Here is a simple, effective, and ridiculous way to make people on campus approach you and start conversations. (It really is simple!)

Want to know how? Unlock our monthly charging plan for the low, low price of $7,999,999 and— (Gets punched.)

Fine. What actually happened was that, after SI tonight—think of it as an after-class study session where a student instructor leads everyone through problems and reviews the material—I was about to leave when someone called me back. He invited me to play table tennis, so I stayed, and we began chatting on and off.

Then he said my name.

I was baffled. Wait, do I know this person? No, surely not… oh, yes… wait, no… In the end, I deployed my traditional opening move and asked his name, immediately chaining it into the advanced run-on combo: “I am bad at remembering names and cannot connect them to faces, so even if we have met I may not recognize you; please forgive me; I may ask the exact same question next time; thank you for your patience.” Potential awkwardness: perfectly neutralized. (You made it more awkward, hello!)

He told me that he sits behind me in Calculus. That explained it.

Ever since arriving at LETU, I have constantly worn the school jacket I paid a “small fortune” to customize at Peninsula, a monument to my glorious campaign of wits against the school. Back then, the administration required every student to buy a school jacket in the name of campus culture. At first glance, that seems reasonable. Please note, however: we were in Malaysia. The tropics. A mandatory jacket. Thanks to the school’s year-round air-conditioning, set to a perceived temperature somewhere below freezing, those words could finally coexist in my imagination.

As the brick everyone carried wherever a brick was needed, I became even more annoyed after being dragged into a promotional photo shoot. The sweater was genuinely ugly! Mine was also one size too small. It was uncomfortable, and from a distance you could not tell whether I was wearing a jacket or a compression shirt. So when someone proposed a custom Grade 12 jacket at a Student Leader meeting, I voted for it with both hands and both feet.

After that, the project had little to do with me. As perhaps the most laid-back Head Boy in school history, I “supervised” the entire purchasing process from beginning to end—which is to say, I slacked off. The final product cost a little more than buying directly from the school, but this was still a victory! A vocal uprising of the student class!

After graduation, I looked at “2024 YEAR 12,” “Graduating Class,” “Peninsula International,” and the enormous “Flare” printed on the jacket and thought, well, this thing is probably unwearable now. But guided by that excellent Chinese spirit of compromise known as “I already paid for it,” I brought it to America.

Who cares? Just wear the thing!

As a result, almost everyone who has seen me knows my name, at the very least.

I do feel a little guilty about the name “Flare.” My English name used to be Jason, chosen for me by Grandpa David from America. It is a perfectly nice name and appears in the Bible. But having four Jasons in one middle-school class was too extraordinary a coincidence, so I took it upon myself to change mine.

I invented “Flare” while agonizing over a name for my Minecraft account. The final character of “Zhuge Tianyao” is yao, meaning “shine”; a flare is a different form of the same idea and sound. Combined with “Sky,” the end of my real name, it became “FlareSky,” a name that made me think, “Whoa, that looks so cool.” (Incidentally, my brother now plays on the account more than I do, so everyone on the server calls him Flare. Damn it, I have been NTR’d out of my own name.)

And thus Flare has survived to the present day.

Sometimes people hear it and call it “weird”—a direct quote from one of my Peninsula teachers—but more often they call it “special,” which makes it easier to remember. That is the only defense I can offer.

So, have you learned the trick? Simply carry your name around the entire campus on your back, and people will come talk to you!