Pressed Pages

Odds and Ends

• In high school, I ran a BTS fan account with over 2300 followers on the Amino App, where I wrote short stories, music video analysis, and tried to write educational posts like how to use a protractor.
• When I was eight years old, I did a voiceover recording for a dual-language children's toy for Fisher-Price. I recorded the Chinese parts.
• I didn't learn how to ride a bike until I was 19 years old.
• I've spent at least 33 days watching just K-dramas, calculated based on runtime.
• I have visited 10 countries across 5 continents.
• My boyfriend surprised me and took me to watch the June 8, 2024 eclipse at a location 300 ft from the centerline.
• I had two cats growing up: Ricky and Flower. Ricky was named after my preschool crush. Flower was the first name I could think of that would fit a female cat.
• Until I went to high school, I never had any grades, homework, or exams.
• I grew up with severe allergies to peanuts, pistachios, and cashews. In 2024 (with my boyfriend's encouragement), I managed to get rid of the allergies (in that order) by simply doing gradual exposure.
• I speak the following languages:
  - English (native)
  - Chinese (fluent)
  - Japanese (conversational, in need of review)
  - Spanish (elementary)
  - Korean (self-taught alphabet)
• To study for the California Bar Exam, I used a combination of watching the Barbri lectures at double-speed, modifying an existing anki deck, and asking LLMs to create essay questions and evaluate my answers.
• My paternal grandfather was born in a rural village Guangzhou, China, but joined the KuoMinTang army when he was a young adult, eventually ending up in Taiwan. According to my family, he was so hungry he would have joined any army that passed by. We're also unsure whether my last name, Liao, is "real" or if my grandfather chose it to start a new life.
• My undergraduate college required all students to pass a swim test to graduate. Despite learning how to swim when I was little, I failed the swim test because I 1. forgot how to switch my breath with freestyle, and 2. stubbornly refused to do backstroke.
  
  I was then mandated to take swim lessons for one semester, in which after showing the swim teacher my backstroke, was allowed to do backstroke laps for the entire semester while the other students learned how to put their heads underwater.
• I first began taking piano lessons at age 4, and dance lessons at age 5.
• I was accepted into the San Francisco Ballet School when I was 10.
• I've been trained in more than a dozen types of dance, including ballet, modern (Horton technique), contemporary, tap, jazz, classical Chinese, Kathak, Dai, Mongolian, Chao Xian, Miao, Uyghur, Tibetan, Balinese, etc.
• In law school, my ritual during finals was to go with friends to fill out coloring pages (provided by the school's wellness committee) and eat deep dish pizza at Giordano's.
• In 2nd grade, I once convinced myself and a friend that I could control the color saturation of a rainbow outside the classroom window.
• I have a slight addiction to purchasing various lip products (and currently have 7 on my desk, two in each bag, and a few laying in different jacket pockets).
• My graduating eighth grade class consisted of two people, including myself.
• I convinced my middle school science teacher to allow us to spend a month filming a silly short film called "The Blue-Faced Alien," which featured the class guinea pig as a spaceship.