(Emory Wheel/Gabriel Hirschhorn)
Kaldi’s Coffee at the Depot is teeming with lunch-goers, coffee dates and eager college-touring high schoolers on a warm spring afternoon. A hand waves at me, and Carolyn Ma (23C) smiles radiantly, beckoning me over. Ma immediately strikes me as someone uniquely kind and deeply inquisitive. Her button-up shirt, which she thrifted in Atlanta, is covered with patterned fish. The sun blinds my face as I sit down to greet her and we settle down on the patio.
I quickly learned that Ma — as her eponymous Instagram username, @carolynmakeseverything, suggests — truly makes everything. She cooks delicious food, crafts original clothing, fixes bikes and makes rhodium catalysts. She’s also made airplane trips from Canada, to California, to Atlanta and to China. And she makes bike trips to Atlanta, Birmingham, the Pacific Coast and the Bay area. In each place, Ma has approached community through deep connectivity.
After four years of studying chemistry and philosophy, Ma remarked, “[It’s] not about what you can have, but about what you owe your community, what you should do to make things better for everybody,” Ma said. “You couldn’t survive on your own. If you don’t think you’re connected to nature, hold your breath and you die!”
Connectivity is Ma’s calling card. Through stoicism and feminism, Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Alan Watts, I learned that she not only makes everything, but also finds community wherever she goes.
Ma makes journeys
She was born in Vancouver, Canada, and moved with her parents to the Bay Area. There, her parents worked in the Silicon Valley’s booming technology industry, which Ma described as “staring at a screen looking at incomprehensible texts.”
Ma, on the other hand, was surrounded by books. She discovered “Skullduggery Pleasant” by Irish author Derek Landy, a children’s story in which “a strong female protagonist” beats up the other characters. Inspired by this book, Ma took up lessons in Tae-Kwon-Do and, later, joined her high school’s wrestling team as the only girl team member.
Ma’s high school was 60% Asian and 40% white, and filled with what she described as “very wealthy technology tiger parents.” While in high school, Ma took AP English Language and Composition, which the teacher had turned into a philosophy course.
“That was one of the best things I got out of high school,” she told me. “There’s a lot of ways of thinking you take for granted.”
Ma was introduced to chemistry by a caring high school teacher who Ma said took time to explain complex ideas to students, sometimes drawing insightful analogies to cooking. Ma, who enjoys cooking, said this teacher sparked a desire in her to teach and help others.
“I would say when you cook, you’re doing chemistry because heating something up will change the molecules in it and make it taste good,” Ma said.
Ma makes food
Back home in the Bay Area, Ma would return home to the smell of Napa cabbage drifting out of the kitchen. Her dad would make the noodles. Then her mom would chop the cabbage, add a little pork and stir fry it before combining it with the noodles and broth. Her dad immigrated from the Chinese province of Hebei, and her mom from Lanzhou, two places that are known for their noodles. But Ma said that her health-conscious mom refused to make lasagna.
“I was like, ‘I’ll make lasagna so I can eat it.’” Ma said.
Now, Ma makes endless lasagna, stir fries Napa cabbage for her friends, throws dumpling-making parties, makes croquembouche towers and creates the periodic table out of cupcakes. When she was six years old, Ma visited her dad’s peanut farming village in China.
“Every time we visited a family friend, they would set peanuts on the table, and eat peanuts and talk because that’s what they grew,” Ma said.
Similarly, Ma has built a community around food.
Ma makes her own philosophy
In twelfth grade, she was introduced to stoicism, the Western Hellenistic school of thought which advocates enduring pain with resignation.
“That is so cool,” Ma said she thought at the time. “I will only control what I feel, and nothing else.”
But Ma said that her then-boyfriend was uncommunicative and showed her little attention, causing her to question the effectiveness of the philosophical practice.
As college approached, Ma chose to move to the East Coast to attend Emory University, where she majored in chemistry and philosophy, but headed back west when the pandemic hit. Back in the Bay Area, Ma read “King Lear” for Dr. Sarah Higinbotham’s online Shakespeare class. She said that the novel showed her that “horrible, horrible things” can happen to a person even if “there’s no meaning behind it.”
“Even if you think things will get better, there’s no reason why you should believe that,” Ma said.
She said the play made her feel hopeless, but she found an antidote in Western philosopher Albert Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus.” The book showed her that even if there’s no meaning behind unfortunate events, people can still “have the freedom to decide what we want.”
Upon returning east to Emory in person in the spring of her sophomore year, Ma began to search for her own philosophy.
Throughout her spring semester and junior year, Ma made a philosophical shift away from stoicism. John Wegner, a professor in the environmental sciences department, introduced her to “The Wisdom of Insecurity” by Alan Watts. Watts was a British philosopher who popularized Buddhist, Hindu and Taoist philosophy in the Western world. After her breakup, Ma embraced Eastern, and specifically Buddhist, philosophy. Unlike in Stoicism, Ma said that in these philosophical traditions “the concept of ‘I’ is not real.”
“There’s a lot of benefit to thinking more on the collective than on the personal level,” Ma said.
Ma makes bikes
Biking, for Ma, arose as her high school relationship ended.
“I started biking over the pandemic because I started running to get over a breakup,” Ma said. “Then I injured my foot so I had to start biking, and that’s how I started at the Fixie.”
That spring, Ma spent hours working at the Fixie, the student-run bicycle repair shop. She also began to bike into the city, leaving the Emory campus to see the surrounding area. Ma also shadowed a mechanic at Atlanta Pro Bikes, and came to learn that she was one of few female bike mechanics.
At the bike shop Ma would often encounter bikers who didn’t take her suggestions seriously, and she said that she faced frequent verbal harassment. The mechanic she shadowed — an older man — took her mountain biking and offered to go hiking, which he told her he only did “with my girlfriends.” Over lunch, he asked about Ma’s dating preferences and mentioned his affinity for younger women. That day, Ma left and sent the mechanic a text expressing her discomfort.
“‘Woah, that’s not what I meant at all,’” he responded. “‘But I like having you in the shop, so you’re allowed to come back if you want.’”
Upset, Ma said she was unsure of what to do, but said that she had a close friend at the Fixie who helped her process the event. Now, at the Fixie, Ma said she makes a point of showing other women that they’re capable of fixing bikes.
“A lot of the time, when women think they can’t do something, it’s because they don’t see other women doing it,” Ma said.
Since leaving Atlanta Pro Bikes, Ma has biked a total of 160 miles from Atlanta to Birmingham alone over two days and made it back in time for lab. Eventually, Ma became vice president of the Spokes Council, the graduate student bike organization.
Ma makes rhodium catalysts
These days, Ma spends countless hours in Dr. Huw Davies’s lab working on creating rhodium catalysts, a concept she correctly deemed too complex for me. Just like biking, Ma explained, the field of chemistry is male-dominated. The chemistry department once held an advising event for freshmen.
“Oh, there’s one woman,” Ma remembered thinking to herself. “There’s two people of color, and they’re both male. And then there’s 30 white men, who are all like 60.”
No longer a stoic, Ma aims to change this: she is working towards a Ph.D. with the goal of becoming a lecturer in chemistry. She said that other pioneering women, particularly Ruth Bader Ginsberg, act as a guiding light in her journey. Ma recalled a quote from Ginsberg that she said gives her strength.
“When women have a hard time in law school, they say ‘I’m stupid;’ When men have a hard time in law school, they say, ‘Oh, law school is really hard,’” Ma quoted.
While Ma’s default instinct is to self-blame, she will now catch herself, and she said she aims to help other women do the same.
“Every time I see a problem I can’t really solve, thinking I’m stupid won’t help me solve the problem,” Ma said.
Ma makes trips to Lullwater
Outside of the Fixie or her lab, Ma can be found by Lullwater lake, resting on the large magnolia tree. Professor Wegner, who introduced her to Alan Watts, would sometimes take Ma’s class to Lullwater.
With a glimmer in her eye, Ma spoke about the Lullwater tree struck by lightning, the secret plants, the old nuclear test site, the spring house and the field where people had sex in the 80s. Then Ma frustratedly brings up the PATH foundation’s recent development plans: a contentious trail through Lullwater which will result in environmental degradation.
“I oppose the PATH, and nobody who commutes wants it because it doesn’t go anywhere important,” Ma said.
As a bike commuter, Ma said she sees no need for the path. She emphatically told me about the path’s detrimental impact and the environmental disturbances it will cause. She said that it runs counter to her philosophy of connectivity.
“More people need to know what’s happening,” Ma said. “If they made a path I would use it for recreation and enjoy it, but knowing the harm it would cause, I don’t think it’s worth it.”
Ma makes clothing
Between extensive hours working with rhodium catalysts, biking and cooking, Ma somehow manages to crochet sunflower tops and knit sweaters. A jack-of-all-trades, and a master of all, Ma performs countless labors of love. She creates without needing to add a price tag.
“I don’t like the idea that you have to monetize all your hobbies,” she said. “There’s a huge disconnect between what prices people expect and what you value your time as.”
Ma turned her phone around to show me pieces she’s created. First a poncho, then a dress and finally a hat. A few of Ma’s friends passed by, and she waved a brief “hello.” She has built a community at Emory, and plans to do the same once she graduates. This summer, she plans on working at a summer camp for kids and maybe bike down the Pacific Coast as well.
As we parted ways, she called after me, “Come to the Fixie!”
Ma makes everything
“Whenever I want to do something, I’ll just go try it,” Ma said.
She can ride the unicycle. She can cook. She’s very good at baking. She makes her own clothing sometimes. She crochets. She knits. She bikes. She hikes. She does martial arts. Ma is a multi-talented scientist, a deeply inquisitive thinker, a learner, a lover and a helper. Most importantly, Ma has baked a tightly woven community — one which wrestles with philosophy, cycling from east to west and back again.
