I last updated this profile (indeed, last looked at it) a week after graduating from high school. Now that I am a week from finishing my first year of college, it seems as good a time as any to revisit and reassess.

But first, I would like to thank you for coming here, whoever you may be and from wherever you come from. Probably you washed up here. Perhaps you came of your own accord. Regardless, the chances of you in particular finding this place in particular are astonishingly low. So: thank you for making a statistical impossibility into a reality. It means a great deal to me.

My name is Terry S Zhou in my own head and 周思佳 in my parents'. It is spelled Zhōu Sījiā and is thoroughly unpronounceable. The first character refers to a 3000-year old dynasty which failed to do much over its 800-year lifespan, but saw the birth of both Confucius and the base system for writing modern Chinese characters.

So that's alright.

The second two characters are my personal name, and translate roughly to "Think beautifully." I cannot tell if it is a wish or a command. Certainly it's an aspiration. Often it's an unfulfilled one.

My writing tends towards the fantastical, and people who matter to me tell me it is both clear and expressive. The people who don't matter to me tell me that it is impossible to eat that many bananas as per my short story Mathew Cheung and the Curse of the Banana King because bananas have some sort of auto-ripening factor which prevents them from staying good and gold. For the sake of honour in fiction, I can promise you that I will never waste your time by writing about rotten bananas. Only the good kind.

Instead I will waste your time with stories which deal mainly with dreams, love, nationalism, cultural identity, and more often than not some small measure of thievery. At least, these are the things that are important to me, the former being what makes me write and the latter being how I get no small number of everyday necessities (clothes, food, pen and paper, dignity).

I could tell you, bashfully, not to look at anything written before this update (The 1st of May, and the 2012th Year of The White Man's Lord) on the grounds that early stories are unrefined, weak, juvenile, and overall bad. But that would be dishonest. Mainly what they are is a little embarrassing, like a photo of you as a child, dressed in a superman costume even though it is nowhere near Halloween. These older (younger?) stories are, however, much more honest, much less prone to subterfuge, and have just as much right to exist and to be read as any other story (which is only as much right as the writer is willing to write and the reader is willing to give). And honestly, who doesn't want to dress up as superman sometimes?

In parting (or on further acquaintance), go where you will. I can't stop you, and I would never dream to even if I could.

Regards,