I was nine years old.

With one more birthday, I would be old enough to start my quest and chase down my lofty dream of becoming a Pokémon master. (In that world, ten-year-olds can receive their first Pokémon, a “starter,” and go off on their own to catch more and challenge other trainers and masters.) I’d travel the globe with my starter, Eevee, meeting the challenges and attacks that came our way. 

Already, I knew that Eevee had limitations. As a normal-type, Eevee would usually only know attacks such as tackle or flee. It would only know elemental attacks depending on the elemental stone used to evolve it into something else. Even then, it would only be able to use one element. I decided to imagine for myself an Eevee that could wield water, fire, and lightning. Why settle for one when I could have them all? 

With that imaginative act, my nine-year-old self unknowingly took her first step into the world of writing, penning her very first story, a Pokémon fanfiction.

But there was a big hurdle in my way: I didn’t enjoy reading. English was not my first language, and the books I was given to read in English were difficult for me when I was a child. I learned to read things at face value and accept the words for what was said on the surface. I learned to read by seeing language as mere information. 

This problem became especially prominent when I was older, reading novels assigned to me in high school. Where on earth were all of my classmates finding all this symbolism? Weren’t the lights at East Egg and West Egg just… lights? I can’t deny that having to learn the language the way I did was a main reason for this difficulty. When I was learning English, it was simply a subject, and reading was just a way to master the subject. 

My upbringing didn’t help, contributing to my disdain for the subject in its own way. At a young age, I was taught to respect my elders and those in authority. In other words, be quiet and don’t ask questions. To behave otherwise would show distrust and disrespect. Looking “deeper” into the text of a book given to me by a teacher—an elder who, like the author, held authority over me—violated those lessons. Who was I to say what Maxine Hong Kingston meant by her use of the clanging monkey toy? Literature quickly became my least favorite class throughout most of my schooling.

Much of my creative writing, at least that which I completed for school, reflected this respectfully quiet and incurious mentality, too. I remember an assignment in second or third grade where we read Snow White and then had to write a new story set during the time she was lost in the woods. I ended up just summarizing the one we had read. I did the same thing when we read about Humphrey the Humpback Whale. The professionals had already written the story. Why let amateurs change it?

Despite all this, I somehow graduated college with an English degree. If that isn’t character development, I don’t know what is.

I had to confront my reading nemesis when I declared English as my major. I’m not sure what prompted this declaration. I had considered teaching ESL at one point, so it seemed like a practical support in that regard. I also had a great freshman English professor. I loved learning from Dr. Schaak. The way he approached literature and the enjoyment he expressed in teaching us stories and poems made him my favorite professor, despite my lingering suspicion of literature.

So I declared English. Entering the major uprooted me from my comfort zone. In a room of English students, I felt really out of place. These people were finding one thing after another in passages I never considered relevant enough to note. As the semesters went on, however, it got weird: I too started finding things in the text that others hadn’t noticed. Soon enough, Amy Tan and Maxine Hong Kingston became mentors and friends, rather than the obscure, authoritarian monoliths I had imagined the authors to be.

Through reading fiction, I recognized the truths and reality of being an immigrant child born in the United States. I understood for the first time why my mom and I heard each other’s words but seemed to interpret them differently. In The Joy Luck Club, I observed in each daughter a reflection of myself: my frustration, my selfishness, my fractured identity. In each mother, I saw my mother: her patience, her sacrifice, her disorientation in adjusting to a brand new country and culture while an adult. The mothers and daughters bridged their gap through telling each other stories. In stories, they taught each other subtly, patiently. In stories, words wove magic instead of criticism. I loved that power in fiction. It lives and breathes, and it somehow manages to slip past your defenses to teach you lessons you’re otherwise too stubborn to learn. 

I also learned that fiction is not only limited to print. Fiction taught me a life-changing lesson through a unique medium: the video game Final Fantasy XV. I loved seeing the tiny, seemingly mundane details that contributed to building the bigger plot of the game. The characters were so real that I laughed when they laughed, mourned when they mourned, and wept when the story concluded (and several times along the way). Engaging in the storytelling made my heart sigh and my soul sing. I wanted everyone to know this feeling of togetherness, of joy. Of life. The lesson fiction ultimately taught me, whatever its medium, was that I cannot live without writing.

The plans I’d made while working toward my degree, to go to seminary and gain more understanding of theology, were scrapped. I really didn’t have a good reason for pursuing it in the first place—it just seemed like something a responsible Christian “should” do. Fiction awakened me to an exciting reality that revealed how much I had just been surviving before, when I thought of writing as something that was only “practical.”

Getting serious about writing after my twenties has made me feel really behind, especially when I’ve compared myself to other writers I know, who have been writing story after story since the age of seven. But even at seven, I had already discovered that my imagination was not very imaginative. It’s no wonder considering my dubious outlook on reading and stories at the time. I could play well in worlds that were already established. Asking me to write something original was a challenge. It’s a challenge that I’ve taken up, recently. 

Though I discover more obstacles every time I pick up a pen, picking it up is the only way to build the muscles needed to one day leap over those obstacles. As a full-time employee and part-time graduate student, sometimes picking up the pen is its own obstacle. During this chapter of my life, I have to set small, attainable goals for my writing: half a written notebook page a day; meeting up with a writer friends in person or via Skype at least once a week, for accountability and connection. These goals are so small that they seem insignificant, but little by little, they come together to build my future masterpiece. The pen feels less heavy every day.

Thanks to an April Fool’s promotion from Google Maps a few years ago, I caught all 150 species of Pokémon on the map and even found the rarest of them all: Mew. Accomplishing this feat earned me the title “Pokémon Master.” My childhood quest is still alive. Adult quests can be attainable, too. I look forward to pursuing writing—in all its elemental evolution, ready to meet the challenges that come my way—wherever it leads.