Dreams of Another Year

This past year I had the good fortune to share housing with Francis Phuang from Singapore. Among the many cross cultural lessons we shared, I saw this music video/short film for the song "Ordinary" which was an official song of the 2015 Southeast Asian Games.  Ordinary It's a long 12 minutes, but the video is inspiring. It tells the story of Fandi Ahmad, the best footballer in Singaporean history, which was also the inspiration for the song.  The song starts "When I was just a little boy from a little town / I made a wish that someday I could turn this around / I made believe that I was right on top of the world." And even though it is a story of a person whose circumstances have very little in common with mine, I can very much relate to it. There is that primordial draw of sport, those dreams of a powerless child to become a powerful player that drive relentless training and so often are prerequisites of success. There are the pains of defeat and rejection which make the hard work and successes so rewarding. These raw emotions transcend generations and continents, so that a kid from suburban Massachusetts in the 1990s can identify with a kid in the early days of independent Singapore.

I've written in my blog about how I relate to Singapore and Malaysia in a way. Well when I visit, the differences in flora and fauna strike me, and I am hyperaware of the accents and ethnicities and cuisine. But the presence of such a large Chinese diaspora grounded me in the mere fate that placed me in America and someone else in Malaysia, and the vast implications that follow. Sure I could have been placed in a rural town in Uttar Pradesh, or among a tribe in the Amazon rainforest, but those experiences are so hard for me to imagine that it doesn't resonate with me to the same degree.

In addition, I've written in my blog about my experience with ultimate, and the joy I found in college after recreationally pursuing it in high school. I want to take this post to further elaborate. I'd love to wax poetically about how the disc has always floated with me, ever since my brother went to CTY summer camp and came back wanting to toss. I was 12 or 13. Minutes after he taught me the forehand grip, I could flick it. I can still remember the shock at seeing the disc leave my fingers after such an unnatural motion - I felt like Harry must have after he waved his phoenix core wand and sparks flew out.

I did not grow up to defeat the most evil ultimate player of all time, but I did throw a lot more flicks. My own summer camp introduced me to my first organized ultimate experience and I quickly became obsessed. Once summer was over though, I lost all access to ultimate. High school ultimate was very much in developmental stages, and my tiny high school will possibly never have an official team. Our school would organize a sport day in May (creatively called May Day) where we'd play games like Capture the Flag, Dodgeball and yes, ultimate. It's amazing how much I'd look forward to that day every year. I did eventually play organized ultimate in high school, and had some fond memories from that experience, but I also had a ton of frustrating moments trying to form a team, failing to transfer my passion for the sport to fellow students. Even after joining ultimate leagues around Boston, my ultimate experience consisted of playing with makeshift uniforms in random unkempt grassy fields. Spectators were a dream - my parents never even saw me play. Ultimate was a hobby that I would pursue passionately almost in secret. The effort I gave to it was almost embarrassing to me, with a massive imbalance between my personal regard for the sport and society's respect for it.

Flash forward to November 2015. Hong Kong is hosting the Asia Oceanic Ultimate Championships. An infrastructure has sprung up around ultimate. Professional leagues are selling tickets in the US and Canada, websites are formed to cover ultimate news, ESPN is showing layouts in their daily Top 10 Plays, and ultimate is officially recognized by the International Olympic Committee. And there I am on the field of Mong Kok Stadium, which only a few weeks before had been sold out hosting a World Cup Qualifying Match. Yes, that World Cup. I'm under the field lights wearing a finely made jersey that says Hong Kong - I'm representing Hong Kong. I'm shaking hands with some of the best players in Australia, Japan and the Philippines - some of the best players in the world - and they're thanking me. There are professional photographers capturing the moments. There's a banner with our neon design displaying boldly WFDF 2015 Asia Oceanic Ultimate Championships Hong Kong. There are TV cameras setup through the stadium livestreaming the event - and there is my voice on the telecast, commentating on the highest level game ever played in Hong Kong. Throngs of players wearing jerseys of every color are milling about exuding joy. They've come from places like New Zealand, India, United Arab Emirates, just to play this game chasing a circular piece of plastic. This game that I once played only on May Day. If my 17 year old self could see this scene, his mind would be insanely blown.

I made that scene above very personal, but I only had a small role in the event. Many long hours were spent by my friends coordinating with the government, designing memorabilia, and setting up endless logistics. I felt guilty somewhat experiencing so much joy on the backs of their hard work. But I did put in my effort as well - and never have I felt so much reward from my hard work. From coordinating nearly 100 volunteers, to running sprint workouts after months of rehabbing from ankle tendinitis, I took AOUC very seriously. And when I walked onto the field after it was done, I felt like Fandi Ahmad, like I was right on top of the world.

Personal Data Science

When I graduated with a Master's in Statistics in the summer of 2011, I had never heard of the term data science. And most of the world hadn't really either, it only picked up as a term really in the year following. Now I can no longer just say that sort of sentence. I have to show some data 

In these intervening years, I've been working in an engineering firm learning a lot about how buildings work, what sort of mechanical systems use power, how to pick a piece of glass with the right reflectivity, light and heat tranmissivity, how to model wind flow and all sorts of applied knowledge I never conceived of as a student. But I haven't been getting in on this data science action in my day job. 

But I did study statistics and I like to play with data. While trying to turn my academic knowledge into something with real world applicability, I've realized how off-base a lot of my education was. Let's start with undergraduate, where I took courses such as Abstract Algebra, Galois Theory, and Complex Analysis. I haven't even come close to using anything there at all. Even with multivariable calculus, one of the foundations of a math major, I can't remember Green's theorem and don't particularly care to. The statistics portion of our learning was thus certainly more applied. The regression course I took junior year has proved invaluable, and learning to code and model in graduate school has been great. The most valuable lesson I probably learned was to not overfit the data when modelling, to make sure your fundament processes are right rather than your results. However the fundamental processes of graduate statistics are flawed in this modern world - courses teach more like history courses. Painstaking attention is made to how a theorem was discovered and proved. Professors are convinced these steps are crucial. Sure, I think there is something to be said for understanding the theory behind a model or function, but goodness gracious we never use those proofs again. And we spend very, very little time working with real world data and never any of the large datasets that have become so common. There's some balance between blindly learning how to use a tool and understanding the tool's entire backstory and manufacturing process. 

And there's a ton of free data out there, but there's also my own data. There's stuff that's automatically kept track for me, like bank transactions, cell phone data etc. I decided to play with my own Facebook data. Due to Facebook's stringent API, you can't really access their stuff by a scraping algorithm. So I took my own data myself. Copy and paste. Went through all my statuses and took down the time of posting, the number of likes, comments, and then whether the status was a joke, pun, announcement, topical, language-related, a link, a check-in, a holiday etc. I know, I'm ridiculous. But I really wanted to practice and not lose out on the value of my education. While at the Census Bureau, I read a lot of statistics papers that I no longer recall, but I also attended a very popular talk by Dr. Nathan Yau, at the time a Statistics PhD student who had just published a book on visualizing data. He lectured on the value and techniques behind awesome data visualizations, and I was hooked. I bought his book and follow his blog (flowingdata.com). I still haven't come up with any graphics worthy of his blog, but I tried here. I started with a simple plot of the post likes vs time and colored them in differently based on some of the metrics I recorded. 

 

The data is actually quite fun to play with. There's a few motivating variables to analyze. For starters, I want to see how often I pun, and whether these tend to be the most popular posts. It turns out they're not! The graph to the left actually graphs 6 variables. There's time on the x axis and # of likes on the y axis. Blue dots are puns. The size of the dot indicates the number of shares the post has had (most have 0 and a few have 1), and actually the color of the dots are different for posts judged to be "topical." Posts that are squares are picture posts. However, I feel pretty strongly now that most humans can really only grasp 4 variables. Yeah if you stare long enough you can try to understand them all, but after 4 the mind really has to work. I redid the graph with a log y-axis, which I think looks a bit better but doesn't make the popular posts look as impressive. For the record, puns make up 18.6% of the last 3 year's posts. 

I also used the wordcloud package to pick some of my most used words. This is a good package and once I downloaded it, I really didn't have to do much. The results are quite pleasing and cool. Note that <97> represents some Chinese character - I can't get Chinese character display working on my R.

Well those days are pretty even, but Sundays are fun days aren't they. Sunday's have the highest mean likes, but this graph shows that Thursdays have the highest median. The results aren't very drastic though, and just looking at the sample variances one can see that the differences might not stand up to a test of robustness. Add in the fact that these times are all Hong Kong based but not all posts were, and I wouldn't publish an academic paper advising Thursday posts. As a note I'm a big fan of boxplots, but not everyone learns how to read them, and it seems like they might be a legacy of older statistics that'll seem too clunky in this new age.

If you notice though, none of what I've done has involved any sort of fancy modeling. Maybe my experience has been limited, but it seems most of the value of data science is relatively simple. Most often at work I'm asked "what's the average energy use for a tall office tower?" All I have to do is type in a simple query, but this is a service simply not available before we had the database. It doesn't involve any explanation to math illiterates, or model validation. With my Facebook example, just having the database in the first place setup to allow these useful queries is the main step. This is primarily why the data science game is shifted towards computer scientists right now. The market demand is to get data in all the right places rather than advanced statistical modeling, so you need programmers to scrape data or design apps or programs that continually feed in usable data and store it. You'll need a few Statistics PhD's scattered around to come up with the original algorithms, but everyone else just has to learn how they work.

Here's one more graph with comments and likes together:

But anyway, I want to just post my own favorite statuses. These are not the ones with the most statistical properties, just my own faves:

• My mom asks me if I want a home sound system for my birthday - I tell her thanks but I'm not the stereo-type.
• I'm being asked at work to write an "inception report." I'm not sure what that means, but I hope it doesn't involve a report within a report.
• England is to football as Iraq is to civilization. Sure they might have invented it, but you could argue other countries are doing it better now.
• The Hong Kong Football Association reportedly paid about $30million HKD to get the Argentine National team to come play in tonight's friendly against the 164 ranked Hong Kong team. I guess this is the second time this month that the government has paid a group of men to beat up on Hong Kongers."
• Once upon a time, Georgetown and Syracuse had a rivalry. Georgetown won. The end.
• Sometimes I do my own crossword puzzles, which I no longer remember. And then when I solve a particularly clever clue, I feel pumped that I solved the clue and more pumped that I wrote it. #lowselfesteem
• Reading from a Kindle is not helping my shelf esteem.
• China doesn't have a Mount Rushmore, it just has a Mao-nt.
• Sometimes my phone says "Call Failed" and I think it says "Cal Failed" and I'm like come on, I really don't need you to rub it in.

Running Diary

The last week of October was the strangest week I've had in Hong Kong, moving out from my Kennedy Town apartment to a family farmhouse outside the Aberdeen tunnel isolated from urban convenience. This move was followed two days later by a stay at the hospital for a nasal surgery and then several days of recovery at another uncle's actual apartment. When I emerged from this strange week, I could breathe out my nose, my voice had changed, my sleep schedule had adapted to early morning Aberdeen buses, and I hadn't really hung out with people for over a week, an interminable length for an extrovert.

The following weekend that all changed. It was Tommy and Jana's long awaited wedding day Saturday night, and Colin Erickson-Sheehy's farewell weekend in Shenzhen. In addition, I had forgotten that this was Georgetown's International Alumni Weekend hosted in Hong Kong. For me, this alumni event was merely a Google Calendar event but others were flying in from all over the world. Paul Tagliabue, Nancy Pelosi, Senator George Mitchell and President John DeGoia were among the appearances. How to prioritize?

I figured that while I would party with Colin the following weekend in Manila, I had really promised to come up to Shenzhen many times. And whenever I'd gone to Shenzhen to party, I'd not been disappointed. I couldn't make the Georgetown weekend's main events anyway because of the wedding, so I made my plan. When I learned I had a meeting Friday night with Swire, necessitating fancy clothes, and needed a followup doctor's appointment, well things got complicated. But I managed, and kept notes as well. I'll take off at the end of the meeting.

Friday, November 6, 2015
5:47pm: The meeting had started in 3:30 and at one point descended into a shitshow, but luckily I was able to leave at this time. My boss has sometimes been stuck in there until 7:30. I navigate out of the Swire buildings footbridge systems, which was incidentally what the meeting was about, and jump onto the MTR towards Central.
6:22pm: Enter Dr. Victor To's office. I'd said I'd be there at 5:45, but they always overbook anyways and turns out showing up late means I have to wait less time.
6:30pm: In fact I wait like 8 minutes. The doctor sticks a scope up my nose and proceeds to poke around in my sinus, and looks confused when I scream in pain.
6:40pm: Doctor decides to end my torture. Says my nose is a lot better but I still have to come back next Monday and Thursday and finish getting dried blood out of my sinus. I currently have undried blood flowing out my sinus. Tells me my sinus will stop bleeding in a few minutes
6:45pm: Holding a tissue to my bloody nose, I decide to risk venturing out to Central.
7:09pm: Show up at the Watermark Cafe at the central piers. The event is more formal than I was expecting. Staff are tabling at the door handing out nametags. I'm glad I'm dressed in a suit instead of my typical casual Friday clothes, or my Shenzhen party gear. Someone is speaking already, which is frighteningly early for an event that started at 7:00pm. He's saying something about international development and is name dropping countries - Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos and Philippines - like he's announcing ASEAN bingo.
7:12pm: Cool Vincent Ko is here. I last saw him a year ago when he visited Hong Kong. Apparently he's in Ho Chi Minh City now.
7:15pm: Caroline Kwok is here. I last saw her last night. She is very, very excited about this weekend.
7:20pm: Jas Wee is here. I last saw her at the end of December, but she lives in Hong Kong so this is less excusable.
7:22pm: There's a minibar of hors d'oevres and I raid the hell out of it. There are Brie & Gorgonzola crackers which are better than anything I ever ate at Georgetown. My university definitely treats its alumni better than its student body.
8:10pm: I've had more glasses of champagne (3) then met people not working in finance.
8:40pm: Meet someone who studied full time at the SFS Qatar campus and knows two of my friends who worked there. He speaks Turkish, Arabic, Armenian and English fluently.
8:44pm: For the first time in my life, someone says "Hi this is Cal Lee and he's interested in going to Armenia." I'm not sure how that happened but it was definitely an escalation in conversation.
9:10pm: Find three other people from my year, Susie O'hare, Abby Zhang and Winston Wang, and talk about 27 year old Hong Kong things.
9:30pm: Realize we've closed out the party. Head on downstairs and wait for the ferry across to TST, cause I mean it's right there.
9:49pm: Man Hong Kong is beautiful tonight. Everyone on the ferry seems to be a tourist.
10:05pm: Was going to meet up with Nick Tsao and go to Shenzhen together, but he seems way behind schedule. Decide I have time to drop off my fancy clothes at work and change. 
10:05pm: There are still 4 coworkers at work who don't seem to hate the fact that they're still working at 10pm on a Friday night. I tell them I'm slightly drunk and on my way to Shenzhen to get more drunk.
10:23pm: I drape my jacket, pants and tie over my chair and bounce down to the light rail line in tshirt and shorts.
11:05pm: I race through the border crossing at Lo Wu and fill my form in expert fashion. I have a new passport now but my China visa is in my old passport, so I expertly hand my passports to immigration open to the right places. The woman seems unfazed by this and stamps me through.
11:07pm: Swarmed by people offering black cab rides. Make the mistake of saying "screw off, I'm taking the metro." Informed the metro is closed. Guy follows me for 100 yards before I tell him he's bothering me and losing money.
11:10pm: Shit, the line for taxis is really long. Damnit China.
11:15pm: I actually offer my destination to a soliciting black cab driver. He asks me to name a price. I say 50 kuai and he laughs me off.
11:14pm: He comes back with 80 kuai and I laugh him off. Two beggars also approach aggressively and initiate physical contact. I have plenty of spare change but I don't appreciate the aggressiveness in a port of entry.
11:35pm: Taxi ride exposes my rusty Mandarin, like when Isaid diaozhuan instead of diaotou. Taxi driver comes within 100 yards of my destination before turning off into a side street for no clear reason. Drops me off and tells me it should be somewhere near here. Thanks shiji.
1140pm: The bar is called Hawa. I run the last half block and excitedly see the name. I run up the stairs like a kid on Christmas morning and almost into a bar called Sugar. Apparently Hawa is the basement bar. I awkwardly walk back down the stairs and enter.
11:41pm: Colin is the first person I see. He totally was not expecting me to come and gives me a huge hug. He's like "we're heading off to KTV, but you can order a beer or something. Oh wait, someone ordered a rum and coke and didn't finish it. Perfect, you can have his leftovers."
11:43pm: I realize I've been here before. I've been to like 4 bars in Shenzhen,  a city of 12 million, and this is one of them.
11:50pm: Everyone gathers outside to head to KTV. Matt Sexton hands me a bowl of punch with 3 straws.
12:05am: A KTV building is conveniently located across the street. There's a piano in the lobby and drunk people go and excitedly hit keys. Sexton's girlfriend Irene can actually play and starts Fur Elise. The keys are hopelessly out of tune like they left the piano through a typhoon. Nonetheless, I beseech to play next and Sexton is like "Irene, let Cal play." I put the bowl of punch off to the side and start playing. It takes 15 bars but Glenn Cornell exclaims, "it's Piano Man!" I don't get far in the song because apparently the black keys are purely ornamental
12:13am: We head upstairs to the real KTV action and there's another piano there. This one actually works. Colin calls on me to perform and for the first time in my life, I play Piano Man to an adoring audience. I miss half the notes.
12:17am: Colin opens up the KTV performance to Avril Lavigne's Complicated. Hits all the high notes. Bruno Mars follows.
12:20am: There's a proper mic stand and Glenn is all over it.
12:25am: The KTV has like a supermarket aisle to purchase singing help. We scoop up a couple dozen cans of cheap beer.
12:45am: The song choices are not randomized, which means the 3 songs I picked come one after another. I crush 2 of the Chinese songs I know and then One Thing by One Direction, which is like One Squared, which is also One.
12:54am: Finish my songs and decide to upgrade from the cheap beer. I was thinking of a going away present for Colin, so a bottle of whiskey during this session seems appropriate. While it might not make sense to pay 800 kuai for this bottle when I wouldn't pay 80 kuai for a cab ride earlier, it did to me at that point.
12:57am: The cashier is unable to process my credit card. She asks me if I got this credit card in Shenzhen. I race my mind trying to think if I've had other encounters where a Chinese credit card machine only took local credit cards. Would this machine process credit cards from Guangzhou? I don't think that's how credit cards work? The beer challenges this recollection process.
1:05am: Run outside to the nearest ATM. At some point I knew how to say ATM in Mandarin, and that they used a different word in Taiwan, but right now I just use 銀行. Run back with 500 kuai like I just robbed a very poor bank.
1:10am: The whiskey arrives and people are confused like there's been a mistake. Well if there was a mistake, I made it.
1:15am: Nobody is drinking the whiskey. Aggressively pour out 8 glasses of whiskey and coke and hand them to people.
1:16am: Oh God there is not enough coke in this glass.
1:33am: Lots of songs.
1:52am: Make Colin do a shot of whiskey with me. I remind him about that time I first met him and he wouldn't let me play with him.
2:08am: There's been like a run of this female pop star.  I can't remember her name but it's all these catchy songs from the last few years. No, not Rihanna, a bit more annoying than her. No, more talented than Miley Cyrus. Less talented than Lady Gaga. Oh it's Katy Perry. My goodness we've sang so many Katy Perry songs.
2:20-2:45am: Complete black hole.
2:45am: Roldy says let's go.
Sometime in the middle of the night: Glenn comes out of his bedroom naked to take a piss. Sees me passed out on the floor and is like "ah who the hell is that?!"
9:30am: Wake up on the carpet of a strange apartment. Complete discombobulation lasts 3 seconds. Pleasantly surprised to find that phone is charged. Piss out about a gallon of processed alcohol from the Pearl River Delta region. Discover there's a mop in the bathroom.
11:50am: Roldy comes out of his room and wakes us up.
11:53am: Celine comes out of her room looking remarkably not dishevelled. Glenn comes out in a bathrobe. I suddenly realize how hungover I am. Drink two bottles of water.
12:50pm: Lunch in a classy cafe that serves quesadillas. Glenn and I act very American. I ask for 3 glasses of water.
1:15pm: Glenn reveals he only just learned that Tommy and Jana were dating.
1:50pm: Oh shit. How did I spend so much time at lunch? Shit I have to be at Hang Hau at 3:30pm to take the shuttle bus to the wedding in Clearwater Bay. And I kinda need to take a dump. No time for that.
2:00pm: Taxi reaches the Huanggang border. Oh I had found 35 kuai in coins while cleaning out my apartment. I pay the driver in coins. He is not amused.
2:02pm: Line to cross immigration is depressingly long. Mentally calculate every minute of my journey time to my office, changing time, and time to Clearwater Bay. I think I need to take some taxis. This is that border crossing that is so long you need to take a bus in between.
2:23pm: Reach the Hong Kong side and get on a Mong Kok bound bus. The hangover is quite real. I begin to have my first regrets of going to Shenzhen. Still need to take a dump.
3:00pm: Still on the bus. Concede shuttle bus defeat.
3:02pm: Man I really need to take a dump. But I realize I need to take out cash for the wedding Lai See present. Balls. Redirect route planning to the HSBC ATMs in Pioneer Center because my office building doesn't have an ATM except inside the MTR station.
3:05pm: Bus finally lands and I run off. Almost vomit on the streets of Mong Kok but rein it in. Dash to the Pioneer Centre.
3:08pm: There are 15 people in line for the ATM. WTF. Immediate regrets not going into the MTR station ATM.
3:27pm: Finally make it back to my office. Take my clothes into the bathroom. Details will be omitted here but let's just say I took that dump and changed into my suit within 4 minutes.
3:31pm: Put on my American tie for the first time. Tie was given as an award in 2012 and is so ridiculous looking that I've never worn it. Crush a bottle of cranberry juice that I have at work and run down to get a taxi.
4:00pm: Taxi ride to Clearwater Bay Golf & Country Club is very long, and there are lots of winding roads once you leave civilization. The hangover intensifies exponentially with car sickness. Stealthily lower the window slightly.
4:10pm: Reach the country club and stumble outside the taxi. Try to gauge whether I can make it to a bathroom. Can't. I make it as far as a small bush next to the entrance before yaking. The cranberry juice comes right out. Hold my tie against me as I throw up more water.
4:11pm: I'm still throwing up. Food is coming out now. This is a low moment in my life.
4:12pm: Finally done throwing up. Turn around and see Clay Carol and Kim Alexandersen staring at me. "Are you ok? We thought you were an elderly man suffering a heart attack or something."
4:13pm: Wedding time.

Mixed Feelings

It's an all-too-typical scene for me: I walk up to the cashier at Manning's and greet the cashier with a casual "你好." Perhaps this is my giveaway - Chinese culture tends to be light on unnecessary formalities. "Have membership card?" the cashier replies in an incredibly strong Hong Kong accent. The slight is unintended and perhaps unperceived by you. But I come across it daily, and while I typically ignore it, today I take it head on. I ask him, "你可不可以同我講中文？ (Can you speak to me in Chinese?)" The cashier apologizes with a deep shade of embarrassment, and quickly tells me the price in Cantonese. I thank him after collecting my change and move on.

An all-too-typical question to me: "Which of your parents is white?" As many times as I've heard this question, I still lack a quick response. The answer the questioner wants to hear is "my mother", but this answer sells out my mother, with which I'm not comfortable. I gauge how long I want to spend talking to my conversation partner(s) and I choose either the simple answer. "Neither. They're both Chinese." A true statement that I'm perfectly comfortable delivering. Generally, this is accepted with minor acclaim and the conversation proceeds as normal. Occasionally, I get retorts of disbelief and accusatory follow up questions. I will hear "then why do you look like what you do? Are you sure?" from generally well-mannered people unaware how rude they sound while assigning someone a race to their own satisfaction. To avoid this line of questioning, I sometimes give a longer response. "Neither, but my mom's family is mixed. Both my parents were born and raised in Hong Kong." The conversation will never stop here. The most common followup question I hear is "oh so you're 1/4?" I'll generally take this comment in stride, while making a note to self that I probably shouldn't talk advanced mathematics with this person and their limited vocabulary of fractions. For these simple people, I'll sometimes say, "Sure," more willing to sell out a grandparent I've never met.

Young siblings

An atypical scene happened in the waning days of 2005. I was in the dark days of college applications, having just spent my entire winter break writing college essays for Ivy League schools and non-common app schools (damn you Northwestern). My parents had been overly involved in this process from the very first page of the application form and had poured a lot of sweat into making me express the very best of myself. For every application, I checked Asian in the race/ethnicity box without much thought. However as it came time for me to send out the application for Pomona, a school I only knew about because of my cousin Andrew Barnet, I thought about filling in an extra box. Andrew's father is a white man from Ohio, and I figured if my biracial cousin could get into Pomona, maybe I should try being biracial as well. I stealthily went back to page one, ticked "White" as well, and closed the application before I felt too guilty about it. It felt like a bold lie on an official form, but I told myself, "technically you are part white."

Tse family photo

The details about my ancestry get complicated quickly. Yes my mom is the mixed one, but her parents are both mixed. Further complicating matters, her parents/my grandparents were distant cousins, sharing the same full blooded white European ancestor. There is likely at least another white European ancestor in the family. The one I'm most aware of is Charles Bosman, a Dutchman who traded in Guangzhou and Hong Kong in the late 1800's. His son Robert Ho Tung was definitely a halfie, and he became Sir Robert Ho Tung, whose bilingual skills made him invaluable in the growth days of Hong Kong and became the first Chinese knighted by the British. My uncle has set aside a portion of his retirement into investigating our heritage, visiting Bosman's grave in London and publishing an ancestry book. He believes Bosman was Jewish with roots outside of Holland, but that we likely aren't related to him at all, instead having Parsi blood (Zoroastrian practicers banished from Persia in the 1500s and mostly migrated East) through some off the books relationship. The most precise fraction I've seen for our non-Chinese part is 13/64, and I've made sure this calculation is possible, but honestly I have no clue if it's true. But it doesn't really matter.  None of these details affect my identity. I don't have a direct fully Caucasian relative alive, and neither does my mom. She grew up what they call Eurasian in Hong Kong, speaking Cantonese primarily but English secondarily, and it was only after I came here that I realized how atypical her experience was from that of the average local. But she moved to the eastern US where she was just Asian, at a time when there weren't many, and I don't think being mixed has had any part of her identity for a long time.

My dad is "just" Chinese, but even his family history takes a few lines to retell properly. He was born in Hong Kong into a Shanghainese family who were refugees anticipating Cultural Revolution purges. They spoke Shanghainese at home and identified as Shanghainese, but in reality, their history in Shanghai spanned only two generations and their ancestral hometown was somewhere in Hunan. They claim to have some Manchurian blood, with some relation to the last Emperor of China Pu Yi, but the details may have passed away with my great-grandmother. My grandfather was extremely adventurous and quite a gambler, a combination that saw my dad move to Brazil, back to Hong Kong, to Sierra Leone, New York City, Boston, Cote D'Ivoire and back to Boston. He has since lived a decade in Shanghai, a city he visited for the first time in his 30's.

My own history is far less interesting. I was born and raised in suburban Boston, and I grew up Chinese-American. I had two Chinese parents, played chess and piano, excelled at math and sucked at basketball. I went to China for 3 months in college and for the first time, I was told by a society around me that maybe I'm white. Only two and a half years removed from guiltily ticking "white" in that college application form, I was giving an English lesson to a Chinese man, and somehow I ended up writing my Chinese name. He asked me, "how did you get this Chinese name?" and I replied that my parents gave it to me. "Really? Why? You're Chinese?" Turns out he legitimately believed the whole time that I was completely white, which was an utter shock to me. This was far from the last such instance.

Too often I am assigned an ancestral history that isn't mine, and often without me realizing it. Many times I've discovered years into a friendship that a good friend had thought I was half white the whole time. They were misinformed about me for years. To a great credit to today's society, this hasn't usually mattered much, because as far as I can tell, people have treated me the same whether they thought I was Chinese or half Chinese. But when I do correct people who mistakenly call me a halfie, they rarely get what the big deal is. "But it's a good thing! Halfies are really good looking!" said my friend after she introduced me as her halfie friend, for the second time. True, halfie is nothing like a racial slur and it seems for whatever reason that most societies' conceptions of attractiveness venerate Asian-Caucasian mixes. So really, why should I care that someone gets my racial background slightly wrong?

Because the truth matters. The difference between my experience and that of a half-Chinese half-White guy has significant differences. I was never a child walking down the streets with parents who looked nothing like me or each other, receiving bewildered stares from people. I never had to choose between adopting my father's or my mother's cultural heritage. I never spoke a language that only one of parents understood (and still don't, because I think my mom understands more Mandarin than she lets on). I never heard any lessons of "good old American values" from a white grandparent. I never grew up as a mixed kid - I grew up as a Chinese kid in America.  And guess what? I never thought I looked mixed. When you grow up everyday thinking you're Chinese, everyday you look in the mirror you're going to see the reflection of a Chinese kid. Now that I've had several years dealing with people telling me that I'm mixed, I start to look in the mirror and think maybe I look mixed. But I still don't think I look like a halfie.

I am also fully aware that I'm far from alone in the experience of constantly being on the receiving end of incorrect assumptions. I bet all mixed people have experienced this in some way. Most anyone who speaks a foreign language will experience this in some fashion. I will say though, I've been the "Chinese guy" who had to rely on a white person for linguistic help while learning Mandarin in China, and I've been the "white guy" whom Mainland Chinese people had to rely on for linguistic help in Hong Kong. I'm not sure that's a typical experience.

Anyway, while most Asian Americans I know are put off when people assume they can't speak English, the "Forever Foreigner" stereotype, that rarely happens to me in the states. Probably that's part of my privilege growing up educated in liberal diverse areas, but even when it does happen it's easy to shake off. That's because my Americanness is unshakeable - it's a permanent part of my identity that I'm totally secure in, partially because the concept of American is so fluid. Try as he might, not even Donald Trump could deny me my Americanness. I'm definitely less secure in my Chineseness, partly because it's not so well defined worldwide and some people have a very restrictive view of it.

So when a cashier doing his job assumes I'm not Chinese and speaks to me in English, it doesn't seem like a big deal. But it hurts me. The U.S. equivalent would be a Hispanic immigrant who spent many years in the U.S. and learned English going into a store and having a white clerk ask in 6th grade Spanish "tienes bago?" Many such shoppers would feel offended and wonder if they would ever feel truly accepted in this country. And perhaps for me it's even more personal. Even though English is my best language, I actually spoke Cantonese first. It is inextricably tied to my identity especially my Chinese identity. When I hear parents telling their kids "乖乖地,小朋友要聽話" it resonates back to my childhood. So when someone tries to deny that language to me, I feel like a dart has been thrown at me. Even more painful is when I'm debating Asian-American issues, and my argument gets this rebuttal: "well you wouldn't understand, you're mixed." Few things would get me more riled up, so luckily this has only happened twice.


So back to the cashier. Yes I get it. We all have to make some judgement calls and when I have to ask some Chinese stranger on the street, I will talk to him first in Chinese, even though I don't know for sure that's his first language. And when I see a Caucasian stranger, I will always use English first. The reasons why cashiers in Hong Kong instinctively use English has a historical backdrop in colonialism that has nothing to do with me. These instances occur much more often in places with a long history of service to westerners like Bangkok, Hong Kong and Philippines rather than say in Taiwan or South Korea. Hong Kong is a city where westerners almost never learn Cantonese, and both the local and western community seem to accept this without any qualms. The language situation here is another post entirely (and likely will get one soon). So when I am able to properly consider all that context...no I can't really fault the cashier. Yet at the same time, I don't fault myself for feeling bothered. It's certainly a paradox isn't it?

So how do I want people to interact with me? Don't get me wrong, I totally welcome asking about my race/ethnicity. I never shy away from asking others, and I ask directly (none of this 'where are you really from?).  The point is, we have to be more educated in the way we talk and think about race. Being mixed does not mean half one race half another race, and future generations hereon out are only going to be more complicated. You will also likely encounter more "third culture kids" of mixed race. If you don't learn how to talk to and understand these people, you will be that crockety old grandparent who embarrasses the younger generation. Reduce your assumptions as much as possible, and just ask curious but respectful questions. And even if you find to your satisfaction that the person in front of you has a grandfather from Italy, a grandmother from Korea, another grandfather from Turkey and a grandmother who was adopted into an Irish-American family...well that might not actually tell you anything about who the person in front of you really is.

P.S. Pomona was the most selective school that accepted me.

Homecoming Narratives

I cut a syrup-laden piece of the fluffy waffle I had ordered to my brother. I tried to get a good amount of fruit on it as well, and in the process a blueberry went overboard and fell on the floor.  I gave a small sigh of remorse, scooped the piece over to him, and went back to eating my waffle. DJ got up and picked the blueberry, and dropped it onto my napkin. I sheepishly thanked him, embarassed that it hadn’t even crossed my mind to do the same.

The waitress walks by our table and my drink had been empty for quite some time and I tried to flag her down. “Put your hand down Cal!” my friend Kerry yelled at me. I sheepishly lowered my waving arm, not sure what I had done. “You’re not in class, you don’t need to wave your hand to get the waitress to come over!”

Having spent over three years now living on a continent eating mainly in restaurants with dirty floors and inattentive service staff, I come across as a blustering rude philistine in my home country. It’s both embarrassing and fascinating, embarassing because I wasn’t raised to be disrpesectful, fascinating because it gives me even more sympathy for the “uncivilized” manners that mainlanders are accused of exhibiting when visiting Hong Kong.  Not only can I wave my arms to grab a waitress’ attention in Hong Kong, I can shout “waitress!” to get one to come over.

I have lots of Hong Kong-honed instincts now. My feet were glued to the first crosswalk I encountered in America, not sure why that approaching car was slowing down. I instinctively carve space for myself when getting ready to leave the subway cars. And I go inside bathrooms in restaurants and bars and I freak out that there’s space to turn around.  I’m not sure how the experiences of the first 23 years of my life can fade away so completely, but this is clearly an example of out of sight out of mind. For the first time in my life, a life which began with 18 consecutive years in suburban Boston, I feel like a third-culture kid without a country or culture.

I’m not sure how I really got here. You can write your own narrative, but that doesn’t mean it’s accurate. That doesn’t mean there aren’t plot elements that you’ve forgotten, or never noticed, or deliberately choose to ignore. For example, I like to start my story as an 18 year old sports-obsessed unworldly college student who was home in suburban Massachusetts working an ordinary suburban college job teaching tennis.  It so happened a coworker that summer showed up fresh from Ireland, with startlingly few solid plans but lots of great stories.  It also so happened that the Summer Olympics were to take place in Beijing the following summer. Though these two events were completely unrelated, the former inspired me to attend the latter and circumstances were favorable enough for this to become possible.  Once in Beijing, I found myself overtaken by the sheer mass of China in front of me, but otherwise took notes on what was different, asked people how to say this or that in the local language, and started practicing my stories for when I got home. Along the way, I met up with a cousin of mine who had moved to Shanghai from the staes and stayed for many years. He told me to not look down on anything in China as inferior, but just as different and try to understand the nuanced context around everything. I laughed and exclaimed that surely he knew I was an educated bleeding heart liberal who wouldn’t make such prejudiced judgements. But his followup example, of left turn only lanes in the middle of a multi-laned road in China, stood out to me. I had only noticed that these lanes made no sense – why wouldn’t you place them on the left-most lane of the road? But because in China, there was no way to turn left except on a left-turn only traffic signal, and in the middle lane, this turning angle was much better. It was a strange concept to my American wired brain, but perhaps it wasn’t so crazy.

Chance conversations like that might have separated me from the many many other westerners who came that summer, saw some Olympic events, and then never went back. But I came back, two summers later in 2010, and then in 2011 to Hong Kong for these many years. Perhaps that conversation set me on a different trajectory. Or perhaps my father’s presence in Shanghai was a much more major influencer. Or my parents’ collective histories of immigration. Or my own sense of community and self-respect. Or perhaps I would have stayed in America for the rest of my life had it not been for a job opening from a family friend in the summer of 2010. These aren’t the sort of questions that have answers.

Whatever it is, I’ve become a very different person from who I was when I was a newbie Laowai in 2008. I no longer have that same mindset, and I no longer remember what that mindset would think. That pre-Beijing version of me would have a similar conception with most other Americans of Asia as an unknown, mysterious land of disparately equally foreign people. Flash forward to April 2015 and I'm in a backyard patio in Arlington, VA with a group of friends and friends of friends. Everyone is within my peer group - in fact, most of us were college classmates. Everyone else seems to have been friends for many years going through similar life experiences in metropolitan DC and the conversations flow that way built upon layers of mutual understanding and omissions of plot exposition, because it's the third movie in a series and everyone has seen the first two. Eventually the scene focused on me, the guy who had just returned from Hong Kong, and I was asked to comment on the protests taken place there only a few months previously. I was well prepared to give these comments (or so I thought) having written an extensive post on my many thoughts on the protests' origins, effectiveness and what they mean for national identity, economics and race relations. I'd talked about this before a lot - for a month it was all we talked about in Hong Kong. But even my friends elsewhere, in Beijing, Seoul, Singapore, America - they all had questions for me regarding the well-publicized events. And now I found myself talking about it again, but as I talked about the public takeover of streets, the power imbalance, the vestiges of colonialism, cultural identity and sub-nationalism and...I saw eyes glazing over. And I was immediately taken aback, and awkwardly stopped. 

For sure I was probably being very boring and overly academic, but I realized upon reflection that this is what it means to come back to a place you no longer fit into. This is what it means to be a third cultural kid. This is what it feels like to talk about issues that are extremely relevant to your life to people to whom they are completely irrelevant. Many of the peers I was with, despite a worldly education, did not have much of a conception of China or Hong Kong. The Occupy Central news stories in the past year blur into the likes of the Syrian Civil War, and the kidnappings in Nigeria, and the refugee crises in Southeast Asia - no more relatable or lamentable or inspirational.

Anyway, it wasn't just this topic. I found that a Venn Diagram of the conversation topics I had in DC and the ones I have in Hong Kong has a frustratingly slim middle section. I was able to "pass" though, by digging into my memory bank and retrieving sports references and coffeeshop locations. It comes back pretty quickly, and I had a great time in the states with my friends. But it did make me question whether I was ready to return home, whether I was prepared to say goodbye semi-permanently to a big chunk of my life. For I realized it's more than just the location. It's not just about the people, the languages, the food, the currency - it's the desire to not accept the geographical hand that you were dealt and to enhance your personal global story. And it's the experiences that come directly from that, which sound pompous to those who have not been able to have them, and make up the conversations to those who have been able to have them.

Trevor Noah

The Daily Show announced yesterday that Trevor Noah will be succeeding Jon Stewart as the host of the Daily Show. Now I don't cover news in my blog much, if ever, because I only post like once every two months. But I feel compelled to talk about this story. In fact, I'm positively obsessed with this story and I'm not entirely sure why. But here I'll try to explain.

Many people, me including, are totally surprised by this pick and at the risk of sounding too self-centered, it feels like it attracts mainly my demographic: 25-34, educated internationally-minded multicultural-philiacs. In fact, Trevor Noah's act fits in very well in expat circles, where his biracial upbringing, language skills and accent impersonations would receive huge acclaim. As the son of a Swiss German father and a Xhosa mother of Jewish background during Apartheid South Africa, his origin story has the trappings of Third Culture Kid identity issues that many of my friends can relate to, mixed with major policies of oppression that few of us can relate to. I'm not sure of his linguistic roots exactly, but he probably grew up speaking English and Afrikaans in school and isZulu and Sotho in the Soweto township he grew up, only later learning his parents' languages of German and Xhosa. In his standups, I've heard him do great impersonations of Americans, Brits, Africans, Australians and even a Chinese airport announcer in passable fake Mandarin. When people call South Africa the Rainbow Nation, they are hoping to move past the ugly Apartheid past and into the country's untapped potential manifested in Trevor Noah.

Can you tell I like this guy? I also really like Jon Stewart and the Daily Show. How often do two things you like combine and make a third thing you like? The Daily Show has become a singularly American institution and while Trevor has shown an ability to pick up local nuances quickly, he is very much a newbie to our country. The show taps on the liberal pulse of the nation and covers a lot of very American issues. Sure the show had a foreign correspondent who was a temporary fill in for 3 months in John Oliver, but part of John's success there and now as host of Last Week Tonight is that he really understands America. John Oliver's international perspective allows him to comment on sensitive American issues without letting pride or feelings come in, but it is his many years living here that allows him to go on rants about issues like Civil Forfeitures and Municipal Violations. It is these issues that disproportionately affect poor Americans that most middle-upper class foreigners would struggle to understand. For sure Trevor Noah will have to at least take the show to a slightly different direction.

There was a lot of speculation who would take over Stewart as host when he announced earlier this year that he'd be leaving after 17 years at the helm. It very likely would have been Oliver had he not already gone to HBO. The next in seniority, Jason Jones or Samantha Bee, would probably both have been great hosts. This was highlighted in a funny sketch where those two and the correspondents Jessica Williams, Al Madrigal bitterly complain when John Oliver got the guest host gig over them. The sketch's humor papered over a real sadness. Going from correspondent to host is such a dramatic career upgrade and an opportunity that just doesn't come around often. But it's obviously a very important decision for the network and not necessarily one where you reward the hardest worker. I really believe that for a show that spends so much time covering liberal issues and mocking conservative groups for their lack of diversity, they felt a really strong need to bring a non-white male voice to the role. And in this case, perhaps Jason Jones really was the victim of reverse racism, because as deserving as he was of the role, there really was no way Comedy Central would pick him. And while claims of reports of white males being discriminated in America and greatly exaggerated, in this case of a limited high profile role, it is probably legitimate. I'm not sure why the Comedy Central brass passed over Samantha Bee - females are more of a minority in comedy than blacks - but both her and Jason Jones (they're married) have moved onto other shows after presumably learning they will not be able to host.

This issue fits into the greater issue of workplace diversity as a whole. Why do we want a diverse workforce? It's a huge question. a) we want to get the best staff, and don't want institutional racism to disadvantage worthy workers b) we want different views that a diverse staff/leadership bring to the direction of a company c) we want the staff makeup to reflect that of the business customers to better address/understand their needs/concerns. Those points are all critical here but c) may be the most underrated one. The Daily Show demographic is becoming more and more racially diverse and having someone with a nuanced understanding of race and culture is critical for the job, given the direction in which Stewart has led the show.

On a side note, Trevor Noah's humor touches a lot on race and culture and this has gotten him some criticism since the big announcement. People have scoured over his twitter record and found among the heap of his many humorous tweets some objectionable jokes, mainly to Jews and women. I won't delve into the tweet details because I think these objections are mostly not well founded, but they do show that Noah will have to adapt to American sensibilities and those of historically discriminated groups here. He probably didn't have a full understanding growing up in Africa of the stereotypes that Jews are maligned with here, but he'll have to get that. Jon Stewart is probably an ideal coach in this area. Noah wil have to come to understand Americans much faster than Americans will come to understand him.

Cal's Guide to Asian Cities

This guide is very me. I've spent quite some time traveling around Asia, mostly to cities, and here is a wayward collection of experiences and opinions dressed up into a guide. All travel tips, pictures, puns, and snarky comments are mine. If you don't like me, you won't like this.

Bangkok

Minimum Time: 2 days

Linguistic Notes: Bangkok isn't the official name for the city. The official name comes from Pali and Sanskrit root words, ancient languages of northern India which were the scripture languages for Buddhism, similar to ancient Hebrew and Aramaic for Christianity.

Do: Bangkok has a lot going for it. There is a reason the city has often been the most visited city in the world. The Grand Palace is golden and grand as are so many temples. There are happening markets, riverboat tours, and so many malls. The food options are tremendous, with street-side vendors selling skewers and orange Thai Iced teas and many different regional Thai cuisines packing their own spices. Then the sun disappears and trucks open up Transformer-style into parked bars, night markets emerge, tourists and locals alike rage underneath expressways and interesting night shows shall we say take place. Bangkok is similar this way to Amsterdam and New Orleans - there's plenty to do culturally, but that's not why you're really there. 2 days is enough to scratch the surface, but especially when factoring hangover time, 3 or 4 is recommended.

Pun Factor: 10. While not unanimous, Bangkok is at least a Thai for punniest city in Asia. There's a reason schoolchildren ask "What's the capital of Thailand?" before punching you in the balls. "Let's go to the temple." "Wat Pho?" There's also a MRT station called Nana, which even locals find funny.

Beijing

Minimum Time: 4 days

NLGX

Linguistic Footnote: Beijing (北京) means Northern Capital. There is also a Southern Capital (Nanjing - 南京) and an Eastern Capital (Tokyo － 东京). 

Do: China has 5,000 years of history and a lot of it took place in Beijing. Large restored sections of The Great Wall are an hour away and are required for Chinese to "become real Chinese." The Forbidden City and Summer Palace preserve some parts of the last dynasty, and Tiananmen Square will invoke more recent Chinese history. There's the Drum Tower and other sections of the former city wall, numerous temples, other former imperial courtyards and gardens, upscale shopping, hidden Hutongs, crazy nightlife, Peking duck, the huge Summer palace, the 798 art district, Beihai park, Nanluoguxiang street, the CCTV tower, the Bird's Nest, the Olympic Sites and some of the world's worst air. The city as a whole is a great collection of tough people from all over China who have been through a lot.  Due to the spread of the city, you really need 4 days to do it properly.

Pun Factor: 4. I heart BJ, as well as heart getting Tanked in Tiananmen (original name of this blog).

Guangzhou

Minimum Time: 1.5 days

Linguistic Notes: Guangzhou has historically been known to the Western world as Canton. When the Portuguese arrived in the 1500s, there really wasn't a name for this city, but the province name was/is Guangdong. The Portuguese somehow transformed this into Canton. Oh don't worry, we will delve more into Portuguese trans-phonetics in this blog post.

Guang-tham City?

Do: Guangzhou is a historic center of trade, trading with the Arab world as early as the 9th century. There's some history to be found, like the former colonial enclaves and the church on Shamian Island, some old school Cantonese architecture and a museum dedicated to the father of modern China, Sun Yat-Sen from nearby. But despite the long history and its reputation as the birthplace of Cantonese culture, Guangzhou really disappointed me in the cultural category. It's modernized into any other Chinese metropolis. It sprawls into other cities with far too many people, and with road names like Jie Fang South Road divided by the same plastic white gates, Guangzhou typically feels like any other city in China. On the plus side, there are some cool modern residential buildings in Zhujiang New Town, and some cool teahouses and a very solid nightlife scene. The city is so big that if you actually do want to see the sights, it'll take a while, but the sights aren't all that special.

Pun Factor: 1. I cant(on) even.

Hong Kong

Minimum time: 2 days

Linguistic Notes: Hong and Kong do not actually rhyme in Cantonese.

Do: I originally came up with the concept of "minimum time" to help tourists plan their trip to Hong Kong. Despite the often overwhelming density, Hong Kong (Skyscraper City) is arguably a better place to live than to visit. The main attraction is that skyline, as seen from the the Peak (take the tram up for old timeyness, or a taxi up waiting behind 100 people for a 100 year old ride isn't your thing), the Star Ferry, the ICC Sky bar, the Avenue of Stars, or one of hundreds of great spots weaved into the mountainside. First timers to Asia generally enjoy the Big Buddha statue out in Lantau, which is larger taller in meters (34) than it is old in years (21). There's street stall shopping in Mong Kok and Temple Street, colonial history in Tsim Sha Tsui and Sheung Wan, aggressive hooker bars in Wan Chai, a crowded materialistic public area creatively named Times Square, and the world's heaviest concentration of debauchery upon a steep gradient in Lan Kwai Fong (LKF). Because of the city's great transportation system, that can all be done in 2 days and still leave you time to spend way too much money on a purse. If you want off the beaten path, there's the park/outdoor museum in the former Kowloon Walled City, incredible hiking trails all over the territory, easily accessible beaches, charming streets in Sham Shui Po, an old tram that locals call the Ding Ding, the Asia Society's intricate connection to the mountainside, and so much great food that you might get too full to do any of these things. The connected elevated walkways in Central are also attractive to those who like urban design, while fans of skyscraper architecture could consider this their Mecca. My five favorite buildings here: 1) Bank of China 2) HSBC Building 3) K11 4) The Centre Building 5) Carnegie's.

Pun Factor: 5. Haters like to call this place Hong Wrong, fans like to call it King Kong, but I'm not sure how long you can keep these puns strong. I was proven wrong though, by this: http://mashable.com/2015/01/13/hong-kong-metro-puns/ . I would like to say I wish I came up with those, but I really don't. 

Kuala Lumpur

Minimum Time: 2 days

Linguistic Notes: Its name means "muddy estuary" but read my previous post for way more linguistic background on Malaysian Chinese than you'll ever want to know.

Do: Kuala Lumpur only developed as a major city out of a tin mine in the late 1800s.  The only must-see in KL are the Petronas Towers which splendidly stand out in a skyline that gives it very little competition. The Batu caves are slightly outside the city, still accessible by metro, and are very cool for the large statue 43m statue of Hindu deity Lord Murugan and the awe inspiring (and bat-filled) caves up the mountain. Chinatown is cool if you don't live in a Chinese city, Merdeka Square is nice but empty, several of the Mosques are notable, and there are some fairly epic malls (Pavilion, Suria KLCC) because no Asian city would be complete without those, and a surprisingly strong nightlife scene in the Golden Triangle, especially for a Muslim country.  The food though is the main draw, and I cannot underemphasize how good and varied the cuisine in KL is, from Nasi Lemak to South Indian roti to Bakuteh. Malaysia's tourism slogan is "Malaysia, Truly Asia" which I find pretty fitting (and better than the alternative: Malaysia, the Airplane Mystery State). The city is not only incredibly diverse with so many Asian ethnicities and languages visibly represented, but it also exhibits many of the forces facing Asian cities today, including modernization eroding tradition, religious tension, traffic problems and solutions, pollution and the smell of durian. Whatever your preconceptions of Asia are, you will probably find them in Kuala Lumpur. 

Pun Factor: 2. It seems like you got something to work with here, but I got nothing of kuala-ty. I just got a ton of bad ideas all lumpur-ed together. 

Macau:

Minimum Time: 4 hours

Linguistic Notes: Macau sounds nothing like the Chinese name for this city (Cantonese: Ou Mun. Mandarin: Ào Mén). It is possibly named after an A Ma Temple that used to be there (A Ma Gok), but my theory is that the Portuguese were just terrible at transliterating names. I mean, they thought that Canton sounded like Guangdong. Also the current Portuguese spelling of Macau replaces Macao which is confusingly still used, even in official capacities.

Do: Count the number of face cards and non-face cards, and when the non-face cards outnumber the face cards by 10, start betting big. There's the Venetian, the Sands, the MGM Grand and the Casino Lisboa, none of which will kick you out for staring and all of which will let you slobber their free milk teas. Other than the the casinos, there are some cute European streets, a large historical Chinese house called the Mandarin House, the House of Dancing Water Show, the lovely Portuguese seaside restaurant Fernando's and the remaining wall of the St. Paul's Cathedral. Truth be told, Macau has had a rich and interesting cultural history, similar to Hong Kong, as an independent polity next to a turbulent mainland China. It was one of the earliest European colonies in Asia, and the most recently returned. However, unlike Hong Kong, Macau has ceased to develop it's own industry and has instead sold out to a comfortable quality of life financed entirely by mainland gamblers' losses. All that is left of the heart and soul of Macau is a burnt-out facade, which is physically manifested in the St. Paul's Cathedral.

Pun factor: 3. When introducing a local specialty item to Macau, what lazy name can McDonald's executives come up with? The Macau McCow.  

Manila 

Minimum Time: 1 day

Linguistic Notes: Most Americans just assume that people speak Spanish in the Philippines because so many Filipinos use Spanish names. But nowadays, nobody speaks Spanish

Do: Manilans will quickly tell you that next to Warsaw, Manila was the city second most devastated by World War II. This is used to explain why there isn't a whole lot of special visible history. There is a lot of Spanish influence in the background, in the old stone architecture and horse-drawn carriages, and a lot of American influence in the foreground, in the road signs and Krispy Kreme stores. There are aspects of Manila that fit into any leading global city, from the Mall of Asia to the clubs of Makati to the Fully Booked bookstore in Alabang. There also lots of leaky slums and crammed jeepney rides that show the poverty still rampant throughout the country. Rizal Park is worth checking out, as well as St Augustin Cathedral, Intramuros and Chinatown. See some of the sites, get to know some Filipinos and see why they're awesome and then leave the city to learn more about the country if that's what you want.

Pun Factor: 6. What do offices in Manila use? Manila folders. What do you call a white rapper from here? Manila Ice. Maybe it's true what they say: It's more pun in the Pilippines.

Mumbai

Minimum time: 2 days

Linguistic Notes: This city was called Bombay for many years before a 1990s belated decolonization name change, and is still referred to as such by many longtime residents, in a similar manner to how Aussies might call Uluru as Ayer's Rock. Bombay might come from the Portuguese words for "good bay", which seems kinda lame, or it might come from a brutal mishearing of the local Marathi word Mumbai. As we have established, the Portuguese are terrible with foreign languages. The city has historically been referred to "as Mumbai or Mambai in Marathi, Konkani, Gujarati, Kannada and Sindhi, and as Bambai in Hindi, Persian and Urdu." 

Do: One's experience in Mumbai/Bombay will likely depend on one's familiarity with India. Out of context, Mumbai can be a very overwhelming city, a dense dizzying array of people, colors, aromas and sporadic Bollywood dance numbers. The main sights include the city harbour with the Gateway to India arch, the adjacent Taj Mahal hotel, and the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (call it VT). Other reasons to visit Mumbai include the beaches, the temples (Hindu, Jain, Sikh and Parsi are well-represented), the food and the museums. And the food is really, really good. If you can arrange it, a tour through the slums will provide a glimpse into the reality of over half the city's population. On the flip side, if you want to throw up, you could try to get a glimpse into the life of the 0.1% and see Antilia, the world's first $1 billion home.  Like several other cities in this list though, Mumbai is a younger city with far more to offer businessmen than it does tourists. 

Pun Factor: 5. The city was formerly the Bomb, but now is kinda mum. 

Osaka

Minimum Time: 2.5 days

Linguistic Notes: People from Osaka have a distinctive accent in Japanese 

Semi-enclosed shopping way struck by lightning

Do: Osaka is the second biggest of Japan's metropolises and one if its former capitals, but suffered a lot of damage in World War II. The main site, Osaka Castle, is a "ferroconcrete reconstruction" and while an informative museum and nice view, does not take you back to the days of samurais and ninjas. Dotonburi with the famous running man billboard is very bright and sensory overloading, and the same can be said of the neighborhood of Namba, which launched a popular band of rotating female dancers/singers called NMB 48. Shitenno-ji Temple is worth visiting if you haven't seen too many Japanese temples, and a baseball game is definitely a good experience for those familiar with the sport. There is also a giant outdoor climbing wall in the shape of a bowling ball that hangs over a street. Osaka is a good introduction to Japan, known as a great city to eat and drink, from high end sushi to fried innards underneath a railway bridge. Walk along the beautiful canals, the covered shopping alleyways, eat the fried food and then take a train to Kyoto, Kobe or Nara.

Pun Factor: 2. O for Pete's Sake don't try.

Seoul

Minimum Time: 3 days

Linguistic Notes: Most places in Seoul and Korea have corresponding Hanja Chinese characters due

to the historical Chinese brought written language. Seoul did not and recently decided on a phonetic transcription of 首爾. However the Chinese name had been 漢城 meaning city on the Han River or Han City, which is kinda confusing because Han is also the name for the Chinese people.

Do: Seoul is a loaded functional city. It's divided by a river and develops into the mountainside, with old and labyrinthine neighborhoods in between.  For tourist sites, the regal palace is a B version of the Forbidden City, but all told the Five Grand Palaces in Seoul are great examples of classic Korean architecture. Seoul City Hall and Dongdaemun Design Plaza among the many curved compelling pieces of modern architecture in the city. Seoul has a ton of museums, notably the National Museum of Art, the National Folk Museum and the Samsung founder's personal project Leeum Museum. Seoul boasts shrines that the UN has deemed worthwhile, an Olympic park, the Banpo Rainbow Bridge (which both crosses water and spurts out water) and the most wired city in the world (wifi everywhere). There are so many great food options, including street side tents and even food without kimchee. The drink option are impressive as well, whether you want to cheers with English teachers in Hongdae or Itaewon, get drunk under the table by Soju-hardened Koreans in Sinchon, or go upscale and pay homage to Psy in Gangnam. You could do Seoul in 2 days (if you don't spend too much time hungover) because there aren't exactly must-dos in this city, but you certainly won't get bored with a 3rd day.

Pun Factor: 10. Whether you arrive via the Seoul plane or Seoul train or by the Seouls of your shoes, hope you make some Seoul mates and leave a Seoul survivor. But due to the existence of Bangkok, Seoul is not the sole leader of Asian puns.

Shanghai

Minimum Time: 1.5 days

Linguistic Notes: The Wu dialect that emerged from the surrounding area is the descendant of the Chinese language that most influenced Japanese Kanji. The pronunciations of these characters have all evolved, but they still sound closest when comparing Shanghainese with the Japanese.

Do: The touristy aspects of Shanghai are essentially contained within one panoramic shot from the Bund and a walk underground in the most touristy tunnel imagineable to the other side of the Huangpu and the Oriental Pearl Tower. There's Xintiandi, a rare example of a redevelopment of a traditional Chinese neighborhood into an upscale commercial pedestrian zone that does not make you vomit. Actually, I don't really know much about Shanghai because even though my dad lives there and I've been there over a half dozen times, he takes me to the same places every time.  If you want to take the James Lee tour of Shanghai, then get some spicy crayfish in the wee hours, jog around tourists to the Bund, dine at the TMSK restaurant for their fusion band, visit the exquisite wooden furniture by an acclaimed artist/architect at a store/exhibition called 半木, and go to that one Japanese restaurant where you have to duck your head to enter. Apparently there's the Zhujiajiao Water Town far to the southwest of the city; but if you're gonna go that far, you might as well go to Hangzhou. Other than that, go to Shanghai and enjoy the First World offerings. That might mean tasting a Coldstone Creamery in a mall, drinking martinis in a 70th storey hotel bar, gawking at the bottle opener building or the even taller Shanghai Tower, regurgitating lots of East meets West cliches, or stuffing your face full of Xiaolongbao.

Pun Factor: 4. In this city, the proof of the pun is in the Pudong. It helps that Shanghai has become a verb in English, and that if you fly from Shanghai to Mumbai (analogous cities), you are literally going from Hai to Bai.

Shenzhen

Minimum Time: 1 day

Linguistic Notes: I got nothing here.

Can't we all just Paidui?

Do: If you want to know how different Chinese are from Westerners, all you have to know is that Shenzhen is a major tourist destination within China. Lots of Westerners living in Hong Kong would be shocked from this, because their experience of Shenzhen is usually something like the scene on the right, a mad scramble across the border to a much less polite city. In actuality, Shenzhen is one of the most developed and most Western cities in China, with a mind boggling skyrocketing pace of development. Chinese people enjoy seeing the fake Eiffel Tower in Windows of the World and the amusement park / European replica OCT East. More compelling to me is the 大芬油画村, a zone out in Longgang where artists are trained to copy classic works of art like the Mona Lisa. I've not been yet, but the place seems very cool and emblematic of the foundation of China's modern economy - copycatting. Shenzhen is no longer so economically tied to Hong Kong. Companies all over the world are flying in directly to do business with the factories, and the city is home to a burgeoning tech startup scene. Still, as a city barely 30 years old, there's plenty of ammunition to disparage the lack of cultural anything in Shenzhen, and I will stick to using a picture of Futian the one time it took me an hour and a half to cross back into Hong Kong.

Pun Factor: 0. Literally I got nothing here.

Singapore

Minimum Time: 2 days

Linguistic Notes: Singapore comes from the Malay word Singapura, itself from a Sanskrit word meaning Lion City. The Chinese name I knew growing up was 星加坡, which sounds like Singapore in Cantonese, but with the full on adoption of Mandarin, simplified characters and pinyin, the official name is now 新加坡, which sounds more better in Mandarin.

Pictures in Singapore look like architects' renderings

Do: The world's only shopping mall with an immigration counter has a million ways to make you forget about the poverty in surrounding nations. It's a great place to visit if you hate dirt and chewing gum, if you like toast and Milo, if you want to call your taxi driver "Uncle", or if you want to eat at a hawker centre but are too much of a hypochondriac to try in Malaysia. To Westerners, we call it Asia Lite, where the city collectively speaks dozens of language but really just uses English. Get a picture spitting with the Merlion, pay your way up to the top of Marina Bay Sands and marvel at the infinity pool, and go window shopping in Orchard Row. If you want a manufactured good time, venture out to Sentosa beach or Universal Studios or the Night Safari. But really just eat eat eat and keep eating, whether it's Malay food, Indian food, Chinese food, chili crab or western food. In truth, people like to give Singapore a hard time for its perceived sterility - in Singapore, once you've seen one, you've seen the mall. CNN even published a travel article "Top 10 Most Boring Things to do in Singapore." But we mock because Singapore is so functional and well thought-out, there are few outbursts of the organic craziness that expats grow to expect and love in Asia. People in China will see a collision of a truck carrying eggs with a moped on a pedestrian sidewalk and mutter to themselves "only in China" whereas people in Singapore will see ordinary citizens neatly line up for the opening of a new restaurant in the airport and mutter to themselves "only in Singapore." But deep down there's a lot to admire in a society that has lifted itself from poverty to the economic elite, dramatically raised health standards and lowered crime in its short 50 year history.

Pun Factor: 4. I mean, Singapore is a fine city. Was it ever a sunken colony? No it was a S'pore colony #starcraftjoke.

Taipei

Minimum Time: 2 days

Linguistic Notes: Few countries have had as large scale a linguistic transformation as Taiwan, with the main spoken language of Taiwanese replaced by Mandarin within 2 generations. Taiwanese is still alive and well but there are many native Taiwanese, particularly those raised in Taipei, who are well short of fluent in it.

Do: Taipei is an easy and common weekend destination for Hong Kongers. Mainland tourists now have direct flights and get to enjoy speaking their native language while handling currency that doesn't have the same picture on it. Taipei 101 sticks out in what is really a short city, and much of the charm of Taipei is ground level. The night markets make this city famous, where the smells of stinky tofu are partially diluted by those of steamed balls and teppenyaki. The National Palace Museum is priceless, consisting of many of the most valuable works of art from the Forbidden City that were carefully taken away before the Japanese invasion and moved to Taipei during the Chinese Civil War.  I don't usually spend much of precious travel time in a museum, but this one is worth a good chunk of hours. Then go to Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall, because it's there, and Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, if you want more memories. Taipei is a good city to hike, with Elephant Mountain convenient and providing great views of Taipei 101, I mean the city skyline. If hot springs are your thing, there are several not far from the city. Besides these attractions though, Taipei is a great walkable city with lots of coffeeshops, cute alleys and bubble tea.

Pun Factor: 6. Just depends if you're a Taipei personality, or a Type B personality.

Yangon

Minimum Time: 1.5 days

Linguistic Notes: Yangon literally means something like "no more enemies" in Burmese and is translated as the End of Strife. The name of the first village to be at this site was called Dagon, which is still reflected in place names, including the city's famous icon Schwedagon Pagoda (Great Dagon).

View within Kandawgyi Park

Do: The Schwedagon Pagoda alone is enough to visit the city formerly known as Rangoon. The golden splendor of the most important Buddhist site in the land is among the more spectacular sites I've ever seen, and the city's streets are laid out to keep it getting seen. There's a lot of colonial history in the city, with more colonial-era buildings than any other city in Asia, but much of this is because the buildings are crumbling and the city has been too poor to rebuild them. Still, Yangon is a bustling diverse market town with Bogyoke market in particular trading some interesting spices, fabrics and jewelry. The jade market especially has exploded in Burma, due to demand from China, but I wish I knew about its devastating social consequences before I bought my amulet. In contrast to the daytime activity, the city goes all but silent after 9pm. Sule Pagoda is noteworthy on its own but pales in comparison to Schwedagon. The other main religious site, Botataung Paya is important historically, claiming to house strands of Buddha's hair, but was bombed in WWII and will not impress on travelers who have seen a stupid number of stupas. The city has a great park around Kandawgyi Lake which has a tourist-only fee that is still worth paying. Aung San Suu Kyi's house is reachable, but is no longer a site of demonstrations. My taxi driver literally stopped on his own and pointed out the house. Yangon's colonial history seems so removed from its modern construction, reflected its buried dead - the grave of the last Emperor of the Mughal Empire is here, as is a Jewish cemetery. And amazingly, the city is small enough that I was basically able to do everything on this list in 2 days and still check out the nightlife, which is so many levels below every other city on this list. Food-wise, I've documented how bizarrely bland Myanmar food is despite its culinary neighbors, but Shan noodles are worth a bowl.

Pun Factor: 3. How do you ask a Chinese person in Myanmar if he/she is cold? Brrrr 吗？


Of course, there are many cities in Asia I have not been to that are very worth visiting. The ones with the deadliest Pun Factors include Hanoi (puns can get Hanoi-ing very quickly), Penang (Punang), Delhi (cold cuts), Phnom Penh (Phnomenal), and of course, Phuket. While crafting this post, I was reminded how great Asia is. There are old cities, there are new cities, and there are interesting places that aren't cities. I was also reminded how I haven't written a travel recap post like this since: http://cal337.blogspot.hk/2009/01/recap-overratedunderrated.html. Anyway if you haven't visited Asia, come check it out. If I left anything out or really missed out on some city attractions, leave a comment below.