Category: Blog

A Chinese boy sits in a warm classroom in Puerto Rico.  He learned Cantonese from his parents, and they don’t speak Spanish at home.  His first experience speaking the native tongue is Kindergarten, where he needs to catch up.  This boy is now in third grade; he learned to print and write in cursive.  His teacher calls upon him to read and he reads as competently as anyone else in his class.  This boy is me around 1976.

As our teacher calls upon different students to read, there are two students (a boy and a girl) who consistently struggle; they’re siblings if memory serves.  They seem perfectly competent at everything else but struggle to read.  Naturally, each student will struggle and excel at different subjects, but this felt different.  The way that they read almost seemed as if they transposed letters.

Continue reading “We are not ‘confusing’ them” →

Years after I left Florida, I stopped to visit a Chinese friend of the family on a return visit.  He was a friend of my mom’s, but he and I also worked together for a while.  He now owned his own business.  I admired him for his kindness and respected him for his principle.  He gave me room to be myself apart from the pressures from the community.  We caught up in our respective lives.  I asked about his business; he asked about my life as an engineer.  Eventually, he makes a suggestion, which sounded more like a directive, “You should go back to China to find a wife.  It’d make your mom happy.  It is our people.”

Continue reading “Finding my Asian-American voice” →

I hate daylight saving time.  I have no preference for one time over the other, but I detest the process of abruptly and arbitrarily offsetting your time by one hour.  Many devices will automatically adjust their own time, but some won’t.  Most of us will still have one device where we either don’t know how to set the time, or it is too much of a nuisance.  For me, that device is the stereo in my car.  We end up making that one compromise; we won’t set the time but make a mental adjustment that the time displayed is an hour off.  The time will be right again in a few months.

Continue reading “Debugging our prejudice” →

I sat in my Senior English class in high school.  Our classroom opens into the hallway; movable panels separate our classroom from the next.  This particular classroom sits on the end of our hallway.  I spent a fair number of my afternoon hours in this room that year.  One afternoon, I got into a discussion with a classmate, he was popular and the class president, if memory serves.  During this discussion he calls me a ‘sumo wrestler’.  I am both Chinese (not Japanese) and overweight.

It was a derogatory reference to both my race and my weight.  Having dealt with interactions like this often, I understood that while I need not escalate, I did need to respond.  In my mind, I searched for a proportional response.  I called him a ‘spook’; yes, he was black.  I knew it was derogatory and racist, and I still did it.

Continue reading “How much do we really value life?” →

I grew up Chinese (unyieldingly rational?) and have a natural inclination for engineering problems.  No, these are not correlated.  Some allege that I have artistic tendencies too.  Many years ago, I got a Wacom tablet to draw on my computer.  However, it worked great except for one thing, I naturally use my right hand for everything.  Allow me to elaborate; I had both a mouse and drawing tablet to the right of my keyboard and in order to use them both interchangeably I needed to move the mouse pad and tablet back and forth.  My engineering mind decided that I could fix this with a very simple adjustment…  I’d move one left of the keyboard and start to use it with my left hand.

Continue reading “Who we are and who we love aren’t ‘choices’” →

I have a confession to make, I’m a bit of a traditionalist.  Many of my tastes lean towards the retrospective; I won’t apologize for it.  It’s not quite the “kids get off my lawn” sentiment, but still I may sound like that crochety old man at times.  I speculate that it’s a function of a couple of forces.  First, I have good memory and knowing precisely how something works and behaves brings great comfort.  Second, I’m a sentimentalist.

Continue reading “There’s nothing wrong with retro” →

I was a freshman in college at the University of Miami and lived in Pearson Hall.  One afternoon, I came back from classes to find a note left by Guy, my suitemate.  It read that someone broke into my car, a 1966 Mustang, and I should contact campus security.  They broke my small triangular window and took my stereo and battery; the latter was especially petty.  My family got a new battery and drove it down; I got a replacement window from a second hand shop; I didn’t replace the stereo.

Continue reading “You only get what you literally pay for” →

This occurred sometime after I arrived here in Washington state.  Some local citizens were fascinated by the story of a local black teen, DeShawn Johnson.  Truthfully, he fascinated some and irked others.

Over the years he broke into businesses after hours simply to feed and amuse himself.  Occasionally, he broke into people’s homes while they were unoccupied, staying there like Goldilocks; this entailed eating food from their refrigerators and soaking in hot baths.  He preferred to stay on the run, so he stole vehicles…  a lot of them.  In fact, he lived here but ‘travelled’ all over the country precisely this way; he maintained this for two years.

Continue reading “The history of a local teen” →

Imagine this hypothetical, you and I make plans to play tennis.  Initially, we meet at your home and we travel to a tennis court.  I have a bag slung over my shoulder and carry a tennis racquet in my hand.  We get along well but haven’t seen each other for months.  As we walk towards the tennis courts and pass many people, I reach back with my racquet smack someone squarely on the face and continue walking as if nothing occurred.  This stuns you.  You are shocked; you know me to be a reasonable person.  This is not anything you can comprehend.  I still have the racquet in my hand, so you’re reluctant to say anything.  We continue walking.

As we make our way to the courts, we pass many more people.  However, you’re still in stunned by the event that transpired.  As your mind is racing and contemplating what you should do, I again reach back and this time I strike someone squarely on the knee.  They collapse on the ground and cower in fear.  You are still in shock and continue to walk but put more distance between us.  This continues.

Continue reading “Establishing hate crime by probability” →

This is an embarrassing story, but I’ll tell it for two reasons.  First, one of my aspirations when writing this blog is to be honest, even if that doesn’t necessarily paint me in a good light.  Second, it illustrates a subtle point that many of us don’t think about much but is important to mention.

Few years ago, I wandered down to the cafeteria to get lunch like most afternoons.  Our cafeteria is in a cluster of four buildings, serves hundreds of people, and has many different stations.  I came down right around noon, so it was busy.  As I stood in one line to get my food, my mind wandered, and I people watched.  I took note of a young woman several feet in front of me on the next station; she was facing away.  She was sharply dressed and had long flowing hair.  For a brief moment, I thought to myself, “She’s cute.  I wonder what she looks like.”

Continue reading “Is this chrysoprase or seafoam?” →