My phone vibrates and I pick it up to check my notifications.

“Sup I’m free now”.

Immediately I settle on a location and arrange to meet E-yang there. With his busy schedule – having to attend to student teas, Interest Group (IG) commitments, various meetings, classes and personal commitments – it was difficult to get hold of him.

“Heyyy…” he says as he walks into my suite. Tall, fair and bespectacled, dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, the only missing feature would be a lightning bolt scar on his forehead to complete the transformation of E-yang into Harry Potter. We exchange greetings, formalities and the mundane customaries of ‘how’s life/school’. Coming from the same school, we were acquainted, and the ice broke quickly as we both got down to business.

He gives me his elevator pitch, describing himself as “a person who has gone through a lot of retarded YOLO (You Only Live Once) things and has no idea what he was doing then”. Eating glass when he was two years old proved to be a very defining experience in his life. “It gave me courage to do and try all sorts of new and different things”. An optimistically cynical person is what he would classify himself as, almost borderline masochistic: “I know it’s probably gonna hurt, but how bad can it be?”

E-yang considers his own luck that of a fickle mistress. With all the stuff that he has tried, things have gone south quickly on various occasions, but somehow he has always managed to emerge unscathed. When he was 15, he got into a car crash while speeding along the highway. The car flipped three times, but he crawled out of the window and was unharmed.

I threw him a hypothetical: which would he prefer, a boxing match with a kangaroo or a wrestling match with a tiger? After thinking about for a while, he picked the tiger, confidence brimming in his voice. I could only wonder if he spent that time visualizing himself in an actual fight with a tiger.

E-yang’s music choices reflect that same willingness to explore, citing me various obscure trance music (his favorite genre) artists and tracks as his most recently listened to and his favorite pieces. When it comes to food and drink, he proudly claims his love for Shiraz Wine, although later admitting he is more of a snacks person, with biscuits being a guilty pleasure of his.

Another guilty pleasure he enjoys is gaming. He considers conquering the “Impossible Bosses” Warcraft 3 mod to be his most memorable moment of schooling. Thinking back, he recalls the struggles he and his friend went through in facing the various challenges the game threw at them, and the final moment when they eventually beat the game, describing it as a ‘slow-mo moment’ for everyone in the room as they dealt the final blow, after which the room erupted in cheers.

Having travelled the world since he was young, E-yang hopes to bring his experiences and attitude in fulfilling his post as the Intellectual Activities Director of Tembusu. We at Treehouse would like to wish him the best in his endeavors.