Author Archives: Lana Yoo

As physically unthreatening as my mother is, her verbal artillery is quite intimidating. After threatening to send me back to Asia if I limited myself to befriending only Koreans, I became so fixated on being diverse that I shied away from my own people. Once I arrived at UCLA, however, my mother’s ominous precautions kicked […]

One of my greatest childhood regrets is not taking advantage of mandatory afternoon naps. I was definitely not a favorite of my kindergarten teacher (and the other sleepy kids I pestered). Now that I’m actually old enough to plan time for napping and relaxing, every day is a race against time. I’m lucky if I […]

Whenever I asked my mom, “Where do babies come from?” she told me that I came from a special seed, as ridiculous as it seems. I never did receive “the talk” from my mom. My friends, enlightened with “the truth” thanks to candid discussions with their parents, eventually satisfied my curiosity. Raised within Korean culture, […]

Deprived of TV during my pre-college years because of my mother’s decision to cancel the service, I decided to live out my dream of being a TV junkie for a day. If anyone says you can’t learn from watching TV, it’s a lie. I learned plenty that day, especially about a certain sect of American […]

As summer was drawing to a close and before the beginning of a hectic school year, a couple of friends and I hopped on the bus to Santa Monica. Along the way, we reminisced about how during our first year we were intimidated by the idea of taking the bus to the city and realized […]

I can get a pretty mean bonfire going. It requires perseverance, but the efforts are justified, especially when you can toss in standardized-test-prep books and watch the flames engulf them mercilessly. “That’s the last time I’ll see these,” I thought as a fresh high school graduate, feeding the books to the fire. But the standardized-testing […]

I’m not too fond of calculations, but one thing sustains my exposure to them: the unit cap. With every enrollment pass, I whip out the good old paper and pencil to calculate the units I have left to complete my major along with prerequisites for graduate school. Unfortunately, this habit becomes futile as my available […]