(soft music)
- I consider creativity to be a form of rebellion because
it is an opportunity to do what is speaking to you
and that might not be what everyone else expects.
Hi - Hi
- Hey dad your flower is so pretty.
My dad was born and raised in Hong Kong.
And then my mom is from Jakarta Indonesia.
As a kid I never wanted to inconvenience anyone
or cause any trouble.
I was an honorary student made straight A's
all through grade school.
I loved math.
I loved science.
I loved all those courses and I was really good at them,
but I also really loved being able to have
an outlet for creativity.
My parents would take me to art camp during the summers
and I would paint and do things like that.
But I knew for the sake of my future
then the pressure that I put on myself
to find a stable job in STEM
I really wanted to focus on those subjects
and thankfully I really enjoyed them until I got to college.
(laughs)
The petroleum engineering program at UT was really
the number one reason why I wanted to go there.
I was a little bit nervous that this was
the thing that I was going to do
because I had so many other interests
outside of engineering that I wanted to explore.
I was 16 when I started my first blog,
some of my biggest hobbies were fashion and makeup and food.
And I didn't have a space
in real life to really talk about it.
And so I thought,
Oh like blogging would be the best next option for me.
When I was first starting to create content
there really wasn't anyone that was doing what I was doing.
And still like, I don't see a lot
of Asian faces that are creating the content
that I'm creating.
It was kind of an exciting place to step into
because I was really the only person that was doing it.
So all of my years in school, I had this blog.
I knew I wanted to do something with it
because I had it as a creative outlet,
but why not make money off of it.
My office slash bedroom we're filming.
I was let go from my job in October of 2020
at the beginning of October
it ended up being really fortunate for me
because it was a last push I needed
to dive off the deep end into self-employment.
My blog is called The Bella Insider.com
I really found that there was not a lot of support
for women who are graduating
and kind of going into that next step of becoming an adult.
So the blog now focuses on helping women
transition out of college and giving them resources
both kind of fun and playful stuff
like apartment decor and organization
into the more serious things like budgeting
and preparing for your first job and your first career.
And there's also social media content
and there's Pinterest where people
can actually find a lot of the different posts.
And then there's also Instagram.
Instagram is also my favorite place to share all
of my bullet journals.
As an influencer I feel that I have a responsibility
to uphold my values and that people can trust me
to recommend things and also live my life
in a way that upholds those values.
I think growing up Asian kids have this expectation
that they need to do whatever it takes to make sure that
they are bringing honor to their family.
But I think there are a lot of ways that you can still
do that without having to do what everyone else is doing.
I hope my readers feel inspired to do what they
feel called to do.
There's no rule book for how to do something the right way
because there is no right way.
Everyone finds their own way, how to do things.
And I hope that they learn from my content
that I'm just learning my way through all of this too.
(gentle music)