An interview with NYU student Angela Chiang

“I’m very indecisive,” Angela Chiang says when I ask her about her favorite things. “The hardest question you can ask me is what’s my ‘favorite’ of anything. I guess it’s because I never really had to make many of my own decision when I was younger. My life was always about skating, and my mother was in charge of that.”

Angela’s history as a figure skater has colored the other details of her life in more ways than one. A petite girl of 21, wearing blue jeans and a faded black tank top that reads “Ice Theater of New York,” she looks more like one of the city’s Lower East Side hipsters than the longtime figure skater and instructor that she is. This is probably intentional; skating has not always brought her the happiness it does now.

Born in her namesake city of Los Angeles to immigrant parents (her father Kevin is from Taiwan and her mother Eri is from Japan), Angela moved to Staten Island with her family when she was two years old. She was transplanted once again when she was three to New Jersey’s Bergen County, where her family has remained ever since.

At the age of four, Angela began skating – an activity that demanded much more than the typical Saturday morning soccer practices or after-school tutoring sessions of other children. She was entering skating competitions at a young age, and when it was time to enter high school, she enrolled at the Harvey School, a boarding school in West Chester known for its ice skating program.

But through it all, Angela realized that she was feeling forced to skate, as if she had been brainwashed and sheltered by her parents for more than 10 years before she finally decided to quit. That decision caused her to drop out of the Harvey School after her sophomore year and enter the public high school, where she says she joined the boy’s hockey team “just to be rebellious.”

Angela took time off from figure skating – even while feeling the pressure from her mother to return to her training – but then rediscovered her love for it all on her own. Since the age of 17 she has been a skating instructor at Chelsea Piers. By lessening her time commitment to the sport, Angela has been able to pass on a love of skating that she never felt before. And even though she no longer meets with Tara Lipinski’s coach, will probably never again compete against Sarah Hughes, and might not train with the Austrian, Japanese or Chinese national teams any more, she is much more content knowing that she still skates because she actually wants to.

Angela is now a senior at NYU majoring in Journalism, with a minor in Metropolitan Studies. Like many college students, she is unsure of her future. But she is happy to be in the city that she loves, doing what she wants to do and not only what she has been told to do.

“My mom finally understands how I felt,” Angela says. “She knows how difficult it was. So we’re in a much better place now.”