I spent the late afternoon and evening tonight hanging out with my colleague who is temporarily in the U.S. until August. He’s based in our Amsterdam office, but is relocating to the Cologne office due to an office restructuring. He’s actually originally from Germany, anyway, and lucky him, he got a Green Card through the Green Card lottery, which is why he’s in the States for a few months. He’s ethnically Armenian, but his family roots are in Turkey, but he was born and raised in Germany. I am ethnically Chinese and Vietnamese, born and raised in the U.S. He grew up thinking racism was the norm while in Germany, and I grew up in a bubble in San Francisco, never truly experiencing racism until I moved to the East Coast. When you give two people of different ethnicities and nationalities about five hours together, a lot ends up being discussed around culture and each culture’s idiocies.

“Why do people call Asians yellow?” he asked me. “I don’t get it. At the lightest they are whitish skinned, or they look like you… what are you, like tannish?”

“I have no idea what color I am,” I said. “You might as well call me beige.”

“In the American education system, do you guys get taught that Hitler was actually Austrian and not German?” he asked.

I told him that I remember learning he was Austrian, but it is likely it gets lost in the shuffle of how awful of a person Hitler was.

“I’ve been asked all kinds of questions that I think are dumb since I’ve come here… one person asked me what the capital of Germany was. Another asked me what the official language of the Netherlands is.”

And here’s the real thing that stung: “I realize that I’m really lucky to have a green card… and that so many people want it. But the major thing holding me back from wanting to live here is… I just don’t understand how any rich country like the U.S. doesn’t have universal health care. That should be illegal. What kind of developed country allows people to go bankrupt because they get cancer or some other life-threatening illness? Or why should my university education put me $200K in debt? That makes zero sense to me.”

It makes zero sense to me, too.

I’m pretty sure that when people first meet me now and have any real interaction with me, they will find out fairly quickly that my two major loves are 1) food and 2) travel. For me, food is part of the excitement of travel because when you go to new places, there will inevitably be food that you can have more readily than in your home.

So it warmed my heart this week when our friends who lived in Switzerland for six months last year told us that they were having a raclette grill shipped to their apartment, and they wanted to christian it with us over brunch. They figured that of all their friends, we’d be able to appreciate it best given our love of food and travel, and the fact that we’ve been to Switzerland before and have enjoyed raclette.

I love sticky cheeses. I love Switzerland. And I love friends who love a variety of food. It was a delicious meal.

Tonight, I went to a happy hour hosted by my company to bid farewell to one of our colleagues, who has left the company to travel to Bali for a month, and then will be joining her boyfriend in his small marketing company. It’s always sad to see colleagues leave who you like, and though I didn’t have much time to get to know her, she’ll be missed a lot. She was one of only five women in our office of about 27, and she’s also very outspoken about human and women’s rights.

Since she has left, the company needs a new ambassador to lead volunteer efforts for our Impact Weeks throughout the year, so our philanthropic leader reached out to me to ask if I’d be willing to fill her spot. I accepted and figured this would be a good way to get to know more people in our small office, and also establish myself more as a leader in general. It’s a great thing to be part of an organization that actively encourages volunteerism, even if it’s during regular work hours. It’s not just about us; it’s about the world and everyone else who has less than us.

After months enduring the new homeowner’s life, from picking what shade of grey-eggshell to paint the house to what type of wood to redo the floors in, my couple friend in Long Island City has finally finished and deemed the apartment worthy of a visit, and how flattering to find out that Chris and I are the first friends (after their visiting friend from California) to see the apartment. For the last four months, they’ve spent almost every weekend working on shopping and picking out furniture, building furniture, overseeing construction, and figuring out how to lay out their apartment, and it’s basically been like a full-time job on top of having an actual full-time job. The idea of being a homeowner just based on what they shared with us today makes my head spin. These are all the little benefits of renting and not owning; someone else has to deal with these issues and not me.

And on my end, because I knew I would see them soon, I wanted to get them a housewarming gift, but I had no idea what their home style was and was worried if I picked out something decorative that would’t go with their current look. I toiled over multiple ideas and finally settled on a set of Portuguese ceramic bowls, with the look of cracked glass inside them. These are the kinds of things I’d like, and they look very sophisticated. Plus, they’re dishwasher safe and are a faded blue color, so they’d go with lots of things. Who doesn’t need bowls to eat out of? I got a gift receipt just in case, but I told them that in the event they didn’t like them, I’d just take them for myself and get them another gift. 🙂 But they ended up really liking them and keeping them.

“These make our kitchen seem more adult like!” My friend exclaimed.

During a meeting with my manager today, we were discussing some potential road blocks I may encounter since my ramp period has ended. A number of customers probably won’t want to talk to me and will ignore my emails, so he told me not to take it personally and to try my best.

“One of the reasons we hired you (other than being smart) is that you have a very friendly, positive demeanor,” he said smiling (or smirking?). “You’re the kind of person who customers want to meet and want to talk to, so make sure you show your winning smile and make them want to engage with you!”

Considering I was raised by two glass-half-empty parents, it’s actually a bit comical that I come across this way to new people I meet, especially at prospective jobs. Or, maybe I just have everyone fooled?

If there’s one thing I respect above anything else in an Asian household, it’s that shoes always, always go off as soon as you enter the house. Nothing is dirtier than trampling all over someone’s house with your outside shoes on. It’s absolutely disgusting. Without even knowing it, we all step on the filthiest things: sidewalks that have had dog poop and urine covered in them and simply wiped off; endless spit, insects, cigarette buds and ashes, gasoline and dirt from the streets. Many studies on dirt, grime, and germs over the last couple years have shown that the bottoms of our shoes have even had traces of e. coli. No one wants e. coli, even the non-Asians. Even Martha Stewart advocated for a shoes-off household, and we all know how much I love and respect Martha Stewart. Crafting for a living would be my dream.

This apartment that we’re moving into is supposed to be fully cleaned before we move in; even the windows are getting a washing, both on the inside and out. I pressed the leasing agent about how clean it would be. All I could think about were all the disgusting feet that have walked through this apartment for viewings and how dirty the bottoms of their shoes were. I want all the counters sanitized and the floors swept and mopped… because if I move in and feel any bit of grime under my feet, I will probably abandon all the packed boxes and luggage and just start mopping. Really.

Today at a dim sum palace in Brooklyn Chinatown, it was like the typical Chinese restaurant situation where you see disparate groups of people all seated at the same round table with a Lazy Susan: an Asian woman with her brown husband, a Chinese couple with their four-year-old who won’t sit still unless he has his iPad in front of him with a handful of Pepperidge Farm goldfish, and two older Asian female friends with a random eight-year-old girl who refuses to eat or speak. Except in this case, we were all technically the same party. My aunt always insists on inviting random Jehovah’s Witness Chinese friends to our family meals. It’s like her thing. She always treats them, and she probably never gets treated back, and she really doesn’t care; her generosity seriously knows no bounds. My cousin and his wife didn’t acknowledge or even say hi to the random Chinese friend my aunt met in China who joined us for lunch. The eight-year-old girl stared into space and didn’t touch any of the food that her mom’s friend, who took her to this restaurant, put on her dish, and Chris and I happily ordered away and got all our favorite dim sum dishes, and then some.

That’s a day in the life of the extended Wong family meal. Fun, fun, fun.