Teens of Bay Area

At school, he’s focused on computer science, peppering his schedule with personal projects to help calculate the surface area of the brain regions from MRI scans, or simply just creating his own VPN. But beyond that, he’s an avid reader of realistic and historical fiction — an “explorer,” he calls himself.

Frank Huang, a senior at Lynbrook High School, enjoys fiction all the way from Chinese classic “To Live (活着)” by Yu Hua to George Orwell’s dystopian fictions. Though, he claims that literature wasn’t always his forte. In his freshman year of high school, he struggled with essays, often “shying” away and thought of them as an annoying task that he just had to get done — that is, until his freshman literature teacher, Mr. Seike, changed his perspective.

“I thought I was not cut out for literature,” Frank said. “But Mr. Seike approached literary analysis in ways that encouraged creative expression, fostered analytical thinking, and helped connect the stories to real-life events. After that, I was definitely able to find more fun in literature from that point forward, and engage with the stories in the text side of me.” 

Since then, he’s been enjoying other pieces of literature such as The Great Gatsby, which although he’d eventually encounter in his 11th grade English class, he’d find his appreciation of the work from a rendition he read earlier.

“I think it left a really deep impression on me in the way that it touched on how modern society works,” Frank said. “There’s a lot of symbolism, and in the end, it’s more about the hopes, desires, and ambition of the people and how that is all balanced.”

Other favorites include books such as Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, a coming-of-age novel on alienation and maturation, and Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse, a novel recording the devastating consequences caused by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. After reading about the main characters’ struggles with identity and isolation in “Catcher in the Rye,” and revisiting history from “Black Rain”, Frank contends that he’s been inspired him to be a more empathetic towards others with internal struggles and became increasingly aware about the long-term impacts of conflict and injustice on individuals and communities, respectively. 

In the future, although Frank intends on pursuing computer science and cryptography at college, he says that he hopes to explore magical realism and speculative fiction and deepen his connection with Chinese classics through the “Four Great Classical Novels of China.”

More on Frank:

If you’re curious about what other books he has to recommend, here are his top 10 favorite texts of all time (with a mix of cybersecurity!):

1. Applied Cryptography – Bruce Schneier 
2. Debates Between Lu Xun and Yu Qiuyu (鲁迅余秋雨论战) 
3. To Live (活着) – Yu Hua
4. Black Rain — Masuji Ibuse
5. Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger
6. Endurance — Scott Kelly
7. Life Without Limits — Nick Vujicic
8. Atomic Habits — James Clear
9. The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
10. 1984 — George Orwell

Other favorites:

Favorite music artist: Kapustin

Favorite place — his “secret hideout”: his closet space. It’s where he also does all his experiments with Raspberry Pis and completes his daily schoolwork.