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

I walked by two girls kissing on the sidewalk. They were maybe fifteen or sixteen, just let out from school and still wearing their backpacks. I felt shy or embarrassed at first, because they were so deeply engrossed in kissing and here I was, not three feet away. They had their arms around each other's necks and they pressed their mouths together, not with the false perfection of kisses in movie scenes, but with urgency and fullness, as if they meant to melt into each other through the lips. It was somehow innocent and earnest. They didn't care who else was on the street, they didn't even notice I was there, as if some force field around them had obliterated the public and the private, their puritanical rules, and remade space into some third transcendent category.

So I walked by unnoticed, averting my eyes only as a gesture of politeness. I thought of love and of being young, and I felt an overwhelming affection for the things around me--the reverent quiet of a city park, the bare armed trees overhanging the cast iron fences, the false spring weather in February--this little corner of the world where, for a moment, there was peace.

LA may be a total piece of shit, a sprawling suburban monster with freeways for veins, strip malls for organs, and chrome plated rims for a soul. But sitting against the back of my car in a trash ridden parking lot with this cool ocean breeze blowing, this warm sun shining, these big billboards glaring, some blithe delusional part of me still feels like everyone here could be a movie star, maybe even me.

(4 hours being a tourist in LA)

I wish there were a zero transaction cost way to pay all the random street performers when I pass them in the metro stations. Too often I'm late to get somewhere or I just don't have any spare change on me. And so over the years I have derived a nearly incalculable amount of joy from hurried snatches of jazz or funk, from the aching melodies of ragged violinists, the irrepressible energy of homeless saxophonists, the foot stamping rhythms of bucket drummers, the easy charm of old accordion players, the anguished beauty of long drawn out notes from street side opera singers...

and I never even stopped to tell them thanks.

Jet lag is a form of nostalgia for the body. I lie here in my hotel room in Ukraine at 3am, and my body imagines itself back in DC. My wife and I talk to each other about our days, we cook or exercise or delay doing little chores. Outside the bright twilight sky peers between the tall trunks of trees. It is a time to be awake, to be alive. And ~30 hours from now, perhaps I will wake up in my own bed, with my sleeping wife beside me, and I will peek through the window blinds not knowing what to expect: a starry sky, the glimmer of dawn, or maybe a distant city of gold domed cathedrals where revolutions are talked of as yesterday and shrines to martyrs line the city square.

No two people in the world are perfectly matched, but one of the things that binds me and my wife together is a common instinct for the shortness of life. We both know in our quaking bones that death comes swiftly, unexpectedly, that human beings are fragile things easily broken and slowly repaired, that sanity, health, and wholeness slip away from us at some unavoidable deadline marked in red on the calendar.

And yet, when in the earliest hour of the morning, I bend down to my sleeping wife before I head out to work and I press my cheek to her cheek, my breast to her breast, I wrap my arms around the comforter covered shape of her, she smiles at me through a dim semi-consciousness and I know what she is feeling because I feel it the same: that neither of us can see the end of things yet, and that for these two or three minutes a little act of tenderness feels like it could stretch until eternity.

All life on this planet begins with a common origin, a stirring of the primordial soup, a reordering of acids into an elegant double helix, a warm gelatinous mat of quivering single cells. There we are, you and I, and her and him, and that little child with the red-handled scooter riding recklessly around the metro station. There too are the birch tree, the apple tree, the bee, the moth, the cockroach, the woodpecker, the dodo bird, the dinosaurs, the trilobites and the species of of Staphylococcus. You can still feel it sometimes, the magnetic pull of this common origin point. How all living things contain within themselves a pair of delicate strings that tremble at the same harmonic frequencies when you pluck at them, how they call to one another sometimes in yearning.

The room is small and windowless, buried deep in one of Washington D.C.'s labyrinth office buildings. The man delivering the sermon at the front of the room is Arab, in his late fifties, and grey-haired from the top of his head to the tufts on his knuckles. “Nowadays you have all these feminists, but you see them and they do not practice the modesty,” he is saying. “What does the Qur'an say about the adultery? It does not say 'do not do the adultery'. No. It says 'do not come close to the adultery'. And how do you come close to the adultery? Through immodesty...”

In the front row, a young man is staring glassy eyed at the khateeb while his fingers nimbly manipulate his prayer beads. Off to the side, a long-faced man with a jet-black beard is slumped against the wall and has fallen asleep with his arms crossed over his chest. A trio of men in expensive suits eye the door and the minutes hands on their platinum wristwatches. And in the shadowed compartment toward the back, two young women see their own thoughts reflected in the other's face, and for a moment the hardness in their eyes softens as they share a silent, commiserating smile.

--related to me today by an anonymous Muslim woman who may or may not be my wife

I feel like everything I needed to know about being a decent human being I learned from Sesame Street: be nice, share your toys, don't make generalizations or assumptions about people you know nothing about, try to put yourself in other people's shoes, be nice, etc.

And yet the implementation of Sesame Street wisdom continues to be a struggle for all of us.

I guess it's natural to compare every new place you go to some other place you've been before. I'm here in Guatemala, in some obscure city in the countryside, and I can't help thinking how this arid highland landscape could be parts of California, how these colorful storefronts on narrow streets could be in Bangladesh, how these chilly evenings and lingering twilights could be summer in Montana, this chemical smell of smoke and car exhaust could be in Cairo, these small farmplots of vegetables could be in Palestine, and the concord of children's voices and the sounds of play coming from the nearby school could literally be from anywhere.