Jen Eng is serious about pursuing a career as a designer, but when she tells others of her plans to go to the Rhode Island School of Design, she says “I usually receive a disappointed ‘Oh.'” Writing in WireTap, the 18-year-old tells of the frustration of pursuing an artistic career while living in the community of Palo Alto, where most youth are children of lawyers, doctors, or tech industry professionals. “As a sixth-generation Chinese-American, I see myself as one of the many Asian-American designers who will be taking the art and design world by storm in the years to come,” Eng writes. “In the meantime, however, I sometimes feel like I’m caught between two worlds.” Eng explains the common misconceptions about designers as being “starving artists,” and she looks to current role models in the art world who are “everywhere breaking the Asian mold.”
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