My name is Marian. Some people call me 玫瑰 or 岳玫瑰 but if you don't speak Chinese you can just call me Marian. That's with an "a" please, not an "i" and the final consonant is an "n".

         I'm 24 years old, almost 25, which is starting to feel a bit old since I've spent so much of my life as a kid wonder and now I have friends who are younger than I am. I mean, there is nothing wrong with 18 year olds (or 15 year olds) being interesting. When I was 15 I had friends in their 20s. When I was 15 I had friends in their 50s. The thing is that these people are younger than I am! And that's only recently started happening to me.

         Currently I'm studying Chinese at Hainan University. I know what I'm doing with my life right now but I don't know what I'm going to do in the far future or even in the very near future. Almost four years ago I went to China for ten months. The idea was to spend that time teaching English while also doing things like graduate school applications. I never did make up my mind about which graduate school discipline interested me the most or which school I really wanted to apply to and somehow those ten months got extended and extended again and again.

         I go home fairly regularly but I keep coming back to China. And with my Chinese starting to reach the level of being a marketable skill I think I'm starting to get some idea of what I might be doing with my life. Maybe. I don't know. Business calls. So too does translation work. Or the tourism industry. Or something. I don't know for sure. Whatever I do it will probably involve Chinese.