![]() ![]() On the rare occasion that we’d get together for dinner, she’d ask me where I’d been hiking or climbing. Yosemite, Lassen, New Zealand, Norway, the North Cascades, the Eastern Sierra, Smith Rock … and her interest was piqued. It allowed me to escape the hum of computers and business of everyday life.Įvery beautiful spot I went, I’d send my mom photos. I insisted, instead, on spending long nights at the gym climbing and weekends exploring California’s public lands. At the time, I was working a customer service job for a tech startup, and my mom was insisting that I go back to school to get my masters and find a better job. Still, the outdoors were not so much a priority as an extracurricular for my college applications.Ĭompetitive volleyball took over my life throughout high school and college, but once I graduated, I joined a climbing gym to pass the time and fell head-first into the outdoors. The outdoor bug bit me-hard-and I ended up volunteering for several years at the same camp, working with kids on the trail and the high ropes course. I spent the week in the Santa Cruz Mountains with miles of trails, a high ropes course and rock wall. Our parents wanted us to follow in their footsteps, attend good colleges, and get engineering or pre-med degrees.īut one pre-teen year, my parents sent me to an outdoor summer camp-where camp leaders and counselors gave me my first taste of redwoods and banana slugs, learning about the environment right outside my front door. My siblings and I all played competitive sports and participated in student government to round out our college applications. Any grade less than an “A” was unacceptable. They both worked their butts off to earn engineering graduate degrees and then held my siblings and me the same level of commitment in all aspects of life, never failing to remind us of their sacrifices to ensure we grew up comfortably. My mom arrived when she was a teenager, leaving Vietnam the day before Saigon fell. My dad moved to Illinois to attend college. My parents are Vietnamese immigrants who came to America in search of opportunity. I butted heads with them often over every little thing. I was always the black sheep of the family. “Maybe if you didn’t go camping every weekend.” Maybe if you didn’t make him go hiking all the time,” she countered. Maybe if you were more supportive of him. ![]() “Maybe if you had stayed home more and cooked food. On the other end of the line was a long pause. “We broke up,” I sobbed into the phone to my mom. ![]()
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