The Book of Job

Rumors had been whispering for a month. The new financing round hadn’t gone well, the expected deals hadn’t materialized, and something had to give. Free lunches had been cancelled, the weekly company updates had changed to biweekly and the last one of these had been mysteriously cancelled. I started updating my resume.

One Tuesday I learned from backchannels that there would be “a layoff of not insignificant size” the next day. Despite some reassurances from a colleague that I should be safe, that night I tossed and turned until 3am, when I firmly concluded that I would be laid off. A mix of terror and exasperation hit me. I’d been laid off just a year previously, and I didn’t want to be unemployed again. When I awoke Wednesday morning, the commute to work felt like marching to the gallows. 

The process was efficient. They called half the company one-by-one into private offices, handed us exit papers and collected our badges and laptops. By 10am I was out, and by 11 had rendezvoused with other ex-employees at the Friendly Toast, where the bar was empty but open. The ensuing hours reached a level of day drinking rivaling my senior year St Patrick’s Day.

When I sobered up, I was sad, bitter, exhausted but excited. I was sad because CiBO had been my most enjoyable job. I had done interesting work with smart coworkers serving a great high level mission. It paid well, hadn’t been too stressful, and I could run to work on occasion. It had even taken me on a crazy 1 day trip to Malaysia. While the job didn’t trap me in the office long, I found myself home practicing Scala and studying the growth stages of corn. It bristles me now how fruitless this effort feels. Furthermore, the immediate termination was much rougher than the 1 month notice GE had given me. I had no time to mentally prepare to wake up the next day with absolutely nothing to do. I was bitter that after this long journey of changing careers, having spent so much time reflecting on what I wanted and then working so hard to actually get there, I had ended up with nothing. Twice. And during winter again. My browser cookies still remembered the Massachusetts unemployment website. I joked that I was now an expert in company collapses, of all different sizes. I got plenty of sympathy laughs, but when faced with the reality of yet another job hunt, I was exhausted before I even began.

Considering how much I care about my career, it’s a bit ironic that I’ve spent so much time funemployed that I'm able to name each period. Leaving Hong Kong, backpacking around Asia and returning to the US was my SabbatiCal. The period between GE and CiBO that included two international trips were my Callivanting days. This period? More like a Calamity. While I’m lucky to have had so many employment breaks - so many of my friends haven’t had any - this one was ill-timed and unwelcome.

However, I was excited because I had options for in 2019, data scientists are in short supply.  CiBO had been a fantastic tech environment where I’d worked closely with great software engineers. I had accrued enough confidence that I was a pretty badass data scientist and almost immediately began working with 20+ recruiters. I quickly realized though that I wanted, and had enough savings, to take my time. I wanted to explore transitioning out of a technical role, perhaps into strategy or product management. I wanted to return closer to the energy sustainability domain. And I wanted to move back to Asia. It was a tough multiple-criteria decision problem to optimize.

The best part of this Calamity was the many people who reached out to me and helped. It seems like I caught up with 100 friends that first week, juggling all time zones to the east and west. I chatted with friends about their professional lives and gained valuable insights into how other jobs worked. I had plenty of deep conversations that convinced me that my heart was still in Asia. I specifically targeted Beijing, Shenzhen, and Saigon, cities where I felt I could find cool jobs and cool people.

Saigon had vibed with me when I first visited during the SabbatiCal. I knew there was a decent tech scene, with a large concentration of foreign “digital nomads” utilizing a local ecosystem full of talented (and cheap) coders. I wasn’t sure what the options were for someone with no local country or language background, but my Saigon-dwelling friend Sam Axelrod connected me to someone who’d know. This guy gave me a rundown of the work international consultancies were doing, the locally-disconnected digital nomad scene, and the rapid government-backed digitization across the economy. He inadvertently went on a rant against those big name consultancies collaborating with government officials and multinational corporations to perpetuate modern colonialism. Having also lived in an Asian former colony, this rant won me over - he had expressed my views, albeit much more profoundly and eloquently. When he told me that in his previous role leading a UN bureau, he had made all his employees learn Vietnamese, I was sold. Then the conversation took a turn. “I lead a startup consultancy now. We have a Taiwanese manufacturing client and only one Chinese speaker on staff…and all of our work is really about using data to drive decisions….actually we could really use someone like you.” And so the informational chat turned into a job interview. A week later, I booked tickets to Ho Chi Minh City.

This is a fine ad for funemployment

In the meantime, I had already had a trip to New Orleans to visit my friend Jason Siu and partake in Mardi Gras. I took my employment frustrations out on hurricanes and Sazeracs, and somehow found myself walking down 10 blocks of Bourbon Street double fisting beers looking for Jason. The next morning, I awoke wearing a bushel of beads and needing to dry heave. I had scheduled a handful of recruiter calls before a late afternoon flight back to Boston. As I laid down on the couch in utter pain, I talked to Amazon on speaker phone and tried to go through my work history. I didn’t get a second interview. I barely made it to the airport, where I passed out on the dirty floor while JetBlue delayed us for 2 hours. When I took my middle seat, the old man sitting window asked me, in a volume indicating he was hard of hearing, “Did you enjoy the parades?” I did my best not to puke on him.

Back home, I planned an Asia trip to be part fact-finding mission and part friends catchup tour. I eschewed traveling to new places in favor of looking for jobs in familiar cities. I initially outlined a Saigon to Hong Kong to Shenzhen to Beijing to Paris to London trip, allotting myself 3 weeks. When my friend Doug Heimburger sold me hard on his 40th birthday celebration, I swapped out Shenzhen for Tokyo, then dropped Paris. I realized my dates in Hong Kong would coincide with Tosscars, the annual awards ceremony/party for the Hong Kong ultimate community. The ceremony’s hosts are secret until the event itself, and I had never been a host. I texted the organizers, and asked them if they wanted a super secret host. They replied that the theme was Carnival, and asked me to bring over Mardi Gras party supplies. Coincidentally I got that text while in a cafe in New Orleans, and walked outside to see a street vendor hawking party jackets. I got a sympathy $20 unemployment discount, and that jacket has proven to be one of my best investments.

I made a pun so bad, Vietnam decided to banh mi

Even since 2016, Saigon’s change was noticeable to me. There were more foreigners around District 1, Southeast Asia’s tallest skyscraper on the horizon and flat whites served in some coffeeshops in District 3. My first sight was a continuous stream of motorbikes street with no crosswalks and I had to relearn street crossing in Vietnam (with confidence and without eye contact). 

The startup consultancy was located above a clothing store and consisted of 6 employees. Though I’d be the only non-Vietnamese speaker, I knew I’d fit in well. My main worry with the role was whether I would stagnate technically. Though I was excited to learn about the Vietnamese economy and management consultancy in general, there was a good chance that the clients wouldn’t be ready for any interesting modeling, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to give that up. On my last day there, I was offered a role as an analyst, with the expectation that if I proved I could adapt to Vietnam, I would create and lead the company’s analytics division. There was a lot to consider. Between the motorbike traffic, lack of a subway (coming in 2020!) and inexorable heat, Saigon life is not without its challenges. But the food, coffee, nightlife and people I met in 3 days convinced me I could adapt to love the city.

Saturday morning I flew into Hong Kong. I had told myself that I shouldn’t move back to Hong Kong, that it wouldn’t be good for my career. But as my taxi zoomed down Gloucester Road past the pretty buildings, I thought to myself, I could carve a good life for myself here again. A few hours later I was in my party jacket hidden on the top floor of the Winery in Sai Ying Pun. It had been weird keeping my arrival a secret. As I heard the voices of my friends entering from below, I so desperately wanted to burst out and shout my presence. I managed to contain myself until Donna Doubet announced a surprise guest from America, and I flew down the stairs, threw some authentic New Orleans beads into the crowd, and awkwardly raised my arms, a little uncomfortable with the sudden attention. This was only my second time back in Hong Kong since I left, and I couldn’t imagine a better rewelcome party.

The next several days consisted of as many as 7 appointments a day, catching up with friends and family. I also got some intel on the work environment, and while the tech scene is growing rapidly, I confirmed my suspicions that interesting and high paying data science jobs don’t exist in Hong Kong yet. 

Doug popping his cherry blossoms

Doug’s party in Tokyo was a Hanami 見花, meaning cherry blossom viewing party, because of course Japanese has a word for that. We had rented out space at Yoyogi Park, roped off and carpeted to enforce a shoes-off policy. Organizer Niji had arranged for a small arsenal of whiskey, champagne and a buffet of sandwiches. To meet the formal dress code, I paired the New Orleans party jacket with grey suitpants. Even at this party, I met a programmer who tried to recruit me. I realized that having a skillset unbound by geographies or business domains could be a blessing and a curse - too many options means you have to restrict yourself to stay sane. I decided not to pursue working in Japan. 

Taking place a month past his 40th birthday, the Hanami was really a farewell party for Doug, as he had just accepted a promotion that would relocate him to Seattle. We spent the entire weekend bemoaning the challenges of managing an American career while smitten with Asia. Discussions with him and Austin taught me that for us, location can be more important than job, and wanting to learn a language is a legit factor in deciding location.

In Beijing I was fortunate to get connected with good tech people. My friend Joohee had moved from Hong Kong, and it was only face-to-face when I learned she now worked in Chinese tech venture capitalism. She connected me to the CEO of an AI startup trying to develop the flying car, and through another friend I met the former head of data science at Mobike. I learned about the speed of China’s 9/9/6 tech culture, the role of WeChat in everything, the way government-led directives influence entrepreneurs, and the sheer abundance of data available. Joohee evangelized her bullish views on China, and I was reminded how much I missed the uniqueness of Beijing life when I found myself telling my life story to an attractive group of film producers in Mandarin. I seriously wondered if I should focus on returning to China. However, barriers included the vast amount of competing Chinese programmers and the increasingly domestic nature of China’s tech scene that render multilingual people like me no longer highly valued. And this is before getting to all the moral and logistical complexities enforced by the Chinese government. 

By the time I got to London, I was exhausted. I met with friends there in interesting companies, and tried the city on for size. In my most productive conversation, I talked with a former coworker and ultimate teammate about how moving to Vietnam might mean missing weddings and/or an ultimate tournament in Amsterdam that I’d been invited to. “Oh, you have to go to Windmill.”  And so I did. I returned from my round the world trip with lots of renewed friendships, and lots of discussions comparing the social joys of living in Asia, the family warmth of staying in the east coast, and the asymmetric way America treats international experience. While Asia would always respect my US work experience, the converse was not necessarily true. I decided I needed to at least explore interesting jobs in the US to compare with the offer in Ho Chi Minh City.

-----

I was full of energy the first month back in Boston. I pursued all those things I never have the energy to do when working. I read voraciously, studied languages, attacked the gym, played ultimate and went through a TensorFlow tutorial.

The second month was harsh. The job interview process plodded along frustratingly slowly, and all my hard work towards self-improvement was largely irrelevant to the interviewers. It became difficult to sustain such intensity, and the uncertainty slowly ground me down. Not knowing where I’d live or what sort of income to expect made it difficult to plan things, date or try new activities. 

The Vietnam offer was still outstanding, while two local options were in play. One was a tech startup where I had wanted to work back in 2016 that was now recruiting me. They had given me a dataset assessment back then, and I laughed when they sent it again, virtually unchanged. With years of practice now under my belt, I did a way better job on the assignment. In the followup interview, a kid just out of college review the assignment with me. It was a little stunning to see 2018 as his graduation year, but he introduced to me a little trick transforming linear variables like date or time into cyclical variables, by taking the sine and cosine of them. The interview went well and they indicated they would bring me onsite. Then without explanation, they wished me luck and rescinded the onsite interview.

The second was a large tech firm where my friend had internally referred me as a product manager. I was excited to pivot away from straight technical work, which often strained my extroverted personality. That firm’s HR operated slowly, and weeks elapsed between followups. Finally in mid May, they brought me onsite for a marathon session of interviews. While the experience was largely positive, I reflected over the weekend and realized I needed to follow my heart to Vietnam. With that realization, I then booked my Europe trip for Windmill.

That following week my brother and sister-in-law visited, and I told my whole family that I was moving to Vietnam. They did not take the news well. They mainly believed that the low salary, distance from tech thought leadership and lack of any incredible valuation growth were wrong for me. Only my father, who had spent a decade working in Shanghai, considered the possible upside of being in a growing economy at the right time. The next day at breakfast, my brother asked me if I was happy at my last company. I had been, because we had been working towards real global impact, and that in the months since I hadn’t come close to any company that excited me like that. “Oh there was this company in New York that tried to recruit me last year. They’re using machine learning to solve city sustainability issues. Would that interest you?” “Uh, yeah, no shit that’d be cool.” “Damn, I should have remembered to bring this to you earlier.” “Yes, you should have."

I figured it was too late to apply as I had already interviewed onsite at the big firm. But my brother emailed the CEO, who responded extremely quickly, and the next day I spoke with the head of their urban analytics team. The conversation went shockingly well and I learned that this guy’s previous role was leading analytics for the city of New York. A Google search revealed him to be kind of a big deal, as well as a visible minority in the field. It’d be really cool to work for him. They sent along their dataset assessment and told me to take a week on it. I pulled an all-nighter and turned it back in a day and a half, producing some of the best modeling I had ever done including applying the cyclical transformation trick I’d learned just a couple weeks before.

Finally on Monday, a full two and a half weeks after I’d gone onsite, the big tech firm gave me an offer. It was at the level that I had wanted and legitimately thrilled me. It’s funny how much more interested I’d become in the role when the offer became tangible. Still, I made arrangements to speak with the Vietnam CEO and sent an email to the New York startup informing them of the offer. Again they got back to me right away, and I soon had a call scheduled with the CEO for Wednesday morning. The Vietnam CEO also asked to speak Wednesday morning, and I had a followup with the big tech firm for Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday evening I would fly out to Spain. It would be the most eventful Wednesday since the CiBO layoffs, and similarly, I couldn’t sleep at all the previous night. I had 3 separate timelines at my fingertips, with 3 very different cities and 3 very different roles.

The New York CEO informed me that they typically bring people onsite before offering roles, but he’d be willing to make an exception if I was committed. I replied that if they could meet my salary expectations, I’d also take an offer without coming onsite. He then said he’d have his people get back to me.

The Vietnam CEO and I had a good heart-to-heart chat, but he was not able to meet the salary expectation that I wanted. It was an enormous risk for both of us, and while I’m not exactly risk-averse, I realized that his startup probably wasn’t as ready as other places to get value of data science.

Finally, the Boston tech firm gave me their final offer and told me I had until Friday 5pm EST to accept it. After how long they took to get back to me, I was a bit resentful about the tight deadline they’d given me, but they had other candidates in queue.  I then proceeded to fly to Spain.

When I landed in Madrid on Thursday, I had emails from the New York startup. They wanted me to go on Google Hangouts with some more employees. Sigh. I wanted to vacation, but this was my future, so I said sure, how about 4pm EST/10pm Spanish time? Considering I’d done my final interview with CiBO in Tokyo, this wasn’t even unusual for me. I flew to Bilbao, met up with Antonio and his wife Raquel, grabbed a quick dinner and drink, then hustled back to get on Hangouts. The interview was full of challenging questions, but by now I’d done so many interviews I was almost on autopilot. In one of the last questions, they asked me how I approached a dataset. Tiredly, I asked back, did you see my assessment? Surprisingly, one of the interviewers excitedly responded, “yes, I thought it was awesome, it was so cool how you transformed those cyclical variables.” Fuck yeah, I thought. Finally I told them I had until 5pm tomorrow to respond to the tech firm.

¿Donde esta el email de Nueva York?

The next day we touristed around beautiful Bilbao. I tried to enjoy it as much as I could, but the whole day I was aware of the time in New York. 9am... they’re getting into work... lunchtime….no email yet. 11pm Spain was my deadline. By 9pm we posted at a bar with wifi. I tried to be a fun conversationalist but the anxiety was real. At 9:30, the New York startup sent me an email…all it said was “hang in there, we’ll get back to you within the hour.” By 10:30, they still hadn’t. 10:45, the inbox was still unchanged and I’d lost the ability to make conversation. At 10:50 Antonio lent me his phone and I called someone at the company. No response. Finally at 11:00, I sent an email to the big tech firm saying, “I accept!”

The burden was gone. I’d be a product manager in Boston. It’d be a good life. I approached the bartender and said, “Tres tragos de tequila por favor. Tengo un nuevo trabajo!”

I brought the three shots back to our table and prepared to do a toast to the new job. Glass in the air, I sneaked a peak at my phone and glimpsed one new email. “Wait hold on! We have an offer for you!” I put my glass down and sighed.

In the ensuing telephone call, I admonished the New York startup for being late. They quantified their offer, apologized for missing the deadline by 5 minutes, and asked me to consider rescinding the acceptance. That thought literally made my heart quiver - I hate going against my word. I sighed, told him I’d sleep on it, and to please send a formal offer via email. When I checked my email that night, there was a formal offer that was slightly larger than what he’d said on the phone - turns out accepting the other job was a good negotiating tactic - as well as a response from the big tech recruiter revealing her joy at my acceptance. 

I did sleep on it, sent the offer around to my family, and ended up choosing the New York startup - Urbint. The email to the big tech firm rescinding my acceptance was the hardest email I’ve ever had to write - I had to get my brother to draft it for me. I clicked send on the train to Paris, and now, two weddings and a painful move later, I’m in New York City.

The Calamity was longer than desired, but was an invaluable period reconnecting with friends. My lessons learned:

• It is so valuable having a strong, diverse peer network to inspire and raise you
• It's important to be patient
• It's important to be bold
• It's ok to prioritize location
• Jobs are like buses. You wait around for ages and then they show up all at once

I've chosen to be patient, to put off my return to Asia for an exciting job opportunity. Hopefully I'll be here in Urbint and New York for a long while. If I'm in this position again in a year, I'll know I'm truly cursed. But if that happens, I'll tell big companies to pay me to work at their competitors.

Asian Calmination - Cambodia

Cambodia

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

Spark - eccentric establishment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Angkor Wat from the back

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

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

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

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

Asian Calmination - Vietnam

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

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

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

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

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

Vietnam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Minority Report

Visiting the Long Neck Karen village was a complete afterthought. I had left Pai at the crack of dawn and arrived in Chiang Rai that afternoon. I had only two objectives in Chiang Rai, the Black House and the White Temple, both eclectic modern takes on ageless spiritual concepts. However the two attractions were not merely opposite thematically but also geographically opposite from Chiang Rai center. With our late ETA, I had resigned myself to requiring two nights in an otherwise ho hum city to see both sights. But our bus had made an unexpected stop at the White Temple en route, enough to gaze at its spiky glory in a half dozen angles, and shortly after arrival at my Airbnb I caught a cab to the Black House. 

Through the chance sharing of both a bus ride and Airbnb booking, I had acquired a travel buddy, a Chinese girl named Qiao Li from Chengdu. We strolled around the Black House leisurely for an hour and I was feeling very content having knocked out the two birds with one stone, but Qiao Li wanted to keep hunting for a third bird. She pointed out that the "长颈村" was not far, and I had no idea what she meant. Long neck village? This wasn't highlighted in Wikitravel. She pointed at her tourist brochure and there was a picture of a woman in pink embroidery with shiny brass rings covering her neck. It took me a minute to mentally remove the rings, upon which I realized her neck must've been extraordinary long. Part of me was interested in going - there were many ethnic minorities I had only read about in the Demographics sections of Wikipedia articles of places. Part of me was fascinated to learn more. But part of me was reluctant because of the feeling that I wasn't going to learn more, and this part was right.

I visited a Miao village in Hunan within the past year, as part of a group of a few dozen Chinese tourists. The visit was one of the fakest experiences of my life, complete with a large sign at the town's main gate that said Miao People City … in Chinese characters. The whole place was a charade for tourists - an interesting experience, but not one that shed any light on Miao culture. Most real Miao people were adapting to modern China, doing regular life activities and trying to move up in Chinese society. Maybe there was some existential dread on how to preserve their traditions, but preservation wasn’t accomplished in this village by weaving baskets in front of tourists. For their part, I couldn't discern any sense of disillusionment or outrage from the other Chinese tourists.

At the beginning of this southeast Asian voyage I was breakfasting in a cafe in Sapa, at the northern tip of Vietnam. The cafe staff expressed their curiosity in me, and we exchanged pleasantries. Their English was good, and one of the girls had been learning Mandarin for all of a week. I smiled at her efforts, and she told me that it was her 4th language, after English, Vietnamese and her native language of Hmong. My first reaction was surprise - I hadn't been able to tell that they weren't Vietnamese. My second reaction was a light bulb going off - Hmong is the real name used by the people whom the Chinese call Miao. I tell them about the other Hmong people way up to the northeast, in China where the Chinese call them the Miao. They tell me that the Vietnamese call them Meo, which sounds the same as the Vietnamese name for cat, and so they don't like the Vietnamese. I hesitate for a moment, then inform that Miao sounds the same as the Chinese name for cat. The girl scowls. "Now I don't like the Chinese."

If I rack my brain hard enough, there is a bit more in there about the Hmong. They have been a stateless people for a long time, scattered from southern China by Han Chinese invasions and living in pockets throughout Southeast Asia - China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia. Many Hmong joined the US-led anti-communist efforts in the Vietnam war and its spillover into Laos and Cambodia, and when the war ended, they faced reprisals from 3 governments. The Hmong refugee crisis resulted in many Hmong being resettled in the US, seemingly chiefly in Minnesota of all places. One of my Georgetown classmates was born to Hmong refugees, and the movie Gran Turismo highlights this community. I'd figured their homeland was gone, inaccessible to someone like me, but here I was in a cafe speaking English to a Hmong college student.

All of this was in the back of my mind as I entered the Karen Long Neck village. I didn't know nearly so much about the Karen (despite having friends with that name). I had read something about them in Myanmar but had forgotten it all. We paid a 300 Baht entrance fee, which after free admission to the White Temple and Black House felt exorbitant. A long dirt path down the hill was calm and devoid of any extravagance and I held out hope that this could be a genuine village. Those hopes were dashed so fast.

It was towards the end of the day and several huts were empty. A single woman with the neck bracelets was there and smiled as she saw us, her hands mindlessly weaving on her wooden loom. As we walked past, other women materialized out from the huts and immediately went to work on their looms. Their bamboo huts were lined with scarves and trinkets for sale, because you know, who doesn't keep goods for sale on their front porch? Karen villages apparently are in a state of perpetual yard sale. 

The tour saw women and kids come out of the woodwork, all dressed in traditional dress and bangles. Everyone was very friendly, giving a Sawadee Ka and smiling for pictures. The women wore a full 8 inches of neck rings, with larger rings at the base. Some had on modern fleece jackets, but with more traditional-looking scarves, shawls and sarongs underneath. A little girl smiled and held some sort of game board, with a few inches of neck ring on her. I wanted to give everyone a hug and $100. Where are the men? Are they unfit for display because they don’t wear neck rings? Where are the "real" Karen people? Are they blended into Thai society, secretly waiting tables in Chiang Mai? Are they all still on the farms, tilling the land that the Thai people deigned to give them? How much more are they making in selling their culture to tourism?

This tourist site encompasses other villages, "inhabited" by other minorities, who aren't advertised as heavily because their necks are of normal length. I am introduced to the Akha, whom I had never heard of before. Their village is entirely inhabited by elders, and they're offering a set of wares that might have come from a factory. To my untrained eye I can't tell any difference in their appearance - they could all be Karen playing pretend for all I know. The women wear white headdresses and lots of bangles around their necks. Two of the elders who welcome us speak some basic English and even more Mandarin and throw many wares in our faces. As I ask them about their goods and history, I inadvertently get the elder man to call for a dance performance. Dozens of Akha elders with unenthusiastic expressions come out of their abodes and grab thick sticks, and drum the sticks straight down into the ground unleashing a deep earthen beat. I watch with 1 part awe and 9 parts embarrassment. After the minute long performance, Qiao Li walks away and I guiltily drop 100 baht into a jar in front of the dancers. I muster a thank you in their language, long gone from my memory, and feel pity that this community has to resort to performing like trained monkeys.

Walking back up the hill to the site entrance, I wonder what are the best options for impoverished village minorities here. In this region of Thailand, groups including the Karen, Akha, Lisu, Meo and Hmong are called “Hill Tribes,” mostly all relatively recent migrants from Yunnan province. They probably settled in the hills not because that’s the terrain best suited for their traditions - growing food in mountainous regions is rough work - but because the Thai wouldn’t let them settle in the better lowlands. They had to retreat to the more remote areas to not be bothered. And now they could try to continue their traditional lifestyles, subsisting on their crops and with limited access to modern infrastructure. I mean, how many scarves and brass rings does one need to trade for a car? Or do they try to assimilate into larger Thai society, starting from the dead bottom? Or do they engage in some sort of tourism contract like this, getting some revenue from curious people like me, and figuring things out from there?

How blessed am I to be from the world’s largest ethnicity, holding the passport of the world’s most powerful country? How would it feel to be a minority in every single country, speaking a language no one else deigns to learn, official absolute nowhere? 

I used to be idealistic regarding linguistic conservation and diversity, but I now believe that there is no way for people like the Akha to advance economically and simultaneously preserve their culture. When you read figures about how many languages are dying each year, they're languages like Akha and those of even smaller communities. Any stateless minority will eventually face the same challenges. There are some stateless people that we hear about in the western media, but most are not covered. Maybe my thoughts are too western-centric and bleeding hearty, and maybe most Akha people live happier lives than me. Nonetheless, my visit to this Long Neck Village reinforced a belief that the nationality and ethnicity you are born to matters far too much in this world.

The next day I boarded a boat to Laos, and drank beers with a bunch of western backpackers. We boozed lazily as the boat eased its way down the Mekong.