I’m at the last Friday of the month team lunch. Something I schedule since I don’t do lunch. Someone suggests each person share the craziest thing they’ve ever done. This would be interesting except it’s not because people won’t be that open around coworkers. And the fact is, it isn’t that crazy of a bunch. I have a few stories, but I settle on a safe one. Yang and I moved to Beijing with two small children, jobless, homeless, and our belongings limited to checked in luggage. ...
I’m in Sabrina’s hometown apartment, sitting in the corner of the couch, reading the book Chaos. Sabrina is on my left and on her left are her parents. The TV is on, and I look up when I hear some English dialog. It is a scene from the oval office of the 1950s. Someone who doesn’t look much like Eisenhower is asking a naive question about the Soviet / China relationship. The advisor angles towards Eisenhower and the camera and in a knowing way says not to underestimate Mao - that he’s in in total control. The flash to another scene with Mao sitting at a desk, reading papers when his daughters come in and share some playful banter before Mao returns to his work. ...
It is maybe January 3rd, 1989 and the next day I will move out of my parents home and into my own apartment. I have a box of kitchenware, not exactly out of the Crate and Barrel catalog, more like from the lost and forgotten catalog. My dad tells me the closet is ready to paint. Having me paint my parents’ bedroom closet has been a mild obsession with for my father over the past month. Now was the moment. I was ambivalent to the whole thing, so I just went upstairs, took his direction, and started while he left the room. ...
I’m watching an episode of Winning Time when Lydia calls me. She’s about to have the final exam for her pre-calculus class and she’s feeling anxious. I leave my apartment and go down a flight of stairs into her mom’s apartment and find her petting their cat, Saisai. She describes her anxiety and I say I will hang out. I really don’t like hanging out in that apartment that used to be my apartment. I sit in living room then decide I want water. While in the kitchen I eat a couple cold dumplings from the fridge. Aidan is in the den playing a video game; I call out to him. ...
I’m scrolling through twitter and a global times opinion piece with headline “US pullout of Shanghai consulate staff reveals who the world’s biggest Karen is”. I don’t read he post but take a screen shot and send to a friend. I send it to point out how divisive media in China is getting and also comment that US media (Fox anyway) is also divisive. Then I realize I am falling into the no classic social media trick – reacting to the reactionary. And I admit that there are times when I look at Twitter just to find the tweets I can take offense at; like checking CNN during the Trump presidency. My nature, however, embraces diverse opinions. ...
It is Saturday afternoon and I’m walking unremarkably alone to a supermarket that specializes in foreign goods. A voice from in front of me gets past my headphones “Vince..Vince..”. I look up and it’s an old colleague. He looks fit and strong and energetic. We catch up. Still working at the same place, I say. At a startup, he says. We exchange some small talk and take a selfie. I smile and try to stand tall. I’m having a very inward day. ...
Elisa wanted to play basketball this weekend. She’s been getting into it recently; playing it after school and maybe she has a crush on a boy. We decide to play on Sunday, 10am. We walk 10 minutes to where they have some courts under a tent but the courts are being used by some organized practice until noon. We come back at noon and pay the equivalent of $20 USD for two hours on the court. On the way over I had told Elisa that at her age we could play school courts for as long we wanted but the school courts are locked in Beijing and I guess even now in the US. ...
Am I the creative type? What does that even mean? For what it’s worth I do consider myself creative. Not in the sense that I create art. In the sense of how my mind works. Where it takes me and I take it. The open mindedness of it. The emotion of it. In college I took a creative writing class during the summer. It was a small group; eclectic in age and backgrounds. The teacher had her own writings which she read. An older man seemed genuinely interested in what I wrote. A young man who wrote astonishing well but faced harsh criticism from the teacher for being naive and wrong about society. For my part, I struggled with plot; less so on characters. I wrote historical fiction short stories generating ideas by walking through the campus library. The teacher dismissed me as a writer since I was a computer science major. Also, my writing wasn’t very good. A bit creative, but technically not so good. ...
I’m sitting next to my brother Jimmy at the Grand Lake theater in Oakland. October 1999. With heavy anticipation we are about to watch the movie Fight Club. When the movie was over we both shrugged “it was alright”. Watching it again last night, 22 years later, it struck me differently. The first act of the movie was fantastic and the rest good if a little long at times. What really struck me was the Ed Norton character realizing the pointlessness of his early 30 something life. The need to be something beyond IKEA, a good job, and lattes. He wanted a human connection. He wanted to be masculine, not emasculated. He wanted to be a badass like Brad Pitt. So he blew up his life figuratively and literally. Not sure why, but I didn’t catch that then, when I was in my early 30s and was in the middle of blowing up my life. Quit my stable job for a fragile startup. Quit my wife for a whisp of what could be. Moved from the suburbs to the city. Started over. There isn’t sentence that can capture how that worked out. I can’t say things worked out for the better. I can’t say they worked out for the worse. It is a mix of things which leaves me here, typing on this coach in Beijing at age 55. ...
In my 20s I used to play basketball regularly. Played hard. Full court. Ran whoever was guarding me to death. Got buckets. Tried on defense. In my early 30s I joined a startup, and my basketball days went from three days a week to one. Still played hard but didn’t regain the three days a week lungs. Then I moved to China at 39 and never really found a game so I ran. I let go of my basketball player self-identification and a few years later knew I would not be able physically keep up anymore. I’d be elbow jumper guy when my whole game was outworking my matchup. ...