Alex Ko Read Free

time with my brothers and my dad when I was little. Dad took care of the house, while Mom worked for the ACT, that test that high school seniors take to get into college. My mom’s really smart. Like, for-real smart. She has a PhD in applied statistics and psychometrics, which basically means math. Really hard math.
    It’s probably weird to some people that my dad stayed home while my mom worked. But it was the right thing for our family. It showed me from an early age that what mattered most was doing what was right for you, not what anyone else said was right. It was a lesson that really helped during the long years when I was the only boy in any of my dance classes. If you’re a guy, and you want to dance, be prepared. Most of the time, you’ll be the only one. But you’ll always stand out, and for a performer, that’s a good thing.
    I was lucky—not many people in our neighborhood judged us in any way. Iowa City was a great, open-minded place to grow up, and our neighborhood had a real community feel. People were accepting of all kinds of different folks.
    Dad did lots of things around the house (he even built the speakers I used for my shows), but he was an especially great cook. Before I was born, his family owned a Chinese restaurant in Iowa City. In fact, that’s where he met my mom. In 1993, the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers both flooded, leaving thirty thousand square miles of the country underwater. It was one of the worst natural disasters to ever hit America. My dad was living in California, but he came to Iowa to help his sisters get their restaurant back together after the flood nearly destroyed it. My mom just happened to work there. It sounds like the plot of a musical, doesn’t it? A big disaster, a new boss with an exotic accent, and a beautiful girl who was waiting tables to pay for college. It’s no wonder Dad loved to cook after that!
    While I played his Chinese pop tapes, Dad would be in the kitchen, whipping up big pots of noodles and dumplings. He cooked for us every day. I can’t have Chinese food now without missing him.
    Things were pretty great until I turned five, when it was time to go to school. School and I didn’t get along. At all.
    I don’t want to give anyone the wrong idea: I love learning, and I plan on going to college at Yale. Or maybe Stanford. A good school, regardless. But elementary school was hard. When I wasn’t home or performing, I was really shy. As a character in a show, I could say the craziest things. And I’ve always been able to express my feelings through dance. But making friends at school was difficult. The teachers said I was smart but needed to stay focused. At home, we had lots of rules and chores we had to do around the house, but the rest of the time my family let me go at my own pace. At school, everything was much more structured. I had so much energy that I just couldn’t sit still. My kindergarten teacher told my parents that I kept doing other students’ work for them, to hurry things along. I mostly spent recess alone, wandering the playground and kicking piles of snow. I was always that kid who got along better with my teachers than my classmates.
    I had only one close friend, and we weren’t even in the same school. His name was Sasha Trouch, and he was Russian. Our moms had been friends for years, so I’d known him basically my whole life. His house was just a five-minute bike ride away. Maybe part of the reason we got along is that both of our families were pretty different from everyone else around us. Eventually, his dad, Dmitri, would become one of my first important mentors.
    If you’ve seen Billy Elliot , you know that he had only one good friend too, a boy named Michael. It was one of the many things Billy and I had in common, which I think is a big part of the reason I was able to play the role as well as I did. So I guess in the long run, it was all good. But when I was a kid, school made me feel lonely. I couldn’t wait for