Pedkop Bambera: Cars
With the very blood of Confucius in my veins (ALL East Asians are Confucian through and through, no matter what their nationality or their stated religion), I of course aced school, aced the S.A.T., and at the appropriate time was shipped off to Boston and the secure science or engineering future my parents saw as guaranted by the three letters, "m", "i", and "t". It could've been worse, a lot worse. At least they had smarts enough not to have a Harvard MBA in mind for me. So. From Third World to Nerd World, that's the story of my life. BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science (what else?) zip zip zip, just like that. Off to Palo Alto, San Jose, Redmond zip zip zip. Ideas led to one IPO after another, and another, and another. Now I have so much money that I have a manager whose only job is to manage all my money managers around the world. And you know what? It is profoundly depressing (HE can say that, right? He's fucking rich). And of course you're right. I AM fucking rich, so I can afford to be depressed and talk about it with seeming casualness like this. But. And here's where (finally) it gets both weird and real. I had to do all that, school, degrees, money, to be able to do what I want. Which is? You may well ask. Let me break it to you gently. When guys in my prep school were jacking off to Playboy or net porn or smut videos or whatever, what was good little Pedkop doing? He was alone in his room reading every page, every ad of... (get ready, here it comes) Car and Driver, Road and Track, etc. We get to the truth: Pedkop Bambera, B.S., M.S., Ph.D., millionaire many times over, is a car freak. Total car freak. Me who grew up carless on Manhattan. Me who didn't get a driver's license until age 24 when I finally arrived in California. How total? Let me tell you. I want to get this off my chest. How total? I have so little modesty left at this point I can say this: I'm one cute Asian. And Americans of various ages and sexes are always falling in love with me. Huh? you say. I say, cute, really cute. I'm cuddly, adorable, huggable. And all I care about is cars. Yep, I've left a trail of broken hearts behind me, on this strange, gold-paved path that led me to become the Car Editor of Magellan's Log. So here I sit now, in my cyber-cabin (If I told you where, and how big... I would blush, etc.), thinking cars, eating cars, living cars, and writing the occasional story for ML. Alone? Yep. Nobody here but me and my cars. Happy? (You're going to be sorry you asked.) Yep. |
A product of the Upper West Side of Manhattan... Need I say more. If I tell you
the names of my schools (day school, prep school), I will blush and you will like me less,
I think. Surely, I had a privileged upbringing. Though born, uh, abroad, I was moved in my
second year to New York City, where my father took a high diplomatic post at the
U.N.representing the unusually affluent, unusually stable (surprise!) East Asian
principality of my birth. If I tell you the name of the country, I will blush again and
you will like me even less.