My guide to how China is changing

Happy Lunar New Year everyone or as we call it in Chinese Chūn Jié or spring festival! Hope everyone experiences lots of happy things this year. I know it's kind of special year for a lot of you since it's the year of the pig. In Chinese tradition everyone gets one year older over the New Year (instead of during your birthday), which means that you've turned 24 (or some multiple of that)! So happy birthday!

Setting off a string of firecrackers on the beach since it's illegal to do it within the city.

This year's the first time ever that I've celebrated it in China. And it honestly it's the first time I've ever really had off for Lunar New Year since it's not something you get off when you live in America. On New Years eve we had a huge dinner with my grandma, cousins, uncles, aunties, with lots of auspicious dishes like fish and geese. We went to the beach and we set off fireworks (which I often forget is actually a Chinese invention). And watched lots of reruns of the new year's programming on TV.

Lighting incense so we can offer food to our ancestors.  

For the past four years I've been traveling back and forth from the U.S. to Japan quite frequently. For studying abroad, for my summer internship, for school, and now for work. And that has indirectly given me lots of opportunities to visit China to see my grandma, and other relatives like cousins, uncles, and aunties. In the past four years I've gotten to visit China five different times (compared to just 2~3 times from age 6 to 18 growing up in the states), and while I can't speak for how China is different from when my parents left in 1995, I've been able to see with my own eyes how China is evolving.

Shantou's old district was very busy over the new years. Swatow is how you would pronounce Shantou in the Chaoshan dialect (which I can't speak D:)

From my experience as an American watching the news, you get this sense that China is this large looming threat to the United States, I think because China's often portrayed as the antagonist, media portrayal of China is often made to intimidate. "Look how fast China is growing, be scared." On the other hand working as a designer in Japan, a lot of what I see is technological innovation in China that is moving in a different direction from how technology integrates into our lives in both the U.S. and Japan.

Driving down a road in Nan Ao, my uncle told me that this place is known as China's Hawaii.

In the past week I've living here and talking to family about how life is changing here in China. So here's a micro-look into China's development from one perspective in one city.

Expanding Infrastructure

The train I took to get to back to Hong Kong for my return flight. Every seat was packed.

China has been rapidly expanding it's network of high speed rails since the early 2000s. These trains are bullet train fast, the kind that doesn't exist in America. Last year when I visited Shantou, I flew into Hong Kong's airport, and took a 5 hour bus from Hong Kong to Shantou. This year, there's a new high speed rail station in Hong Kong, which shortened the ride to just 3 hours by train (which honestly could've been more like 2.5 hours if we didn't stall at Shenzhen for half an hour). To give you some perspective that's like if we could travel from New York to Boston in 2.5 hours. Imagine if there was a convenient way to move from state to state that didn't involve long distant driving or going to an airport. This is the kind of infrastructure that China is spending it's money on. The kind of infrastructure I wish the U.S. was spending it's money on.

Was it a similar experience to riding the Shinkansen in Japan? Not really. Most people I see riding the Shinkansen are business people. In contrast most of the travelers I traveled with on the high speed rail were people going to or coming home to family. Granted, this was peak holiday season, so it's not a fair comparison. Maybe I'll do a blog someday on trains in Japan because, I love the trains.

The Nan'Ao Bridge, which you guessed it, leads to Nan'Ao Island. (Huaxinnet)

One of the days we headed off to Nan'Ao, an Island off the coast of Shantou to set off fireworks (it's prohibited to set off fireworks within the city, but you hear people do it anyway). One thing that was super striking to me was the Nan'Ao bridge. You used to have to take a ferry to get to the island but more recently they built a super long bridge connecting the two so that you can directly drive across the ocean to China's Hawaii (though tbh, I went to Hawaii for the first time recently, I am absolutely in love, and Nan'Ao doesn't hold a candle to it). I was impressed by how freaking long it was, I'm not sure I've been on a longer bridge.

Proliferation of QR codes

Originally I was going to post something useful like a video of someone actually purchasing via QR code but then I found this music video on youtube.

I feel like QR codes in China is something that either you know is rampant in China or you have no idea what I'm talking about. Well, QR codes are everywhere. You know those things that never really took off in America? When's the last time you actually took the effort to scan a QR code?

In China, QR codes are almost the defacto way that people pay for goods now. In America I carry around a credit card. In Japan I fumble around with cash. In China, most people will scan the merchant's QR code, which takes them to the store's payment page where you would type in how much you pay them, and then press pay. And wahlah! The money then gets transferred to their account. There are two primary payment processing companies, one of them run by Tencent that's connected to your wechat account (which is the messaging app of choice in China), the other is run by Alibaba, the Amazon/Ebay of China.

People in China actually scan QR codes. You can put a QR code on your advertisement, and you can reliably count on interested people to scan the code to get directed to your website. QR codes aren't just used for purchasing from stores or people, there are also vending machines everywhere that take payment via QR codes. Here are some examples:

Bike Sharing

Normal bikes costs 1 RMB per ride. Motorized bike shown above costs 3 RMB per ride.

I know I said vending machine, but lets talk about bikes. Dock-less bike sharing is huge in China. There are multiple bike share companies that can be seen cluttering the sidewalks everywhere. These bikes are cheap cheap cheap. You scan the QR code located below the seat and it'll cost you about 1 RMB, or 15 cents for a single ride. You don't have to find a specialized dock, you don't have to worry about any time limits (probably, I've actually never ridden one because my relatives escort me everywhere I go), they're convenient for the consumer but come at a cost of taking up a ton of space.

While walking around the streets of Shantou it's apparent that these share bikes vastly outnumber personally owned bikes. Most people prefer to rent these bikes than buy their own. I was told that their popularity is due partly to the fact that Shantou doesn't have good local public transportation infrastructure so these bikes can be alternatives to buses that might only come on the half hour. Though that seems pretty typical tbh if you are in America.

A pile of broken share bikes.

I walked past a mountain of these bikes just piled up like a scrap heap and I was like smh, people just treat shared property like shit (or like the educated like to say, aghast! The tragedy of the commons!(am I using this right?)) . But my cousin reassured me that this isn't just any old pile of bikes, people with broken bikes are directed towards these piles, they leave it there, then the company picks them up and fixes them up for redistribution.

It is still a mystery to me how these companies are profitable when renting bikes are dirt cheap and people are not taking care of them.

Phone Charging

Tiny phone charging station located at a dimsum resturant.

This box was outside a dimsum restaurant we ate at. You scan the QR code and you can then keep your phone in the box to charge while you eat. I'm skeptical people use this particular one because it looks kinda sketchy and you could probably just pick it up and run if you wanted to steal a bunch of phones at once. But apparent phone charging stations are pretty popular in China. Probably cause everyone's constantly glued to their phones.

Tissue Paper Dispensing

Tissue paper vending machine located outside a mall bathroom.

This one is the funniest example imo. Most bathrooms in China lack toilet paper. In the past it was probably something like if we put toilet paper in the public bathrooms people will steal it. I think we are past the era of stealing toilet paper, so my theory on why there is still no toilet paper in public bathrooms is that people are disgusting.

You know when you walk into a stall and you find that half of the toilet paper is on the floor and there are crumpled pieces of paper scattered everywhere. I think they're trying to avoid that. I personally feel super grossed out when confronted with disheveled toilet paper, and I'd imagine that other people do too. There's no trust in nasty public toilet paper.

This is why people bring around packets of tissues when they go out. You bring your own toilet paper, that way you can trust your paper, and you're unlikely to be a messy asshole. In the event that you forget to bring a pack, pray that you do not need to number 2. Anyway, all this talk was to point out that in this mall bathroom, right outside the door is a tissue paper vending machine where you can scan the QR code and for a little bit of money, gain access to "the loo roll".

Societal shifts

Throughout my week in Shantou, one of my uncles would constantly tell me about how soon life in China is basically already better than life in the U.S. or Japan. I will say that quality of life in China has improved drastically since my parents emigrated in 1995, but as someone who has experienced living in all three, I'm nodding my head yes cause I don't want to make my uncle feel bad...but in my heart it's still a no. Anyway here are a few things I noticed about Chinese society.

Pursuit of trends

Streetwear

It's like wearing COMME des Garson.

China is very trendy, for better or for worse. You know how more recently the Chinese international student look has shifted from poor pHD student to rich hype beast?  I was sitting at a hotpot restaurant, looked down, and everyone was wearing Adidas ultra boosts. And these people aren't even that hype. They were my cousin and my uncle's friend's kids. You go to the mall and the predominant fashion for young people (from 50 to as young as 2) is street wear. Phone cases are Gucci, shoes are those chunky looking Balenciaga that look like you fused two shoes into one. And if you can't afford that you're wearing either counterfeit or a knockoff. Personally I don't really get the point. What's the point of getting expensive hype stuff when the person next to you is paying pennies on the dollar for Soupremes. 

Muji Copycat

This is the inside of a Muji Store (Power Plant Mall)

Muji is a pretty ubiquitous brand in Japan, it sells clothes, travel items, cosmetics, furniture, and is well known for it's stationary. I would say it has as much brand power as Uniqlo within Japan, and has a decent cult following in the U.S. among the designer types *waggle eyebrow*.

This is the Muji lookalike I found at the mall

I was walking around the same mall with the tissue pack dispenser where I found this Muji copycat. I was like, wait is this Muji? Except the logo was different. Except I literally own the same travel-sized shampoo bottle at home. It's not unlikely that the products are the same exact thing with a different logo slapped onto it. I mean many companies do their manufacturing in China, and these factories I suppose can sell to many different brands.

I feel like for a lot of things in China, rather than having their own innovative ideas, Chinese companies just copy what is doing well in the mainstream. This happens a lot in tech. 

Huawei MateBook X Pro review from my favorite tech youtuber Dave 2d.

One example the Huawei MateBook X Pro, it takes heavy inspiration from the Macbook Pro. 

And a broader example is apps. Because the great Firewall of China blocks many of the apps you and I use in daily life (here's a blog I wrote about it a few years ago), China has it's own unique app ecosystem. For Messenger there's Wechat (actually it's kind of creepy when I get a notification that it's running in the background despite me not have had open it), for Google there's Baidu, for Amazon there's Alibaba, for Uber there's Didi Chuxing. You can bet that for every tech giant in not China, China has something like it. These companies have a huge sandbox in China with a captive audience of at least one billion people. Capitalism, am I right?

The Line Bunny

The Line bunny casually hanging out outside the real estate office

So LINE is the messaging app that people use in Japan, I know some people who use Facebook Messenger, but the vast majority use LINE. The thing is, LINE is blocked in China like everything else on my smartphone. Yet, Cony, a LINE mascot has been everywhere in Shantou. Cony was in the claw machines, Cony was chilling out at the real estate office. This really felt like something being popular for the sake of being popular abroad. China has no cultural ties to Cony, the real estate company definitely didn't ask if they could use Cony as a mascot. Why can't you go design your own mascot.

Bonus picture. Kumamon, another Japanese mascot, chilling out in front a buffet resturant. 

Cleanliness

So...the parts of China I've been to, they are not clean places. Japan might have ruined me. Unlike Japan, China actually has trashcans everywhere. In Japan I carry my trash on me everywhere I go because there is a distinct lack of trashcans. In China, there are trashcans everywhere. But there's still a large amount of trash on the ground. Like you know those moments when you're so shook that you don't know what to do. I was going on a walk with one of my relatives, and when they finished drinking their juice pack, they just tossed it on the floor. I mean if we just kept going there would've been a trashcan in another minute, yet they it threw it on the floor. And I kept walking. Cause I was paralyzed.

And it's not like Chinese people are dirty all the time, it's just I've noticed this distinction between mine and not mine. People tend to treat public areas like shit, but you walk into their houses and you've got to switch to slippers cause otherwise you'll make the floor nasty.

Shoe shrink wrap machine at the real estate office.

One interesting intermediate I saw was at the real estate office for apartment condos by the beach. They had showrooms of these apartments you could buy from them and there were these cool machines that would shrink wrap some plastic onto your feet so you wouldn't make their floor nasty.

Anyway, there are people just spitting on the sidewalks, and children peeing behind signposts. I find that even new trendy drink shops tend to look on the rundown side because nothing public ever feels clean. People don't take care of what's not theirs.

Shrink wrapped utensils at the hotpot place we ate at.

One interesting example of this is bowls and utensils in restaurants. At the hotpot place our dishes came in shrink wrap. The restaurant does this to show us that it's clean. After they wash it, they shrink wrap it so you can be sure that no one has handled it with their grubby hands. But then, they bring over a tub of boiling water. Which after unwrapping our utensils, we wash it in the tub a second time. My aunt said that this is largely symbolic at this point, but you've got to wonder how deeply ingrained is this distrust of public items.

Here's a picture of the food at the hotpot place. It was only beef. We ate only beef. It was delicious.

Social Credit System

So the last thing I'm going to talk about is the social credit system. For those who haven't heard of it, the government is attempting to keep a tally on every Chinese citizen, assigning them a score depending on what they do or don't do. If your Social Credit is good, you can have advantages like lower interest rates or better access to public services. If your Social Credit is bad the Government can stop you from traveling by stopping you at immigration or high speed rail stations. This score isn't just based on data the Government has on you (like if you've been breaking laws), it's also based on data that private Chinese companies have on you (like maybe if you buy "items that good people wouldn't buy" from Alibaba). It sounds terribly dystopian, and if you want more information on it you should google it (unless you're reading this from China...which I'm not sure is possible? Since Blogger is owned by Google?) since I am not a subject expert. I have however a few stories of how it's changing China though.

Bike Sharing

Nice and clean share bikes.

So earlier I was talking about the widespread diffusion of share bikes in China. Because these bikes are dock-less you can basically put them anywhere and no one can stop you. A while back they were having problems with people abandoning bikes in rivers and lakes. Now these companies are looking to tie your bike share account to your Social Credit. Dump a bike into a lake, your Social Credit will drop.

Traffic safety

Being in a car in China feels dangerous, especially since I'm not used to it. Lanes are more like suggestions, people weave in and out of traffic frequently, and do not believe in pedestrian right of way. However, according to my grandma, it has gotten significantly better over the past couple years. She said that in the past if you were stuck in the crosswalk when the light turned red on you, you were just stuck. Grandma would stand in the middle of traffic as cars zoomed past her on either side because no one would let her finish crossing. She said that more recently cars will yield in similar scenarios. 

A traffic camera that we passed. Not too different looking from your average traffic camera.

I've noticed a decent amount of traffic police at intersections, supposedly they would call out bad behavior and your Social Credit would drop if you were found disobeying traffic laws. There are also a ton of traffic cameras along the freeway. And they are not discrete. When you zoom past them they will flash to let you know they've taken a photo. They can tell if you're speeding, if you're driving without a seat belt, and they will send you tickets based on your traffic violations. Get caught too many times and you'll get your license revoked. You can be sure that this is tied to your score.

No picture of the poor Social Credit monitor, but the map app alerts you of nearby cameras.

One part of the Social Credit system is that people with low Social Credit will get their photos posted in public areas, kind of like that thing people do with bad behaving dogs on the internet. This is probably to discourage you from doing bad things cause you'll lose face (by having your face everywhere). I thought that this had to be a joke, because it just sounds like something you would do if you wanted people to call your government evil, but lo and behold as we drove by a toll, there was a small monitor right outside of it with eight or so faces of people I'd assume have poor Social Credit. Not quite what I was expecting, I was imagining something more like a time square billboard. I wanted to take a picture of it but it was so fast that by the time I registered what it was, it was already too late. 

So my thoughts on the Social Credit system. Yeah I mean it sounds pretty fucked up. But from an on the ground standpoint I think partly it's just the government trying to stop people from being assholes. China has developed extremely fast for the past few decades, but some people need to do some catching up when it comes to social etiquette. Like please, I know the bathroom has a small line, but if your going to let your child pee in public, at least find something to hide behind.  

For offences like traffic violations and damaging public property I would say it's pretty black and white what is right or wrong. But it's on more grey issues like anti-government speech or cycles of poverty that result in poor Social Credit that make it unpalatable to my westernized self. 

Final Thoughts

I think that China is modernizing in a way that's different from how developed nations today have modernized. Partly it's due to the fact that it's growing up in a era with new technologies like big data and new trends like the sharing economy. 

The old district in Shantou, super lively due to spring festival events. Do you know there are 5 million people living in this city? Yet you've probably never heard of it before.

I think that Chinese citizens are very connected digitally, most people I saw were glued to their smartphones. There are an abundance of ways to interact with the physical world using your smartphone, QR codes being the obvious example, but also things like shaking your phone when a prompt appears on TV for a chance at getting digital Hong Bao (or red envelopes) filled with money.

Copy-paste condos, this picture is from when I went to Shanghai.

I think that it's full of stark contrasts. You see new multi-story condos getting copy pasted throughout the city, but at the same time you have old buildings falling apart also sprinkled throughout. You see the person head to toe in expensive expensive brand name clothes, and you see the auntie standing next to her rickety bike hawking vegetables. You can also see the sidewalk, which are meant for people, but instead parked from edge to edge with expensive luxury cars.

This is the China I see, cobbled together from my experiences over the past few years.

I'm not sure exactly what any of this means, and I'm not exactly sure where things are headed. But one thing that I am certain of, is that China is changing.

Bonus funny picture from when I went to Xiamen in 2017. The couples taking wedding photos outnumbered the rest of the beach go-ers.

How I got to America. Part 1: My Grandmas

Today I was listening to the podcast “This American Life” on the way home from work. This particular episode was titled “How I got into College,” a topic that’s somewhat relevant in my current life, since for the past few weekends me and my brother have been talking to each other about how he’s going to get into college, under the guise of playing video games together.

This particular episode was really good. I was riding on the train, staring outside the window discreetly dabbing tears from my eyes using the back of my pointer finger. The protagonist of the story was telling his mythology of how he went from a refugee in Bosnia to a Harvard graduate with a tenure position at UChicago through the sheer virtue of luck and the kindness of others. It got me thinking, how much of my life is a fluke.

That story doesn’t just begin with me though. It begins way before I was ever born. But I’ll start telling it from where I’ve heard it start.

Mama

Chinese is a tonal language, in the Shantou dialect where my dad’s from Mama could mean mother, but if you emphasize both syllables it would mean grandma. Mama is not my mom, she is my grandma on my dad’s side of the family.

Mama was born in a rural village in China back in the 1930s. She had a few siblings and her family worked on a farm. Back then it wasn’t uncommon for children not to go to school. This was especially true if you were a girl, because what’s the point of educating girls if they just get married off? And also true if your family farmed, because what are you going to do? Read to the rice stalks to make them grow faster?

But Mama was lucky, she went to elementary school all the way until 6 grade. She was an intelligent girl but was pulled out by her auntie at the end of elementary school because they needed her to help out more on the farm. She learned how to read and write a little, but I think more importantly she got a taste of what education was like and the experience kindled a desire in her to learn.

It wasn’t until she was 18 before she had another chance at school. Now the next part is a little fuzzy for me, but there was an opportunity to test into a prestigious middle school in the area, and someone managed to convince Mama’s aunt to let her go and take the test. She didn’t technically qualify to even take the test. They required applicants to be under 16. But Mama and her friend smudged the document stating their birth year and with two strokes of a pencil changed it so that they were 16.

She took the test and 5% of the applicants were accepted. Out of her cohort, only two kids were selected, and Mama was one of them. She went on to attend night school, and then moved to the city to study at a telecommunications school. She eventually moved directly from the training school to their parent company where she worked until she retired. She had four kids, and grandpa was always sick, so she was the one handling most of the things in the house. Money was always tight, so the kids had to grow up fast and do their fair share.

Present day she still live in China in the same apartment that she bought after retiring some 20 years ago. I didn’t get to see her frequently back when I lived in America since we traveled back to China only once every few years. Recently, the past 3 years or so, I’ve been flying to and from Japan a lot so I’ve been able to see her more often as I swing by China. Everytime I am touched by how loved I feel despite these years of being apart.

I have really clammy hands, so it’s not a pleasant experience holding them, but whenever we crossed the road together, she reaches out and grabs my hands. And hand in hand we would dodge cars, motorcycles, and bikes on our way to the market.

She’s doing alright, but I can definitely see what time has done to her health. Things like clutching the banister as she walks one foot next the other as she makes her way to her fourth floor apartment. While I was there I held the groceries, which were even heavy by my standards, and I wonder what she does when no one there.

As an American I always expect there to be an anti-U.S. sentiment in China but talking to my family, it doesn’t seem like that’s the case. Mama came to live with us in New York for a year when my brother William was born. Taking William out on strolls, friendly strangers would comment on how cute he was. Those memories of the U.S. dyed her impressions of Americans as a open-hearted bunch.

Popo

Popo, not like the police popo or rhymes with bobo the clown popo. It’s really hard to romanize non-mandarin Chinese, but I assure you it sounds a lot nicer than it does in your head. But anyway, Popo is Cantonese for grandma. She’s my mom’s mom.

I’m not sure if she had an education beyond elementary school, but growing up I remember watching her put on her reading glasses and read the Chinese newspaper we picked up from Flushing. She was a really accomplished woman, though not in the sense that the word is usually used. When she was younger she single handedly saved her siblings from starvation, and till this day it’s a debt that can’t be repaid.

She passed away my Junior year in highschool, so most of my information about her life is second hand from my mom. But my mom remembers back in her childhood that when Popo got off work at the factory she would bike home with a giant bag of chestnuts. Popo and my mom would then peel and wash that entire bag, which then would be brought back to the factory and sold for a little extra money.

She was a hard worker all her life. And I would say that it paid off. Her kids both went overseas, they both got ph.Ds, and both now live upper income lives with highly educated children (that’s me ;)

She moved to America sometime when I was a elementary schooler when my cousin was born. Popo lived with my uncle’s family most of her life after immigrating to America, she had a brief stint at our place for a year or two, but since they actually bought a house and we were still living in various apartments in New York, she lived with them.

When she died my mom was understandably really sad. I think what got to her the most was that we finally bought a house when we moved to Kansas, we finally had the means to give Popo her own room. She could finally live with us. But she was gone.

I don’t really remember the process of her dying. It felt like it was a short period of over a year, in which I saw her once in the middle, and once towards the end. I knew that she had cancer but towards the end she also had a hard time remembering things, remembering me. That final time I remember her grabbing all the grandkids and leading us into her room where she sat us down and splitting what was left of her money among the four of us. She split it evenly except for this one 2 dollar bill she had. It was special and she kept it in a special place.

There was only one so it went to the oldest cousin. Jimmy. Who by the way, is younger than me by 5 years. I’m still not quite sure what she meant by oldest cousin. Maybe it was because he was the oldest male cousin or maybe because Jimmy’s technically the one who’ll carry the family name? I was understandably hurt, but more hurt by the fact that she was not going to be here anymore.  

After getting home I wrapped up the bills that she gave me in a sheet of sketchbook paper and labeled it grandma’s money so I wouldn’t accidentally it. She passed away shortly after. Her funeral was held in China since the majority of her friends and family still lived there. Since it was so far away, my mom was the only one who was able to go.

Anyway, that was the end, but there were a lot more happy times in between. One summer during elementary school I lived at my uncle's house. I remember her taking me out on walks to the playground, packing me spicy seaweed packets for my snack, and watering her garden with pee that was collected from Jimmy’s duck shaped potty chair.

And during that year that she lived with our family, my brother’s Cantonese dramatically improved, and then she left and it subsequently declined. And like most grandmas that immigrated as an older adult, she didn’t learn much English during the years that she was here. But one phrase that William taught her that she always remembered was “I love you.”

---

So my writing took a little detour from my original topic of detailing “how much of my life is a fluke,” but maybe it took a better turn, and gave me the opportunity to write down our histories. I think I’m going to make this a series, and next time I’ll talk about how my parents ended up in America.

What am I procrastinating on?

It’s been a long time since my last blog. Partly because there’s just too many things that I want to do, too many things I need to do, and too little time to do. And all of these things are pulling and tugging me in different directions and the end result is more or less I feel like a puddle. I just want to lay here until I evaporate. But anyway I thought it would be a good idea to organize a bit, and maybe that would help motivate me to finish something.

Things that I want to do:

I want to write more. I always mean to write more. I have a list that I keep with different blogs I want to eventually write, topics like: an update on how my Japanese is doing, what it’s like being a hidden (Asian) foreigner, my favorite things in Japan (which is a surprisingly dull list).

Part of what’s stopping me is I have this grand ambition of writing a field guide documenting every year I’ve spent studying Japanese, what worked, what didn’t work, milestones, but it’s just a little outside of what I can handle right now so instead I just plan and dream about it, ha, ha..

I want to draw more. I think I always fancied myself to be an artist, but as a 23 year old it’s a lot different from middle school where every single anime boy you drew got compliments like “omg ursoo good at drawing. Can you draw me something???”

I have this stupid pressure to be “good” (everyone who makes art probably gets it), but in reality I draw way less than I did as a 13 year old. Everyone of my watercolor pieces takes at least a few hours (and usually I’m not even that satisfied with the end result). Also, after getting back from work, arms shaking from using the mouse all day, the last thing I want to do is hunch over a piece of paper weighed down by my own personal expectations of making “good art.”

I want to pass the N1. Which for those who don’t know, is the highest level of the Japanese Level Proficiency Test, and every foreigner’s wet dream. Honestly it’s kinda a bit far fetched seeing that I’ve never taken any of the easier levels. But. Go big or go home right? (And I want to get it over with. None of that, study for the N2, take the N2, study for the N1, take the N1 bullshit. Yes I’m so lazy…)

The problem is that I’m not studying for it... And the times I’ve cracked open a practice test I score around 60% right…

*Just did some research into what counts as passing, and their standards are so abysmal that maybe I can pass...full score is a 60. You need to score at least a 19 in order to pass. That’s like passing with a score of 32%...

Ok, maybe that’s doable.

I want to learn Chinese. Which I’m literally doing nothing for. I keep telling myself that I’ll start after I pass the N1.Which I’m not studying for. I’m thinking about bringing the study book to work so I can do it during lunch. We’ll see how that goes.

I want to get skinnier. “But you look fine” my friends all say. But we all know that we look into the mirror and everyone has gripes that no one else cares about. I’m going to the gym about three times a week. It pretty much siphons all the time I would spend working on any other of my goals. Changes are extremely incremental, I’d probably get way better results working on literally any of my other goals for the amount of time I put in. So from an efficiency standpoint, I am clearly prioritizing wrong.

Things I need to do:

I need to clean my room. In college we had carpet floors so I never noticed how much I shed. By the time Saturday rolls around I’m always confronted by a shit ton of hair on the floor, a slow migration of stuff from my makeup shelf to my desk, and the appearance of abandoned cups that I haven’t bothered to wash throughout the week.

I need to go to the dentist. I’ve never booked my own doctors appointments before (yes, I know. I am a child…). I haven’t booked my dentists appointment despite musing on it for a couple of weeks. I have these two divets in my teeth that feel sensitive when I swirl water around my mouth. Partly it’s just cause I’ve never done it before. Partly its cause I don’t want to go to a Japanese dentist and have to fill out paperwork in Japanese and have a conversation about my dental hygiene in Japanese. I’ll book it after writing this blog.

I need to make food. Having a cafeteria is really convenient. You get pre-prepared food. You get company to talk to. You have your dirty dishes whisked away by a conveyor belt. I’ve been dealing with this by meal prepping a week’s worth of food, the downside is that I’m eating the same thing for lunch and dinner for the whole week. Luckily it doesn’t bother me too much.

I need to watch Youtube. Or anime, or netflix. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a chore so much as I need it to feel like a sane human and to destress throughout the week. This season’s Anime I’m watching: Working Cells!, Bananafish, Boku no Hero Academia. And I want to watch season 3 of Attack on Titans but I haven’t had the time.

Yeah so that’s all the stuff I want/got to do. If you’ve made it this far, hooray I guess? You should probably get off the toilet seat now.  I’m gonna make lunch and book my dentist appointment.

Jiaying tries to explain the blockchain

What is blockchain and what does it promise?

From what I understand, a blockchain is a database that is stored on a distributed network. Changes in the database, which can also be called transactions, are stored on the blockchain as blocks, which are linked up in chronological order (like a chain) creating a timeline. By going back in a blockchain you would be able to look at all of the changes/transactions that happened during the history of the blockchain. You can only add new blocks, you can not change previous blocks.

Analogy: It’s kinda like the version history on google spreadsheets, you’re able to see all of the changes that have occured since you’ve created the document, and multiple people are able to add their changes

A blockchain is not meant to be stored on a single centralized server, if you want to participate in editing the database, you will need to download a copy of the blockchain and serve as a node in the network. Nodes in a blockchain network talk to each other in order to verify that everyone’s copy of the blockchain is the same (and not tampered with) and notify each other of new blocks that have been added to the blockchain. This system allows every participant in the blockchain to know that the previous blocks are not being edited. Every node gets to send transactions to every other node without having to go through a central entity.

A simplified node diagram

Analogy: I need to pay my rent ($1000), I have an account with bank A, my landlord has an account with bank B. Bank A needs to debit my account $1000, send this money to bank B, and bank B will then have to credit my landlord $1000. This relies on all of us trusting that at each stage of the transaction no one is fucking the other person over (because we’re not trucking $1000 dollar bills from bank A to bank B). If I was paying my landlord using cryptocurrency like bitcoin, I would just send my rent to them from my node to theirs, and as the transaction is being sent across the network, every node would verify with their blockchain that nothing fishy is going on.

Me before you (blockchain)

The use of blockchain promises:

Security - The anatomy of a blockchain makes it difficult to edit previous blocks without invalidating all subsequent blocks, this prevents hackers from changing the data. Because all other nodes are cross checking with each other’s copy of the blockchain, edited blockchains will also be rejected by other nodes as fraudulent.

Privacy - The data on all blocks are encrypted, which anonymizes who’s sending what to who.

Decentralization - Because the data is not stored on a central server somewhere, no central institution has control over the database (unless of course they own all the nodes on the blockchain)

Trust - Which becomes unnecessary since the blockchain algorithm will make sure that no one is making fake transactions (ie. paying someone money that we don’t have).

Reduction of Bureaucracy - It simplifies transactions and can reduce costs by cutting out the intermediary infrastructure needed to support peer to peer transactions.

Anatomy of a blockchain and how it works

A blockchain consists of blocks. These blocks are linked together chronologically.

Each block has:

Transactions - Theses are the changes to the database

Hash - This is a fingerprint uniquely identifying the block and it’s contents

The previous block’s hash - This is what chains one block to another

This is what a simple blockchain would look like:

The hash of each block is basically the encrypted information on the block. To generate a hash you would feed, the transactions and the previous block’s hash into a hashing function, which would then spit out a unique hash.I’m depicting it as a pictorial fingerprint, but a real hash would look something like this:

28902a23a194dee94141d1b70102accd85fc2c1ead0901ba0e41ade90d38a08e

This hashing function is deterministic, which means that editing any of the input would change the output hash.

If you edit a transaction in a block, it will change it’s hash.Because blocks are linked to each other by their hashes, changing one block’s hash will change all the subsequent blocks’ hashes as well. Your blockchain is now completely different from any other node’s blockchain, which will result in them rejecting your changes.

Blockchain 1: “Why won’t you accept me? D’:”

Blockchain 2: “Because we come from two different hashgrounds”

So why’s people so hyped on bitcoin? Cryptocurrency and mining

So...honestly I feel like most people hyped on cryptocurrency don’t really know or care for its benefits (for list of benefits read section “what is blockchain and what does it promise”). Many people are just hodling onto the cryptocurrency waiting for it double and triple its price before selling it for the mad cash.

The reason why I feel it hasn’t swept the world by storm (or at least the bubble in which I live in) is that it doesn’t really address most people's needs. I trust my financial institutions not to fuck me over (maybe naively you might say), the places I shop don’t take bitcoin, and it’s too volatile as a currency.

Maybe cryptocurrency will take hold in places where the government and institutions can’t be trusted, but I don’t know.

Anyway, one part about bitcoin I never understood was

What the hell are these miners and what are they mining?

So one feature of bitcoin is that it has these bitcoin miners. Bitcoin miners are nodes that verify transactions and add them to a block, these blocks get added to the blockchain once that block is verified by other nodes. As a reward for verifying transactions and adding a new block, miners are rewarded with new bitcoins increasing the whole bitcoin economy. Right now miners get a reward of 12.5 bitcoins (which is approximately $150,000).

Because bitcoin is a currency, you can’t just flood the market with a ton of new bitcoins. That would screw up the value of each individual bitcoin. Which is why bitcoin’s algorithm only allows one new block to be added every ~10 min.

There are tons of these miner nodes competing to create the next block (and earn bitcoins), so how is only one created every 10 minutes? The algorithm does this by adding a layer of artificial difficulty by only accepting blocks with hashes that fit a certain requirement (ie. a hash that starts with n number of zeros)

000000cdccf49f13f5c3f14a2c12a56ae60e900c5e65bfe1cc24f038f0668a6c

In addition to the base hashing function inputs (transactions & previous block’s hash), miners also put in a third input, a number (which basically functions as a guess), which will hopefully generate a hash that fit’s the algorithm’s requirement.

These miners repeat this process 1,000,000,000,000,...s of times to find an acceptable hash

You need really powerful computers in order to mine bitcoins because it’s so astronomically impossible to find an acceptable hash. These computers also are super resource hungry. Currently bitcoin miners use as much electricity as the country of Algeria does in a year. Which is definitely bad for for the environment.

Eventually this energy consumption should decrease (or so people say) since the end total number of bitcoins in circulation will be capped around 21 million. Miners will be getting less and less bitcoin reward for each successful block, which will decrease incentive, decrease competition, and the algorithm will adjust the hash requirement to be simpler (less zeros).

But yes for now verifying bitcoin transactions are actually a lot slower than verifying credit card transaction. And it’s also destroying the environment with its carbon footprint.

What is a coin vs. token?

So one thing that was super confusing for me was what’s the difference between a coin verses a token. Quick googling seems to indicate that coins’ primary purpose is to work as currency, while tokens are a more generic counter system.

So why would you want to use blockchain?

So I get the appeal of blockchain for the anarchist type person (screw central powers of authority), but decentralization itself can’t really be a driver for big corporations to want to use blockchain right?

Well it does seem like there are several other benefits of blockchain for businesses.

1. Prevent hackers and security breaches
2. Make record keeping more automated (and reducing

But what I don’t get is how exactly do blockchain companies make money, if people are making peer to peer transactions, and skipping out on paying the middleman. The incentive to create a platform/software that facilitates direct transactions would have to come out of the goodness of their hearts right? What exactly is the blockchain business model if you employ the fundamental basics of the blockchain’s benefits?

Non crypto-currency examples of blockchain applications:

I was going to compile a list of non cryptocurrency examples with long explanations, but I figured other people have done a good enough job:

• Voting - Secure online voting
• Real Estate Sales - Record keeping for real-estate transactions
• Supply Chain - Know where every part of the finished product came from
• Crowdfunding - Direct peer to peer crowdfunding
• Copyright Management - Making sure that content producers get paid
• Customer Loyalty - Cryptocurrency replacements for membership points
• And more!

Mourning for my adolescence

It’s been awhile since I’ve last written a piece for my blog, but they say that if you love something, you’ll never truly leave it. It’s like an itch, that sooner or later I would come back to pouring my thoughts and feelings into the vast expanse of a google document. Also it’s just a time of big transitions in my life, and I’m not entirely sure how I’m feeling, but it always seems like by the time I finish writing a blog, somehow the loose ends of my thoughts wrap up somewhat nicely.

So main transitions going on right, is one, moving to Japan, and two, moving to adulthood. After landing at Haneda airport I took the train to the station nearest to my new apartment. I was sitting on the train, gripping my luggage, looking around, and I just had this really strange feeling. It felt like very familiar moment, millions of colorful advertisements fighting for my attention, and me, staring hazily trying to decipher what they’re trying to sell me in my jet lagged state. But at the same time everything felt really foreign, and I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why I was feeling that way. I stared outside the window watching the landscape woosh by and in my head I felt like it was very, Japanese-poi, or Japanese like. But it didn’t feel entirely like I was here in Japan either.

It’s been a few days since then, and even now I still feel occasionally disoriented. There hasn’t been a decisive moment where I’m like, “yup I’m in Japan now” even though all the cues are screaming that I am no longer in America. Moving to a new country is tough, but right now what I think I’m having the most trouble with is coming to grips with adulthood.

It’s not really any particular aspect of it, moving to a new apartment, not seeing friends, going grocery shopping, cooking, working, figuring what to do with my spare time, I’ve done all of those things before, but still nothing has ever felt so final as it feels now. You know, like this time it’s for real. And that I think is what scares me the most. That when fall rolls around I won’t see my friends, there’s no winter break for me to bum around at home, and also just the realization that everyone is diverging living their own separate lives. That no matter how much effort you put in to things to keep in touch, and no matter how well your efforts are rewarded, it will never quite be the same anymore. And that too, scares me.

Everything is so unfamiliar. Maybe it just takes time. We all get thrust into adulthood, and maybe the truth is that no one is ever quite ready for it. Maybe it’s a matter of treading water now and eventually a sense of normalcy will return. And hopefully even though things won’t ever be the same again, that the new doors that open will be as much, if not more, enthralling.