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From NPR.

Before she got a PhD and became a scientist before she wrote an award-winning memoir, Camilla

Pang was just a kid collecting leaves in her family's garden.

I love being in the garden.

Just starting my science journey by observing things that had no significance to me in the

same way that others did.

When it was in that garden in Wales, that Camilla asked her mom a question that had been

bothering her.

This is how she starts her memoir.

It was five years into my life on Earth that I started to think I'd landed in the wrong

place.

I must have missed the stop.

I felt like a stranger within my own species.

Someone who understood the words but couldn't speak the language, who shared an appearance

with fellow humans but none of the essential characteristics.

In our garden at home, I would sit in a multi-coloured tent tilted sideways, my spaceship, with an

atlas laid out in front of me, wondering what it would take to blast off back to my home

planet.

And when that didn't work, I turned to one of the few people who maybe did understand

me.

Mum, is there an instruction manual for humans?

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