Mexico redux

I didn't publish a single post in 2023. It was largely a year where I was not in a great mental space for sharing, exerting energy on the hardest job search in my life, a life that's had its fair share of hard job searches. Fortunately, I was able to end the year visiting Mexico with my girlfriend Jenny. Our trip created new stories and rekindled my interest in Mexico, where I'd spent 2 months bumming around in 2021 but never got to writing about. Though those 2021 travels were noteworthy, at that time I couldn't summon the energy to execute with the effort Mexico deserved. I can try to make amends for that here. 

On that 2021 stretch, I had worked remotely for two weeks in Roma Norte, Mexico City. Two weeks is a decent amount of time in one place but between work, Covid restrictions and the sheer size of Ciudad de Mexico (CDMX), there was plenty I hadn't gotten to see. Jenny and I found an Airbnb on the edge of Condesa overlooking Bosque de Chapultepec park, a large forested park that contains several museums. Chapultepec means "grasshopper hill" in Nahuatl, the Aztec language, and chapulines means grasshopper in Mexican Spanish today. I had wanted to see the Castillo de Chapultepec, a castle museum prominently on the top of the hill, but it turns out the National Anthropology Museum was by far the more worthwhile visit. Documenting the many pre-Hispanic peoples and civilizations of these lands, from the Olmec to the Maya and Aztecs, the museum contains priceless artifacts including the massive Aztec Piedra del Sol. Despite the Museum being the #1 attraction on TripAdvisor, it had somehow slipped past my radar last time.

I had started to get a sense of Mexico's massive scale and diversity. The Mexican culture that bleeds into America doesn't quite reflect this. Mexican food in America largely derives from northern Mexico including the parts of Mexico that the US conquered, and has additionally been heavily Americanized. Burritos and quesadillas are rare in the parts of Mexico I've visited.

Historically, diverse civilizations and language families influenced the areas comprising modern day Mexico. The Mayans, who built Chichen Itza and Tikal (Guatemala), and the Aztecs, whose capital Tenochtitlan became Mexico City, are the most notable, but they did not even overlap temporally or linguistically. The Mayan Empire, based in the Yucatan peninsula and extending into modern day Belize and Guatemala, mysteriously collapsed in the 9th century AD, while the Aztecs arose from well north of Tenochtitlan and expanded southward in the 13th century. From the Baja California peninsula in the west, the northern border between Chihuahua and Texas, Oaxaca in the south and the Yucatan peninsula in the east, Mexico is full of different climates and indigenous cultures. Like India or the United States, once you get familiar, Mexico doesn't really feel like a single country.

Enough history. I have three short modern stories from this trip. 

One - in CDMX, at a market trying to buy some craft backpacks. I handed the vendor a 500 peso bill and she immediately started muttering, crumbling the bill over and over and walking around. After enough pacing and muttering she pointed to the rip in the bill and said she wouldn't accept it. Similarly, a taxi driver had earlier had balked at our ripped currency. We just said sorry and moved on without the purchase. I ended up nursing a beer at a cafe inside the market while Jenny shopped around. Again that server rejected my 500 peso bill, but unlike the backpack woman, accepted my credit card.

As we exited the market, a cop came running and yelling at us. She said some of the vendors had told her that we had bad money or something, and seeing my limited comprehension, asked if I spoke Spanish. I said a little yeah, but slow down. She waved a colleague over and a male cop came and tried to explain in English, but quickly ran out of words and ended up asking again if I spoke Spanish. "Sí, qué está pasando aquí?" He tried to explain and I caught words like "moneda" or "billete" and "pesos." The first cop radioed for more backup. Suddenly I remembered the 500 peso note, and fished it out of my wallet. Light bulbs went on for both cops, and they took the bill and rubbed it with their fingers.  They took out another 500 peso bill and pointed out subtle differences and asked me to feel them. I recall feeling and seeing slight differences, maybe the real one felt more plastic-like, but it was quite abstruse and I had no confidence I could repeat the differentiation later on.

Two more cops arrived, in more military-looking outfits with big guns, and suddenly my confusion gives way to alarm. Could this be an imprisonable offense? These military cops try English as well, before quickly resorting to Spanish. Clearly this system was not designed for linguistic backup. This cop says essentially the exact same things the previous guy said, telling me to feel the difference as well. It seems the rip had nothing to do with anything. Finally I asked "necesito ir al estadio de la policia?" and all four cops vehemently shook their heads and went no, no, no. "Podemos salir ahora? Can we leave now?" Si si si. It ended up being much ado about nothing.

Two days later Jenny and I made a quick trip to Puebla, about two hours east of CDMX. One of Mexico's oldest colonial settlements, Puebla has a historic cathedral plaza and I figured we could have a good time just walking around, but I also had Jenny scan through Puebla highlights to make sure we didn't miss anything. She spotted a geodesic dome à la Buckminster Fuller in a park southeast from city center. I don't quite understand Jenny's architectural affiliation with domes, but it seemed like a reasonable site to visit. After checking out an old battle fort (the site of the Cinco de Mayo battle) and dropping our bags off at our hotel, we rushed to the Parque Ecológico, the site of an aviary in the geodesic dome. 

Our first signs that something was off was the price of the tickets. I can't remember exact numbers but they felt higher than I would a dome to cost. Then after acquiring the tickets, we were directed to wait outside the park entrance. We stood there for five minutes as a young man fiddled in the back. Finally I asked can we just walk in already? We just wanted to poke our heads in the dome and move on. The young man then assented and announced the tour would begin after providing some instructions. He continued at length about not petting the animals and other rules that didn't seem important enough for me to keep up with translating. Finally he led us onto a walkway through a garden with flamingos and tortoises, leading into a massive plastic tree. The guide kept providing scientific descriptions for animals, and I kindly said something to the effect of, "hey, we're good, can we just check out this dome in peace?" And he left, and we had peace.

Until a large shirtless man in green body paint stepped out from the dome entrance. "HOLA CHICOS!" Jenny and I took a step back, frightened of an ambushed by a malevolent ogre. But Mexican Shrek was friendly, inviting us into the tree, pointing out some of the animals within, and explaining that he had lost a "talismán de aguamarina" - an aquamarine talisman. He mimed searching high and low. Suddenly it dawned on us - we had signed up for a children's quest.  Buckminster Fuller may have envisioned his domes as inexpensive housing, but in Puebla it contained a Disney-esque kids experience in a plastic treehouse. Mexican Shrek continued guiding us, speaking to us as if we were children, which was convenient given my level of Spanish. He mostly stuck to his script, but occasionally threw in English words when he knew them, and broke the 4th wall to ask where we were from. The talisman was nowhere to be found. 

Green man left us and for a moment we could hear the birds chirping, a large blue man reminded us that we were still in a theme park. This blue man explained that he represented the earth, and that the green man was actually an evil force trying to destroy nature.  Then he broke character and chatted with us. I told him we were looking for an aquamarine talisman. Gone was our desire to poke our heads in, I had firmly embarked on this quest. The blue man laughed with self-awareness and we eventually found the talisman in a box of sand. We made our way to the park exit where a thick ceremonial door awaited. The blue man asked if we knew any magic words. "Ooh, open sesame!" I shouted. The blue man pushed, but the door wouldn't budge. "Quizas la puerta solo habla espanol," he chuckled. I cracked up and said "Abre seseame!" and the door opened.

Story #3 is set in our CDMX neighborhood of Condesa. I glimpsed a thin pizza bar a block from our apartment and convinced Jenny to swing by. We were the only patrons there, and I ordered a mezcal and coke. This bar clearly expected mezcal to be drank straight up and didn't have coke, but the owner asked me what type of coke I wanted. Then he left the bar completely unattended, and walked several blocks to a supermarket, returning with a bottle of coke. This fairly extraordinary act of service merited a conversation, and after thanking him profusely, I asked him about a flag hanging inside.

I know my national flags pretty decently, but what on earth is that? The bar owner, Fabricio, introduced us to the nation of the Yaqui. "Qué es Yaqui?" The Yaqui are an indigenous people mostly based in the Mexican state of Sonora, but also in Arizona. Fabricio explained that they had an autonomous government, and could even issue papers for their tribal members to cross the border. My mind imagined an ICE officer examining Yaqui documentation and having no clue what to do. Fabricio continued with a history lesson, of how the Yaqui were the last indigenous group to resist Spanish colonization, how the Spanish tried to enslave them and split up their men and women, resulting in many Yaqui women taking Chinese immigrant husbands, and that he himself had Chinese ancestry. He was quite extraordinary, pursuing a PhD in Dance Anthropology while running this bar, and actively writing poetry. He shared a small book with his poems in Yaqui and Spanish, and bizarrely, one that was translated into Japanese. I asked to purchase his book and he agreed, but said it was his only copy with the Japanese. I didn't want to take his only copy. He said he would get more, and in fact he could have them on Monday when he'd be hosting a birthday party / poetry slam at the bar. Would we like to come?

And so on Monday we found ourselves squeezing past a tiny room full of Mexicans we didn't know to say hi to Fabricio. We then did that awkward thing you do when you arrive at parties, staring at people in conversations hoping they'd stop and say hi. Slowly we ingratiated ourselves in with our story of being visitors from Seattle who had just met Fabricio. Fabricio introduced us to Taiga, an artist / filmmaker / playwright from Sapporo, in Mexico on an advanced scholarship program, who had been the one translating the poem into Japanese. We switched from our rudimentary Spanish when we realized we were both better in English, making me wonder how he had done the translation. 

Then the poetry began, and four poets read long original passages. Following poetry is an ultimate test of language acquisition, and I'd have to say my Spanish level wasn't even close enough to make an attempt. However I was able to use Google Translate's voice feature to transcribe the speaker and discovered that one of the poems was about narwals. At least two of the poets were indigenous and spoke partially in indigenous languages (Zapotec, Nahuatl), culminating with Fabricio himself sharing poetry in Yaqui.

After the poetry, Fabricio let the mezcal loose and we started to break into the crowd more. One of the guests was a gynecologist who spoke excellent English and helped us into the conversation. Most everyone assumed we were friends with Taiga and were shocked to discover we had only met that night. A lot of confusion was apparent in the differences between China, Korea and Japan, not to mention Hong Kong and Taiwan. Fabricio was very interested in our Asian-ness, and for better or worse, I'd describe our interaction as having an air of mutual exoticism. Noting the international representation in the room, I stated, "necisitamos hablar en el mismo idioma - Yaqui." Fabricio whistled and said, "Ojalá! I wish." He proceeded to show his intoxication by delivering a monologue about how the Yaqui see nature and the world and our interconnectedness, but not fully landing it. Despite the mezcal-induced chaos in that cramped pizza bar, I felt a true elation from happening onto a Mexico City experience that one simply cannot buy, a spontaneous night of human connection that could never show up on TripAdvisor. Fabricio then forgot that I had already paid and charged me a second time. I wished him "feliz cumpleanos" and happily paid again.

Once Upon a Time There Have a Place Called Hong Kong

When I left Hong Kong in 2016, I wanted to write a love letter to the city. I wanted to wax poetically about the skyscrapers, the ocean, the jungle, the dim sum, the mountains, the cultural mishmash. But as I started typing, it felt wrong. The words were so sappy and my perspective felt too shallow. So much had already been said about this place, what could I add? 

Since then I have lived in three other cities and visited dozens of others while Hong Kong has come under existential attack. What once felt over-the-top now felt therapeutic, and the time away allowed me to offer a knowledgeable yet outsider perspective. With the intense protests beginning in 2019 followed by the pandemic, during which strict quarantine requirements for arrivals reaching as much as 21 days were enforced, Hong Kong became this far-off unreachable place where no one went in and only bad news came out. 

They finally dropped the quarantine in October 2022, and I returned in December. Though the intense Covid protocols had turned the airport into a medical site, the consistency of the city amazed me. That simple jingle of the MTR (subway) brought out a feeling of internal dissonance, as my soul struggled to reconcile how this MTR station had operated unchanged while I had changed so much, like when you return to your high school and see strange young faces doing what you used to do. Returning to find the city so resilient after several traumatic years and aware that the future may call for further resilience gave me some courage to at least put out that love letter.

I believe there are hundreds of cities in the world where residents who love their home can argue in good faith that they live in the best place on earth. When you get to know the nooks and crannies, the founding mythologies, the juicy political scandals, the hole-in-the-wall restaurants, the hidden walking paths, the generational stories of family-owned businesses, the cheapest happy hour deals and the best sunset view, you feel a sense of earned personal attachment. Each city has its own story that makes it like nowhere else.

Even given this caveat, Hong Kong objectively stakes a singular claim. It is a true creation of merging civilizations, the type of place that made the English language steal a word like entrepôt. Hong Kong has as complicated a colonial legacy as anywhere, but is unlike most former colonies where either the indigenous culture was dominated or dominates. In Hong Kong the colonized Chinese maintained an independent identity but English law, customs and know-how were thoroughly integrated. Many aspects of English rule, starting with its origins in the Opium Wars, remain despicable, but the small fishing settlements did soon transform into a major outpost for maritime trade. Not only did many more Chinese move in, but many whose ethnicities had left them essentially stateless - Armenians, Jews, Parsis alike - found a home in Hong Kong. Their legacy is largely forgotten today but remains in institutions and place names, like Kadoorie Hill, Mody Road, Chater House. Hong Kong was a place of all nations and no nation, a stateless city state.

Hong Kong retained geographic continuity with Cantonese culture, even after China became the People’s Republic of China and legal migration became limited. During the turbulent early years of the PRC, Hong Kong benefitted as a haven of relative stability and its population nearly tripled from 1.75 million in 1947 to 5 million by 1981, driven largely by migration from the mainland. The migrants found a capitalist society with a bustling harbour and accentuated it with industry and manufacturing. Aided by English rising to global lingua franca status, entrepreneurial people of many nations found their way to Hong Kong.

And so Hong Kong became this city of contradictions. Its cityscape inspired futurist films like Blade Runner, while its preservation of Buddhist rituals and Tin Hau temples make it a bastion of traditional Chinese culture. It’s a city where you can walk from a luxury mall allergic to blemishes directly into a filthy back alley with exposed pipes and chefs on their cigarette break. It’s a finance hub that still runs on cash. It’s a city operating at breakneck speed but filled with slow walkers. It runs on the most intuitive, efficient subway system but also a semi-lawless minibus with its own special jargon. It's filled with skyscrapers of steel and glass built using bamboo. It’s half concrete jungle, half actual jungle. It’s overwhelmingly cosmopolitan and also 95% Chinese. It can feel so global and simultaneously so parochial. It's a place where many people find freedom, despite not being particularly free.

Immersed amidst all those contradictions, living in Hong Kong is inescapably a love-hate relationship. The incessant fighting through crowds and the cost of the cramped housing gets to everyone, and these two struggles join forces when air conditioner condensation (aka building juice) drips over you on a Mong Kok sidewalk. Many Hong Kongers are fiercely pragmatic to the extent that dreams are not entertained. Sometimes it seems all people talk about is buying a flat. It is a society particularly glued to their phone, that loves the pre-packaged tour industry. And it's easy to walk into a dinner party where everyone works in finance and complains about their job.

New York has this belief that dreamers move there and non-believers move out - “if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” However, for most born in Hong Kong, there’s really no moving to the 'burbs. Thus Hong Kong has to cater to everyone, including those who don't like the urban busyness as well as the elderly and disabled. Communities like Lamma Island and Sai Kung offer rural camaraderie just beyond the shadows of the skyscrapers, while top-notch facilities and a sense of community obligation make Hong Kong a good place to grow old.

After years I'm still amazed how much there is to do in Hong Kong. The skyline view from Tsim Sha Tsui Kowloon-side is the best in the world, matched possibly only by its reflection from the island-side. Central is a concentrated block of the fanciest shopping and offices mixed in with historical gardens, government buildings and prisons. There are kilometers of continuous elevated walkways through past Admiralty, even more kilometers of electric trams locals call the Ding Ding that somehow are still useful. There's a Times Square in Causeway Bay,  sketchy nightlife solicitation in Wan Chai, beach and market life in Stanley, artists working in warehouses in Aberdeen, a chill waterfront bar street in Sai Wan Ho and 100 trails from the Peak to Shek O. There's betting on weekly horse races in Happy Valley, and a jetfoil to Macau for even more intense gambling.  And that's just Hong Kong island! 

In Kowloon and the New Territories, collectively making up >90% of Hong Kong's total area, there might be 1,000 shops in the kilometer and a half between Yau Ma Tei and Prince Edward via Mong Kok. There's history and Thai food in Kowloon City, a Buddhist complex near Diamond Hill, and the former airport in Kai Tak that doubled as the endpoint of an aerial obstacle course. There's a street that sells goldfish, a street that sells toilet seats, one that sells dried seafood, one that sells kitchen tiles, one that sells elaborate funeral provisions, another that sells flowers and a bunch that sell electronics. There are scores of hiking trailheads accessible by public transit, and when it gets too hot and humid to hike, it's junk boat season. There are 10,000 Buddhas in the hills overlooking Sha Tin and the highest bar in the world in the ICC overlooking the whole city. There are African bistros, great South Asian food and the sketchiest backpacker stories all within the legendary Chungking Mansions. There are waterfalls and infinity pools hidden in the wilderness. And I can't even get started with the food for fear of salivating over my keyboard. Despite all this, swarms of tourists visit just for Disneyland.

For multinationals like me, Hong Kong was/is a dream city. Everyone could find bits of culture that made them comfortable and bits that piqued their curiosity. It was routine to attend at a large gathering where everyone had lived in multiple countries, where everyone spoke multiple languages. It never ceased to amaze me the range of people with whom Hong Kong resonated. The success and brilliance of Hong Kong was a celebration of internationalism itself, a celebration which has come under attack with the recent global rise of nationalism, a rise which has rendered Hong Kong a pawn in a much larger contest.

On my recent trip, I found in Tai Kok Tsui this graffiti saying "Once upon a time... There have a place called Hong Kong" from which I've taken the title for this post. I found it a simple and encapsulating work of sidewalk penmanship. Hong Kongers have never taken that their way of life for granted, aware that their city could be undone by political turmoil at any minute. Nor have they always written English with correct grammar. Once upon a time, there have a place called Hong Kong, and the world was better off for it.

Tourism beyond the Gram

The body heat remains far more vivid than any of the books. If I spent too much time at any particular shelf, someone from the swarm of other tourists would bump by and spread their warmth, and so I kept moving, vainly trying to find my own space within that crowded bookstore. I had thought the Livraria Lello in Porto would be a cool little find, a travel suggestion I'd come across in a random article about the most beautiful bookstores in Europe. Bookstores are fun! Never did it cross my mind that so many people might be interested in reading.

But they weren't interested in reading per se. The Livraria made the list because of its ornate cladding, the elegant gold accentuating its shelves, the central spiral staircase that branches and merges and branches back out, and its association with Harry Potter - JK Rowling once lived in Porto and reportedly frequented the bookstore. As a result, the Livraria Lello fame has skyrocketed, transforming it essentially into a small museum. Entering the store/museum now requires pre-purchasing a $5 ticket and still queuing for a long while. Once inside, all the tourists mill around undertaking the Herculean challenge of trying to photograph the bookstore's glory with as few human distractions as possible.

The Livraria is emblematic of Porto as a whole. Portugal's second largest city located in the country's north, Porto has contributed much to the world in its two thousand years of history, notably port wine. The Ribeira, the beautiful medieval square along the river caters entirely to tourists, is teeming with hotels, restaurants, bars, street performers and vendors. With bright orange tiled roofs, sweeping arching bridges and overelaborate gold-gilded clock towers, Porto might be the most beautiful city I've ever visited. But as I watched groups of Italians and French taking selfies, I pondered about how this charm came about. It must have originally evolved naturally as commerce grew along the square, but it was clear that today's neighborhood is artificially maintained to look beautiful and to encourage travelers to part with their money. The economic activity that spawned the Ribeira can ironically no longer continue, displaced by its own success.

Tourism as an economic driver has been called the devil's bargain. As the Ribeira neighborhood of Porto attracted more and more tourists, it became more profitable for businesses to cater towards tourists rather than residents. Another store, the Casa Oriental, encompasses this change. Founded in 1910, its storefront plaque depicts a "native" serving something to his colonial master and yeah somehow they've neither changed that nor its name. What they have changed is what the Casa sells, originally stocking groceries and meats but now peddling factory-made chocolate bars, canned sardines and kitschy trinkets. Tourists got a place to bring back souvenirs - locals lost their source for cooking dinner. This precipitates a feedback loop, causing locals to move out and clearing space for more hotels and tourism-based businesses. Eventually the area becomes so filled with out-of-towners ambling slowly, taking photos, not speaking your language and getting so rowdy late at night that no one wants to live there year-round. Additionally, the place becomes generically touristy, no longer displaying the daily culture of the Portuguese.

As I admired the river and soaked in the Portuguese summer, I felt a pang of guilt at contributing towards this devil's bargain. Was this an inevitable economic evolution, or was it a result of a fixable human flaw? I think there is a bit of both.

Porto, and the Livraria in particular, are extremely photogenic. Photos have become the dominant way of sharing information through our society.  Facilitated by Instagram, cool photos are how tourist sites effectively market themselves and how travelers share their trips. I don't find this alone intrinsically bad, and I personally love taking interesting pictures and sharing them on Instagram. But after arriving at the bookstore and getting the best shots I could, I was left wondering "what now?" I had little tangible interest in the Livraria other than its superficial beauty, and now I was bothered by all the other people in that cramped space. The photos ironically portrayed a special experience, belying my annoyance and discomfort at the time. I realized that the popularity in sites like the Livraria had blown up in recent years precisely because of Instagram and targeted advertising. Photogenic places that successfully attracted tourists then organically got more social media attention, thereby attracting more interest and more Instagram posts. 

Planning for Instagram has taken a disproportionate role in my travels. There are many great reasons to travel, and visual pleasure is only one of them. Sounds, smells, conversations and discovering different customs make traveling to new places so fulfilling, yet these are so difficult to share. There are even beautiful sights that don't fit neatly within a camera frame. Videos and stories can do their part, but most of the best aspects of travel cannot be truly shared. 

Part of the virtue of travel is growth by going far outside one's comfort zone, whether it's developing villages in Myanmar, rural Idaho, or Fort Lauderdale. I've found great joy in traveling to places to learn more about their history, with no clearer example than my Bosnia trip. Going there a week after Porto, the types and numbers of tourists I met in Sarajevo was juxtaposing. It seems everyone there was curious to know more about the unique history and present, not just to capture great photos. Furthermore, there's joy in simply satisfying the curiosity of what an unknown place is like. Sometimes, the joys of traveling manifest only after the trip. Now when I meet someone from Bosnia, we can more meaningfully connect. I'd likely have a less interesting conversation with someone from Porto because I only learned superficial things about the city.

If we are all collectively over-emphasizing shareable photos, we will find ourselves rubbing elbows with strangers and over-taxing a local ecosystem. Beautiful places are certainly worth visiting - I don't regret going to the Livraria bookstore, and it's likely that I would have regretted not going. The crowd was an experience in itself, and it ultimately inspired this post. My main takeaway is that anything pretty is likely to be popular, and it's worth counterbalancing these with other places that pique your interest. A little genuine curiosity and research can go a long way towards making a trip more distinctive and memorable. 

Layoffs and Relationship to Work

I was so nervous as I finished typing out my resignation letter. I looked up resign in Chinese, 辭職, prepared what I'd say, and trembled as I walked over to my manager. He initially refused to accept it, telling me to think about it til the end of the day. Had I considered a different team? Transferring to London? Arup had been my home for over 4 years, and neither side took the idea of splitting lightly. When he did accept it, I followed through with the standard one month of notice and worked as hard as ever to wrap up and document my projects. The phrase "好頭好尾", literally "good head good tail" but idiomatically start well and end well, rang through me as I felt an obligation to coworkers and clients to leave everything in good standing. On my last day, my colleagues surprised me with a cake and a sweet card with a fold-out Hong Kong junk boat which I've kept to this day.  That was the last time I left a company with good vibes. Since then I've had four layoffs and one ignominious resignation. 

This time, it was the Microsoft Teams App that foreshadowed something might be wrong. Teams lets you know when someone starts a meeting, and at 9am when my 1 on 1 with my boss was set to begin, it was my boss' boss who instead started the call. This unprecedented gatecrash couldn't be good. He got right into it, delivering in his business-like manner how my role had been eliminated in a non-performance based restructuring across the organization. He refused to tell me who else was affected, although he said it affected a lot of product managers and not data scientists. Ironically I had switched from data science to take a product role but had been coding data science work for the last month. I asked if I could just be a data scientist here. The director was initially stymied, then replied, "that option isn't on the table, but you can reapply for those roles." I had to suppress a laugh. There was no need for "好頭好尾" - within an hour my accounts were disabled.

Layoffs expose the transactional nature of jobs. With system accesses revoked, suddenly you have no ability to message your colleagues, no way to retrieve old emails or other important documents you'd inadvertently saved on the work computer on which you'd spent so much time. You find your phone left with useless apps which you just delete. You've still got loads of activity in your brain space concerning project details, or a to-do item, or how to access a particular dashboard. These all go from being critical to your livelihood to complete irrelevance. People whom you used to speak to weekly or daily soon get forgotten. One second this company needed you, the next it doesn't. 

Reactions come in waves. The initial event delivers somberness and shock, even in the cases when I knew it was coming. The tone of the conversation is so unnatural. In my first layoff, my boss had been too ashamed to look me in the eyes, and read corporate speak from a script. In my second, a seasoned HR professional sent me off as one of many in a sequence, able to show perfunctory sympathy but clearly eager to get everything over with.  In my third, my boss read a script then immediately signed off, displaying the backbone of a jellyfish as a young HR leader talked through the details. This past one was actually the most pleasant experience of the four. 

There's the horror when you reflexively try to access your email and find yourself locked out. There's the indulgent joy slacking off from all the work you'd thought you'd have to do. There's the sharing of the news, and the steady outcry of support from friends. There are offers of free drinks and plenty of reasons to accept them, and lots of laughter, mirth and sympathy.  The criticism of the company or coworkers that you'd held in come gushing out. Layoff day is a hell of a holiday.

Then there's the next day when you wake up and realize that you have nothing to do. No commute, no first meeting, no reports to review. There's seeing your company's posts on social media, marketing posts with trite descriptions of business problems that now induce vomit. There's freedom, the perks of exploring areas and venues in broad daylight.  There's the shame, the self-doubt, the retrospective analysis of assignments and meetings and wondering if there's anyway you could have done better with the people who made this decision, if you're truly unlucky or just bad or somewhere in between. There are trickles of emails and LinkedIn messages from coworkers revealing which of these transactional relationships might have evolved in something slightly more. There's the updating of the resume, the responses to recruiters even as you figure out what next steps might possibly be.  As the days go by, a new normal starts to establish itself, but small memorandums of the lost life creep back in - a business card, a bookmarked article, a conference badge. 

Work does not need to be so transactional. In previous generations, many people worked for the same company their whole lives. Single factories could provide a sense of community for an entire town, and their closings were often devastating. But in 2022 America, the tech industry has reached a state where rapid growth and reactive pullbacks have become standard. Several companies have demonstrated success by faking it until you make it, operating at losses for many years, doubling down on unbridled blitzscaling, and reaped staggering financial rewards for their efforts.  Despite plenty of examples of burst bubbles and failed startups, human nature fixates on the winners. Investors and entrepreneurs buy in on these dreams together and an entire system emerges upon an unrealistic foundation. Employees took a back seat to shareholders. Since the pandemic began and upset society's preexisting rhythms, the economy has seemed extremely kneejerk-y. Stocks collapsed with the first lockdown, then soared disproportionate to fundamentals. Tech companies entered into an arms race that they couldn't sustain, and pawns like me got caught up in it. 

Personally, this layoff caught me at a terrible time. I was already struggling, and this layoff isn't even the major negative event in my life. While I do see some potential upside as I didn't exactly love this job, I don't feel confident entering a tight job market alongside tens of thousands of Meta, Twitter, Amazon and other tech employees. What hurts worse though is the time and effort I spent at this last job, now seemingly wasted. I've worked in so many industries - buildings, manufacturing, agriculture, gas utilities, electric utilities, trucking.  I know about the silking phase in corn growth, the operations of 811 call centers, and the seasonality of truck prices Florida inbound. All the effort to grasp a new industry seem for naught. 

Intellectually I know that this is not my fault, that none of these layoffs were my fault. Never have I been fired for underperforming, never have I compromised my integrity. I know that I'm a badass data scientist and product leader who's fun to work with and valuable to society. But it's hard to justify how you can have this much bad luck without wondering if you are the problem.  

I don't think it's healthy when work becomes too great a part of one's life. Companies are not families, and work will not love you back. But there is a balance, and the degree to which my last few jobs have felt so transactional is not healthy either. With remote work and camera-off cultures, lots of coworkers feel like faceless mercenaries. It makes me resentful of the number of hours I spend with them, without a relationship growing, instead of with my friends. Ideally coworkers can reach a state of mutual respect if not mutual admiration. It hurt so much when my boss ghosted me after my recent layoff - it made me question his intentionality in any of our previous transactions. I had learned his kids names, his high school track times and we had joked about sports. Suddenly he did not need me to drive a product roadmap and any desire to talk to me vanishes. 

I believe there is room for human connection and basic decency even in competitive corporate cultures. We are all here on earth trying to do the best we can.

The Rest was History

When planning where to travel with friends, exploring recent war and genocide history is typically not the deciding factor. However, my friend Sam and I were surprised to discover a mutual interest in understanding the Bosnian civil war, a topic I daresay few of my other friends would be interested in, and we decided to make Sarajevo the focal point of a trip to Eastern Europe (piggybacking off my week in Portugal with family). We met up in Budapest, and originally I wanted to start this blog from there, but so much happened in the Balkans (the former Yugoslavia) that with apologies to the great Hungarian capital, I have decided to skip over Budapest entirely. Our jaunt through territory that had passed through many empires would be steeped in history with a side of modern day fascism.

We drove west from Budapest to Lake Balaton, a resort destination and the largest lake in Central Europe. We were pleasantly surprised when the restaurant I randomly picked welcomed us with a sweeping view of aquamarine water. Lake Balaton also comes with kitschy craft stores, a bizarre Stations of the Cross setup complete with 14 crosses laid out across 100 yard on a hill, a rocking nightlife scene that we didn't get to experience and a car ferry which we did. 

Crossing the Hungarian border got us some perfunctory questions and a passport stamp. As we entered Croatia, a line of trucks a half mile long faced us, with bored drivers standing outside their trucks, waiting for whatever inspections were needed to enter Hungary. We gave this horrific line a passing glance of curiosity, unaware of what it foreboded.

Croatia is oddly shaped, like a C. The most well known parts of Croatia, including Split and Dubrovnik, border the Adriatic sea at the bottom of the C. Our trip passed through the top of the C, a region known as Slavonia, with its capital Osijek our planned stop. Osijek boasts an old Habsurg-era stone fort, complete with a dry moat. The fort interior now holds restaurants, bars, parks and our hotel. The city also had a charming trolley and old town square with no obvious tourism - it really felt like an unexplored gem. I wondered if the hotel concierge / bartender was at all curious why these two Americans of different ethnicities had wandered through this town, but when I engaged with him, he displayed absolutely no interest.

We continued through slow rural mountain roads into Bosnia and Herzegovina where signs alternated between the Latin alphabet and ћирилица. Our map showed a curious dotted inner border indicating we were in the Republika Srpska part of Bosnia. I spent much of the ride researching what that even meant, and only then realized I had fundamentally misunderstood the outcome of the Bosnian civil war.

A college course on Europe and Nationalism assigned us a book of poetry written during the war by a Bosnian poet besieged in Sarajevo. I remember asking at the outset how the different sides, who all looked the same and spoke the same language, even recognized who the enemy was. How could there possibly be genocide amongst these white people? The professor said I'd understand after reading the book. During the pandemic in 2020, I found the book, thought back to my question, and realized I still didn't know the answer. So I re-read Sarajevo Blues and got absorbed and kept researching. I learned that the different empires that had dominated the Balkans over the years, namely the Austro-Hungarians, the Ottomans and the Venetians, had created borders that split these people up. Political borders can forge new identities independent of ethnolinguistics - as a Hong Konger, I get this. To oversimplify, the folks living within Austro-Hungarian and Venetian territory, called Croatia, became mainly Catholic while those living within Ottoman territory, called Bosnia and Herzegovina, largely adopted Islam. The territory of Serbia changed hands between these empires but achieved independence in 1815, with its inhabitants overwhelmingly following Eastern Orthodox Christianity. 

Nationalism was sweeping through Europe and the independent Serbs wanted to liberate their fellow South Slavs from their imperial yokes and create a Greater Serbia, with them in charge.  World War I started in Sarajevo when Serb nationalists, who might not have had direct ties to the Serbian government, assassinated the heir to the Austrian throne. The outcome of two world wars eventually did lead to the union of South Slavs in socialist Yugoslavia. By all accounts, though Yugoslavia's capital was Serbia's Belgrade, nationalism was kept in check by the dictator Josip Tito during this time. However, when Tito died, nationalism erupted again. Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia all wanted to be their own countries, and the idea of Greater Serbia regained popularity. Because there'd been no internal borders during Yugoslavia and identities are fluid, plenty of people who identified as Serb lived in these areas, especially in Bosnia. Serbs were used to being the dominant ethnic group but now faced the prospect of being minorities. When Bosnia declared independence, many of the Bosnian Serbs had been preparing and quickly showed up around Sarajevo with artillery. They nearly conquered the city in the early days of the war, but ultimately settled for an endurance approach with a brutal siege that lasted over 4 years. I learned from this history that the most dangerous people are people formerly in power now facing a loss of that power - a situation very relevant to the United States in 2022.

Sarajevo itself had been a bastion of multiculturalism where Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs had lived side by side. Before World War II there was also a substantial Jewish population. With synagogues, mosques, Catholic and Orthodox churches, Sarajevo was called the Jerusalem of Europe. Though the Yugoslavian wars pitted religions against each other, religion hadn't been such an identity marker in Sarajevo itself, since like most cosmopolitan European cities, atheism had been growing. Many Serbs ended up fighting alongside Muslims during the war, and the Bosnian government was careful to label the other side "Chetniks" or extremist Serbs and avoided demonizing all Serbs. The war was not Muslims vs Orthodox but those who believed in a diverse Bosnia vs Serb nationalists. I learned that identity is all what we choose to make of it - all differences amongst humans are simply ones we've chosen to believe are differences.

Republika Sprska is non-contiguous with very irregular borders and a "capital" in Banja Luka. I had thought that at the tail end of the Bosnian war, US & NATO got involved, bombed the Bosnian Serbs and helped the Bosnian Muslims win the war. In reality, the Dayton Accords peace treaty that ended the war wasn't really a victory for any side. The Dayton Accords carved three autonomous regions in Bosnia more or less based on where the armies were, one to each side and one in the middle that they couldn't decide on. The regions are so autonomous as to be functionally separate countries, with a very weak Federal government. The Dayton Accords also created the unusual position of High Representative, a person chosen by other nations to have total veto power over the Bosnian government. Essentially everyone realized the two sides would fight over legislation and thus implemented an overlord to babysit the country, until they showed they had sufficiently grown up. The current High Representative is a German man who speaks no Bosnian.

All this I was absorbing as we drove past Cyrillic signs in the Republika Srpska. The only flags we saw were the flag of the Republic of Serbia, and the Republika Srpska's similar own flag, both using red/white/blue horizontal bands. Given the history of the war, the refusal to fly the blue and yellow Bosnian flag and insistence on the Serbian flag is asking for a fight. We saw police checkpoints periodically on the road, where a policeman asked for our passports and registration in German before letting us move on with an "alles gute!" Even as outsiders, we felt the tenseness of a frozen conflict.

Across the river from Serbia proper, in the city of Zvornik, we stopped for lunch. Walking into a random restaurant, the owner greeted us like he had never seen a blue-haired Asian man before. No one spoke any English, and our Bosnian-Serbo-Croatian was limited to about 5 words. He offered us a drink, and I indicated a no, and he gave an aha and hurried into the kitchen. We awkwardly took seats and marveled at the table cloth decorated with cigarette burns and the pictures of Jesus and Putin side-by-side on the back wall. The toilet was a squatter. After about 15 minutes, Sam asked if we should just grab snacks at a convenience store, but I replied with 50% confidence that the owner was probably cooking for us. And so he did return out with a steaming tray of barbecue and stretchy bread. Considering we literally did not order, it was the best possible outcome in that Putin-worshipping restaurant.  

After two hours on mountainous country roads, we arrived at Srebrenica. In July of 1995, after intense negotiations, Dutch UN Peacekeeping troops handed over the Bosnian Muslims who had been under their protection. Over 8,000 boys and men were separated from the group and methodically murdered by the Bosnian Serbs in what the US recognizes as a genocide. A genocide memorial has been set up over several acres of grassy hills. Reminiscent of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, gravestone pillars are setup in a grid, each representing one of the slaughtered with an Islamic burial epithet written in Bosnian. Signs in the front were written in Bosnian, English, Turkish and Arabic. Across the street, where the Dutch UN headquarters had been, dilapidated buildings house exhibitions about the massacre. The buildings lacked any markings, and seeing broken windows and empty door frames, I was skeptical that it was a museum at all. I was shocked to find inside a well curated assembly of personal items and video recordings from survivors. It struck me that this memorial was deep within the territory of its perpetrators, the area having been awarded to Bosnian Serbs after they had cleansed it of Muslims. The Bosnian Serbs unsurprisingly showed little interest in maintaining the memorial, evidenced by the near absence of road signs to it. It crossed my mind that the restaurant owner from earlier was old enough to have served in the Serb army. We spent well over an hour in Srebrenica and saw maybe a dozen other visitors, understandable given the remoteness. I wondered if any other memorials in the world could match Srebenica in this unusual combination of being distinguished yet unvisited. 

Finally, in a spectacular sunset drive descending from the mountains, we reached Sarajevo. The city met our expectations. It attracted just the right amount of the right tourists, those who have also put in the requisite Wikipedia research. Minarets and calls to prayer reminded us we were in a predominantly Muslim city, but the nightlife indicated that this was "Islam lite" and still very much a European city. We stayed a block from the Latin Bridge spanning the Miljacka River and the site of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination. A memorial featuring a metal imprint of assassin Gavrilo Princip's position when he fired his gun struck me as a strange glorification of murder.  Nonetheless, the site conveyed how this restless, diverse city had been a happening place and would witness so many events of consequence just in the 20th century.  Of course, our neighborhood had more to offer than Sarajevo's dark history - a delightful mix of restaurants, shopping, gelato, bakeries and bars made me want to explore every corner and nook. A historic market square called Baščaršija hosted a lovely scene of elderly folk sitting and drinking Turkish coffee in the mornings surrounded by ancient stone buildings.

A guided tour of Sarajevo took us to a damaged and graffitied bobsled trek in the mountains east of the city. Sarajevo had hosted a successful Winter Olympics in 1984, only 8 years before war would engulf those venues. It's a travel hobby of mine to visit Olympic cities and look for Rings or the host stadium, but with Sarajevo, a dilapidated concrete slide seems to better represent the city's Olympic memory. The tour continued to the Tunnel of Hope. With the city besieged and constantly shelled by artillery, an 800m long tunnel was dug underneath the UN-controlled airport runway. The tunnel allowed supplies to be brought in and likely saved the city from capitulation. As the airport runway is still used, most of the tunnel is not made accessible for tourists. We were able to walk through a small authentic stretch, and while it was crouchingly tight, it didn't reach the claustrophobic levels of the Cu Chi tunnels in Vietnam. We continued to the War Childhood Museum, where stories of children during the war were documented. The museum reminded us that when we talk about nationalism, and geopolitics, the effect on people's lives can get lost in the large numbers, but when we are shown war's effect on the innocent individual, we understand better what is truly at stake.

We drove southwest along the gorgeous Neretva River to Mostar. The 5th largest city in Bosnia (technically in Herzegovina), I'd imagined Mostar to be a bit of a random spot with an elegant old bridge. Imagine my surprise when I arrived to find out Mostar is the most popular destination in Bosnia. Old Bridge, or Stari Most in Bosnian, was originally commissioned by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1566. The entire structure of the bridge, included the walking path, soars over the Neretva at such an acute arch that the original builder, so worried it would collapse, prepared for his own funeral after it opened. Instead, Stari Most stood as a wonder for over four centuries until the civil war when Croat forces, not Serbs, destroyed it. Though they claimed the bridge was of strategic military value, the general who ordered it was convicted of a war crime. The bridge was rebuilt in 2004. Now, its every inch and every viewing angle is capitalized, with wall-to-wall restaurant coverage along the riverside. A man was diving off the top of the bridge every couple hours with his accomplice collecting money. Initially confused on where this influx of tourists came from, I realized that Dubrovnik, aka King's Landing,  was just over 2 hours away. While the main town square was cobblestoned and charming, the touristy nature made me believe it was designed to look charming. Outside the center of town felt more authentic with many shelled buildings still in ruins, and inexplicably a statue of Bruce Lee in a park. 15 minutes drive away was a Dervish House, built into a cliff alongside where a river enters a cave. Though this was also extremely touristy and I was unable to appreciate the Islamic spirituality of the location, Sam and I did find a rocky hiking path ignored by everyone else that led to scenic views of the valley, and randomly some climbing equipment.

We had decent luck meeting interesting people in the Sarajevo bar scene. A tall German got to talking to me and Sam at the bar, while his girlfriend remained at their table for 15 minutes. Gathering that his girlfriend was Nicaraguan, I asked if we could join them at their table. The German replied, "sure, but uh do you talk the Spanish?" An hour later he remarked, "I definitely wasn't expecting the two Americans to speak Spanish...in Sarajevo." We learned that they were waiting for a Schengen visa to process and had somehow survived 5 days in the boring Banja Luka. The next night, after failing to strike up any conversations, a group of young Bosnian guys approached us out of nowhere. What transpired was tremendous for we had lots of questions for them and they had lots of questions for us. Some question examples were: 

"You could've chosen Spain, Italy, France, Germany - why did you come to Bosnia? What do you think of Joe Biden? Do most Americans have guns?"

And my questions for them included:

"Who did you root for in the World Cup when Croatia made the final? Would you root for Serbia if they were in the final? Do most people drink here? Do you think there will be another war here in your lifetimes?" One of them responded, "When we're in the Balkans, we all hate each other. When we're outside the Balkans, we realize we're all the same. I rooted for Croatia and I could root for Serbia." With regards to drinking, Bosnian Muslims either drink alcohol or smoke hookah, with very little overlap. Avoiding pork was far more commonly followed. I enjoyed tremendously watching how they interacted - I was shocked to see how much internet meme culture, jokes that I thought were English-specific, was part of their lives. One guy demonstrated via meme about how his friend was a ladies' man, with a picture of a man videochatting 50 phones. The tallest of the group, a good looking guy with glasses and a crew cut named Harun explained his position as one of 4 Bosnians at a US sponsored army training program in Turkey. He said there would only be war again if the US allowed there to be a war. 

We got up early the next morning, unfortunately smelling of Bosnia's lack of indoor smoking regulations, and set out for Belgrade. Sam had messaged his Serbian-American friend Igor when we'd previously driven along the border, and in an incredible coincidence Igor told us he was currently in Belgrade. We changed our plans to swing by Belgrade. Igor had moved from Belgrade to the US when he was 5, but he spoke Serbian fluently and knew Belgrade pretty well. As he took us through historical squares, respected restaurants and a Roman-era fortress, I recognized in him a joy of showing Americans a country he knew intimately, a joy I shared when friends visited me in Hong Kong. He gave us a culinary tour with cevapi, which I recognized as the barbecue plate from the Putin restaurant, the soft yet crispy pastry borek and a dessert shop with delicious knedle, potato doughballs filled with chocolate or fruit. He explained how Serbian soccer was talented but disappointed in big tournaments, how much people revere Nikola Tesla (born in Croatia to Serb family) and NBA MVP Nikola Jokić, and how they also take credit for Slovenian  Luka Dončić who "has a very Serbian name." 

Though he'd spent decent time as an adult in Belgrade, Igor hadn't really partied in the city with friends. Apparently Belgrade is known as a party town, with Europeans from richer countries often coming to splash for a weekend. Through extensive Instagram research, he chose some bars and clubs and we went hopping. We were a few drinks in and quite tired from the long day when we reached our final club, but the cool design and 90's music revitalized us. We knew all the lyrics and so apparently did the Serbs. Igor ordered each of us a shot of the Serbian national drink Rakija, which he subsequently described as "moonshine brandy." After an hour or so, I was feeling in a good place, until I turned around and saw six more shots of Rakija arriving which Igor had apparently ordered in Serbian. I stumbled home at 1am and puked so badly I made it to the sink because I couldn't reach the toilet. I felt terrible for being a drunk mess until Sam came home and started his own chunder show. We traded puking bursts all night. I started to feel stable around 9am, but Sam was still in bad shape and not helped by our need to drive 3.5 hours back to Budapest that day. 

Mercifully, a dual carriage highway connects Belgrade and Budapest, and we didn't have to deal with the hairpin curves through Bosnian mountains on a hangover. The most notable sight were numerous signs in English saying "Kosovo is Serbia." While we had been primed to look out for anti-Bosnian sentiment, it was another conflict with NATO involvement that still riles up nationalism. The 1998-1999 war with ethnic Albanians trying to breakaway had ended in NATO bombing Belgrade and Kosovo becoming de facto independent, although it seems none of the highway signs agree.  I thought about how much pride played into these conflicts, with people willing to kill each other over perceived historical wrongs.

As we approached the Hungarian border, Google directed us off the highway and onto a small road where all the cars were stopped. I was confused when a woman exited her car with Slovakian plates and took her dog for a walk. We had never expected to wait at the border. I walked out as well, and in addition to the hundred cars ahead of us, abandoned buildings and barbed wire gave me an uneasy feeling. Piles of litter contained old clothes and broken tents hinted at a former refugee camp of sorts. Suddenly I realized we were "entering Europe." It had not dawned us the entire trip that we had left the EU - Bosnia and Serbia are not member nations. Hungary has famously been unwelcoming to migrants at its border, and this crossing of Horgos had been the site of clashes in 2015. I suspected that our lengthy border wait was both typical and planned. It took us two and a half hours to get to the customs officers (who seemed genuinely surprised to see American passports) and two minutes to get past them. We finally made it back to Budapest where we checked into an airport hotel, returned the car, and fled with our tails between our legs, more knowledgable of the potency of Balkan conflicts and moonshine brandy. 

City Centers

My first company Arup has an internal company directory. It's basically Arup Facebook where employees share their headshot, professional qualifications, expertise, project experience, as well as personal interests. One field "Proudest Achievement" could be either, and revealed a lot about one's personality. Years later, I still remember my friend's achievement: "High fiving Michael Jordan."

You can search for coworkers by name, or by office. Sitting in the company's largest office, I was often intrigued by the smaller offices around the world, in faraway places. There's an office in Mauritius that had probably 40 people. Mauritius, the island nation off the coast of East Africa with British and French colonial history and possibly the world's most diverse populace. I browsed through the office employee names and saw someone whose name looked a lot like mine. It could have been Christopher Lim or Calvin Liu or Kevin Lee or something. He was definitely Chinese but Mauritian, a Graduate Engineer who had graduated university in the UK. He was a Manchester United and F1 fan. As I stalked read his profile, I couldn't help but feel an incredible sense of connection - I felt from his interests that we had similar personalities, perhaps even similar life experiences despite our wildly different places of birth. I wondered, would I be him if my parents had chosen to move to Mauritius instead of the United States? It suddenly seemed less preposterous a hypothetical. What would that have been like? Here I could see one manifestation of that alternate universe, as a skinny engineer who grew up watching David Beckham, speaking English, French and Chinese (maybe Hakka?), playing Starcraft, and now working at the exact same company as me.

Publicly available photo of Arup Mauritius office

I grew up believing the United States to be the center of the world. I wondered how anyone else could interpret the world any other way. With its geopolitical might and the immigrant melting pot legacy, American exceptionalism is core to our upbringing. Even our immigrant tale is inextricably spun with a sense of superiority, about people finding a better life in this better country. Somehow I was educated with the misbelief that the US was the only country with substantial immigration - in my mind, the other countries were monocultures with little desire or ability to accept immigrants.

I'm not sure when I discarded this myth, but by the time I was working in Hong Kong, my peer group included overseas Chinese from Canada, Australia, UK, Ireland, Malaysia, South Africa, New Zealand, France, Italy, Germany, Singapore, Panama, Indonesia, Tanzania and so on. Everyone was well-adjusted, well-educated and often substantially more interesting and multilingual than me.  When I discovered my Mauritian doppelgänger, I had completely detached American-ness with exceptionalism.

So this is actually a post about New York. I know, that was a long walk. But hear me out. My life in Asia re-centered my world. With over 4 billion people, the majority of humanity, living in Asia, how central could America possibly be? Asia and its billions had rewired my ambitions, dreams and definitions of "cool" or "success." 

When I moved back to Boston, I found myself walking past buildings downtown, including the high rise on State Street where my mom worked. As I watched suits dashing by, I couldn't help but think how provincial it all felt. I imagined these people trying to climb the corporate ladder at these downtown offices to get club seats at Fenway Park and a seat at a gala hosted at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum. It was jarring to realize that I used to want that life.

And then I moved to New York. Having grown up in Boston and gone to college in DC, New York had always loomed large. For so many in my peer group, New York City was their dream. Many of my friends didn't even consider jobs in other cities post-college - many probably didn't even wonder if they'd enjoy living here, they just figured it was the path they should take. Landing a job and moving to New York represented success. But for me now, it just represents this concrete mass with a decrepit subway system and an obsolete class system where a lot of high paying US jobs happen to be based. The city's self-centeredness clashes with my rewired sensibilities, and my peers reeked of default choices.

My mentality in NYC was edgy.  When asked how I was enjoying the city, I wanted to summarize the previous 8 paragraphs. Instead I'd deliver some snippy response meant to establish my cosmopolitan credentials, point out my barbs against the city while minimizing offense at the questioners' invariable New York pride. I was so preoccupied with distinguishing my attitude that I struggled to enjoy the city as it was. I took in the skyscrapers and the street food and those flimsy metro cards as someone else's ideal city, and told myself I was just here for a job. 

*****

I'm not sure exactly when I wrote that. I'm picking this up in a different city, a full two years later. The last few paragraphs don't entirely jibe with how I feel about New York, or how I remember my experience there. I was only 8 months in when Covid-19 shut the city down and my East Village apartment suddenly felt very small. I ended up moving out in the beginning of May, and though I thought I'd be returning, I didn't. 

At some point it became clear that I'd need to start over somewhere, and it wasn't going to be in Asia. At that point, moving back to New York didn't feel like moving back - it felt like starting over. Considering I never fully felt like I vibed there, I instead sought out a place where I did feel some connection. Seattle ended up being the only choice.

Unlike New York, Seattle has no pretenses about being the center of the world. Similar to Boston, it is a small city tucked away in a corner of the country but makes up for the lack of size and geographic centrality with outsized economic and cultural impact

The Great Leap Forward

 Rarely does a story touch on as many issues personal to me as Eileen Gu's 2022 Winter Olympics run representing China. Olympics, China, America, international sports - it's a quadruple lutz of meaty topics. Her Winter Olympic performance across three events - Big Air, slopestyle, and half pipe, all on skis - netted her a gold, silver and gold and made her arguably the most memorable individual of the Games. The unique intrigue to the story however was her representing the host China, despite being born and raised in America. Her decision and citizenship status raised a lot of speculation and generated controversy in some minor subcultures of American society. 

Here are the facts - Eileen Gu was born in San Francisco to Yan Gu, a Chinese winter sports athlete who had moved to the US for Master's studies. Her father's identity is not public, but he is known to be a white American and to not have had a major role raising her. Eileen was born a US citizen and given the omniscient Chinese name of  爱凌 Ai Ling, meaning "Love Ice" but also sounding like Eileen. In some ways it seems her upbringing was very similar to that of an ABC (American-born Chinese), speaking Mandarin with her mom and maternal grandparents. However she spent a lot of summers in Beijing and it's pretty clear she has a closer grip to Chinese culture and Mandarin than the vast majority of ABCs.  In 2019 when she was 15, she decided to change her affiliation from the US and compete for China as a freestyle skier. 

Eileen has explained some of her reasons for changing, touting her close affiliation with China and her desire to inspire the Chinese youth to take up winter sports. Outsiders have speculated cynically that she did it for sponsorship reasons, soaking up the spotlight in the massive Chinese market in lieu of the crowded American one, or that Chinese propaganda had brainwashed her. The lowest rung of hateful American conservatives have branded her a traitor, a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, and the "worst person in the world". Furthermore, as Chinese nationality laws prohibits dual nationalities for anyone over 18, questions have arisen over whether Gu has given up her American citizenship.

As is often the case with personal attacks, they reveal less about the victim and more about the insecurity of the attacker, in this case insecurity in America's global status. International sports have long struggled over rules designed to create firm team boundaries in a world full of fluid borders and identities. Examples abound of individuals representing countries other than their birth place for all sorts of reasons, to the extent that this Wikipedia page goes on and on.  Lots of people immigrate and choose to represent their naturalized country, like Somali-born distance runner Mo Farah who won gold medals for the United Kingdom. Others choose to represent the country of their parents, often because they are not good enough to represent their birth country, but sometimes because they want to support their heritage nation, like French ⚽ star Riyad Mahrez playing for Algeria.  Most international federations allow athletes some flexibility in choosing their sporting nationality.

As a nation of immigrants, USA sports have particularly benefitted from dual nationals, including athletes like Philip Dutton, Kaillie Humphries and Bernard Lagat who competed for the USA after having won Olympic medals for other nations. In many sports, the US revel in naturalized citizens. On the flip side, for the US men's ⚽ team, nearly half the stars are Europeans who happen to have a US passport for one reason or another. I suspect when the culturally French Jordan Pefok scores for the US in the World Cup, no one will complain about how he can't speak English. Meanwhile in sports where America excels, many athletes who miss the US cut often find their ways onto other countries' teams, such as WNBA star Becky Hammon playing for Russia. What America rarely sees is a homegrown superstar choosing to represent another nation. Even more notable is when that other nation is a geopolitical rival. 

Eileen Gu jumped into this firestorm when she chose to represent China. She easily would've been the top American competitor in all her events and a Wheaties Box idol - though granted that was not predetermined when she made her decision three years ago. Though I also am an outsider speculating, I think far less cynically about her decision. I think she just thought it would be fun. The Olympics will never be in China again in her lifetime, and it is so exhilarating to perform in front of a "home crowd." It is so much fun to appear in grand media appearances, smile on billboards, give interviews in Mandarin and be complimented on her fluency. Following her on Instagram, it seems she is soaking this all in.

Peeling back this successful stardom in China reveals the extent of colonialism in sports. Skiing in its many forms comes from Scandinavia and has spread largely through western culture. In fact, nearly every Winter Olympic sport and most Summer Olympic sports are essentially western sports. While the Olympics has tried to cultivate a reputation of facilitating truly global competition, they sometimes have the effect of facilitating Western dominance in sports they invented. All sports have regional differences based on culture, history, and access to equipment or facilities. It takes a lot of effort and time to bring sports to new countries. Skiing is particularly inaccessible, requiring snowy mountains, expensive resort infrastructure, personal equipment and instruction. No one raised in China will recreationally rise to become an elite skier at the level of skiers in Colorado or the Alps. China can only compete by intentionally finding good athletes as children and training them for these specific events. Gu is privy to her Chinese superstardom experience because she has the combination of being culturally adept in China and athletically trained in the US. It should be noted that Asian-American gold medalists like Chloe Kim and Nathan Chen don't experience the same sort of fame in South Korea and China, because they lack the ability and interest to connect with those countries.

My relevant experience is in ultimate frisbee, a sport invented in the 1970s in a New Jersey parking lot. When I played in college, there were tens of thousands of ultimate players in the US. When I moved to Hong Kong, there were around 100 regular players. The difference in level of play was enormous, and enabled an average collegiate player like me to represent Hong Kong in world tournaments. It was an honor and a thrill to attend these tournaments that were as grand as ultimate tournaments could get, wearing an official country jersey. Additionally it was meaningful to lift the level of play in Hong Kong, spread the wonderful sport to more people, and help this land where I go back 5 generations and love deeply. Even if I could represent the US, playing for Hong Kong provided a unique sense of fulfillment. I'm sure Gu felt similarly about representing China.

Regarding her citizenship, I found it pretty clear from her painful non-answers to pressing reporters that she had not given up her US passport. Admitting outright that she was receiving special treatment from the Chinese government would undoubtedly provoke a firestorm from Chinese netizens. My theory is that the Chinese government did make numerous unusual "nationality grants" to athletes in these Olympics - the Chinese hockey team was almost entirely American and Canadian. I certainly don't believe Gu will attend Stanford next year as an international student. This awkward nationality issue only arises because of China's strict rules and usually isn't an issue with European nations.

Hanging over this entire Olympics have been China's human rights abuses and general place in the global world order. What the CCP have been doing to destroy Uyghur and Tibetan identities are crimes against humanity, and I think I've made my feelings about the crackdowns in Hong Kong pretty clear. The authoritarian government in Beijing has taken a disturbingly nationalistic turn in the last decade, questioning whether these Games should've taken place there at all. When Eileen Gu wears the Chinese National Team outfit, she does in part represent that authoritarian government. However, she is also representing 5,000 years of history and the world's largest nation with a vibrant middle class. Accepting citizenship does not mean one condones everything that country has ever done, but rather that they accept the present whole, warts and all. We wouldn't like it if Russian media pressed naturalized American gymnast Nastia Liukin to answer for the invasion of Iraq. Neither should an 18 year old ski jumper be held responsible for mass internments in Xinjiang. 

The bottom line is that we shouldn't take sports allegiances too seriously. Athletes change allegiances and make surprising representation choices for all sorts of personal reasons which are rarely geopolitical in nature. We should want to move towards a world in which where one starts doesn't dictate where one ends up.

My Language Philosophy

 "I think I'm just not good at languages."

This sentence, which I hate so much,  came out of my mouth during my sophomore year in high school. I was choosing my classes for junior year, and I had decided to drop French. My high school offered Latin, French and Ancient Greek (yes, that's it), and I had taken the minimum amount of languages - 3 years of Latin, 3 years of French. I wasn't terrible at these classes, but I didn't feel like I had gotten much practicality out of them. 

Fast forward 15 years, and I consistently spend 2 hours a week studying languages. Some of these languages had provided a lot of practicality, such as helping me escape from a remote town after all flights were cancelled. Most importantly they have helped me connect with many people all over the world, creating lots of bidirectional laughs, knowledge exchange and reducing misunderstanding.

I now feel comfortable saying I can speak five languages, though I am insecure about all of them.  I've managed to do all this while possessing no real talent for language acquisition - in fact I believe I possess a below average memory and ear. 

And so I hate it when people say, "I'm not good at languages", especially when they say it in English. It usually betrays the speaker's position of privilege. It doesn't help that often they are ignorant of this privilege. This isn't a view I've found commonplace, but I'll recount how I developed it.

As with this blog, my language story begins in my summer of 2008 in Beijing. I had come into the city alone armed with one introductory year of Mandarin from college. I also had grown up speaking Cantonese, the Chinese language dominant in the south, but that was of limited use in this northern capital. Everything was terrifying at first. Taxi rides would begin with 5 minutes of me trying to say where I wanted to go before the driver would begin driving, and sometimes they never would. I would go everywhere with a notepad and jot it down in English all the points I wanted to express but couldn't and look them up when I got home. Slowly I began to converse, but listening remained very hard. People spoke so fast and the Beijing accent is famous for its slurring of syllables. At first I thought I couldn't understand anything because I didn't know the words. But Chinese is a language with a relatively sparse word domain - a lot of complex concepts involve the bundling of more elemental words. Very often people were saying words that I had learned, I just couldn't recognize them at live speed. I needed to train my ear, listen very attentively, and load up guesses based on context. 

In due time my ear got better and I was able to have conversations by the end of the summer, most commonly to taxi drivers about NBA players. It was a rush, feeling the improvement and being able to accomplish tasks easier and getting compliments. I remember talking to my building staff, who'd seen me progressed all summer, and observing real pleasure in their eyes when I said "慢慢走" at the end of a conversation, a phrase I'd heard dozens of times from service venues. The city slowly deciphered itself as I learned to recognize more characters.

During the Olympics, loads of foreigners came to town and I found myself useful linguistically. I could help people order cabs or ask for directions. Then sitting on the subway, I sat next to a French couple looking at the subway map, clearly trying to figure out where they were. Almost miraculously, though I had always been crap at listening comprehension in my French tests, I could understand them. I told them they were going the right direction and they could transfer in two stops, in French. I realized then how much French vocab I had stored in my brain, accumulated through all the homework and tests, but it was only now when my ear had progressed that I could actually perceive the words in spoken conversation.

Language acquisition is notoriously difficult to measure, and I can't find a definitive research source for it, but by all accounts the majority of the world is at least bilingual. This certainly jibes with my experience, as is the notion that this figure drops to 23% when examining just the United States. Not only is knowing multiple languages the norm in most places but monolingualism is associated with lack of education. Especially in the global south, inability to work in a "major" language can be a major hindrance to societal mobility. For the past two centuries, there has been no language more major than English, and it is amazing how different language acquisition is treated in English-speaking countries. In these highly developed countries, outside of immigrant communities, language acquisition is treated like an elective course. There is no link to economic advancement, and no stigma associated with monolingualism. In fact, it is common and socially acceptable to say the sentence I opened this blog with: "I'm just not good at languages." This educational domain, which is treated like a core human skillset like math or reading in much of the world, is treated with an optional "let's see if they have talent" mentality in the US. While there is a talent component to learning languages, it is not a prerequisite to becoming bilingual! You cannot tell me that every single Dutch or Filipino person is linguistically gifted. This success is due to the national education system and incentives of the citizens.

The lesson is not necessarily in replicating those educational systems. I believe people in English-speaking countries are bad at learning languages because they don't need or care to be, and that this attitude derives from a position of privilege. Learning a language as an adult is difficult, stressful, scary and full of embarrassing moments. You have to accept that you will be mocked and that your brain will feel like mush. And much of the world has to go through this process to enter the global economy. English speakers need not, and that is an immense step up. At this moment in time in the US, I find that privilege is spoken about within a national context, with a perspective of shining light on the struggles some Americans face that other Americans do not. But it needs to be spoken about with a global context, of all the powers that Americans, even Americans that lack privilege locally, have to step into another country without visa-stress and expect other people to understand them. 

This privilege is so pronounced when one lives abroad. The number of English speakers who have been living abroad for years without picking up the local language is astonishing. The legacy of colonialism and the hierarchies of international trade has allowed this to be generally socially acceptable. With this context in mind this, I find it unbelievably hypocritical when English speaking countries attack immigrants for speaking English poorly.

It is true that native English speakers have experiences unique to them that I've written about before, including some that make it more challenging to learn other languages. But the reality is that learning a language is hard for anyone. It takes a ton of time and pain, but it's a challenge that most of the world has accepted is important.

If you are truly interested in global equality, you have to learn at least another language, and preferably a non-Indo European one. Not only is the acquisition process crucial for developing empathy, but post-acquisition one can access knowledge channels outside of the ones colonialism setup. And it's fun and rewarding and useful. 

Personally, I find language learning a permanent part of my life. It is usually not a top priority and so I rarely study intensively, but I have 10 year plans for acquiring new languages (Vietnamese by age 40). Not only is it rewarding to be able to connect with whole new parts of the globe, but new grammatical structures and idioms shed new light on how humans think. Good luck with your language learning.