Pura Vida

Pura vida.

This literally translates into "pure life," but after hearing this phrase daily for a month, I'm not sure it's really translatable. I've heard it used as a greeting, a farewell, a thank you, an encouragement and as an acknowledgement of agreement. It reminds you to live your life in a way that's pure in a Costa Rican sense. Pura vida beseeches tranquility and nature, a taking of your time that I, as an unrepentant urbanite, have difficulty grasping.  Along with the word "mae" (meaning something like "dude"), pura vida distinguishes the Spanish of Ticos and Ticas (Costa Ricans), though the phrase itself originates from a 1956 Mexican film of the same name.

Pura vida may claim responsibility for the highest quality of life in Central America. It is definitely responsible for the extreme passage of time between a waiter collecting your finished meal and bringing you the check. Pura vida also demands the acceptance of inconvenience when you inevitably come across a delay in the narrow roads that criss-cross the mountainous country. Pura vida and its free-spiritedness may run counter to social responsibility during a global pandemic, but cases were relatively contained here and as of November 1, tourism was fully reopened.

Traveling during the pandemic opens oneself to risk and disparagement, and I very much had to battle wanderlust with my obligations as a public health citizen before committing to work remotely in Costa Rica for a month. Though the packed flight to Miami was unnerving, arriving in San Jose I knew I'd made the right choice. The temperate climate and strict adherence to masks and hand-washing made socializing less fearful. Indeed it was strange to interact with a populace, that while cohabitating this same pandemic reality, had not been through the same degree of suffering. I never got sick in Costa Rica, and I tested negative when I returned.

San Jose has its charms - plazas that love their sculptures, tropically-vegetated streetscapes, baristas mixing flat whites, and a gaudy Chinese-built stadium (that doubled as a bribe to unrecognize Taiwan) - all surrounded by green hills.  However the bulk of the urban area consists of unremarkable stretches of crumbling concrete interlaced with barbed wire and a smoky commuter train that blows through town at 20 MPH and 100 decibels. The Museo Nacional de Costa Rica itself used the word "backwater" of the Spanish Empire in describing the history of the region. As a result, it lacks the stately buildings and charming old quarters of Panama City, Bogota or San Juan. Many American tourists never spend a minute in the city. I spent ten days there, working from my Airbnb apartment in a high rise in Barrio Escalante. I arrived to an Indian dinner on Diwali (which I dubbed chicken tica masala), attended a Peruvian protest, played ultimate frisbee, picked coffee beans, climbed to the rim of a volcano only to see fog, and spoke a lot of Spanish.

My main adventure began with renting a car on Thanksgiving Day. By strict UN member nation accounting, Costa Rica is my 40th country visited, but this was my first time extensively driving outside the United States. I had been apprehensive, but like the rest of the trip, once I got started I knew it'd been a good idea. The streets of San Jose are chaotic, but outside the city they are fairly straightforward. The danger was getting distracted by the verdant scenery, which ranged from novel to breathtaking. Though Monteverde is to the northwest, my journey started due west down jungly mountains to the sparkling Pacific coast that left me gasping and craning my neck left. 

By now my Spanish was good enough that when I saw signs saying "Puente Angosto," I knew to slow down. In Costa Rica, most roads taper into a single laned bridge over water. Perhaps originally this made engineering or financial sense, but by now short two way bridges surely can't be hard to construct, even in remote areas. I suspect people have become so accustomed to them though that they can't cross water in two directions anymore. 

Continuing up the coast, I turned onto the grand-sounding Pan American Highway. This stretch was basically a humble two-lane backroad. The turnoff to Monteverde was even more minor, to the extent that I missed it completely. I continued down the "highway" looking for a turnoff, but found nothing suitable until suddenly the car in front of me stopped. As far as the eye could see, some mysterious event had frozen traffic. As I sat there idling on the wrong road, I wondered, can I pull a U-turn on this Pan American Highway? I slowly got the courage to peek over the meridian, and seeing no oncoming traffic, pulled an excruciating 10 point turn and scampered out. 

Driving views

Later I drove past a peaceful cow pasture and realized I'd missed another turn, this one even more unobtrusive. Doubling back, I saw a shortcut on Google Maps. However when I turned onto the shortcut, I screeched into a stretch of gravel and dirt leading into a farm, complete with roving cows. Were it not for a pair of tire tracks going through, I wouldn't recognize it for a "road." Instant regret. As I jackhammered my way over the rocks, I could hear my bumper getting scratched and hoped the rental agent wouldn't get too particular. 

Monteverde felt like a small ski town, with lodgings scattered across miles of thin winding dirt roads but a built up downtown belying its population. My two night stay at the Selina hotel (a Portuguese chain that has caught fire over Costa Rica), was punctuated by hot tub drinking with a Dutch couple, an American couple, and a German-educated Costa Rican programmer. The Tico programmer, whom I offered a job, explained pura vida as well as he could. "Sometimes you get to a road and they're doing repairs for an indefinite amount of time, and you have to go pura vida and wait. But I'm not sure this is good. The Germans wouldn't like it."

The vaunted Cloud Forest preserve was within walking distance of my Selina, and I set out at 7am for I was told that the mountaintop would get foggy quite early. I beelined to a pinnacle quickly, from where I was supposed to be able to see both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. For the second time though, I hadn't the foggiest idea where they might be. On the way back, I aimed to cross an iconic red hanging bridge, that bridge that occupies slot #2 in a Google image search for "Costa Rica travel." However I found that the path was blocked by yellow tape printing out "PRECAUCION." This just sparked my curiosity, and I walked around the tape ad hiked toward the bridge. Arriving at the bridge, I found this:

Why was it closed? Why hadn't anyone, including the guide who recommended this trail, warned me about this? Was this worth sneaking onto? Taking a hard look at the whole bridge, the far end did not look entirely flat, I figured it was closed for good reason. Typical 2020. Pura vida.

Monteverde is also famous for canopy zipline tours. I booked one and arrived early, chatting with the guides David and Raul until I realized I was the only customer. Still two guides are needed to run a zipline safely, and bashfully I wondered if they were losing money on my transaction. I'm not a big fan of heights-based adrenaline activities, like roller coasters, but I'd gone ziplining once before in Laos, and hadn't found it scary. However the start of the tour was a "Tarzan swing," in I was tied to a rope and aggressively pushed off a high structure to pendulum down and up 50 feet over the jungle. After recovering from that, the ziplining was fantastic. The longest line spanned 800m across a valley, over a public road, with spectacular views of the thick jungle. The path of the tour included climbing up the inside of a hollow tree - actually a Ficus tree that had long since surrounded and strangled another tree. Most surprising to me was the platforms with no guard rails. Zipping in with momentum, I would land and cling to the cables with an illogical sense of fear. I recall the ziplines in Laos having more built-up landing platforms. I wonder if Laos had ever been compared favorably in the development game before.

One night, I found a roadside chicken griller who sold me a pincho de pollo (chicken skewer) for 800 colones ($1.30), and wrapped it in a flour tortilla for free. At an adjacent convenience counter I asked for a glass bottle of coke for 500 colones. That cashier asked me where I would drink the coke. Confused, I pointed to the grill, and she gave me a set of instructions that I gradually understood to involve returning the bottle to her. I took this as another example of Costa Rica's environmentalism. While eating the skewer and chatting with the griller, Antonella, a black Escalade pulled up. An Asian-American woman got out and misinterpreting what I was eating, asked for a taco. When she didn't understand Antonella's reply, "con papas o con ensalada?" I found myself translating from Spanish to English for the first time in my life. I finished the skewer and returned the coke bottle with a "pura vida."

On Sunday I began my leisurely drive down to Puerto Viejo (de Talamanca) on the Caribbean coast, where I would spend the week working. I had researched wifi availability on this small beach town, and learned that Banana Azul, the fanciest resort, did have a high speed connection. However, they were full on Sunday, so I booked them for Monday to Friday and found another place for Sunday night. I was slightly worried about the logistics of Monday morning work, but I figured pura vida, it'll be alright.  I took my time, stopping in a random remote restaurant outside Puerto Viejo de Sarapiqui (it's confusing) which doubled as a house, and befriending the staff/residents. Later I found the road filled with stopped cars and a couple motorcycles. Clearly unspecified roadwork was going on, so I shrugged and thought, this requires pura vida. Slowly cars accumulated behind me until I couldn't see the end of the line, while the motorcycles ahead of me multiplied. 45 minutes in, my pura vida was expiring and had I trusted my Spanish more I may have started yelling at the construction crew. There was no communication whatsoever. Finally they let us through, and we drove through a half mile of windy dirt road being paved and passed an even longer vehicle queue on the other side.  When I reached the main Route 32 to Limon, I saw construction doubling its width, often assisted by massive machinery with names in Simplified Chinese. The scenery evolved from rainforest into endless banana farms. The Boston-based United Fruit Company's (now Chiquita) had built the railroad from San Jose to Limon and birthed the term "Banana Republic" into existence. I wondered if they still owned these farms. Suddenly, my phone, with a Costa Rican sim card installed, rings and I perplexedly answer. "Hello this is Alamo....are you going to return your car today?" Like that, my pura vida was interrupted by contractual obligations. I found out that the Alamo in Puerto Viejo closes at 5pm, figured I was on track for about 4:05, and said no problem, pura vida.

I quickly drove through Limon, past a massive cemetery and a small airfield, and alongside the ocean. Driving along the Caribbean coast was another spectacular experience, especially having driven along the Pacific only a few days before. Approaching Puerto Viejo, the road got smaller but the cars got wider. Not long ago Puerto Viejo was a small fishing village that wasn't even connected by road to the rest of Costa Rica, settled largely by black Jamaican immigrants. Many had arrived during the railroad-building in the 1870's, and their descendants still generally speak English and Spanish. Now it is a destination internationally well-known for its surfing waves, but as I discover the roads have not grown proportionally. Puerto Viejo is essentially a one street town, and that street lacks the width for cars and bikes to cohabitate. Further space competition comes in the form of large tour buses and pedestrians, the majority beach drunk. The townspeople seem to be embodying pura vida but as it ticks past 4:15 I am increasingly not.  I end up putting my car in neutral and edging into the trespassing pedestrians, one of whom slams my trunk in response. I took deep breathes, and repeated "pura vida" to myself, though I was bursting with anxiety. I couldn't wait to check in, ditch the car, and drink on the beach.

I finally reach my lodging and execute a painful parallel park. "Qué tal Rasta?" the receptionist greeted me in an Afro-Caribbean manner that I absolutely love. "Tengo una reservacion," I respond, and the receptionist gives me a quizzical "reservacion?" reply. Frustrated, I pull out my confirmation email and the receptionist goes "ah, Expedia. They do this a lot. They allow you to book, but there's no room to book." I was fairly stunned - this has never happened to me before. I would've been angry, but I figured there's been so little tourism, I'll find something else. The hotel next door had 1 room remaining. "I don't think you want it though," said the receptionist. "It's our honeymoon suite." I felt a bit judged by that and inquired about the price. "$160." I figured I'd find better options elsewhere. Looking around the unpaved side streets, I found I didn't, and authoritatively strolled back into the hotel offering: "$140." The receptionist got on the phone with her boss, and came back with, "sorry but no." I huffed away and got in my car. I had only 5 minutes to get to Alamo.

I did make it in time, and despite that pounding on the cattle farm, incurred no damage fees. I grabbed all my bags and started going door-to-door, from hotel to guesthouse to inn. Each one was full. Finally I asked a guy, "what's going on here? Why is everything full?" In Monteverde everything was at like 30% capacity."  The guy looked at me with profound sympathy. "Ah mae, it's a holiday tomorrow." That's when I knew I was in real trouble. If I had a set of rules for traveling, somewhere below "never take your phone out in the bathroom of a moving train" would be "be aware of local holidays." This has happened to me before. Puerto Viejo was not full of international tourists - it was full of Ticos/as at the beach for the 3 day weekend. 

I hurry back to the hotel with the honeymoon suite and I sweep in, sweaty and disheveled, proclaiming, "I'll take it!" The receptionist looks at me again and says, "I'm so sorry. I just gave it away." "You're kidding me." I sit down in their lobby couch, dejected. "Have you tried Rockin J's?" suggested the receptionist. 

I head down the main road, maneuvering past the oversized tour buses and carefree beachgoers, carrying all my luggage in this hot beach town. The first part of Rockin J's that I glimpse is its barbed wired fence. The second part is the tents, rows and rows of tents. They occupy the entire second floor of what looks like a hastily built shelter, with wooden columns holding up a corrugated metal roof. I can't help but think it looks like a refugee camp. Warily, I approach the front desk. "Do you have a room? ....with walls?" "Yes of course, we have one left." This receptionist takes me past some surfer bros smoking weed in hammocks, up a set of metal stairs and into what looked like a compartment of a small tanker ship. The compartment door is shut via padlock, and the receptionist spends 10 seconds fiddling around to unlock the padlock, and chunks of rust flake off in the process. Finally voila the door opens up and I see a bunk bed, with a needlessly high top bunk and a bench where the bottom bunk should be, and a visibly sticky floor. "Shared bathroom over here, shared showers down stairs. Beach access over there." This was a place I would've enjoyed in my early 20's, perchance even bragged about. "I stayed in Puerto Viejo for $15!" But now, with Agile sprint practices and customer delivery dates in my head, I thought to myself, "I've made too much money for this." Audibly however, my mouth resignedly said, "I'll take it."

That wasn't even the end though. I went to take a shower, and heard two French voices occupying the two shower stalls and patiently waited my turn - until I realized the two voices occupied the same stall. I entered the other stall, and found instead of a showerhead and faucet, there was just a PVC pipe, and a spigot. The spigot would allow no flow of water whatsoever until suddenly it would allow a slice of Niagara Falls to spurt out. As I stood getting hosed by PVC water in this Costa Rican beachside hostel/refugee camp with thin shower walls, I thought to myself, this wasn't even my first time getting too close to a lovemaking French couple in a cheap lodging. What sort of life decisions had I made to end up here? Later as I sat alone on the beach, sipping a beer and watching the Caribbean waves crashing down, I felt like a stereotypical middle-aged divorcee.

The next morning, I got up early, called a cab, and moved from the cheapest hostel to the nicest hotel in town. I settled in the hotel lobby, connected my air pods and got on my 10am zoom with my boss as if it was a normal Monday morning.

Pura vida.

Living a Diverse Life

Professionally, I spend a lot of time working with data, mostly from physical events like pipe inspections.  There's a machine learning technique called clustering that identifies groupings of observations, finding those that are along multiple variables more similar to each other than to the rest of the population. Usually the data I look at does not lend itself to neat clusters.  Most data contains variables along a continuum without clear demarcations. It might look something like this:

Applying a clustering algorithm like I did essentially draws an arbitrary border through a mass of points. The spots near the center could really be in any of the clusters.

Our society however, is not shaped like that.  If each dot represented a person, and we clustered based on socioeconomic variables, interests and how people spent their time, we might be able to plot something like this:

The clusters are quite distinct. If you know which cluster a point is in and where it lies on the x-axis, you can reasonably guess where it lies among the y-axis. Only a smattering of points are not in clear clusters.

Many aspects of the physical world are messy. It's not easy to tell which part of a pipeline will rust and which part won't, necessitating the collection of tons of data points and the use of sophisticated algorithms. But in our society, we humans routinely and subconsciously guess people's background, such as religion or economic standing, based on a handful of attributes including name and appearance.

The more of the world I experience, the more I notice the clustered nature of our world.  "Clustered" can be replaced by "segregated." This word has strong racial connotations, intentionally, but is not limited to that. We are segregated by socioeconomic status, by geography, by ideology, by language, by vocabulary, by common cultural and knowledge bases. Technology, which can overcome or deepen this segregation, lately seems to be doing more of the latter. We have folks absorbing different news sources, getting targeted different advertisements, and seeking out those within their own cluster with more precision than ever.

This has perhaps always been true in the history of civilization. Ancient Rome was so class divided that there were essentially two separate languages. The educated folks spoke and wrote in the Latin we study now, and the common folk's language was called Vulgar Latin, from which modern day Romance languages descend. 

What's changed in 2020 includes the globalization bringing many disparate peoples into the same towns.  Additionally, technology allows us to form social circles that span great distances, rendering geographic proximity less relevant than ever. Thus even if one's surroundings are "diverse", one's social circle might not be. Thirdly, many of us are now inundated with so many more opinions from social media. We react, often emotionally, to opinions and often have our beliefs crystallized and strengthened through many iterations of catered social media views. When two people have widely different social media experiences and engage in discussion, it can feel like they are starting from page 500 of two different books.

How often are our clustered existences the source of conflict in our society? How many of our problems stem from people not understanding those in other clusters? It's the reason dumb niche ideas like the Juicero are conceived and funded, the reason why people write tweets that they don't realize are offensive and get fired, and a reason why white cops arrest and kill innocent black people at disproportionate numbers.  Sure, some people do bad things because they are rotten in their core, but most people who disagree with you do so because all the evidence they gather in their very different life experience leads to forming a very different opinion.

Exacerbating this is how separate are lives are. Again historically, the urban - rural divide has always been massive.  Everything from housing sizes, means of transportation, job opportunities to demographic makeups are dramatically different between cities and the countryside.  In addition, our world is structured to literally divide us with borders. Even between countries of similar language and culture, these borders are real. Anecdotally, I know more people who move from Boston to Seattle or from Montreal to Vancouver than between Boston and Montreal. We are perhaps even evolutionary disposed to cluster, to stick to our tribes for safety. Our world is not set up for us to experience a cross-section of society.

I think it's easy for people of color in America to underestimate the degree of difficulty for their fellow white citizens. People of color must learn a lot about white people just to survive in this country. There is a system incentivizing the understanding of the culture, history and mannerisms of the white majority. They, being the majority, lack this incentive. There's no boost to your college application for being woke, no additional points to your credit score for having black friends. And yes, it is natural for people of color to feel infuriated at this imbalance, and bitterly mutter well they should put in the effort, and yes, they should. But it's still worth examining how a white person growing up in a white environment, without much social or economic incentive to truly understand the minorities in their country, may not really know how to learn. Yes, there's plenty of anti-racist literature available to read, plenty of inspiring speeches on YouTube, but those aren't necessarily enough to empathize with the daily reality of someone familiar. They might not necessarily be enough to give someone confidence to ask the right questions or even have standing to get involved in racial justice issues.

I don't want to come off as a white people apologist. I'm angry too. I wish it were mandatory that everyone learn how to pronounce pinyin, or know that Hong Kong is not in Japan, or at least not accuse COVID-19 of being concocted by the CCP. But I do know that it's hard for anyone to live a diverse life, and particularly hard for those in the majority in their societies. It's not an excuse, but it should be recognized. And if we truly are all in this together, then we need to start bringing in people together. We need to deliberately seek out new perspectives, including in dramatic ways such as living in neighborhoods of a different ethnic background, learning a completely unrelated language, or volunteering at a charity that doesn't directly help your cluster. It goes for everyone - even the wokest people do make ignorant comments about situations they're not familiar with.

I know there are those who will instinctively resist this viewpoint. I've heard black people express the frustrations of being integrators/explainers their whole lives and a desire to just be left alone. I happen to love being an integrator, but I get it, maybe I wouldn't if I had 10x the explanations demand. It's true, there should be plenty of safe spaces where people can just live their best life. But unfortunately, we also can't make progress without the majority and those with access to power on board, and some of them might need some handholding on the ramp.

Being an Asian American male has allowed me to play different cards sometimes.  I'm definitely not white, and face a lot of minority-specific issues, but there are many issues I don't need to worry about including being killed by the police. Many Asians here are able to tap into white societal power structures while rarely getting called out for perpetuating them. Being a minority provides a useful defense when facing an accusation of racism, but being a minority does not mean you too don't need to do the work of living a more diverse life.  I myself strive for this goal, but it's been a difficult one to attain alongside the many other goals I have in life. Almost by definition, the neighborhood that would most shake up my world is not the best neighborhood for me to get to my job or hang out with my friends. And it's never been a good idea to seek out friends because of the color of their skin. But I try to be self-aware of my place in the world, and my understanding of it. I try to be intentional about what I absorb, where I travel, what I support. I find this to be a virtuous cycle - when you learn about new domains, you are usually able to connect with more people, who then introduce you to more new domains. There's no "diversity target" - this is a guidance for life.

Lastly, while we may be firmly defined within our clusters, we generally still have weak connections to people outside them.  Technology also allows us to glimpse into these other clusters, without supplementing the context that comes with true familiarity. We see videos or tweets espousing views we find radical and have to make assumptions as to what led to these views. It's a toxic environment of billboard communication that results in each cluster just flipping more pages along their disparate books.

So in the wake of the racial justice protests that engaged so much of America in June 2020, I hear a common question being asked, "What next?" In addition to entering politics, reading up on anti-blackness, donating, volunteering, leading further protests etc., I would posit one further: Live a more diverse life. I doubt that there's anyone who couldn't find some way to expose themselves to new viewpoints. Watch more Bollywood movies. Listen to a podcast by transgender hosts. Read more books from before the 20th centuries. Spend more time in places without a cell phone signal. Without running water. There is no person who cannot have their ideas challenged through a new perspective and continue to grow. 

Reamed in Reims

The passenger next to me on the train to Reims was clearly an English-speaker and affiliated with the World Cup. She had a serious face and one of those IBM ThinkPads and was going through some instructive PDFs. "Are you working for FIFA?" She nodded, and responded, "And you must be supporting the Americans." We were clearly on the same train of thought. She had been with FIFA for many years, working U17 and youth events before getting her chance organizing security for the Women's World Cup. It was a 5 week sprint of a job with almost no days off.

Reims is a fairly random city for a World Cup match, a  town of 180,000 with a grand cathedral where kings of yore were crowned. I was extremely excited to be in a real French city not spoiled by excess tourism, for the chance to speak French and learn more about the country.

The ride was a disarmingly brief 45 minutes. Emerging from the train station, I added to a mess of disoriented Americans. The taxi line was quickly overwhelmed. Hotels had been well-booked, and so I had found an AirBnB way out of the city, a full 50 minute walk from the stadium. With the help of a physical map and passable French direction asking, I took a public bus filled with high school students into the suburbs. This neighborhood could've housed the French Harry Potter growing up on a Privet Drive. Stepping off onto the quiet sidewalk, the normality of the place jarred me during such an abnormal time in my life. I rang a bell outside the gate to a modest stone house.

"Bonjour! Je suis Cal." I greeted the woman who emerged."
"Elcome! Et vous parlez français ouais!"
"Ah bien sûr! Merci pour votre hospitalite sûr Airbnb!" I stepped inside.
"Comment êtes-vous arrivé ici? Par voiture?"
"Ah non, par bus."

With the host I had my first real French conversations out of necessity in years. I was surprised by our level of communication. I had not put any concerted effort into French since high school. The last couple years I'd been learning Spanish, but on this past trip in Basque country, I'd used to Spanish to get by and nothing more. Upon crossing the border, I'd had to suppress the instinct to say "si!" or "por favor." It was bizarre to discover I could have Spanish instincts, as if discovering a new crease on the back of your hand. And yet now French was flowing out - not as fluently as Mandarin - but good enough to have a real conversation. I learned that my hosts Mireille et Hervé have six adult children - three living in Lille, two in Paris, and one in Ankara, Turkey working as a professor. They'd been getting a handful of guests since they started Airbnb a year ago, and now were receiving exciting volume from the World Cup. Hervé expressed surprise that I'd come explicitly for this match, and I had to clarify that no it's a longer story.

Hervé drove me into town where I maneuvered to meet future teammates. I was picking up with a team in Windmill Windup in two days, and knew only two of my teammates, but our shared GroupMe had allowed me to connect with two stranger teammates who'd also be at this match. Lauren and Mo were part of a group of 4 who were eating dinner before the 9pm match. When I did find them upstairs at a restaurant bar, my awkward insertion into their evening was somewhat reduced by my recognizing one of their friends! Glenn had coached the Georgetown team after I left but I'd met him at alumni events.

For global time zone reasons, World Cup schedules can result in some strange match times, and this match started at 9pm. For no apparent reason, alcoholic beverages were not sold on premise. Even stranger, at 49 N and the middle of June, it was still very light out. Walking over a bridge towards the stadium, we were quickly immersed into a very American crowd split between blue jeans and soccer jerseys. There were the USA-USA cheers that might come out of a college football tailgate, but intermixed with a staidness that comes with an international footballing match on French territory. The first dozen minutes the Americans dominated pace and possession but couldn't quite convert. And then they did. And again. And again. Very quickly I had found fellow Americans to high-five. Everyone I spoke with was either already living in Europe (mostly military in Germany) or in Europe on a pre-existing Eurotrip (like me). Across the stadium, I saw a section filled with the Thai contingent, increasingly less jovial. As Alex Morgan powered and finessed her way past the Thai defense, many of whom came up to her shoulder, I never stopped cheering. Goals are awesome - World Cup goals are even better. The joy of scoring didn't dissipate even when we reached 13-0. I spent most of the match watching with Brian and Diane, brother and sister from Texas who also had tickets for the finals in Paris.

Upon exiting the stadium around 11pm, the light was just fading. The mass of soccer fans were crossing the river Vesle from the uninhabited stadium area to the city proper. As I maneuvered through the crowd in this modest sized French sub-prefecture on a Wednesday, night I had never been more desperate for a drink. 

Notification from the Massachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance (DUA)

A few weeks ago, the Greater Boston Legal Services reached out to me. I had volunteered there as a translator last year during a bout of unemployment, and now they were asking if I could help Cantonese speakers apply for unemployment insurance (UI). Having used the Massachusetts unemployment system twice, and whereby encountered deep levels of frustration, I was uniquely well qualified to help. This task could only be more in my wheelhouse if it required generating a chart and a pun, attaching them to a disc and flinging it all across a river.

www.mass.gov/dua houses the Massachusetts Department of Unemployment Assistance program. Hopefully many of you readers are unfamiliar with the ins and outs of unemployment assistance in America (although I suspect that is less and less true). The principle asserts that taxpayers who have paid into state coffers and find themselves suddenly unemployed can assuage their situations by receiving weekly payments in proportion to their tax contribution, until they find a new job. It is limited to state residents and state earned income, and not eligible to people who have voluntarily left their job or been fired for cause.

My frustrations with the system encompass both its design intentions and its execution. A pall of antagonism against "government handout takers" hovers over every new page of inane questions - I sense that the designers would rather ten worthy UI seekers be denied rather than one cheat take advantage of the system. When combined with a user interface design from the early 2000s without any sophisticated "user research", and you're left with a system that has nearly reduced me to tears on multiple occasions. I've needed to show up in person to the offices twice and still lost out on 2 weeks of legitimate claims - and I speak English and use the internet well! Imagine how hard this is to navigate for older immigrants, who empirically comprise the bulk of claims in Boston?

So you sign in with your social security and click submit - but of course you have to first check that camouflaged box on top that says you agree to a bunch of government legalese. Then the application process consists of approximately 10000 questions - no but legitimately there are 30 pages. The first question asks, "Did you work part-time last week?" If you didn't work at all last week, you are supposed to answer.... yes. What they mean is "were you eligible for unemployment last week?" The system assumes that you are applying on your first full week of unemployment, not taking in mind that quite a lot goes on when you unexpectedly lose your job, and a filing with the government might slip a few weeks. So if three weeks go by since your layoff date, can you apply for all three weeks? Yes you are eligible for full benefits, but the system only lets you apply for this week and the past week. If you want to get that third week, you have to call the state or visit in person - neither of which are options at the moment.

Another logical breach occurs with the following 1-2 punch of questions:
1) How would you like to receive your correspondence? Electronic or US Mail
2) Is English your primary language? Yes or No

Corresponding via US Mail makes me shudder, but if you choose Electronic and not English, the system tells you that Electronic correspondence is not available in other languages - although it actually is. You LITERALLY cannot proceed unless you change your response to indicate English is your primary language. A representative government is a government that forces you to lie.

The system requires choosing most applicable job title amongst a list written in the late 90s (I waffled between Research Statistician and Computer Informatics) for no real discernible reason. Further questions include:

• Are you considered working on-call for this employer?
• Are you a member of a corporation or a shareholder in this company?
• Are you customarily laid off?
• Are you required by a court order or other government agency to pay child support?

Lastly, you are required to look for work 3 days/week and fill in a Work Search Activity Log. This includes interviewing, attending training workshops, networking, going to the career fair. Is it an efficient way to show you are looking for work? No.  Does a legitimate job search require spending 3 different days each week doing these specific tasks? Some weeks almost certainly not. Does anyone actually ever check? No.

If you remain on unemployment for 8 weeks, you have to attend a Job Center workshop, to learn to find work, otherwise you stop claiming benefits. Does it matter if you went 7 weeks without a job then landed one with a start date in 2 weeks? Still need to attend. Does the state have any resources even remotely helpful to a data scientist? Rhetorical. I took the bus into a training center in Roxbury only to find out the session information was inaccurate, and had to shuttle to a session later that day in downtown Boston where I sat bored for 2 hours.

But the worst part are the numerous critical, time-sensitive correspondences between you and the DUA. Do they email you? Kinda. Does the email say anything? Never. It merely links to the department website, where you then need to log in just to read the message. The message isn't even a message, it downloads a PDF, which is always by default blocked by browsers. The platform is not accessible outside the US, and is frequently down for maintenance.



God forbid you forget your password. The password reset system is legitimately bugged, as I walked clients through the process and entered the exact right verification codes and the exact right security question answers only to get denied. If you need that password, the key to everything including even reading correspondence, you have to call the state or visit in person - neither of which are options at the moment.

I lost two weeks of claims because I didn't read a notification and respond within the assigned 10 days. I filed an appeal, which was denied with no explanation provided.

The people I help are all from Guangdong province, China. They range from 40-70 years old, worked as restaurant waitress, home care aide or masseuses, with educations ranging from 5th grade to finished high school. All of them are literate in Chinese, except for the one who is Viet Hoa, and speak standard Cantonese, except for the one whose Taishanese I understand maybe 60%. Many of them worked at restaurants I've frequented, meaning I've likely interacted with them before, but never gave much thought to their lives outside the restaurant. For my first "client", I tried to walk her through the website, directing her to the login link. As I struggled to figure out how to say "login tab" in Chinese, she told me she wasn't seeing what I was seeing. "Um, do you see that blue part underneath the light yellow part, above the white part, above the picture with the woman?" "No." The client finally sent me a picture of what she was seeing and I realized she was accessing on her mobile. I wouldn't even have conceived of that option for myself, but having now worked with 8 clients, none of them own a computer. Most of my clients have not figured out how to open the PDF messages on their phone.

When I first saw the estimated weekly payout value for my client, I thought we'd made a mistake. Only $120? I looked at her wages, did some quick math, and sat stunned wondering how anyone could survive in Boston on $20K a year. None of my clients make more than $35K of taxable income - here's a reminder that the tips-based economy really hurts in this situation. All of my clients live in the metro area and I can usually hear children in the background. Every single person I talk to needs this money, and none of them are realistically capable of applying for it on their own.



I know that building an unemployment claims system is hard. There are so many different types of workers, so many bad actors to account for, so many permutations of unemployment seekers and job discharges. And I did get paid a sizable chunk that covered my rent and expenses, twice, bringing me much relief in times of stress. To be further complimentary,  Massachusetts has waived the required waiting week period and work search activity requirements in this COVID-19 period. They've poured resources into keeping this overwhelmed system afloat, but fundamentally they're patching a broken system.

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I learned that the DUA online platform was created in the early 2000s, when state governments were given federal dollars to invest in digital infrastructure. Invariably the decision makers didn't know how to make the best technical decisions, and the lowest bidding contractor they hired used some front-end and back-end technologies that quickly became obsolete. This is similar to how New Jersey has ended up needing COBOL programmers in this time of crisis. As time passed, only that contractor could maintain the system, no one could really add to it. I'm sure no product designer at the time was thinking about the experience of Haitian or Chinese immigrants. Mobile internet didn't even exist yet. Federal money has not been earmarked for state digital infrastructure in the same way since, and that poor decision in the early 2000s haunts us to today.

It's not fair to blame the programmers for their lack of multi-decade foresight, or the program manager who approved these fateful choices. What I encountered with the DUA was the product of a systematic defanging of US government depriving it of crucial expertise. A trend pushed by Reagan¹ but picked up by all subsequent administrations has seen more and more work outsourced to private contractors. What has suffered has not been so much the quality of the product - I'm sympathetic to the argument that the private sector may do specialized work more efficiently - but rather the gradual erosion of expertise within government. As skilled government workers left for higher paying equivalent roles in the private sector, an "unvirtuous" cycle was created with less skilled employees training less and less skilled employees. The crisis of the federal talent pool was identified as early as 2000 in this Brookings article which stated:

Government must provide challenging work and the opportunity for growth. It is irresponsible to recruit talented graduates only to squander their commitment in a dead-end job with no chance to make a difference.

With all due respect to my friends who work in government, I see a lot of truth in this. When combined with the overly restrictive government GS pay bands, which limit all federal employees to below the salary of a second year Facebook developer, government is rarely seen as a desirable job for America's best and brightest.  As a result you have program flops like the Job Center I was forced to visit, which I was delighted to find panned in another article:

For example, the Department of Labor’s One-Stop Job Centers were intended to be an all-in-one resource for employment seekers, providing job seekers with career counseling and connections to both job opportunities and education and training programs. Unfortunately, they have failed to live up to their promise. ... What’s needed, according to the Brookings research, are performance measures that encourage cost-effective One-Stop programming that leads to higher wages, more tax revenue, and less taxpayer spending on unemployment insurance.²

It doesn't need to be like this. Civil service is an honor in many countries, where the best and brightest do hope to end up. Singapore is the most obvious example, where a variety of factors such as the Singapore Government Scholarship (free international tuition in return for years of service), higher wages and greater overall trust in authority has created a country where government actually works, and people want to work in government.

With regard to tech in American government, the salary difference might pose too high a barrier without substantial reform. But can we get creative? Can we not create a secondment system for burned out Silicon Valley workers? A three month semi-sabbatical lending your node.js or pandas expertise to federal programs? Can the FANG firms not scrape together a fellowship to instill some mid-career product managers in a 1 year position redesigning a decrepit state program? Surely there are better uses of societal capital than throwing $200,000 at  a senior software engineer to improve the backend data ingestion in adtech.

************
I'm glad the Greater Boston Legal Services in conjunction with the Chinese Progressive Association, Viet Aid and others have created a network providing service to underserved immigrants that is able to scale up in times like these. It's been quite stressful fielding texts and calls in Chinese, often with frustrating issues that I'm unable to resolve, between taking meetings at my real job, while ambulance sirens inexorably blare outside.  However, I'm grateful for my experiences and ability to help out those in need, while I keep my job. But if coronavirus teaches us anything, government is important. We need a way to collectively help each other out when disasters strike. We need a deep rethink of how government operates and equally important, who operates government.

¹ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/the-federal-outsourcing-boom-and-why-its-failing-americans/2014/01/31/21d03c40-8914-11e3-833c-33098f9e5267_story.html
² https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-us-department-of-talent/404428/

Covid, the viral Roman poet

COVID-19 is devastating because it's already killed ~6000 people worldwide and counting, halted economic activity, and pretty much affected all of our lives. I personally know one friend who got it, know of one person who lost a family member to it, and know of dozens who have had trips and events cancelled. The whole plague sucks.

For the vast majority of people who are not infected and practicing self-quarantine, one of the major effects of the disease is that there's not just nothing to do, there's nothing to talk about. Well, there's one thing to talk about, but there's nothing really to say about it. Coronavirus is all anyone can think about, and we all have the same opinions / experiences. "Flatten the curve", "social distancing", "not enough testing kits", "wash your hands", "I hear they'll be shutting down so-and-so" - there's only so much to say. We all are going through this very unusual, very disruptive, very uncertain times together, and we have NOTHING ORIGINAL TO SAY.

There's no new sports games, no new James Bond movie, no new trip stories, just everybody asking each other how many masks, groceries and rolls of toilet paper they've accumulated.

That's all. Coronavirus is not my muse.

Stay safe.

Tech Debt

Insomnia kept me tossing and turning, and sometime after two in the morning I caved and walked to my couch and got on my laptop. I'm not sure how I got to it, but I ended up thinking about past jobs and job applications and Googling "Jana Boston." I had applied to the Boston-based startup Jana in 2016, and now I was seeing on Crunchbase that they had raised a $57 million Series D round in 2016.  Having moved from Hong Kong to Boston a few months before, I was desperately trying to land a data scientist position and ideally at a place with an international reach. I had come across Jana from job boards and read about their work providing digital access to the developing world, mainly rural India. The main product was a platform that enabled users in areas where mobile data was expensive essentially to trade ad views for free data. Everything seemed incredible - mission-driven smart people using software and data science to fight global inequality, all from a cool Downtown Crossing office with glass whiteboards and ping pong tables.

It did cross my mind that in recent memory, internet accessibility had increased dramatically in rural China without Jana's platform. But surely this fancy cool well-funded startup had already succeeded, and would be an amazing place for me to learn data science. I reached a final round interview before getting rejected. I later worked as a data scientist for GE and CiBO, getting laid off from both.

It was irritatingly difficult to find any news about Jana since 2016. There were a bunch of mixed reviews on Glassdoor, the historical funding information on Crunchbase and little else. On a hunch, I then googled "Jana Boston layoffs" and I came across some Boston Globe articles behind a paywall. At 2:30am I became a bostonglobe.com subscriber. 

It turns out that mobile data indeed had gotten a lot cheaper in India. Jana which had raised around $90 million overall had died an ignominious death. Our  $30m CiBO disaster looked like a fender bender compared to this train wreck. The tech startup world was a cruel one. I thought about the number of employees who had bought into the mission and ended up disappointed. I thought about the hundreds of thousands of lines of code that have been painfully written, tested, edited, deployed and discarded.

I came out of that wee hour search rabbit hole pretty jaded. I had very much bought into the story of Jana and was only now discovering that I'd have cast a losing wager. As I had done at CiBO. The following Thursday, February 13th, I learned that a company I nearly worked at, Wayfair, laid off 350 people in the Boston headquarters. What is it with all these layoffs? What did it portend for my current mission-driven tech startup? If these company failures are so common, how does anyone in tech make any money?

They say startup founders can go from feeling like they're creating a unicorn to worrying they'll go bankrupt in the same week. I seesawed similarly - about our financial success, our environmental impact, and my personal impact. What scared me the most was my willingness to ignore skeptical safeguards. Optimism had obscured my sensibilities in the past, and it could be doing so again.

There were ways for me to rationalize the macro view.  I could take the odds view, that the venture capitalists behind these companies were making bets hoping that 1 out of 10 might win - my work effort was a part of that calculus. 9,999 cancer researchers might fail to find a cure, but society needs them all to work hard for the 1 researcher who does succeed. I could think about the work that these startups do accomplish, which even if aren't directly built on, prove out a direction to either follow or avoid. Then there are the lessons learnt for everyone involved that potentially could help guide future endeavors.

Ultimately there are so many factors outside of your control that it becomes illogical to base too much of your sense of self-worth on the company that hires you. Job-seekers are rarely in a position of power, and though I tried to be extremely judicious in my last job search, I ended up needing to take the best position available to me. There's a fine line between being passionate and dedicated about your career and letting your company's success and impact define your dignity. Work hard, earn those wages, be realistic about what you can accomplish and influence what you can influence.

In another post sometime I'd like to dig deeper into the deluded nature of thinking we can solve world hunger from a computer screen in America. For now, I'd like to note that I find it far healthier to feel grateful for all that I have gained from my past jobs instead of dwelling on the lack of sustained impact.