hayao Miyazaki, Full Metal Alchemist, Disney, Pixar. The Mummy and the Mummy returns. Lord of the Rings, Brave New World, Lolita, Necrophilia Variations (this is a book!), the Crucible, everything from Shakespeare.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Slept out in the middle of nowhere, in Norway, in the middle of winter. Had to made my own stove out of a tin can and some Burger King straws.

Teach, Learn, Share

I can teach English, Mandarin, Law, cooking. I've been to the army, so I can teach you some outdoor skills. I also happen to be fastidious with the management of my personal life, so I can teach you how to organize your life.

What I Can Share with Hosts

My opened can of beans. My toilet seat cushion.

Countries I’ve Visited

Austria, China, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Indonesia, Malaysia, Norway, Poland, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom

Countries I’ve Lived In

China, Singapore, United Kingdom

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