How do I fit into my womanly shoes?

I can’t handle my level of importance at work. It stresses me out more than the work itself.

I’m 23 and I just want to make sarcastic liberal jokes, drink beer instead of wine, and wear tight skinny jeans and a t-shirt that says “Che.” I want to be that carefree girl with a pretty skirt and long hair, opinionated and cute. But my attempts always fail, especially at work.

Instead, I am surrounded by married people and couples in serious relationships; I hangout with men whose wives stay at home and girlfriends either dance or teach. I would be less of a weirdo if I just lie that I have a fiance; maybe he could work in banking.

I wear wrinkle-free dress shirts even though I look horrible in collared shirts. I am a mac user, but I carry my company PC in tumi laptop cases and seriously, when a tiny girl like me carries that “awe-inspiring” bag through the airport, no arist/hot frequent-flier guy wants to flirt with me. I try to read Obama’s autobiography to get their attention, it does not work.

“Older” people assume I have years of experience in their “industry” when really, I just started two months ago and am scared to death they are going to discover I know nothing. Oftentimes I allow this fear to overwhelm me.

I am quiet during meetings, it delivers a horrible message for me as a woman, especially an Asian woman. Silence is practically career suicide anyways. Everybody from the billionaires to the crooks (these days they are really the same thing) talk their way to success. But how do you talk about a topic you have no confidence in?

I feel out of place all the time; part of me thinks I don’t belong here and the other part thinks I should get over this and find my place. And the last part fears that when I do find my place, it will kill my passion in social change.

Sometimes, I think I don’t know how to be a woman in business because I don’t know how to be a woman period. But what woman knows how to be a woman?

I fail in feminism because I can’t help but feel that my co-worker’s girlfriends and wives really know how to be “women” and my mere presence in a place filled with men suggests that somehow I am not being women, enough.

The bottom line: I am uncomfortable in my own gender.

I have struggled for years to come to terms with my race and nationality. But gender is something I only started to notice within the past two years. How do you become a woman and what should a woman be? These are questions feminists have struggled for decades to answer and un-answer. It’s going to take me some time.

Occasionally I see an “older” business woman carrying her laptop case in the hotel or at the airport. She is almost always white, with short hair. She usually looks like she is in a hurry, sturtting away in her stilettos while talking on the phone. She is polished and her mannerism suggests a certain level of command and power. I want to talk to her and ask her if she was just as insecure as me starting out in this business. I want to ask if she is happily married. Or happy, period. But right now, I just can’t see myself in her shoes 10 years down the road.

Reading isn’t everything

Reading is Self-Diagnosis

I self-diagnose, because I am a 1.5 generation; information gathering is necessary to survival. It makes up for my lack of parental nurturing and my innate unfamiliarity against this environment. It prevents me from going crazy.

I am an academic exercise to be analyzed; and I am the chief scientist in conducting systematic research on the contexts of my past and the deficiencies of my present.

I read voraciously because reading soothes my anxieties in a way my mother never could, though she try. Books allow me to delve inside the cultural conflicts of America and its impact on people like me. I obtain through books advice and consolation I did not get from parents who were more confused than I.

Research Allowed Me To Decide To:

1. Become the only person in my high school in Southwest Texas to attend a Midwestern University thousands of miles away.

2. Diagnose my particular skin disease (at the time) my dermatologist could not figure out after 3 visits and a heavy dose of the wrong hormonal pills.

3. Land jobs in a recession

4. Come to understand that my problems are not unique, but rather common with terms people already ascribe to: dislocation and love-withdraw, among others. This realization saved my life, literally, from myself.

Reading Isn’t God

At one point I  believed reading would allow me to figure out everything in life and achieve all that is possible – skills, knowledge, fame, and happiness. I believed in it so badly that whenever life goes awry, I proceed to check out books to figure out life. They worked for a big part of what’s important, but not for everything that’s important.

Relationship Answers Exist in Life and Only Life

Reading never worked when it comes to my relationships. I tried to read about how to accept my parents and all their imperfections, never found answers, still trying today. Some days look more optimistic than others.

I tried to read about why I kicked my then best friend away in high school, and why until this day I don’t feel the least bit remorseful but quit glad I did it, because really she’s done nothing wrong. Psychoanalysis helped a bit, but I am not convinced of its conclusions 100%.

And of course, I am still trying to figure out why I am so mean to the guys who like me, so inapt at getting the guys I like to like me back, and so afraid of telling the guys who definitely like me that I like them too. And why I am so scared of commitment and totally disillusioned by marriage, when people say I have a perfect father and the kindest mother, and between them a pretty healthy marriage, despite everything.

Those are the questions that plague my life right now, and I am finally convinced that those answers do not exist in books. And thus, the realization after 24 years of education is that I should put down books and go out there to get hurt again, to be loved, and to live life through experiences of my own, not of others I read about.

I realized, that I am quite a knowledgeable person, but still so inexperienced in life, because I am afraid of failing.

I should fail more often.

Someday, Maybe

I drew the picture on the bottom because I started on a new project across the country and the pressured made me depressed and I desperately needed to get away from the spreadsheet.

I can’t pinpoint why I’m depressed. It might have been the pressure of learning something new, the fact that I’m surrounded by men, the hotel, the flight, the spreadsheet, the PowerPoint, the numbing meetings, the fake professionalism, the lack of meaning in everything I do, or the fact that I am pretending too much to be this nice person that I am not. 

I flew back to New York, and strangely, the pissed off faces I see on the streets made me feel better. And I realized, I belong here.

The very next day I went shopping, there is something soothing about spending money. And my friend gave me a Valentine’s Day gift, I felt loved (even if it’s only from a girl).  

I stopped by my favorite coffee shop and called my dad for nearly an hour over coffee and Swedish meatballs. I told him I don’t like what I’m doing, but I am sticking to it for the time being because I have $25,000 loans left to pay. I told him I don’t know what I want to do in life, but since I have no kids and no mortgage, I’m going to go out there soon and try to find a career I feel empowered by. I told him I’m not afraid of failure, of taking risks, I’m afraid, however, of never finding my “thing” in life. My dad first argued that nothing remains interesting forever, that most jobs are mundane, and that other people’s opinions do matter. But eventually I convinced him otherwise, and he said he trusts my choices, whatever they may be. And that made me cry.

I walked to the container store and bought some files and a basket, I went home and dumped all that paper on my desk into the basket. I then cooked myself some Korean ramen noodles with a big jolt of Chinese vinegar. I missed vinegar. The sourness brought back a feeling of serenity, and now, I’m ready for some chocolates. 

I have an overwhelming amount of work I still need to do. But the people I have met and the things I have done made that daunting task seemed a bit smaller, a bit less surreal, a bit more “just work”.

And tonight is Valentine’s Day, I am just going to use that as an excuse to push back the work until tomorrow. Tonight, I am going to party it up… with some friends, and some strangers. 

Someday, I will find life. 

 

 

Get off of Facebook

Facebook has done more harm than good. I joined it back in 2004 when there was no wall, tagged photos or the myriad of applications on everything ridiculous.

Facebook has since gotten senselessly competitive and largely meaningless in achieving real communications.

According to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook is “a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, families and coworkers.”

Let’s break this down.

(1) Friends: Of the handful of friends I don’t see but communicate on a periodic basis, we never depend on Facebook to catch up. I prefer a long chat over the phone or a trip to see each other any day.

The vast majority of my friends on facebook, however, are people I don’t care about. I don’t care the girl I went to camp with is now engaged. I don’t care my Asian American Association acquittance broke up with her boyfriend. I don’t want to know some guy I liked is still dating that girl. I don’t care the girl who used to live down the hall from me is in Europe with her sorority sisters. And then there are the handful of people whose pictures make me wonder, “do I know you?”

What does it mean to say we have 1000 or 2000 friends, when those connections does not get me anywhere – because being able to friend someone on facebook, being able to follow someone’s life consistently for years over sheer boredom do not equal to real connections that produce real benefits. It’s a big waste of my time.

(2) Family: God forbid my parents join facebook. God forbid that, along with any aunts, uncles, or grandmothers. I am friends with cousins on facebook, half by choice and half by sheer pressure. Facebook is and should never be a tool for family communication.

(3) Co-workers: if you really want to achieve effective, career-related communication, do not facebook message people, do not friend people just because you want your resume dropped (similarly, do not chat with them on aim). It is just unprofessional, it is invasion of someone’s personal space without their permission. Sure, you are asking to friend him, but he will feel like an asshole for not wanting to friend you and he will be angry at you for making him feel like an asshole.

If you are a coworker I want to be friends with, let’s hang out. If you are a coworker I just want to be coworkers with, it’s best you don’t see my profile on facebook – use LinkedIn instead.

The Bottom Line of what Facebook is Really About:

(1) It’s a Popularity Contest

Some days I feel better when I have 370 friends and 160 photo tags. Some days I feel better when someone writes a witty comment on my wall, especially about how awesome I am. Some days I read someone’s funny status update and feel the need to write something even funnier. Once out of desperation I wrote, “I love NYC, ready to party it up now!!!” How pathetic was that?

Facebook is a popularity contest about what hot parties you went to this weekend and what hot friends you have. It’s about how many people write on your walls and what sarcastically fascinating profiles you can create. But it’s a popularity contest where both the winner and the loser get screwed over. Too many photo tags will make you “seem” popular, but will also make others hate you, prejudging you into a snobby and character-less bitch or son of a bitch. Similarly, when you have less than 50 friends, an empty wall and no tagged photos, you are a loser by default. But really – how can Facebook just label someone a loser without knowing anything about this person? Too bad, it just did.

Isn’t it better to show who you really are in person and on a one-on-one basis instead?

Some people will argue right now that the precise point for facebook to exist is that one-on-one opportunities to showcase yourself is not always possible. This brings me to my last point:

(2) Facebook is used by people who are scared of real communications.

If a guy likes a girl, go ahead and get her number, don’t just facebook her. If calling is too much for him to handle, then he should text. Text, don’t write on her wall “last night’s party was awesome.” It gets him nowhere.

If you meet someone new, same or opposite sex, and find him or her a cool person, then see him or her next week, have coffee, go visit a gallery or hang out at another party. I have met too many new friends with whom I became friends with on facebook and thus, never felt the need to keep in touch outside of the Net.

Wouldn’t it be meaningful if you actually write to me and we actually meet up, either on a weekend or next time you are in town? Wouldn’t it be interesting if, instead of reading my profile, you ask questions yourself and I tailor my answers just for you? Wouldn’t you feel special knowing something about me that is not mass produced and readily available to the public?

I’m not trying to get dates or become best friends. People expect too much from face-to-face communications that they are afraid to commit, and so instead, they facebook and think everything is okay. Well, everything is only okay because there is nothing there.

I wish someone can do a study to show that Facebook event-invites precisely produce lower turnouts because it is too easy to mass-invite. So nobody feels special anymore, and nobody feels the need to turn up because nobody feels like they are genuinely invited.

Conclusion:

Real communications are risky – they involve embarrassing blunders (cute guy does not call me back and it’s been 2 weeks) and huge rewards (10 missed calls from the cute guy). Facebook is riskless – therefore also meaningless. What’s the point of not failing big and winning big, that’s life!

Opinion on China, Part I.

Back Then:

In Middle School the only thing people ever asked me about China is whether or not I eat puppies and kittens. I tried to explain only Southern Chinese eat dogs. Nobody believed me, or cared about the difference.

Then the millennium arrived and China went from being a joke to being a threat. Interests over China started to boil and people went from saying “I pity your sufferings under a Communist regime” to “I envy your ability to speak the language of billions of people (more importantly, trillions of dollars).”

In June of 2001, CNN held a discussion on the fifth anniversary of 6/4/1989. Wei Jingsheng declared on Larry King that the Chinese government will one day screw up so badly that the revolution will revive itself. Not to say that day will never come, but it was suppose to come sooner, definitely sooner than 2009.

Now:

Seven years later in August of 2008, the world’s media began the broadcast of Beijing Olympics in horror of not able to find anything significantly wrong with a city everybody came to find faults on. My coworkers in New York would not shut up about the suppression of human rights and China’s surveillance on its own people. Neither facts I deny.

I am all about human rights. But I hate arrogant white people (and Asians and Blacks and Browns I suppose too) who knew nothing about China except coverage from CNN and proceed to argue with me because I am Chinese and they want to show me off about their vast knowledge and certainty regarding democracy over oppression. Go read a book on China written by a real scholar, go live in a Communist country to understand what Communism is all about. I don’t think you know anything about democracy until the day you lose it. I really do believe that.

Trying to constantly “show” me China’s oppression on human rights really do nothing to improve anybody’s situation, and at its deepest level just reveals American’s inability to digest the FACT that a Communist country is turning somewhat cool.  Which, really, is all just flair.

I have no time to comfort their feel-good ego and seriously, these attempts (mostly from male coworkers) are just not necessary.

Athletes came into Beijing wearing masks in fear of the smogs that are sure to clog their lungs. In the end, nothing like that ever occurred. In fact, the Olympics was so drama-free that it disappointed many who expected much worse embarrassments than just some gymnastic girls lying about their age. It also didn’t help that this Communist regime that is (at least temporarily) backed up by its people showed the kind of responsiveness toward a major earthquake disaster that would put the democratic US government’s response to Katrina to deep shame.

My Perception:

My perception is that the core of China really hasn’t changed since 1989 – its goal back then and its goal right now have always been economic development. But American’s perception toward China has gone from passive ignorance to undisclosed envy and I’m afraid, to a kind of hatred rooted in none other than xenophobia.

China is simply a country whose people’s lives have improved, and for some still improving.

The suggestion by many American politicians that China’s improvement is at the expense of American lives is simply, economically ungrounded. Anyone with a simple introduction to Political Economy would know that a country cannot “manipulate” its currency for its own benefits forever without seriously hurting its own citizens – so the currency manipulation accusation about China is as legit as the immigrant accusation that American values are being threatened by “outsiders.” Both accusations expose fear and insecurities against something unknown and foreign. Instead of trying to face each other and understand each other, Americans box themselves up and cry that they want equality – equality from what?

In Conclusion:

I think many things are wrong with China. Internal unfairness against migrant workers is taking over economic progress, which means 2 billion Chinese workers will be out of jobs this year while the rich keeps on getting richer (this further slashes American’s claims that their job losses are all going over to China.)

I think education and creativity are being restricted. I think citizens are discouraged from helping each other. I think migrant workers (and their children) are going psychologically insane over the impossible conditions they find themselves in order to just survive.

But I don’t think China is in any shape or form exploiting America. Quite on the contrary.

Eatery – Midtown Espresso – Fika

It is hard to find a place in midtown that’s neither corporate nor insanely expensive, and, also not a Starbucks. Fika is one of the rare, a small espresso bar two blocks from Central Park.

Fika is authentically Swedish; it claims to sell the best tasting coffee in NYC. I am no expert on coffee but their latte is honestly the best I’ve ever had, at a price for Starbucks to beat. Their coffee is only $2, I am really impressed.

Fika also offers a menu of food items, from chocolate balls (my favorite $2 dessert) to entrees under $15 that range from sandwiches to meatballs to chicken salads, all Swedish style of course.

I usually just go for a cup of coffee plus a chocolate ball (covered with fresh coconut). It’s really a delicious afternoon snack. Fika alao has free wifi and model-looking waitresses – well, they are Swedish, so they are tall, skinny and blond.

Too bad the place closes as early as 7pm. And the other draw back is that they really need to rethink about building the decor: everything is on a stool and sort of steel-like. I know Swedish people are tall but it is very uncomfortable having to sit high up there all the time. The place is also tiny but not in an inviting way: most people just stand around and leave after they get their drink. Considering the fact that this country invented Ikea, I am disappointed they are not making this place a little bit more homey. At least they got the food part correct.

41 W 58th St
(between Avenue Of The Americas & Grand Army Plz)
New York, NY 10019
(212) 832-0022
www.fikanyc.com

The Smell of Saffron

I grew up in a tiny part of Western China no one’s ever heard of. I can easily survive without your idea of “Chinese” food – stir fry chickens, any sort of rice, dim sum, or seafood that your idea of “Chinese people” supposedly cannot live without, that most Jews in New York City probably cannot live without. 

But everything I ever loved eating growing up in Western China involved lamb – spicy noodles with lamb in a popular spot just down the street from my dad’s work, lamb intestine for breakfast with my mom, lamb dumplings when the get together gets large, stewed baby lamb prepared by grandfather on my birthday, lamb in clear broth with winter melon when grandmother wanted us to get healthier, lamb kabob every time when go to the night market, and lamb stuffed in naan I always buy with my cousin after school behind our grandmother’s back. There were just too many culturally vibrant cuisine dishes that existed no where else in this world but in this tiny autonomous region. 

I once read an article on Valerie Jarrett about her experiences growing up in Iran. When she says ”If I walk into a house and I smell saffron, I’m happy,” I instantly knew what she was talking about. That is because the Persians where the ones who traveled two thousand years ago via the Silk Road to eventually settle in that tiny region within Western China where my parents were born and raised, and where I was born and raised. I often wonder if I were to visit Iran one day, would it oddly feel kind of like home? 

Memories triggered by the senses can cause powerful emotions. For me, it was not just the smell of saffron, but also the sight of slaughtered lambs being cleaned and dried on wooden racks, the arabic phrases and the symbolic moon outside of every restaurant, and the presence of elderly Muslim men with their white hats and long beard that instantly put me at ease. It was days of not seeing the rain, sand blowing with the wind, the brightest sun and bluest skies, that somehow puts me in a better mood. 

I will forever connect those sights, sounds, and smells to a world that I deemed completely nostalgic, reassuring, and fortunate to have lived within. A world that has pretty much ceased to exist today as China develops and assimilates into the 21st century. But that would be another long post on my witness to change on a city I have repeatedly returned to since my first departure more than 13 years ago. 

The trick any immigrant (or kid from a divorced family, girl dumped by a boyfriend, or anyone who went through trauma for that matter…) should keep in mind is to not dramatize the past and over-glorify the motherland like it was some kind of perfect Heaven – as much as I miss my childhood city, I know full well that had I lived and grew up there, the childhood city still stays in the past and this present city that embodies that space today is something totally different. While I changed thousands of miles away, so did my city. So, it would be foolish for me to claim that life would be easier had I staid in my city of perfectly sweet memories.

For now, I’ll settle with the smell of saffron.

I am a Math Major

I am a math major. I tell people with a mixture of embarrassment and self-absorbed glory.

The only reason why I even tell people I am a math major is because being able to say “I am a math major” is just about the only privilege I ever got from achieving that goal.

I didn’t get hired because I majored in math, nor gathered anything profound about life through the myriad of math classes I suffered myself through up until the very last day of college. In fact, I don’t think I remember anything past Calculus II, which I actually studied in high school.

I received my first and only failed grade in my 16 years of schooling from a math class called Differential Equations; I got this weird disease called Pityriasis Rosea from stressing out too much in a math class called Modern Algebra. [Quick note: I'm not going to link this disease because I know you will google Pityriasis Rosea anyways and will be grossed out by the pictures you see; I can assure you my condition is equally as gross, except it happened on an Asian, which the doctor has never seen before, so he took a bunch of pictures of my torso - I wonder if my torso is somewhere on the Internet]

Anyways, back to math. The only math class that interested me is Real Analysis, a class that does not involve any calculation whatsoever. Our grade is determined by a series of group assignments consisted of using sentences to prove simple sayings, like why A+B=C if B+A=C. It was suppose to be the most difficult math class in the entire undergraduate Math Department, but I found it to be the easiest and by far the most fascinating. So I gloat ever so often about how I aced Real Analysis, which further legitimizes me as a math major.

But really, I know crap about math, which has led me to think that many doctors know crap about how to treat people, many lawyers know crap about the law, and many engineers know crap about how structures and circuits work. And I think I’m probably right.

It is so easy to get a degree or a title these days that having one means nothing.

Which is why I am not going to graduate school, because being able to say “I Have a Masters in Public Policy” or “I have an MBA from this Ivy League” will mean crap if I can’t actually do anything substantial in life. And I don’t think I need a graduate degree in order to accomplish just about everything I view as substantial in life.