x-axis: Your Country, y-axis: The World

If you follow US politics, you might have heard a lot about income inequality recently. The dreaded 1% possess 40% of the country's wealth. Barack Obama has called it "the defining challenge of our time," and Bernie Sanders has essentially built his entire campaign on this issue. I've heard the talking points many times: wages are stagnant, student loans are oppressive, jobs are moving overseas, the wealthiest individuals and corporations are buying politicians and rigging the rules to the profit of their upper management.

I write this paragraph from a minibus, rolling through rural Cambodia, and I agree that those are all problems. But outside my window are symptoms of other problems. I've long suspected that in a world where I'm typing on my iPhone 6s driving past wooden bungalows with thatched or corrugated metal roofs that fat cat CEOs can't be the source of all these problems. Regrettably I didn't study a ton of economics and the mysteries of poverty escaped me. So I printed out some research papers before I left work and brought them along on this trip. I've read a bunch of Branko Milanovic, including his paper on the history of wealth inequality, Peter's paper on the winners and losers of globalization, and Gini's inaugural paper introducing his coefficient in the original Italian. I've also been influenced by Klein's "This Changes Everything" book on climate change that is extremely critical of globalization. And I think I have a few more answers now. (All are recommended reading except Gini, that was just for fun)

Inequality has gotten far worse in the age of globalization. Milanovic estimates that the Global Gini was 0.55 in the 1820's and 0.65 in 2002. Inequality overall fell somewhat since 1980, but almost entirely because China emerged from stifling communist economic policies into a world power, with hundreds of millions lifted, or perhaps dragged, out from extreme poverty, many into a legitimate middle class. Additionally, income inequality between countries is greater, far greater, than inequality within countries. In many ways, this latter fact is obvious, if so rarely addressed. Furthermore, while globalization has created some jobs in developing nations, it mostly has increased global consumption. Corporations keep retreating to areas where labor and environmental standards are more and more reduced, saving costs and keeping the savings largely to their own upper management (and shareholders).  The rich get to buy more things and the majority of that money goes to the even richer. As nearly all the richest multinational corporations and their boards are from the richest countries, this has aggravated global inequality.

The status quo amongst nations remains largely because our world of nations is not set up to address other people's problems. I think we can identify these problems - the largest seem to be infrastructure, whether physical or intangible. There aren't good enough roads, pipes or wires. There aren't good enough schools, doctors, understanding of contraception, financial knowledge etc. And the governments are too corrupt. So even if you have the best intentions and know-how, when you send $100 million into a country to build roads and realize that you've actually increased income inequality because $80 million disappeared into a few pockets, it's easy to throw your hands up and back away. It's true, it's not your problem that Vietnamese officials are corrupt or don't prioritize the education in this region. With our current system setup, it's much easier for people to focus on their own problems, of which there always plenty. There is no accountability for someone else's poverty, even if you are unwittingly complicit in exacerbating it.

Superstar economist Jeffrey Sachs describes the situation in another way: it's not just that there are billions of people at the lowest rung of the economic ladder, it's that billions of people are not even on the ladder. Try as they might, bright as they might be, without external assistance they will never escape from poverty because the markets are working against them. The way I like to picture this situation is if you made a graph with every individuals salary on the y-axis and individual people on the x-axis and then tracked where every dollar they spent went, you'd see that a lot of the money that the rich spend goes to other rich people. Some of it trickles down, but as rich people go out to expensive restaurants and buy expensive apartments and cars, a lot of that money circulates among the rich. Similarly, down at the bottom of the graph, poor people sell goods or provide services to other poor people, very rarely getting any monetary input from the people above them.

So I thought I had an idea. If I travel to these places, I could identify the people not on the ladder, those circulating meager savings amongst themselves, and buy stuff from them, or even just give them money. In Hong Kong I'd tried to put this into practice. Whenever I could, I'd get my groceries at the wet market, where old people who didn't go to high school cut the day's meat and leave it out on tables without refrigeration. I'd eat street food or at local restaurants and buy simple items like water and socks from stall vendors instead of from a corporation. None of this was particularly onerous. However, the vast majority of my money went to rent, more expensive restaurants, bars, movie theatres etc. I estimate I spent less than 1% of my money to people "off the ladder," as identified by them running businesses with very low capital costs.

I've found this even more difficult to implement when traveling. The people off the ladder are mostly offering me things I don't want. There are lots of useless souvenir trinkets, and there are the groceries and then there are the items catering to locals that I don't even understand. The language barrier hurts. Old women in Vietnam were often selling bottles of some yellow tonic. I never figured out what it was, and never shelled out $2 for it. I do eat my fair share of local meals, but it starts to feel like a burden, trying to constantly pick out which restaurant looks the shabbiest. And I can't ensure that the guesthouse I stay in is Mom and Pop run - in fact most of these aren't on booking.com or hostelworld. Lastly, I just don't have that much money. I double my pay as a tip to people I think need it, but this usually amounts to an extra $2.50. Certainly not a life changing amount. I can't even afford to give $10 to every person who needs it much less $100. Maybe the effort is there but the effect isn't.

As we approach Siem Reap, I realize that a lot of the people on this bus aren't really going to Siem Reap. I'm the only foreigner here and while we are still about 50km away, the bus has already made two stops. It's dark but it appears the homes on the side of the road here are of better quality than before, some made of plaster with glass windows. How well educated are the people sitting next to me? Are they middle class? There are smart phones and casual brand clothing. But they didn't have their own cars to make this 6 hour trip, and it's quite possible they will never leave the country. And what sort of industry is out here? It's too far from the temples to get any tourism revenue. Even when it's right in front of you, there are a lot of pieces to an economy hidden to you.

And even when poverty is right in front of you, it's not simple to contextualize it. Are these "poor" people happy? Are they more satisfied with what they have than I am? Is it better to make $2/day in a village where that's average, or $100/day in a city where everyone else has so much more? In these philosophical debates where it becomes clear that there's no equation for happiness and so much is relative, a lot of people shy away and instead focus on poverty-related issues like health and education. We can't tell if people are sadder, but they're definitely dying earlier. I won't discount these measurable metrics, but I find plenty of other issues that poverty breeds. Poverty breeds hopelessness - when you don't see any way out of poverty because no one around you has ever created a blueprint for escaping poverty, it's easy to give up. Poverty breeds boredom - many jobs I see are monotonous and involve waiting on events outside your control. Poverty leads to distorted decision making - when you can't find a way out of your boring job in your tiny village that produces nothing and someone comes along with a promised escape, you might give up your better instincts and take this risk. It's how you have thousands of laborers signing 5 year contracts to work in deathly construction sites in the Middle East. It's how people get lured into sex trafficking, or recruited into drug gangs. Distortions like these are sprawling problems with many branches but poverty right at their root.

When you are traveling to developing countries, you often come face to face with these distortions. You get harrassed by tuk-tuk drivers desperate for your service. You come across begging children repeating the word "school" but who very often have to hand over your money to pimps. You come across hardworking people with life savings totalling less than the emergency money in the bottom of my bag. You walk around with so much power and respect simply because of where you are from.

I believe there actually is a solution here. Paradoxically, it's tied into the same source of the problem: globalization. While the hard effects of globalization may have worsened inequality, the soft effects of globalization may eventually alleviate it. When multinational corporations enter a new country looking to cooperate rather than exploit, to share knowledge and provide new opportunities rather than extract value and leave, then we have a chance. Globalization's benefits - creating more multicultural people, increasing awareness of international issues, making it easier for people from opposite of the globe to not just do business together but simply interact - all need to be magnified. We need Americans to better understand what life is actually like in a Cambodian village, and we need Cambodian villagers to learn what's going on in New York. I think we need more people traveling to developing countries and spending a few extra dollars at the street fruit stall. Even if those few dollars don't make that much difference, collectively having more globally aware people can only help. Individual travellers as an agent of change can't solve global inequality on their own, but I think they are a critical part of the solution. Hopefully some of these travellers may run a multinational corporation, and others may become players within the government. Hopefully all these people will take their experiences and refuse to be indifferent anymore.  It takes the political will of the people to stand together and say that we shouldn't be living in a world where some people are developing a hyperloop and others don't have paved roads.

Where are the rest of the photos?

I may be sharing some stories soon where you'll want some photo evidence, which unfortunately I cannot provide. This is the post explaining why.

Tuesday morning I woke up at 4:20am in Hoi An, on the central coast of Vietnam. Hoi An is a beautiful city with roots as a centuries-old trading port, with well-established Chinese and Japanese trading colonies. Their architectural legacies are remarkably well-perserved. As a major port in olden times but its modern position usurped by Da Nang, Hoi An has much of the same feel as Malacca in Malaysia. Though the shophouses have long been converted to cater their services (souvenirs and beer) to tourists, the old town center is kept motorcycle and car free, which is a HUGE relief. Vietnamese streets can be hectic and loud, with extremely liberal horn use making me ask the question whether cars and motorcycles should be designed without horns.

The port of Hoi An was likely settled over a millenium ago by the Cham people, who ruled the region before the modern Vietnamese (Kinh) people came around the 14th century. The Cham people were related to modern Malay and Indonesian people and practiced Hinduism, the region's first major religion. They built a ton of temples in their spiritual capital called My Son about an hour from Hoi An up the mountains. This was where I was heading to at 5 o'clock in the morning.

I was taking a bus to Buon Ma Thuot at 3pm, and the sunrise temple visit would be back by 10, so I figured why not. The My Son visit was a morning well spent, and the sturdy stupas of unknown construction methodology were fascinating. I was more moved though by a bomb crater caused by Americans with poor judgment that destroyed a major temple.

I got back to my hotel at 2:40 and I figured I had some time, so why not grab another Banh Mi. I was back 10 minutes later baguette in hand and was told that my ride was here. Early, but I don't see any bus? A rough-looking man tells me "I take you" and grabbed my luggage and threw them over his lap in the same motion he jumped on his scooter. Ah...I was hoping to not do a motorbike ride with all my luggage on me, but he ensured me this was just going down the street. And indeed a block later he jumped off in front of his travel company, only for someone else to take over and take me the rest of the way to the bus station. A much younger man got on and with one hand gripping the back of the seat and my other hand gripping the Banh Mi, I went on for a ride. And this ride was not just down the street. We weaved through traffic into the countryside, passing slow trucks and bikers while getting passed by cars. At one point a massive tour bus honks right behind us and my heart skipped three beats. Though my driver was going at a pace typical for what I'd seen in Vietnam, it was still absolutely terrifying. I'd driven my own scooter for a day in Sapa, and it was significantly scarier being behind someone else, completely out of control, than it was driving myself. I'd been on the back of a motorbike in Burma once, but that was in an empty countryside and felt very chill. This ride through the streets of Hoi An was the opposite of very chill. Now outside of the city going through rice paddies and sparse developments, I was barely able to appreciate the views around me. I spent more time thinking about which body parts I'd want to protect more in a fall - I really wanted to keep my teeth.

Finally mercifully the driver slowed down. I jumped off the scooter and gathered my belongings. In my pure terror I had morphed my Banh Mi into a panini. Looking around, I realized there was no bus station. I was at the side of the highway with a few people who seemed to work for the bus company, who I realized were basically helping me hitchhike onto the 16 hour bus ride. While I broke out my Kindle and tried to displace myself from this spot into storyland, this crew opened up a durian-looking plant and called me over. "You!" A guy peeled off a piece of this tropical fruit - it's rind was guava-colored and the fruit a bit more orange like - and mimed what parts to throw away and what to eat. It was a pretty delicious fruit and about as much of a connection as I could make at that time.

The bus did arrive and quickly my bags were thrown underboard and I was taking off my shoes and stepping aboard. Apparently you take your shoes off when you enter these sort of overnight buses and place them in a plastic bag. The bus has two aisles between three columns of double bunk leather chairs that can recline into a nearly flat position. I had taken one for a couple hours on the way up from Da Nang to Hue, and that one had been full of backpackers. This time I was the only non-Vietnamese person in sight. But there was wifi. I settled into my seat and dove into my Kindle.

I was reading "River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze" by Peter Hessler, one of the diamonds in the China expat literature.  Hessler is a well known China writer amongst China Watchers, and I'd heard him first in Sinica. I'd resisted reading this book because a) I don't really like hearing white people tell me what China is all about and b) I was worried he'd have a lot of great insights on China and that I'd really like. I think any person who ever dives deep into a very different culture, especially westerners in China, like to think that they're having unique experiences. To read lessons you learned the hard way written onto paper a decade earlier can be quite humbling. And that's precisely what happened. Hessler joined the Peace Corps volunteers in 1996 and was part of the first group sent to Fuling, China (now part of the massive Chongqing metropolis). My friend Devon had joined the Peace Corps in 2011 and sent to Guiyang. Because I had visited him there, I had some picture of the life of the volunteers - very budget, many personal relationships with English students, and very often being the first foreigner someone has ever spoken to. But every year China becomes easier and easier to live in - tracing backward to 1996, Hessler's experience is particularly impressive. As he writes about traveling multiple nights by boat down the Yangtze and waking up to find a rat crawling on him, I stopped feeling sorry for myself being on this 16 hour bus ride. Hessler also very cleverly showed his Chinese improving through this two years with more fleshed out conversation excerpts.

I snapped back into my decidedly less adventurous Vietnamese trip. The sun was dropping and we were still rolling down the coast, no sign of turning westward into the mountains. I had no control over anything - when you're on these local buses, it seems like everyone else knows what's going on except you. I could only stick to what I knew, and the wifi was slow - one of my podcasts took over four hours to download. Towards the end of the night we made a pitstop. Sometimes these stops are to stretch and pee, and sometimes they are to eat and I needed to guess what this one was. Other people seemed to sit down to eat, and I awkwardly looked around for a menu. No one was helping me and I was thinking of just saying "pho bo" (beef pho noodles) before I was invited into a table with five or six dishes. Very graciously we all shared rice, vegetables, eggs and meat in a comfortable and delicious meal. I regretted that my Vietnamese wasn't anywhere as good as Hessler's Mandarin and could only muster out thank you numerous times.

In the middle of the night, I awoke sweating, having fallen asleep with my jacket on. I was emerging for a deep sleep haze and in taking off my jacket I think my phone may have fallen off. My earbuds were still on me, but when I pulled on them, they returned unanchored. Well my phone must have dropped onto my seat somewhere. I reach this way and that, check my jacket pockets and come up with nothing. I resignedly get up out of my seat and in alarm I see that the phone isn't anywhere on my seat, nor clearly on the ground. I start grasping at the cracks and crevices at the sides of the leather seat and as the minutes pass I get more and more alarmed. The guy next to me stirs from his slumber and looks at me, clearly understanding that I've lost something. "iPhone six," I say. "iPhone sao" using the Vietnamese word for 6.  The lighting is very dim though and I don't have much of a chance to look carefully. I'm exhausted and resignedly go back to sleep in an anxious state.

I need to use Find My iPhone. I can get my laptop in my backpack and access the wifi. We make another stop, to let a passenger off I deduce, and I go up and ask the driver if I can get my bag. He doesn't understand me and gestures at me to get back at my seat. I plead "iPhone sao iPhone sao" but he doesn't understand. I give an agitated sigh and go back to my seat. The rest of the ride was a bunch of frustrated searching in vain. My phone was just there in my hands, and now it's gone.

When we reach our destination, I angrily scramble and get my luggage and come back onto the bus. "I need to find something....I need to find something." Mutual comprehension starts to spread throughout the bus, and people start helping me search with flashlights. There are numerous hard to reach places on the back of the bus, and I get down on the ground to reach in behind the seats. These are some filthy places but I was desperate.  One of the people on the bus gave me his phone and I made an international call, but the engine was still on and I couldn't hear anything. It took some shouting but eventually they turned the engine off. This time I heard buzzing! It seemed like maybe my phone had shifted all the way over to the other side of the bus, but I couldn't pinpoint it. We searched for maybe 20 minutes there before they told me we had to go. I pleaded with them, but they told I could stay on the bus. We had stopped some place outside Buon Ma Thuot and they would continue driving to their bus services spot inside the city and I could search there for a longer time. At least that's what I deduced after the fact - at the time, I was kinda freaking out and just nodding along.

With the weak wifi, it took me 20 minutes or so to get onto icloud. I buzzed and could hear a faint sound, and the laptop told me the phone was still on the bus. Try as I did though, I really couldn't figure out where the phone was. The other people kept calling it nonstop, even though I told them please stop, the Find My iPhone beep was louder. I google translated the word "unscrew" and got them to understand to take off some of the seats. They eventually unscrewed my seat and another seat, and with a flashlight I looked everywhere. Everywhere. Could not find it. They kept calling it until I must've run out of battery. The Find My iPhone showed a dead phone. Nothing. I was on the verge of tears the entire time. I'd been looking for it for over an hour and it was still not even 7am, and I'd barely slept on this 16 hour bus ride. It's among the lower moments I can recall feeling. Ultimately I believe the phone had fallen into some mysterious hole in the floorboards and was bouncing around underneath my feet. The vibrations and rings were echoing all over the place, making it nearly impossible to pinpoint. Anyway, it wasn't really possible to remove the floor boards on that operational bus.

I eventually left in anguish, taking their business card, looked up my guesthouse address on my laptop and showed it to a taxi driver. Then I put my laptop in my backpack and the trunk and sat back in defeat. The driver drove a block or two, started going really slowly in search of the address, then gestured for a map or something. I replied in frustration, "I don't have a phone...." Man I relied on that thing for everything. He said something that clearly meant I have no f***ing clue where I'm going. I couldn't have been more frustrated. Eventually I got out, opened the trunk and took my laptop out again. I opened up the email with the address again, and he took a harder look then backed up a block. He rolled down his window and asked someone on the street to throw him a lifeline, then eventually he turned down into the right street. Turns out my guesthouse was literally a block away from where the bus had ended, and where my phone was presumably hiding from me. The guesthouse was closed, but I knocked very loudly on the door in some desperation. It took minutes for a blurry-eyed man to open the door. "Sorry we don't have any open rooms right now," he said in great English, the first spoken English I'd heard in a day. I plead in response, "I'm booked here tonight! Sorry I'm early, but please let me in. I just lost my phone." He relents and informs me my room will be ready at 9am. He's a nice guy but I think he resents me for the rest of my trip for waking him up. I eventually brought him along to the bus people and told them I'd offer $100 if they found the phone, but this was actually laughed off.

So I had a terrible time in Buon Ma Thuot. The coffee was great, but not really that much better than everywhere else in Vietnam. While it was freeing in some ways walking around without a smart phone, like we all did pre 2010 or whatnot, I'll leave with this story of just how reliant I'd become. I stayed in town only one night, getting a ticket for the 9am bus to Ho Chi Minh City the next day. I couldn't set an alarm, because I used my phone for that, but I went to sleep before midnight and figured I'd be ok. I woke up peacefully the next morning and leisurely yawning out of bed, I checked what time it was on my computer. 8:54am. Holy crap. I hurriedly threw my laptop into my bag, grabbed all my stuff, double checked my valuables and ran downstairs. The guesthouse people see me and say "oh your bus is leaving soon!" Thanks guys, great help. They help me into a cab, take my money and luckily I do make it onto the bus. It's 8 hours to HCMC and I'm meant to stay at my friend Sam Axelrod's US state department housing. He had left me good instructions for how to get there, but unfortunately they were via Whatsapp, and I couldn't access that now. I had meant to wake up that morning and contact him, but alas I'd left without enough time. Luckily the bus did have wifi and I did have a kindle, which I had never previously used to access the browser. I managed to figure it out and send Sam a facebook message, and got his apartment name in English. However when I arrived the people I spoke to had no idea where this place was. I had to lug my stuff across a super busy Vietnamese horror show of a 4 lane street, and find a cafe with wifi. I found the address on google maps and wrote it out with the proper Vietnamese accents and finally hailed down a cab.

What's the morale of this story? Keep track of your phone while you sleep? (Yes) Be less reliant on technology? (Maybe) Don't worry so much about material objects? (Sure) I don't know. I bought a new phone in Ho Chi Minh City. I'm most upset about the loss of photos - everything in Da Nang and Hoi An were on that phone - and the cash I had to shelve out, which is still more than I've spent on everything else thus far on the month-long trip. Ultimately though it hasn't been too much of a setback, nothing like bodily injury or the loss of a passport. Life goes on.

Vietnamese Ground Services

On Saturday morning, January 23, 2016, I woke up staring at a white plaster ceiling that I could nearly touch. Momentarily confused, I realized that I was on the top bunk of my hostel in Hue, central Vietnam. I'd slept clutching my water bottle. The previous night was spent entirely with western backpackers, devolving from trivia night into shots night into dance night, and I immediately downed the rest of my water bottle.

Heavy drizzle created a miserable morning mood at the hostel. Guests who just eight hours earlier had been joyously conversing with strangers had reverted to the groups they had arrived in. I followed suit, eating the complimentary pancakes alone. Hue has a lot to offer, including an Imperial City, many impressive tombs, and a cool bridge but I had seen none of those yesterday, opting instead to fulfill my social wants. Today obligatorily, I tightened my raincoat and headed out to the Imperial City.

The Imperial City is heavily influenced by the Forbidden City and actually quite impressive despite taking wartime damage. But this post isn't about centuries-old palaces - it's about something much more epic.

My friend O'Neal Qin works for Cathay Pacific, and after 2 years in Hong Kong they put him in charge of their Vietnam team and sent him to Hanoi. I met up with him in Hanoi and he told me that he'd be in Da Nang that weekend for a team event. His team there drank a lot - would I care to join? I was going to be in the vicinity then, so I decided why not, I'd join. In fact, I'd flown into Da Nang before spending 2+ hours on a sleeper bus to Hue. After returning from my rainy sojourn to the Imperial City, I was pretty to keen to escape and return to Da Nang. The hostel staff informed me that public buses left every hour and called me a taxi to the station.

Immediately upon alighting from the taxi, I was harassed by motorbike drivers. It seems that a significant portion of the Vietnamese economy is just offering people rides on their motorbikes, clearly without any sort of license required. The near constant unsolicited drive-bys yelling "Taxi?" are probably as close as a male can get to experiencing catcalling. In this occasion, I was particularly pissed, because it was raining and I was literally just dropped off from a taxi at my destination. No one in the bus station speaks any English, but after sufficient grunting I get on a rusty minibus to Da Nang. The bus is nothing like the double deck sleeper bus I had arrived on, but there are only 2 passengers on board, so I take my two huge bags and hop on. I put my bags next to me and occupy two seats. The bus sits there for another 15 minutes and slowly fills up and I start to feel guilty for occupying two seats - still there's some empty seats. Then these seats vanish, and an employee roughly comes over and takes my bigger bag away. Half my worldly possessions are inside, so I watch it with concern, but apparently there is a trunk to this thing. I put the other bag on top of my lap and another woman with a facemask and a bamboo hat gets on next to me, then 3 people squish into the seats behind me, and the bus takes off.

But it stops almost right away. Periodically along the path, people on the roadside just keep getting on and suddenly there are stools down the aisle of the bus with people sitting uncomfortably on them. My position is so cramped that it literally takes me a full minute of shifting around and zigzagging my arm to reach my phone in my left pocket. This is unbelievably less comfortable than the previous bus ride which had reclining beds and wifi, and only $1 cheaper. I'm digging the experience though - this is how a lot of Vietnamese people get around. At one point one of the people in the chicken coop that is the backseat is the first to disembark, and he literally climbs over every man woman and child in the minibus aisle.

When the bus finally gets to the Da Nang bus station, it takes me about 3 minutes to get out because I have to wait for blood to circulate to my legs. I get pestered by motorbike taxi people again. One guy follows me for 200m, at which point I went on a 30 second rant to him in Cantonese, after which he meekly replies, "Moto bike?" I eventually do grab a taxi, but get held up by an old man chatting to my driver for several minutes. Then inexplicably the old man gets into the taxi with me. I'm astounded - how rude? I try my best not to get offended - if the driver goes straight to my stop first, what difference does it make?

Next thing I know the a valet opens my door and picks up my bags. I bemusedly step into the 4 star hotel and am offered a complimentary glass of fruit juice. It's the first time I've encountered good service in Vietnam and the contrast to the minibus, the motorbike harassment and the impromptu car pool ride could not be more stark. O'Neal arrives a few minutes later - Cathay is putting him up in the hotel - and he takes me into a room larger than the one I stayed in the previous night, but with one more fridge and eight fewer people. O'Neal informs me that the event tonight is actually a gala which Cathay is just a participant, and that it's fairly casual. I ask him, "Are you sure it's ok if I go?" and he reassures me it's ok. The party starts at 5:30.

I only have a short sleeve collar shirt, but I throw a sweater over it and you can't tell. With jeans and sneakers, this is literally the most formal my backpacker self can get. The banquet hall is called "For You Palace" (don't ask), and we're early. There's apparently no assigned seating so we have our pick of tables, each of which are adorned with a bottle of Macallan's. Everyone seems to know O'Neal and treat him with pleasantries, and are confused when I am introduced as "just a friend." When O'Neal leaves for a minute to attend to some business, a woman who seems to be running things approaches me. "Do you work for Cathay or DragonAir?" she asks me. "No," I answer honestly. "I'm just O'Neal's friend traveling through Da Nang." "So you don't have connection to aviation industry." "Uh, no," "Hmph." She hovers next to me awkwardly for a few judgey moments, possibly my most uncomfortable moments of a long day full of them.

Despite a lack of connection to Vietnam aviation, I see a dozen business cards before I see any food. The event is sponsored by the Saigon Ground Services (SAGS), and I now know their CEO's email address. While I am in fact looking for a job, I don't try very hard to network this night. Da Nang is a city of 1 million, and Cathay have just four staff members permanently here. At some point, O'Neal says I should pretend to work for Cathay. "You can be a Hong Kong based Strategy Director." I'm glad for the instant promotion and start practicing for my role before I realize I've actually worked in Aviation before - with the Airport Authority Hong Kong as a consultant designing a runway expansion.  I quickly jump to the client side and rebrand myself as an AAHK Project Manager.

The whole event feels very much like a Hong Kong wedding, and so there's a lot of ceremony before we get to the food. For this gala, the show includes a song and dance number with about a dozen performers. By now there's over 150 of us but it feels like a bit of an overkill - this ain't the Academy Awards. After the applause, two Emcees come onstage, one speaking Vietnamese, the other speaking halting English. I'm surprised the event is even bilingual - O'Neal and I are almost certainly the only non-Vietnamese here. At some point we hear the name "O'Neal" called and his Vietnamese coworkers tell him in slight horror that he's supposed to go onstage now. We knew it was in the program that he would present some gifts to the best performers of the year, but apparently it wasn't supposed to be this early. O'Neal rides with it though and I'm greeted with the surreal sight of seeing my friend give a speech and then presenting gifts that are teddy bears to excited staff members. And the evening had just begun.

As I mentioned, every table had a bottle of Macallan's. Other tables were coming over cheers-ing us, aggressively forcing us to all down whiskey. I do a shot with the CEO of SAGS and try to keep track of how many drinks in I am. 3...4...5... now it's our turn to do the rounds and we stroll across the room. "Who are you!?" "Hi I'm Cal, I'm from Hong Kong Airport!" "Cool! Mot Hai Ba Yo!!" The last phrase means "1, 2, 3, Cheers" and while I may forget most of the Vietnamese words I learn on this trip, I think that phrase will stick. The meal gets more interesting because between every course, there is another dance and song performance. I return to my seat about 6 drinks deep to watch a male singer crooning in Vietnamese. O'Neal leans towards me and remarks, "It's only 7 o'clock."  I marvel at the chain of events that led to my semi-inebriated state at a Vietnamese Aviation Annual Gala. I'm not sure what was more amazing: that 4 hours before, I'd been cramped into the side of a minibus, that 20 hours before I'd been in a hostel with 40 backpackers, that 3 weeks before I'd been at a desk job in Hong Kong, that 6 years before I'd been in an American university.

The next couple hours get pretty hazy. I give a blurred glance around the room - I don't think anyone else on my minibus is here. I see a girl who reminds me of my ex, and it dawns on me that I once dated a Vietnamese woman. Could this have been my life? Someone asks me about my job and I tell him that I'm working on the Third Runway Expansion, but his English is terrible and he just pats me on the back and moves on. I meet a cute girl who tells me her name is "Mya" not "Mia." Suddenly I'm dragged onstage and I'm dancing among a huge crowd. A guy in ripped jeans goes to the edge of the stage and proceeds to do a backflip off of it. I back away from the edge just in case anyone pressures me to attempt a backflip. A bathroom stop reveals a bent over man puking into a urinal, with a For You Palace staff member patting him on the back and holding his head up. When we head out around 9:20pm, Jai Ho from Slumdog Millionaire comes on and I sneak a peak back at the stage, now a crazy Indo-Viet dance floor underneath corporate sponsorship banners. If there are delays at Da Nang airport tomorrow, you know why.

The rest of the night included a club with similar dimensions to a football pitch, and a smaller karaoke club, because of course it did. I woke up the next morning in a 4 star hotel clutching my water bottle with a bunch of business cards in my back pocket.

Get Out There

A lot of people never travel. Maybe around 64% of Americans never leave the country, and given that many people in less developed countries can never afford to travel, I'd guess that between 70-80% of the world spend their entire lives in one country. Among those who can afford to travel, a lot either don't or stick to the same familiar safe spots.

One of my main goals on this trip is to figure out how to reach tentative travelers or non-travelers. I've seen a lot of manifestations of this mentality now. There are the Americans who don't think about leaving home, there are the Europeans who are so focused on how much there is on their continent, and there are Hong Kongers whose trips rotate around the same familiar comfort spots among Taiwan, Singapore and Japan. This last demographic is one I've long struggled to reach. When I told coworkers of my plans in Southeast Asia, they thought I had made a bizarre choice. One coworker legitimately asked if I was going to Vietnam to do opium. I asked him what he likes to see when he traveled, and he said he likes scenery. So I Google image searched "Sapa", my first stop, and beautiful mountain rice terraces came up. He merely shrugged. "You can see those in China."

I think I did a better job expressing myself the day before I left. I was having lunch with a thoughtful local developer, and he asked me why I would start in Vietnam of all places. "Hong Kong people would normally go to places like Japan or Singapore or Western Europe where it's clean and nice." I paused for a moment and said, "It's the exact opposite for me. I come from a clean and nice country country. I know what that's like. What I don't know is what it's like growing up in a developing country. These places have seemed off limits to me, growing up millions of miles away. But they're not actually off limits for me, I just need to make the effort. But for most people who grow up there, coming to a developed country is what's off limits. So I'm lucky, I'm in a position to travel, to see very different lives and share as much as I can about my life." And the developer nodded, and said something to the effect of, "I still won't go, but I'm glad you are. If I ever go to Vietnam I'd go on a tour."

Fair enough, everyone has their limits. But as I travel I try to practice my personal travel philosophy that I've developed over the years. Perhaps the first commandment in this philosophy is, "Thou shall not join guided tours." Now I'm not talking about getting a tour guide to explain what the significance of this castle is - oftentimes you need that knowledge to make the stone walls meaningful. I'm talking about the tour company trips that pick you up on arrival and shepherd you around from site to sight on a bus. I've joined these before with large families and I understand the demand. If you can pay to remove stress from your life, why wouldn't you?

But for my travels this is unacceptable. It's not just that it's cheaper to go on your own. Behind a tour guide dictating where you have to go, you can't actually discover a country's real character or offerings. You only discover what your tour guide lets you discover, and you have no idea what that might entail. Is this really a market where locals buy their groceries? Is this really a traditional alpaca farm or is it a modern zoo for tourists? Shedding that oversight and navigating the streets on your own gives you so much more understanding of how life actually works where you're visiting, even if you need to supply your own narration. 

What's even more crucial, hiding behind a guided tour reduces the local's exposure of you. A tour contains very few organic encounters where you and a local can see each other as individuals instead of a part of an incomprehensible foreign blob. I think this impacts national reputations. So many Chinese, as well as many other East Asians (and Europeans to a lesser extent), travel by tour and this is what locals will see of them. It doesn't do much for your standing abroad when all anyone knows of your country is a bus full of your people ignoring local customs and obnoxiously reducing the surroundings as lifeless photo opportunities. It's very different than seeing one couple walking into your restaurant, struggling to order off your menu and having a nice laughable lost-in-translation exchange in the process. The former builds resentment and the second raises curiosity. In my opinion, the travel habits of Chinese have done much harm to China's international reputation.

I'm also looking to find the balance between "getting off the beaten path" and "seeing the must sees." Really these are overused buzzwords. Perhaps I can phrase it as a balance between reaching the celebrated beautiful wonders of this world and uncovering the beautiful within the mundane. In this specific case, how can I spend so long in Vietnam and not go to Halong Bay? There's nothing wrong with venturing to one of the most beautiful places on the planet - even if it's overrun with tourists. One just has to be wary that the cruise trip teaches one little about the Vietnamese way of life. Such tours can be supplemented by spending some time in average towns and smaller cities, the flip side being that a lot of that time spent can be very boring. The places where regular people live and work are generally pretty mundane and get old fast. It's a tough balance to strike, an experience that is organic and not packaged and also riveting.

Other commandments are more like guidelines. Support the local economy, eat the regional cuisine, learn some of the local language, walk around as much as possible, smile as much as possible. Be flexible - a lot of the greatest travel tips will come from the people you meet along the journey. And don't buy too much cheap crap - those sort of souvenirs don't last (lesson learned the hard way).

Thus far I've had a fairly fly by the seat of my pants trip. I got off the airport in Hanoi needing to take a bus into town and catching a sleeper train to Sapa. I asked a Canadian couple for directions and ended up sharing a hired car with them. I was greatly embarrassed to find out at the end that they had already paid for the ride, and proceeded to buy them 6 beers and apologize in a most Canadian manner.

I've yet to book my lodging more than a day in advance. Twice I've just shown up and asked for a room. I've depended on the kindness of strangers and friends several times. Barely two weeks ago I was engaged in a life of routine and tasks and now I am comfortably removed from such restrictions. There have been many situations where I'd pause and chuckle at the absurdity of it all. There's been a moment where I thought I had seriously screwed up, and a day that started poorly but turned out impossibly well. And I've been brought to tears by separation anxiety in one of the filthiest places I'd ever been. Stay tuned for these stories.

舊的不去新的不來

I am cleaning out my guest room in anticipation of the beginning of my travels tomorrow.  I am sure that tomorrow my mindset will be one of wonder and anticipation, but tonight it is one of nostalgia and reminiscence. I pull out this poster board with photos. I assembled it as I began my senior year of college in 2009, one of the first times in my life I had this many photos that made me happy. The frame has been damaged since before I came to Hong Kong, but amazingly it has survived all these moves. Now has come the time to dissemble it. I scratch off the scotch tape with my fingernails, peeling off patterns that the same fingers had laid down so many years ago. The tape has aged so much while it hung on my walls, nearly degrading into a mass of resin. Oblivious was I to this process while I passed times of laughter, sorrow, suffering, joy, hate and love. I see pictures of friends I still cherish, and some I no longer do. I see a version of me who has no idea how much is going to happen over the next 6 years.

Tomorrow in a different place this all will seem far away. I know because I've been there before. It was a shock even after a week and a half in Burma, returning to the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong as if no one else had just experienced a slow reflective life off the grid in a developing country. I know I'm going to get on the ground in Sapa and regret just how fast my life was in Hong Kong. I know that the traveling me will enjoy so many hours of the day and have some chill advice, but the working me would slap that advice around with a disparaging self-righteous look of someone suffering to make money. The working me will want to remind the traveling me that ideals rarely apply to reality here somewhere in the middle, I'm guessing one needs a bit of both in life - the busy times to push forward on one's priorities, and the slower times for one to rejuvenate all areas that weren't prioritized. 

Hong Kong truly was packed. There were times in my life where I felt bored enough to create a "Things to do While Bored" list, times where I wanted to go out but couldn't. That wasn't ever a problem in Hong Kong. My life instead was filled with books I never got around to reading, spices I never got around to cooking with, letters I never got around to writing. And I'm not particularly upset by them. The last four years were spent without a television, without a Netflix account and without any computer games. In one sense I did far less time wasting than I normally would.

Exploring a Better World

Friday January 8, 2016 was my last day as a working employee at Ove Arup and Partners HK Ltd. This was my first full time big boy job. It was my first job where I went to client meetings, where I went to multiple offices in different cities, where I got a business card. And it's the first time I've ever resigned, which was a surprisingly difficult process to complete. When I look back on my projects, I do find a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. In the environment of a major international engineering juggernaut, I managed to work on the M+ Museum for Visual Culture, the conceptual planning for the Hong Kong Airport 3rd Runway Expansion, building physics analysis on Icon Siam (luxury mall in Bangkok), and doing stats and regressions for the HKGBC Benchmarking and Energy Saving Tool. While my role on these massive projects were relatively minor, those were four very cool projects with such large scope makes them interesting to talk about. Still, while this retrospection can conjure up feelings of satisfaction and enjoyment, most of my time at Arup was very difficult to endure.

M+ Museum for Visual Culture

Pretty quickly it was clear to me that this was not an ideal job for me.  Obviously I had not studied engineering. This presented both a knowledge gap and a mindset disparity.  Despite their left-brain link, a mathematician is more interested in the thought process and proof of a theorem, whereas an engineer is interested solely in the answer. To a humanities outsider, these differences may appear insignificant, but to me immersed in engineering territory, I felt radically different. In addition to what I lacked, whole skillsets I did possess were marginally used. My background is not just in mathematics and statistics - I graduated from a liberal arts university and took full advantage of its offerings. While I do not expect every little course I study to advance one's career, it pained me that my writing ability, interest in politics and policy, and travel experience were essentially irrelevant to my job performance. I barely even scratched the surface of all the statistical modeling I had studied.

Cultural barriers were ubiquitous throughout my time at Arup. The engineering/liberal arts difference is itself a cultural barrier, but my western education and upbringing often posed difficult for my local coworkers to reconcile.

I leave with a completely transformed mindset. Somewhere along the way I learned to be professional, responding to emails timely and treating clients and contractors with respect. I can see the way I used to write emails and handle simple affairs, and it's a world away from what I do now. 

I've now left to embark on my own. I'll be able to accomplish a dream I've always had of doing work in a foreign coffee shop, starting in Vietnam, one of the best coffee nations this world offers.  I have plenty of worries. I've always had ADD so focus has always been a problem. Even right now as I write this post, I am multi-tasking with an email announcing the HKUPA Annual General Meeting in draft and an MBA essay by Janice in track changes. I know I'll have to be extremely disciplined and set achievable goals along the way.

I had always wanted to create my own career path, and certainly studying statistics then working at an engineering company in a foreign country is an unusual path. I knew there was so much I needed to learn, and these past four years have not disappointed. But now it's time to take what I've learned and apply them in the direction I want to, and prove to myself that I am capable and can create something original.

Travels Visualized

If you've read my post on my Data visualization of Facebook data, you may have learned that I have this odd hobby of playing with personal data. However you are unlikely to know that I have kept a spreadsheet of where I have spent every night since 2008. But it's true, and it hasn't even been remotely onerous. I have noted the date in which i entered a city and the date in which I left. I've kept the detail mainly to the city level, so there is no record of meanderings throughout urban bedrooms, if that had theoretically happened. There is no record of day trip cities I've visited without spending the night, so sorry Nara, Krebs and Brookline. I also did not stress about whether I reached a city before or after midnight - with the exception of red eye flights, if I flew from Hong Kong on a Friday night and reached my room in Taipei 2am Saturday morning, I recorded myself as spending Friday night in Taipei.

I started this list in the margins of my notebook in a Geography lecture in University College Dublin in the fall of 2008, mainly because I was bored in class. It was far more interesting for me to think about the places I'd traveled to in that very epic year of 2008. Through memory I filled in most of the dates, and eventually I went through my gmail archives and filled in my whole year. It would not be possible for me to fill in 2007 and before because of lack of memory and records. But starting from that fall, I created a spreadsheet and it has survived 4 computers and is now safely on the cloud. I started this blog in 2008 and I feel that I became a very different person starting from that year so I find this data very fitting.

For me, trawling back through this data just brings me pure joy. I had not planned on ever analyzing the data as I am doing now - just scrolling through it had been enough. I'm not sure if anyone else would enjoy it so much going through their own life, and they certainly wouldn't find it so interesting going over mine. But these data visualizations directly take me back to trips I had forgotten.

In terms of the visualization nitty gritty, I had a lot of cleaning up to do. I hadn't even heard of R when I began these records, so I didn't really have a thought to how I should format the data or the scheme of the database in technical speak.

Once I fixed name inconsistencies and date formatting, I decided to focus on the chronological part of my data first. I found the ten cities I'd spent the most time in, then realized many cities were tied and expanded the list to top 15. Without worrying about a y-axis at all, I plotted the dates I'd been in these cities and assigned a nice color palette to them.

And immediately I was pleased. As familiar with my own life story as I am, I could see a lot of stories in those dots. I was at first surprised to see what cities made it. Civate and Osaka are on there on the strength of one trip each, which were both for World's ultimate tournaments. Ultimate tournament trips to Manila are also clearly regular, spaced out evenly starting in 2012. My move from DC, where trips to New York and Newton (my hometown outside Boston) to Hong Kong in late 2011 is also quite obvious. My lengthier stays in Dublin and Beijing which are well-documented in this blog are also visible. Irregular trips to Shanghai, Taipei, Shenzhen and Bangkok pop up. Lastly, I may never spend another night in Newton after we sold our family home, and instead nights in the city of Boston show up instead.

These cities appear low to high in order of appearance (starting from 2008), which is really quite arbitrary. I played around with making the order completely random. I actually liked that better, because in the original version, all the long stays are at the bottom and the top seems very bare, giving the image a sense of imbalance.  My friend points out that at this point I enter data art, because the randomization serves no functional purpose. Here is that graph with even more cities.

Now this has more little stories and might be too cluttered. I don't think I could possibly fit all of my stops in there. Because I go back to places multiple times, I don't know how to provide a sense of chronological order to the cities. There isn't a sense in either graph really of many sequential trips.

Skipping this thought, I considered graphing the latitudes on the y-axis. As the data points were all geographic this was the logical next step. If you didn't recognize the names of these cities, the graph loses a lot of meaning. However, adding longitude and latitude coordinates was tricky. I hadn't been inputting that data in along the way, but the Maps package in R comes with a nice database of world cities. The database comes with population and coordinate information for just about every city of more than 40,000 people in the world (as of 2006). However the naming of some of the cities is bizarre, full of colonial-era names (Rangoon, Bombay), out-of-vogue spelling choices (Cracow, Soul), and a full pinyin rendering of Macau and Hong Kong, with Hong Kong being split into the Sai Kung, Kowloon and Hong Kong Island (xigong, jiulong and xianggangdao). Some of my travels had taken me to places of less than 40,000 people. For the names that didn't match, I didn't know of any better solution that editing all the names individually. If there is a more common sense laden database out there, please let me know. For the cities not on the database, I googled their coordinates. I'm not quite a good enough programmer to build a scraper to do this automatically, but I aspire to get to that level soon. Here's the same graph re-run with latitudes on the y-axis. I added in the names by hand where I saw fit, otherwise they'd bleed over each other.

This graph doesn't do much for me. It's very cluttered and it's hard to organize time and space coordinates together in my mind. The points give the illusion of coordinates, but they're not, they're only one dimensionally coordinates. It is interesting to see that so many of the places I've been are on the same latitude (Beijing is nearly the same as New York), and places that actually are near each other (Hong Kong and Shenzhen, Newton and Boston) now appear so on the map. And it's also cool to see that these cities range as south Bangkok to as north as Dublin, a thought I'd never made on my own. Still, I think there is limited use to this visualization attempt.

Well with all the coordinates in hand, it was time to put them on a real map. I've learned that with maps it's easy to control the size and color overlaid points. R has some in-built plotting functions, which I'd been using for 5 years, and they're pretty great. But people serious about data visualization seem to use a lot of ggplot2 and ggmap, packages developed by the Kiwi statistician Hadley Wickham, who should probably be knighted. I decided it was high time to learn some ggmap. Here's my first attempt:

This map visualization is much more of a classic representation and was equally delightful to me. I particularly liked the lack of borders in this version. It requires more deductive efforts in identifying all the points. I decided to color the points by the year that I first visited that point. Blue represents 2008 and takes up a lot of real estate. The size was set to the number of days I spent in each city. Note that the sizes are not scaled linearly, and in fact I haven't figured out how to control this properly. I actually am rather alright with the outcome though, otherwise Hong Kong and Washington, DC would drown out other cities. I could see more stories here, such as two separate trips to Europe. I could see the "outlier" travels of 2010 that took me to India and Peru. I saw two points from 2008 in western US and was confused as to what they might represent until I remembered I went to Las Vegas and Los Angeles many months apart that year. This truly shows the power of visualization, the ability to convey so much more in so little space. I could also see a bug in my data in this black dot in western America. Investigating further, I'd inputted the coordinates for Littleton, Colorado instead of Littleton, New Hampshire by mistake. Some of the years were also incorrect.

My second go at the map fixed these bugs and added borders just for kicks. I don't really like these large borders, which seem to drown out and minimize my destinations. But for the most part, I was very happy with this map. All I needed was a legend. Turns out this was way harder than I realized, because I had been using ggmap incorrectly this whole time. Hours of debugging later, I finally converted my years into factors and got this to popup.

As a conclusion, these Travels of Cal are about to get a lot more interesting. After 4 years and 3 months at Arup in Hong Kong, my last day will be January 8, 2016. I will be adding some data points in Southeast Asia and building on these visualizations. There's a greater purpose here than documenting my own life, rest assured.

Dreams of Another Year

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

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

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

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

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

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