About
/ Christine
The Basics
Likes
- Cuddling, hugging, spooning… pretty much anything of an embracing nature.
- Mangoes, strawberries, fudgescicles, lemon and lime popscicles, cheesecake, lemon merange pie, pumpkin pie, pasta.
- Martial arts (specifically phoenix kung fu), dancing, singing, playing piano.
- Designing (for myself).
Dislikes
- Backstabbers, liars, cheaters, hags that try to steal my job, hags that try to steal my boyfriend.
- Designing profesionally.
Family
I’m the youngest in my family, and I have a lot of siblings. Since I’m the baby, I basically grew up with five parents. My oldest siblings filled in where my parents seemed to be lacking. My parents have always been there for me, financially… but it’s the emotional support that they’ve never been able to offer me. Maybe it’s because they came from Vietnam, and feel that their only responsibility is to make sure I grow up to be successful and financially set for life. But I’m grateful to have grown up with older siblings that lived through this before I did, and knew that they would have to be the emotional pillars in my life.
I was the black sheep in my family… the only one daring enough to tell my parents that I wanted to be an artist, instead of a doctor or a lawyer or even some kind of accountant. I set myself up for a lot of stress and turmoil when I announced my career choice to my family. My parents didn’t think that art was a practical career path for me to take, and since my academic performance was pretty embarrassing for a Vietnamese girl with a surprisingly high IQ and SAT scores, they seemed convinced that I would never go anywhere in life. They never understood that it wasn’t that I wasn’t smart enough to pass all my classes; it was that I wasn’t motivated enough. One night I overheard my mother telling my older brother and sisters that she thought I was stupid. They laughed and assured her that I was actually the smartest out of the brood, but that I was too cocky to buckle down and just sit through a four hour lecture taught by a professor that I constantly had to correct during class. My brother never finished school, so he knew that I would find a way to succeed outside of my education.
I decided to start pursuing my career immediately. I found a low paying job as a graphic designer at iCella; a Korean wireless accessory distributor based in Cerritos. After a few months working there, I realized that I would never get a raise there because most old Korean men are cheap. Since then I’ve been hopping from job to job, each time managing to increase my salary. Eventually I became the Art Director at myGenopedia, and my mother couldn’t have been more happy with me. She called all her friends in Boston to tell them how successful I had become, and how she had her doubts when I was younger but she was finally proud of me. I was delighted. I’d never heard my mother say that she was proud of me before; it was enough to make me cry.
My relationship with my parents has never been stronger. My father’s told me that he had always been worried about what would happen to me after he and my mother passed away, but now he has no reason to be. After 21 years, I’ve finally gained my parents respect, and I hope to god that I can keep living up to that.
Love Life
I haven’t been single in about three years. The current boyfriend’s name is Rick; he’s a web designer, like me, and I’ve known him for about two and a half years now. He’s sort of always been a colleague/mentor of mine; he’s who I always go to when I can’t figure out what the fuck I’m doing. I never know what I’m doing, so you can see how we might have gotten close over the years.
He’s the first person I’ve been with that actually makes more money than me. I’m not constantly paying for dinner AND the movie these days. I’m the farthest thing from what you’d call a gold digger, but it’s a relief at times knowing that I can leave my wallet at home most nights. At the same time, it’s kind of a challenge, because I think over the past few years I’ve forgotten how to let someone else take care of me… and he does that, and not just in a monetary way. He’s one of the only people that understands what I have to go through from a day to day basis. He doesn’t trivialize what I do and the things I have to deal with at work, and that’s new to me because most people I know don’t take me or my work very seriously.
Design / Career
I first stepped into the design world when I was thirteen years old. Suffocated by a family that frowned upon self expression, I needed somewhere to go; something to place my creative energy into. Being on the computer gave my parents the illusion that I was actually working on schoolwork. I found a small network of designers online who’s artful website amazed and intrigued me. I never knew that you could create something so complex and beautiful on the web.
I started out downloading a trial version of Adobe Photoshop, and played around with the different tools. For the most part, I taught myself the basics of creating websites with HTML, and using graphics to create something unique – not the every day Angelfire or Tripod website with the silly looking pixel characters and flashing text marquees.
I enrolled in the few digital art and desktop publishing classes that my high school offered, if only to fine-tune my already large repertoire of skills. There were some more technical things that I didn’t know at the time – most of which I realize today was just unimportant and useless information. During my senior year was when I decided to start accepting freelance and contract jobs, making websites and graphics for low-budget clients.
In college, I settled on Web Technologies as my major. After the first semester, I decided that I really really hated to program. It was migrane inducing and not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. There was very little graphic design involved in the field. So I switched my declared major to Digital Media Art.
I had successfully completed two years of school in Boston, but when I moved to California, I was told that none of my prior credits were transferable. This, of course, meant that I would have to start all over. Yeah, right. Instead, I continued to take classes that I didn’t take in Boston. Now, only one semester away from my bachelors degree (well, if any of my credits had transfered), I’m not even going to school anymore.
I’ve always hated school, and couldn’t stand sitting in a classroom listening to a professor who half the time was reading from a book, without knowing any of the information she was vomiting herself. I knew everything they were trying to teach me, and cocky as I am, I decided to just start working fulltime.
I got a job at iCella as a graphic designer, being paid $11 an hour to design the ugliest and most boring packages, flyers, and websites. You would think that a wireless accessory distributor would be at the cutting edge of design; seeing as how their product appeals mostly to college students and young professionals. Unfortunately, the company was ran by old Korean guys who still thought rainbow gradients were the coolest thing to come out of Photoshop.
Feeling stifled at iCella, I decided to find a job at a design firm closer to my home. MyWebTeam was the only firm willing to hire a nineteen year old designer with six months of work experience. I thought that was a good thing at the time, but I came to realize in later months that I was being grossly underpaid and mistreated. I was hired to be the assistant designer to someone I now consider a great friend. The week I started to work there was the week Rick decided to quit… leaving me as the only designer in this small firm. I had to train myself how to use Plesk and maintain our five servers, while also running the support line. This is actually the work of five people. I never received the raise promised to me by the firm’s owner, Thomas. Months went by, and my hatred for Thomas increased. He was condescending, and constantly patronized me.
After parting ways with MyWebTeam I found a job at LifeScript, which lasted for a few months. This is when I started to realize that I was skipping around jobs too frequently. Unlike the last two jobs, I didn’t quit because I was unhappy with my situation or my superiors. I actually quite liked my job at LifeScript, and with the exception of my manager, my coworkers were pleasant to work with. However, a recent client of mine (9genes) offered me a fulltime job as their Art Director, and a salary 10k more than what I was receiving at LifeScript. I took this opportunity without thinking twice.
Unfortunately I was screwed over at 9genes (who later changed their name to myGenopedia). A friend of my bosses stole my job there; or at least tried to before I finally quit when my boss called me into his office to complain about the “bad feedback” I’d received from this bitch who only showed up in the office about two hours a week, and was otherwise unavailable and never showed me any of her work.
I then moved on to work with an old colleague of mine from MyWebTeam, Pam, who wanted to start her own firm with me as her Creative Director. But since she was just starting out, it involved a lot of waiting and it seemed like I would wait forever for her to build the clientèle to keep me busy, and to pay me the salary she had promised, so I respectfully told her I couldn’t afford to wait any longer.
Now I work at Golden State Communications… my impression of this Orange County web firm has been great so far. I am a designer and project manager on a team of about 12 people and they keep my pretty busy. The people are nice, and the projects are interesting. The atmosphere is really laid back, and most of us spend our time playing ping-pong in the office than actually doing any real work. (Just kidding. Well, there is a ping-pong table, and we do play pretty often. I suck at it.)