Tonight, we went to see the show Admissions at the Lincoln Center, which is about a liberal white couple, one of whom is the head of admissions at a New England prep school, the other the school’s headmaster, and the contradictions in their beliefs about “diversity” and what liberal white America truly is. The conflict arises when their only son, who gets deferred for Early Decision by Yale, starts speaking about the supposed injustices he’s faced by not getting accepted and instead getting deferred, when his black classmate and fellow basketball player friend gets admitted. His parents call him out on his state of being spoiled and privileged and his racism, and he has a change of heart that ultimately results in massive conflicting feelings for both his parents about how much diversity they really want in life.

The play was extremely well done, and it also brought up a lot of questions I’ve had that I’ve never been able to answer. While their son is screaming and bemoaning not getting into Yale, he also calls out the contradictions of how Americans view people of “color”: why is it that people in Argentina or Chile who speak Spanish are considered “brown,” “Latino,” “Hispanic,” and thus people of color, but someone who speaks the exact same language, Spanish, in Spain, is not necessarily considered “brown” or “Hispanic,” but instead is categorized as “white”? Here’s the case in point that I actually thought about while in high school watching the horrible film Vanilla Sky, in which Penelope Cruz was a costar. Penelope Cruz is Spanish, from Madrid, Spain, yet she’s oftentimes given roles in which she portrays people from Latin America (hi, Frida Kahlo). Hollywood kind of views her as white… but not really given a lot of the roles that she’s played? So because of this, why do we not consider people from Chile or Argentina “white”? What the hell really is the difference?

What it ultimately brings up are the contradictions of how we perceive race and “color” in the world here in the U.S. We love to label and pigeon-hole everyone. Some people are considered more “white” than others, therefore more “acceptable.” Frankly, it’s easier for someone from Chile or Argentina, based on her face, to “blend in” as a white person in white America than someone like Chris or me ever could. The fact that we have to have these conversations is just so ridiculous and makes me feel unsettled about race in general and the supposed “progress” we have made.

I was on the train today, still thinking about my time this past Wednesday at the Bowery Mission. I’m not accustomed to getting yelled at by strangers, but this ended up happening while I was serving meals to the homeless and in-need people lining up at the Mission two days ago. All of the volunteers were lined up at the food station, manning specific dishes, utensils and cups to hand out. I was in charge of the pasta station and given strict instructions to give only two scoops of pasta to each person, regardless of whether they asked for more. The supervisor was watching closely in the beginning, whispering feedback to me about when I might have scooped too much, too little, and of course, what was just right. I had a feeling this was going to get messy at some point, but I just had to wait for it.

So it did happen. One guest passed on his portion of pasta; he didn’t even want it touching his plate. The guest after him asked him if he could take his portion, and he said yes. He asked me for a double portion, and I gently told him that he could only have one portion as that was what the rules were. He started yelling at me, telling me that the previous guest said he could have his portion, so why can’t I just do what I was told. Then, he proceeded to call me stupid, dumb, and awful until the supervisor got involved. “It’s okay,” the volunteer next to me said while smiling. “Don’t worry about it.”

I came back to the office after our volunteer service, and when the head of our office comes over to ask me how it was, I told him that I found it to be a great experience, a character-building one at that. He asked me to elaborate, so I told him this anecdote. He started laughing and said, “So, let me get this straight. You’re the awful person for spending five hours of your day doing free labor to serve meals for people you don’t even know who need food and likely won’t eat anything else that day? Sure. You must be terrible.”

I know it’s nothing personal. It certainly was a bit more drama than I originally anticipated. But I get where the guy is coming from. Like most of the people who were there to receive a free hot meal, this would likely be his only meal of the day, so he wanted to maximize what he could get. In theory, it did make sense to get the portion of the guy in front of him who passed, but I wasn’t really in a position to do that. When you have that little, you want to fight for every last bit that you can get, right?

Did I really just find out tonight that one of my colleagues is actually a Trump supporter?

I know I’m not supposed to be shocked because Trump supporters are all over this country, but really? Now, every single time I talk to her, I’m going to have this in the back of my mind: “you are one of the 53 percent of white women who helped elect this dipshit, this pussy grabber, this no-politics experience, this illiterate and racist asshole into the highest office of the land? You think you are smart? Really?”

I’m not trying to be a nice person here. I’m just being honest. She probably thinks I’m another docile Asian, another person of color adding diversity to this metropolis we know as New York City. I’m some liberal from San Francisco who doesn’t know any better. It’s okay. She is entitled to her potential opinion. Even if it’s wrong.

I just really cannot stand stupid people.

Today, I spent five hours of my work day at the Bowery Mission volunteering with four of my colleagues to help prepare and serve meals for the homeless and New Yorkers in need. As the Optimizely.org ambassador to our New York City office, I head up all our volunteer and charitable efforts. The Bowery Mission has been serving homeless and in need New Yorkers since 1879. They serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner meals every day of the year to those in need, without any show of ID or income. They provide emergency shelter, housing, showers, and food.

Shortly after we all arrived, we had a short orientation to learn about the organization before getting started. The director of the program actually started out as the people they serve do — as a homeless drug addict with no where to go, no future in sight. But years ago, he came to the Bowery Mission for a free hot meal, and suddenly after that, he was inspired to change his ways, get clean, and get back on his feet through the services they provide. He wants to serve and help these people every day because through this type of help, he himself reaped the benefits and is in a healthy and happy place now.

It’s inspiring to hear these stories of people whose lives seemingly crumbled, getting back to a normal and healthy life. We volunteer to help others, but to be totally honest, we also volunteer our time and energy because it makes us feel good about ourselves. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing as long as someone outside of yourself is benefiting. Doing good work like this benefits everyone. I wish there were more charitable, like-minded people in the world. So many people talk about doing good. Far fewer actually make it actionable.

Gossip is a thing in every office environment, in any environment where there are multiple people who repeatedly interact with each other. Bad mouthing is generally a part of gossip — everyone loves dirt on other people. Some of us are more discreet about it than others. But isn’t it especially toxic when the bad mouthing is done from people who are in leadership positions, speaking this way to people on their teams and cross teams about people who have departed the company?

There’s a colleague of mine who was let go back in the autumn and I was really sad when he left because I got along with him really well. Ever since then, I can’t seem to go a week without hearing his former manager bad mouth him, or people who directly report to the manager saying derogatory things about a guy who they haven’t even met because they started after this guy was let go. It puts such a poor taste in my mouth and is just not a good reflection of a manager, who is supposedly a people leader, nor is it a good reflection of any any current employee who speaks badly about someone she’s never even met. Doesn’t this just go back to basics of what we were taught in kindergarten: treat others as you’d like to be treated? Are we really living in such a world where we can’t do or even think about that anymore?

I have a lot of biases. I am wary when a white person gives his opinion of any Asian food. I won’t take a man’s opinion seriously about how he feels on women’s rights if he’s insistent that she change her last name after marriage and/or be the primary caretaker of children. If you have never lived anywhere outside of a 30-mile radius of your hometown, I’ll probably dismiss your opinions about other parts of the world or the world in general unless you make a really good case for it. But some of my strongest and most easily guessed biases are the ones around food: if you ever say you hate an entire continent’s food, I’ll never respect your food judgment (or maybe even your judgment on anything — who the hell says they will write off an entire continent’s food when that continent will likely have so much variety that this idiot making that comment probably has never even had half of their food?!). If you say you are gluten-free but do not (and very likely do not based on statistics) have a gluten allergy, I will think less of you. If you ever categorically say that an entire food is unhealthy and bad for you (e.g. bread, meat, fruit, and I’ve met people who’ve said all the above), I will not want to have any further voluntary conversations with you. At all. And if you tell me you can’t stand any Indian food, we’ll probably never share a meal, ever.

The reason I say this is because India… is a damn big country. Each region, much less each town or city, has its own dishes, its own way of spicing things. It’s the same reason I take offense when people say they dislike all Asian food, all European food — how much have you really eaten, anyway, to make such a massive statement like that? A Kerala curry is very different than a Punjabi curry; they are NOT the same thing. The base isn’t even the same. So why do people make stupid statements like this? Does it make them feel more comfortable being in their ignorant little shell of “this is what I like to eat and that’s it?” Has it ever occurred to them that a comment like this could be perceived as… racist?

Somehow, I remembered someone telling me she just couldn’t stand Indian food, especially having traveled to India multiple times for work — all while doing research for our India trip this summer. She said she just couldn’t take it even though she tried.

Yep. Never taking a food recommendation from this person ever again.

As someone who enjoys cooking, I like to cook for others and have people over at our apartment. When more people come, it makes more sense to have more dishes, which is not always practical to do when it’s just the two of us. Traditional Chinese meals always have multiple dishes at the table that are eaten family style, so having Chinese New Year style meals with 7-8 dishes is a comfort to me and a reminder of some of the greatest Cantonese meals I grew up with.

At tonight’s dinner, other than 75 percent of me, we didn’t have any other Chinese guests. No one else would really understand Chinese traditions around the Lunar New Year meal unless they grew up with Chinese friends and were invited to their homes. But that’s part of the fun with food: you get to introduce people to different cultures by feeding them. But the sad thing is that people of my generation don’t really do things like this anymore. They don’t really make the foods that they grew up with. They rely on restaurants and their older relatives who will eventually die to make these things for them. So when those relatives die, when those restaurant owners decide to close their shops, who is going to continue these amazing food traditions for future generations to enjoy and appreciate?

Tonight, we went to see the play Queens at the Clare Tow Theater at the Lincoln Center. The play is about two generations of immigrant women, seven of them, who come to the U.S. in hopes for a better future for themselves and their future families. They share living space in a basement apartment and their concerns about trying to make ends meet, even though most of them spend all of their waking hours trying to earn just barely enough to cover their heavily discounted rent. The woman who ultimately ends up owning the building where that basement apartment is located leaves her home country hoping her daughter will come join her, but she never does. Instead, she grows up and builds her own life back home in Poland. She even had a child and got married and never informed her mother in the U.S. Their family and friends back in Poland just assumed her mother was having a grand old time living the easy money-making life in New York.

When I watch shows like this, I always feel even more frustrated and angry at the current political climate which is so anti-immigrant, so anti the American dream… well, according to President Dipshit, the “American dream is for Americans.” He wants a merit-based immigration system. He wants to deny people who are trying to flee life-threatening political situations in their own country the right to come to the U.S… those are people in situations like my mother once was, like so many of the people I know have descended from. People leave their home countries and everything and everyone they know and immigrate for better opportunities, not to enter foreign countries where they can commit mass terrorist attacks and laugh at all the pain they want to cause others. At the end of the day, we all have more in common than we think. We just want to live happy, healthy, prosperous lives and be free. We all have that in common. It’s just a shame that people like Dipshit and idiots on the right don’t seem to get that commonality. People immigrating today — their intent isn’t any different than the people who immigrated after World War II or the Vietnam War. They just want a shot at a decent life. That’s all.

Tonight, my friend and I went to see Eve Ensler’s monologue play In the Body of the World. I was eager to see it, especially after having read the original play that made her famous (Vagina Monologues) and seeing it performed by a Wellesley cast during my first year in college.

The play is a monologue of Ensler walking us through the brutality she witnessed over women in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The prolonged war over copper, gold, and coltan—minerals used in computers and cell phones—has claimed eight million lives and led to the rape and torture of hundreds of thousands of women. Ensler’s philanthropic organization, V-Day, was beginning to build an urgently needed women’s center there when she was diagnosed with uterine cancer. In a series of medical nightmares, she sustains the same harrowing wounds as Congolese women who were gang-raped and is flooded by memories of her father’s sexual assaults. She feels herself gradually being removed from her own body and being separated from it. She aligns her body with the earth and pairs her cancer with the pillaging of the Congo and BP’s poisoning of the Gulf of Mexico. She illustrates her healing through her emotions and courage. Ensler harnesses all that she lost and learned to articulate the essence of life: “The only salvation is kindness.”

This was my friend’s first time joining me for a theater show. I wasn’t quite sure if this would be too intense for her first time, but she actually really enjoyed it and found it very profound, and wants to come to more shows with me.

My usual end of day meeting got cancelled today, so I left work a little early to do some Chinese New Year grocery shopping in Chinatown. I wasn’t sure if it was because everyone in Chinatown was mostly home preparing elaborate celebratory meals or already off to their romantic Valentine’s Day dinners, but I was shocked to find that the grocery stores I usually go to were extremely quiet. The roasted Chinese meat shop still had a queue out the door, but that was pretty much it. I was able to get all my shopping done in less than 45 minutes after hitting three different shops.

The stores were all decorated with Year of the Dog new year’s decorations. It made me a little nostalgic for the types of decorations and traditions my grandma would do when I was growing up. I’m never going to be that person to deck my house out in Chinese New Year decorations or do the odd traditions of not washing my hair on new year’s day or maniacally cleaning the house before the lunar new year begins, but there actually is a little fun and excitement involved in all of that.

It’s all right, though. I can still embrace the food traditions. Food never will die.