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About Me — Shunyu (Andy) Tang
A Tale of Four Andrews — My Journey of Enthusiasm
While being obsessed with coding bots for my Discord server, I heard an unpleasant chat from downstairs, though the voices were faint and intermittent. It was a conversation between my parents. My mother Wen, proud of keeping a “full-time job” raising two sons for over 14 years, was very much anxious, with a depressing tone that was never heard before. And my father Hao, a professor in the chemistry department at a state university in Pennsylvania, soliloquized about moving to Mississippi after being notified of a retrenchment decision. He was quite upset that his immense contributions to the university could not make up for his low seniority among his colleagues, upon which the retrenchment decision was made. It turned out the quarrel started when he could not convince my mother without first convincing himself of a delusionary bright future of another speciously stable job. The 2020 pandemic made everything uncertain. I was relieved days later when I heard he did not get the Mississippi offer and thus the moving plan was postponed. To me, there would be too much to give up again, just like what was lost during the previous move from Minnesota to Pennsylvania in 2017: the friendship, the mentorship, and the honors and opportunities as I was planning on earning more Minnesota statewide chess tournament titles.
