Category: Blog

Decades ago, I moved from Florida to Washington state after graduating to start my professional career.  While conversing with friends they told me this outrageous tale that occurred here in the Pacific Northwest.  The story goes that a whale had become beached in Oregon and died.  The decomposing whale had literally become a stinking problem and the locals contemplated how to remedy this problem.  They concluded that the easiest way to address the issue was to blow it up with dynamite, which would vaporize the whale.

Continue reading “What do exploding whales have to do with racism?” →

The year is around 1980.  I, a boy about twelve years-old, quietly exit the school bus; I hope to avoid detection.  Unfortunately, I do not.  The bullies subsequently harass me as I walk home in quiet humiliation.  Repeatedly, they shove me hard enough to lose my balance and fall to the ground.  The bullies continue yard after yard.  Other kids meanwhile watch in fascination as they witness the altercation but do not intervene.

Months later, I attend school like any other day.  Some boys and I take a break between classes, and we start to horse-play.  In one of those exchanges one boy shoved me much like those instances off the bus.  This shove was different; this time another boy kneeled behind me.  In this position, I failed to break my fall and land squarely on my clavicle, fracturing it.  I initially believed that they merely dislocated it; my friend naively tried to pop it back in place.  It hurt… a lot.  With the pain persisting, I went to the school nurse, who consequently called my mom.

Continue reading “Are your intentions honorable?” →

I first discovered baseball in my teens, and it’s a passion that has cycled from casual to ardent.  I’ve never played the game, not even in a league.  I think my interest stems from my fascination with numbers and my alleged ability to endlessly recall facts that elude so many others.  I was indoctrinated by some very wise and witty voices that taught so many interesting tales about the game.

Fast forward to 2001, this is a year where my attention to baseball is heightened.  It is midway through the baseball season.  I wait in line at a Barnes and Noble with a baseball book in hand.  The man behind me sees the book, turns to me, and comments, “Isn’t this season great?”

Continue reading “Identifying with a team” →

We all have those moments when we’re flying; we get into that mode.  This is an account of a day of travel.  First, my initial flight takes off late; I normally schedule a moderate layover, but this was going to cut it close.  Next, we land in Texas.  It was either Dallas or Houston; I don’t remember.  My second flight has yet to depart, which is in an entirely different concourse.  I barely have enough time to arrive at the next gate.  The moment the plane stops, I grab my bags and deplane as quickly as possible.  I stop only long enough to get my bearings in an unfamiliar airport.  Finally, I conclude that the quickest way to get to my next gate is the shuttle between concourses.  That’s precisely what I do.

Continue reading “Is this racism?” →

A Chinese boy sits in a warm classroom in Puerto Rico.  He learned Cantonese from his parents, and they don’t speak Spanish at home.  His first experience speaking the native tongue is Kindergarten, where he needs to catch up.  This boy is now in third grade; he learned to print and write in cursive.  His teacher calls upon him to read and he reads as competently as anyone else in his class.  This boy is me around 1976.

As our teacher calls upon different students to read, there are two students (a boy and a girl) who consistently struggle; they’re siblings if memory serves.  They seem perfectly competent at everything else but struggle to read.  Naturally, each student will struggle and excel at different subjects, but this felt different.  The way that they read almost seemed as if they transposed letters.

Continue reading “We are not ‘confusing’ them” →

Years after I left Florida, I stopped to visit a Chinese friend of the family on a return visit.  He was a friend of my mom’s, but he and I also worked together for a while.  He now owned his own business.  I admired him for his kindness and respected him for his principle.  He gave me room to be myself apart from the pressures from the community.  We caught up in our respective lives.  I asked about his business; he asked about my life as an engineer.  Eventually, he makes a suggestion, which sounded more like a directive, “You should go back to China to find a wife.  It’d make your mom happy.  It is our people.”

Continue reading “Finding my Asian-American voice” →

I hate daylight saving time.  I have no preference for one time over the other, but I detest the process of abruptly and arbitrarily offsetting your time by one hour.  Many devices will automatically adjust their own time, but some won’t.  Most of us will still have one device where we either don’t know how to set the time, or it is too much of a nuisance.  For me, that device is the stereo in my car.  We end up making that one compromise; we won’t set the time but make a mental adjustment that the time displayed is an hour off.  The time will be right again in a few months.

Continue reading “Debugging our prejudice” →

I sat in my Senior English class in high school.  Our classroom opens into the hallway; movable panels separate our classroom from the next.  This particular classroom sits on the end of our hallway.  I spent a fair number of my afternoon hours in this room that year.  One afternoon, I got into a discussion with a classmate, he was popular and the class president, if memory serves.  During this discussion he calls me a ‘sumo wrestler’.  I am both Chinese (not Japanese) and overweight.

It was a derogatory reference to both my race and my weight.  Having dealt with interactions like this often, I understood that while I need not escalate, I did need to respond.  In my mind, I searched for a proportional response.  I called him a ‘spook’; yes, he was black.  I knew it was derogatory and racist, and I still did it.

Continue reading “How much do we really value life?” →

I grew up Chinese (unyieldingly rational?) and have a natural inclination for engineering problems.  No, these are not correlated.  Some allege that I have artistic tendencies too.  Many years ago, I got a Wacom tablet to draw on my computer.  However, it worked great except for one thing, I naturally use my right hand for everything.  Allow me to elaborate; I had both a mouse and drawing tablet to the right of my keyboard and in order to use them both interchangeably I needed to move the mouse pad and tablet back and forth.  My engineering mind decided that I could fix this with a very simple adjustment…  I’d move one left of the keyboard and start to use it with my left hand.

Continue reading “Who we are and who we love aren’t ‘choices’” →

I have a confession to make, I’m a bit of a traditionalist.  Many of my tastes lean towards the retrospective; I won’t apologize for it.  It’s not quite the “kids get off my lawn” sentiment, but still I may sound like that crochety old man at times.  I speculate that it’s a function of a couple of forces.  First, I have good memory and knowing precisely how something works and behaves brings great comfort.  Second, I’m a sentimentalist.

Continue reading “There’s nothing wrong with retro” →