Autobiography

My grandfather is helping me walk.

I was born on July 9, 1985 in Cedar Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, California. This makes me 1) an astrological Cancer, 2) a hippie vegetarian, and 3) incredibly shallow. You can’t be raised in California, and southern California at that, without escaping rampant liberalism and a penchant for following Hollywood fashion trends.

Everyone says I look like my mother. This can be good and bad. On one hand, my mother is an astoundingly attractive woman. On the other, people tend not to notice that I am biracial. You see, I’ve always wanted to be Welsh. The family on my dad’s side is a sort of European melting pot (English, German, Danish, and Welsh) and although Wales constitutes only very small percentage of the Jones Family genetic lineage, I picked it out and clung to it hopefully. Maybe it’s because Wales births some pretty amazing people. Dylan Thomas. Bertrand Russell. Anthony Hopkins. Christian Bale. Did I mention Christian Bale? I thought that perhaps that by identifying myself as someone of Welsh descent, somehow this ethnic legacy would manifest itself in great artistic talent. Thus far, it hasn’t borne any fruit.

My other, more obvious racial identity, is Korean. North Korean to be specific, although my grandparents and uncle fled Pyongyang and escaped to Seoul before the end of the war. The Communists didn’t like us too much because we were rich, landed aristocrats and too bourgeois for their regime, not to mention we also betrayed our country by supporting Japanese annexation of Korea. Oops, our bad. Fleeing the Communists, my grandparents made it first to Seoul, and then to the United States.

My family has a penchant for moving. Factoring in my college moves, I have changed residences 26 times in my entire life, over half of which were within southern California itself. My parents both nurse secret wanderlust; my dad in particular likes to change/look for new jobs every two years. Although he works in finance, his real occupation is sending out resumés. My mother, who until recently also worked in finance, is now a Korean-English interpreter who occasionally freelances as a translator for a certain governmental agency made famous by The X-Files.

Schoolgirl JJ is judging you.

Despite the constant moving, I was primarily raised in the very WASP-y, upper-middle-class Los Angeles city-burb of Pasadena. My parents made the decision to put me through prep school when I started fifth grade and because Pasadena is the epicenter of Los Angeles prep school proliferation, we lived there. For high school I attended Mayfield Senior School, which is an all-girls Catholic-affiliated independent institution. Basically this means I had all of the (dubious) benefits of a sound religious education at a private school price. My parents still haven’t forgiven me for choosing Mayfield over Flintridge Prep, where I might inhabited the same hallowed halls as Haley Joel Osment and played volleyball with Kevin Costner’s daughter.

Unlike other unabashedly geeky girls, I rather enjoyed high school. I was one of Those Kids: one of the number of obnoxious overachieving brats who took every advanced course they could get their overachieving little hands on, the ones who played every sport ever (I fenced), or participated in every extracurricular activity (I was editor-in-chief of my yearbook for two years in a row), or joined every artistic conservatory offered through the school’s programme (I was part of Visual Arts, Vocal, and Creative Writing). Even though this meant that I had no free time whatsoever, somehow I managed to pursue my interests in Ancient Greek, HTML and CSS coding, and other dorky pursuits like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. I even learned Elvish, but focused on Sindarin rather than Quenya because it sounded more Welsh.

After graduation (wherein my class of sixty-seven girls all wore identical white gowns with identical white elbow gloves with identical Holy Child pendants on white ribbons), I packed up my bags and got as far away from Los Angeles as I could. I entered New York University as a freshman in 2003 and majored in English Literature right away. I took a brief hiatus in the spring of 2005 when I fell a thousand feet during a skiing accident at Mammoth Mountain and destroyed my knee. I took a semester off to recover from surgery (to the extremely generous dead man who donated his Achilles tendon to make my new ligaments, I thank you), grabbed some credits at UCLA, and then made my way to Good Old Britannia for a semester abroad.

I'm in Liverpool with a Beatle. Obviously.

It was the best four-month holiday of my life. I don’t recall too many details as most of fall 2005 was spent in a drunken stupor, but I did come away from the experience with a hatred of all English washing machines, a kickass British military redcoat, probable cirrhrosis of the liver, and a fiancé. Go figure. I adore London, but I especially fell in love with the Lake Country in Northern England, where I inadvertently and irreverently ashed my cigarette on Wordsworth’s grave.

When I returned to New York, I decided that I had had enough of school and wrapped up my degree. There might be some advantages to entering the workforce before you can legally drink, and if you can think of any, please email me. After a brief stint as a slave legal assistant in a large law firm, I worked for a private wealth management firm in midtown. Alas, in these uncertain economic times, my position as a lowly peon was precarious and soon enough I found myself back at sudden uselessness.

As the great musical Avenue Q once asked, “What do you do with a B.A. in English?” It is one of the most respectable useless majors in the world. People often assumed I would go into law or teach. As it turned out, I don’t have a talent for either. What I was really good at and what I was passionate about more than anything else was reading books. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could just read for a living?

My ideal job.

Turns out there’s an industry for that. In spring of 2009 I interned at Writers House, assisting Al Zuckerman and Maya Rock with slush and reading manuscripts. A few months later, I was hired at St. Martin’s Press as an editorial assistant and I hope to acquire my own list some day.

In my spare time, I write children’s fantasy novels. For a while, like most English majors, I tried to write The Next Great American Novel, but when I realised that I rarely actually enjoy reading The Next Great American Novel, I ended up writing what I truly love: children’s fantasy. Long after it was appropriate to read Diana Wynne Jones or Lloyd Alexander or Susan Cooper, I was still hanging out at the children’s section of most bookstores. While I enjoy certain adult fantasy novels, it’s really children’s fantasy that holds a special place in my heart.

I also love graphic novels. As a young child I drew a lot, and I especially loved drawing comic strips, which I drew in lieu of a written diary in the fourth and fifth grade. I still doodle little cartoons of my best friend that everyone keeps telling me I should publish as a children’s picture book called The Adventures of White-Harp and Chubby. And no, I never stopped playing with stuffed animals. Apparently, neither did my fiancé. Both of us are overgrown children. White-Harp calls my fiancé Teddy Bear because he is one: big and cuddly and oh-so-huggable.

Token image of the photographer taking a photograph of herself in the mirror.

My other pastimes include taking horrifically amateur photographs when the mood strikes me. In addition, I dabble musically here and there with Arkady the Piano and Sabina the Guitar when I’m not bashing my head against Pantalaimon the Apple iBook trying to figure out what went wrong with my code. I have a tendency to personify inanimate objects. And I talk to animals.