Asian Calmination - Thailand

Thailand
I was pretty zonked out boarding the bus at Siem Reap at 6am, and almost got lost in the border crossing no man's land, but 10 hours later recognizable sights and sounds of downtown Bangkok refreshed me. This was the first "not new" stop on my trip. I was far from familiar with Bangkok, having spent most of my time there in various Sukhomvit Sois (side streets), usually inebriated. Sukhomvit is a huge road and a life artery for the wilder expat scene, but the enormous city has far more to offer. I alighted near the railway station, where backpackers and motorcyclists flooded my path. I elbowed my way into a 7-Eleven to purchase a phone card. A pay-as-you-go phone plan was cheap in Vietnam and Cambodia, but for whatever reason I hadn't felt like getting one - a foreign trip just feels different when connected to the interwebs. However I was planning on being in Thailand for quite some time, and staying with a friend, so a phone seemed necessary. Service in the Land of Smiles is usually pleasant, but the 7-Eleven outside Bangkok Railway Station broke such stereotypes. The clerk went to activate my phone card, left me hanging for 15 minutes, then came back to simply say, "No." The language barrier surely inhibited a more detailed explanation, but this guy's lack of effort was infuriating. In one of the few shoplifting efforts of my life, I pocketed the card (and later succeeded in activating it), and snuck out the store.

"Cal!" Imagine my pounding heart - someone had caught me.  Did I give the store clerk my name? I looked up to see one of the many backpackers on the sidewalk staring directly at me, a white guy with impressive facial hair. "Do you remember me? It's Mark Waterman!" I quickly pieced together my memories from another life of a college ultimate teammate, and had one of those "it's a small world" conversations. In fact I was in town for an ultimate hat tournament, but in a twist of small world irony, Waterman was not in town for that tournament.

I stayed at fellow ultimate player Asha's apartment in Silom. Dinner that night consisted of delicious street food with other visiting players from Islamabad, Pakistan of all places. The Bangkok Hat is one of my favorite tournaments because of the players it attracts. Its central location regularly allows as internationally diverse a participation group, from the UAE to Japan, as any hat tournament in the world. I captained a team with a large Singaporean core, supplemented by local Thai players and expats living in China. I think we finished 2nd to last, but no one remembers that. 

Getting to explore the rest of Bangkok was a wonderful boon. You can get around the city pretty painlessly - outside of rush hour. The BTS is actually quite convenient when not jam-packed, and if you have the luxury to live near it. At Arup, I had worked on a luxury mall in the city called Icon Siam that was under construction, and savored the chance to check out an overseas project for the first time.  On the western bank of Bangkok's main river Chao Praya, I approached from the east bank where the Shangri-La and the Mandarin Oriental landmarked an upscale neighborhood. Water transport used to be Bangkok's main mode of transport, and though times have changed, a raft ferry across the river cost just a few cents. The neighborhood around the western pier was drastically different, populated with dense apartments and tiny convenient stores navigated via narrow dirt roads. The construction site itself was closed off with larger banners blocking a sneak peak, and so I made my way down an adjacent narrow road. To my surprise, the path took me to what could be described as a shanty town - a bunch of tin shacks and some abandoned wooden houses on stilts. People were living underneath the stilts, proved by the operating clotheslines and hammocks. Unbeknownst to me, the multibillion-dollar luxury mall where I had done advanced daylighting simulations was next to this squatter settlement the entire time. Did my project replace the lives of many poor Thai residents? What sort of massive gentrification had I partaken in? Would the Icon Siam eventually help the lives of the people on the wrong side of the Chao Praya?

From the train ride over, I glimpsed a crazy looking building - Google eventually told me the story of the eerie abandoned Sathorn Unique Tower, 68 haunting floors of bankruptcy. Apparently bribing the security guards and taking the stairs to the top is a thing - alas minor shoplifting was enough lawbreaking for me. I also managed to visit the equally unique Jim Thompson House, a combine of traditional Thai houses lifted from remote villages by Jim Thompson, the American architect turned WWII spy who revitalized the Thai silk industry before mysteriously disappearing in Malaysia.

I hadn't made solid plans post-Bangkok, and realized too late that I may have been overstaying my welcome. To the south of Thailand were some of the loveliest beaches in the world, but I'm not much of a beach guy and I'd missed out on a bachelor party in Chiang Mai, so I looked northwards. Unbeknownst to me, that very weekend was a long weekend on account of the Buddha's birthday, and buses and trains to Chiang Mai were packed. I cover this ordeal in a separate post, where I explain how I eventually ended up in Phitsanulok, the city of 84,000 halfway between Bangkok and Chiang Mai and almost died on the back of a motorcycle on a highway. I left out another harrowing experience on that trip. Once I returned from the Sukhothai ruins back to Phitsanulok, I still wasn't home. First, I explored a sprawling night market that swallowed up two Wats, which was awesome - so many delicious options. 

Then I found the Thai address of my hotel, which was really a motel 20 minutes outside the city, and showed it to a motorcyclist who was very eager to give me a ride. He looked at my address, then started driving - all the way to the first stoplight, when he asked me where to go. I was like I don't know! Here's the address again! He huffed and took a right, then in the middle of the street flagged down a driver and asked her to look at the address. I couldn't believe it. The woman read my address several times, then had a far lengthier conversation with my driver than I felt comfortable with - a simple "it's that weird Days Inn ripoff right off the highway" should have sufficed - and finally the driver seemed to know where to go. I relaxed and leaned back,  or as far as I could on a motorbike. After a few intersections, I took my phone out again and checked our progress, and was stunned to find that we were going the opposite direction! I shouted stop to my driver and jumped off. As I was showing him the address again, furious and confused, I finally realized that perhaps he couldn't read. This had been such a rarity everywhere I'd been - China has a 90% literacy rate now - but I'm guessing the illiteracy rate for motorbike drivers in Phitsanulok is not insignificant. I spent another 20 minutes in the area unable to find a taxi or motorbike before finally flagging down a tiny clown car with my battery at 10% life. The car zoomed along at 25 mph and by the time I got home I was exhausted. But hey, at least I made it to those ruins.

The next morning, my bus to Chiang Mai broke down. Really not a great transportation week for me. We were waylaid for a bit over an hour and then crammed onto another bus for the rest of the journey - luckily only another hour. Behind Bangkok and on par with Koh Samui, Chiang Mai is among the Thai places best known to westerners. For tourists, it's an old city with a major airport and access to many activities. There are elephant sanctuaries, zipline course, hikes, night markets, ancient temples and massages galore. Though a city with less than a million inhabitants, Chiang Mai is also a place of abode for a unusually many foreigners, many working unusual jobs. The city teemed with cafes and bars run and frequented by white people. I struggle to find a similar city in Asia - Bali is the best I can come up with.

As a city, I found Chiang Mai...ok. The centre is constrained by a moat and well-preserved city wall, and there aren't a lot of those in the world. Many of the cafes and bars are objectively charming. I guess I found Chiang Mai to be too much of a tweener place. It was too busy and industrial to be quaint, but not nearly built up enough to be productive or have a skyline. It was too touristy to be culturally interesting, but not centralized in its activities, resulting in my walking around constantly feeling like the cool kids were partying elsewhere. Perhaps I was doing it wrong - the most appealing aspects of a Chiang Mai vacation involve getting outside the city. As such, the city itself can feel lazy and boring. 

Among the outdoor  activities I partook in was hanging with elephants.  I had only recently learned how cruel training elephants to be ridden was, and now activities like what I did, bathing and walking with rescued elephants, were in vogue. The Elephant Jungle Sanctuary tour I signed up was located 90 minutes outside Chiang Mai deep in mountainous jungle, and had four elephants. I think all four had been rescued from other, presumably less moral, elephant tours. Seeing the elephants walking through the jungle was pretty surreal, thinking about how heavy they were but how quietly they were stepping.

My other Chiang Mai activities included going to a bizarre outdoor music festival in a hot air balloon field, with a handful of imported American freestyle rappers, and playing pickup with the (relatively) large ultimate community. There I met Jazi, the mysterious Israeli-born handler with a huge beard. When Jazi heard I was a math major, he actively tried to recruit me. He never got too detailed with the type of work I'd do, but it was basically data analysis for his online gambling site. I didn't find that particularly interesting, but I found him fascinating. Jazi was part of the sizable digital nomad crowd that had settled in Chiang Mai, and had made enough money from the site that he didn't need to work a ton. He spoke with a thick accent but with a learned vocabulary, for he had learned English in his adulthood for the express purposes of understanding an academic computer science paper (which I still can't understand). His English was aided by having been raised bilingually in Hebrew and Yiddish, a Germanic language. He didn't seem to have had a formal university education, but instead got intense programming training in the military.

After 3 days I boarded a bus to the legendary backpacker town of Pai. Unlike Chiang Mai which I think is trying to be many things, Pai knows what it is. It's only got 6,000 or so residents, but another 600 or so tourists, and about 60 ways to make a pun on its name. With streets full of souvenir shops,  signs in English and four 7-Elevens, no one will mistake it for an authentic Thai village. However it's geographic remoteness helps preserve a chill atmosphere and keep it from getting overrun with tourists. Some of the bar owners I spoke to were Bangkok transplants seeking a quieter place to ply their trade.

I stayed at an inn complex with an upside down house in front of it. It proved to be a popular photo spot for tourists who were consistently mainland Chinese. Most of the Chinese tourists traveled in groups to a variety of sites, including a strawberry field outside of town that wasn't even on my English map. The tourists explained to me that there was this love movie popular in China set in Pai, which started a buzz for this spot. Funny how one movie can tap into a market of a billion people.

2016 in Recap

Some years are just more eventful than others. 2016 was a year where a hell of a lot happened, both in the world and in my life. My bulletpoint summary of this year is about as full as I could imagine. In order:

• I left my job at Arup in Hong Kong after 4 years
• I took on consultancy work with a HK energy efficiency startup and helped them win a major project
• I flew off to Vietnam and lived the spontaneous backpacking life for 3 months
• Continued through Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Xinjiang, Beijing and finally Shenzhen to Hong Kong
• With a tournament and going away party, said farewell to my friends and family in Hong Kong
• Came back to America and resettled in Boston
• Learned how to use Python by finishing a webscraper project I'd started years before
• Mastered ggplot and R data visualization techniques
• Went to my 10 year high school reunion
• Watched all of Game of Thrones
• Went to my cousin Parissa's wedding
• Underwent LASIK
• Went to Toronto and saw my cousin, having missed his wedding years before, and his wife and baby girl
• Saw my mom retire after an incredible career
• Met local politician and role model Michelle Wu at a fundraiser
• Got hired by GE as a data analyst. Started work 5 years to the day of my start date at Arup
• After growing out facial hair for many months and focusing more on upper body exercises than ever before, dressed up as Cal Drogo for Halloween in NYC
• Became an uncle to a girl named Audrey

However, life is not a series of bulletpoints. Many of my darkest hours occurred interspersed between those highlights. Leaving my job in Hong Kong without anything else lined up was not an easy decision, and it created serious consequences. There were long stretches where I wondered whether I had made terrible mistakes in pursuit of some of these highlights. There were months where my transition to a different country and different industry was rife with disappointment, and I had little salvation on the horizon. For so long, I floundered about in the unknown, with no confidence that I was on the right track. 

I'll start with my decision to leave Arup in Hong Kong. Or maybe I'll start with a Steve Jobs quote, from his much ballyhooed acceptance speech at Stanford. Among his many great quotes was this one:

"I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."

That hit me one Monday in early December 2015. The weekend had been a life highlight - a successful hosting of the Asia Oceanic Ultimate Championships, a massive 300 person tournament in which I had a small, but still stressful, role as an organizer and competitor. The tournament was more thrilling than I could have possibly imagined, validating this little hobby that I've pursued for over a decade. Compliments from multinational strangers made it feel like my hard work and passion had paid off.

That next morning I returned to work and nothing had changed. I had a ton of awful boring tasks to complete and hand off to unappreciative coworkers. For years I had balanced my work and ultimate life and dealt with the incongruity between the two, but this morning, I felt like I might be wasting the last day of my life. After two weeks consulting friends and family and receiving a mixture of encouragement and warnings, I submitted my resignation letter. I had only partially convinced myself - I almost withdrew the letter that afternoon and made moves towards an internal transfer to London. But ultimately I quenched my self-doubts and heeded the Cantonese idiom "delay no more," and one month later I thanked my colleagues and handed in my badge.

At that point I didn't have a clear plan - I hadn't 100% committed to returning stateside. All I knew was that I had long held aspirations to travel in bulk during one of those rare life intervals where this is possible. Packing up 4 years of life was hard, but picking up and backpacking was the easiest part of this whole year. Work life had bottled up so many goals and now the open facing road provided every opportunity to let me pursue them. Seeing new places was hugely important to me - it's added so much to my life - but I was equally as excited to pursue a bunch of nerdy projects. Among the possessions I stuffed into my backpack were research papers I printed out with my Arup ScienceDirect account and a book on web app development. 

From 4000m up on the Karakorum Highway

I've got other posts to recap that trip and describe how great it was for me. I didn't set off intending to find myself - I went in with life goals already well-defined - but I ended up learning a lot about myself. Spending that many hours on end alone with your thoughts, with long bus rides to read and write and think, was a pretty fantastic reset button. This travel experience was fairly different from my previous weekends gallivanting around Asia - I spent a lot less time in cities, a lot more time socializing with fellow travelers and locals, and revelling in the freedom from itineraries. The trip significantly influenced many of my beliefs, including those on globalization and ethnic identity, and refined my thoughts on how to travel. 

Most importantly though, the trip recentered my approach to life. I think it was during a glorious week in Penang, after the wilder chunk of my backpacking, a week I intentionally setup to pursue some of my deep-seated goals. I love working on my laptop in coffeeshops and I had always wanted to uproot and plop down in a coffeeshop in some faraway city. Penang was the perfect spot, as I'll explain in another post. That week I was focused - I awoke at 7am to run in the equatorial heat, finished this post, and finally figured out how to plot points in shapefiles. As I sipped Tiger beer in celebration, the loneliness really struck me. This trip had been all about me, myself and I. And when I thought about it, so had my years in Hong Kong. 

When I left Hong Kong, neither my self-indulgences nor my self-improvement would remain behind. The only real imprint I'd leave was those I'd left on people. I hadn't been entirely self-absorbed in my time there, but for one reason or another I hadn't made that many truly great friends. I hadn't realized it then, but there were many subtle changes I could have made to my priorities and interactions with people that would have made a great difference. It took me three months of solo travel to realize that relationships are everything.

The relationships that I had made were instrumental in getting me through the 2nd and 3rd quarters of my year. I came home and thought I'd get a job pretty quickly. I had two interviews already lined up with building energy/data science roles. Neither of those interviews panned out - in one case the recruiter completely ghosted, not returning any emails after we'd already exchanged 10 and agreed to setup a meeting in Boston. The other involved me flying on my own dime to DC, and a bizarre rambling rejection several weeks later that a friend described as "word vomit." I was surprised and disappointed - I had already talked myself into that unique role, but had some relief that I could now focus entirely on tech roles which I preferred. After my time at large corporation, I wanted to try the tech startup world.

Turns out that changing industries was hard. I had the right educational background, but with no experience in the roles I was applying for, I couldn't hit the ground running on any job. I pored through dozens of job descriptions every day and felt overwhelmed by the amount of words I didn't know. Scala, MongolDB, postgreSQL, Docker, the list went on and on. I had just barely learned Python - now I saw that there were so many different interpretations of data scientist, and what I was able to do was not enough. In Hong Kong I rarely had any deep data science discussions with anyone - my ability to use R was an extreme novelty within my firm. In Boston, I couldn't throw a stick without hitting a couple developers, and all those great universities churn hundreds more out every year. These kids were being taught those skills that I was now trying to learn. Additionally, I came in with a further few disadvantages. Many American companies, and startups especially, do not give great respect to international experience.  I found my language skills very rarely valued, or even noted - at best, it was an interesting tidbit that I happened to have spent hundreds of hours on. Even worse, my firm Arup, though well known in many parts of the world, was met with clueless stares by those in the American tech sector. While talking with an older female HR recruiter for GE, in response to my work experience in sustainability, condescendingly poo-pooed my "green living" phase and said that a lot could change after my "first job." When I asked her what she meant by first job, she mispronounced my previous employer's name (Ovid Arp?) and asked whether it was an international or big firm. Not that it should really matter, but Arup has 10,000+ employees headquartered in London. Luckily her opinion wasn't the important one, and other interviewers at this global firm saw the importance of my international experience .

What I had going for me were real projects that I enjoyed. I had good ideas that pushed me to learn all sorts of new technical skills and I loved it. They gave me purpose, and if there's anything you need when you're unemployed, it's purpose. Primarily pursuing around with my theory that city metrics could be found that would cluster together among the continents, I dove down a project that taught me formatting regular expressions, map visualizations, encoding formats, clustering algorithms, dataset merging, database design and creating interactive maps. These were techniques I might have been able to learn in a course or something, but with a project in mind, I got to learn them on my terms (and for free).

Ogawa Coffee, one of the coffeeshops I spent time at

A negative turning point came in mid July. I had been back for almost 3 months already and gotten the lay of the land, knew some startups I wanted to work for, and networked my way into an interview with a startup that I really liked. It seemed like a great fit - they were hiring for an entry level data analyst position, I ticked off just about all the job requirements, the company did great socially impactful global work (including in China), were financially stable and even shared the same name as one of my good friends. I passed their phone screening, then put in a solid 10 hours completing their take-home assignment (recommended 3 hours). I was brought in for back-to-back-to-back interviews and left feeling like this would be an incredible place to start my new career.

I was devastated when I didn't get that job. They had liked me, but not enough to compensate for my lack of experience. I had nothing else on the horizon, no other interviews in the pipeline. That week, it was so hard for me to move on from that rejection back to studying clustering. It was hopeless looking through job ads posted by marketing companies, e-mailing my resume to anonymous black hole addresses, googling all these biotech terms that I didn't know. I'd been ready to work that very Monday and now I didn't know when I'd work again - it certainly wouldn't be soon. That indefiniteness is rough practically and emotionally  - it disrupts one's abilities to make plans, and one's ability to sleep at night.

During the intervening months, I didn't get many interviews. Half the time I didn't even get a substantive reply. (As an aside, I think the way job seekers and employers use online recruiting has not converged, and hopefully this is a field that will keep getting more efficient.) In those days, I felt very aggrieved and sanctimonious. How could all these companies not recognize my talent?  Did they not know how good a writer I was? Did they not care about my nuanced thoughts on socialist reactive movements to colonialism? Were they aware that I had goals far beyond the scope of their little enterprise software? Each individual rejection or non-response I could accept in stride, but in their collective, I felt like my entire career and life path was being rebuked. 

After identifying a startup in travel that I liked, and finding a friend who knew someone at the company, and again passing through a phone screening and a 10 hour take-home, and getting rejected again, I was in pretty deep despair. In these times, great friends were there to remind me that 6 months was not that long. That I had so much going for me, that in fact these companies did suck, and that it would be much better on the other side. With so much time on my hands and so few people around, I texted all the time. I had time zones down pat and knew how many hours I had in the morning to get responses from people in Asia, then I had my friends in Europe until 5pm or so, and then I'd talk to the west coast until Asia woke up again. You know who you are, but I will still shout you out: Ben Goldsmith, Joan Xu, Jackie Fan, Diana Pang, Kat Tse, Michele Mak, Ria Sunga, Charlotte Poon,Seems Tsang, Hyun Park, Asha Sharma, Lesley Sim, Jen Thomas, Hannah Lincoln, Andrea Phua, Che Bello, Maggie Lonergan, Janice Shon, and my Boston-based friends Henry Fingerhut, Glen Cornell, Alison Shin, Sam Malin and Joe Nasser.  To give people an idea of what these folks dealt with, these are true back to back text mesages I sent to Jackie Fan: 1. "How do I deal with the existential dread today?" 2. "Omg I got the job with GE"

Now busy and employed and settled into a Cambridge apartment twice the size of my Hong Kong apartments, I feel genuinely grateful. I'm lucky that GE moved into Boston this year and in their tumultuous move, they weren't able to interview too many candidates before needing to respond to me.  I'm grateful that I pulled the trigger on this career switch now - in 3 years, the average college graduate would likely be too good. I'm lucky that the major I studied happens to be employable now - this certainly was not a foreseen consequence of my 18 year old self. I'm extremely grateful that my parents let me live with them rent-free and in a city with a thriving tech scene (what if I had been from Buffalo?). Even within the context of my own life, this was a particularly privileged period.

To be fair to myself, I put in a lot of work. I proved to myself that without structure, without guidance, I could still work productively. At GE I recently had to solve a similar geospatial visualization problem that I had tried to solve in March. What had previously taken me a week I now typed out in a matter of minutes. I had gotten in so many data science reps that I had forgotten how complicated some of these problems were that now felt old hat. Like a tennis player whose racket is an extension of his arm, I became attached to my R-running laptop and approached new datasets like returning groundstrokes from different angles.

So it ended up being a good year for me. However I'm not sure what lessons I'd glean from it, or what I'd recommend to my friends. I'd happily extoll the virtues of taking a long solo trip, giving your mind space to clear out and visiting the less accessible parts of the world. I'll go on and on about the importance of living abroad. These experiences are fundamental to forming my worldview and basic personality, and I wish that everyone could share them. However, I do not wish everyone to share the months of rejection and despair. Without the guarantee of a happy ending, that is not a fate I'd wish on just anyone. So take my journey for what it is and draw from it what you will - I won't preach about quitting your job and traveling or whatnot. What I will preach about are the importance of relationships. I sincerely resolve to put friends and family on the top of my priority list. To all the people who assisted me this year - thank you. To all the people whom I wasn't a good enough friend to - I am so sorry.  I regret the happiness that we could have shared, the lessons we could have learned from each other.

To friendships in 2017 and beyond -

All Sides of the Border

There’s no doubt that immigration is one of the main issues in the 2016 US Presidential Election, if not the main issue. The Trump campaign kicked off with the unusual idea of building a wall on the Mexican border,  and the resulting dumpster fire has routinely dehumanized of immigrants and refugees. Immigration is also a divisive political topic throughout Europe, especially the Brexit-ing UK, and as far as Singapore. I won't rehash all the notable anti-immigration rhetoric, but I'll just leave here this gem from Fox News displaying their nuanced understanding of Chinese immigrants.

There’s certainly no lack of pro-immigration champions. We have all sorts of arguments for taking in immigrants: they add value to our economy and actually create jobs, they bring in new ideas and cultures, that America has always been a country of immigrants, that it's the compassionate option. If you want a collection of pro-immigration arguments and stories, go no further than Define American created by Jose Antonio Vargas.  However, I find some of these arguments fundamentally flawed and not unified, inadequately voicing a cohesive basic reason for supporting immigration.

I am not writing a policy piece – in fact I really don’t intend this to be political. I just want to lend an international perspective to reframe a dialogue that frankly nauseates me.

As a child of immigrants to America, I have seen much of the American immigrant experience. As an American who has spent 5 years of adulthood living outside the country, I have also seen much of the American emigration experience, which I call (controversially) the expat experience. This piece explores the staggering differences between those two experiences.

In western countries, assimilation is the go-to word in expected immigrant behavior. Assimilation is about adapting your language, choices and activities to fit those of the people around you – you know, changing everything about you. Immigrant children are expected to go to local schools. Eyebrows can raise up when immigrants gather for group cultural activities, whether it's prayer at a mosque, a Chinese lion dance or a cricket game. There are no shortage of stories of Americans feeling uncomfortable in the presence of people speaking other languages, even starting confrontations. The phrase “go back to your country” has likely been uttered angrily to an immigrant, or maybe just a visible minority, a dozen times since you began reading this.

I wish there was good data on ex-patriates and their language skills, but I am not aware of such data. In lieu, I have my personal anecdotes from travels. I’ve met lots of impressive multilinguals, particularly in Beijing and Tokyo, but I’d argue that in no major city do a majority of expats successfully learn the local language. The percentages get a lot higher outside the major cities, but even in the smallest villages, I’ve met expats piss poor in the local language. 

Hong Kong is a particularly extreme example - as a former British colony, English is an official language and still dominates in higher education and the professional world. Among places in Asia, only in the United Arab Emirates and Singapore do westerners put less effort into learning local languages. In my 4+ years in Hong Kong, I met two people who learned Cantonese from scratch to a proficient level. And I met a lot of people. The overwhelming majority of foreigners possess a core vocabulary of "hello, left, right, thank you, shrimp dumpling." 

In Hong Kong there is no shortage of 15+ year long expat veterans who cannot converse in Cantonese. There is no shortage of people born and raised in Hong Kong to western parents who could not converse in Cantonese – I’ve met easily 100 people in this demographic and not one was fluent. The Kadoories, one of Hong Kong’s oldest and richest families, no longer speak Cantonese. Western children are expected not to go to local schools, even though Hong Kong’s education system is great. Very often they’re multilingual in French or German or Mandarin, able to communicate to anyone but the people around them. A Swedish coworker who had been in Hong Kong for 7 years without speaking Cantonese explained unironically of his resentment for Iraqi refugees in Sweden, who lived in enclaves for years without learning Swedish.

The game is pretty rigged for English speakers all over, even in places without direct colonial legacies. There are English announcements in all the subways of Asia, from Tokyo to Bangkok to Changsha, as if there is some UN decree. Nowhere in America are there even Spanish announcements. I literally spoke English every day I spent in Asia and never once did I worry about making people uncomfortable. Often I’ve been that American engaged in loud uproarious English conversation with friends on the public subway, and not once has anyone dared complain or told me to go back to my country. Expats abroad party hard, even when local cultures that don’t, and easily engage in drugs, even when local laws heavily criminalize them. Many expats work for years on tourist visas - not once have I heard an expat referred derogatorily as an illegal immigrant.

The truth is that becoming an expat is a bestowment of privilege. You are assumed to be an educated professional and granted an amount of freedom to make yourself comfortable. The assumption of a white collar  job isn’t necessarily true – there's this white minibus driver in Hong Kong. And experiences may differ by place and ethnicity - many parts of Asia are deeply racist and sexist - but I think most expats will agree that their social status elevated after moving abroad. The reverse experience is precisely the opposite. A non-westerner moving to a western country knowingly engages in a stripping of privilege, often profiled as a job stealer or an uneducated migrant, regardless of background.

You might think now that I wrote this to excoriate expat behavior. Not at all. I was an expat, and I took full advantage of my privilege in Hong Kong.  In fact I mean to paint the picture of immigrants to the west in a sympathetic light. It’s easy to judge an immigrant for their lack of assimilation, their inexplicable clinging to their old country ways. But until you try, you might have no idea how hard it is to assimilate. How hard it is to learn the local language. How hard it is leave your culture behind, how greatly you desire to keep doing the activities that have always made you happy. I lived as an American in Hong Kong, where I have direct ancestry, for four years and I wasn’t close to assimilating. I wasn’t even on the path to assimilation – I could have lived there for 40 years and I would not have enjoyed drinking hot water like a local, I would not have watched TVB programs like a local, and I would not have stopped calling in sick on Super Bowl Monday. I think there’s nothing wrong with that. Sure, I wish that more expats in Hong Kong could be more engaged in local affairs, but I don’t see anything fundamentally wrong with a society that has diverse groups of people happily doing their own thing.

So if you’re a citizen of a western country and discussing immigration, please consider the following tenets. Understand the degree of difficulty. Embrace the diversity. Check your fucking privilege. Try to accept immigrants not because they add to the economy, or because you live in a country of immigrants – because this doesn’t excuse discrimination against immigrants who don’t add to the economy or excuse countries without a legacy of immigration. Try to accept immigrants because they are humans, and any one coming with good intentions should be welcomed. On a global issue like migration, we cannot narrow our focus to how it affects us in our little part of the world.  We need to be cognizant of the underlying causes that motivate people to make dangerous and difficult journeys to dangerous and difficult lives in a strange country. We need to address an imbalance where an American college graduate can jump into an upper middle class lifestyle teaching his/her native language in Korea while an Ivorian man with a Master’s degree scrapes by driving taxis in New York. At the end of the day, it really shouldn’t matter where you are born. And yet it matters so, so much. Can we try to push this world in a better direction?

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Asian Calmination - Cambodia

Cambodia

I was excited to cross the border. Besides Hong Kong to Shenzhen, real land crossings have been missing from my life. The process didn't meet expectations though, with lots of waiting time in no man's land and no interesting bits, save the exchange of crisp US dollars. In Cambodia, the ride was very rural until suddenly crossing the Mekong River, urban Phnom Penh arose with little warning. My hostel, 19 Happy House Backpacker, was a couple blocks away from our dropoff point, at #59 Street 13. A wrong turn and a dozen blocks later, I was lost with the early afternoon sun really weighing down on me and my red backpack. When I finally reached the hostel, the staff could not find my booking. Minutes of awkward confusion later, I realized I was at Happy Backpacker, a separate establishment. I circled around even more confused, as Street 13 was somehow between Street 15 and Street 5. I came across #60 Street 13, which was some Malaysians' home. Malays speak English which is great, but they had never heard of Happy House Backpacker despite my protests that it must be next door. Some venting later, I kept walking down the street and finally saw the sign for 19 Happy House several blocks away. I learned the hard way that street numbers have absolutely no meaning in Cambodia.

Spark - eccentric establishment

My first night in Phnom Penh included pickup ultimate with the young athletic Swa players on a barebones mini turf pitch, followed by many beers at a concert hall/beer hall/replica Italian plaza/microbrewery/cafeteria called Spark (complete with sinks specifically designed for pukers in the bathroom) with Asian Ultimate legend Jared Cahners. I learned that the fellow Newton native has been living in and out of Asia since the 1990s, coming to Cambodia for his PhD but quitting shortly before we met, and had various histories of fluency in Mandarin, Vietnamese and Khmer. In between, I met a Japanese/Chinese/Thai Wellesley College graduate Clinton Global Health employee looking for someone to analyze malaria data, a Peace Corps volunteer and some of the pioneers in Cambodian ultimate. I always enjoy entering a new city and observing the makeup of the economy, and the makeup of the foreign population.  Throughout Asia, English teachers abound, but in Cambodia I met many aid workers/NGO veterans. This influx gives Phnom Penh a distinctly non-traditionally Asian feel. The downtown is awash in bars and pizza/Chinese food joints with stories traded in English and French.

I didn't have the best time in Cambodia. Everywhere I felt like locals were constantly trying to fleece the last buck out of me, and it really wore me down. Sure, this vibe was prevalent in all the former communist countries I visited (Vietnam and Laos) but most evident in Cambodia.  Ironically, while I attribute communism for the uninspiring aspects of Cambodia, a better understanding of the rise of communism is my best takeaway from the country. While Phnom Penh dates back to the 15th century, and was called the Pearl of Asia in the 1920s, it doesn't feel like an old city. The French and the Communists had left a grid of dusty and sweaty streets, old architecture too rundown to exude any colonial charm and a skyline dotted by a handful of uninspired modern high rises. There are some golden Wats scattered throughout the city and a major boulevard with a pretty monument in the center, but it struggles to compare to the temples of neighboring Thailand. And though I did not find Khmer cuisine bad per se, my palate was so well primed before and after in Vietnam and Thailand.

The ugly legacies of communist rule, and specifically the bloody genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, are thus still very tangible. The government was brutally anti-intellectual, killing most anyone with glasses, education or foreign language knowledge. The country's genocide caused the deaths of around a quarter of the population, an astounding culling of 8 million down to 6 million. When you lose an entire generation of cooks, architects, bureaucrats and writers, cultural devastation is inevitable.

I never really understood communism in history classes. We studied so much about its deleterious effects that it never made sense how such extreme practices took hold in the first place. I read Lenin in high school and Marx in college and still had no idea. But my second day in Phnom Penh involved visiting the Killing Fields outside the city, where hundreds of skulls are prominently shown, and the S21 school-turned-prison-turned-museum, which documents accounts of the atrocities that occurred there. Walking through history, I learned that Pol Pot as a frustrated failed man, who despite an education in France, rode a populist ideology that villainized the educated elite, foreign influences and minorities. The Khmer Rouge promoted rural ethnic Khmers as the backbone of Cambodian society, preaching self-reliant isolationism. If any of that sounds familiar and scary, reread what the regime did after they got into power and be even more scared.

I had planned to be in Cambodia for a brief two stops, before reaching Bangkok for an ultimate tournament. However I mistook the tournament to be a week earlier than it was, giving me another week to explore Cambodia. I'm not much of a beach person, but I figured a southeast Asian trip was incomplete without one, and so I ventured south to the resort town Sihanoukville. There awaited miles of pristine beach facing the Gulf of Thailand, and a bizarre mixture of expensive restaurants and hotels, dirt-cheap bungalows and hammocks, and a bunch of nothing in between.  Young Europeans who were lazing around the hostels for weeks on end seemed to outnumber any other demographic. They were apparently not my group, for in a backpacking rarity, I actively tried to  go out hard and have a good time and came out with no memorable stories whatsoever. Maybe it didn't help that I spent the day reading research papers in my air-conditioned bungalow and was looking for people with whom to discuss global income equality. Sorry I'm just not a beach person.

I quickly moved on to Kampot, a river town that was much more my kind of place. Just two hours away, the demographics could not be more different, with a local economy grounded on its famous pepper rather than tourism. The city's key attraction was an enormous durian sculpted into the middle of a major traffic circle. A conversation the previous day with friend John Johnson alerted me to an abandoned town between Kampot and Sihanoukville, but it was tough to verify on Google. Exploring a charming collection of expat-friendly riverside bars on the east side of the river, I found some seasoned expats engaged in academic research. I asked them about this abandoned town, and the expats enlightened me about Bokor Hill Station. One of them showed me the Google streetview, and pointed at himself standing next to a church. "I was there when the Google Earth guy was walking around with all the cameras!" I resolved to go the next day. 

Curious about the opposite riverbank, I explored a bridge closed to traffic and found a hole in the barrier, evidently used by pedestrians. I snuck over to the west side and found a decidedly more local scene. At an outdoor club blaring Khmer music, I ordered iced beer and cow entrails. On the way home, I passed by the durian, took one sniff of its imaginary scent, and threw up the entrails.

The next morning I was back on a motorbike for the first time since my Sapa fall. From a purvey of Googlemaps, the trip seemed like a 40 minutes straightshot on one major road. However at the 40 minute mark I reached the ticketed entrance to the mountain road, and I realized that the Hill Station was of course, up on a hill, and that Google hadn't quite charted that winding Cambodian mountain road. I drove up into the unknown, made a sharp turn around a bend and nearly fell off my bike. The mountain sloped into the Gulf of Thailand to the south, and the ocean winds crashed down unimpeded. The winds affected me mostly on the hairpin turns, when I slowed down dramatically. More daring motorcyclists zoomed past me on those turns, but I wasn't shamed out of braking - my nerve had left with my palm skin in the mountain gravel of North Vietnam. Finally I reached the top of the mountain, past the construction of a monstrous modern casino, a budding tourism park, some sanitation pump stations. Hiking up a grassy clearing, I found a solitary stone church. A bench that could have been lifted right out of Paris sat undisturbed in front. The church's stonework was definitely weathered, but otherwise everything was in remarkably good shape.  The doorway arch was doorless and I walked into an eerie interior. The multi-scripted graffiti covering the walls and the flower pots in front of religious statues reflected a dichotomy between disdain and worship. A small Jesus on the crucifix still hung overlooking it all, silently witnessing decades of good deeds and sins.

There were no explanatory plaques, but the area had been settled by the French in the 1920s, providing a cool getaway from the stuffy Phnom Penh. It was abandoned by the French twice, ultimately to the Khmer Rouge, and was even used by their remaining forces after a Vietnamese invasion overthrew the regime into the 90's. Now Cambodia has been stable enough that the area is being developed, and the ghost town may itself ghost away. The lack of historical preservation is understandably not a focus (any cultural preservationist would be busy further north), but it still saddens me that so many stories there go untold. With no public information, I had very nearly missed this site.

I had already spent way longer on this hill escapade, and hurried back, driving past the large abandoned Bokor Palace Hotel that was apparently even cooler. The ride down the steep mountain slopes was interminable and I couldn't wait to never drive a motorcycle again. Returning to Kampot in the late afternoon, I was stunned to learn that there were no more bus options returning to Phnom Penh. Turns out the start of the Chinese New Year affects commerce in Cambodia as well, and buses simply stopped operating. The Super Bowl was the next day and definitely watchable in Phnom Penh. Wikitravel did list one alternate form of transportation - car pool. And so I found a bunch of drivers and agreed to pay $20 USD to join an unknown number of people for the 4 hour ride to the capital. I waited in the park for 2 hours, and finally there were 3 other Cambodians joining. The sedan driver and I made 5, and as we hit the main road, I thought to myself this wasn't so bad - Wikitravel had warned that these carpools often crammed 7 into the same car. As soon as I counted myself lucky, our car slowed down and I had to scoot in for another passenger. And then we stopped again, and two woman were sharing the shotgun seat. As the 7 of us drove down the road, imagine my surprise when we slowed again. I shuddered to think of 5 of us fitting in the back, but instead the driver got out and then essentially sat on the new passenger's left lap. And the 8 of us in this clown car of a sedan made our way up to Phnom Penh for the start of the year of the monkey.

Watching the Super Bowl in a Texas-themed bar in Phnom Penh was an experience, but the game sucked and I moved on to take a minibus to Siem Reap. Here again I was a victim of Cambodian capitalism. The minibus was run by a minor agency and not easy to find, and my desperation at potentially missing the ride was showing when I asked a tuktuk driver for help. He ended up taking me for a $1 ride, and literally drove around the block back to where we started and pointed out the agency. Upon landing in Siam Reap, I luckily had saved my hostel location on Googlemaps and realized it was a 3 block walk. I was harassed by tuktuk drivers anyway, and I gave one the address as a test. A $1 ride would have been generous, but this guy brazenly asked for $5. I was more than willing to contribute to the local economy, but such shameless disrespect honestly infuriated me. I told him to fuck off and walked.

No place on my path was as touristy as Siam Reap. In contrast to the well ordered geometry of the nearby ancient sites, the modern city felt like a disorganized cantina of businesses clumped every which way to mine that tourism gold. Hotels and restaurants catering to tourists of all types face each other with services advertised in English, French, German, Chinese and Korean.

Hostel owners advised me it was possible to rent a bicycle at 5am. Indeed it was, but I had to jump over the locked gate of the hostel first. Though I'm not much of a morning person, I biked the 8 miles out of town and reached Angkor Wat an hour before sunrise. The classic view of Angkor Wat at dawn is usually taken in front of a lake, but a tenth of humanity was camped out on that spot. I thought I could take an equally impressive shot from a different angle, and jostled with a separate large group of people for position. I failed to capture any decent photos from the front, except perhaps this one of the crowds. I raced through the temple and tried to process everything. The palace was immense yes, but each column was still intricately carved, the stonework carefully laid. Statues and murals were so commonplace that negative space was a rarity.

Angkor Wat from the back

Nowhere was I more negatively affected by hype than here. I had heard so much of these ruins and even the previous night, a hostel mate had talked about the spiritual experience of witnessing the sun rise in Angkor Wat. In front of the building, surrounded by thousands of people, I did enjoy the bright hues of the morning sun...but I was not spiritually moved. Perhaps my favorite part of the experience was reaching the back of the complex, the sky still in the later stages of dawn, and looking out into the relative peace of the jungle. Whether I like it or not, preconceptions heavily influence my enjoyment, and it is no surprise that some of my favorite experiences on this journey were ones that I had no expectations of at all.

The whole set of ancient temple complexes is often collectively referred to as Angkor Wat, but Angkor Wat is only the biggest of the temples in the Angkor ruins (Angkor means capital city, Wat means temple). Angkor is undoubtedly the largest and most famous of the many temple ruins attractions in Southeast Asia (of which this trip included 2 others), all with a Buddhism-appropriating-Hinduism shared history. Dating primarily from the 12th century, the city is believed to have been the largest pre-industrial city in the world, spanning 390 square miles, before essentially being abandoned and lost to the jungle for centuries. Angkor Wat is so impressive, reaching the height of a 20 story building, and so revered, being the only building in the world to be featured on a national flag.

I biked over 40 miles that under that brutal Cambodian sun, stopping for coconut water whenever possible. I saw a temple in a marsh, a temple with a giant tree growing through it, and the temple that Lara Croft/Angelina Jolie had run through. By the early afternoon, I was unable to appreciate the ancient wonders around me - I had had my temple run.

There were plenty of temples I didn't get to on my one day of biking, but I didn't go back out the second day. Sure I felt bad, drinking beer in a cafe in the vicinity of some of the worlds' greatest treasures, but I was so tired it was a no-brainer of a decision. Even worse I was cognizant that my lack of appreciation of the temples was a product of my western education. I've learned enough about gothic arches and flying buttresses to admire European cathedrals, but I don't know the first thing to look at when staring at the Hindu/Buddhist temples. I don't know the difference between a temple dedicated to Vishnu or Rama, and the murals tell stories that make no sense to me. Clearly the course of action is to study this history, but I prefer to blast the parochial scope of my education. I explored the rest of Siem Reap that day, and was surprised to find a functioning town with some non-tourist economy, and a very touristy street creatively called Pub Street. Wandering through town, I got hassled nearly every block by a tuktuk driver offering to take me to the temples. Unable to find a respite, I walked straight to the bus station and bought a ticket to Bangkok the next day.

Asian Calmination - Vietnam

The giant red backpack is completely deflated. At its peak it bundled 30 odd pounds and imprinted its shoulderstraps onto my body.  Long hauls in bus hulls and nights on dirty hostel floors has bruised the polyester casing. Somehow it held up and protected my laptop, my clothes and my sanity over the many miles.

The longest trip I've ever taken feels very epic to me and my little world. By plane, train, boat, bus, motorbike or carpool, I made my way through the unfamiliar. I had my resolve tested deep in the jungle, survived hairy motorbike experiences, crossed five land borders, crashed an aviation annual gala, squished into a clown car, bathed an elephant, soared over the rainforest, drunkenly floated down a river, climbed a waterfall, prayed in an abandoned church and refreshed my trove of good stories. I ran into a college teammate in Bangkok, explored the best coffee shops in Luang Prabang and was offered jobs in Phnom Penh and Chiang Mai. I ate street food everywhere but miraculously never got food poisoning, or even had a calamitous toilet encounter.

I had been thinking about a trip like this for a while. I'd enjoyed traveling before I moved to Hong Kong, but 4 years in a great jumping off point fed a growing travel appetite. The more of the world I saw, the more of the world I realized remained to be seen.  Many cities were accessible by short flights, but plenty of fantastic less urbanized areas were beyond the reach of the weekend warrior. If I were to leave Asia, I had always planned on allowing for a lengthier trip to visit some off-the-path areas. And at the beginning of 2016, I made the decision to leave my job and make this trip happen. I targeted places I hadn't yet been able to visit, mainly Vietnam, but I didn't set a real itinerary. I had some vague routes that made geographic sense, but honestly had no end date set. Along the way I hoped to see cool sights, get off the b have fun, learn more about the world and global income inequality, visit friends, and also take "travel breaks" to learn the professional skills to transition to becoming a data scientist. I hadn't intended on this being a soul searching odyssey, but that happened regardless.

The trip weaved in and out of different phases. I departed Hong Kong for Hanoi on January 15, a week after my last day at work. I backpacked through Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos, while I was more of a digital nomad in Bangkok, Malaysia and Singapore. The portion in Xinjiang felt like a separate trip altogether, after which I embarked upon familiar lands for a friends seeing tour. I returned to Hong Kong on March 28 but continued living out of my luggage for another two weeks there before arriving in Boston (via San Francisco) April 12, making for 35 stops in 96 days. These three months were some of the best days of my life and I tried to never forget how lucky I was to have this whole opportunity.

I get some flabbergasted responses when I recount the whole expedition, as if the whole idea was nuts. I get some nonchalant nods as well - while this may have been my most epic trip, there are plenty of ultramarathon voyagers who sneer upon my measly wanderings.  Some of these expert travelers were great sources of knowledge and inspiration to me. These include Tim O'Rourke, long time Hong Kong expat who tried to bike from Darjeeling to Ireland through Pakistan and Iran in the early 90s, Dave Learn, the long time Shenzhen expat who traveled around the world for over two years, John Johnson, whose Instagram photos have a cult following, and Sam Axelrod, who needs no descriptive appositive.

Vietnam

The instant I landed in Vietnam, I became a millionaire, with more Dong than I knew what to do. I immediately caught an overnight train north to Sapa, a mountain village I had only heard about a few weeks before.  I was in a nervous daze the entire ride, arriving in the chilly darkness into a remote train station an hour away from the town. It wasn't until a local bus took me a main-squarish place that the discomfort eased off and discovery took over.

And I discovered that I'd picked a hell of a start. A simple walk out of town led into gorgeous green valleys with rice terraces carving up steep slopes. The clear weather provided an incredible backdrop to what was probably the most beautiful place on my entire itinerary.  I took a chill hike down the valley to neighboring villages, and on the way back up to the town, I stopped by a cliffside coffeeshop / bar. Sipping egg coffee and beers, I watched as the fog rolled in and out of the valley outside my window, evolving from one sensational view to another. It was as pleasant a beginning as I could ask for.

Sapa was part of a rural mountainous area settled by at least 6 distinct ethnic groups. While it was difficult for foreigners to reach during a long weekend, Sapa was well frequented by backpackers. I quickly began to learn the demographics that made up the southeast Asia, or Banana Pancake Trail, backpacking crowd. There were few professionals based in Asia like me, and far more students in a gap year or about to start work, mostly from Western Europe and Australia. Likely due to greater student loans and a less prevalent traveling culture, Americans were few and far between.

On my second day, I summoned the nerve to rent my first ever motorbike to visit some waterfalls an hour outside town. I immediately braked too hard and fell. I came out of that fall alright and quickly got a grip, and was soon exuberantly cruising along mountain roads. Then the road turned to gravel and I came to a patch mysteriously being hosed by a man. I braked before reaching the puddle and suddenly found my bike skidding and my hands hitting the gravel hard. Emergency thoughts rushed through my head. "Is this how it happens? Is this how people die in accidents?" Half a minute elapsed before I could feel sure that nothing was broken. The man with the hose helped me up and an old man raced down from the hill. He led me to his hut and placed my skinned palms into a bowl of water and watch the gravel sift out. My palms, the right one especially, had little remaining skin. I was wearing long pants, but they had torn apart and left my left knee pretty scraped. I had to get my bloody palms back on the handlebars and finish my ride to a waterfalls. Luckily when I returned to my guesthouse to patch up my wounds, a German couple there revealed themselves as nurses and helped dress my wounds. The damage on my right palm, while superficial,  hindered my ability to carry bags for another month.  The good start to my trip had turned bad quickly.

On my bus from Sapa to Hanoi, I had the luxury of choosing assistance from the Dutch nurse or the Australian medical student to redress my wounds. Hanoi was a hectic city, with its unordered motorcycle madness crazy even when compared to Chinese cities. In terms of crossing the street difficulty, Hanoi is to Beijing as Beijing is to New York City as New York city is to Random Little Town. Within that chaos however, I was able to find lots of chill time within the city's many interesting cafes. The coffee was so good, oh so good, and the food maybe even better.

I stayed in the city's Old Quarter, not far from the west lake with its giant tortoise. Unbeknownst to me, this tortoise died while I was in Hanoi, leaving only three of its species left (am I such bad luck?). The area breathed of the narrow alleyways and makeshift market places, organically winding streets free of the bird's-eye decrees of urban planners. There was plenty of griminess - Hanoi is still in a developing country, but it's a capital with an illustrious history. The Hoa Lo Prison, or the Hanoi Hilton, was despite its dark nature probably the most interesting place I visited in the city. Though the war is long over, the prison/museum is full of propaganda trying to convince viewers that the American prisoners loved it there. I had known enough about John McCain's imprisonment there during the Vietnam War to question these accounts. Though the museum walls now seemed harmless, they were just eerie enough for me to imagine the horrors of McCain's experience being dragged down the same corridors. It was more fun to imagine how Donald Trump might have fared had he not dodged the draft. 

The storied Halong Bay was next. I visited in January, way out of season, and the bright green water and clear blue skies that so many photos had hyped up were nowhere to be found. Both sky and water were generic shades of grey. I joined a two day one night cruise with an interesting cast of characters. People often ask me, "who is the craziest person you met on your trip?" I think it's difficult to uncover the depths of another's depravity until you really get to know them, which doesn't happen too much while backpacking. However on that cruise, there was an old white haired, white bearded American who probably last shaved during the Reagan administration. Upon boarding, he immediately inquired about weed, which endeared him to the younger backpackers. He soon got weird. He was in his 60's and had not been in the US in over 30 years because it was too sinful. He was a Bible Literalist, believing every single word to be divinely inspired, and actually withstood scrutiny of hypocrisy. Another American girl Brook talked about her last name Long and how cool it was that Long means Dragon in Vietnam, and that Halong itself means Descending Dragon. Bible Beard then spoke about how dragons were the flesh incarnate of the devil and how terrible it was for the Vietnamese to worship them. Talk about buzz kill. Luckily the tranquil seas and green islands of Halong Bay were fun enough overall to drown out Buzzkill Bible Beard and the grey skies.

Next up was Da Nang and Hue, and the memorable bus trip and aviation party which I've documented already. Hue was cool and palatial (Hue Forbidden City) and I could have spent more time there exploring, but instead I chose to escape the rain and drink. Da Nang might seem like a boring modern city, but I enjoyed the chance to see a functioning industrious side of Vietnam. From Da Nang it was a short ride to Hoi An, a charming old port city which had eschewed the modern commercial duties to Da Nang and emerged instead as a touristy lantern-lit ode to a historical era. I loved Hoi An and how the tight Chinese-Japanese-Vietnamese urban architecture intermeshed with the gorgeous river scene. Though the town was small, I could have wandered around those pedestrian alleyways all day. The trip was greatly supplemented by a long bike ride to the beach with a French girl I had just asked to take my picture, and another ride out from town to the Terracotta Park, a random museum with clay models of world wonders, which I had learned from Mya at the aviation party. The liberated joys of backpacking - meeting fellow travelers and finding hidden gems - reached new highs in Hoi An. 

This high was soon to crash down. Sometime on my next voyage, a 16 hour bus ride to the mountain coffee town Buon Ma Thuot, I lost my phone. I spent about 24 hours mostly feeling sad, but I fit in 5 delicious cups of coffee, observant walks through a tourist-free city economy, and a great goat meat dinner with a retired Canadian couple.

Skipping the resort city Dalat, I headed straight to Ho Chi Minh City to a new phone. I was lucky to be offered housing from Sam & Quentin Axelrod, though they were both out of town. Their US consular housing provided a pitstop of luxury, with AC, TV, gym, wifi and an immense jewelled tiger (that Sam loves and Quentin hates). I also was able to connect with some ultimate friends and a Georgetown classmate who based his startup there. I learned that Saigon, or HCMC, is a surprisingly great city for startups. For a city of its level of development and quality of life, the cost of living is bizarrely low (sidenote: its abundance of skybars are also an urban outlier). A steady local graduate corps of programmers are readily and affordably available, and several co-working spaces have sprung up to make HCMC a go-to spot for location independent workers.

I planned my days to involve at least 2 coffee outings, interspersed amongst tourist site visits. My 5 days in HCMC were chill, with sobering trips to the Cu Chi Tunnels, the War Museum, and Saigon's Chinatown. I went into the tunnels confused about how a rag tag underground (literally) bunch could beat the US army machine, but left with an idea of the terror any American soldier must have felt entering those narrow dark trap-filled death corridors. I went into the war museum prepared to deflect the Vietnamese propaganda, but left aghast and abashed. Even if the Agent Orange exhibit inside was incredibly exaggerated, the US atrocities during the war were unfathomable. I felt deep shame for my country and my ignorance of this event. The Chinatown experience was less sobering, but still war-related. I walked around District 5 and found my way into a housing estate where I heard Cantonese. In the courtyard, a pair of adjacent stalls sold dumplings and tea respectively. I sat down and awkwardly started a conversation with a 50 year old enjoying his lunch. His vernacular was odd, with an unfamiliar word to be found in every sentence. He used a formal term for a soldier's march in lieu of the verb for walking. He went on to describe how the whole area used to be in Chinese, and how 4 in 5 residents left during or after the war. I asked him why he stayed, and his calm demeanor belied the sadness of his answer. "Most of them died leaving. The Chinese people have forgotten us. Few Hong Kongers like you want to visit us. But it's ok, life is pretty good here."

The rest of my Saigon experience consisted of expensive drinks at skybars, to the extent where I nicknamed the city Skygon. My first country and main impetus for the trip surpassed my expectations. The pho, banh mi and coffee defied the laws of economics in their quality and price. The foods that hadn't been popularized worldwide, My Quang and Bun Bo Hue and Banh Xeo, rocked my world. I had tasted enough of the food and learned enough of the language that when I entered a Vietnamese restaurant in Bangkok weeks later, I felt surprisingly at home. There was never a dull moment outside either. Cars didn't own the roads and pedestrians didn't own the sidewalks. Everywhere the motorbike was king. The system seemed to be in a state of dynamic flux, never at any equilibrium but somehow never breaking down.