I was on the phone for over an hour with my work mentee today. She was lamenting the layoffs that have happened at our company, saying that she felt like she tried so hard to be nice and kind to everyone, but in the end, it didn’t matter because she was still disliked. She still got laid off. She mentioned to me this one person at work who is a manager on the team. She clearly got there because of politicking internally, constantly advocating for herself and talking herself up every chance she got, even when she wasn’t actually the one who achieved anything. People like that in our work world get ahead. The general theme that has rang quite loud and true for me since the beginning of my career is that activity is valued more than genuine achievement. Activity is what will prevent your getting laid off, not the achievement. Because when it comes to “achievement,” even when there is hard data, real numbers, to back it up, even when you have killed your retention rates, expanded your customers by hundreds of thousands of dollars, company leadership who is against you will do whatever they can, smear you however they can, to get your job eliminated. It’s the dirty capitalistic society we live in.

I tried to console my mentee. I told her I really empathized with her, but at the end of the day, she needs to get over the desire to “be nice to everyone.” That will never get her ahead. It will never get her recognized. If anything, people would use that against her to manipulate her, take credit for her work, ignore her, gaslight her, and do anything they can to undermine her. Hasn’t that already happened here to her? This needs to be a lesson to her. “Nice girls finish last.” There’s a fine line between maintaining one’s integrity and playing the game. I still haven’t mastered it at all, but one thing I never strayed from while working at this current company is maintaining my integrity. I’ve stayed true to myself no matter what, and perhaps at times, that has costed me, but I have zero regrets. She shouldn’t have regrets either, but she needs to wean herself off the “be nice to everyone” mentality and put herself and her values first. That is such a female way of thinking that we women are taught; what BOY is ever taught to be nice to everyone and to value that above everything else…?!

Since quarantine began and when the weather has been nice outside, we’ve taken a short walk on Sundays around the neighborhood. Chris has always hated these walks, as he said they are aimless, pointless, and just a total waste of time. Okay, so maybe we do not always have an end goal in mind. Perhaps we’re just going outside for the sake of going outside to get some fresh air, a little exercise, and simply just to get out of the apartment. In a day and age of COVID-19, what else are we supposed to do to go outside, anyway? We don’t have that many options. As humans living in the western world, we spend the vast majority of our time indoors. So what’s so bad about “going outside for the sake of going outside” during a pandemic?

In addition to our Sunday walks that usually last for something between 30 minutes to over an hour, I also make time to cook vegetable dishes. Today’s dish was oong choi / kong qing cai, or morning glory. I prepared it with one of my favorite methods, which is to stir fry it with some white fermented bean curd. It’s super stinky and pungent right out of the jar, but it really mellows out once heated and stir fried with vegetables. I’m pretty certain this is one of my all-time favorite Chinese ingredients on earth. This stinky jar of goodness makes me so happy when the final product is ready to eat.

It really is the little things we should be appreciative for. And now, I no longer need to worry about sourcing it since I can go to Chinatown whenever I want now!

As people who are attempting to be responsible citizens of the world in a time of Coronavirus, Chris and I have not been doing any travel domestically or internationally. Not to say that any country would want to accept us, but even if they did, it would just be really irresponsible and selfish of us to travel overseas. It’s really made me angry to see posts about people within my network and beyond it who just insist they need an “escape” and then travel to another country. You never need to travel; you want to travel, especially when it’s for a beach or to go snorkeling, NOT because your parent is dying. This period of COVID-19 truly has revealed the true depths of selfishness of some human beings. It’s really embarrassing to see this lack of humanity exhibited by a lot of people.

While we are not traveling, the mini type of traveling we have been doing is visiting neighborhoods beyond our own during the intense quarantine period of the last few months, whether they are in Manhattan or beyond. Today, we spent the afternoon in Crown Heights in Brooklyn and enjoyed Trinidadian food from a spot that had a very notably long line going out of it. It was cash-only, had no menu, and every single thing on offer looked absolutely delicious. I only have surface level knowledge of Trinidadian food given one one of my friends/former colleagues has roots in the Caribbean. We got this massive roti filled with a lamb curry and a chickpea curry, plus a little snack called “doubles,” which is like a fluffy roti that is stuffed with a chickpea curry. The texture of this bread was just mind-blogging – super fluffy, airy, but chewy and moist. The chickpea curry had a lot of similarities with Indian chickpea “channa” curries, but the flavor profile was a little bit different. After further research, I noticed that the type of spice/peppers used is different, plus there seems to be more thyme and allspice used, which I don’t see much of in Indian cuisine. The roti also felt flakier and dryer in many ways than the average Indian roti. It was incredibly addictive, and even though I was stuffed (we shared one!), I still wanted to keep eating it because it was so good.

There’s so much to learn about different regions of the world, and so many have overlapping characteristics given patterns of migration, colonization (oh, British colonization…), and oppression. The more I think about it, the more and more grateful I am to live in a city as eclectic and diverse as New York. I have pretty much anything I want from a wide variety of cuisines available to me — as long as I am willing to walk or take a subway ride there. Not everyone is that fortunate.

On Monday of this week, massage parlors and nail salons were finally able to open. All must comply with new regulations, including both the workers and the guests wearing masks at all times, and separators have been installed between payment counters, between massage chairs, pedicure stations, etc. A lot of thought and effort was put into this, not to mention money, and the time has finally come.

As soon as Chris found out that the massage parlors would be reopening, he immediately booked appointments for us. We got rained out on Friday when we originally planned to go, so instead, we went down to Manhattan Chinatown today. While it was strange pretty much being naked except for my underwear and a mask while getting a massage, it actually did feel quite good. My hands and wrists have still been tight and not feeling “normal,” so I asked the masseuse if she could spend some extra time on those areas. When she found out I could speak some Chinese, she asked me what I did for a living. When I told her I work in technology and spend all my working days at a computer, she sighed and said, “You use your hands for work all day, too, just like me. We are the same. Working and working. Work is hard, isn’t it?” I insisted that it wasn’t the same at all, but she persisted. At the end of the day, it is the same. We use our hands to work, and we feel pain.

She’s right. That’s all we do. We work with our hands to earn our paychecks, and then we are left in pain. It doesn’t matter what we are doing or how much we are paid. If we had to distill it down simply, that is definitely a fact. And that is a really sad thought.

A few of the Instagram personalities I follow for lifestyle, fashion, and food have posted in recent years about all of the interesting things that are available to children of today that I never had access to: the ability to have books that teach multilingualism in an inclusive, non-cookie cutter way, customize children’s books so that the characters look like that child’s family (for example, if your mom is Chinese and your dad is Indian, you can have images of an olive-toned mom and a mocha-toned dad), and books that teach anti-racism and inclusion. Many of these books were made by people who felt unrepresented in children’s books, got sick of it, and decided to actually do something about it. Well, we really are the change we want to see, right?

I was giving some of these recommendations to my friend who is just over three months pregnant. There’s a lot of big questions when you’re bringing a child into the world: what types of values do you want to instill in this child? When and how do you want to teach them about racism in society and how to face it? Are you going to teach your child to be apathetic and indifferent, move along with the status quo (which is clearly oppressive and not working for anyone who isn’t White), or teach them to challenge the status quo, learn as much as possible, and actually speak up against it to effect change? How many parents or potential parents actually think about these issues or talk about how to address them? Perhaps not enough, which is why we still have the divided society in the state that it’s in today.

We have to be the change we want to see. We need to be the change we want to see.