Category Archives: Friends

Old friend meetup in HK

Posted on by
Reply

Today, we met up with an old high school friend for lunch in the Jordan area of Kowloon. We overlapped in a few classes in high school and went swimming together often to prepare for our school’s swim test requirement, but after high school, we saw each other only twice — once for lunch after our first semester of college, and once again a year and a half after college graduation. When I look back at why I never really made a huge effort to keep in touch, I realize that although we liked a lot of the same things, our chats never really went beyond the surface. We didn’t really have any of the same friends that would force us to see each other; the one remotely mutual friend was an emotional roller coaster who is the only person who has ever cut me off. So it didn’t feel like I was really losing anything big.

When I saw her today, I immediately noticed that her voice had deepened, and she was far more outgoing and talkative than I remembered. Since we last saw each other, it’s been six years, and during that time, she had moved to Hong Kong for work, quit that job and taken a couple others before finally quitting and founding her own startup with a friend based in Hong Kong. Given her business and work needs, it makes sense that she would be more outgoing and confident now. It was refreshing to meet an old friend who was clearly really happy with her life now and motivated and confident about her future.

Wedding RSVPs

Posted on by
Reply

We brought dinner over to Chris’s friend’s house last night. This friend and her husband recently had a baby in July, and despite that, they are planning to come to our California wedding — with the baby, a car seat, and a whole lot of diapers in tow. It’s a heart warming thing to think that despite all the people who have declined that these new parents will be coming, even when it is harder to travel with an unpredictable infant with unpredictable needs. I was so happy when I saw our wedding invitation posted up on their fridge with magnets. Our wedding invitation is being loved!

Since we have made our wedding date and location official, we’ve heard all kinds of reasons for declining, everything from cost (understandable), limited leave time (unfortunately, understandably), having conflicting international non-profit work travel at the time of the wedding (that sucks but at least someone is doing something to help others with his life), being due for a baby the week after our wedding (very unfortunately understandable), having three kids under the age of five and being too difficult to travel (well, I just feel sorry for them and having three kids to deal with and no life outside of being a parent, which is one of my many life nightmares), and scheduling an extended holiday right before our wedding (not so understandable, but I’ll get over it). At the end of the day, our wedding will be what it is with the people who will show up. The ones who don’t show up, it will be their loss. The best thing to know is that of the people who do show up, they are proving that they care enough and are willing to make the effort. The others won’t matter as much. On the morning of my wedding, I won’t be lamenting that these people didn’t show up; in fact, I won’t even think about them at all and could care less.The only person in the world I will be really sad about not being there is my Ed. And in his case, he really had no way of making it.

Vietnamese food in Melbourne

Posted on by
Reply

I never realized how large the Vietnamese population in Melbourne was until my second visit here in 2013, when Chris took me to two different Vietnamese neighborhoods, Springvale and Richmond. It shouldn’t surprise me given Australia’s proximity to Vietnam, but it was more just intriguing to me to think of Vietnamese people speaking English with Aussie accents and living in the land Down Under. This morning, I had a craving for pho, so I asked Chris to take me to have some. We decided to go to Springvale, where we passed by a handful of Vietnamese butcher shops one store at a time. I’ve never seen a Vietnamese-specific butcher shop, nor have I ever seen Vietnamese-only barbecue restaurants and takeout counters for classic dishes like heo quay (Vietnamese roast pork belly). Here, there are pho shops that open at 8am, which I also hadn’t seen before outside of Vietnam. Traditionally in Vietnam, pho is a breakfast dish, and here, people actually do have it for breakfast… and queue up for it!

The original place we wanted to go to have pho had too long of a wait (I have never seen a queue for pho, nor have I ever had to wait for it anywhere), so we settled on a place a block away, which ended up still being quite satisfying with a side of jack fruit shake. These shops serve pho and only pho, and they are bustling. I wish New York had Vietnamese food like this and quality that was as easy to find as this.

Seven years later

Posted on by
Reply

Today, we met up with our former colleague and friend at Efficient Frontier here in Zurich. It’s always incredible to think about where life takes us in just a handful of years. We were all colleagues then in our own respective relationships. In the last seven years, all three of those relationships have dissolved. She moved to Chicago, then to Shanghai, and finally to Zurich. Chris and I have been at five companies collectively since then, and somehow we got together, became engaged, and are planning a wedding for this coming March. She ended her long distance relationship from 2008, met a guy through a friend in Shanghai who happened to be Chinese American in Shanghai, had two weddings, and gave birth to a son who will be turning two just days after Christmas next month. She had no idea we even got together, but she seemed really excited and happy for us to be together. We’re all a little different than we were in 2008, but so much has changed in our lives since then. The one thing that has remained consistent is that more or less, we are still connected and have a level of affection for one another. I hope we will be able to meet again sometime soon. Distance makes staying in touch and remaining friends harder, but it always feels warm and fuzzy when you meet up after a long period of not seeing each other, and you still feel the same level of comfort as you did the last time you saw this person.

Thai in Midtown East

Posted on by
Reply

Tonight, Chris and I went to his friend’s apartment in Midtown East and ate takeout Thai with a bunch of their mutual friends. Two of the friends were relatively new, so one of the friends was describing how we’d all met and how our lives have changed over the last four years since they met. We’re engaged, one of them is married and has a child on the way, and two of them are “the same,” as in, single without any realistic prospects for romantic relationships in the near future. This isn’t really the future that the three of them had envisioned for themselves four years ago.

Chris’s pregnant friend is actually due the week after our wedding, which pretty much means that she and her husband won’t be able to come. It’s a sad truth, but that’s life. We can’t all coordinate our lives to make sure we can always be there for each other at our biggest life moments. It makes me sad, but it’s just another reminder that we should all just live our own lives and stop living it for other people or around other people’s schedules.

“Is your friend a king or something?”

Posted on by
Reply

I’m spending the next couple of days in Tampa for a work trip, and my friend’s friend, who lives in the area, invited me over for dinner with his wife, their one-year-old son and 13-year-old dog. It was a really enjoyable evening spent eating, catching up about life, and giggling with and kissing their incredibly enthusiastic and intelligent baby.

On the drive to Lutz, my Uber driver was talking about his life in Tampa, working as an IT worker, not making much money, but working as an Uber driver to earn extra income. We pulled into a gated community where my friend lives, and my driver had to not only get his face and driver’s license photographed, but he had to announce who he was, who he was seeing, and how long he intended on staying as my driver. When we arrived at my friend’s house, which in all honesty resembled a replica castle complete with a footbridge entrance over a moat, the driver exclaims, “Is your friend a king or something? This house is definitely something!” I thanked him for the ride, got out of his car, and immediately felt bad. He hated his job, didn’t think he earned enough money so took a second job as a driver, and had to drive me, some random tech girl on a business trip, to an area he was unfamiliar with to visit my friend and his castle. Great. I became so painfully aware of the separation between the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, and my own privileges then.

My friend’s friend owns a video game company, so he is obsessed with all things gaming related. Each room of his house is themed after a different warrior, and his formal living room space has coats of armor and medieval style lights and tapestries. In the master bedroom, they have a large wooden axe that is mounted above their bed. Their mischievous one-year-old has unlocked every freaky thing in their house and has even climbed up the bed post in an attempt to get the axe. I wonder how they don’t think this entire house could potentially be a death trap of wooden axes and coats of armor and swords.

This friend told me that he bought this house during the economic downturn five years ago when no one was buying, and homes were being sold for less than 60 to 70 percent of their actual value. And because it was only partially finished, he got to custom design the undone spaces and rooms to his exact preferences. It’s his dream home at a fraction of what the real cost should have been.

“I know it doesn’t seem like it, but we’re really, really cheap,” my friend says while the three of us are enjoying ice cream in one of their common areas.

“Yeah, you can tell that to the Uber driver who took me here,” I responded, laughing. “He’ll really believe that!”

The photo frame with a hidden message

Posted on by
Reply

Today, I met briefly with a friend and her daughter at Spreckles Lake at Golden Gate Park. I cannot remember the last time I walked through that area, but Ed and I used to go all the time on the weekends as kids and feed the ducks by the water there. It made me feel nostalgic to walk along the lake today with them and see the ducks and the remote-controlled boats gliding across the water at rapid pace.

My friend and her daughter came to my bridal shower and gave me a silver photo frame from Gump’s. At the shower when I was opening gifts, she told me that there was a story behind the frame, and today, she shared it with me.

She told me that her husband was at work the week before the shower, and somehow dozed off, and when he did, he dreamt that he saw Ed. Yes, that’s Ed as in my Ed, my brother. He couldn’t quite make out his face clearly and could only see black, but he knew it was him. “Isn’t your wife attending a bridal shower this weekend?” Ed asked her husband.

“Yes, she’s attending a bridal shower,” the husband responds.

Ed reveals that it’s his sister’s bridal shower. “What is your wife getting as a gift for the shower?”

Her husband finds this amusing and said he actually had no idea, as they hadn’t discussed it.

“I think you should get her a photo frame from Gump’s,” Ed suggested. “I think she’d like it.”

The dream ended. Her husband woke up from his nap and asked his assistant to go to Gump’s and pick out a photo frame. He then took the photo frame back home to my friend, and said that she had to give this gift to me. “You can’t ignore a message like this,” her husband told her.

Ed’s still out there watching over me. My friend says this was his way of being part of the shower, of speaking to her husband and knowing that the message would get back to me. I’m not sure what I felt more when I heard this — happiness that his presence is still here, or sadness that he physically is no longer here.

I miss my Ed. I love you wherever you are.

Not the same

Posted on by
Reply

I was at dinner tonight with two of my best friends, eating deep dish pizza and discussing my last relationship. “We didn’t realize he was so critical of us!” One of them exclaims after thinking about things we discussed as a group over my bachelorette weekend that just passed. “It’s not a big deal,” I responded. “It’s all over now.”

“We’re surprised you never told us,” she continued. “You’ve been more open about the things that Chris has said… which is why I have a less rosy view of him than I did of Arnold before.”

That’s true. I have been to a degree. But I think what I failed to express tonight is that I feel like enough about me has changed from the last guy to Chris where I just say more of what I think, for better or for worse. I’m a bit more blunt. I offend people more often now because frankly, they can’t handle the truth and people’s real opinions. I get tired of always having to get everyone’s input before voicing my own. What we all fail to do as human beings who have human relationships is to be honest with each other about things that really matter and are dear to us. I don’t feel the same way about life as I did before Chris or before my brother passed. I feel like my mindset has changed a lot, and I can sit here and talk or write about how it’s changed to convey it to people, or, I could just say what I want and do what I want and let people judge for themselves whether I am the same or not the same. I need more honesty and am constantly seeking it because I don’t think I get enough of it.

Bachelorette weekend

Posted on by
Reply

The weekend my friends planned for me included a purple and green-themed bridal shower, some nice dinners and a brunch out, hiking at Point Lobos State Reserve and picnicking, spa time and gel manicures at the Marilyn Monroe Spa in the Hyatt Regency, and a number of bachelorette games both slightly naughty and nice. It’s clear a lot of thought went into the planning of this. I’m very touched by all the work my friends did to pull this together.

My friend was so exhausted planning this that after the bridal shower was over and we finished cleaning up, she had to “decompress” for a bit before getting in the car to drive down to Monterey. I guess we’re not all natural planners and handle stress differently. I remember when I planned her bridal weekend three years ago, and my “tense” period was in the two days leading up to the event. There’s always this feeling that as the planner, you have to make sure everything has to go perfectly and as you envisioned it. But I guess I was more militant than she was in terms of setting timelines for things, which tends to help when you have a group larger than two people.

I always look back and wished I had done a few extra things for that weekend to make it the “ideal” weekend, especially when I would hear about ideas that other colleagues had carried out for their friends and family. I actually enjoy event planning and the details of it. Maybe one day in the future I’ll have the opportunity to do it for someone else. And if I don’t, I hope I get to enjoy someone else’s labor that went into an event like this.

Different friends forced together

Posted on by
Reply

I’m really happy that I had all of my friends and family together in a room yesterday, and also grateful that I was able to successfully get five of my friends to spend a weekend with me. Three of them have never traveled with me before, and all five of them have very different personalities and preferences. I don’t really like a certain “type” of friend, which is a good and a bad thing. It’s a good thing because it means I have a variety of friends with different interests and perspectives, but it’s bad because once they are all in a room together, for some reason even though they might like me, in most cases they don’t really like my other friends. The last time I organized a birthday event for myself, I was painfully aware of how awkward it was and decided to never have a big event ever again… well, except for this weekend and our wedding.

All the usual things played out as I thought they would: one friends’ desire to make sure everyone was happy became exhausting when it came time to actually making decisions because it meant everyone had to agree; exhaustion tends to happen when we don’t have someone who is assertive enough to put her foot down. Another friend decided to sit in the front seat of one of the cars and instead of navigating, lazed around, so that resulted in slight delays arriving at final destinations, almost getting lost, and frustrations for the driver and myself. One friend didn’t have much interaction with the rest and seemed to only interject occasionally to say the not-PC comments that the rest of us would have thought about minutes later; we’re clearly not as quick-thinking as she is. The fourth friend amused with her sarcasm and occasional confusion when she didn’t understand a joke was a joke. My last friend was probably the smoothest sailor and took everything as it came. She was also the lightest packer ever.

It still ended up fun, mostly as a learning experience for my friends who don’t know all the crazy things that have happened in my life and in my family’s. It was like a constant unraveling of exactly how dysfunctional my family is. One of my friends was so exhausted by the stories that she just left the room. Maybe not everyone wants to hear how crazy my family is, but I think it’s good to know about people’s backgrounds because it helps us understand them better as individuals. You can’t really understand anyone unless you know what they have gone through.