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From Lei Day to distress call in 31 days. (ok, maybe being a little dramatic)

On May Day, we hiked Diamond Head before it got hot.

Ok, that’s not entirely true — it got hot. More like humid. But we started early enough (6am!) that the worst of it hit on the way back down, when we were already done being heroic about it. Fried rice from Rainbow Drive-In in our immediate future. Rainbow Drive-In is a plate lunch institution, the kind of place that has a line at 9am and should, and the fried rice is exactly what you want after a hike. The hike was a bit harder than we thought it was going to be, mostly because we are no longer used to humidity. But it was worth it. We’d earned it. We’d earned being in Hawaii, even without the hike.

We were in Honolulu to reward ourselves — for surviving a half year that had featured more appointments to a retina specialist than I care to recount. (If you’re new here: my husband has had three eye surgeries since Thanksgiving. Detached retina and related issues.) 

You slog through the adversity, you book the trip for as soon as you’re clear to travel, you go eat fried rice on a Friday morning on an island where it’s warm and the flowers are everywhere and it’s May Day, which in Hawaii is Lei Day, which means the whole city is doing something fun and festive.

That afternoon, we visited Shangri-La, Doris Duke’s vacation home turned museum of Islamic art, right on the water. She knew what she was doing, real estate-wise. The lusterware mihrab was the star of the show, and I could have sat in front of it all day listening to our tour guides, whose level of knowledge was giving full PhD dissertation energy.

We walked Chinatown — downtown Honolulu — where everyone was having a party and a sale simultaneously, which is a combo I fully support. I was handed a glass of prosecco just for walking into a shop. We wandered into what we thought was an art gallery and turned out to be another curated home goods store. With party drinks! I was so wiped from the day that I found a vintage chair in the corner and just sat in it while R and our friends chatted up the owner. I didn’t even pretend to browse. I just sat there, in a stranger’s nice chair, in a room full of things I wasn’t buying, and it was perfect.

That evening we had dinner at Fete, which might be the best restaurant in Honolulu, which might mean I have to go back and confirm. You know, for research.

The rest of the week was like that.  I was doing stuff, but I was decompressing. I know how to say it without guilt now: I was resting. On purpose. 

Then I came home.

The job offer came fast — faster than I expected, which is funny because I thought I was ready, I’d been waiting for it, and yet. I wasn’t expecting the CEO’s Slack DM at 7:30am on the day I returned. I scrambled. We talked through paperwork and logistics, and then I hit the ground running the following Monday. Hit the ground running. A phrase I’d forgotten I knew how to do… which maybe should have been a warning. Oops.

The first couple weeks back I kept catching myself mid-meeting, surprised I still remembered how to do this. How to context-switch. How to move with urgency. The vocabulary came back like muscle memory — syncing, aligning, circling back, let’s find time — a whole language I’d spent the majority of 2025 not speaking, and I was suddenly fluent again. I clocked more hours than I probably should have. I felt that productive exhaustion I’d almost forgotten I used to run on.

Almost forgotten. And then immediately remembered. Snapped right back into it.

What my body had to say about all of this: No.

Or more like: Hell no. It was more like a door that just stops opening. I got diagnosed with a frozen shoulder — the joint capsule tightens, mobility decreases, treatment is physical therapy a few times a week, and every day at home, until things loosen up, which takes months. Cool, cool cool. A frozen shoulder is exactly what it sounds like. I did not need it explained to me. I understood it immediately, physically, because my body was making a point.

I had been going to the pottery studio every week, often multiple times a week, for hours. It was the thing that had nothing to do with output or productivity or any of the words that used to follow me around — just clay and community and a two-hour block where I made things that were sometimes beautiful and sometimes fell apart. Unfortunately, that time is now dedicated to physical therapy (or physio, as it’s known in Canada and now in my lexicon). I need the physio more than the studio needs me. I know this, but it doesn’t make the absence smaller.

All things considered, I’m doing ok. The job is ok. My shoulder will thaw. I’ll get back to the studio eventually.

But not gonna lie, May hit me like a truck. A truck wearing a lei.

I miss Hawaii. I need another trip to reward me for enduring the month of May.

we walked into that one. and made friends.

The shoes are brown oxfords. So soft out of the box, as Italian shoes are. I haven’t worn them in a while — because I don’t need to wear brown oxfords when my daily outfits are big concert tees and shorts.

We wandered into the shoe store because it was our first trip to Florence — Firenze if ya nasty — and we were told we had to buy Italian shoes. Makes sense. We had stopped by some random little artisan workshop I learned about in one of my internet black holes, but that was a bust. I did not need custom shoes with a long lead time and high price tag because they would be handmade by an Italian grandpa. Anyway, we stopped into this store because shoes were displayed in the window, and we figured why not. He didn’t find a pair he liked in his size. I found a pair I liked in mine. We bought the shoes.

That part of the story has a clean ending. Girl sees shoes. Girl buys shoes. Girl wears shoes.

Inside the shop, a fabulous couple was browsing, and wondering aloud — in English —  whether to buy these gorgeous red boots. R, after a few days of hearing zero English being spoken and getting by on “grazie” and “prego” while I stumbled through the rudimentary Italian I learned on the plane, was so excited to hear words he understood. I cannot overstate how elated he was to hear English. (We are so American.) He commented that the shoes are amazing and they should buy them. We started talking — the way you sometimes do with strangers when you’re traveling and your guard is down and you have nowhere to be. We asked if they had bought shoes here before (low key, R and I just wanted to know if we had stumbled into the Payless of Italy). They told us they buy multiple pairs of shoes at this store every time they’re in Florence. Solid endorsement.

They ended up not buying the red boots, because the store was out of stock in their size. They left, I browsed, I bought the aforementioned brown oxfords.

When we left, we thought: That was nice, they were so sweet. We’ll never see them again.

We walked out of the store, new shoes in hand, and got gelato from our spot across the street: La Carraia. (Yes, it was our first time in Florence, but we already had a favorite gelato spot.) For me, a lighter, likely fruity flavor. For him, something chocolate. Now with shoes and gelato in tow, we started our walk across the bridge (Ponte alla Carraia) back to our hotel.

And there they were. On Ponte alla Carraia. With gelato from La Carraia. 

I don’t know exactly what we said in that moment. It was probably like, “oh hi, what are the odds?” — whatever you say when you’re surprised and slightly delighted and don’t yet understand that the moment you’re standing in is going to matter. 

We learned their names, Robert and Mark. That La Carraia was their gelato spot too. That they’re from San Francisco. That they were on their honeymoon. And — within the first ten minutes of talking — that Robert was R and Mark was me. The gay alternate-universe versions of us, personality-wise.

We planned dinner for a few nights later.

Robert and Mark are now some of our dearest friends.

They’re the kind of friends you make plans around, like adjusting your Hawaiian vacation dates so that it overlapped with theirs. The kind whose texts light up your day. The kind where we’ve stayed at their San Francisco apartment when they were out of town, because we were in town, and they insisted we shouldn’t stay at a hotel. The kind that refer to their guest bedroom as “your second home”.

We found them in a shoe store we walked into because… there were cute shoes in the window. As is the case with shoe stores.

I think about the version of that afternoon where we don’t stop. Where we’re on our way somewhere, or the window catches our eye and we keep moving anyway. I’ve kept moving past a lot of windows.

What would Florence have been? Still great. We’d have hit our reservations, seen the things on the list, gone shopping, come home and said it was wonderful.

And Robert and Mark would exist somewhere in the world, and we’d have no idea. We wouldn’t miss them. You can’t miss people you’ve never met.

That’s the part I can’t shake. The loss is invisible. You come home full and happy and completely unaware of what you didn’t find.

There’s a version of this essay where I say something about luck, about how you can’t engineer the best things in your life. And that’s true, but it’s not really what I’m sitting with.

What I’m sitting with is: I didn’t choose the accident. The shoes were in the window, we stopped, Robert and Mark happened to be in that shop on that particular afternoon, we all wanted gelato, we all walked on the same bridge home. None of that was a pre-planned decision.

But everything after was. The dinner we said yes to. The choice to invite them to our wedding. The next trip we overlapped on. The friendship we decided, slowly and without ceremony, to keep building.

The luck got us to the bridge. We did the rest.

I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately — we just saw them in Hawaii, and we’re making plans to visit them in San Francisco in a few weeks. When we tell people how we met, it sounds unbelievable. And I keep wondering how many bridges I’ve crossed where I just didn’t happen to look up.

What I know is that Robert and Mark are in our lives and we’re better for it in ways I couldn’t have predicted — and it started with a shoe store we almost didn’t walk into.

I still have the shoes. Brown oxfords, soft as anything. Worth every bit of stopping.

The friendship was not on the receipt, but I’m keeping it anyway.

I got a job and have a lot of feelings about it

“I saw you got a full-time offer. Congrats?”

The people who know me well were the ones who included a question mark with their congratulations. They are spot on. The question mark is exactly how I feel about the whole thing.

I came home from Hawaii tan, rested, and connected with the ocean, and got hit in the face with a full-time offer from the company I’d been contracting with. The catch: GTM Architect, a job I’ve never done before (GTM = go-to-market). The gist is working with companies to implement their GTM operations infrastructure and technology. I’ve never worked in a GTM organization before — what even is a GTM organization? I know how to log into Salesforce and that’s pretty much it.

I was hesitant to say yes because it felt like a trap. I wanted to make sure we were aligned on expectations — like, if you think I have experience in any of this, you are sorely mistaken — and that I would actually be set up for success. The CEO booked time on my calendar to “close” me. (Nothing like a sales call about your own employment.)

He told me that I already do the hard stuff: the stakeholder management, the clear communication, the relationship-building, the “executive presence” (yuck, I hate that term, but I understood what he meant). The team is committed to ramping me up on the technical stuff. He admitted that people who have all the GTM experience and technical skills are not always good at this job, because it’s the people stuff that can be difficult.

To be honest, that was validating and reassuring and made me feel so good about myself. They realized that the “soft skills” I’m good at are… well, skills, and skills that are more difficult for them to teach. Perhaps for the first time in my career, a company saw me for my potential and not just what I’d already done. And I’m not even a white man!

The last year and change had been genuinely amazing. Turns out not being on the late-stage capitalism hamster wheel does wonders for your mental health — who knew? I loved the freedom to do what I wanted, and to not have anyone have control over my time. I loved waking up to decide I wanted to spend the entire afternoon in the pottery studio, being glued to the wheel and not a screen, with nowhere else to be. 

What I didn’t love was being broke. I was moving money around from savings and living paycheck to paycheck in a way I’d never done before, because wow, bills are expensive and they do not care about your personal growth arc.

Truly, one of my first questions when I got the offer was: “what does this mean for my studio time?” Which tells you everything about who I’ve become over the last year. Which also made me a little afraid of who I’m about to become again.

Part of me thought accepting this job would contradict — set back, even — everything I’ve been trying to do in the design of my life. I’ve been writing about my freedom and rediscovery of myself and everything important to me, and how my nervous system is finally in a stable place, and how I have time to create art with no pressure from anyone but myself. Working a 9-5 again goes against much of that.

I originally wrote “takes away,” but I backspaced the hell out of it. I think the only thing I lose is time, if I do this right. But that’s a big if. And it has a smaller, meaner question underneath it: will I do this right?

It’s easy to talk myself into why this is great. A full-time job is really all I’d ever known until recently. It’s familiar. It comes with a regular paycheck and health insurance — and after R’s unexpected eye surgeries, plural, having actual insurance that will cover an emergency is not nothing. (It is, in fact, a lot.) The company is small, I like the people, and I will not pretend the idea of a bi-monthly paycheck didn’t make me exhale in a way I hadn’t in a while. (Side note: the word bi-monthly is ridiculous. In this case, it’s 2x a month.)

But I’ve also learned that a full-time job is not safe. It gives the illusion of safety. They could decide they don’t want to employ me anymore, for any reason. That hasn’t changed.

And if I’m being really honest with myself, what scares me more than getting laid off is getting so deep in it that I lose the plot.

For starters, I’ve already googled basic GTM things. Things I probably should have known before saying yes, though I think I’ve done a decent job of making them believe I know them. I also may have asked Claude to explain RevOps to me like I was five. The “I know how to log into Salesforce” bar is even lower than I made it sound.

And an underlying fear is that saying yes makes me a hypocrite. Or worse, a failure. Like I couldn’t actually make it work any other way, and the full-time job was always going to be the ending, and everything I wrote this year was just a very long way of arriving back where I started. I don’t fully believe that, but I believed it for like 45 minutes while I was spiraling, so I’m including it for accuracy.

The thing I’m actually really scared of is the nervous system response to an unexpected Slack message, or a terse comment on a call, that sends my body into full threat-response mode — heart rate up, jaw tight, that flavor of dread that makes no evolutionary sense because it is a frickin Slack message, Amanda — as if I’m being stalked by a tiger and not pinged by a coworker about a deck. I spent a year getting that response to quiet down. I do not want it back.

That’s the real loss I’m calculating. Not the time, exactly, though that is a loss I’m grieving. But the nervous system.

The question mark in “Congrats?” isn’t pessimism. It’s my friends knowing me well enough to understand that I don’t experience things cleanly. I said yes to the offer. I think it was the right call, or at least a reasonable one, or at least the one I made.

I had to remind myself that nothing is permanent. This is my reality until it isn’t. I could leave if it sucks. Past Amanda would have never considered quitting an option. Past Amanda would have ground it out and called it resilience.

The question mark stays.

or: Where are you really from?

My grandmother had remarkable, somehow ageless skin. Like she discovered the whole glass skin thing before glass skin had a name and was a beauty trend. She also had a perfect perm — the Asian grandma perm — for as long as I could remember. It always worked for her, and I never knew how.

I also never knew how to tell her any of this. She didn’t speak much English. I don’t speak Toisanese, or any Chinese dialect for that matter, besides what little Mandarin I struggled to learn in Chinese 101. So mostly what I did was sit across from her and smile and eat whatever appeared in front of me and hope the smiling and the eating said what I meant, which was: Thank you. Your cooking is incredible. You look incredible. You are incredible. I genuinely hope I got your genes.

This is, more or less, my experience of being Chinese-American.

I didn’t go to Chinese school on the weekends. I took exactly one piano lesson — because my cousins were taking lessons, and I showed up and assessed the situation and decided “nahhhh”. I did not attend an Ivy League university; I went to *gasp* a state school. I am not a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer. I’ve definitely been the only Asian person in a meeting full of white men, and I always knew my shit — which, yes, is just who I am, but also: it was never not a choice. (Unless it was math. I am pretty bad at math.)

Not stereotypically Asian-American. In certain circles, this has been noted.

But I’m also not what *ahem* many Americans consider American. I look the way I look, and in certain rooms, that’s the thing that gets clocked first — before the New York-adjacent attitude, before anything else about me. 

Then there’s The Dreaded Question: “Where are you from?” (New York. Jersey City. Take your pick.) 

“No, but where are you really from?” (Did you not hear me the first time?) 

We do a few rounds until I get frustrated and say something resembling “I’m Chinese-American.”

My name is a case study. Amanda: after the Dynasty character, apparently; a few of my cousins also have Dynasty names. Jane: after Jane Pauley, of the Today show. Lee is the Chinese part, the one that arrives before I do. Primetime soap, network news anchor, Chinese surname… about as American a name as you can have.

I do have a Chinese name — it’s Toisanese, something to do with the moon. We think. Based on my best phonetic guess and a Gemini search, it might be “Ngut Vah” which means “Moon Flower”. But I’ll never know for sure, because the only person who knew for certain was my grandmother, and she’s gone. (P.S. Any Toisanese speakers here who can help me decipher my own name?)

So. Not Chinese enough. Not American enough. The in-between — which is a lot of us.

The label situation does not help. First generation or second generation — I have been trying to get a straight answer on this for a while. My parents immigrated here, which technically makes me first gen: first born in America, first to grow up here. My parents have referred to me as first gen my whole life. But there’s a whole discourse about whether claiming that for myself diminishes my parents, who are American, who are citizens, who have been building their lives here for decades. They are not less American because they were born somewhere else. The word “immigrant,” used a certain way, implies they never fully arrived. They were the first gen to build their lives in America; they just weren’t born here.

The labels are contested and probably always will be. I’ve started using “third culture kid” — a term that describes those raised in one culture, tethered to another, not fully fluent in either. American enough to feel out of place in China. Chinese enough that America occasionally reminds me I don’t always belong.

The third culture isn’t the absence of two others. It’s the thing that forms in between. 

Recently, on vacation, my husband looked at me — he’s Indian-American, his own flavor of third culture — and said, “I’m so glad I don’t have to explain myself to you.” Different Asian heritage, same general territory. 

I grew up desperately wanting Lunchables. Not my mai fun and soup — the actual good food my mom packed — but the little plastic trays with the crackers and questionable meat slices and artificial cheese. I wanted bologna and cheese on white bread. Something unremarkable, something that wouldn’t require explaining. I had to explain my mai fun and soup every time.

I am now an adult who is vocally, almost aggressively, proud of that same food. Who will argue about where to get the best dumplings and order whatever comes with the head still on and feel a specific territorial joy when someone discovers Chinese food and acts like they invented it. And who is, if I’m being honest, a little mortified that I ever wanted to trade any of it for a Lunchable. I can’t even think of Lunchables right now without gagging a little. (I did love those Kraft Handi-Snacks cheese and crackers though. The one with the plastic red stick.)

The third culture-ness is a low-grade ambient condition, mostly. Something you move through without naming, until something forces you to name it. A heritage month. A question that won’t take Jersey City for an answer.

My grandmother would be at family gatherings and we’d sit across from each other, smiling and eating. She would gesture for me to put food on my plate before I finished — the universal grandmother move, which requires no language and no explanation. I am not entirely sure what she thought of me; I don’t know if anything got lost when my mom or aunts acted as translator.

I’m still hoping I got her genes.

I learn through suffering.

I know how seatbelts and airbags work because I was in a car crash. 

We were driving out from New York to Colorado and had just left Kansas City, way early in the morning. I was snoozing in the passenger seat when I felt the car rapidly decelerating. I opened my eyes, and my little Honda Fit (RIP Blueberry) smacked right into a deer.

I felt the seatbelt yank my body so that I was pinned to my seat. The airbags didn’t deploy. We were shaken up, but unscathed. I learned later that the technology in cars is so advanced — it made a series of split-second decisions based on perceived impact. Blueberry detected it was a collision, so it wound the seatbelts back on their spools, and deployed the tiny explosive in them to lock them in place (this is why you need to replace seatbelts after a crash). It also decided that we didn’t need airbags in that particular crash, because of where and how we hit the deer.

I likely would have never looked any of this up if it hadn’t happened to me. The experience made me care enough to wonder. 

This is how I learn. 

You know the Trammps song “Disco Inferno”? Turns out “disco inferno” in Latin translates loosely to “I learn through suffering / hell.” Probably not what they had in mind — they were definitely talking about discotheque — but here we are.

I am a disco inferno learner. I don’t always heed warnings. I don’t always learn from other people’s mistakes. I learn from mine. I often don’t even care until there’s an inferno.

It’s not always the heavy stuff either.

I first drove stick shift in someone else’s Mini Cooper — I tried in a parking lot, but it wasn’t very big, or very empty. I stalled almost every time I tried to drive. I didn’t get out of first gear. Anyone backing out of a parking space freaked me out. I panicked. That very specific panic when the car jerks and you smell burning clutch and you hope no one is behind you. 

I know that life is short — really short, YOLO short — because I lost my dad and my in-laws. They all died relatively young, in their sixties and seventies, not from old age. I knew intellectually that people die young, that time is finite, that we should etc. etc. etc. I had heard the speeches. But I never truly understood it until my grief forced me to. We finally took the trip to Thailand last year — the one we’d been postponing for over a decade because “we’ll make it there eventually.”

I learned that I cannot give my entire self to a job because I’ve been laid off three times. I’m not telling you this for sympathy — I’ve written about it before, I’ve made my peace with most of it. I’m telling you because three times is a lot of times to learn the same lesson. The first time I thought it was a fluke. The second time, bad luck (the blow was softened by a generous severance, and I was there for only a few months anyway). The third time: OK… I see what’s happening here. The job was never going to love me back. Companies don’t, actually — they care about productivity, not people, and I had to get laid off three times to really believe it.I know this now. It’s lodged in my body in a way no career coach could have put it there.

There’s a part of this disco inferno realization that I keep wrestling with. 

I write. I write about the things I’ve lived through, the lessons that cost something, the patterns I finally saw after I’d already paid the tuition. I write hoping that someone reads it and maybe doesn’t have to learn it the hard way. Which is insane, right? Because I am Exhibit A of the person who needs to learn the hard way.

I spent years in program management doing the same thing professionally. Being the person who’d seen the pattern before, who’d watched a similar project collapse for the same reasons, who’d say — gently, then less gently, then really less gently — “I think we should think about XYZ”. And then watching the company have to live through XYZ anyway. And then being joylessly right about XYZ. There is no satisfaction in the “I told you so”… ok, maybe a tiny bit of satisfaction. But I would have rather they listened to me in the first place.

So what am I doing here?

I think — and I’m still working this out — I’m not actually writing so you won’t have to learn it the hard way. I’ve made my peace with the fact that you probably will. I think I’m writing so that when you’re in it — when the seatbelt catches, when the room gets quiet, when you’re shipping your company laptop back for the third time — you might remember: “someone was here before me. It was like this for them too.”

Not a warning. More like finding someone else’s handwriting in the margins.

Disco inferno. I learn through suffering. I write through the fire too, apparently. And maybe that’s the only honest thing I can offer — not the lesson in advance, but the proof that you can come out the other side of it and still think it was worth writing down… even if nobody learns a thing.

The exhausting business of performing in business

I have rehearsed the answer to “tell me about a time you navigated a difficult stakeholder relationship” more times than I have told the actual story to anyone who knows me.

I know my lines. I know where to pause for effect, when to laugh a little to signal that I have perspective on the hard thing, when to bring it back around to what I learned from the experience. I know when to say “I” and when to say “we” so it sounds like I’m owning it vs. throwing my team under the bus. I know which stories to keep in rotation and which ones — the more honest ones, the hot messes — to leave in the mental filing cabinet.

Every interview I’ve ever had has felt like opening night for a show I’ve been running for fifteen years. What is this, Cats on Broadway? (Which ran for 18 years, by the way. TIL.)

I hate it, but I’m not even that bad at it. That’s maybe the worst part. I’ve gotten good at the performance. I can be warm and competent and funny and curious and just self-deprecating enough to seem like I have healthy self-awareness without actually revealing anything that could be used against me. I can answer behavioral questions like I’m narrating a highlight reel. I can do the voice. You know the voice.

What no interview has ever actually asked me to do is the job.

The things I’m good at live in writing. In the space between the question and the response, where I can think. In a doc with comments and track changes and the ability to revise (and revise, and revise) before I hit send. In a Slack message I’ve rewritten at least three times before anyone sees it. In the slow, iterative, asynchronous way that most knowledge work actually happens. None of that is available to me in an interview. The interview is testing my ability to perform, live, under pressure, with no tools and no time — which is to say it’s testing almost the exact opposite of the skills required for the role.

What an interview is really measuring is your nervous system. How confident you can appear when you’re scared, how smoothly you can surface a prepared answer and deliver it like you just thought of it. Whether you’ve got enough stage presence (… “executive presence”? ugh) to make the panel feel like they’re getting the real deal, and the real deal is a good one.

Now that I think about it, this is exactly what first dates are testing. (I’ve been married for over ten years, so it’s been a minute — but I don’t think the audition has changed much.)

The whole first-date experience is not so different from an interview — the rehearsed lines, the careful revealing, the performance of your best, most dateable self. You wear the perfect outfit that says “I have my life together” but also “I’m not too high-maintenance” and you order something that says “I’m adventurous but not too adventurous if that scares you” and you laugh at the right moments and you don’t lead with the thing about your anxiety. You do your highlights reel. You do the voice.

The difference is that a date can go somewhere real. If it works out, the walls eventually come down. Not all at once, but you get there. Someone sees the version of you that exists on a Tuesday at 8pm when you’re tired and grumpy and out of witty remarks. Someone learns the stories you don’t tell in rotation. Someone knows which answers are the real ones. The performance ends, or at least softens, into something that’s actually you.

Corporate life doesn’t have that third act. You perform your way into the job. And then you perform on the job, while doing your job. You learn to narrate your mistakes correctly and frame your wins and calibrate your visible enthusiasm. Even your competence is a performance — you’re not just doing good work, you’re making sure the right people see you doing good work, making sure your brand, god help us, is being managed.

Here’s the part I don’t know what to do with: I got good at it. Good enough that I stopped noticing where the performance ended and I began. Good enough that I got promoted and praised and eventually laid off thrice with some kind of comment about how it wasn’t me, it was them. “It’s not you; it’s me.” Classic breakup line.

The last almost year and a half not working full time has been nice for many reasons, and one of the big ones was I didn’t have to perform full time. And one of the things that surprised me was how long it took to figure out what I actually thought about things when no one was assigning a grade to my answer. When I wasn’t framing my response for the room. When I could just, like, have an opinion. Without the voice.

I think the corporate world is the most sustained version of the performance. We perform. We’ve always performed. But most performances have an intermission, or a closing night, or some small window where you get to just be the person who’s tired and doesn’t have an answer for this one.

The career ladder doesn’t give you that window. And every few years you go back out for another run, rehearsing your lines again, performing your competence at a panel of strangers who are also performing, everyone pretending this is how you find out who someone actually is.

I don’t know how to fix it. I’m not sure I’m even making an argument. I’m just noticing that it’s exhausting to perform for that long, and a little lonely, and that somewhere in the middle of all those highlight reels there’s a person who does their best work slowly, in writing, with time to think… who has never once been asked to show up that way in an interview.

My fried rice is sometimes made with Costco chicken. It’s still real.

Whenever my mom tells me about a new Chinese restaurant she’s tried, she tells me how authentic (or not authentic) it is.

When she says a place is authentic, she means it as a compliment — this place is the real thing, you’d love it. And I believe her. But the word “authentic” makes me grimace; it doesn’t sit right with me. Authentic to whom, exactly? Authenticated by what? Is there a council? Do they have a stamp? (They do not have a stamp.)

The thing about “authentic” as a descriptor for food, especially Chinese food, especially Chinese food made in America, is it’s a word that sounds like a compliment and functions like a trap. When a reviewer calls a restaurant authentic, they mean it as high praise — “this is the real thing, this is legit, you can trust it.” But implicit in that praise is its shadow: the not-authentic, the lesser, the performed version of a cuisine that exists for people who don’t know any better.

And who decides? Usually not us.

My “inauthentic” dish, the one that’s most mine, the one I come back to, the one I make without a recipe, is fried rice. Whatever’s in the fridge. Sometimes leftover Costco rotisserie chicken, sometimes whatever orphaned veggies are in the crisper drawer, some frozen peas, an egg or two, some combination of soy sauces and sesame oil. It takes twenty minutes. It tastes exactly right.

Would a food critic call it authentic? Almost certainly not. It doesn’t follow any canonical regional recipe. It’s not from anywhere specific. It’s from my kitchen, on a Tuesday, with a $5 bird we picked up while bulk-purchasing gummy bears.

Is it less real because of that?

The word I actually want to use is “traditional”. When a stranger says something is authentic in a review, it just means “I have decided what the real version is, and this isn’t it.” Traditional means it follows a method, a lineage, a set of techniques passed down and replicated with intention. You can say a dish is traditional without implying that the chef’s grandmother’s version, or the version made with ingredients available in Colorado in 2026, or the version adapted for a dining room that is not in Toisan, is somehow a fraud.

“Traditional” acknowledges that food travels. “Authentic” pretends it doesn’t.

Chinese food has traveled. It traveled when my grandparents immigrated from Myanmar to New York City. It traveled through generations; I cook some of the things my Po Po used to cook. And it traveled when Chinese restaurant owners in America looked at their new customers, their new context, their new everything — and adapted. On purpose. With skill. The Chinese takeout menu is one of the great acts of culinary translation in American food history. General Tso’s chicken? Invented by a Hunanese chef in Taiwan in 1955, sweetened and deep-fried to American tastes by a New York chef in the 1970s, and so unknown in China that when the original chef tried to introduce it back home, nobody wanted it. The dish traveled so far it couldn’t go back. Crab rangoons? They were invented at Trader Vic’s, a tiki bar in San Francisco. (Yes, the tiki bar that claims to have invented the mai tai. lol.) Both now so embedded in the Chinese-American takeout canon that people order them as if they’ve existed for millennia. That’s not inauthenticity. That’s invention.

Every diaspora cuisine is a living document of that travel — what you kept, what you swapped out, what you invented because you missed something and had to approximate it with whatever ingredients were on hand. That improvisation isn’t inauthenticity. It’s history. And in the case of Chinese-American food, it’s also just good business sense dressed up as culinary instinct.

When a reviewer docks stars because the mapo tofu isn’t “authentic” enough, I want to ask: authentic to which decade? Which province? Which family? Sichuan cuisine has changed over centuries. It’ll keep changing. Every cook who makes it puts something of themselves into it.

There’s also something specifically uncomfortable about who tends to wield the word. When a non-Chinese reviewer calls a Chinese restaurant inauthentic, they’re implying they have a clearer idea of what Chinese food should taste like than the Chinese person who cooked it. That’s a sentence I could keep unpacking forever, but I’ll just leave it there and let it be weird.

I wrote this whole essay and I’m still not going to have this discussion with my mom. That feels like the most important thing I’ve said here, ha.

Driving a very big car and learning to take up space

We got a new car last summer. Well, a used car, but new to us. We traded in our zippy Audi A5 Sportback for a hulking Lexus GX460.

We had taken our A5 in for an oil change down the street, and they — of course — did a “complimentary check” and told us we needed new motor mounts. Sounded like a typical sus mechanic thing, because who ever needs new motor mounts? What did we even do to this car for it to need new motor mounts?

In any case, we said thank you, and we planned to get a second opinion. In parallel, we went down a path of “what if we do need to pay thousands of dollars to replace motor mounts? Is it even worth keeping this car?” The short answer: probably not. It was already six or seven years old, and German cars don’t have the best reputation for reliability. They do, however, have a reputation for being expensive to maintain. And so we did a little car shopping. Our next car would be our forever car. Without boring you with all the details of the thought process and the dealership experience, we handed over the keys to the A5 and suddenly were owners of a Lexus GX460. It has a red interior, and I referred to it as “cute” and “a cozy little boat” during the test drive.

It wasn’t meant to be a statement car. It was a practical decision. Reliable Lexus, more comfortable road trips, Colorado things, and hey I felt confident driving this giant car.

A good friend was visiting from out of town recently, and he asked me how I liked driving it. I told him the biggest adjustment wasn’t the size (surprisingly — also, heyo!), or the parking, or the turning radius, or the lack of Apple CarPlay. The biggest difference is that people drive differently around me now. They’re aware of my presence on the road in a way they never were when I was in my Audi. I’m not blending into traffic anymore. I am traffic.

He laughed and said: “Because they know you can end them.” I’ve been thinking about that a lot.

For most of my life, I’ve been pretty good at making myself small. Not in a self-deprecating way — more in an accommodating way that felt, at the time, like being easy to be around. I was agreeable. I took up only the space I was given. I moved out of the way. I apologized preemptively. I shrank so other people could feel more comfortable, which I told myself was just being polite or considerate, but was probably something else.

A lot of it is my Asian-American upbringing: don’t make waves, don’t rock the boat. That instinct followed me into my career. Early on, I did what I was told. I rarely pushed back. I made sure other voices were heard in meetings without trying to amplify my own — not until later, when I had enough experience and clout to start making waves. But even then, it cost something to get there. I didn’t realize how practiced I had become at disappearing until I had a year to stop and actually look at myself.

This past year — the year of not working full time, the year of pottery and writing and record players and learning how to taste wine with intention — has been a slow process of remembering who I actually am. I’ve written about that in various ways. But I’ve been slower to name the thing underneath it all, the thread that runs through every rediscovery:

I’m learning to take up space.

Not space as in being loud or demanding or difficult. Space as in: my presence is allowed to be felt. My opinions don’t need to be softened before I offer them. My needs don’t need to be minimized to protect someone else’s comfort. I get to exist fully, not just on the sidelines.

And then I look at what I’m driving around in — this big, 5,000-pound, not-subtle SUV — and I think: huh, maybe I already knew that, even before I knew it.

When I drove the A5, I was fast. Nimble. I blended into traffic and drove around my obstacles. When I drive the GX, I am on. the. road. I am aware of how much space I take up, and others are aware too. They move around me. They stop for me. I now fully understand why you see the smallest women climb out of the biggest SUVs. There’s a feeling of presence and power. And safety, honestly. Because they know you can end them.

There’s something interesting about a car as a mirror for identity. We don’t usually think of it that way — a car is a practical object — but we’re aware of what our cars say about us. The stereotypes exist for a reason. When I drove a Honda Fit, I felt practical but cool. When I drove a Subaru Outback, I felt practical and uncool (I hated that car; it was zero joy to drive). When I drove my A5, I felt impractical and very cool, and had a lot of fun.

The GX doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t try to fit in. It’s not sleek or subtle. It rolls up and is unapologetically there. People see it. People accommodate. Not because it’s threatening, but because it’s present.

I want to move through the world like that.

I think I’m somewhere in the middle of a longer recalibration, figuring out what it looks like to take up space without overcorrecting into something that doesn’t feel like me either. It’s a balance I’m still finding.

But I keep coming back to that moment: a friend, a joke, a throwaway line about physics and vehicle mass. What I’m now hearing underneath is something else — an instruction, almost. Exist in a way that can’t be easily overlooked. Take up exactly the amount of space you’re entitled to, and stop apologizing for it.

I called it a cute and cozy little boat on the test drive. But did I really buy something I’d been working toward my whole life?

I’m becoming more like my parents each day

I don’t know if it’s because I suddenly have more “free time,” or if I’m just more present these days — more aware of everything, including myself — but I’ve started to notice something a bit unsettling: I’m becoming just like my parents.

There wasn’t a singular moment where I thought, “oh, this is it.” It’s more that I catch myself in the act, in these small, specific ways, and think something like, “oh my god, I’m becoming my mother.”

Horrifying, I know. Not unexpected, but still.

It wasn’t one big transformation (for some reason I picture a werewolf — unclear what that says about me or how I view my parents). It’s a collection of preferences, habits, and reactions that I used to question or ignore, and now… they just make sense.

This one was probably always true, but feels especially true now: I dress almost exclusively for function. There’s a joke that everyone in Colorado dresses like they’re always prepared in case a spontaneous hike breaks out, and my environment has likely pushed me further in that direction. Post-Covid fashion hasn’t exactly helped. Comfort wins every time — I can count on one hand how many times I’ve worn “hard pants” since 2020 — which feels like something I used to judge and now can’t imagine arguing with.

And everything is so loud. Places that used to feel normal now feel overstimulating in a way I don’t remember, and I find myself getting irrationally annoyed by background noise that, objectively, is probably fine. And I always find myself extra sensitive to the cold, when it’s supposedly 65 and perfect outside. Maybe this isn’t becoming my parents specifically, but just becoming an old person in general.

I adjust the thermostat to save energy… and money. I’ll turn down the heat and just put on a sweatshirt and a hat. Same with lights. I mean, I do prefer sitting in the dark, but I also like to conserve electricity. Now that I pay my own bills, I understand why my parents scolded us about it.

Every once in a while, something comes out of my mouth and catches me off guard. I’ll ask Kona, “you got out of bed only to lie down on the couch?” which is something I heard constantly as a kid, because I did exactly that while getting ready for school.

“You smell like the sun” is another one. I remember hearing that as a kid and accepting it without question. Now I understand what it means, and I’m the one saying it, as if it’s a completely normal observation to make. Same with describing any dessert I like as “not too sweet.”

I sneeze with my entire body now, like an old Chinese man. To be fair, there are days I feel like an old Chinese man — the whole exercising thing is still a work in progress.

I get excited about buying things in bulk at Costco. There is something satisfying about knowing you’ve made a practical, long-term decision. I eat and drink things not because they’re enjoyable, but because they’re “good for me,” which feels like a personality shift I never saw coming.

And then there are the things that feel more specific, harder to explain unless you already understand them. I think about the Traditional Chinese Medicine concept of ngit hee / yeet hay more seriously now, when I mostly dismissed it as a kid. It’s not just a concept anymore; it’s a consequence. If I’m breaking out, it must be because I ate too many fried foods. Gotta drink some chrysanthemum tea. Or beer. Or eat some watermelon.

I reuse glass jars and takeout containers. After our New Year party, I sent people home with leftovers, and multiple people asked why I have so many plastic deli containers on hand. I save plastic bags — not just shopping bags, but the small produce ones too. I’ve caught myself saying “we have food at home,” sometimes out loud, sometimes just in my head.

I check the weather before I make plans now, because it actually affects what I’ll do and how I’ll feel (why is this such an old person thing?). I’ve also become skeptical of trends — not loudly, just a hesitation that makes me want to wait and see how things play out before buying in.

And there’s this saying: “You’ll understand when you’re older.” 

I used to hate that. It felt like a dismissal, like a way of ending a conversation without really answering the question. But now I understand what they meant, which is not the same as agreeing with it.

It’s not just that I’m picking up their habits, it’s that their reasoning is starting to make sense in a way it never did before. The decisions, the things that felt unnecessary or overly cautious at the time… they weren’t random. They were just based on information I didn’t have yet.

I don’t love that I get it now. That things I used to question are actually kind of reasonable. That if I follow the logic all the way through, it mostly checks out. Which is annoying, because I used to be very confident they were wrong. Ah, youth.

But I can see it now. And I can’t unsee it.

It’s a good thing my husband likes my mother.

One story about two people navigating three surgeries in four months

[Note: If you’re squeamish about eye stuff, maybe skip this one? I don’t get into too much detail, but there are some details about eye surgery.]

I now know too much about eyes and eye surgery. But hey, at least I don’t make as many disgusted faces about it anymore.

The Saturday before Thanksgiving, R’s eye was, in his words, “buggin’ out”. He figured he was tired or the Colorado sunshine was messing with his vision, so he shook it off. But there was no improvement Sunday… and we said if he was still seeing funny, he’d try to get seen on Monday.

Well, it was no better on Monday. Our eye doctor was fully booked, surely with the end-of-year-before-my-benefits-reset appointments, but they referred us to a sister office who was able to see R that afternoon. Great! I dropped him off at the doctor’s office and was off to run some errands. After I checked off my to-do list, I called and asked if he was ready to be picked up.

“Uh, I think you should come here and come in. The doc is on the phone with a retina specialist now.” 

Without getting into too much detail, he had two retinal tears that was causing the “buggin’ out” with his vision, and was referred to a retina specialist who recommended surgery. ASAP. (The cause? Likely bad genetics, and it was just time.)

And so the day before Thanksgiving: surgery.

Or as it would turn out to be: the first surgery of many.

He was almost in the clear, after two months of eye drops and pirate jokes. And at his Valentine’s weekend appointment, they discovered his healing process produced too much scar tissue, which was causing new issues, including distorting his lens. Cool. (It happens about 10% of the time, and being younger is a risk factor. Cool cool.)

The last week of February: surgery #2. This one came with an annoying recovery process that required him to be positioned face down for a week. This was because a gas bubble was inserted in his eye to act as a splint holding everything in place, and it needed to remain in a certain place initially. I explained it to people like an air bubble in a snow globe, where in order to move the bubble, you had to rotate the globe. Oh, and changes in altitude could cause it to explode, leading to blindness. Yup.

First follow-up appointment went well. Everything was healing well and looking like it should, after his week of face-down time. The doctor would like to see him again in two weeks to ensure everything was still progressing nicely.

Welp.

Everything was still progressing nicely where the operation was… but the other side of that same eye was showing signs of detachment. So he now needs a third surgery. 

We added a third surgery to the calendar the same way we added the first two. Another mound of e-paperwork, even though nothing significant has changed in four months, besides the surgeries. Another frustrating anticipation period, counting down the days until surgery day. Another stretch of time shaped around waiting rooms and follow-ups and recovery. Another medical bill. And another. It feels almost… routine? Which feels absurd, considering it’s EYE SURGERY.

The good(?) news is, for surgery #3, they’ll be inserting an oil layer to act as a splint, and there will be no face-down positioning, and he’ll be able to see through it. The bad news is oil doesn’t dissipate on its own like gas does, so there will be a fourth surgery sometime in the future. Woof.

I think part of what makes this — for lack of a better word — annoying is the constant recalibration. Each time, we believe we understand the scope of it. We’ve set our expectations. We ask questions. We prepare, mentally and practically, for what’s ahead. Then the scope keeps changing, right when we think we’re in the clear. 

This feels ongoing, without a clear end in sight (ha, sight. See what eye did there? I need this to end). 

What’s weird is I think I’m more upset about the whole situation than he is, considering he’s the one going through it. He’s accepted that this is just something that has to happen, and is for the best, and that eye surgeries are now part of routine health maintenance. Which is probably the right attitude to have.

What isn’t obvious is the in-between, the part where nothing is actively wrong, but nothing feels fully settled either. The waiting. The wondering if this is the last thing or just the most recent thing. The mental math of best-and-worst case timelines and recovery logistics and what-ifs. The having to update our friends and family AGAIN. Have I mentioned all the eye drops?

It’s the ongoing-ness of it that is unsettling. The way this timeline stretches. The way we think we’re at the end of something, and then the rug gets pulled out from under us.

I will say: I am grateful that I have enough flexibility in my schedule to show up for him. To drive him to and from surgeries, to take him to all the follow-up appointments. To sit in the waiting rooms. To not have to constantly choose between being a supportive partner and being responsible at work. Because there is so much life and responsibility outside of work. I digress.

Because this isn’t a one-time thing. It just… keeps going. (Yes, I’m talking about eye surgeries, but also not.)

And for now, that mostly looks like more appointments, more eye drops, more patience, and us getting a little better at dealing with all of it.