Angela Yang
In third grade, a teacher told Angela Yang ‘23, “You should try writing a novel, even if it's just a side project to work on.” And so Yang ended up writing four or five novels as a kid, which she says she is slightly ashamed to look back at. In high school, Yang taught creative writing classes at her local middle school, which was in San Francisco. According to her, schools there are very STEM dominated. She was inspired by how, despite the STEM focus, her students came to class regularly to use their imaginations and open up to her.
“Sometimes I still flip through their writing,” Yang said. “And it just makes me happy. And it makes me think about the reason I started writing, which was just because it was fun, and it was a metaphorical language I spoke, and I often felt like it communicated my feelings better than just writing in a diary or journal.”
Once college applications drew nearer, Yang felt peer pressure to earn recognition for her writing, entering contests and going to a writing summer camp. At camp, Yang realized she was surrounded by skilled writers, making her feel like “one little fish in a huge sea.”
“While I used to think as a kid that I was really good at writing, because I did so much of it, I realized that in the writing world, I was mediocre at best,” Yang said. “And part of that was motivation for me, because it motivated me to work harder and really practice the craft. But part of it, I think, killed something in me a little bit. I feel like there was definitely a point where I became a little bit less intuitive and imaginative, starting end of high school, beginning of college.”
Currently, Yang tries to write every day, even if it is just a couple of sentences. While she is working on craft and reading literature, Yang is trying to figure out the role writing plays in her life. She is also contemplating the idea of external gratification, and how she can be satisfied independently or by sharing her writing with a few friends.
“I know plenty of phenomenal writers in my class at Stanford who are going to make it very far, I think, and I want them to make it very far because their voices need to be heard,” Yang said. “They are brilliant and talented and hardworking. I'm grateful that they're there. And I think I'm just going through a process of, on one hand, accepting that I am not them. But on the other hand, accept that it's okay for me to not be them, so yeah, I think I'm still growing a lot.”
Mainly writing realistic fiction and memoirs, Yang draws most of her inspiration from small interactions in her life, and sometimes from her Asian American studies classes or family history. Yang also dabbles in poetry: she wrote a poem, “ReturnRerun,” when she went home to quarantine and found relations with her parents difficult to relearn.
“It's sort of a rerun of everything, of all the dynamics of being home in the past,” Yang said. “Feeling like I have to reincarnate backwards when I go home, to who I was when I was younger and before I'd left for college. And I made [the title] one word, because it felt like a very close, cyclical kind of feeling — it never really ends. I'm just constantly trying to fit back into who I was.”
In the last few lines of the poem, Yang describes an image of a kid roller skating too fast on the street, which she correlates with her leaving for college to find herself. She ends on an image of “doors without rooms and windows without walls,” which she matches with her impression of college.
“People are always like, ‘Oh, open a window of opportunity,’ or like, ‘Open new doors for yourself,’” Yang said. “And we try so hard to do that in college. We're constantly pushing forward and onward. But I feel like we're all often not very rooted. And we're not building these structures around ourselves that we can fall back on, and where we can pause and contemplate.”
“Sometimes I still flip through their writing,” Yang said. “And it just makes me happy. And it makes me think about the reason I started writing, which was just because it was fun, and it was a metaphorical language I spoke, and I often felt like it communicated my feelings better than just writing in a diary or journal.”
Once college applications drew nearer, Yang felt peer pressure to earn recognition for her writing, entering contests and going to a writing summer camp. At camp, Yang realized she was surrounded by skilled writers, making her feel like “one little fish in a huge sea.”
“While I used to think as a kid that I was really good at writing, because I did so much of it, I realized that in the writing world, I was mediocre at best,” Yang said. “And part of that was motivation for me, because it motivated me to work harder and really practice the craft. But part of it, I think, killed something in me a little bit. I feel like there was definitely a point where I became a little bit less intuitive and imaginative, starting end of high school, beginning of college.”
Currently, Yang tries to write every day, even if it is just a couple of sentences. While she is working on craft and reading literature, Yang is trying to figure out the role writing plays in her life. She is also contemplating the idea of external gratification, and how she can be satisfied independently or by sharing her writing with a few friends.
“I know plenty of phenomenal writers in my class at Stanford who are going to make it very far, I think, and I want them to make it very far because their voices need to be heard,” Yang said. “They are brilliant and talented and hardworking. I'm grateful that they're there. And I think I'm just going through a process of, on one hand, accepting that I am not them. But on the other hand, accept that it's okay for me to not be them, so yeah, I think I'm still growing a lot.”
Mainly writing realistic fiction and memoirs, Yang draws most of her inspiration from small interactions in her life, and sometimes from her Asian American studies classes or family history. Yang also dabbles in poetry: she wrote a poem, “ReturnRerun,” when she went home to quarantine and found relations with her parents difficult to relearn.
“It's sort of a rerun of everything, of all the dynamics of being home in the past,” Yang said. “Feeling like I have to reincarnate backwards when I go home, to who I was when I was younger and before I'd left for college. And I made [the title] one word, because it felt like a very close, cyclical kind of feeling — it never really ends. I'm just constantly trying to fit back into who I was.”
In the last few lines of the poem, Yang describes an image of a kid roller skating too fast on the street, which she correlates with her leaving for college to find herself. She ends on an image of “doors without rooms and windows without walls,” which she matches with her impression of college.
“People are always like, ‘Oh, open a window of opportunity,’ or like, ‘Open new doors for yourself,’” Yang said. “And we try so hard to do that in college. We're constantly pushing forward and onward. But I feel like we're all often not very rooted. And we're not building these structures around ourselves that we can fall back on, and where we can pause and contemplate.”
Listen
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to Yang’s poem, “ReturnRerun”:
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ReturnRerun
In this house I rush
to reincarnate in secret folding backwards to who I was when I left prodigal daughter learning the only way to return is to crawl. I wonder how many porchlights burned out in my absence and how many moths burned out in those porchlights Did you find their silver bodies in the morning — cooked mid-writhe, headed home to moonlight they’d never reach? I am infinity doll, wound to wander outward till a dead end catches me. Butterfly kiss of curb on shins, rollerskates flinging too fast down the street, beyond which are doors without rooms and windows without walls. |