“I watched a lot of TV, as well as a blend of Asian and Western cinema and I loved imagining myself in these worlds,” she says. While there, Wang took theater, which fanned an ember of desire for acting. Wang was thrilled to get accepted to the elite Culver Academies boarding school on a full-ride scholarship. I worked on my application for two weeks and sent it in without my parents knowing.” “Most kids would not give it another thought, but I was really intrigued.
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“One day I got this postcard in the mail advertising a school in Indiana that looked like Hogwarts from Harry Potter,” Wang marvels. Which came in handy as she looked to further her education.
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“I was feeling settled in and happy with a great group of friends. “By the time I got to middle school, my parents got their bearings and through hard work, bought a small house in a nice neighborhood,” she smiles. It still took me a while to speak English fluently and I had an accent until my early 20s.” “In two years, I was better at English than my mom and dad, so I took over a lot of things, like helping them with bills and calling Verizon to sort things out. “In Singapore, I learned British English, so for ‘color’, I spelled it ‘colour’, and the teachers in Texas were like, ‘That’s not how you spell the word,’ ” she chuckles. What little English Wang knew (“I spoke Mandarin with my parents”) was still lost in translation. Here was this Asian family that hardly spoke English, but this car stopped and someone asked, ‘Hey, do you guys need a ride?’ I remember thinking right away that American people were so nice.” “While we were at a playground, the car broke down and we had to hitchhike home.
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“Our apartment was in a not-so-good neighborhood and we had an old, beat-up car,” Wang remembers. “Plus, they wanted me to get a solid education and there was a lot of opportunity in America.”Īside from the culture shock (“The food, the culture, the schools, were so different”), the family faced financial hardship. “Dallas was an epicenter in the ’90s for chips and LCD technology,” she explains. Because of his line of work, Wang’s father decided the family should move to Texas. “My life was all about education,” she notes. When she was ready for school, Wang scored high on her academic tests and was placed in an honors program. He taught my dad and they were on the frontier of making LCDs, liquid crystal displays.” He was this super-charismatic, funny guy who was a chemistry professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, which is like the equivalent of Harvard University here. “So I was really raised by my grandparents, and I was extremely close to my grandfather. “My grandparents moved with us to take care of me because my mom and dad were working hard at their careers,” she shares.
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Although Wang was an only child, she didn’t lack for companionship. “I loved it there as a little girl,” she recalls. K elsey Wang’s journey to Y&R’s Genoa City started in Asia, where she happily spent her formative years, first in Beijing and then in Singapore.