The Rain Cascading Through My Life - Milian Chen

Double rainbow at Stanford, April 21, 2026. Photo Credit: Milian Chen

When the first droplets touch my eyelashes, my first instinct is to squint into the world. Unlike times where I love to look far into the distance, rain brings the things most immediate and peripheral to my front and center. Leaves shine a brighter shade of verdant, and the world seems to focus. When people see or feel rain, there are a few options for courses of action. Panic, dance, or plan. The first follows along a foiled plan— the second, an acceptance of our beautiful world. The third, is what most of us do, I think. Instead of walking with both hands pulling onto the straps of my backpack, one of them holds an umbrella. Instead of a leisurely bike through the rain, it’s a blood-pumping sprint to the dorms. Instead of doing a Stanford interview at the coffee shop outdoor seating, it’s conducted under the awning instead. There’s an action and reaction that happens when we encounter rain, and it's flexible. It depends on time, on emotions, on comforts and preferences. Human induced climate change is a rigid fact, but the solutions to solve them often aren’t. Like many scientific facts shrouded in conspiracy, skeptics demand one-hundred percent’s instead of the scientific natural of ninety-nine point nine. Rain is unpredictable. Your weather app could say 20% rain, and it doesn’t matter which option you choose to embrace, you’ll have to bring your rain jacket anyways.

My last day (and only free day) in Seoul after a week-long Stanford-sponsored sustainability conference started off…wrong. My overambitious plans to visit Gyeongbokgong Palace and the National Museum of Korea on the other side of the city were foiled, and it was already 2 PM in the afternoon. Sipping on banana milk in a CU convenience store, I just wanted to go home. I called my parents in exasperation, feeling like I had wasted my day already in a country that I had wanted to visit for so long. After some consoling and brainstorming, I headed down to Changdeokgung Palace, which was near our hotel and had cool places to visit as well. My mom told me about the palace complex being the “real” seat of power for a long time after the Japanese invasion, its topographic design that fit in harmony with the mountain instead of imposing on it. She added that it looked pretty similar to the places featured in my favorite BTS music videos like IDOL. When I got there, my hopes rose from the gutters, filled with a new excitement and goal to explore everything that I could about the palace, then go eat some haemul pajeon, a Korean seafood pancake that I adored. I had just bought my ticket when the rain started to pitter patter outside, a small drizzle that started to become more prominent as time went on. For a split second I realized I had forgotten my umbrella—and went down a rabbit hole of rushing back to the hotel to get it, how long that would take, if it was worth it—but I was lucky enough to find that the gift shop sold umbrellas, and I calmed down by picking out a beautiful quick-dry green one I still use today. The rain didn’t change my hopes for the day, just added umbrella-purchasing to it. The patterns on the umbrella were similar to the colorful and geometric dancheong art style painted on the main hall of the palace and other lavish wooden overhangs. My Vancouverite blood—more used to rain than clear skies—and resilient umbrella powered me through the complex as I walked down different stone paths. I remember leaping past puddles and miniature rivers (though some of those “rivers” became pretty deep and large), happy that a little rain didn’t “rain down” on my day. Because of the rain, most other tourists were hiding under the awnings and looking longingly at the vast grounds. I felt like I was the only person there, walking the grounds, like time had stopped just for me. I walked down the path leading up to the main hall, where old advisors used to gather before the king, one side for scholars, and one side for military strategists. Even back then, rulers knew that multiple perspectives were needed to solve any problem they had. I marched straight up to the main hall and saw the throne up close. I took a couple silly selfies, my background the palace instead of a river of camera-waving tourists. I found a little gazebo that reminded me of a secret hideout, and sat down to write. The rain falling on the rooftops echoed and vibrated. I felt the wood underneath my hands, the air I breathed through my lungs, the pitter-patter in my ears. With my eyes closed, I was no longer in a bustling modern city, but in an old palace listening to sounds of falling water as the people of the castle ran in hurried steps in preparation for an upcoming royal dinner. The steadiness of it all was the stuff of poetry, and the scholars that had the privilege to visit were surely blessed with hearing it in the same way. I wrote a story in my notebook that day: about love, about rivers, about promises. When I stared out into the nook I had found in this palace, I saw the world through the eyes of someone older than me, someone wiser, and found inspiration like they had before me. The city and surrounding area may have changed, but the rain that falls miraculously from the sky fell in the same way it did hundreds of years ago, pulled by gravity and providing the ambience for reflective listeners. All the water on this Earth has been used before, since the water cycle returns everything eventually to reuse. My water bottle label that reads “Dino Pee” is evidence enough. The same water falls on my face as it did on my ancestors—all the human beings that have come before my existence all the way back to the first Homo sapien. Rain has transcended time, past collective memory, connecting us to the earth as the water returns, no matter where we are on this planet. I’ll always see rain as a gift to the world. But some places are blessed with irregular rains, rain that falls like a bad omen instead of a gift.

I grew up in four-seasoned California, observing bugs in my backyard in spring and writing reports on the Rim Fire in autumn—then known as the largest fire in the state. Rain was an invitation to jump into puddles on the way to school, anticipate Thanksgiving break, visit the book fair, get cozy with indoor recess games, and to rescue worms strewn out on the blacktop back to their underground homes. When my small pink rubber boots were replaced with hardy waterproof hiking boots, droughts in California were becoming more severe. The Rim Fire became a small tick mark in the line of history among modern giants like the Palisades (2025), Eaton (2025), and Camp Fires (2018). Moments in the rain for reflection have diminished as dry tan grass replaced it. Gone were the rainy-day recesses building monorails out of geometric patterns and skyscrapers out of tens and hundreds counting blocks– though I had grown up too. The memories were brought back to life by petrichor every November to April (when April showers bring May flowers still made sense), when the familiar smell rejoined my lungs.

California’s droughts have been on my mind since day one, judging from our bucket-water bathroom system we had for a few years while we waited for the water to warm, and in water saving kits handed out to me in fifth grade that had more efficient faucets and showerheads. It was more of a fact than a preventative act it seemed, an issue to deal with and solve with collective action. I remember opening that water saving kit and thinking how cool it was that everyone in my class got one, for free, so that we could all do our part at home. Unlike some climate policies now, it seemed normal. Accepted. Common knowledge that a plan like this was meant to benefit everything and everyone. It would take almost a decade before I learned in Earth Systems 10 at Stanford, that it was more complicated than free stuff, and that California and neighboring states derive most of their drinking water from the snowpack of the Sierra mountains, a natural reservoir that stored enough water until it melted down in spring. For years the state has relied on the snow to keep and store the water up the mountain before refilling our reservoirs, but now, we’ve lost over 70% of it. The snowpack has dwindled to a few small patches of white on stone from huge swaths as it was before. What little falls as snow now is what keeps us going throughout the warmer months when it replenishes our reservoirs. The Colorado River depends on it to ebb and swell, and the cities and states depend on the river running through it. With our warming climate, the snow has stopped falling. Instead, it becomes the much more speedy, much more headstrong sister, rain. Rain doesn’t wait in the mountains for us to use the meltwater later. Rain cascades down the mountainside and floods rivers and reservoirs, accelerating the melt of the little snow. In this version of the story, rain is the villain. I used to pass by the Crystal Springs Reservoir along Interstate 280 on weekends, none the wiser as to how those got filled, with snowfall that I’ve never seen.

Conversely, heavy rainfall has also been shown to follow intense wildfires, a paradoxical impact that shows even if something feels most unrelated, they are connected in deeper ways. I remember classmates wearing masks in middle school, long before COVID-19 to bar off dusty orange particulate matter. I brushed it off as silly at the time, these plastic-cotton-plastic things that made faces look like ducks. Fires bring California to headlines across the country nearly every year now, and for months longer than historical fire seasons. Nowadays, it seems more logical to ask, when is it not fire season? Communities up and down the coast from Napa to LA have been paying the price since. Without controlled burns by Indigenous peoples in California, hundreds of years of fire suppression followed, and the state has accumulated tinder and kindling in the form of unchecked undergrowth to the flint that is climate change. In those moments, watching a huge DC-10 Air Tanker release 12,000 US gallons (45,000 L) of water onto towers of smoke, it looks like a small droplet in an ocean of fire. In those moments, rain is begged to arrive like a miracle. But after the burns, the exposed land bleeds like flesh, prone to mudslides during heavy unexpected rain events, as a result of the chemical changes and the loss of tree roots that once held the soil together and locked water in place. I wonder then, when the first rains fall after fire, can we stand and appreciate the return, or fear what comes next? During a freshman dorm trip to Yosemite, we drove along rows of charcoaled trees before arriving at our campsite for the night. It was the first time I had seen the effects of wildfire up close, and I remember feeling a profound sense of sorrow as all I could see were skeletons of a forest.

California seemed to be in a perpetual drought, and Stanford weather masked it as a sunshine-filled paradise. I thought it strange that whenever there was a little rain, the campus grew tired and dreary, wishing for sunny skies again. As a writer, I relished those days because it felt moody, charismatic, and mysterious. A welcome surprise in the monotonous sunshine. I moved at eleven years old from California to rainy Vancouver, telling myself Vancouver had so many more trees, so much greenery. Life. I tried to convince myself that this was the place I was supposed to feel most welcome in—it was the place of my birth, after all, where I lived for less than a year before I was to grow up in California. Nevermind that I felt like I had the best year of my life that first year in middle school, where I made new friends who didn’t belittle me, my grades were good, I actually liked PE. It was okay that I didn’t get to say goodbye to these new friends, the memory of that etched into the Sharpie of my yearbook spelling out: HAGS (have a good summer) and see you next year! It was raining when we first went to Vancouver to look for apartments. It was raining when I was younger, when visiting Canada felt more like a vacation than reality. Maybe it was raining when I started walking to my new school on that first day instead of being driven, or at least I remember the trek through a temperate rainforest path to get there. The rain became less special, and more of a thing that was always there, a freebie of life. It wasn’t even attached to the emotion of sadness. Her sister, snow, enraptured my heart more, and being the first time I’d ever seen it fall naturally from the sky, I made snow angels, a real snowball, a three-tiered snowman. The year we moved to Vancouver was one of the snowiest years in a decade, another testament to how rare it was to see snow in Vancouver in recent years. I relished the thick layer of frosting over the city, and it was one of the early things that helped placate my move. But COVID-19 was the thing that really helped me adjust, retaining the connection I had to old places like the California Academy of Sciences, as webinars went online. I could get a taste of my past while finding new experiences in my present, and my past life felt reconnected to my new one instead of being ripped away. Soon the slow dribble of rain down the drainpipe near my window in my new room became the melody that lulled me to sleep. I felt water all around me as I steered a kayak up Indian Arm, during a British Columbian youth ocean conservation program. There were worms on pavements to save in Vancouver too. Opening up like a pinecone after rain (except I opened in the rain), I finally began to see myself as a permanent fixture of this home. 

I returned to California once again to begin my studies at Stanford. It felt weird returning in a way to a place close to where I grew up, but also far enough away that I couldn’t recognize streets or restaurants. It was hard explaining to new friends that ah yes, I’m Canadian, I’m from Vancouver, I was born there, but I grew up in the Bay, then I moved back to Vancouver, now I’m back in the Bay. It always took a second for that story to load during New Student Orientation. Going back to this version of my hometown felt like a new start, an understanding that maybe my home was non-singular, or both of them at different times, or none of them at all. In the way that rain falls from the sky, landing on different surfaces a new way each time, we all look up, no matter where we are in the world. Even if the rain comes at us sideways and my nicely-patterned umbrella is trying its best (a few raindrops still slip through), we share the same sky. The same earth that the rain lands on. And at the same time, a different earth, a different sky. Defined by our own worldviews and values and connections and loves. Our Earth can be both the same and different. Something that’s been shaped and changed irrevocably by anthropogenic timelines, but also an origin, a home that we find familiar. A few weeks into sophomore Spring Quarter, California was recovering from the hottest March on record in the state. It beat previous March records across the Pacific, and even best some April temperatures at 112 °F (~45 °C). I was looking forward to my first Broadway-esque show later that evening, Hadestown–highly recommended to me by my Classics professor–and ended up incorporating themes of capitalism, oppression, and climate change. As I biked across campus to get ready to carpool to San Francisco, a light drizzle began to fall. It came slowly like a tickle, at first. As I passed Hoover Tower, the tickle had turned into a full on downpour, drenching my socks and seeping through my water resistant jacket. But when I passed the eyeline of Palm Drive, that majestic view down to Palo Alto or up towards our gilded MemChu, the Sun peeked through the clouds, and the rain was once more a slow tap. I thought to myself, now would be a great time for a rainbow. The combination of sunny Stanford and rainy Vancouver, both of my homes working together to create a bridge of color. And when I looked up, into our rainy sunstreaked sky, what else was there to greet me, but two.