Under the spotlight, I wore a fluffy, emerald robe and an exquisite, shining sword, with an artificial beard on my face and a wooden crutch in my hand. I was excitedly acting my role and performing the story, together with my classmates.

The Vardar River carves its crooked way along the bisection of my hometown Skopje. Even though it might seem as if Vardar is just a body of water, to the citizens of Skopje it carries much greater social implications.

“I don’t understand. You are not Buddhist, but you spend so much time studying Buddhism.” I have often heard this statement, but coming from a monk at the renowned Shwedegon Pagoda in Yangon, Myanmar, it resonated more deeply.

It all began one day in June 2004. It was the end of the school year and everything was covered in a veil of idleness. For my classmates, this season of chirping cicadas was a time for games by the sea. Not for me.

When I think about a possible future in information technology, I think first about the past, when my parents endured oppression, when I was raised in false freedom.

I have a fetish for writing. I’m not talking about crafting prose or verses, or even sentences out of words. But simply constructing letters and characters from strokes of ink gives me immense satisfaction.

As a child raised on two continents, my life has been defined by the “What if . . . ?” question. What if I had actually been born in the United States? What if my parents had not won that Green card?

When I failed math in my sophomore year of high school, a bitter dispute engulfed my household—“Nicolas Yan vs. Mathematics.” I was the plaintiff, appearing pro se, while my father represented the defendant (inanimate as it was).

Growing up in a society in which any sign of femininity is associated with poor intelligence and lack of logic, I have had people frequently doubting my abilities and discouraging me from pursuing my academic goals.