10 Things I Hate About You is junior Kayla Quach’s favorite rom-com. To her, it encapsulates the high school relationship experience in a sweet way.
In her free time, Kayla can be found watching rom-coms as she busies herself in baking. Kayla loves how rom-coms are upbeat and amusing. Not only does she enjoy the escape they offer, but she also enjoys the time spent watching them with her sister and mom on movie nights.
“They make me feel alive,” said Kayla. “I’m trying to live vicariously through the characters.”
When she isn’t baking with a rom-com classic like When Harry Met Sally in the background, she’s out of the house actualizing the life of their characters.
She finds a connection between her memories and those of the characters before her on the screen.
“I like listening to them talk,” Kayla said, “and it’s like reliving all the happy memories that I associated with movies.”
For Kayla, nearly all of these memories are with groups of people. As an extrovert, she loves surrounding herself with people. Because she enjoys creating more communities for herself, she decided to join sports and is on the swim team and the crew team.
She finds her and her teammates bond over their endurance in the physically demanding sports. On the other hand, she spends time with her outgoing friends as they bond over their adventurous undertakings.
“I have my friends that I know if I want to go and have a good time, just go out and just do absolutely anything,” Kayla said. “We’ll go to Grand Haven, and we’ll jump off the pier. We’ll just kind of do whatever. It’ll be 11 at night, and we’re like, ‘Do you want to go see the cows?’ So, we’ll sneak into the field, and we’ll go and look at the cows.”
Just as Kayla loves the exciting main character excursions of rom-coms, she finds that she can explore that side of her with her friend group.
She finds that it brings out her outgoing personality, the one she is most known for.
“I probably fit the ‘short and crazy’ stereotype,” said Kayla, who is five foot one inch.
At the same time, she also has a group of academically driven friends with whom she can focus and study.
With her parents and older sister, Kayla is the baby of her family. She gets her outgoing personality from her mom, FHC substitute teacher Mrs. Tu, who is always happy to talk with students.
“My mom and I have the same personality—we’re very extroverted,” Kayla said. “She’s a very bubbly kind of person. My mom and I are very loud.”
Kayla also furthers her adventurous nature with her family as they opt to travel and go on cruises and drives rather than stay at home on the holidays. They also would travel a lot when they lived in Shanghai, China, from when Kayla was four to nine. They visited Vietnam, Thailand, and Cambodia.
“It was very eye-opening,” Kayla said. “I feel like if I grew up here, I would be a very different person, and I was exposed to all these different cultures. And so the best part is that I feel like I didn’t lose my heritage.”
Since then, she has also traveled to Dubai, the UK, and France and hopes to revisit some places in Asia. Kayla especially loves big cities and their high energy and many, many people.
This past summer, Kayla went to Lollapalooza and met several new people whom she talked with.
“It’s so interesting hearing about everyone’s lives and what they do and their advice to me,” Kayla said, “and then that can change my personality and my lifestyle.”
From her various sports teams, friend groups, and family, Kayla feels like they each bring a new value to who she is.
“Everyone has their own unique qualities, and that’s my favorite part about all of my friends,” Kayla said. “I’m not necessarily a different version of myself around them, but they bring out different parts of my personality as a whole.”
The people in her life have been with her all along, and she cherishes the memories and the movie moments she’s created with them all.
Kayla loves them and is forever grateful for them.
“I really appreciate everyone that’s been there for me, that has kept me going,” Kayla said. “Even when I start to shut down, they’ll be like, ‘Oh, let’s go out. Let’s go do something.’ They all care about me. I really love them for it, I really do.”
