YMFY

An Attempt At Exhausting A place in the Financial District

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 00:06:23 -0700

A truck pulls up, obscuring my view of the street. It says “Dynamic Pacific Enterprise” on the side in large and small caps. A man and a woman sit next to me at the bar looking out into the street. She tells him about her dream, which is to become a surf instructor. She tells him first she needs to learn how to surf. An old woman seems to be studying my face. She is looking at a menu taped on the window. I become an Asian mannequin. This guy has the most monotone voice in the world. I close my eyes and imagine Dilbert. I try to tune him out. A beautiful Asian woman walks by, I try to picture her naked. I can’t. Fake Paul Krugman strolls by. He has a double-breasted coat, camel colored. An old Asian lady wearing a hairnet drags along a huge tote bag. I can’t get this banal talk these two are having out of my head. Dilbert tells her about the time he tried to save himself, and how he was heartbroken in the process. I don’t know if I should laugh at him, or feel sorry for myself. I choose ridicule. Pigeons fly in and out of view.

This was scrawled into a notebook of mine over a year ago, transcribed for you today.

Never forget your beginner’s spirit.

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 19:42:24 -0700

It was both awkward and accurate to say that we didn’t have very much money when my family came to America. My father spent most of it buying a very used Oldsmobile and he worked double shifts until he made enough to send for my mother and I.

We ate a lot of rice porridge and vienna sausages. Sunday was the only day we ate meat unless it was payday.

If you were to look up my hometown, you’d realize that the median income for a household in the city was $26,704 (versus $48,259 for the rest of Texas), and the median income for a family was $34,543. The per capita income for the city was $13,993. About 17.3% of families and 22.2% of the population were below the poverty line, including 22.3% of those under age 18 and 21.7% of those age 65 or over. A quarter of the city was living UNDER the poverty line! The funny thing is, we didn’t know we were poor. At least I didn’t.

Around the time we arrived in Texas, a group of retired teachers volunteered and were assigned immigrant families like ours to teach the basics of the English language. I remember when my father left to work in Taiwan for a few years, I had to sign the checks for the utility bills because my mother could not.

Eventually I’d go to college. When I graduated, I left Texas and moved out west with little money and almost no possessions. I smile when I think about how similar my beginnings were to my father’s. One of the few possessions I owned was a very small square photograph of my grandfather as a boy with his family that I kept pinned on a bare wall. It’s unclear how they afforded it, but I keep it to remind me where I came from.

Never forget your beginner’s spirit.

BATNA

Wed, 20 Jun 2012 10:33:00 -0700

I think the most important lesson I’ve learned in the past year is to always have leverage. The concept of leverage has been around since the dawn of time, but capitalism seems to have exported it on a grand scale. It scales so well because the principles are so fundamental.

Leverage eliminates the need for instruments like trust. No need for trust equals speed because things are binary. “In good faith” gets replaced by the next best alternative and life goes on.

Where you from?

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 16:12:15 -0700

Having lived in Los Angeles’ Koreatown (where I famously stepped over a fresh dead body), it’s unnerving to be asked: “Where you from?” and even stranger still to answer.

Even now that I’ve moved out of the Mission and into a nicer area, an area with windswept trees and spectacular views, I still flinch.

Anniversaries

Tue, 29 May 2012 19:14:55 -0700

A little over a year ago I took a chance on love and haven’t looked back since.

Hunter's Point: Where Gully Happens™

Sun, 27 May 2012 09:23:32 -0700

After going to a couple of bars and dancing with my roommate I decided to meet up with a friend of mine at another bar. By then I was sufficiently toasted and was simply wandering from spot to spot not really aware of the scenery. Before I knew it, I was in the backseat of a cab.

I rolled down the window and got some fresh air and it occurred to me that we were going through a part of San Francisco I’d never seen before. “Yo where the fuck are we?” The cabbie explained that he was taking us to Hunter’s Point based on directions that someone scrawled on a napkin. My eyes widened; I sobered up immediately. “Are you serious!?! No cabs go out there, how do you expect us to get back? We’re gonna get fucked!” My friend was able to calm me down and eventually I resigned to the fact that I’d soon be robbed blind and left for dead.

A bit about Hunter’s Point. It’s located in the extreme southeastern part of San Francisco, strung along the main artery of Third Street from India Basin to Candlestick Point. The boundary to the west is Interstate 280 and to the south Highway 101. The entire eastern portion of the neighborhood is the San Francisco Bay and the former naval base of Hunters Point. Most of it is landfill from the Bay. Pizza delivery services refuse to go near it. The city stopped allowing hybrid MUNI buses to service HP because hoods would do stickups by flipping outside emergency switches that instantly shut-off all power to the buses. Two-way radios would die, all the lights go off, and if the bus was climbing a hill, it’d start rolling backward.

Don’t get me wrong. Hunter’s Point is still not Camden. No one that I could see was cooking rats over a burning oil drum. Young boys weren’t perched on rooftops flipping pigeons. Crackheads resisted pressing their faces against our glass at lights.

Were some of the houses we passed trap houses? Probably. Did it seem like we only made rolling stops and right-turns? Yes.

I sunk lower into my seat, hoping to pass off as a Puerto Rican.

Eventually we turned onto a long dirt road and about a hundred yards in we see a huge cattle gate type entrance with barbed wire on both sides. This was it. We pay the cab driver almost double for his troubles (hazard pay) and hop out. A guy in a hoodie slowly walks up to us and asks us if we have our tickets. We tell him no. He sounds sincere when he informs us that the party is sold out and he can’t let us in, but my friend pulls out two fresh twenty dollar bills. No go. We up it to 60. 100. He shakes his head. This isn’t even the doorman! This is just the guy that hangs out by a cattle gate! Reality eventually sunk in and we realized that no matter what we tried, we wouldn’t be getting in to that party. I looked back into the darkness and saw the cab disappearing, headlights sweeping as it turned on to the main road.

I don’t think I’ve ever run that fast in my life. Our legs became blurry ovals.

Fortunately we were able to flag down the driver. We told him the news, and eventually he took us to Mighty and I danced some more and went home.

What I kept thinking about, even now in my hungover state was the cattle gate man. He could have taken the money. No one would have known. They would have probably turned us away at the door but he would have gotten paid and we wouldn’t have said shit because he was huge. So why? Why not just take the 100 dollars?

I thought at first maybe it was this innate sense of discipline. You don’t hire guards, good ones anyway, that are subject to outside influence. They have a very simple job to do, and there are no exceptions. I could accept that theory.

My second theory was that maybe he felt sorry for us. He knew we’d get turned away at the door, with our cab driver long gone and marooned in the ghetto. Maybe there were roving bandits just past the gate and he was feeling particularly magnanimous. This is where kids threw an old chinese lady off the Muni platform. Hunter’s Point: Never not gully.

But my final theory, and I think the most compelling, is that he was honor-bound to preserve the hype. That’s how these things work. Legendary parties, the ones you hear stories about, are all cloaked in secrecy and exclusivity. That’s why even lame clubs have velvet ropes. Did this party have a vintage stock of top shelf women? Probably not. Maybe there wasn’t ant hill-sized mounds of coke on platters. Maybe it didn’t really go ‘til eight in the morning. The truth is you never know.

The best disguise is one's own face

Sat, 26 May 2012 09:29:58 -0700

When I was in Los Angeles, I visited an ex-girlfriend of mine. We went strolling about the LACMA, then got fruit and yogurt slurries at Jamba Juice. While we were waiting for our drinks to be blended, she asked me why I didn’t have a girlfriend. I didn’t have a satisfactory response, and I heard myself try out answers: I enjoy my bachelor lifestyle unencumbered by the needs of others; I didn’t want to bring someone into my crazy and busy world. She told me I was full of shit, which is true.

There’s a problem with the way I love, which I will attempt to express with a borrowed parable. Slavoj Zizek tells this story about how Domingo Cavallo, the Argentinian Minister of Economy, escaped from his beseiged offices in Buenos Aires when the country was on the verge of collapse. When Argentinians took to the streets to protest against the government and gathered around Cavallo’s building threatening to storm it, he put on a fright mask of himself that was popular among the protesters and slipped into the crowd. The best disguise is one’s own face, you see.

Do you understand what I’m trying to say?

Broadsheets

Fri, 25 May 2012 09:20:46 -0700

When I was a child, I’d always eat breakfast early in the morning with my dad. He’d be at the table, sitting with his legs crossed, sipping tea and reading a copy of the Wall Street Journal. It came every morning. There wasn’t a weekend edition like there is now.

I’d always peel apart the Marketplace section, because that was the only section that interested a kid my age.

It’s funny that I actually got a printed quote in the The Wall Street Journal last year. My parents have it taped on the fridge next to some crappy drawings I did as a kid. A scant five years ago, it would be ludicrous to think I’d have the ear of a reporter of that caliber. We are truly living in the Twitter age.

It wasn’t that long ago that the iPad launched and there were bold cries that Paper was dead, ink was drying up, newsstands were a wasteland and the future was backlit, animated and user-generated.

Conversely, I’ve seen that print is enjoying a renaissance, even in the age of Kindles and blogs. Print is dying because in the past it was held hostage by advertising. The magazines I read now are expensive yes, but they’re giving me what I want to read and aren’t having to kowtow to some large faceless conglomerate. There are less new periodicals launching, but the ones that do are really bringing something compelling to the table instead of trying to make it work under a broken system.

Print will die, yes. Absolutely, 100% yes. I don’t have any delusions about that. But I can’t really change the age I was born in, and like generations before us that were propelled forward with the wings of progress, we can’t help but possess a tinge of nostalgia for the future…some yearning for the past.

Possible Skillshare courses I'll be teaching

Thu, 24 May 2012 13:44:00 -0700

+ How to disappear for weeks and worry your mother sick
+ Asian Loneliness
+ #bloglife
+ Moving in with your auntie and uncle in Bel Air
+ Quack Medicine: The Pros and Cons
+ Easy mnemonics for remembering all the various grudges you hold
+ How to get priced out of a neighborhood you thought you were gentrifying
+ How I learned to stop worrying and just hook up with as many Asian girls as I could
+ Meth: What you need to know
+ Double standards for fun and profit
+ How can you hate it if you haven’t ever tried it? It’s easy. Here’s how.
+ What Mr. Kiasu can teach you about FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)
+ What getting shingles at the age of 26 taught me about stress and mortality

Flaneurita

Thu, 24 May 2012 12:09:22 -0700

It rained for a short time while I was running, but it was a cooling rain that felt good. A thick cloud blew in from the Pacific right over me, and a gentle rain fell for a while. My legs became two soggy matchsticks, clumsily pounding the pavement of the Embarcadero.

The running made me realize how weak I was, how limited my abilities were. My lungs screamed. My head spun. I convince myself to put up with the pain because running offered the only time for me to be alone and without thought. I ran in a vacuum. It’s not a complete void of course, a stray idea or memory will sometimes creep in.

I stop when I’ve reached Pier 39. I’m winded and a familiar pain starts to emerge from my left knee. Now I remember why I stopped running in the first place. The kneecap hurts in a peculiar way, a little different from an everyday ache. These are the only knees I’ll ever have, and I hadn’t taken care of them. A single sailboat skimmed lazily by in the distance. I stare at an American flag flapping wildly, seemingly mocking my current state. I shift my weight to my other leg. Soon, I decide to sit down on a bench, away from the sea lions and the flocks of tourists who come to admire them.

As soon as I sit down, the levees break and thoughts come rushing back in my head. I think about a date several months ago, where we sat at the water’s edge a few piers down from where I was today, watching a massive 450 ton crane dredge mud from the ocean over onto a gridded container. We never figured out what it was straining and sifting for; the grids being spaced too far apart for anything we could think of. I can’t say for certain if the crane itself knew what its purpose was. What guided it? Had it assured itself it’d recognize what it was seeking all along if only it believed?

That day the stevedore became an astronomer and the ocean’s depth: his universe. Searching his small patch of sky, day after day, beyond sick pay and children’s birthdays for yet-to-be-named stars. I threw my arm over her shoulders and together we watched him diligently carry out his sisyphean tasks. I’d see her only once more after that day.

An Attempt at Exhausting a place in Chinatown

Thu, 24 May 2012 09:11:55 -0700

A feeble man peddles bits of jade from a worn wooden box. Stockton Tunnel has been scrubbed clean, all but one of my stickers have been removed. A fuji apple rolls across my path and into the street. A man, presumably American, wears a bomber jacket with a patch that claims “I fought in the Pacific”. I cross paths with a beautiful desi girl. She soon becomes a face in the crowd. Children cling to their mothers. I pass a hair salon. Two women in their fifties have their heads stuck in perm machines. I pass by a herbal shop plastered with faded advertisements for ginseng and tiger penis. A brief lull in traffic allows me to advance almost a full block down Stockton before a darting shoal of young Cantonese girls cut me off. A car honks, then a truck blares. I pass by a butcher shop, a small pig hangs upside down: hooks set deep into its hindquarters. Next door a shop sells trinkets. Looking up, a couple of white shirts hang on a line, next to a small yellow dress. I smile.

Ad copy for urns

Wed, 23 May 2012 13:07:43 -0700

+ Let’s face it - you’re too cheap for a coffin.
+ Death got you down? We think you’ve urned yourself a treat.
+ Express yourself! Be Crema-tive!
+ I was saying boooo urns.

First Impressions

Wed, 23 May 2012 09:22:00 -0700

I’m always very interested in my first impressions of a person after I’ve been away for a while, because in a way they’re the strongest and most revealing ones, before it all becomes familiar and habitual. Sometimes the slightest characters figure the most prominently in your life. Friends, lovers, friends that become lovers.

They just show up one day.

Christina's World

Tue, 22 May 2012 14:19:20 -0700

Everyone is familiar with Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World” painting, yes? The work became an American icon like Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,” or Emmanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware.” Wyeth’s painting is what popped into my head just now after an encounter that happened this weekend. I was meeting someone in Berkeley and was halfway up the BART escalator when I noticed her, gingerly tapping her cane as blurs of yellow and blue whizzed by. A blind woman (Asian, not that it mattered) was fending for herself, trying to navigate to the turnstiles as hoards of football fanatics swarmed from every direction. Oregon state was visiting. Immediately I turned around and rushed against the crowd to get to her. Maybe she reminded me of my grandmother. She was someone’s grandmother.

When I got to her, she was still shuffling her feet, inching her way towards the gate. I asked her first in English and then in Chinese if she wanted my help. She stopped moving and raised her head a bit to listen. A second later, she waved me off. I insisted I help guide her but she waved me off a second time. I suddenly felt embarrassed. How presumptuous of me. I turned back around and went on my way. I didn’t look back to see if she made it without incident. I didn’t need to.

Mr. Wyeth had seen Christina Olson, crippled from the waist down, dragging herself across a Maine field, “like a crab on a New England shore,” he recalled. To him she was a model of dignity who refused to use a wheelchair and preferred to live in squalor rather than be beholden to anyone.

I roamed. When I liked the look of a place, I stopped.

Tue, 22 May 2012 09:18:42 -0700

I roamed. When I liked the look of a place, I stopped.

レイナ

Tue, 22 May 2012 01:10:21 -0700

The minute I stepped off the bullet train and into Shibuya, we were no longer just friends. We ran down the streets at night, drank wine in the park, took in jazz music from cramped cafes, ate whole meals from vending machines. The city was alive all around us; I had never been so happy. This magical week turned into months of distance. Sometimes you fall in love with a city instead of the person in it.

Sam

Mon, 21 May 2012 17:32:12 -0700

I find her beauty hard to quantify when put on the spot to define it, but I know it when I see it. It feels like the safety and warmth you get knowing your best friend is just in the other room. It’s a broad smile and a soft kiss.

The details come into sharper relief when I’m actually standing in front of her, but some things you don’t forget. Like the way the corners of her eyes crinkle into a feint birthmark, and how her dimples figure prominently when she smiles.

Golden Hour

Mon, 21 May 2012 11:31:34 -0700

I like these long days, when the sun is still out and throwing a long and yet longer shadow. For a moment, everything is motionless except for particles of dust whirling on the back of invisible eddies of air in a shaft of late evening sunlight.

On Michelle Wie

Mon, 21 May 2012 09:38:31 -0700

“I’m going to play on the mens tour and win the masters after i sweep all the womens tourneys”

Reality:
DNQ // DNQ // 18th place // 12th place // 6th place // DNQ // DNQ // DNQ

“BUT I CAN DRIVE IT 300 YDS!”

Yeah so can that old fat bitch who looks like John Daly in drag but she aint going to the mens tour either.

San Francisco Sticker Shock

Mon, 21 May 2012 08:51:10 -0700

Me: Sir, I would like to order your finest burrito.
Taqueria: Ok, nueve dólares.
Me: Ok. How about your second finest burrito.