Rant of the Exiles

[Spoiler alert - no major plot twists revealed but I quote from the book. I haven’t seen the show] My wife cautioned me when I picked it up. “It’s really feminist.” She told me a couple times. I hadn’t read a Margaret Atwood book yet but heard she was an amazing writer and the TV show was getting press.  The Handmaid’s Tale is a great novel. It accomplishes exactly what dystopian fiction is meant to do - to imagine contemporary culture, twisted in one particular way so that its corresponding ripple effect reverberates throughout every aspect of society. The prose is brilliant, the images evocative, but most of all, it’s haunting. There’s a sense of dread that accompanies the main character, Offred, throughout the story. The narrative is told solely from Offred’s perspective, as if you’re reading her diary. There are moments when the storm clouds of dread momentarily clear and rays of light peek through. The tension keeps ratcheting up, with brief episodes of dissipation. Al...

Sometimes ideas linger in the back of one’s mind like dirt at the bottom of a swimming pool - dormant, unnoticed yet hiding in plain sight. They are left lying at the edge of one’s consciousness for years because they’re too unsettling and difficult to articulate. Only when a cleaning implement rustles them that one becomes aware of how filthy the environment really is.  For decades, I had suspected an affair might exist but the fact of it eluded me until a recent disruption. The problem with this tryst  is that it ’ s hidden from one of the partners. The relationship functions at the subconscious level. The rustling started with conversations some friends and I had about race, ethnicity, and culture. This dialogue birthed a desire to read a book or study a curriculum together on the topic. One friend recommended Daniel Hill’s White Awake , a book about diagnosing the hidden cancer of white supremacy in American evangelicalism. Earlier this week some members o...

It was 6:30 AM on a Saturday morning. Five-year old Tommy looked up from his Chinese homework and protested: "But mom why do I have to study?" Ai-Ling looked down and as she stroked Tommy’s hair affectionately, looked out the window at the sunrise and said:  "Tommy, studying is about learning. Learning is the greatest beauty. Some day you will attend an Ivy League school, take literature classes, and immerse yourself in the work of giants. Your mind will expand and grow as far as the horizon, like the radiance of the sun rising into the sky." The preceding sentence has never been uttered in an Asian* household. And yet I’m certain the scene of early morning studying has been replayed often. This the premise of Bryan Caplan’s book, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money , that education is anywhere from 30-80% signaling. Signaling is communication. Education communicates to employers that you’re suitab...

“All models are wrong but some are useful”  - statistician George Box I was startled this morning by my friend Todd's (not his real name) example of how personality tests are reductive and unreliable. According to the Enneagram, his personality type tends to avoid emotionally charged situations. Todd then cited a recent instance where he encountered a crying coworker in the elevator and instead of walking away, he approached her and listened to what was going on. He easily stepped outside the box of his personality type: Todd 1, Enneagram 0.  Contrary to common perception, the Enneagram is not witchcraft. It has some Christian roots .  The problem with personality tests like Myers-Briggs, 16PF,  and DISC assessment is some people swear by them and these fanatics tend to see everyone and everything through the lens of the test, often in reductionistic and deterministic ways. So in a conversation, I might say “I ate too much last night and I fe...

[1400 words, 8 minute read] During the start of Linsanity in 2012, Jeremy Lin spent a night sleeping on the couch of his New York Knicks teammate. After Lin exploded in popularity, Taiwanese and mainland Chinese reporters expressed concern over his lodging situation, repeatedly asking him if he had found more permanent digs. Western media had a field day with the question - the idea of a stranger publicly worrying over a NBA player’s living situation was preposterous. And yet this is classic Asian culture - unsolicited care-taking for an independent, capable adult.  According to Cloud and Townsend’s seminal book , boundaries are anything that helps to differentiate you from someone else. According to Bowen theory (a widely accepted psychology in Western culture), this is what self-differentiation looks like: “People with a poorly differentiated “self” depend so heavily on the acceptance and approval of others that either they quickly adjust what they think, say, and do to...

I posted something two years ago about dating an emotionally repressed Asian guy and recently received two correspondences regarding the comment . Here’s an email from a young woman: "My boyfriend is Korean-American, born to immigrant parents and raised in New Jersey in a heavily Korean area. All of his friends from home are Korean. We met in college and were friends for about a year before we started dating. Since the beginning of the relationship I knew that he was always reluctant to share his feelings, but I know that he has them deep inside him and that they are just shown in different ways. I accepted early on that he has different love languages than me. Everything in our relationship was going well for about a year, but towards the one year mark he started to say no to many activities I wanted to do, or outings I wanted to go on, saying that he was busy with school or projects or just tired. I thought we were just going through a busy time and that he would soon be...

Kevin Kwan’s 2013 book, Crazy Rich Asians , tells a modern tale of the ultra-rich Chinese diaspora in Singapore. The novel has now been made into a movie coming out August 17th that stars Constance Wu of Fresh off the Boat fame. The book follows three families - the Youngs, T’siens, and Shangs. The central protagonists are Nick Young and his girlfriend, Rachel Chu. Nick is from an old money, ultra-rich Singaporean Chinese family. Rachel is an American-born Chinese (ABC) who grew up middle-class in Cupertino and has no clue about Nick’s family background.  They’re both professors at NYU which is where they meet and begin dating. The plot of the book surrounds Rachel’s visit to Singapore, being initiated into Nick’s ultra-rich family (who  have  no idea she exists), and the hijinks that ensue.  One enjoyable and unique thing about the book is the sprinkling of Malay, Mandarin, and Cantonese phrases in dialogue throughout. It’s classic Chinglish. That’s ...