Yes, ladies and gents, WTY is yours truly, me, Wai Ting. (Not that fuzzy thing in the pic... that's Paddington!!!) Seriously though, I never really found myself to be particularly attractive, though more and more people have been refuting that statement, so what do I know? Anyhow, I'm a College Grad with BAs in history and political science from the University of Michigan and a newly-minted grad from the Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA with a Masters degree in Public Policy and Management. Now I'm learning to readjust to life outside of the classroom and diving headfirst into full-time employment, working hard to make sure budget numbers are correct and spending matches revenue. I'm currently in my 25th (!) year on earth and ready to take life on. But you know how it goes - only after you made a whole bunch of mistakes in the past do you realize how good you have it now - which I do.

Like I said, I have more or less been a city girl all my life. I was born in Hong Kong and lived there for the first seven years of my life before my family and I immigrated to New York, not so much because we were better off in the States but rather because there was a big fear of the Chinese Communist government, especially after the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the year before we moved. There was great fear of what would happen to HK after the handover back to China in 1997. If you hear my parents sometimes, they actually do reminisce about how we would actually be financially better off had we stayed, but you can't really play that what-if game, you know? I'm too young to totally remember what it was like then, but I do still go back to visit family about every other year. Other than that, I've been living in good 'ol Flushing since then, first with my mom's side of the family (try squishing 12 people in one two story house, it's not pretty) for about two years, then moving out to the house we live in now.

Other stuff that define me includes church, family, and friends. Growing up as a fourth generation Christian (according to Grandma, her mother was baptized by missionaries in China or something), church has basically been injected into my blood since day one and I more or less have been raised just as such. In HK, I've been going to the church where my grandparents on my dad's side had been attending since they came down from China in the early 1950s, where my dad met my mom (she was the secretary there) and got married, along with my two aunts. Heck, that was even where I attended elementary school until I immigrated. Nowadays, I've been attending a Presbyterian Church since I was around 12, though the last few years, I think I've been having more and more issues with the organized church, mostly because of my contrasting political views. (And yes, my distaste of that guy in the White House for another four years.) I still believe - it's just that I think I can deal with God better one-on-one rather than through the medium called the church.

To show how much religion works in my life, I met my best friend, Henry Chiao, at church, when I was 12 and he was 11. It took a few years and the help of a little thing called the Internet, but for the last seven or eight years, he has been my rock no matter what and no questions asked. And friends do matter to me. Especially given my shyness, I don't have a lot of friends to begin with, so their significance is multiplied. Not that it's a bad thing, since most of the friends I have are people with whom I have weathered a lot of things through over the years and look where we are now, years later, still standing. Paul (though this one is beyond weird now) since 5th grade, Jennifer since 7th, Brian (what were the odds that we would both end up at UM after going to different HS?) since 8th, Christina since 9th, Henry and Louisa at church, Kevin at UM, Rick over the net and Troy, and the whole slew of people I've befriended and grew close to the last few years on the NYYFans.com forum...Jo, Kathy, Kevin, Paul, Vito, Chana...and though not so much anymore since he now mostly annoys the daylights out of me, Scott. And of course, Chris in the last two years-plus. (And if you want an explanation for the title of this page, you'll have to ask him yourself. And yes, I still refuse to be known as "Do-blay-ooh-vay" or "Duh"!!!)

And in the same way that my friends matter a lot to me, so does my family. Estella might be seven years younger than me and I complain about her being annoying and violent (well, she used to be when she was younger, Henry knows, he experienced it first hand), but in a lot of ways, she is my live-in best friend, hearing all the good and bad whether she wants to or not. And as she grows up, she's also not just a sounding board anymore, but a source of advice, though there are some topics that I steer away from her, or at least be a lot more vague about it, just because I also know that being my mother's daughter, she can accidentally leak stuff back that way. And really, I know I complain about my parents a lot, mostly because of the family discontent they cause with their verbal abuses towards each other and sometimes towards us, but I do love them and they do matter, especially my mom. And of course, there is the extended family too...

Whoa, I didn't expect to write an essay...but that's about it, that's my life in a nutshell. Hope I didn't bore anyone to death...