Why Act Three?

A month or two into our friendship, Leslie sat me down to tell me a story. "I don't tell this to many people," she prefaced.

It was a practiced story, I could tell, by the way she moved from plot point to plot point neatly and linearly – by the way she elaborated on the most distressing things as if she were reading from a moving, but familiar, book.

I was 21 then, and Leslie 20. If Leslie freaked when she found out I was a senior – I think her word was "immature" – I often stood in awe of the centeredness she possessed for her age.

In listening to her story, I learned that at the age of 20, she had already lost a mother and moved to another country, adopted a new culture. She had not only scrambled to survive, but worked hard to succeed. She seemed to have gone through more at that age than what some people will experience in a lifetime.

Leslie has an affinity for the literary, appropriately, because her life sometimes reads like a story. She asked me to think of a title for her blog. I thought, if her childhood in Taiwan was Act I of her life, and her maturation into adulthood in the U.S. was Act II, then her return to Taiwan and her search for a place to plant her feet makes a pretty compelling Act Three.


I can only say that I'll be here to read it.

—Andy