People don't ask me for relationship advice, probably because they look at me, they meet my wife, and they see that I am the beneficiary of disproportionate dumb luck. But if I were asked, I would say you begin with compatibility. You want someone who shares your values, your expectations and assumptions about what a relationship is, someone whose strengths and weaknesses complement your own, but above all you want someone who gives you an instinctual feeling of ease, like you're rediscovering a long lost friend you somehow forgot, a familiar stranger you knew in another life. I would say that after compatibility the second half is compromise. You need someone you can talk to, argue with well, forgive and be forgiven by, you will want someone who understands themself, just as you will need to understand yourself in order to speak your heart and listen. Lastly I would say that yes, you will want some dumb luck, or maybe faith for the religious, because God only knows the shape of the future and the depths of our souls, but you'll navigate both of them together with a little luck and faith inshaallah.

--7 years since the awkward joyful delirious beginnings of a relationship. Alhamdulillah.

Jan 5 2020

 Whenever we visited my gramps as kids, we'd sit with him and watch the Lakers on his fat old TV with the wood panel siding and turn dial buttons. Gramps would quote statistics and chat gregariously about the Lakers playoff chances. I remember asking him once what he thought about a rising star named Kobe Bryant. He chuckled and ruefully shook his head. "He can shoot but he doesn't pass."

In the summer of 2009, while the Lakers were making a playoff run, my gramps was in the hospital with cancer and a head injury. "Gramps," we'd say. "The Lakers are in the playoffs. They're heading for the finals!" Every time, he'd chuckle and blink at us like someone seeing through a haze. "Is that right?" he'd say with wonderment. We watched the games with him on the little TV suspended in the corner; often he slept through it and we watched anyway. My dad brought the newspaper and read to him from the sports section. Kobe won the series MVP and led them to victory in five games on June 13. My gramps was too sick and gone already to understand that the team he loved were champions. He died nine days later. It would have made him tremendously happy to see.

Anyway. I'm not personally into sports, and I dislike celebrity worship, especially when it distracts us from their character flaws. So I post about Kobe Bryant, mostly because news of his sudden death brought me back to my grandfather, and gave me a chance to say goodbye again to someone that I love.

--Jan 26 2020

 My great-great grandparents came in 1876.  They were laborers on sugar cane plantations and pig farms in Hawaii.  Like many Asian immigrants to Hawaii back then, they were deliberately recruited in waves from different ethnic groups so employers could more easily exploit them.

My great-grandfather came in 1913 as a Paper Son, an illegal way of circumventing America's racist immigration laws.  At the age of 15, he started working in LA as a servant for a wealthy Mexican-American family that took him in and encouraged him to get a high school degree.  To this day my family speaks of that family with gratitude.  

My grandfather was the last of my ancestors to immigrate, in 1948, on a lucky scholarship to Pepperdine.  He flunked American Literature, twice I believe, in his final year.  Without a degree and soon without a visa, he applied for permanent residency.  He was denied, then reapplied under the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, was denied again, then appealed, and finally was allowed to stay.  If he'd been deported, he would have left behind a wife and newborn daughter, my mother.

I grew up not knowing most of this, although I knew of course that we had come from China.  America reminded me in myriad ways, both subtle and obvious, that we were from somewhere else.  It was like having a hole in my identity that needed to be filled.  I read books about China, obsessed about Confucius, collected Chinese things like red laisee envelopes, old coins with holes in them, and cheap folding paper fans from Chinatown.  I tried also to be more like white kids.  I wanted to have parents like them, own video game consoles like them, get ten dollars for every A on my report card.  White friends from these early days would, I think, be surprised at how much race played a role in my consciousness.  And I, looking back, am somewhat surprised how easily they were permitted to forget that they too are from somewhere else, someplace foreign and different, that their sense of belonging and rightness in a multicultural nation shouldn't be anymore a given than mine.

I think about all of this when immigration is in the news---diversity lottery, chain migration, kids separated from parents, people kept in cages, DREAMERS, refugees and asylum seekers vilified and denied.  I think about it when racism is in the news and a small vocal minority of you make it depressingly clear you have no serious understanding of race and history.  But I also think about it when I walk around my neighborhood in Jersey City.  Here there are signs in at least six or seven languages.  On the streets you'll hear people speaking Spanish, Bangla, Hindi, Urdu, Egyptian Arabic, Gujrati, Punjabi, Tagalog, Cantonese, Mandarin.  I think about my ancestors, my friends and family, about our shifting and manifold identities in America.  It seems insane to imagine that we all might have something in common.  But here we are in this beautiful if deeply imperfect corner of the world, struggling and living, and somehow, to me at least, making it feel like home.

July 2020

 Nerdy Love Letter

In a closed system, mass and energy are neither created nor destroyed. Which means that if we went back in time, all the way to the shuddering birth of the Universe, we would find somewhere in that glorious mystery all the pieces that make up you and I. It means that if, on a cold winter's night, I reach for you and put my ear to you, like a child listening for the ocean in the pearly folds of a conch shell, I might hear echoes of the universe, the hum of cosmic radiation, the roar of solar fusion, the collisions of moons and meteoroids. It means that if I were to travel back in time without you, perhaps a hundred years, perhaps a thousand, and lay myself below a cherry tree, close my eyes, and stretch my senses, I could find you there around me, in the living sponge of the soil, the waxy blades of grass, in the atmospheric nitrogen, and I would know that you were with me.

--Jan 29 2021

 When we imagine someone praying to God, we commonly imagine someone asking for things like riches or success. But I find that my best prayers are always for other people. Friends who are sick, who have loved ones who are sick. Friends facing difficult decisions. People I love, who are still here, or who've passed away. I pray for unborn children and distant strangers, people I've never met, who suffer from injustices I play some part in, and must strive to correct.

It's not a question of being selfish or selfless in prayer, which misses the point, I think. Perhaps, as the sufis say, it's a matter of obliterating the self altogether, submitting to the divinity of unity, the truth that we are each a part of something vast and whole. I'm not a sufi, and I don't really know if that's what they mean. But I know the feeling when prayer falls into that space.

Anyway. I'm getting old (we all are) and these are the things I think on the first day of the holy month, as life, the collective life, goes on in the midst of everything. Ramadan Kareem.

--April 13 2021