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Kevin Tanawong
Mr. Savage
Christian Leadership,
Period 1
22 January, 2008
The
Autobiography of the Most Interesting Man in the World
I am the most interesting man in the world, not because
of what I’ve done or who I am, but simply due to the fact that every man is the
most interesting man in the world. We all are the most interesting men in the
world, no not because we are all “a beautiful and unique snowflake”, but
because we can believe ourselves to be so different when we are exponentially
more similar than we are distinct. You may be able to connect with me because
you were born in Santa Monica on June 20, 1990. Or perhaps you might see
yourself in me because you too are the youngest in your family with two older
sisters. Maybe you share a similar relationship to your older siblings as I do;
where their experience and knowledge serves as supplemental teachings to the
reality you live every day. Possibly you join me as part of the alumnus of
Cross and Crown, Vanderlyn, St. John Eudes, Magnolia Science Academy, or even
Notre Dame. But that should not interest you in me, you should be interested in
who I am because I am fundamentally and scientifically a different person from
you, but still even more so the same. Sadly, even after I say all this you
still want to know and maybe you ask in order to help me reinforce what I think
to know is Kevin Gawin Joseph Jung Ang Jeen Vichairattanawong Wu Lom.
The process of learning to know myself has been minutely affected
by my situation, but actually centralized by the situations I have experienced.
The most impacting event in my childhood was moving back to Los Angeles. My
family moved from Los Angeles to Atlanta when I was less than a year old, and
throughout my stay in Atlanta I was quiet. I made friends and was happy, but I
found no purpose in talking excessively. I was comfortable with who and where I
was, but then I was forced to move. Los Angeles was my birthplace but
everything was foreign. I was excited for the change, but even to this day I
think of all the things I’ve missed to see back in Atlanta. Living up to my
father’s famous words, “It is what it is.” And my mother’s philosophy, “Rejoice
with what you have and despair the fact that not everyone share’s your same
good fortune”, I broke out of my silence and began frequently speaking. Me
losing everything I knew forced me to realize that it did not really matter
what I had before and I started wanting to learn about everyone else and I did
so through making new friendships. All the way up to high school, my teachers
dreaded my constant interferences with their class plans. My classmates always
wanted to talk to me as much as I wanted to talk to them. Maybe my charm is a
gift but I have seen the many ways it can work as a curse as well. I had always
known that my family loved me, but I did not see their reason to other than a
blood bond. I needed to explore my relation to others while being blind to the
genetic bonds that forcibly bind us. I had a mission and it was love, hormones
fueled me and ignorance intrigued me to the L word. I still remember the way
she looks, Megan Chong. She was my first love and my first girlfriend; I still
define love in relation to the way I felt while I was with her. I was in sixth
grade and she was in seventh grade when we met. Constant trips to the mall
provided me opportunity and the teen movies I grew up watching with Amaree, my
older sister, showed me how it was “supposed” to be done. Megan made everything
so exciting and she intrigued me by her experience and life seemed so wondrous when
we talked on the phone for hours not remembering the topic of three minutes
ago, made every weekend trip to the mall a new and exciting adventure, and
every movie trailer a calendar for our next movie date. Megan’s ability to make
every part of my life, even the most painful parts, worth experiencing is the
way I’ve come to define love. Megan taught me love just as Los Angeles taught
me adventure, and everything I’ve learned to be real to me has made me who I
am.
My personal experiences are not the sole foundation of my
learning; I have found that I can relate to people’s experiences without
explicitly being a part of them. Through art, I have occasionally found even
more of myself than in what I have actually accomplished. My favorite work of
art is the film, Driving Miss Daisy. A
part from the heartwarming story, the underlying message of people changing as
easily as seasons do is what really affected me. The film has taught me to be
indiscriminate in my relationships, and my grade school teachers have always
been impressed by my blind eyes to people. I’ve always seen people as people no
matter their past, their culture, their social status, their race, or any other
distinctions, and I believe I owe one of my proudest traits towards the film. I
am actually drawn towards the differences I share with people and I have always
wanted to change the very same differences into similarities. As a citizen in
Los Angeles, it is not a rare occasion to come across someone from a foreign
country or someone whose ancestors originated from a foreign country. Their
ability to speak a language that I cannot is always the first thing I want to make
mine as well. Foreign languages are my favorite things to study and in high
school I studied Latin for three years in order to have a strong foundation in
the widely used Romance languages. I am proud to say that I am fluent in English
and Thai, capable of conversing in Japanese and Spanish, and have some
knowledge in Korean, Latin, and French. I am not quite sure I conventionally
learned any of these languages except for English and Latin, the others I have
simply played with until they became natural. Learning constitutes that you are
instructed, but my way of learning is making something a mannerism. You have
not learned it unless you are able to use it. I can say I’ve learned about the
civil war or the quadratic formula, but in all honesty I have just memorized
them. Learning is the process of incorporating something into yourself and
making it part of your whole. My way of learning necessitates other people to
be involved and that is the only way I like it. Practicing what you think you
learned with other people reinforces the ability of the subject to be a part of
you. In comparison to the people I work with, I am neither wise nor smart.
Until I have experienced everything someone else has, I cannot judge myself
better or worse than them. If I were to judge myself without any comparison,
then I would still be neither wise nor smart but simply a canvas for life to
paint. I value all of the knowledge that Notre Dame has bestowed upon me during
these past few years, but I think the act of learning has been more valuable to
me. Learning at Notre Dame has given me the opportunity to be part of the class
of 08’ and given me a community for me to connect with for four years. I have
no regrets with my time at Notre Dame, because I celebrate who I am and if I
changed anything about my past I may not be as satisfied with the end product.
My education has prepared me for what lies ahead by
providing me with statistics, but life is much more than comparing statistics
between people. I have been participating in the restaurant hospitality
business since I was twelve and I can create an array of cultural cuisines, but
that does not determine how successful, influential, or promising my future
will be. I predict that I will study hospitality during college and open a
notable restaurant before finally settling down after opening a distinguished
hotel. A prediction of what I will do hardly answers, “What do you wanna be
when you grow up?” or “what do you wanna do after college?” When I begin to
grow older, I want to be proud of myself and the people around me. After
college, I want to do what I believe in. In the future, I want to be the person
my parents are proud of; kind, gentle, intelligent, cultured, sympathetic,
zealous, and dutiful. In the present, I am not proud of everything that I have
become but I am quite boastful of many aspects about myself. I value my ability
to influence other people, incite change, please my father’s palette, travel to
foreign nations and almost completely disguise myself as a local, make friends,
love, be loved, and recognize the fact that I am blessed. It is quite a long
list of things to be proud of but there are so many things I envy other people
for, such as; other people’s ability to act in complete confidence, commit
themselves to an art, make my cooking seem like airplane food, draw everyone’s
complete attention, sacrifice themselves completely for the betterment of the
whole, and continue to attempt to befriend those who completely hate them. My
pride and my envy, both stem from everything that has happened in my life. I
believe that even mundane events such as eating toast contribute to who we are.
However some events such as my near-death experience, my first heart ache, my
first cooked meal, and my stay in Thailand caused more monumental changes in
who I am over what I had for breakfast yesterday. Worrying about the future and
forgetting the now turned into excited about the future and celebrating the now
after I was caught in a near fatal car accident. Not knowing who I was without
a girlfriend turned into not having a girlfriend unless she really knew who I
was after my heart was broken for the first time. Searching for something to
love doing turned into loving everything I can do myself after I cooked a meal
by myself for the first time. Finally, rejecting where my dad is from turned
into rejecting staying where my dad is now after I lived in Thailand by myself
for two months. All of these things have made me who I am and taught me how to
be.
I am who I am, but I cannot be without my relation to
others. I could not be me without my relationship to my ancestors and to my
communities. Without a strong standing in where you are from and where you are
now, you cannot begin the journey of introspection. Writing this autobiography
has become another part of my journey into knowing me and the word love has
been used ten times thus far. I cannot say that I am in love the way I was in
love with Megan, but I know I am loved the way I loved Megan. I can see the
gleam in people’s eyes especially in Sunissa, my older and mentally handicapped
sister, where just my presence is needed in order to make everything
worthwhile. I think out of all of the relationships I have, my relationship to
Sunissa is my most highly valued. I value it so much, because it requires
nothing but gives everything. I can just greet her and happiness flows out of
her and infects me. Sunissa is my carpe diem; she is the reason I strive to be.
And without her I could not be, the most interesting person in the world.
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