Monthly Archives: May 2017

Breakfast plans

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My mom was really excited to see me almost every other day for the two-week period I was back in San Francisco for work. She’s so excited that she’s already counting down the days until she comes to visit us in New York in August. I am not quite counting down the days the way she is.

Mom: You always cook all this good food in New York. Are you going to cook all that food for me when I come?

Me: Umm, I can make you breakfast foods, but we’ll probably be eating out for dinner in the evenings after work. I won’t see you during the day because I’ll be at the office.

Mom: Eating out all the time is so unhealthy. You should mix it up when I come and cook for me! What will you make me?

Me: Well, I can make you granola or oatmeal or eggs. I guess we can eat lunch at home on the weekends, and I can cook.

Mom: Don’t worry about it! You work so hard! I don’t really want you to cook for us. I was just testing you!

Why is everything always a test for her with everyone? Does she constantly have to “test” everyone in her life? Isn’t this a sign that she’s miserable and looking for reasons to be angry at me?

 

Paratha

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I have always believed in cooking food from scratch. It’s primarily because I just love cooking and baking in general, so the time invested in it doesn’t seem like a waste as it does to so many, but it also makes sense from a health and awareness standpoint. When you make your food, you know exactly what goes into it, and there are no surprises. There’s no hidden high fructose corn syrup, no monosodium glutamate, no disgusting artificial colorings and preservatives that have complicated and scary sounding names. You can control the amount of salt or sugar or oil or any ingredient you use.

But then I think of all the things I have absolutely zero desire to make, primarily because I’ve made them in cooking classes in the past and realized that they are hard AF to make (e.g. croissants, macarons), or because I know they are hard and laborious, and I simply have no desire to make them (Peking duck, parathas). And then, on my last trip to Jackson Heights to stock up on Middle Eastern and Indian ingredients, I found a VALUE PACK for 25 paratha in the freezer section, which I rarely look at unless I’m getting frozen vegetables as backup. 25 PARATHA FOR SEVEN DOLLARS? And all made of natural ingredients with zero preservatives? And all I have to do is heat them up in an empty skillet? Yesssssssssss.

These are the joys of the modern (and increasingly obese and unhealthy) world, of the lazy person who likes food and doesn’t want to cook it. I can kind of relate now.

Cultural taboos

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After a long time with this book on my reading list, I finally finished reading Fuchsia Dunlop’s memoir Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China. I think to this date, it’s probably one of the best and most interesting memoirs I’ve read primarily because a) it’s so authentic in discussing the cultural clashes of Asian food in general vs. Western foods, b) her perspective on being a foreigner in China and being an “outsider” actually mirrors how I sometimes feel when trying to understand Chinese culture, though I am three-quarters ethnically Chinese, and c) she very vividly illustrates how she transformed from a (relatively speaking) closed-minded Westerner who wasn’t open to eating a lot of “exotic” ingredients to someone who embraced eating scorpion to dog to caterpillars, and even began thinking like a native Chinese person. And none of it felt disingenuous at all. In fact, she became a bit like Chris is when it comes to embracing both her native culture (she’s originally from England) and her pseudo adopted culture of Chinese: she’s fiercely loyal to both her mother country and her adopted country and will relentlessly defend it when the situation or conversation arises that tries to jab at either one. That’s the way Chris is when someone either criticizes the U.S. or Australia. That’s my baby.

Living in China, formally being trained as a chef in Sichuan, and immersing herself into Chinese culture made her question why Westerners think it’s okay or “civilized” to eat certain animals such as chickens or cow, but not okay and even barbarian-like to eat animals like dog, cat, or insects. It’s a valid question to ask because when people speak down at the idea of eating insects or cat or scorpion, what they are actually and indirectly saying is that they think people who do choose to eat those things are lesser than they are or lower on a totem pole in terms of status. The other assumption this brings up is that we actually have a choice in what we have to eat, and so many people in the world die of starvation every day. Why do we need to be so judgmental of cultures different than our own? Instead, shouldn’t we be questioning why we have such strong reactions to these ideas? Part of understanding other cultures is letting go of our own learned cultural taboos and making ourselves vulnerable. Fuchsia Dunlop has clearly done that to a very applaudable level. I still am in shock that not only did she learn to speak Mandarin fluently, but even picked up Sichuan dialect (she had to, as people in cooking school would try to tease and make fun of her in that dialect), and learned to understand Hunanese dialect, among others, during her travels throughout the country.

While reading this book, I recalled my former white male colleague who recently flew to Beijing from New York City for just four full days to attend his best friend’s wedding. He left his wife and baby daughter at home in New Jersey. Being a token Chinese person in our office, I must have seemed like a good person to discuss China with, and he of course came to me and asked for travel advice (I was useless, though, since I still haven’t been to Beijing). And when he came back, he came to chat with me about his experience. He said it was far more crowded and more chaotic than he’d ever imagined. He said the wedding was massive with endless food, and he did a few touristy activities like the Great Wall. But he’d never recommend Beijing as a destination to visit to anyone. He said it was too crowded, too busy, too much sensory overload.

And that made me sad to hear. It further fulfilled the Western/white stereotype of ignoring China, this great and massive country, as a place that didn’t really need much regard from the Western world. He didn’t want to immerse himself and went in with a closed mindset. So of course, he wasn’t going to leave China with a total 180-change in perception. He’s the kind of person who Fuchsia Dunlop would get angry at and probably sit him down and tell him he didn’t like China because he didn’t properly give China a chance to be liked.

Transparency

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In getting ramped up for job training, I’ve been encouraged to look at different people’s calendars in the company and add myself to meetings I think would be beneficial, so everything from customer calls, internal product calls, engagement calls — you name it. I’ve been told to shadow as much as possible and refer to everyone’s calendars. One of our main company values is transparency. All our calendars are visible to all so that our colleagues can know what we’re doing and who we’re speaking with and what we’re working on. That all sounds like common sense, right?

Well, it isn’t really. Because where I came from, we had different people on sales and someone who was once on my own team who refused to make their calendars transparent. So if you looked at this guy’s calendar, instead of telling you what his meeting was and who he was speaking with, it would simply block out a time and say “busy.” If you’re working at an organization where people are supportive of one another and share information to help one another, why the hell would you make your entire calendar blocked from others to see? His response when we actually debated this? “I don’t want you to see when I’m at the doctor’s or getting my teeth cleaned!” That argument is so weak because you can just mark those specifically as “private.” Your work calendar is your work calendar, not your personal calendar. Your work calendar should be visible in a healthy organization. No one is asking you to make your private non-work life visible. At the “top” of that team I started on at my last company was someone who didn’t want to instill any values about transparency or trust in his team, so he stayed out of this conversation and said everyone could make their own decisions about this. It probably wasn’t apparent to him because he was dense and self-seeking, but something as seemingly trivial as this actually speaks volumes regarding the organization he is trying to lead and the culture he wants to instill. Until the last day, there was no real sense of “team” on that team. It was really sad.

My new company is by no means perfect, and every day I’m seeing things that could use improvement, but I never entered this place thinking it would be paradise. But to be frank, it actually does feel like a sort of paradise when you compare it to the last place where I spent 3.5 years. It still kills me when I think about it that I stayed there that long.

Hasan Minhaj on Galaxy Note 7

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During his test comedy show at a small, intimate venue last night, Hasan Minhaj talked about an experience on a plane where a guy who sat next to him was carrying a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 — you know, that one single phone that has been exploding and catching fire that has been banned from planes? Hasan immediately is alarmed and tells the guy that he cannot have that phone on the plane, that it’s dangerous and could explode. The guy gets really defensive and is really annoyed. He responds with questions like, just because other Galaxy Note 7s have exploded doesn’t mean his will. There are plenty of Galaxy Note 7s that have not exploded, so why are the few that have exploded giving the rest of these phones such a bad rap? You can’t just assume that my Galaxy Note 7 will be bad, too! Mine is fine!

Hasan Minhaj’s response? “Well now, my friend, you understand what it’s like to be a minority.”

Budding talent

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Tonight, I went to see a test comedy performance by Hasan Minhaj, who I love and have seen live before in his one-man show Homecoming King, and of course, have also seen in The Daily Show. Chris couldn’t make it as he had a work trip that conflicted, and my friend who was supposed to come with me bailed on me right before the show because he was too tired to stay late enough. So it was just me sitting on my own amongst strangers.

It was actually really nice to be there on my own because I ended up having a decent conversation with an Indian-American guy who had traveled from LA for work. He works for Adult Swim, a film company, and was here this week for work. As someone who works in film and writes, he’s a huge fan of Hasan Minhaj and was on a mailing list that alerted him to this show. He looks at people like Hasan Minhaj, Aziz Ansari, and Russell Peters as inspirations. As the son of very traditional Indian parents, with his dad working and moving their family all over the country with his career in IT, he’s very well aware of how Asians are stereotyped and hopes to follow in these writer/comedians’ footsteps.

I’m excited to see a more colorful representation of talent now and in the future since it clearly was not something I grew up with. This guy at just 24 gives me hope, just like Hasan Minhaj and Ronny Chieng do.

Modern day plumbing

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I’ve never lived in a place without working plumbing. Isn’t that supposed to be part of the guaranteed glory of living in America, that your home should have working plumbing? This is partly why I was slightly taken aback when I was reading Jeannette Walls’s memoir Glass Castle to find out that pretty much her entire childhood, she lived in homes without toilets across this country. She and her siblings lived in rural areas where they’d literally just drop their pants and pee in grass, or dig holes in fields and take a dump.

I thought about this when I came to our new office location today. It’s our first day in the new office space. The office space is beautiful and modern, and it’s clear that a lot of work was put into renovating the space and building it exactly as our company wanted it: lots of natural light in every section of the floor, huge windows, high ceilings, a beautiful and brand new open kitchen space complete with three refrigerators, a double sink, and a massive kitchen island. The conference rooms all have glass doors and walls, and every room is hooked up with the latest and greatest for video and phone conferencing. Our desks are all adjustable via a button for sitting, standing, or half-sitting on stools. The one thing that was lacking? Working toilets. The toilets would not flush. And the plumbers were delayed in getting to us.

What were the alternatives? 1) Take the freight elevator to the basement where a haunted-house-like bathroom exists. 2) Walk two blocks north along Fifth Avenue to the old office space, where our badges can still scan us in and we can still use those bathrooms. Yay!

This is definitely a New York City thing when everything seems perfect during a move except one, big glaring issue. Classic New York.

Coffee date

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Two weeks have flown by quickly in San Francisco. Between new hire bootcamp, new hire bootcamp homework, 1:1 meetings, team meetings, lunch meetings, and family/friend/colleague get-togethers after work, there’s been very little leisurely time for me to plop myself on my bed and decompress, to think about everything that I’m trying to learn and what all this is going to mean.

On Friday early afternoon, I set aside 45 minutes to catch up with one of my counterparts on my team. What was originally supposed to be a meet-and-greet and work discussion ended up being something I wasn’t quite expecting. Life outside of work had been quite excruciating for her in the last year, and she told me she was dealing with a lot of family baggage… mainly because her mother had suddenly passed away last year (about a month and a half before her wedding), and she was handling all the inheritances and legal aspects of death now. It was an emotional chat, and she was especially upset because Mother’s Day was coming up today, and it made her really miss her mom and the great friendship they had.

“I just feel angry,” she said. “I don’t even know what I’m angry at… maybe the world? I get so pissed when people actually try to say that life is fair. It isn’t. It isn’t at all.” She reflected on the devastation of her mom’s decline and death, how hard it was for her to get through her wedding day, though it was beautiful and memorable, knowing that her mom was supposed to be there. I felt myself aching as she described all of this. Her mom even helped her pick out her wedding dress and went to most of her fittings.

So this became a segway into a discussion about whether life is fair or it (it fuckin’ is not at all), what death actually means, what death means to us who are still living, and how we keep going despite losing those so close to us. It’s one of the rawest discussions I’ve had in 45 minutes with someone I literally just met in my whole life. At her request, we even talked about Ed, and I shared with her general details about him and his passing. And because I’m a crappy colleague, I made her cry even more sharing this.

My colleague apologized for prying, but I told her what I tell anyone who wants to know more about Ed and his life; I actually am very comfortable discussing it (well, I still get knots and choke up, but I end up spitting it all out in the end) and want to discuss it with whomever wants to listen and truly understand. My qualm is whether others actually want to know and understand. So I never get upset or feel taken aback when people ask. When I hesitate, it’s really because I don’t know if people truly want to know or are hoping I will just say my brother died in a freak car accident or a drug overdose or something that sounds more “normal” given his young age. And she said she felt the same and was angry so many times when people she thought would care or at least ask never asked, or never even asked her how she was feeling or doing. This resonated so much with me.

The second thing this makes me think about is my own mom. I was tearing up when she told me about how her mom passed, and how she literally just missed her only child’s wedding day by a month and a half. I don’t even know how I would have gone through my wedding if the same thing had happened to me. I could feel hurt in my own body. My mom, like every mom in every child’s life, drives me crazy to no end. She worries way too much about me and about everything that doesn’t even need worrying. I even tell my mom this all the time: sometimes I feel like she searches for new things to worry about to constantly be in a state of worrying about me. She obsesses over trivial things that I think shouldn’t have so much attention or care. She distrusts everyone and thinks they are out to get her and me. She also insists on feeding me until I could potentially gain 100 pounds and doesn’t understand when I tell her I’m too full to eat anymore (“but you barely ate anything!” even after I have already eaten a full plate of food…). But that’s my mom. She does it all out of love, even though sometimes her level of love and compassion make me want to rip all my hair out, shake her, and yell, “please STOP!!”

“Dads are important, and I love my dad, but my mom… that’s different,” my colleague said between tears. “My mom was like my everything, and I hate to say this, but yeah, I do love my mom more. Maybe all daughters do — who knows. And sometimes I don’t know what I’m supposed to do without her. I just love her so much.”

That’s like me and my mom. And for a second, the fear I had from when I was only four years old came over me again — the awareness that inevitably one day, my mom would no longer be on this earth with me anymore, just as my colleague’s mom had passed and left her. One day, she’ll no longer continue to try stuffing food down my throat. She won’t be here to pack fresh fruit and Chinese zongzi into my carry-on luggage. She won’t call me and ask whether I’ve had enough sleep or eaten dinner yet. One day, I will feel the loneliness that all of us feel when one has lost the human being who gave birth to and physically brought her into this world.

That thought is absolutely terrifying to me.

Local Edition

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On Tuesday night, I met with a friend for dinner, and then I joined her at Local Edition, a speakeasy-type bar afterwards, to hear some live jazz, and also see her and a group of her friends dance. The dance floor in the bar is quite small, but she told me that it attracts quite a large crowd most Tuesday nights, many of whom are in her dance class in Golden Gate Park. Their moves were so fun to watch depending on the songs being sung and played; it looked like a mix of both swing and jazz dance.

One of the women who joined our table to watch was really quiet, but we made some small talk that eventually became a lot more serious than I thought it would be. She was asking me a lot of curious questions about my marriage, for whatever reason fascinated that I’ve been married only a year. When she eventually revealed she was also married, but had two children, that was when the melancholy became clear all over her face: her marriage was at its end, and there was nothing either she or or husband could do to save it. Everything was great until they had kids; then they slowly became different people, started fighting more, and eventually stopped communicating about important things completely.

“Don’t ever stop communicating,” she said to me. “If there’s one thing you have to fight against, it’s the end of communication because that will literally be the end of everything, and there will be no going back.”

I also had an Uber driver give me advice the other day to not have children: “JUST DON’T DO IT! IT WILL RUIN YOUR MARRIAGE!”

Yep. Can’t wait to have kids now.

More mutes

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My mom’s best friend, who is an amazing gardener and cook, invited my mom and me to her house for dinner tonight. “Women only,” she told my mom. I have no idea why it was women only (well, except her husband, who is disabled and had to be there), but it was really the most awkward dinner party I’d ever walked into. We arrived at their house at around 6pm, and everyone else was already there — about eight other people. They were all sitting in chairs along the perimeter of the room, and no one was talking — no one. It was so quiet that I thought we were the first to arrive… until I realized I was walking into a room full of mutes.

These are all Jehovah’s Witnesses, and one of them is actually one of my best friend’s estranged cousins. Their family is divided because of how Jehovah’s Witnesses religion has infiltrated their family, so everyone is removed from each other. No one was talking. It was like everyone barely knew each other, or maybe they didn’t like each other. Either way, I have no idea what was wrong with them. They all had expressions of hesitation and borderline fear or intimidation on their faces. After about half an hour of extremely awkward small-talk, the room finally became more open and talkative when we started discussing Shake Shack, In N Out, and Five Guys burgers.

Clearly, food unites us all, even those of us who may belong to a cult. We even all left with freshly cut roses from her garden.