I like to think she was near-clueless. As near-clueless as someone could be heading to Paris, the “City of Light,” with their significant other. Near clueless up to the very last moment when I had asked a local to take a photo of us standing at the tip of Ile Saint-Louis.

As a form of misdirection, I had begun the trip with 9 polaroids printed for the occasion. After a little insistence, she agreed to my plan to recreate my favorite photographs from significant moments throughout our relationship: her 22nd birthday (and my 25th), our first vacation to Hawaii, the night of her acceptance to law school (as well as our first formal together in her 1L year). Even as far back as our third date at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts where Rachel shrunk in shyness when I extended my phone to a stranger.

After a few clicks, he reached back out to return my phone. Despite a petite revolt from Rachel, I asked if he could, again, take a couple shots with his professional camera conveniently (again, not suspicious at all) around his neck. To recreate the last polaroid photo, I put my hand around her waist, her back facing me.

When she felt my trembling hands the second time I held her waist, the jig was up.

Friends that find the time to grab dinner or take walks with me often ask another popular question. Well, how did I know she was the one?

So, here’s a little bit about Rachel.

Her favorite movie is Ratatouille because of the innocent joy she re-lives when rooting for Remy the rat, the champion of the belief that “anyone can cook.” Her ability to sleep is only outmatched by her ability to eat and not finish her food. And her favorite flowers are tulips but she won’t keep a bouquet from you for fear of our cat eating a poisonous pedal.

On the topic of our cat, here’s a little bit about Sir Franklin.

Despite the engagement, I am in an active love triangle, my record stands (at best) at 50-50 with our cat. Because Franklin can neither read nor write to defend himself, I should take the opportunity to slander him. Frankie doesn’t know the difference between me and any of my Asian relatives. Frankie will sleep indiscriminantly next to any warm body, like a dog. I’ve seen symptoms of early onset dementia: forgetting why he’s standing or laying where he is, jumping up without warning to attack the nearest hand or foot, and he smells bad, often. He is an orange cat’s orange cat.

Frankie being the most vivid example, I fell in love with the way in which she loves. I remember how she would jolt in sheer delight when a long-forgotten candy re-appears on a shelf. And her gourmet process of decorating Frankie’s food bowl with bone broth, kibbles, and treats. How she’d skip on the pavement to a Red Lobster or Olive Garden dinner, more excited for American comfort cuisine than a NYC Michelin diner. How quick she is to laugh with, for, and at me.

Finding joys in the ordinary experiences is a gem of a quality. Our relationship started when I was unemployed, unproven, and uncertain about myself. Our first dates were walks (along Charles), drives (to Framingham), and conversations (to anywhere). She loved me all the same back then as she does now. Finding gems within the most ordinary of people and places is something I treasure. Something I don’t believe many people understand.

It would be as if an esteemed French chef believing that a sewer rat can cook.

At our 6-month anniversary, I gifted Rachel a promise. I printed out a boarding pass for an all-expense covered, round-trip to Paris with a redemption date of 3/20/2026, our five-year anniversary. In that way, the engagement was five years in the making.

Three months before the date, I was up at 6:30am Hawaii Time communicating with my ring designer on various shapes, curves, settings I wanted to see in the 3D renderings. Thank god I was a consultant because of my ability to turn my Pinterest wall into a Powerpoint roadmap / next steps.

Two months before the proposal, I had found my French photographer Pierre, and we started discussing locations, time of day, and proposal method. Rachel had once told me that she dreaded being proposed to in public. Thankfully, the week I was in Paris was supposed to be colder and cloudier than the week before. Maybe less idyllic without the perfect sunset along the Siene, but that also meant there were less tourists and locals crowding the same lookouts.

One month before the proposal, I saw the exact location I had in mind to propose in the middle of my Financial Times paper. As a believe in serendipity, I emailed Pierre immediately. On our next 5:30am zoom call, I gave him the exact location where I would plant him to wait for me to ask him to photograph us, him pretending to be a local.

A couple night prior to our departing flight from Newark.

Christian: “Wow, does it not scare you how fast life goes?

Rachel: “I don’t mind. As long as I’m with you.”

This superlative did not come without its share of tribulations. For those familiar with the painful cadence of symphonic practice, the bass section could be sitting for minutes with nothing to do as the violin section repeatedly practiced an arpeggio with some contorted triplets at increasing tempos, and it was our job to appear focused while everyone took a quick respite. I enjoyed the quiet static of inattention that had the comforting sensation of ironing over my over-focused mind. But I missed my entrance, and I missed the second attempt at the entrance. Unluckily after that, I missed the look from our conductor that preceded a chewing out that brought a hush over the entire orchestra. One girl came up to me with a look so pitiful, I felt sympathy for her. “How did you not cry? He was being so mean to you,” she asked. In the midst of the pointed tirade, I hadn’t fully return to my body until after the barking was over. When rehearsal ended, I slowly realized how pitiful it was for me to fail to act in my own body, powerless to only stand by as a witness at a distance.

What most of my friends don’t know about me is that I’ve always used my absent-minded tendencies to drive myself past the point of return. Even to this day, a successful morning is one where I bring my body to the gym immediately after my feet touch the floor—allowing routine to take over before awareness sets in. By the time I regain presence around 8:45 a.m., I’m already showered, seated, and somehow refreshed from an intense workout I barely remember.

That spacious backseat of my mind has been a quiet advantage for decades, helping me push through dull, challenging, and repetitive discomfort while on autopilot. When I was younger, I fantasized about lucid dreaming at night— perhaps practicing Chinese in my sleep and waking up with new vocabulary. This ability to “unplug” as I put myself to work became the closest thing: circular breathing task to rest while I worked. It’s led me to operate the way I currently do: either fully here—or completely disconnected.

I share all this with you because I’d like this post to mark a turning point (maybe more of a bend on the road). My fifth year reunion invited me to be present in a way that felt more fluid. I don’t have the words to express this sense of connectedness I felt, but I’ve jotted down some of the weekend’s reflections below to not forget the meaning I felt to stay present and experiencing more modes of being that on and off.

Friday Night: Landry Hockey Stadium

In the first night of my reunion, they held the 5th year reunion along with the 10 year alumni at the ice hockey rink for dinner. It might have been me, but did my graduating class feel friendlier than I remembered? More patient and receptive? Perhaps our livelihoods had begun to converge in a way that sanded our jagged edges.

I get it now. I understood the significance of achieving a 67% gross margin in your business product. I could understand how one could be so interested in dividend payments as an equity researcher and all that it represents about a company. I’ve even started doing some of this too. I could also frame my understanding of commodities and structured finance in a more concrete way now that invites others in to poke around and inspect the plumbing. Following our quick introductions, there were exchanges— real exchanges— phone numbers, plans to meet for coffee at Riverside Park, work we could do together in Tribeca.

There was something truly relaxing to present myself in my life with little or no context and have the other person immediately understand. It was as if old friends had a chance to meet for the first time again. For me, the emotional release came from a shift in the group’s value away from a yearning for permanence and towards a mutual embrace of how uncertain life tends to be. More often than not, I’d find stories of people who have moved cities multiple times, changed jobs once or twice, and pivoted their priorities a number of times. People, like me, who had encountered the illusion of permanence as a practice, but continued to aspire towards consistency as an ideal.

Sat Afternoon: Science Center Tent

When the class photo was finished in the morning, I found my way down the steps of Widener, and, since my friends were late to the photo, I made my way to where they were waiting around the yard. I walked past my freshmen dorm where I took a hundred photos during move-in day, and exited the iconic black gates enclosing Harvard square. At the John F. Kennedy crosswalk waiting to get to the CO-OP, an older emotion greeted me where as an undergraduate, I felt red-hot frustration at the red stoplight from keeping me from my morning classes, even though I woke up five minutes before class begun. There used to be the world’s only Curious George store at this intersection, which was a hallmark that I pointed out in the car when my parents first drove down the campus’ cobblestone streets. At the change of light, the meek sunlight slipped through the clearing clouds as the last traces of rainfall evaporated in the air in front of me and I saw my friends smiling up at me. I towards them with outstretched arms.

These friends in particular have seen me grow at a level in which I tend to work on myself at — my intentions. Over Pinnochio’s pizza, I caught up with them on their life: first year of medical school, relationship updates, and near-term future plans to visit me in NYC. Oh how refreshing it was to hear them complain!

Negligent managers, egotistical CEOs, classmates cheating with GPT, and the shocking reflection that our work as undergraduate researchers have already been automated by AI. The laughs and stories were fulfilling in a lonely, larger-life-perspective way. No where else do I feel more understood than by those that share my past. So, I tried asking more questions to hear more of their stories instead and register their voices and mannerisms. The more their stories filled me with warmth, the more our conversations started trailing into the backdrop the way voices sound in our memory. I missed the nonsense and pointless chatter irreproducible as we aged.

Somewhere along my current pursuit to clear the “brush” impeding my daily routine, I’ve filed away this beautiful chatter. It’s useful for me now to belittle my small mistakes and focus on positive progress. As a consequence, I’ve lost sensitivity to the universal inconveniences that come with living. It dawned on me over this lunch that this distance from self (my own experiences) from my on-off way of executing each day seemed less agreeable. Symptoms included: spotty recollection of details at any phase in life and a loss of continuity and conviction in my overarching intentions. Even the stories about the last week felt hazy.

There had to be another way to live without dissolving.

Sunday Morning: Quad Yard Tent

What started off as an ironic challenge for myself to meet 25 new people at Reunion (for 2025) became a rallying mantra when I felt too tired to attend an event. How this manifested was being extra social at a table, introducing myself to the person further left than my immediate left, and breaking into new circles of friends when I recognized one acquaintance. Not only did I surprise myself with the energy I felt when I encountered a sincere connection, but also how long I lasted.

Over brunch, I had confided to a new acquaintance that at this very moment, I felt that I was coming up against an invisible “wall” that disrupted my momentum that I’ve maintain the last couple of years. I didn’t have the vocabulary for it at the time, but I’m writing this in part to follow up on that conversation because I’ve begun to uncover some threads of truths for myself that would in fact re-direct my future focuses, even if by a little.

Progress has always been incremental in my history, and the repeating themes of the weekend around where meaning is created is very difficult to incremental-ize. Here’s one truth: meaning is lost in the backseat of my mind even if my progress has traditionally been made here. And somewhere within the clutter that I’ve cleared from my routine lies important emotions and details that I’d like to pick up and carry along with me on this journey. And lastly, to have conversations is the way we all sift through our clutter of our past, present and future. And having a connection with someone that accomplishes this conversation requires you not to move, not to have a desire to move, not to plan a future move. It requires your past, present and future presence.

In Conclusion

The below is a working draft of my answer to the question of meaning from this weekend. Don’t quote me if this ends up being revised in the future…

Where does my meaning come from? It comes from an insistence to insert ourselves into circumstances we care for, not only those we’ve initiated, but instances you allowed yourself to be affected by. Though it may not seem like a significant life shift, it is a big change in posture for my focus to be outward rather than inward, to remain still rather than in motion, and to acknowledge details that are both pleasant and unpleasant along the journey.

25 years old, 26 years old

Aging is a lot like traveling, except no one’s arrived.

Instead, we’re all arriving. Wrinkled tees, scurried sandals under a dark pavement, I was taking trash outside to the green garbage bin somewhere around our new apartment complex, bullfrogs sounds from afar. O how I would look up at the moon in unwanted, unknown yearning. The essence of being 10 is oblivion. Pure, unbothered oblivion.

The night I walked out of the theater after watching La La Land, I remembered looking up at the moon on my walk back to my freshmen college dorm. Imagine if life could contain these certain, beautiful details. If my life could resemble something close to the colors, lights, and action… That was the day I felt the right to want take over the need to survive. To want gave me an endless budget of time to explore, and that’s what I did for seven years following the start of college.

Each passing year is a reminder that where I'm headed will be unlike anything I've experienced up to this point. I expect every facet of life to be disrupted. I plan to undergo personal reconstruction, and like Theseus' ship, each thought of mine will be updated if not replaced through my life experiences. The process is piecemeal and the effects are permanent.

It strikes me so curiously for me to read such welcoming words of complete destruction, even from a year ago. It’s an interesting question: to “feel oneself.” On a daily basis, I can tell you there’s a rudimentary crank and lever machine powered by constant motion and emotion. We simply can’t extricate the performance that make up our behaviors and our being ourselves. Unless you choose to step away from others, and grapple in a vacuum with ones existence.

Every crank is a question, and the machine spins on. If you crank harder and better, then perhaps the disparate frames from one thought to another present something cogent. A flicker of film, for viewers, standing in a circle at a housewarming party.

The brief thought is worth a mention, even if it isn’t complete. That’s the challenge that’s posed by our social reality, isn’t it? The rest of your life gives you the space, time and resources for an elegant answer to its machinery.

A cynic knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. Only recently have I internalized the real value of my time - and it isn’t linear, it isn’t transactional, and it isn’t what anyone says it is.

When by myself, my future often feels like an endowment to someone foreign to who I currently am. He will neither speak like me nor think like me, and his taste and values will certainly not be attuned to my current reality. To what do I owe this stranger in 50 years?

At 23, my answer was consistency.

At 24, my answer was commitment.

At 25, my answer is was continuity.

At 26, my answer is conviction.

My journal entries have changed, I've noticed. I write less prescriptively. I write less factually. I write less certainly. I write less.

I try more. I fear less, but I still fear success. The sort of success that desensitizes you. The one that hands you the illusion of control or a slowly strangling sense of entitlement.

So I move slow, and I think small.  I extend myself, but I don't write about them like I used to anymore. I don't feel the need to see them to know they're mine. Yet I've still grown. I dream longer, I laugh louder, and I sleep better. Each word sounds clearer and each silent weighs heavier. There's conviction in place of where noise once was. My writing is better, because I've only recently stopped deceiving myself that finished sentences were final.

As a kid, I loved buffets. As an adult, I realized it's one large meal. Life is a lazy Suzan that spins and gives and takes, it gets cold when out for too long, and you're constantly thinking about that one plate that got away. Each year since turning 22, I've taken half the plates off the lazy Susan so I can focus on my meal. Yet on my plate, is another buffet. In allowing myself to appreciate each bite, I worry less about finishing.

The whole ordeal of living as a 25 year old feels like an executive enterprise. At this age, you want to thrust yourself into a thriving professional environment, dress yourself (and your partner) in a suitable social outfit, and curate memorable presence. Personality is an expensive sport in New York City. Knowing all of this, I still choose to play. Not because I care for all the glamour of the city, but because this is the right place and time to paint myself onto my surroundings.

Spoiler alert: 25 was not an executive enterprise. There were at most two stars in my galaxy: my bed and my office desk, from which all my life’s activities orbited at a 30-minute-MBTA-ride velocity around their immense gravities.

26 feels more like an artistic endeavor. A strong desire to inject beauty into my work. Somewhere in this non-linear value of my time, I must grapple with the relevance of ideals in my overwhelmingly physical world. How does one reveal oneself honestly, boldly, but also fashionably?

To what do I owe this stranger in 50 years? Nothing, really. I owe far more to the 10 year old that had never wanted much, but to be independent, successful, and confident. The least I can do is offer him the continuity he deserves for the work he's put in.

To what do I owe this stranger in 50 years? Stories for their patience and perseverance. It’s taken me 26 years to even articulate my thoughts, I’m practically a babbling baby still. I’m starting to believe in the value of having a story you’re proud to tell, a story that was yours to make and speaks for you even when you’re gone. As much as it may cost you to write it (in time, in identity, in confidence, in beliefs), isn’t successful living choosing your sacrifices?

“You are 93% exactly what I'm looking for: you're very proactive, hungry, aggressive and that's very good. That's almost impossible to find or train. The 7% I'm unsure of. It boils down to whether you're self-aware enough to know when you're doing too much, and it's really a question of your judgment. For instance, you often ask questions that falls just outside of your knowledge. I can't tell whether your intent is to impress me or engage me, because the line between very low self esteem and very high self esteem is a thin one.”

Honest feedback is hard to come by. So when I receive this thought-provoking message from my MD, it’s trapped in my mind for a meaningful amount of time before I let it go. In the case of the 7%, I held this question close to heart for my entire flight to Honolulu, wondering what exactly is the nature of this 7% and where it came from.

When I was 10 years old, my mom took me to the school auditorium to pick up my first violin. Musty and poorly ventilated, the space was packed with students and parents weaving in and out of the many classrooms tucked away deep in hallways like pockets on cargo shorts. Walking up to the music room, I remember smelling rosin, the coniferous-based resin applied to wooden string instruments. I was entering Sugarmill Elementary School as a new student, and this was the third gymnasium of five that I would eventually step into by the time I finished sixth grade. For those that don’t know me, transiency was practically a philosophy of mine, and with less and less remorse, I learned to carry myself with lightness and minimalism to each of the seven schools I drifted in and out of before college.

Let's start with the obvious: I’m not an non-eccentric guy. That is to say my social reflexes are duller when it comes to social boundaries that drive group cohesion. If I was bent to do something, in my mind, it was never a good enough reason to act out of shame or anxiety. In fact, I made a promise to myself that if I ever felt shame for anything (be it dancing in public or singing karaoke), I had to do it in direct opposition to that emotional response, no matter what. Ironically, over the course of my life, the desensitization to external judgement has helped me achieve the highest results in and out of school simply because I became unthinking in stretching myself to gather help and resources from far-flung places most people would never consider.

In my senior year of high school, I asked my janitor to submit my college letter of recommendation. Her name was Penni, and when we met in 2015, she was welcoming her granddaughter to the family who I got to see pictures of whenever she would stop by the classroom to do her rounds. I looked forward to seeing her late at night while I was doing my homework, and would even help her power clean the bathroom or scrape gum from the desk if I needed a break. In Nevada, education was consistently ranked below the 49th in the country, one year, even the 51st, after Puerto Rico. The reality was that 25% of my county would not graduate and nearly all of them would choose to stay in-state for their higher education. College was a vague ambition that I bootstrapped, and I decided that Penni could speak to my character better than anyone else. And she did. I was accepted by Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and Yale, thanks to her word of recommendation.

When I arrived at college, I realized just how eccentric my decision to ask Penni to write this recommendation was - nobody had advised me to do so, and I hadn’t asked anyone for advice on this matter. Some might say it was a preternatural leap of faith or an impulsive jump, largely due to ignorance. If I look carefully from an outsider’s perspective, I also see a razor-thin line demarcating singular self-belief and hubristic naivete. I am reminded of Roger Federer’s speech at Dartmouth University where he presented the below stat line. Thinking deeply on it now, the line is an important one, like the base and sidelines of a tennis court, but perhaps it matters more to fall on the right side of the lines a little more than half of the times than it is to beat myself up because the inevitable instances of naivete.

By the end of the mind-swirling schedules, orientations, and instrument fitting rooms, we left the Sugarmill gym with a handful of pamphlets, still none the wiser. Truthfully, we couldn’t afford rentals from the school so it didn’t matter what my size was or the brand of the instrument. For my first music class (5th period), I brought with me a quarter-sized violin from a family friend of ours with the fingering tape still taped around the neck-board, which made me happy. We were learning hot-cross buns and I felt a natural affinity in learning the finger patterns on my left hand and plucking the string with my right. I knew I sounded decent, but I couldn’t have recognized how funny I looked from the outside. A quarter-sized violin is sized for roughly a 5-year-old’s arm span, so I was curled up like shrimp in my chair clenching my instrument underneath my neck. I remember doing well in my classes and the teacher pulling me aside after several weeks to present me a bigger violin to play. It didn’t seem significant at the time, but it did relieve my neck, which made me happy.

A pattern would then emerge. I noticed it in my music class, writing class, math class etc. I would immerse myself in something new, then adults would whisper around me, and I would abruptly receive charity in the form of free equipment or private lessons. Special treatment is a drug for kids, and so I doubled down on my effort to master hot-crossed buns. As I grew older, I realized what was happening: I didn’t grow up with means, but I tried hard, and that would move people to help me reach my potential. It was a positive feedback loop: one of the advantages of being poor is the lack of optionality to direct one’s energy (e.g. TV, new shoes, video games), and so it felt like there wasn’t anything to distract me from my classes. From my simplistic corner of the world, there was no hierarchy - no meaningful designation of status outside of one’s effort and intentions. When I was older, one of my close family friend called me to reassure me of one thing while he was battling a terminal illness:

It’s possible that years of moving freely across my “designated lanes” have eroded my own awareness for some of the rigid boundaries and hierarchies established by society. It takes a reality check in the form of an honest conversation to remember that these lanes were set in place for a reason, a good reason if it’s withstood the test of time. Reconciling that reason with my personal, life experience is a new exercise and responsibility because I’ve always felt the most comfortable in-motion, and between worlds, across state lines, or a new seating arrangement in new classroom. Somewhere down the line, I’ve learned to dispose of my facility to impose judgement on others or myself because in my own life, judgment was candidly an inconvenience to overcome when working harder to level uneven competition in school or to ask for better opportunities to enter increasingly privileged spaces. It took some time in my professional career to realize that merit still has a “boundary-bending” effect on institutions, but to a different degree. As a child, you don’t have the communications capability to ask for what you want, and naturally, people will judge your desire by your effort. The 7% represents the adaptation I developed to communicate everything that I am and can be through the one channel offered: my work ethic.

In an embrace of the freedom and means that I have now, I am practicing a newer form of self-advocacy by writing this story. The telling of this story is an anomaly to me as my self-narratives tend to take the shape of my circumstances. Up until college, I’ve done my share of explaining my family situation, income level, and program participation to teachers, counselors, and admissions officers. Yet, there is something extremely pivotal in my conversation with my MD, and I will remember it as my “welcome to the real world” moment. I am reminded of something I once wrote in my journal:

The tune I’m learning today is one of discernment and restraint. I see now that the line between could and should is a thin one. And I have no doubt I can master this song too.

“Most of my endeavors are internal, I find fulfillment and joy from inside.” I’ve known him long enough to know how complex and intricate these internal joys can come from. However, I knew it was deeply difficult to be the person you want to be inside your own brain, not least of which is because of how unobservable development in that dimension is.

There is no mark-to-market for your humility, discipline, or intelligence.

There’s always a point in time in our coffee chats where the conversation gains material weight in the space between us. There’s a silent pause that sits in the air, like the ball and fabric visualization of gravity. If it were up to me, I’d expand my thoughts with bang about everything swirling in my chaotic universe: my stubborn chagrin to “growing up” into managerial duties, my endless thirst for multi-dimensional mastery of my craft, and my idealistic craving to find joy in each job. Sure, this could take the form of career path discussions, feedback on upcoming projects, or one personal anecdote after the other. At this moment, silence was the most concise form, I concluded.

I let that ball of multi-direction implosion sit on that fabric a while longer.

“I can be doing anything right now…” I started. I wasn’t sure how that sentence would’ve ended if he didn’t jump in:

“And that’s the double-edged sword of someone as talented, disciplined, and ambitious as you are. You can succeed anywhere.” I took it in, and appreciated the fact it was coming from him.

I didn’t tell him this at the time, but I took this job because of the wisdom, compassion, and intelligence I sensed from him the first time he interviewed me. I could tell, there was a world and dimensionality to his thoughts that I deeply admired and never expected in a corporate setting.

Our conversation loomed over the skyline outside our office window, seemingly growing larger than the horizon. I can never quite put my finger on why the topic of my immediate future always felt so tangibly imposing. All I knew was that it always felt the heaviest when a change is due to happen.

All weekend long, I was contemplating this sensation that I was only able to describe to him as a “crossroad.” In that, all roads becomes existential, somehow.

Before birth, we are all immeasurably closer to not belonging here than to belonging in this communal existence. Yet I sense (not yet in words) from the peripherals of my introspective self, there appears a thin gap beyond the edges of my conscious self which prevents me from forgetting. Does anyone else remember the thrum of waking and the vibration that pulls us to life as deeply as it lulls us to sleep. Were we not all mere potential before arriving as guests in our own lives? Time returns us all to our original element, the expansive space ahead of us defined by endlessly ending potential.

This question came up twice in the last week. The first time, I was working late in office and on my walk back to my desk, a coworker pulls me to him by leaning back in his chair. With his hands in front of him, he spread his fingers apart, like he was holding a globe in the air. He then let his thoughts drift out into the air like a scientist with an abstract puzzle.

Holding up three fingers, he articulated his sentences emphatically: “Imagine having the option of three women, each of them you like equally. How would you choose who to settle down with?”

Needs and wants, I can struggle with emotions of want. There was a time I dreaded having to follow my college group of friends who would want to go for a mid-day snack: ice cream, coffee, or cannoli. No, it wasn’t a social anxiety that some experience before making an order. Indescribably, I would simply feel a burdensome weight of indifference every time my eyes tried to read the menu. The items were devoid of any strong memories, real preferences, or differentiating characteristics. To make an order I cared so little about, for a snack I candidly could’ve gone without felt borderline dishonest. And so I would shuffle uncomfortably and end up with an order that sounded conveniently like exactly what my friend ordered.

The second time, I was the one that asked the question. Alternating between swings at Chelsea Piers’ driving range with my coworkers, we were talking about marriage and timing a child. The chop of the ball clipped the air. He swung, and turned his head back at me to answer my question:

“For your girlfriend, personality’s probably the most important. Compatibility matters a lot.”

He then stepped off the grass mat and put his hands on his waist.

“For the woman you want to have a kid with, what’s really important is the family setting they grew up in because it shapes the ideal of what a family should look and feel like.”

Around us, I listened quietly to the ceaseless percussive strikes reverberating besides our booth. The sun slowly set ahead of us in a burst of radiance between the Jersey skyscrapers washing over the Hudson River horizon.

Optimistic as I was, I couldn’t help but reflect solemnly at the moment. The wisdom of my 12-year old self was my enduring detachment to the circumstances I was in. If you approached me during recess with a schoolyard issue, I would probably step up on my little pedestal and lecture you about how little choices we had at the start of our lives. Little Billy: you and I, we are frogs sitting in the bottom of a well. With conviction, I’d convincingly tell you that the present is not all there is, for there is always the future to look forward to. The present contained only school work that I needed to finish. Important books I needed to read (like Rich Dad Poor Dad or the news). Reasons I needed to not question. The rare instances were I had ice cream, it was likely handed to me, by my teachers or in church.

At the golf range, I thought to myself how little I wanted my future family unit to resemble the various apartment units I moved from and moved to again and again. Looking down on the ball, I committed to my swing and toed it; it hooked right. The ball set itself up from the automated tee. I rolled it down to the mat and committed to my next swing. I knew I had taken my eyes off the ball before I even make contact; I topped it. I looked out into the water, the distance, the horizon and reminded myself to keep my head and shoulders still. I pulled the 7-iron back and kept my eyes dialed on to the ball. I struck the ball pure and it flew into the air. Higher from and higher to again and again. I tracked it all the way from its apex to where it eventually lands. That went straight, beautifully straight.

So how do you make a choice that you can live and settle with? I start by taking two options away. As many options away that makes sense, and start with one. If you’re right, you’ll end with one eventually too.

A man set himself on fire outside the NYC criminal courts building today. What was he hoping to accomplish?

In Perfect Days, Wim Wender captures in sensitive detail three characters: Hiroyama, his weekday and his weekend. Each day resembles the next, but there’s an element of obsession and craft as he collects a photo from each day, a menagerie of days well spent. He dutifully plays his role as a janitor, taking apart the cover of the toilet to clean the nuts and bolts. He lives in his routine, which starts before sunrise by the sound of the broom outside, and as an onlooker, it’s impossible to tell if he’s confined by his ritual or has constructed a life where he’s discovered true contentment. He works silently and he never more than flirts with the world, friend or tree. Until he has to. And this is the way he chooses to live, and we witness it in wonder. At least I do - what is he hoping to accomplish?

I think I’m jealous of Hiroyama in many ways. He certainly has enough. I’ve surpassed his standard of living probably many folds over. Yet I can’t say with certainty that I’m happier than he is. This is a paradox that I believe thousands of watchers moved by this film can appreciate.

When I was a Sophomore in college, I told my mom provokingly that I didn’t care about making money. “Money is dirty. It changes you, corrupts you, and enslaves you.” Then, we flip the scene to my schedule today: arriving early at work to study the financial service I provide. I spend my day optimizing my performance and energy level. And then I stay late some more to reflect on my learning, and study for a financial charter. When did I make that decision to pursue money, what am I trying to accomplish?

Each day is my craft. It’s why I take the film personally. I document my days through journals instead of photographs. I map out the time of day where I can afford to catch up with colleagues. I have a limit to the number of hours I socialize on weekends. I know myself, I know the environment because I created it. Perhaps a defining feature of youth is attaining perfection until you change your mind. Perhaps a defining feature of life is this. Perhaps we never see Hiroyama in the shot after he’s decided he needs a career pivot.

The self-immolated man has achieved publicity, defiance, and an attempt at revolution. Somehow, his intention to achieve something led him to his choice today.

Hiroyama has achieved self-control, gratitude, and pure existence. He is a world unto himself, and only himself. He carries neither the past nor the future for it would taint the present.

I have achieved pride in my work - a “nice job” from managing directors. I have achieved clarity in a complex financial structure and procedure, a language only a handful of others in my firm can speak fluently. I achieved an allowance to the most expensive neurochemicals - dopamine (motivation, reward), endorphins (pain reduction), oxytocin (love, arousal).

At some point in our life, we run back into the question of accomplishment. Will this make me feel the most accomplished. It occurs easiest when you look up at the costs stacked against you: my youth, my time, my experiences never had, and my emotions chasing this. As dirty as this may sound, what is the monetary value of the part of me that I am pursuing.

Do I need it to survive? Deny it as I will, I likely already know what makes me feel truly accomplished. I have not the sensibility yet to make myself aware to it.

1. It is immediately recognizable to me that the color she has on must be expensive: a vibrant sort of cobalt blue that matches well with La Casa Azul (Frida Kahlo Museum, The Blue House).

2. There was a time when I didn’t recognize this layer of my surrounding: the meaning behind brands, the cost of goods, and the status associated with style. Existence up to my adolescence has always felt self-contained and objective. Between my brother, sister, my mother and I, it wasn’t clear how the rest of society played into our day-to-day.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had with my brother on the way through Time Square train station during my visit back to NYC in 2022. Walking through the expansive tunnels, I turned to my brother and observed out loud: “I feel like I’ve unknowingly aged into the target group for the ads I see plastered along these walls. I’ve never used to encode the content of the images in the past, it was another pixelated ad with colors and words. This time, I’m looking at the posters and wondering if I need a higher APY on my personal savings account.”

My reaction to the jacket interested me. I had read an article about how the wealthiest individuals preferred to dress in “quiet luxury” and that a greater number of high income earners are trending towards brandless, high-quality garments. “Stealth Wealth” is depicted in shows like Succession, which had costumes that were usually unbranded and appears unassuming, but that solid blue T-Shirt is actually $450. I’m not remotely close to that level of wealth, but it always made sense to me: wealth detaches (or frees) you from the constructs of brands and hierarchies. However, there were still design hierarchies that were salient and recognizable.

Sitting in my academic armchair, I believed that this level of detachment to material quality and status also applied to the poor. For context, I grew up in the lowest quintile of socioeconomic class. My observation could be a strict outlier, but I’ve always noticed that much of this world was designed for a prototype individual that isn’t what my siblings and I experienced. What I mean by that is that most products targeting “our demographic” assumes a set of common trends such as curiosity in deepening relationships, budding identifications with external brands, or relating to tropes of maturation, our upbringing almost guaranteed we’d fall outside of every common trope. For one instance, while most students’ development included 3 school from elementary to high school, I remember entered my 7th school by the time I started ninth grade. My mom and my siblings moved from New York, Florida, Georgia, Sparks, and Reno all throughout elementary and middle school. As an unintentional coping mechanism, I learned to treat environments, objects, and people as transient. No identity and emotional attachment can take root with shifting time and unsettled locations. No advertisements are effective to those without an identity or emotional attachments. Put plainly, choice is a product of a higher means of consumption. Personality is a privilege when you look at it that way.

“Unbounded” is the word I’d name my memoir as of now, yet what I’ve come to learn is that living is a series of decisions to choose our bondage. Associating ourselves with certain friends means leaving little time to pursue others. Building a romantic relationship with a partner means excluding that emotional vulnerability to other people. Settling down to build a house means to bound yourself to a location of choice.

When asked what my relationship with my siblings are. I often describe it as a quiet sort of care. I care deeply about the outcome of their lives and so I often insert my opinions on job search, class choice, and relationship building. But what I care more about is the autonomy and security I can afford them to slowly make their decisions that inevitably constrain their freedom: the major they study, the risks they take, and the places they’ll travel. In part, this is my own journey that I’ve been fulfilled by and so I wish nothing but the opportunity for them to choose their own boundaries. I’m not sure which philosophy this aligns with, but the decisions you make to constrain your future freedom are the most consequential to your identity.

We were an isolated group of people growing up, and part of me relishes this purity. I know it’s what has endeared my presence to many of my peers. When I see a jacket like hers at the coffeeshop, I can’t help but be both excited and nervous for my siblings to unravel these layers of society at a deeply personal level. For the time being, I write this blog to relish the moments I get to see my brother learn to travel for the first time out of state without knowing about managing energy levels during international trips. I say nothing more to my sister about tax filing than what she needs to understand when she sees her paycheck. All of the other symbols, complexities and abstractions will come in time, and as the oldest, nothing brings me greater joy than to witness them come into their own in their relationship with this vast world we were never introduced to.

My aunt and grandma would say my grandpa was a well regarded high school teacher in his village. His path to teaching history was tortuous and likely impossible for someone less stubborn that he was. Due to the Cultural Revolution, this period forced him to abandon his education for his personal safety (books were burned, lest he would be too). When he picked up his education again, he had to study again for the Gao Kao (China’s nationwide college placement exam). By that time, I wouldn’t be surprised if the version of history he had studied long and hard for was almost foreign to the rewritten account that he now must re-learn. When he completed college, he was well into his 30s, yet he travailed. As if one historic life disruption was not enough to test his spirits, his path was again upended when he moved to America. (Un)fortunately, this is the life phase that I will come to associate with the man I call my grandfather: re-uneducated, disconnected, and displaced from the social identity that he had controlled, directed, and even taken pride in.

Unfortunately, that is about as detailed of a personal account that I am able to give at this time. These days, I wish I had more words, more details of his life, in his voice. Anything that would give me further evidence of how educated he was, perhaps how sensitive he was, maybe even how stubborn he was. What I’m looking for is more evidence that he was like me and that I was like him. He’d always put on overalls before he stepped out of the apartment. It reminded me of the cut of era he came from: western sensibility, restored dignity and stubborn style. Senior spring, while I was writing my essay one night on war, I heard about his passing, and though I was besides myself, I continued to research through my tears because studying history was the closest I felt I could get to him.

Today, marks the last day of the 2024 Chinese New Year, celebrated by the Lantern Festival which is a time for gathering and remembrance. On my walk home from Times Square tonight, the LED skyscraper lights shown especially bright, endowing a sense of renewal into the air. There was a man in the subway car I was in, wearing a suspender. I was reminded fondly of him.

The drum of mass transit drills past my noise cancelling earphones, encroaching just outside my thoughts: warbling wara-waras existing as senses not yet perceived. The metal screech sounds the summoning of worker ants above ground. My feet pound against this asphalt pavement with each step, and with my chin tucked beneath my scarf, I grind my way past the gravel surroundings, wedging myself through the open space covered by people and city. I drill through the thrum above-ground to get to my office. There’s no love in this part of the city, but that’s why I love it. Nothing about the carbon steel make-up of the financial district, the marble layout of the Goldman office, and the glass interior of my view from my seat was designed to insulate warmth. I settle down with an iced latte, wake the ergonomic keys on my computer, and don my blue-light glasses. Seemingly by magic, all the vibrations held within me, a vessel, flow: from my gaze, from my fingers, my diction, my articulation, my solution, my lateness, my attention, my instructions, and my signature walk. All falls silent, and the emptiness that remains feels most akin to what I know myself to feel like.

From a young age, adults have always reminded me how smart I was, but behind any intelligence is a million sources of locomotion. The reality is - not the absolute reality, but my personal, underlying truth was - I am, by nature, hyper-sensitive and as a result, fairly wary of this world. I stand guard at my thoughts at all hours and minutes. Both a strength and a weakness, my choosiness to experience thing by my initiation, on my time and on my terms, is a rather stubborn approach. This is because the emotions most associated with learning has often been tentativeness, the same way one touches a door that may or may not have a fire on the other side of it (fire in a good, bad, and the best way). It was a pivotal moment in my life when I realized that I could accept rejection far better than I can accept loss. And so rather than learning as a form of acquisition, it was a mode of exploration: I began filling new ideas and concepts with myself into its crevices rather than the other way around. So the contracts, models, and conversations that I have the opportunity to engage with, is one I choose to pour myself into, seeking gaps and space that is created by the architects of knowledge that I find rest in. There is a certain sort of peace in my work every time I start my day.

I squinted through my clenched eyes, fighting my reflexes while I visualized a hot air balloon inside my lungs: puffing out my chest and holding my breath. My legs dropped slowly at first, then all at once. I kicked a little to climb back up near the surface. There's a gentle hand on my neck and back propping up my torso, but I quickly run out of air so I try again, puffing out, then breathing in, but not before my feet falls to the bottom of the 4-feet deep pool. Sigh, it didn't work.

"Hey, nice job! That was a little longer than the last time," he said, "but try to lean your head back more. Think of it like laying back into a bed. You want to relax your limbs, don't think too much about it, and breathe normally."

My shoulders slump in disappointment. I've already forgotten his name. "Ok," I said.

I've always loved water: showers felt safe and rivers were where I'd visit for peace. Within me, I felt that I could be a strong swimmer, a true aquatic specimen, but physically, I couldn't bring myself to float for longer than five seconds. The big man coaching over me was a neighbor in the apartment complex I grew up in. He must've overheard the chatter between one blind mice to the other (my mother and me), so he offered to supervise my floating attempts.

Every one of my friends learned how swim as a young child, toddler even: young enough not to overthink what 'breathing normally' meant. I stayed in Boston over the summer of my sophomore year of college with the goal of visiting the pool every day after my internship to practice. Occasionally, I'd have a friend join me to try and articulate what they knew how to do innately: this proved to be harder than learning mandarin over Morse code.

At the MAC pool, Ryan helped me get comfortable plunging my eyes, ears, and head underwater. Haley walked me through the specific ways to move my arm and legs underwater. On various trips, Rachel would prop up each of my limbs to show me what the sensation of floating felt like.

I kick off the wall to start my breaststroke. Submerged, I take a longer look at the floor of the pool, allowing my body to sink deeper into the water. Silently, I lay still and let the motion run its course. I kick behind me. Then, I pull with my arms like I meant it, which feels more like pushing water aside and behind me. I needed to get front of it to breathe. When I break the surface, a burst of foam washes the front of my goggles, clearing my vision enough to see the blurry visage of my friend, Julian, waiting for me on the surface, waving and grinning at me. Another breath and I'm back underwater. Another kick and a pull. Again, I see Julian's grin.

I breathe in and I breathe out.

No one had told me that sinking is half of what it takes to swim.

My family and I went to see Miyazaki's latest film, The Boy and the Heron, on Christmas weekend. To be frank, I'm not certain I've completely made it out from the Ghibli world. In the movie, the boy follows the heron into an abandoned castle to rescue his mother. In reality, his mother died in a hospital fire during World War Two bombing, which he witnessed as a child. A few years later, he's led by the Heron into the abandoned castle where he finds his mother alive! In this realm, she is not much older than he is and she guides him through this self-contained realm that holds both the past and the future, talking parakeets and carnivorous pelicans. Through this adventure, the boy finds closure with his mother's death and acceptance of his new step-mother.

The movie hasn't left me because I'm unwilling to unclench my hands around it. Like a reunion with an old sweater, there's memory with a familiar touch, and in my own poetry as an adolescent, I've written lines for me and my mother to meet as friends, as the same age. "I used to be a ball of happiness as a young girl," she'd often remind us. Used to be is what she'd emphasize. But the past is where I desired to travel to when I developed the maturity to linger on the rest of her remonstrance. How loud could she make her friends laugh? What sort of gossip would she climb mountains to hear? I haven't been able to let the storyline go, because I've visited that world too. The creative realm taught me to be compassionate towards what I can't understand, wariness not of certain characters but the bondage of their circumstances, and appreciation for the consequences of all forms of realities contained within each of us.

Recently, I had lunch with my mother a month ago when she came to town, and afterwards, I volunteered to see her off to her next activity in Brooklyn. I learned that she was in town that day to attend a mass-marketing training on life insurance. For context, since I could read, she's been selling something to someone for an MLM organization. Almost reflexively, the skeptic in me wonders how she isn't tired of restarting the same climb up a different pyramid. When we were dropped off, it was already dark out. This part of the city was not where I'd expect an office to exist. This was the part of New York City that didn't bother to hide its litter, or its unlabeled stores. We looked for the building where her "manager" was supposed to hold her workshop. We stood on the sidewalk for a while, I guess waiting for the lights behind the discreet store to open. We called the manager only to find out that the workshop was Sunday. Unfortunately for us, today was Saturday.

At least we had each other. I asked her why she kept chasing this trail of bread crumbs.

"With the amount of energy you have to succeed, if you joined a Fortune 500 company, you could probably make VP before you old enough to retire," I pointed out.

"Well you wouldn't be your own boss. As long as you were employed, you would never be financially free." she parried.

She started kicking the air lightheartedly to stay warm. On her tippy-toes she was bouncing and began describing the learning opportunities involved in working with a small team. Before long, she launched into her vision of one day stand shoulder-to-shoulder with her manager, on a poster as a partner alongside her current leader. She was laughing and I looked down to see fire in her eyes. Briefly, I saw the girl in my writing, dream-inspired and relentless. Quietly, I looked away with a smile and nodded diplomatically. We all escape to a fantasy we imagine for ourselves; I wouldn't want her to sacrifice anything if it meant to give up that fire up again.

Holidays can feel surreal to me when I'm with family. Reunions can be a visitation from the past. My breath continued to condensate in front of me as I stood on the side walk, waiting for my Dad to pick me and my siblings up. We had Dim Sum today, an infallible formula for a Chinese family celebrating an American holiday. What feels surreal to me is often how fragile family can feel - that something you once thought sacred or indivisible such as a tradition, a family is in large part a thoughtfully (and often intimate) design of feeling. A bloodline is family, but a strong collective feeling is family. I know the nature of this engineered feeling because I'm in a position now to be the one to organize and sustain the emotional reality for myself and others.

Like a spinning pedal beneath my feet, I come to further realize how much of an accomplishment still it is to feel. Especially as an adult, feeling anything can be a luxury. Innocence is lost the first time we peel back the curtain behind the magic of our reality: we learn how gifts are bought, gatherings are organized, and dessert is baked - with skill and effort and personality. Yes, there's waste that corrupts our impressions of a delicious recipes (please reach out if you've found a second use for the leftover heavy cream, condensed milk, and tomato paste). But what a beautiful sacrifice it is for people to volunteer their time to be together. As much as I've learned in pulling back the curtain for myself, I make sure to preserve some magic in ignorance.

I saw my breath again on my way home. It was because it's Christmas.