Peking House is my family-owned Chinese restaurant in Willamanted, Connecticut（(美国）康涅狄格）, where I spent nearly 20 years growing up before I sold it. My brother and I spent most of our time in the room in the back called The Office. The Office was really just a storage（贮藏） room, but it had our gaming systems, and the game that we played the most was called Super Smash（了不起的） Bros. Melee. For those who don't know, Super Smash Bros. Melee is an older fighting（战斗） game made for the Nintendo GameCube.

  My brother and I spent hours playing this game, so much that we even challenged（向…挑战） restaurant customers to matches. Eventually（终于）, my friends dragged（拖） me out to a local tournament（比赛） where I ended up placing 13th out of 33. Not bad, but definitely far from the best. After training with higher level players and taking notes on matches I found（找到） online, I started to travel to national tournaments, and before I knew it, I was being whisked around the United States at the age of 17. All things of a video game. Totally（完全地） living the dream life, right?

  This is how I ran headfirst into the competitive（竞争的） Super Smash（了不起的） Bros. Melee community, a scene that I've been a part of for nearly 10 years. I'm sure that when I say competitive gaming, you guys are imagining a room of people hunched over their laptops. Sometimes it can look like that, but more often it looks something like this. Because Smash Bros. Melee is such an old game, it requires（需要） those big boxy TVs to be played on.

  Our players are so dedicated（专用的） that they will actually lug（拖） these things onto their flights as carry-ons. The community is also absurdly diverse（不同的）. This is a photo of Apex, an annual（年度的） tournament（比赛） held in New Jersey（运动衫）. In 2013, over 1,500 people showed up from 16 different countries. I feel like if 16 countries are flying out to New Jersey, that's saying something. Sorry, New Jersey.

  In the gaming community, I was known by my gamer tag（标签） Milk Tea. But in real life, I was still very much just Lillian. When I was 17, I was shy（羞怯的） and quiet.