Category: Blog

Years ago, a good friend read my long posts on Facebook and suggested I move my writing to a legitimate blog.  At the time, angst consumed me, and I shouted into the darkness.  His suggestion intrigued me.  This idea wouldn’t be that far-fetched; I kept an online journal many years before.  However, the type and style of the writing would be different.  This idea bounced around in my head for a while.  I always intended to return to writing, but not like this.

As it happens, starting a blog would be relatively simple.  You can register a domain for $20 a year; the price of hosting it will be a little more.  That’s if you want your own distinctive home on the web; there are plenty of websites that will host your blog free of charge.  However, I felt that if I wanted to do this legitimately, I should get my own domain.  Then the gears started churning.

Continue reading “Finding my imperfect self” →

Modern technology has almost eliminated the need to visit banks.  These days, I rarely find myself visiting a bank, or more specifically, an ATM (automated teller machine), unless I travel.  Still, if you’ve regularly used an ATM, at some point you would’ve probably used a drive-up ATM.  I’ll let you in on a little secret about drive-up ATMs; they outfitted them with Braille on the keypads for each of the numbers.  Some likely think that I made this up; I didn’t.

You may ask, “How would a person who is blind ever drive up to an ATM?”  However, they constructed drive-up ATM’s this way intentionally.  First, the most obvious explanation is that the user may operate from the back seat as a passenger.  This scenario is perfectly reasonable, especially since the drive-up ATM’s often keep longer hours than the bank itself.  Second, it costs less money to design, manufacture, distribute, and manage the inventory for one panel instead of two.  Since having the raised dots for Braille does not prevent anyone else from using the keypad, they all have them.

Continue reading “Wishing you happy holidays” →

On a day in late August 1977, my father passed away.  He was the model of health; it happened suddenly.  One moment, he was cooking in the kitchen of our family restaurant; the next moment, my mom took him to the hospital.  He died that night.  He didn’t just leave emptiness, as if he walked to the next room.  He had presence; he left a vacuum in his wake.  I was nine years old.

The family that remained was my mom and my two sisters, ages thirteen and seven.  We had no actual family here in Puerto Rico, but friends flooded our home that day.  They were effectively family; we even called them by the Chinese words for “aunt” and “uncle”.  I had never seen so many of our friends together at once.

Continue reading “To dismantle the hierarchy” →

I spent my early years in Puerto Rico; this tropical island holds my earliest memories.  My family spoke Cantonese at home; this is the first language I learned.  My father ran a Chinese restaurant, which was also our home.  I learned some Spanish while chatting with family friends and patrons.  However, I officially learned Spanish when I enrolled in Catholic school.  All the other children learned the subjects taught in school; I had all those in addition to learning a foreign language.

Once they started teaching English as well, it proved to be too much for my brain; I failed that class.  While I understood early on that my sisters and I were different from the remaining students, classmates didn’t really treat me any differently.  I mean, we spoke Cantonese and were obviously different races, but it wasn’t a thing.

Continue reading “Donde cabe diez, cabe once” →

Drosophila melanogaster.  The biological name of a common fruit fly used for biological research due to its rapid life cycle.  I learned that in high school biology over forty years ago.  I don’t have it tattooed on my arm; I simply remember it.  I’ve occasionally described the random facts in my head to a landfill.  Save for perhaps a trivia game, knowing the scientific name of the common fruit fly will never be useful.  I should just jettison it like jetsam.

I retained a disproportionate amount of civics, which is the study of government.  I remembered details about the branches of government and how they all functioned.  Strangely, I don’t remember if that class was in middle school or high school, nor do I even remember the teacher who taught the lessons; I just remembered the facts.  Though much of this also came through osmosis on Saturday morning cartoons and Schoolhouse Rock.  Where I learned about how bills are passed, and even the preamble to the US Constitution.  I can still hear the tune in my head.

Continue reading “Race ≠ Nationality” →

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” →