Rant of the Exiles

I disagreed with my previous post even as I was writing it. It was something of a thought experiment. I was reading Weike Wang’s short story and thinking “Wow, her writing is amazing and she’s Chinese American. How come most Chinese American guys I know don’t communicate like this? Oh and it’s about dating a white guy and it’s about power dynamics. And oh, she’s married to a white guy in real life. Let’s write a provocative post about the intersection of all these ideas”. Oops.  I’m now aware of the numerous problems with my opinion piece starting with the misleading, clickbait title. I don’t actually think Asian American (AA) women have more “courage”, nor is the post really about courage. I couldn’t come up with a word that captures the specific aspect of EQ that involves verbal emotional expression, but Brene Brown’s concept of vulnerability came to mind and that’s how courage came about. I made unsubstantiated negative generalizations about AA women, AA men, and whi...

Update: What I learned after writing this.  What does the outsized willingness of Asian American women to date interracially reveal about courage vis-a-vis their male counterparts? It’s well-documented that Asian American women date and marry outside their race far more often than their male counterparts. Most estimate around a 2:1 ratio but I’ve read up to 4:1.   Weike Wang’s New Yorker short story perfectly captures the power asymmetry in Asian female-white male dating relationships with this memorable line: "So it was settled. The big question of why he was dating her was out of the way. Her Chineseness was not a factor. They were merely one out of a billion or so Asian girl–white guy couples walking around on this earth.” ONE BILLION Asian girl - white guy couples. That’s certainly what it feels like in the San Francisco bay area and other urban centers like New York City, where her story is set. It’s a trend I observed in my high school over two de...

[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...