Category: Blog

Puerto Rico holds my earliest memories.  As the children of Chinese immigrants, we grew up speaking Cantonese at home.  The front of our home in Rio Piedras hosted my father’s restaurant.  Unfortunately, we didn’t learn Spanish at home, save for a few moments of talking to the patrons at the restaurant.  By the time we enrolled in school, we needed to learn a new language.  Initially, we didn’t realize that the words we knew for trivial things like ‘shoe’ were different.

I believe that my parents enrolled me in school a year early.  I’m not sure if they wanted to give me a head start or simply wanted me out of their hair during the day.  I’m pretty sure that I failed that class and needed to repeat.  No harm, though; I landed in the class where my classmates were mostly my age.  While I could speak the language, I was still the only Chinese student in my modestly sized class.

Continue reading “See who I am” →

Let’s discuss the typical check-out line.  Let’s walk backwards in time through technology.  First, Amazon Go had aspirations to do “Just Walk Out” checkout, though it doesn’t seem to work reliably enough.  Second, many stores have transitioned to having a portion of their stations as self-checkout; you may scan (and bag) your own items and pay.  Next, they introduced the fast “X items or fewer” checkout lines, so that patrons with fewer items don’t need to wait for someone with a full cart.  Finally, they added UPC (bar code) readers; before that, each item had a sticker with a number, and cashiers needed to enter them (much like produce today) meticulously.

We developed all this technology (bar code and RFID readers) to optimize.  We reconfigured lines and checkout equipment to streamline.  Employers meticulously agonize over how many employees to have per shift.  All this to minimize one thing:  the amount of time you spend waiting in line.  We want to think that a few minutes ultimately don’t matter that much.  However, we have all waited in the “10 items or fewer” lines and counted the items in the cart in front of us.  You might as well admit it.

Continue reading “To do it “the right way”.” →

Growing up Chinese, my introduction to pizza was public school lunches.  We got sectioned trays where they could separate each course, like green beans.  On the days with pizza, the cooks in the kitchen would slice rectangular portions from a large, tall-lipped cookie sheet.  The school lunch slices ran a bit thicker than traditional circular pizza, and they didn’t fit into the largest rectangular section.

Naturally, I eventually tried traditional pizza.  I believe that it was Pizza Hut, though I honestly don’t remember if I was at the table or from take-out.  What many found to be perfectly normal, I found to be wildly exotic.

Continue reading “Pizza… Pizza…” →

Friends and family have often stated that I have a good memory.  For me, having only one data point, my memory is ‘average’, though many will dispute that.  I have referred to my memory as a virtual landfill of information, though in retrospect that doesn’t fit either.  The term “landfill” implies that it is filled with garbage, or items that are no longer useful.  Instead, I’ve come to compare the ideas bouncing in my head to a large tub full of Lego bricks.  Each brick has the potential to construct a much larger cohesive structure.  The same is true about the ideas in my head.

Today, we’ll return to high school biology.  “Wait, what?!”  That’s right, high school biology (and maybe a bit of algebra and chemistry sprinkled in).  The lesson of diffusion in biology is that particles move from a higher concentration to a lower concentration.  Furthermore, they also taught the lesson of osmosis, which is diffusion through a semipermeable membrane.  I’ll admit that I remember a rather unhealthy quantity of high school lessons.

Continue reading “How to increase the Christian population” →

I grew up in Puerto Rico from early childhood.  My family spoke Cantonese at home.  I attended Catholic school; my teachers conducted our classes in Spanish, save for our English class.  Along with our regular classes like reading and mathematics, they taught religion.  Naturally, they taught religion in Spanish; therefore, I learned the Spanish names of the apostles.  During one of our grades, they prepared us for our first communion.

In early childhood, I grew up with each foot planted in two different cultures.  We spoke Cantonese at home, and along with the language came the culture, though we learned this in a trickle.  We didn’t attend an intensive Chinese language program.  Instead, we learned our culture much like others hear stories around a campfire.  To this day, I don’t know if certain ideas (like aversion to going to bed with wet hair) were strictly my mom’s baggage or a genuine Chinese belief.

Continue reading “It’s not just about kids being cruel” →

For years, I had a ritual on Friday mornings.  It’s a subtle reference to Office Space.  On Fridays, I’d wear a Hawaiian shirt to work.  That’s the extent of it, but others wore them too.  We were modest in count, but strong in consistency.  We wore them year-round, independent of the weather.  We were our Hawaiian shirt brigade.  I continued even upon moving teams.  One subsequent team dressed up on Fridays once a month, and I participated on both by wearing a festive tie with my Hawaiian shirt.  I would not be denied.

Upon moving to a new company, I started work during the pandemic.  While I could not physically participate with my teammates in wearing Hawaiian shirts on Fridays, I still established that tradition.  We established a channel on our communications application dedicated to precisely this, “Hawaiian Shirt Fridays”.  Even now, after we have returned to the office, we still work remotely on Fridays for the most part.  A number of us dutifully post selfies of ourselves in our colorful shirts.

Continue reading “Those things you’ve ruined” →

A few weeks ago, we had a morale event at work.  Our morale committee does an exceptional job selecting different venues for events.  We held this particular event at Canvas.  These days, people often turn their passions into businesses.  Today, we would drink alcohol and paint on canvas.  They instructed us to park across the street at the public parking structure near the library and walk across.  As we filed in, they ordered us to put on an apron and pick a station.  Each station held two drink tickets.

I took two tickets off one of the stations farthest away from the front.  I had to leave early, and thus I didn’t participate in the painting.  However, I joined my friends with drinks while I watched the shop give basic instructions on how to paint a mountainous, evening landscape.  Each station has schmears of white, black, and a couple of blues.  Since I did not participate in the painting, I never put on an apron.

Continue reading “Losing our humanity” →

I still have my Florida driver’s license. Upon arriving in Washington decades ago, I replaced my Florida driver’s license with a Washington one. They punched a hole in my old one to render it unofficial, but they allowed me to keep it.  I tucked it away in some drawer in my office.  Occasionally, when I dig into that drawer, I see it and marvel at my picture from the 1980s.  I even look at some of the other details.

It explicitly lists a restriction for corrective lenses, which I’ve worn since my teens.  It also displays a one-letter code for ‘race’.  I still distinctly remember the conversation with the person from the department of licensing when I first got my license.  I asked if I may list my race on my license.  Their response, “You may, but it’s optional.”  That one-letter code for me was O, for ‘Oriental’.

Continue reading “Limits to religious freedom” →

There’s a funny clip from the movie, LA Story.  Friends gather for lunch, which includes familiar faces and some new guests.  One such new guest is Sara, a British writer visiting the Los Angeles area to write a story about the city.  During lunch, LA is struck by an earthquake.  First, everything rattles.  Second, the tables shake out of their positions and shuffle around.  Next, items start to fall, and even the ice sculpture cracks, decapitating a melting swan.  While this event naturally distresses Sara, the others’ reactions intrigue her.  The LA natives blissfully continue their meal as if nothing happened.  That subtle, though intentional, joke implies that, as dangerous as earthquakes can be, they’re so common in Los Angeles that they’re neither newsworthy nor even noteworthy.

I get it; there’s an aura of “When in Rome” to it all.  On a particular vacation trip to Miami, I drove north on Interstate 95 along the coast.  I drove past a fire engine on the shoulder of the freeway; it sat immediately behind a car lit aflame.  As I observed the black smoke and bright orange flames from that car, I also noted that the traffic had not slowed down significantly.  Sure, some motorists looked in quiet fascination, but the traffic had barely slowed from the evening pace.  Had this been my new home state of Washington, traffic would’ve been stuck for hours.

Continue reading “376 good guys with guns” →

Many advise against buying the first house you look at; we did.  Our friend alerted us to new construction in a great location.  I entered the address into the GPS (yes, it was that long ago) and off we went, except it didn’t take us to the place in question.  This neighborhood was so new that the years-old GPS had no record of its existence.  As the crafty engineer, I pulled over and reasoned through where this location should be and, after a few minutes, found the address.  We toured the model; it’d end up being our new home.

However, we didn’t know it at the time.  We liked the location, but the builder priced it out of our comfortable price range.  Initially, we found Linda, a real estate agent with whom we had great rapport.  She ended up driving us into neighborhoods, showing us many homes.  That first neighborhood had only built homes for about half the lots so far, so we even toyed with the idea of building our new home. 

Continue reading “Our neighborhood as a microcosm” →