I had built my identity around being “the Mormon” in my social circles, but what would such a thing mean when surrounded by Mormons? Faced with this existential crisis, I entertained the idea that if I had to lose my identity I might as well lose it doing something I actually loved-and at the time, I was in love not with BYU, Utah culture, or even the prospect of mission life, but with Zen Buddhism. In fact, to my exasperated Asian parents who wanted me to major in something more reasonable like law or medicine, I was a little too in love with the gospel.īut on the inside, I was terrified of losing myself. On the outside, I was a solid Mormon boy who loved to study the scriptures and live the gospel, who wanted to become an academic by earning a degree in theology-because I loved religion that much. I would be forced to immerse myself in the Church, and this prospect terrified me. I would have to abandon my circle of friends-most whom would be attending the University of Washington together, developing further bonds without me-and find new friends in a familiar-yet-foreign culture where I was no longer very special at all. My teenage heart felt that once I stepped out of that high school for the last time, I would be leaving a comfortable world behind forever-a world where most of my friends were not members of the Church, where I could be the only Mormon, where my social life and church life would rarely intersect, if ever. I was finishing my senior year of high school and would soon depart for Brigham Young University-a university I did not have my heart set on but one my parents wanted me to attend-and then I would leave on a two-year mission. It was a conflux of events that led to this secret desire.
When I was 17 years old, I almost ran away to a Buddhist monsatery.