Category Archives: Hope

World Suicide Prevention Day

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Today is World Suicide Prevention Day. The international theme of World Suicide Prevention Day (WSPD) on 10 September 2025 is ‘Changing the Narrative on Suicide.’ Suicide is a serious global public health issue, with over 700,000 lives lost each year. Its impact extends far beyond the individual, deeply affecting families, communities, and societies at large.This year’s theme calls on people, communities, organizations, and government to foster open, honest conversations about suicide. By initiating these vital conversations, we can break down barriers, raise awareness, and create better cultures of understanding and support.

This is the 12th year that I’ll be participating in the AFSP Out of the Darkness Walk in New York City and fundraising to help stop suicide. It’s also been a painful year for donations. The donations have been slower to come in. When you’ve been doing the same fundraiser tirelessly year after year for over a decade, people get fatigued by hearing your story. They are naturally less enthusiastic to support you. Their time is limited, and with inflation and tariffs, their dollars don’t go as far as they once did. Hustling this fundraiser, for those reasons, is always awkward. But I keep doing this because I don’t know how else to keep Ed’s memory alive. As each year passes, it’s like his memory becomes more and more distant to me. The other night when I was thinking about him, I realized I had to think for much longer just to remember the sound of his voice. And that made me realize he hasn’t visited me in my dreams in ages for me to hear him speak. I wonder when he will come pay me a visit again. It’s been far too long.

These are the days I think of him even more: his birthday, his date of death, Thanksgiving and Christmas (because he always loved those holidays), and now World Suicide Prevention Day. I hope all this fundraising is doing some good, if even just a little. Sometimes, it’s hard to see what I am really trying to achieve by doing all this. But alas, I keep going.

Phone calls from PoPo and GongGong

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Since we got back from San Francisco, my mom has been calling occasionally to see how Kaia is adjusting to preschool and being back in New York. Given that Kaia is turning four in just a few months, she’s definitely far more aware of her surroundings and what’s being said around her now than she was one year ago. When people call, she always asks who it is. And now, she’s been requesting that we call PoPo and GongGong. She wants to “see” them via the video chat, but she doesn’t quite understand (or accept) that they refuse to do video calls with us, and that with them, it will always be voice-only.

The other day, my mom called, and Kaia asked if it was PoPo (she could probably recognize her voice through my phone) and asked if she could talk to her. She started waving and saying hi to PoPo. When PoPo asked her if she enjoyed San Francisco, Kaia responded, “Yes.” When PoPo said to Kaia, “Kaia, I love you!” Kaia even responded with, “I love you, too.” Even though I obviously have a complicated relationship with my parents, this still made me feel really happy inside to hear them communicating back and forth like this over the phone. I smiled at Kaia talking to her PoPo and then started laughing when Kaia replied “No!” when PoPo asked if she could come to New York and visit her.

Right after we got off with my mom, out of nowhere, my dad called. My dad hasn’t called me in three years since that difficult email exchange we had in August 2022, when he lashed out at me over something completely innocuous and lost his temper in a big way. He asked if Kaia was there, and then he actually asked to talk to her! I put my dad on speaker phone, and he asked Kaia how school was, if she was going home, and then called her a “good girl.” Kaia kept yelling excitedly, “GongGong! GongGong!” Then, he turned back to me and said it was time to go, and to take care. Then, we said bye and hung up.

I don’t think I will ever have an uncomplicated, 100 percent peaceful relationship with my parents where we fully understand or even accept each other. But after all that’s happened in our life together, I know deep in my soul that they tried the best that they could… even if their best was not always great with Ed or me. I know they love me and want what’s best for me. At the end of the day, I have an infinitely better and more privileged life than they could have ever even imagined for themselves. And a lot of it is because of them and what they’ve given me. And well, even if our relationship continues to be complicated, annoying, and absolutely infuriating, I do want them to have a relationship with Kaia, their only grandchild, and I want Kaia to know them and love them. So, these brief little phone exchanges have had a weird way of almost feeling like bits of healing for me.

I hope Ed is able to see all of this and smile down at us. I only wish he could also interact with Kaia directly in the flesh now.

First day of Pre-K was what I expected: lots of “big feelings”

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Thursday was Kaia’s first official day of Pre-K, aka 4K, aka preschool. She’s attending the same school as she did 3K, so same commute down to Chinatown, same building, same set of faces. But this time, she’s in a different classroom with different teachers and maybe a few different students. The enrollment is pretty low right now: we were told there are only six kids in her class, three returning (so she has two familiar faces with her right now). The other three kids are TBD. On the first day of school, it was just the three kids from last year’s 3K class, so a tiny group.

I picked her up at around 5 as I always do. Kaia was pretty quiet. She walked and willingy held my hand, but as per usual, she didn’t really want to talk much. She demanded treats (she got two mandarins). And on the way home, I had this prediction in my head that she’d probably have a difficult evening. And I was exactly right.

Dinner was painful. She whined and whinged through the entire meal. She expressed she didn’t understand why some kids were no longer in her class or school anymore (some had left for other, closer schools; others were moving up to kindergarten at elementary schools). She didn’t know why she wasn’t in her same classroom with the same teachers as last year (different class, higher level up, so different teachers). We tried to explain to her, but to no avail. She cried and was really upset. Her shower wasn’t any better; she cried almost the whole way through it. Drying her off, applying lotion, and blow drying her hair felt like an Olympic feat. I was mentally exhausted by the end of it. Before it was time for Chris to read to her and put her to bed, I just held her for a little bit. My poor, sweet baby: she’s just so confused about all these things all at the same time.

I figured it would take time to adjust to all the changes. This is a lot to handle for her age — so many changes all at once, and so many big feelings for such little people. But that’s what getting older is all about: handling lots of change all the time and figuring out how to manage your emotions all at the same time. People my age and older are still trying to manage all that without losing their crap.

Scallion bun (cong you bao) in San Francisco is better than in New York

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Growing up, there are certain Cantonese bakery staples that would be on rotation at home. The most common ones were cha siu bao (Cantonese BBQ pork buns, both the baked and the steamed ones), nai huang bao (egg custard bao), lian rong bao (lotus seed bao) (my grandma’s favorite), occasionally ji wei bao (cocktail / coconut bun), and cong you bao (scallion bun). One of my dad’s absolute favorites was always the twisted scallion bao. There would be an ample sprinkling inside and out of chopped scallions/green onions, plus the bun would be rubbed generously with a lightly seasoned scallion oil. When made correctly, the bao itself was soft, pillowy, and nearly melt in your mouth tender and good. The best ones were like eating air; you had no idea how much you had inhaled until the whole damn twisted bun was gone.

I didn’t realize how good I had it getting Chinese bakery items through my grandma and parents growing up (plus the times when relatives would generously bring over the almost expected pink cardboard boxes of Chinese bakery items) until I moved out on my own – it was all trial and error by my own buying and tasting. When I was going to school in the Boston area, I had to figure out which bakeries were good on my own. The same was the case when I moved to New York. I had to rely on strangers’ reviews on Yelp and Google, plus the occasional word of mouth. Most were hit or miss. To this day, after 21 years of living on the East Coast, and 17 of them spent here in New York City, I can say with sadness that I still have not found a bakery that makes scallion buns as good as the ones I can find in San Francisco.

I was reminded of this when I visited two excellent bakeries in San Francisco this last week. We visited Cherry Blossom Bakery on Clement Street in the Inner Richmond, then Good Mong Kok Bakery, one of my family’s staple SF Chinatown bakeries. Cherry Blossom Bakery has had rave reviews and been on my list a while, but I finally popped in while going to the nearby Kiss of Matcha for my reliable and favorite matcha latte. I chose the scallion bao, which was $2, and whe we brought it home, I realized it was truly perfect. It was exactly as I described above: pillowy and deceptively light, with a rich scallion flavor throughout. It must have been made with an excellent tangzhong, or milk bread base paste. Then a couple days later, we visited Good Mong Kok, which my family has been going to as long as I can remember. They are known for lines out the door and very typical Cantonese (read: yelling/barking and quick) service. I picked up one cha siu bao for Kaia, and one scallion bao for us. The scallion bun was very long and only $2. And it was also super pillowy, almost flaky at the edges, and unbelievably fluffy.

While digging into Good Mong Kok Bakery’s perfect cong you bao, I lamented why I still haven’t found this perfection in New York City across any of the endless Chinese bakeries I’ve visited. Even my most favorite Manhattan Chinatown bakeries don’t come close to this taste or texture. Or worse, they like to add extraneous toppings like sliced hot dog (ugh), Chinese sausage (unnecessary), or other meats. When you have a truly delicious and perfect scallion bun, it needs nothing else other than its perfect dough, scallion oil, and scallions.

Who knows – maybe next year when I come to San Francisco, I may just be desperate enough to buy a bunch in bulk and freeze them to bring back to New York with me…

What changes in ten, twenty-plus years

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I feel like every time I come home to San Francisco, I notice yet another thing that has changed. I hadn’t passed 6th and Geary Blvd in ages, and I was shocked while walking along Geary yesterday to see that the entire area that used to be the Ashley & McMullen family owned funeral home was not only demolished, but completely replaced by a multi-story condominium building. There’s no way this happened in just the last year, and I guess I hadn’t passed this part of Geary to notice it. I don’t know why that felt so strange to me, though; condos replace older buildings all the time everywhere, especially places like San Francisco that have a housing shortage. Both my grandma and my uncle had their funerals at this funeral home, in 1995 and then in 2000.

The Alexandria theater at 18th and Geary is still abandoned and looking worn down, a pigeon-poop filled home that is blocked off to humans by aggressive gating. Gaspare’s, the neighborhood Italian American restaurant in the Richmond, still seems to be going strong; we ended up getting takeout pizza and clams with linguine from there on Friday night for family dinner at home. B. Patisserie, a popular (and at that time, very innovative) bakery run by a Chinese American female pastry chef that opened in 2012, is not only humming along in the same location on California at Divisadero, but they have even opened a second location in the heart of downtown now. We went there yesterday and enjoyed some pastries and coffee before walking to Japantown. While I was there, I thought about the week and a half I spent at home in November 2014 because of my dad’s scheduled bypass surgery. His hospital was walking distance from the bakery cafe, so I remember meeting my friend there for lunch one day, and also going there on my own a separate time to decompress a little.

On Friday, I took Kaia to the South Park playground to play while I caught up with an old friend there who drove out to meet us. She was meeting Kaia and also seeing me as a mother for the very first time. It was funny to be in that area after so long, as the last time I remember being in South Park, it was summer 2003, when I had a full-time summer writing internship at WireTap Magazine, a now defunct youth magazine that was owned by the Independent Media Institute (which also used to own Mother Jones). Over twenty years ago, I was an aspiring writer in high school, and today, I am living across the country and am a mother. The play structure had completely changed in the children’s play area, yet the park and surrounding buildings all felt the same. Even some of the fancy cafes that were there twenty years ago still remain today, like Caffe Centro.

People always say things like, “If these walls could talk….” The truth is that there are memories that are conjured every time you walk through old hallways, streets, and neighborhoods that you had frequented, especially when you call the city or town your childhood home. The memories are always a mix of happy, sad, infuriating, and even indifferent, but they are ultimately what colored our lives at a given point in time. Because Kaia is with me, I can see the city through her eyes now. On this trip alone, I’ve lost count of the number of neighborhoods we’ve taken her to and playgrounds/play areas where we’ve played: the Richmond, the Bay Area Discovery Museum in Sausalito, Chinatown, North Beach, South Beach, downtown/the Ferry Building area, the Tenderloin, Noe Valley, the Fillmore. I love watching her run around and play on these local playgrounds. Of course, they are not the same as the playgrounds and structures I played on as a kid, as all of them have been redone regardless of the neighborhood. But when I asked her if she likes San Francisco and being here, she vigorously nodded, “yes.” And that made me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

Unexpected tears when watching the field trip bus unload the children

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On Thursday when the field trip bus was delayed coming back from the Melville farm, I stood at the other location of Kaia’s school several blocks down with the other parents and waited for the kids to arrive. As bus arrived and parked, all the parents got into a commotion in regards to where the bus would park and when they could actually collect their children. But our school had a pretty careful system: they had all the teachers get off first and arrange themselves by class. Then, they slowly asked each child to get off the bus; the child was then received by hand by another teacher to stand by their appropriate class group. When all the students were in their respective class groups and the teachers were all present, they then walked them, class by class, to the front of the school where us parents stood, and then each lead teacher or admin would release kids by class one by one.

As I saw all the kids get off the bus, I suddenly felt like my heart was heavy. My baby is 3.5 years old now, turning four this December, yet she’s already gone on three field trips with her summer camp! This means that she’s had three fun-filled experiences involving school bus transportation without me. And of course, she will have even more of this fun and learning-filled experiences without me in the future. I wasn’t able to be there to witness her excitements and little joys and new discoveries. Her teachers and classmates were, though. And as the groups approached the school building, I could see Kaia spotting me from the crowd and poking her head out as much as possible to give me a cheeky smile to let me know she knew her mummy was there waiting for her to take her home. There was just something about all this orderly off-boarding the bus and obediently walking in lines that made me feel sad, resulting in my eyes welling up with tears. My baby’s growing up so quickly, and there’s nothing I can do to pause or stop it even for a second. It was like just yesterday I pushed her out of my uterus and was struggling with breastfeeding her. Yet now, she’s already going on field trips in Long Island and acting like a real student in a real school.

I guess that’s another thing about motherhood: so many emotions all the time like a roller coaster, and like a really good roller coaster, you cannot always see all the twists, turns ahead of time. Sometimes it’s the littlest things that catch you off guard that make you cry your eyes out or feel like your baby is growing up just a little too fast for your liking.

12 years since you left us.

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Dear Ed,

I can’t believe it’s been 12 years since you left us today. I feel like I say that pretty much every year, but I actually do really mean it. Our cousin Russell actually messaged me this morning to acknowledge this. Russell has his own problems, but I know he loved you very much and still misses and thinks about you all the time. Each year that passes feels like a bigger gap between us. But it also makes me realize how quickly time flies the older I get (I can definitely say I have more white hairs right now than I did a year ago today). Sometimes, the day of your death is crystal clear in my head, while other days, it’s fuzzy and as though it was made up and never actually happened. I still remember how numb I felt when I found out you were missing. Even though I was walking around and doing things, it felt like my eyesight had become cloudy, like I wasn’t really walking but instead was floating just above the ground. My entire body felt weightless and extremely heavy at the same time. Nothing felt real. And then, just like that… you were confirmed gone, dead, passed away — a corpse in a refrigerator at the Marin County Morgue. Sometimes, it still doesn’t even feel real now that you’re gone.

I always wish I could have told you more, shared more about myself and my thoughts with you. I wish I could have been there for you more. I wish I could have really listened to more of what you had to say. But it was hard. I wasn’t physically always there. And even when I was, it was hard to talk to you. You had a large grey cloud looming above you all the time. It made our conversations non-continuous, choppy, never able to get past a certain point. We could never peel the outer layers of the onion away to get to the core of anything. You had a mental block that I couldn’t quite see or understand. I’m sorry I never told you all I wanted to say. And I’m sorry I never let you tell me all you wanted to say.

It’s funny, though. Now that you’re gone, out of nowhere, I think about the most random things to share with you that I think you’d find interest or amusement in. None of these things are particularly meaningful or deep or interesting or things I’d expect anyone to remember beyond the moment, but they’re more “in the moment” things that I think you’d appreciate. One of the latest things that happened that I thought would make you smile was when I wore a top with chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry ice cream cones on it. Kaia always gets excited when she sees food she likes in print or on clothing. So she pointed out that the shirt was new (to her) and that it had ice cream. I asked her to tell me what the flavors were, and she said from left to right, they were chocolate (brown), cherimoya (white), and strawberry (pink). And I just giggled because I thought it was so adorable… as we just came back from South America, where we ate a lot of cherimoya, so now, at least temporarily, Kaia associates “white” with “cherimoya” instead of the expected vanilla flavor.

My friends share about their kids and their siblings spending time with them. One of my friends lives a block away from her dad, who is caring for his granddaughter during the work week (so my friend’s niece). She goes over there frequently to spend time with her niece. And even though it has nothing to do with me or you or Kaia, a part of me feels envious. I wish that you could spend quality time and have sweet moments with Kaia. But that is never going to happen. A lot of amazing things were robbed from you, Ed. And for that, a large part of me will always be resentful on your behalf.

It’s July 2025 now, so a year and a half since the safety net was installed at the Golden Gate Bridge. We’re planning to go back to San Francisco next month. Maybe this visit, I may actually feel ready to go see it. I want to see this barrier that is saving lives… just not yours.

We haven’t forgotten you, Ed. We’ll never forget. Twelve years later, and I still haven’t forgotten you. I also haven’t stopped missing you. I love you. You may never read this, but I love you; I really do. And in her heart, I know Kaia loves you, too, and wishes she could have a real relationship in flesh and blood with you, too.

Rest in love, my sweet big brother.

Back from a 15-day vacation and home-cooked food is all I want

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Our Northern hemisphere summer trip is always our longest trip away without any home base. This year, we were away for about 15 days, which according to Chris, felt like a longer trip than last year given that we had an overnight flight form New York to Santiago in June 2024. It felt like a good amount of time to be away to feel like we really got to reset and be offline. But at the end of this trip, while I am always a little sad the trip is ending, I’m actually happy to come back home, get back into my daily routine of exercise, work, and cooking. The part I tend to miss the most when I am away from home for a long while is cooking. A friend of mine thought I was crazy when I shared this, but I actually do mean it: cooking is one of my passions, so when I haven’t made anything in a while, my mind and hands tend to feel a little idle. Maybe at some point in the future, we could do an AirBnB where I could have access to a proper kitchen, cooking equipment, and be able to buy local ingredients to cook. But until then, this trip will always mean that we’ll be eating out the whole time, even if “eating out” can simply mean going downstairs to our hotel breakfast.

For dinner today, I made sure to soak lentils and rice the night before so that we’d have dal and rice as our base. I thawed some frozen chicken and frozen tomato onion masala. I trimmed the chicken and cut it into smaller pieces for a Malaysian style curry using the Sambal Lady’s Burlap & Barrel curry spice blend packet. The tomato onion masala got used in the dal I made in the Instant Pot. I cooked some jasmine rice in the rice cooker, and then I made two salads: Chinese-style cucumber salad, plus an arugula salad with beets, carrots, tomatoes, sun dried tomatoes, and toasted pepitas, tossed with a French-style vinaigrette. I also made a side of stir-fried bell peppers for the Pookster.

It always feels good to come back home from a trip and have home-cooked food that is less fatty, oil, salty, or sugary. I’m not saying all the food we eat out is salty, fatty, or oily, but well, you can’t really know what’s in your food unless you make it yourself. That’s what “home sweet home” is all about.

Day trip to Quilotoa crater lagoon, one of my favorites

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There are dozens of beautiful mountains, volcanoes, forests, farms, villages, and other natural wonders to explore in Ecuador. I knew we had to get out of the city and explore something, but I wasn’t sure where to start when researching. So I did a few searches for single day trips from Quito, and one of the first results was the Quilotoa crater lagoon/lake. Laguna Quilotoa is a collapsed volcano in the western Ecuadorian Andes, located about 178km southwest of Quito, in the Cotopaxi province; it sits at high altitude – 3,900 meters/12,800 feet above sea level. It takes about three hours by car to get there from Quito. The crater lagoon formed as a result of the Quilotoa Volcano erupting back in 1280 in what is supposed to be one of the most explosive eruptions of the past thousand years. This eruption caused the collapse of the volcanic dome to form the wide crater we can now see today. While Quilotoa Volcano has remained dormant since, occasionally, you can see volcanic activity via the electric blue-green waters bubbling at the edges of the lagoon. Even after all the gorgeous places in the world we’ve been privileged to visit, I must say that Quilotoa is likely one of the most spectacular places we’ve seen.

Volcanic minerals in the crater give the lake water its stunning emerald green, almost electric blue tint. The water color definitely changes depending on the time of the day, the weather, and the amount of sunlight hitting its surface. When we first arrived in the morning when it was drizzling and grey skied, the surface of the lake was more of a deep bluish green color. When we decided to go on horseback to get back to the top (partly because we were tired from the altitude, but mostly because Kaia really hated the hiking and whined endlessly), as we rode up, the light rain completely cleared. The sky was really dark and cloudy with light shining through, which then led to the water turning into this bright, vibrant, almost electric turquoise color with bright green at the water’s edges. I also loved seeing the beautiful purple lupine flowers along our hike down. They were really beautiful against the bright blue waters of the lake (they almost asked to have their photos taken…). And if my memory serves me well, these looked very similar to the beautiful purple flowers we saw when hiking in the South Island of New Zealand about 12 years ago, so that also brings back happy memories of brilliant purple flowers against electric blue waters.

Our driver/guide Cristian took us to the lake, and he hiked with us down and hiked up with our horses as we rode back up. He was a real trooper with us. Despite Kaia’s constant whining and protests, he managed to get us through the steep, sandy, and uneven hike down. And finally when we got towards the end, he even carried her down for quite a while since he said he was worried that if Chris tried to carry her given he was just wearing regular sneakers, they could both fall and get hurt. He humored her and carried her to the point up where the horses were, and we spent the best $20 ever for two horses to take the three of us back to the top (I’m just going to say — these were the cheapest horseback riding sessions we’ll likely ever have in our entire lives). Kaia was definitely Ms. Manipulator with poor Cristian. She would whine and whinge until he picked her up and carried her… just so she didn’t have to hike up herself. When she realized she wouldn’t have to go up all the way and would get taken on a horse, she got a little excited and kept on saying “Nay, nay, nay!” over and over again. After getting on the horse with me, Kaia was so calm and steady that somehow, she managed to even fall asleep on the horse with her head up!

Looking out at the lake, it was strange to think that a place this gorgeous and literally breathtaking (I mean, we were at high altitude, and I could even feel myself getting a slight headache on the horseback ride back up) had so few tourists. When we hiked down, we passed maybe just a small handful of tourists. As we reached the lake, there were just a couple more, but that was really it. As we got back to the top and headed out for lunch, we did see a few additional vans parked with people coming out to hike down, but this seemed so tiny in comparison with other famous scenic spots in the world. I really loved the peace and quiet. I reveled in the fact that there were no crowds or hoards of people. It feels really gratifying to see places in the world that “everyone else” isn’t constantly going to, the beauties that exist out there that are less seen and less traveled to.

Being honest with myself, though, places like Quilotoa will only grow in popularity. Who knows – Quilotoa may become one of the next Macchu Picchu type sites in terms of popularity (and over crowding). It’s already seeing an increase in tourists coming from internationally. Our guide told us that about twenty years ago, the entire area around the entrance to Quilotoa was all traditional mud and clay domed houses. Now, they have been replaced with more modern structures going up, with local families opening restaurants and hostels that cater to tourists (including the restaurant where we ate lunch, which had a number of hostel rooms in the back of the building for visitors to rent for short or long-term stays).

When we come back to the U.S. and people ask us what we saw, this will likely be on the top of my list. They will unlikely know what I am referring to, but I DGAF because I am totally obsessed with this place and think more people should visit (I just hope they don’t spoil the beauty of it).

The power of the U.S. dollar

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Every time I travel abroad, I am reminded of a lot of my privileges as an American. Even when you think about disparities between rich and poor, when you think about how people struggle here in the U.S., how people live paycheck-to-paycheck, even the poorest people here still lead richer lives than the poorest people in more developing countries. I will never forget the first time I was in Vietnam in January 2008. There was the moment when my mom’s cousin’s wife in Qui Nhon, Vietnam, came into our 3-star hotel room there. They exchanged a few words. Because I don’t speak Vietnamese, I wasn’t sure what was spoken. When I saw the cousin’s wife undress, I got confused, and I asked my mom what she was doing. My mom looked at me quietly and said, “She asked if she could use our shower, and I said yes. She doesn’t know what it’s like to have a hot shower.” For myself until that point, I had no idea what it was like to not have access to a hot shower.

I recently saw a post in an alumnae career group I am in, where the person posting said she had been living abroad but wanted to move back to the U.S. She wanted to start her job search and was looking for advice. In her post, she wrote that it was “very important for me to earn in U.S. dollars.” And I thought about the shower incident in Vietnam. I thought about the poverty I had seen in Guatemala. I remembered chatting with our Guatemalan driver, who had lived abroad in England for eight years and had an English wife. In his Guatemalan/British accent-tinged English, he lamented how things like a cappuccino or latte at a cafe in Guatemala City seemed affordable or maybe slightly cheaper for Americans, but for local Guatemalans, it was quite the splurge, which I had noted to him. “Sure, it’s affordable when you earn $25 USD an hour,” he said. “But if you earn in Guatemalan Quetzales and only earn the equivalent of $15 USD a day, that $3 USD cappuccino is a lot of money to spend.”

Yes, it’s expensive living in New York City. Yeah, it kind of sucks that coffee drinks here now can cost $6-10+ each. But I am lucky and privileged to enjoy them occasionally. We lead extremely privileged lives to work in white-collar jobs in the U.S., earning our income in U.S. dollars. As our driver noted, “you have money” if you can afford to go on a trip to Guatemala and hire a private driver for a day or so (pretty sure he was referring to us, and not just the previous guests he had driven). Every day, even when I think this country is crumbling down and that democracy is going to shit, I still remember how thankful I am for my life’s privileges, for my health, and everything I have and have access to that makes life so enjoyable and relatively stress free.