The path you take in life is not always easy, nor is it simple.
The day my family landed in America, it was snowing. Kingsport, Tennessee, January 29th, 1979 – I was four, and I’d never seen anything like it. Tiny, icy stars falling softly, like a strange kind of welcome to a whole new life.
We were Lao refugees, searching for a future. We stayed with our sponsors for a little over six months, and their kindness is something I’ll never forget. They made us family, taught us everything they could about this new world. Two paths crossing, shaping one another.
Things are different now. Time changes us all. But what I did as a kid, those little moments, made me who I am. Breaking open my VCR to try and fix the tracking, layering clear tape over my recorder head for makeshift overdubs till my mom told me to knock it off… Losing myself in comic books, then trying to bring those characters to life with my own drawings. Saturday mornings glued to cartoons, those crazy antics sparking something in me… it all made me a better artist, a better designer.
I’ve always had that itch, the one that makes you take things apart to see how they tick. That’s how I learn, even now. Find something, dig into how it works, then put it back together my own way. Isn’t that how everything changes? You do the same thing over and over, you go nowhere. The trick is to never do something exactly the same twice. Sometimes that feels a bit insane, but that spark of crazy gets you closer to genius.
Maybe you have to walk a path a hundred times to really blaze a trail, to let others follow. It’s that struggle, that repetition, that makes the reward mean something. I wouldn’t trade it, not for anything.