First class “diversity”

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It doesn’t seem to matter where I am going or what airport I’m leaving from, but first class (or business class or both, depending on the flight you are on) is so lacking in diversity that it is exactly what is representative of everything that’s wrong with our society. On Monday on my connecting flight through Charlotte to Tampa, I got upgraded to First. First class on this plane consisted of 16 seats. I boarded the plane a little late, so I was the last person in the first class cabin to be seated. I took a quick look around to see who my fellow passengers were. Out of 16 first class passengers, 12 were older white men (at least age 50 and chances are even older than that given the amount of white hair I saw), three were middle-aged to older white women, and… there was me. I’m the only person of color sitting in the first class cabin. I’m also the only person under the age of 40 probably, and a year ago, I could say I was almost always the only person under the age of 30.

To be honest, I was surprised there were three other women sitting with me. Most of the time when I get upgraded, it’s always all men and me, plus maybe another woman or two at most. It was like a tiny glimmer of how women are doing better in our society now, either having the higher earning power to pay for first class seats, or the airline status to actually get the upgrades I get. You could almost call it a slight increase in “diversity” in the front cabin of the plane, as laughable as that is.

How do we get more women with more earning power and airline status, and even more, how do we get more people of color, particularly black and Latino, to have the ability to sit in the front cabin, for it not to be a dream or a reality that is seemingly out of grasp? Optimists say that the world is getting better, that people are less racist. Perhaps they are less outwardly racist, but it doesn’t say much for subconscious racism or the clear lack of diversity on an airplane’s luxury cabin. Articles like these make it hard for me to believe in a truly equal world of equal opportunity. I always get curious looks when I am traveling for work and getting upgraded; it’s like people cannot fathom why or how a young Asian woman would be able to sit with them. Yes, I know you are all used to sitting with people who look like you, dress like you, and probably come from similar backgrounds as you. But get over it and your racist, sexist thoughts. I’m coming to take over and bash all your antiquated stereotypes. 🙂

Business travel

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I’m in Tampa for three days this week for work. Client meetings usually have me coming down here at least twice a year now, along with Fort Lauderdale and Atlanta. On average, I probably travel about every other month for work. In the grand scheme of work travel, this is fairly infrequent, and the distances I travel are pretty short.

I came in around dinner time last night and not sure what to eat, I Yelped a few places that were walking distance from the hotel and settled on the place that had the best reviews but was the shortest walking distance (yes, I was just being lazy). It was a Thai restaurant that was quite large yet practically empty except for four tables, all with older white men dining (this is Tampa, after all, the land of rich, retired white people). It was one of the fanciest Thai restaurants I’d ever been in, with decor that looked like it had been shipped straight from Thailand. The menu was fairly standard for a not-very-authentic Thai restaurant, and because I just wanted something over rice, I got a seafood and chicken stir fry.

As I ate my dinner alone, I thought to myself what it would be like if I were a consultant, traveling the country (or the world) on my own most weeks, four days at a time, living out of a suitcase, rarely having the time or ability to eat or make a home-cooked meal. This would be my life — eating out alone, without many people to talk to. That would get very lonely very quickly and be deeply unsatisfying. I thought briefly of chatting with my server, who seemed curious about my dining alone. I caught him staring at me from the cash register and kitchen doorway multiple times and smiled.

I still think consulting is kind of a bs-y industry, but I guess if companies are willing to pay for outsourced labor to tell them how to run their business, that is what will help make the economy and world go round. But the next thing I thought was… how many of these consultants have these thoughts I do about dining alone and question if they are living a life of meaning?

Hating on Hillary

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I really should stop getting offended or annoyed by all the negative press that Hillary Clinton is getting for being the first female U.S. presidential candidate of a major political party ever, but it’s hard because I take gender discrimination very seriously. I honestly don’t even know where I get it from; no one in my family has ever vocally been for equal rights for the sexes. Maybe it’s because my mom was a hard-working woman who believed a woman needs to stand on her own and not depend on a man financially. Maybe that really is the root of my desire for gender equality, for feminism the word and concept to be embraced and not avoided or shunned or called taboo.

The latest hate that Hillary is getting that is driving me crazy is that because she contracted pneumonia last week that somehow, something must be wrong with her head and nerves, and how possibly could she be fit to be president of the most powerful country of the world if she hasn’t been psychologically evaluated? The stupidest thing about this accusation is that if any male presidential candidate got sick during his campaign, no one would ever jump to the senseless conclusion that if he’s physically ill and that took a while to get out as public knowledge, then maybe he’s sick in the head, too! This irrational thinking goes back to the age-old discrimination against women being in positions of power: they are too unstable, whether it’s emotionally or psychologically or hormonally… or maybe it’s all of the above?!

And to think that some people are so deluded to think that women are equal to men in today’s society. Total idiots.

15 years later

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It’s strange to be living in New York City without having lived here or been to this city to know what it was like pre September 11, 2001, right here in this great big metropolis. I’ve never known what this city has looked like with those twin towers that went down that sad day. The first time I visited New York was in August 2004 on a day trip from Boston right before beginning my first year of college at Wellesley. I remember thinking, one day, I’m going to love this city, and one day, I hope to live here, too. But I’m sure the love for this city is even more nuanced and special for those who lived here during the 9-11 period, who have seen this city before and after that awful terrorist attack.

My bitter cousin who lives in Brooklyn texted earlier today to ask when 9-11 tributes and memorials would end every future September 11, which is just so callous. He doesn’t understand why we’re still honoring the victims. Maybe he has no connection to or love for this city, but that’s because he has no perspective or empathy or understanding to know how many people to this day still suffer from the tragedies that that event brought, whether it’s through loved ones lost, injured, or still suffering health ramifications from being in the area of the smoke and rubbish. I can’t even fathom it. I think it terrifies all of us to some degree that we could lose our loved ones at any time, but in events like 9-11 where they are an intentional form of violence — it’s heartbreaking to think of even 15 years later.

Aubergine

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Tonight, Chris and I went to see the play Aubergine, a play about the power of food as a form of expression that could potentially be stronger than words. It was particularly amusing because the playwright is Korean, and it’s told from the perspective of a Korean American who has already lost most of his Korean language skills. Throughout the play, they touch on a variety of issues, including lack of generational understanding, the pressures to live up to strict Asian expectations and upbringing, the failure of Asian families to acknowledge many truths and human emotions. In the end, the protagonist’s father dies after not having had the soup that his son, a chef, had so painstakingly made for him as his last meal before leaving this world (he even killed a live turtle for this soup to please his uncle, his dad’s brother who came all the way from Korea to see his older brother one last time). And the son thought in the end, he didn’t even want to eat my soup; he died without me in the room. Not only did he not want my soup, he didn’t want to have his last moment on earth be with me. It was a painful moment.

Shows like this always remind me of the inevitable fact that one day, my parents will pass from this world, and it’s absolutely terrifying to me. In the back of my mind, I wonder and probably know that there will be many things I won’t get to say before it’s too late; it’s like how I felt with my brother. Except in my parents’ case, in a “normal” life, children should live to see their parents pass, not vice versa. I should accept this as a fact, as a part of my upcoming reality whenever that may happen. Will they know that I always worry about them and wonder if they are truly happy? Will they know that I always wanted the best for them in the same way that they always thought they wanted what is seemingly the best for me? Will they know I wished every day that they could trust the world a little bit more and have a little less anger against everyone? I don’t think so, and it’s mainly from a lack of understanding. And to be brutally honest, will they know that even though they may one day die, my anger against them because of how they mistreated my brother will likely live on forever in my life, until my death?

Sadness

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I arrived back at JFK at about 4:50am; the winds were in my favor overnight, and so our plane landed about an hour and ten minutes earlier than scheduled. I grumbled at the idea of going back to the office on time, so I decided to sleep a bit longer and come into the office late.

The first full day back in New York is always strange for me. It’s me, back in the freedom that New York City provides, away from the prying, manipulative hold of my parents. It’s away from all the clutter of my parents’ house, the endless screws and paper clips and razor blades that are scattered all over the floors in certain rooms; it’s also away from the darkness that is increasingly becoming my parents’ house.

My bedroom always looks a little more depressing every time I come home. It’s the bedroom that Ed and I grew up in, where both of our beds still stand, where the frames of photos of us and our parents are turned inward, looking stupidly organized (“the light will eat them up and they will fade!” my dad insisted, when he turned the photos away from frontal view. In other words, you cannot see the photos; you can just see the backs of the frames. What a great way to display photographs!!). The blinds are closed, which means no natural light comes into the room. My parents’ bedroom is even worse, with thicker blinds that block out the light even better, and piles and piles of paper, buckets with endless tools and screws, and who the hell knows what else all over the floor. There’s barely any space to get around the bed, and I honestly do not know how my tiny mother hasn’t had an accident tripping over something in her own bedroom yet. Oh, and they lock that room when they aren’t home, even when it’s just me home, which makes their bedroom even more like an unwelcome lair, hiding needless secrets that they never want exposed. In fact, they lock both their room and my old room, always fearful that someone will expose their secrets and get whatever rare valuables they seem to be storing.

In New York, I’m also away from all forms of irrational thinking that my parents have. So while they lock the two bedroom doors, my dad has had this strange desire, since Ed passed away, to leave the gate unlocked when he or my mom is home. It drives me nuts. Why would they keep the gate unlocked but lock their bedroom doors? Even though I grew up in this house and lived there until age 18, my parents don’t think I will close the gate without slamming it because many visitors slam it. My dad put in this weather stripping for it over a decade ago, which for a lot of people, makes the gate harder to close. You really just need to press it for an extra second, but everyone is too impatient and slams it. So my mom and I will usually bicker when I try to close the gate and my mom insists she will do it. That’s the kind of thing my parents like to argue about — how to close a gate and who will do it. When I’m in New York, I never have to worry when I go out with visiting relatives or friends about someone sneakily paying the bill behind my back (and thus my being “indebted” to them); I also never have to worry about others paying the bill and then getting mad at me later that they paid it. I always have to think about that whenever I go home. It’s a really irrational worry and form of stress, but that is instantly on the agenda as soon as I step into my parents’ house.

So despite all the above, the truth is that as soon as I enter SFO, go through security, and reach either the airline lounge or sit down at the gate, I actually miss my parents a lot for anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. I miss my mother’s love and hugs and kisses, the way she is always concerned about whether I’ve had enough to eat or whether I will be safe. I miss my dad’s sheepish hug at the end of my trip, the way he usually pats my back awkwardly in his own way of showing fatherly affection. I miss my dad always asking me if I want anything at Costco (his Costco love will never die; he’s an Asian dad, after all, and loves his deals) even though I usually decline. This time, because we had to get some wedding photos printed at Costco before dropping me off at the airport, I humored my mom and agreed to bring back women’s gummy vitamins. She was so excited; my dad wasn’t, though, because my mom insisted on buying me the name-brand gummy vitamins vs. the Kirkland Signature brand (Costco brand) gummy vitamins.

I wish they could be happier and more content with life. Every time I leave, I know that their level of happiness will decline and pick up again the next time I come home. With my coming home, it’s something they look forward to. I’m honestly not sure if they look forward to anything else in life. And that always is a worry lurking in the back my mind, that they really aren’t living for much outside of me, their one living child. It always makes me feel sad and a little helpless, kind of like how I felt when Ed was at the end of his life and I knew he was struggling, but I had no way to feasibly help.

Leaving home

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Leaving home always leaves me with mixed feelings. I love my parents very much, but the harsh truth is that I cannot be with them for long periods of time, otherwise I lose my sanity. I always feel sad on the way to the airport because I know that my mom has that sinking feeling in her stomach, knowing her only living child is leaving her for the other side of the country. She starts worrying about every last thing: the weight of my carry-on roller bag, whether the night flight will make it all the way to New York (she thinks that flying at night is more dangerous, but obviously she’s just basing that on her lack of knowledge of how airplanes work), and if the driver who takes me from JFK back to my apartment will be a creep or not. She always reminds me right before I leave her at the curb side to stay longer the next time I come home so that she won’t miss me as much (that doesn’t really make sense, but it just means she wants me around longer, even if we do argue).

I always wish my parents could be more positive, that they could try for once to see the best in people and stop nitpicking at everyone in their lives, including each other. I wish my dad wouldn’t have a last argument on my last day with me about the shower, insisting that his tiles never mildew because he always wipes the tiles down after a shower (they will always mildew, just at a slower rate). I wish my mom wouldn’t accuse people like my aunt of trying to take advantage of her. I wish my aunt would stop inviting random Jehovah’s Witness strangers to what are supposed to be “family dinners.” I have a lot of wishes, but they will always just be that — wishes. I know they want the best for me and miss me when I’m gone, but that’s why I do try to come home at least two to three times a year to see them, and when I do see them, I try to have them participate in enjoyable, productive activities together. It’s always hard. That’s all I can say. It’s just inevitable that my mom will get upset over something irrational, blame me and start yelling. It’s also inevitable my parents will argue about senseless things, too, and blame each other for everything that is wrong. It is always hard. No peace exists at the house on the hill in which I grew up. It’s just a cold place with a lot of bitterness.

Space

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Being in my parents’ house, the home in which I grew up, makes me realize that having a small Manhattan apartment really isn’t such a bad thing after all. When you have a smaller space, you tend to have a lesser desire to buy more stuff, which means less chance for clutter. Less space also tends to mean less to clean, which is always a positive in my book considering how anal I am about cleanliness. But to be honest, being in this house for too long ends up getting me angry for some reasons that have little to do with Ed. It has to do with how inefficiently this space is used and how worse it seems to get every single time I come back.

This second floor flat is technically three bedrooms and one bath. Only two people, my parents, live here. Yet there is stuff everywhere — all over the floors of the bedrooms, on the breakfast room booth seats, and even sitting on multiple chairs throughout the house. The sunroom (the third bedroom) floor has model trains, busted computers and hard drives, nails, and screwdrivers everywhere. There are papers scattered around the perimeter of the room. And then right in the center of the room are two vacuum cleaners; one is busted open while the other one has a cord that is undone. In my bedroom, there are two beds. My bed is usually covered with papers piled high everywhere when I am not home. I know this because my mom told me. Maybe, just maybe if my dad cleared all the clutter on the desk in the room, he could actually have space for all those piles of paper.

The sunroom makes me pretty mad because it used to be the play room in the house, the house where we had plants, an extra bed, and fun things. Now, it’s a room that is completely wasted and serves zero purpose other than to dry clothes. A desk sits in there with two chairs (one of which is obviously extraneous) piled with junk on them. The desk is covered in about 10 different open hard drives. As someone who’s lived in Manhattan for four years now, I get mad when I see space that is wasted. You have all this great space, but you’re not even going to use it the best way?!

And then I thought, one day, I’m going to clear out this house, and I’m literally going to take everything and dump it into a massive garbage bin. I can feel my blood pressure going up when I see all the clutter that has zero meaning. This house is Marie Kondo’s worst nightmare. She’d get heart palpitations walking through this place.

Updated stats

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We spent a lot of time the last few days looking at views of the Golden Gate Bridge and on Saturday, even drove across it twice. The drive didn’t make me cry this time, but it still felt pretty miserable crossing it. As we drove across the bridge, I wondered if anyone walking across it was suicidal and thinking about jumping that day.

I googled the latest statistics on jumpers at the Golden Gate Bridge last night. In 2013, the number was around 1600. In the last three years, over 100 people have since jumped off, contributing to over 1700 deaths from this tragic “international orange” beauty. We will never know the actual number because of all the bodies that get swept out of the bay.

During my Google search, I found this New Yorker article published in 2003 — ten years before my brother jumped off. The article is aptly titled, “Jumpers: The fatal grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge.” This is the paragraph and quote that infuriated me the most:

“In 1976, an engineer named Roger Grimes began agitating for a barrier on the Golden Gate. He walked up and down the bridge wearing a sandwich board that said “Please Care. Support a Suicide Barrier.” He gave up a few years ago, stunned that in an area as famously liberal as San Francisco, where you can always find a constituency for the view that pets should be citizens or that poison oak has a right to exist, there was so little empathy for the depressed. “People were very hostile,” Grimes told me. “They would throw soda cans at me, or yell, ‘Jump!’”

When I read this quote, that was about all I had left for this city. This city makes me more mad every single time I come back to it. If it’s not the stupid parking fees in South of Market (where you have to feed your parking meter until 10pm) or the lack of attention to the homeless problem here (I actually detect a stench on Muni now; I must have just been blissfully ignorant before), then it’s how outwardly liberal this city is and how they truly do not give a crap about anyone other than themselves. They just want the perception of doing the right thing all the time. The dog and poison oak comment could not have been more true.

A suicide barrier has been debated since the bridge was unveiled and argued supremely in the 70s to lead to zero action, and finally in the 2010s, we’re actually seeing potential action. There really is zero empathy for those truly suffering from depression or those who are suicidal. It’s saddening to me that it still has to be so stigmatized where people don’t want to acknowledge it openly as a real health problem. I hate it when people are so awkward about my brother’s death. Why can we not just treat it as the disease that it actually is?

So when I Googled jumpers, I actually found YouTube videos of footage of people jumping off the bridge. This is real. Some film maker left his camera running and would record people one by one, month after month, jumping off that damn bridge. So one by one, I watched them jump. Some people climb over the ledge and jump off as though they are sitting. Others stand on the railing (they must have really good balance) and jump off. One did a little prayer and jumped off back first. Another removed his shoes neatly first and dove off like he was doing a dive into a swimming pool. The film shows their descent all the way down, 250 feet into the Bay. And all I could think as I watched each of these people jump was, which part of their body exploded or imploded first? Was it their ribs that shattered and punctured their lungs and heart? Or was it their neck that snapped first and had bones that scrambled their brains? The coroners have said that oftentimes when examining bodies, they see blood coming out of the victims’ ears, as well as organs oozing out. The Columbarium did a really good job cleaning my brother up. I’d ever have guessed he jumped off a bridge looking at his corpse in his coffin. I guess we did pay them to do that.

I wonder if there is footage of my brother jumping. I probably shouldn’t see it even if it is available. But I always wonder what he did in the last moments of his life — what his face looked like, if he was calm, if he was crying, if he was at peace with himself and the last decision he would ever make — to leave this world. I wonder if he dove in head first or if he jumped backwards. I also wonder what the effect was on the person who saw him jump and dial 911, and if s/he still thinks about my brother to this day.

This city will always be a reminder that my brother is gone. And thus a visit to San Francisco will never be absent of pain.

Touristy day in SF

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Today was a touristy San Francisco day starting at the Coit Tower, progressing into Chinatown, visiting the Ferry Building, and ending in the Financial District and Downtown to check in and have dinner at Chris’s hotel with my parents. I think that after seeing my parents and their mood over the last three days of all four of us being together, they are definitely the happiest when they are in San Francisco. Once they leave the city, they tend to get more moody and easily annoyed. Coit Tower and the general area around it holds a special place in my dad’s heart since he grew up in Chinatown, which is right next door to it, so as a child, he visited that area almost weekly. Outside of the Richmond and the Sunset, my mom’s third favorite neighborhood is undoubtedly Chinatown. She loves finding her bargains, especially her beloved bitter melon. Oddly enough, we found out my dad to this day had never visited the Ferry Building post renovation, and so we took him there to explore. The Ferry Building has become a massive tourist attraction, one that has more than anyone’s fill of expensive and borderline overpriced shops (overpriced because they guilt you into thinking they should cost that much because they are all local businesses). I’ve always loved browsing there since my early twenties, and I still love visiting it when I’m in town, especially when it’s to have lunch or try a dessert or have Blue Bottle Coffee. My parents enjoyed it in their own way, grimacing and complaining over the high prices and how ridiculous the vendors were to charge so much. I suppose we all get excited about different things, and ridiculous, overpriced goods are what excite my parents. At least they got a free meal at the end of the day to make them really happy.