At only 15 years old, Grace Huang ’22 has lived in many different places throughout her life. Despite having been a resident of Virginia, New York and even China, she says that Iowa is her favorite. 

Until the beginning of the school year, Huang has been living, and working, with her family in Independence, Iowa, where her family’s restaurant is located. While her parents have chosen to stay in Independence for another two years to run their restaurant before moving to Iowa City to help with their new restaurant, they have sent Huang up ahead of them to live with her brother, Jackie, a recent graduate of The University of Iowa.

“It’s fun. He takes me out to experience new things that I didn’t experience before back in Independence. It’s different, but it’s fun,” Huang said. 

Huang’s life back in Independence consisted of most things a teenager’s life does: school, social media, hobbies, hanging out with friends and homework. But, unlike most teens, her parents have recruited her to help them out at their restaurant since fourth grade.

“I started working for the cash register, and then I slowly started taking phone calls and bringing people in and asking what they wanted,” Huang said.

Huang’s reaction was much like any child who has been forced by their parents into an activity that they never wanted to do: she tolerated it, but she did not enjoy it. 

Now, she has left the restaurant behind and is enjoying her new-found freedom in Iowa City. The first thing Huang noticed after moving here was how different the sizes of the two towns were. With Independence’s population barely above 6,000 people compared to the 75,000 people who call Iowa City their home.

“Independence is a really, really, small town, and Iowa City is, it’s not a big city like Chicago, but it’s kind of in the middle. There’s just a lot more people who are college students walking around on campus outside, and in Independence you don’t really see that at all,” Huang said.

The move from Independence to Iowa City has come with both pros and cons, leaving Independence behind means leaving her friends and the majority of her family. However, Huang says that this isn’t the first time she has lived without her parents. When her parents first opened up their restaurant, she lived with her grandmother for two years before moving in with them. Despite these separations in the past and present, Huang and her family still share an extremely close bond.

“She is very cheerful, and very much involved with the family,” said Jackie Huang, her brother, “Grace has helped me realize certain things about life that make it worth exploring. From family ties to new passions. Plus, becoming a guardian for someone at such short notice has helped me grow as an adult, much more than anyone will ever realize.”

On the pro side, Huang’s life in Iowa City has given her a lot more freedom to explore the things she’s passionate about. Inside of school, she is taking a variety of classes including foundations of journalism and computer science principles. Outside of school, she has kept herself busy by teaching herself to play the guitar and pursuing her passion in photography.

Huang isn’t exactly sure what she wants to do with her life in the future, though, she dreams about going to UCLA. She recognizes that the school might not be the easiest school to get into, so she takes her academic studies quite seriously and helps others around her do the same.

“Grace is a lot smarter than I am,” said Grace Reidy, Huang’s friend from Independence, “so it was always encouraging to know that she had to go through harder classes than I [did], and she also helped me push myself to [my] full potential in academic fields,”

Though Huang doesn’t quite know what she wants to do in the future, she knows one thing for sure: “To not care about what other people think of you, and just be yourself.”