Tired

Hey guys, recently I’ve been trying to grow my instagram account instead of applying to jobs. Not sure I’m using Instagram as an excuse to create art or if I’m creating art as an excuse to post on Instagram.

It’s not going terribly well, followers are climbing at a snail's pace, but despite that I find myself checking my phone frequently just so that I can occasionally see that heart button on the bottom bar notifying that I’ve gotten a like. More than ever I feel myself wanting some kind of recognition, to feel valuable in someone else’s eyes, and when I’m unemployed living at home isolated from my friends and classmates it feels like the only people I can turn to is the internet.

Anyway, this is a story about unemployment. I feel alone in this endeavor, though I know I’m not alone. We try to hide our failures because we can’t help but feel lesser for not having found something yet. Some of our friends were hired long before second semester started, some were uncertain until only weeks before graduation, the stragglers slowly trickled in their success via facebook posts over the summer, and as the seasons turn from hot to unpredictable, we are left and silent.

We stay silent for a variety of reasons, part of it is shame, part of it is there’s only so many times you can complain to your friends until your pain grows dull in their ears and numb in your own heart. We’ve probably tried a lot of things, applying online, asking our acquaintances to hand in resumes, going to industry events, emailing alumni, grinding our faces into our tempurpedic pillow as we scream profanities. And even though we know the paths we’ve chosen is difficult and has fewer jobs, there’s really only so many times you can finish the rare phone interview only to have the trail go cold before you start wondering ‘is there something wrong with me.’ It’s gotten to the point where I’ll just assume that won’t get the job even when the conversation goes well.

I wish I could offer you words of consolation, and tell you that everything will be okay. I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy the hell of a indefinite job hunt. But I don’t know, I don’t know for myself, I don’t want to give you kind but empty promises because you, like me, are tired.

For me what would give me a little solace would be if we could somehow get together and communicate, because I’m tired of keeping this shit to myself, and maybe you're tired too.

[Book Review] The Rape of Nanking, Shelter, & The China Mirage

I never really had the time to read during the school year, so over this past four years I’ve been consolidating a list of books that I’ve been wanting to read. I figure a lot of you guys are looking for new reading material too, so I want to offer my general commentary on the following.

There is a sort of theme going on with the books I chose to review here, The Rape of Nanking and The China Mirage are both non-fiction concerning WWII and post-WWII China, and Shelter is a novel with a Korean-American main character reconciling his current mess of a life with his upbringing as an Korean-American.

The Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang

Growing up I’ve always heard from my parents that China hated Japan because Japan invaded China during WWII. The conversation never really went much into detail besides that. It also never felt personal, my parents did their PhDs in Japan, my dad always gushed about Japanese manufacturing, I grew up with lots of Japanese pop-culture influences like manga and music. But given the fact that I am a Chinese-American that has visited and lived in Japan numerous times I felt like I had an obligation to try to understand this history.

The Rape of Nanking describes the event of Japanese invasion and occupation of Nanking which was the capital of Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China. Iris breaks down the novel into before, during, and after the occupation from the Chinese, Foreign, and Japanese point of view. It’s kind of hard to describe the magnitude of this massacre,but it would not be a stretch to say that it was comparable to the holocaust, if not even more brutal, concentrated in a smaller area, over a much shorter period of time (the book makes this comparison). Despite this I don’t remember learning about the Nanking Massacre in school, maybe partly due to the Western-centric lens the American school system uses, but also Iris describes a huge cover up by not only the Japanese government, but also the American government in trying to rebuild Japan as a Asian ally after Mao Zedong’s communist government took over China shortly after the end of WWII.

Verdict:

It was a really good read, organized in a way that makes the information extremely easy to parse. I recommend this book for people who want to be more educated about a terrible part of history that has been largely relegated to a single line in textbooks, for people who want to learn more about Chinese-Japanese relations, and for people like me who want to understand a little more about their Chinese roots.

Shelter by Jung Yun

Most books I read aren’t really about people like me, there’s something about growing up Asian-American that is different from how main characters in most novels go about their lives. Shelter is about a Korean-American guy who get’s his life flipped upside down when his mom stumbles into his backyard naked, disheveled, and distressed. Throughout the book he is forced to his strict Korean upbringing and examine his relationship with his parents. It has Asian-American themes but even without that it’s a solid novel that gets you hooked pretty quickly and has decent pacing throughout with no lulls. I would tell you more but then I’d be spoiling the plot...

Verdict:

I liked the novel despite fiction not usually being my cup of tea. I was really impressed by Jung’s mastery at describing people, actions, and the setting (I have no good words to describe how good she is at describing). I recommend this for people who enjoy fast paced melodramatic stories, and other Asians who want to read something where they’re better represented.

The China Mirage by James Bradley

I feel like media portrayal of China in my lifetime has always been on the negative side, which was why I was really surprised finding out that in the early 1900s Americans loved China. Not real Chinese people who were the only ethnic group targeted by official legislature (The Chinese Exclusion Act) to be deported and kept from immigrating to the U.S., but a dreamy ideal of a far off Chinese peasant that longed to be westernized and converted to Christianity by their American saviors. It starts with America’s history with China starting from the Opium wars where Western drug dealers illegally smuggled Opium into China in order to turn a huge profit from getting Chinese people addicted to the drug while simultaneously bringing China’s riches (tea, silk, porcelain, etc) to the Western world. It then covers America’s leaders funneling millions of dollars in support of Chiang Kai-shek’s failing Republic of China due to the perpetuation of “New China” with its Christian Chinese population via ignorant propagandists (like Henry Luce of Time Magazine) who never set foot in China. And finally it covers post war communist China, the red scare, and the Korean and Vietnam wars, with commentary on how U.S. and China relationships got so bad.

This book really helped me understand why America and Chinese relations are so terrible, why China is always portrayed as the bad guy in the media, and where general anti-Chinese sentiments have grown from. It has changed my views on Mao Zedong and communist China who earned the trust of the Chinese peasants, offered them better lives, and improved the state of China at the time (though I don’t know enough to judge about his later rule and the cultural revolution).

Verdict:

I did find it on the longer side, especially the middle section where they were talking about FDR’s secret air force in China, I ended up skipping two or three chapters there. But it was still extremely enlightening read, and I recommend it for people interested in U.S.-China Relations, understanding why China became communist, and understanding why the U.S. got involved in Korea and lost in Vietnam.

Reverse Culture Bummers: Coming back to the states

My frustrating experience at the San Francisco Airport after consecutive delays in the 3rd and final leg of my international flight back home.

People talk about getting “reverse culture shock” when they come back from a foreign country, but today what I’m experiencing is more like “reverse culture bummer,” the “oh yeah I forgot that America was like this.”

So first some updates on my life. I just finished my internship at Mitsubishi Electric in Japan (2 months) and traveled around Hiroshima for a few days with my friend Jee, and now I’m sitting at San Francisco Airport for a 6 hour layover before my flight back home (now turned 10 hour layover due to multiple delays). Anyway coming back to the states from Japan I’ve been experiencing a series of reverse culture bummers, ones that I don’t really remember experiencing the first time I came back to the states from Japan (study abroad at Tohoku University 2 years ago).

Language

I thought I would revel in the awesome feeling of being about to understand everything around me effortlessly. But walking around the Airport it just reminds me that TSA agents hate their job, and that people have really boring conversations with each other.

Airports

Wow I freaking hate airports. But especially airports in the U.S. For some reason security lines in the U.S. always take way longer than any other airport that I’ve been to. To give some perspective, there was literally no security line the two times I tried going through Haneda International Airport (one of the busiest airports in Japan). The first time I accidentally just waltzed through the metal detector with my jacket on, things in my pocket, totally unaware that it was a security gate and had to get a pat down.

At other airports I get to keep my shoes on and don’t need to chug all my water before going through the screening, making it through the place in record time. Also all the TSA agents here look grouchy AF. Nothing like doing a 13 hour flight only to be greeted by pissed off immigration officers. I get it, your job sucks, but my flight sucked too.

Customer Service

So this is totally related to the grouchy TSA agents, I’ve been spoiled by Japan’s customer service culture. Everyone smiles at you, speaks very politely, bows and even thanks you for asking them questions. Fast forward to me going through security in SFO where I go through the body scanner and like always my left ankle triggers the machine and I need a pat down on my ankles. The dude TSA agent is like, “can you pat her down” and the female TSA agent is like “haha, are you sure it’s not a dude,” winks at the dude TSA agent, turns to me, goes “haha, sorry,” like somehow I’m in on her joke. I manage a sardonic smile.

Like I get it, I got short hair, and I’m wearing baggy clothes, but there was a million ways to go about  confirming who gets to pat down my ankles without being a dick about it. It’s great that you get to get a laugh, but it’s really coming at my expense and I kinda dislike that.

Toilets

I think the first feeling that I was like “yep I’m in America” was when I walked into the bathroom at the baggage claim area. On the way to picking a stall I walked past three unflushed toilets, and one with a bloody diaper floating on the surface. You’re not really in America unless you need to flush someone else’s mess and hover pee in all public restrooms.

Maybe you’ve heard of the high-tech Japanese toilets that have bidet functionality and the ability to sing waterfall sounds to mask the sound of your pee hitting the water. But that’s not really what I care about. I think in my entire time in Japan I’ve only really seen one or two unflushed toilets. I even got used to sitting on toilets in public restrooms. Everything always felt so clean. The toilets in my company had floors so pretty that I wouldn’t freak out even if I dropped my phone on the floor.

Now I’m in America where all public bathrooms have auto flushers installed to thwart the nonflushers, but what really ends up happening is that they don’t work when they need to, and they flush when I’m still using the bathroom resulting in maximum grossness.

Cleanliness

One thing that always annoyed me about Japan was the lack of trash bins. This meant that I’ll be walking around the entire day carrying my trash in my shoulder bag. Despite this Japan always felt spotless. There was no litter on the floor, there wasn’t a bunch of chewing gum stuck on the pavement, do Japanese people not litter??? The answer is, no, they still litter. In the morning I’ll see a bunch of people walking around with tongs picking up last night’s litter thrown away by drunken salary people.  But then for the rest of the day it remains spotless until people start drinking at night. There was still the occasional abandoned plastic drink cup or wrapping paper, but for a country with a lack of public trash bins, there is not a lot of litter.

Right in front of me, as I’m typing, I’m surrounded by trash on the floor. A dirty napkin, a subway receipt, the top part of a cough drop bag that someone ripped off, a few unidentifiable paper scraps, and old gum that’s been blacked from being stepped on so many times. There are plenty of trashcans in the vicinity. Why the hell is this place so dirty despite having a trash can around every corner!!! Why!!!

Just now a skin head dude with tattoos walked over to one of the charging desks and tossed his trash into the corner of the table. Why, couldn’t you just walk to a damn trashcan? It is probably equidistant…ugh. Update: just watched another guy put an empty altoid tin down in the same area…

Before I sat down I took out some sanitary wipes to wipe down my seat. There was an unidentified brown smear that I refused to subject my pants to.

Hopefully in the next few days I’ll be reminded of reasons why I like living here. But for now it’s just a series of reverse culture bummers.

Wow you use chopsticks very well!

Wow you use chopsticks very well!

This is one comment that I’ve gotten in Japan multiple times that I find entirely puzzling. For me growing up, all I’ve used at home was chopsticks. I eat with chopsticks, I cook with chopsticks, I… can’t think of anything else I do with chopsticks.

It was weird for me that even with my asian face, and my Chinese name, the thing that people were really impressed by is my skillful chopstick manipulation. I asked someone about it once, and they said… yeah if we think about it logically other asian countries do use chopsticks… I guess we just don’t think really about it, that people outside Japan use chopsticks.

Fair, I guess. Anyway this lead me to thinking more about what other questions or comments that I got pretty frequently. (Oh yeah if you’re not caught up in my life, currently I’m doing an internship in Kamakura, Japan and will be here for another month).

For the most part conversations topics are pretty normal, but limited to a very small set of questions. No doubt limited by my inability to speak Japanese well, despite the other person trying their best to talk to me in English. I’m meeting new people all the time, so I would say most conversations are just a permutation of the following set of questions just with different people (plus other things like: what are your favorite hobbies, and do you like Japanese food).

Where are you from? I’m from America.

Which part of America? Boston, I go to a small college called Olin.

Ohh Olin I know that place. This is where I’m internally going wat? Most people in the U.S. don’t even know about Olin, why do you know about Olin?

We’ve had people visit Olin before. And this is where I remember that they send people to our school’s final exposition sometimes so it’s not that weird that they know of Olin.

Is this your first time in Japan? Nope, this is my fourth time. I think almost every person I’ve talked to has asked me this. To the point where I wonder if I ask other people if it’s the first time they’ve been in the U.S. People usually get pretty surprised when I tell them it’s my fourth time, I guess for most interns this is a rare opportunity to travel around Japan.

What are your hobbies? I like watercoloring. I keep it simple so that people don’t immediately find out I’m a huge nerd.

Do you like Japanese food/ what’s your favorite Japanese food? It would really suck if I was in Japan and didn’t like Japanese food. I also have a really hard time answering any questions about favorites. Partly because I don’t think about things like favorites very often, and partly because I become ten times slower when thinking in Japanese.

Wow your Japanese is so good! Is a compliment I get a lot, and I know that people are extremely sincere when saying that, but I can’t help but feel kind of bad when I hear it. It’s because I know in my heart that my Japanese is kind of shitty and that’s the source of the majority of my troubles here.

Also it feels like something very cultural. In the U.S. I don’t give a second thought about how good people’s English is. When exchange students speak English it doesn’t feel out of place at all, in fact I would find it utterly strange if they didn’t. I don’t compliment non-native speakers on their English even when they are practically fluent. The only times I would compliment them would probably be if they told me that they were sorry their English was bad. It makes me think about how much I take for granted that people all over the world learn English as a second language and how so much of the world accommodates English speakers like me.

I’ve been in places in Tokyo where retail staff would speak English, I’ve seen tourists walk into restaurants and order food entirely in English, the subway signs everywhere have English subtitles. But I can’t imagine the opposite even remotely flying in America.

Anyway, I continue to study Japanese. I’m still bad. But I am slowly (very slowly) trying to speak more Japanese, trying to feel more comfortable, trying to make progress. And progress is being made. But it’s definitely very difficult seeing any improvements on the microscale.

How I've changed: high school to college grad

For those of you guys who attended Olin, you might recognize the above as the library quiet reading room. I think it’s pretty safe to say that I spent most of my waking hours at college in that one room.

I’ve recently graduated college so  I wanted reflect a little on how my hobbies have changed. We’ll take a look at my activities before college, during college, how they’ve changed, and what I hope to do in the future.

Before College

In high school if you asked me what the three things that I did, in the order of what I couldn’t live without, it would be:

1. Reading manga
2. Playing MMORPGs
3. Listening to Kpop

I read tons of manga (Japanese comics) in high school, spent hours on hours on online manga readers, scroll, click, scroll, click. I read everything, from ninja things like Naruto, sports things like Hajime no Ippo, romance things like Hana Kimi, to gender bender things like Princess Jellyfish. And I would re-read things, not just short things, but things like One Piece (which at this point is over a hundred volumes long), multiple times. It helped that I have relatively short term memory. Every reread was still pretty fresh.

I enjoyed playing MMORPGs, or massively multiplayer online role playing games (which is honestly a mess of an acronym), Maplestory characterized most of my middle school years, while Vindictus was what I played in high school. After school getting home I would turn on the computer and meet up with my online friends. Like manga, I pumped hours into these. I was bored and there was nothing to do afterschool, no friends to meet up with, no clubs I belonged to, nowhere I could go in the vicinity without a car. Online I had lots of friends, I was part of my guild’s leadership, and I had a constant group of people I hung out with all the time. In game, I collected lots of different clothing items for my character and paid real money to buy fashion items from it’s in game store, in all honesty my in game fashion sense was eons better than the wardrobe that I owned in real life.

I also followed K-pop (Korean pop music) extensively. It’s actually kind of time intensive hobby. I kept up with lots of groups, DBSK, Super Junior, Block B, Teen Top, BAP, SHINee, 2NE1, Big Bang, and F(x), to name a few. K-pop music videos are somewhat iconic in the genre, I would watch the music videos for new songs multiple times a week, commit them to memory, attempt to learn the dance, make my brother watch the music video, attempt to learn the dance with my brother. For bands that I really liked, I would search on YouTube for variety shows that they appeared in and binge watch all of those too.

During College

College was kind of chaotic. I suddenly had all these real life friends, schoolwork became something that I actually spent time on, and I got involved in way too many campus activities. Time became something that was extremely rare, and I couldn’t really afford to keep up my high school hobbies. Manga became something I only occasionally read over long breaks, I lost touch with my online friends, and I slowly lost track of all the different K-pop groups that were immerging.

In their place I:

1. Joined the school’s Go club and started to play Go
2. Learned how to play the ukulele and started singing more
3. Learned about the world of human centric design
4. Started blogging
5. Started drawing comics
6. Created a K-pop dance group (despite not really keeping up with K-pop)
7. Learned how to melt glass and create beads
8. Got trained on most machines in the school's machine shop
9. Started rock climbing

God knows how long this blog would be if I started going into all of them, so here are just some brief highlights.

I’ve always been very much about me. A lot of things come easy to me, I enjoy being the best, I recognize that I have a large ego. Pursuing design has occasionally reminded me to put that aside, to instead think about someone else for a while, to experience their lives, or at least recognize when I’m not authentically acting in their best interest. I think that doing design at Olin has made me less selfish, less self-centered (though I recognize the irony in my statement since I’m talking about how I have changed).

I’ve also discovered that I enjoy writing. Writing in high school was always a chore, something that had a rigid format, statement, example 1, example 2. But since starting my blog I’ve found that writing helps me process my thoughts, reflect on my life, make decisions, share heavier thoughts that I wouldn’t normally toss into conversations with friends or acquaintances. It’s still very much one sided though, most of my readers anonymously click in, sometimes I know who you are because you like my post, very rarely is there dialogue. I think want a little more from my blog, but until I have it I’m not sure exactly what would satisfy me.

Moving Forwards

There are a lot of things I want to do moving forwards. Supposedly life after Olin means that I’ll gain a lot of my time back. With this time I want to:

1. Learn how to fingerpick on my ukulele
2. Start my own business doing something that I love
3. Make more art
4. Learn how to watercolor
5. Get better at rock climbing
6. Learn how to make patterns for clothing
7. Sew more
8. Be able to read novels in Japanese
9. Get better at playing go
10. Learn how to read Chinese
11. Get better at speaking both Cantonese and Mandarin
12. Travel around China
13. Travel around South East Asia

Some of these things are near future things; some are long term investments. I’m looking forward to accomplishing all of them.

My Dear Ellie - Southern All Stars (Is translating songs a good way to learn Japanese?)

Turn on CC (Closed Captioning) for the english translation!!!

We’ve finally reached the 6th song in my Japanese song translating blog series, this is the last song I’m planning on translating for a while (documented to this extent). This time we’re going to translate いとしのエリー(Itoshi no Eri/My Dear Ellie) which came out in the year 1979 by the band Southern All Stars（サザンオールスターズ）. I partly picked this song because my mentor for this project, who was my Japanese professor from Wellesley, said that this was one of her favorite songs, and partly because it’s really catchy. I would catch myself humming parts of it in the library, in my room, in the shower, so I decided to go for it.

Interestingly, the lead singer of Southern All Stars is Keisuke Kuwata, who sang “Johnny the Surfer” which was the very first song in this series. The lyrics felt deceptively easy before I started translating it. My expectation was that this would be the simplest song to translate yet, but instead it has turned out to be the hardest in this series. Here’s just one of the many lines I had trouble with:

誘い涙の日が落ちる (Sasoi namida no hi ga ochiru)

This is how I initially parsed this phrase

誘い 涙の 日 が 落ちる

誘い (sasoi)	Invitation
涙の (namida no)	Tears’
日が (hi ga)	Day
落ちる (ochiru)	To Fall

So my initial attempt at translating this phrase was,

Invitation tears’ day will fall.

Which sounds like something you’d get on a fortune cookie, and I had no clue what it meant, so I did some creative guessing. My thought was that the keywords in this was “day,” “tears’,” and “to fall.” I then further postulated that “to fall” actually meant “to end.” Maybe the line was trying to convey the feeling that when the fated day comes, their relationship will end, so he’d be really sad. So here I am trying to figure out what the best way to make it sound good in English. And this is what I came up with.

So you should laugh more baby, carefreeness on my mind

Express yourself more baby, looking cool in your sight

Until the day you leave me,

Ellie my love so sweet

And that was my best guess. A few days later I had a scheduled meeting with my mentor to go over my translation. Anddddddd, I totally missed the mark. Not like completely off, since the sentiment is still kinda there, but like definitely not bullseye.

What she had pointed out to me was that I had parsed the sentence incorrectly.

誘い涙の日が落ちる (Sasoi namida no hi ga ochiru)

She offered a different parsing suggestion:

誘い涙 の 日が落ちる

誘い涙 の (sasoi namida no)	Tears of Sympathy’s
日が落ちる (hi ga ochiru)	Sunset

誘い涙 (sasoi namida) isn’t really a phased that’s used, but my sensei postulated that it was trying to be a fancier version of もらい泣き (morai naki), which literally translates to “tears that are received,” and refers to the kind of crying that you do when you see someone else crying or sad.

Also I was translating each word a little too granularly before, I had saw 日が落ちる as the “day will fall,” but 日 (hi) not only means day, but also means sun. “Sun will fall” translates to “sunset,” it all makes a lot of sense.

We talked a little bit about what

Tears of Sympathy’s Sunset,

could potentially mean, and I don’t really think we got anywhere. We both agreed that it was confusing. Later that night I did some investigating on the internet, and came upon someone asking the same exact question on Yahoo answers Japan: “Exactly what does 誘い涙の日が落ちる mean?” And the posters seemed to think that it was more like,

while the sun set, my tears also fall (涙が落ちながら日が落ちる),

which is kinda like a pun since both the sun and his tears fall. Though I suppose it’s meant to be poetic rather than funny.

So in the end the verse got translated to:

So you should laugh more baby, carefreeness on my mind

Express yourself more baby, looking cool in your sight

And as the sun sets, these tears they fall

Ellie my love so sweet

Reflection on the series as a whole

I was going to write a few more examples for how this song was difficult to translate, but it takes so much explaining to make it make sense for a non-Japanese audience, and I don’t want to lose your attention or waste your time. Since this is the last song that I’m translating for this series I thought that this would be a good chance to do some reflection.

So before I started working on this project, I had to write a project proposal for how I would go about doing this, and what were my learning objectives. My learning goals list was ordered from most important to still important (but less so).

1. Learn new vocabulary through songs
2. Learn new kanji from songs
3. Learn new readings from kanji from songs
4. Improve my familiarity with the language
5. Learn new grammar points
6. Improve my reading speed
7. Learn how to shoot and edit simple music videos
8. Get better at singing

I’m going to now re-rank them in order of how well I think I accomplished each goal:

1. Improve my familiarity with the language
2. Learn how to shoot and edit simple music videos
3. Get better at singing (at least on camera)
4. Improve my reading speed
5. Learn new vocabulary through songs
6. Learn new kanji from songs
7. Learn new readings from kanji from songs
8. Learn new grammar points

So you’ll probably quickly notice that the list is more or less flipped now. Learning a language is a decent amount of hard work, you’ll notice that anything that started with the word “learn” ranked kinda low on what I felt like I accomplished. There were definitely new words in every song that I didn’t know, and I did go look them up in a dictionary. But the thing is, translating it once doesn’t mean you know the word, and translating it twice probably doesn’t either. If you’re going for true learning what you need to be aiming for is exposure, the number of times you engage with a concept.

Because I was only translating six songs total, it was hard to get the amount of exposure needed to remember those words (short of just writing them on flashcards and committing them to memory, but where’s the fun in that?). But, the key to learning is exposure, so even though I was only translating a phrase once or twice, I would occasionally hear it again watching anime, or see it reading manga, and go “huh, that sounds familiar.”

So although you could argue that I didn’t learned as much as I would’ve had I been studying Japanese in a classroom setting, doing solo karaoke in my room with a ukulele definitely made it more fun. It was so much easier to motivate myself to translate a song that I was singing, than to “write a letter to Satoshi, your penpal in Hokkaido, your topic is ‘places around you’”. And honestly once you graduate college (which I will be doing soon), I feel like motivation to continue learning a language, is way harder but so much more valuable.