My affair with fanfiction started off as an English assignment. At the tender age of 12, my tiger parents forced me to spend every free moment at a local cram school. It was about 6PM on a Friday night in July. None of us had eaten dinner, and our English instructor knew she was losing us. Ms. L looked at us over the top of her reading glasses, lips pursed, and said, “Your assignment for the weekend is to write a one-page alternative ending to William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.”
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