When I was a kid, I wanted to be a fireman. And then a doctor, a marine biologist who could swim with dolphins, a senator, then a concert pianist, even a circus acrobat. When I got a little older, around the ripe old age of five, I realized I loved clothes. I didn't know it then, but what I really loved was a little thing called fashion, and I was hooked. I loved the way my mother would choose her heels to match her bag, the way she wore her pearls to go to church, and the very special way I felt when she made me a dress.

There was one dress in particular. It was a crisp cotton the color of earth, printed with little red flowers and green leaves. At recess, the first day that I ever wore that dress to school, I twirled and twirled around in it on the playground. That was entertainment enough for me that day, as I looked up at the dizzying sky, thinking that nothing could be better than the way that dress made me feel.

When I got even just a little older still, around the age of twelve, writing became my second love. Fashion couldn't answer all the questions I had in my head, the multitudinous ones about growing up Asian in a little town where everyone else was either black or white. Or maybe, now that I look back, those questions were just about plain growing up, Asian or otherwise.

Older still, in college, I wrote. Sad short stories. Personal essays. Even diary entries or angstful poetry. Our newly bequeathed White House poet, Elizabeth Alexander? She was my poetry professor during a semester when I wrote volumes and volumes of verse, mostly of damaged love, or love lost, or love unrequited. What did I know back then of those things when I was too young to know one from the other?

After college, and before a planned life of pursuing a doctorate and entering into academia, I decided to go to traipse across the Atlantic to the City of Light, Paris. With my pathetic high school French and not much more than two hundred dollars in my pocket, I went to write. But the writing that ensued in the nearly 7 years I lived in Europe, wasn't the kind of writing I had imagined. I wrote about European politics and policy, macro-economics, micro-economics, antitrust, agricultural commodities, and even the occasional restaurant or cinema review.

I tell this story often, and it's true. I woke up one morning and literally knew. I had to return to the states and study fashion. Since then, I've been immersed in that world, the pop culture tv reality version of it, as well as the gritty real life version of it. All the while, a little voice occasionally speaks up to inquire softly, what about the writing?

This blog satisfied that craving I have for words in a round-about-way which, for me, is a funny thing, since I've never thought myself a round-about kind of gal. Aside from my 7-year side step to Europe, that is. And so, now's the time to put this blog aside, and tackle the problem head-on. I've always thought that I'd get back to writing once I actually had something to say. Now the problem is, that I wouldn't know nearly where to begin. But at least I know that the time to begin is now.