From The Peopling of New York City

My name is Johnson Ho. I have one older sister and two younger brothers whose names are Joan, Jason, and Jerry. I can’t come up with any other simple reason why all of our names start with the letter “J” except that it’s “J” for Jesus.

I am currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in biomedical engineering at City College, and as for my future plans, I prefer to keep my options open. I can either continue onto graduate school to study biomedical engineering or go to medical school, but I plan to only find out when the time for decision-making comes.

As I’m “J” for Jesus, several of my hobbies and interests are church-related. However, several other interesting facts about me are that my favorite instrument is the cello, which I began playing since 4th grade, while I’ve been playing the guitar for church-services since 9th grade. I love both classical and inspirational music and my favorite Christian artist is Chris Tomlin.

My history with sports is in progression with my increasing height over the years: Handball throughout junior high school (very close to the ground, especially with the “rollers” – a handball term), Track and Field throughout high school (very linear and parallel to the ground, with my personal record of 53.0 seconds for the 400-meter dash), and most currently, Volleyball in college (as a starting middle blocker for the CCNY Men’s Volleyball team).

I often try to connect the things that I read with what’s currently going on in my life or something from my past. Out of all the readings from the class, my declared favorite is a poem by Kim Addonizio titled, “Generations.” When I first read through the poem, I really began to feel the depth of gripping emotion from the author’s words, and I was reminded of my grandfather. Consequently, due to the overflow of the emotion flooding within me, I wrote a “think piece” in response to Ms. Addonizio’s poem.

In reflecting upon the question, “Who am I” and “What’s my identity,” I find that I am more than just a name, more than just an ethnicity, and more than just a list of likes and dislikes, accomplishments, and things that I’ve done and still do. But since these are just surface information and categories that society defines us by, which supposedly makes it easier for everyone to distinguish someone from another, I’ll just leave it as that.