Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

What is it like to stare at the night sky against your will? It's a question I'd never thought I would be asking myself when the unplanned power cut hit my side of Malta in the late afternoon. Based on past experiences, Maltese power outages can definitely last a few hours, but with the hard work of the folks at the national utility, Enemalta, the situation does get resolved soon enough. But as the sun went down and the streets remained pitch dark, the 44-degree heatwave started taking its toll on the century-old stone box that is simply not designed to dissipate heat quickly.

The queue is still at 744 tasks. It has been there for the past three hours or so. I've browsed today's news, answered a few unrelated emails, gone to the gym, and even tried to take a nap as I waited, to no avail, for the ticker to go down to 743 or less. Why not just click the Start button and go through Task #744 myself? Because I tried, realized that it wasn't easy, and decided to take a break by unenrolling from it, in the hope that someone else is more passionately up to the challenge, get it out of the way, so that I can work on something else.

"You just sounded very different from when you usually talk to your students," my wife said after she overheard me finish a meeting. I was surprised. As someone who believes I bring the same communication style to all my interactions, professional or private, I have zero self-consciousness about the changes in my pitch, tone, or speed as I talk in different situations. As naive as it may sound, even as I recognize the inevitable nervousness, lack of confidence, and the shakiness that come with certain conversations, I still see that the differences projected by those emotions are unnoticeably minute.

Researching Chinese companies and business executives, I recently came across a term I had never heard before. Yin-yang contracts (阴阳合同) refer to the presence of two parallel agreements a company signs with an individual or a business partner. The yang is the public one, to be submitted to investors, law enforcement agencies, and other scrutiny; the yin is the confidential one that contains the actual terms of operational ties between the two parties. Implicitly, the contents of the two are quite different, allowing the two parties to do one thing in practice while presenting something different.

As warm summer weather returns to Malta, its seasides once again fill with people. The water is still way too cold for even a quick dip, but its crescent-shaped beaches and smooth rocks lapped by gentle waves are now increasingly home to a kaleidoscope of beach towels, bikinis, picnic bags, and their owners. Couples chat away, doing little besides staring at the waves, friends sit in circles, laughing over sandwiches and soft drinks, while loners take turns napping on their backs and reading paperbacks, hoping to simultaneously get a tan and some knowledge.

It is always a downer to come back from a street party to find your house flooded. But in Malta, that downer is all the more when the stone house is likely more than a century old, and the party may involve half the country's population gathering around to watch a one-and-a-half-hour fireworks display. In positive terms, it is called "tradition and modernity living side by side." In less pleasant words, it can be summed up as "why does the government spend money on free fireworks, when it may want to consider subsidizing housing repairs with that money instead?"

For the frequent traveler, it is a once-per-decade ritual. Visit the nearest embassy or consulate in whatever country he happens to reside in at the time, and come out with a brand-new booklet ready for entry and exit stamps. It is almost a temporary reminder of patriotism: someone who intentionally left the homeland to roam the world, only to pledge allegiance in the form of a bureaucratic procedure indispensable for a nomadic lifestyle in the modern world, where every country seems more sensitive to national security risks. 

As the minutes tick away, the folks at the bus stop are getting jittery. Laughter and banter amongst family and friends gradually give way to silence, occasionally broken by a nervous tapping of a foot on concrete and a dismayed sigh. Otherwise, everyone looked in the same direction, the narrow paved road leading to the stop, the line of sight broken by a sudden curve against the tall trees across the street. Unable to see vehicles incoming more than a few seconds before the stop, no one dared look away and miss the arrival; their eyes intent on peering through the spring foliage for any glimpse of a bus livery.

"I am so looking forward to the next batch!" More than a hundred similarly phrased messages lit up the Slack channel as faces from around the world chimed in with anticipation. I was in a powwow of AI annotation "experts," a collection of more than 300 freelancers, remotely hired and based, to work through a project evaluating the quality of a Large Language Model (LLM)'s different responses to given prompts. Over a little more than two days, the group of people who have (and will likely never) met in person powered through what is likely thousands of tasks.

I'm in the midst of a lull in my main job of supporting high school students with college admissions, with last year's bunch nervously awaiting their results, while this year's haven't started brainstorming the essay topics. During the downtime, I had been partially consumed by a mobile game, in which the player is an independent trader in a galaxy in which the central authority collapsed, and a cult-like rebellion seeks to assert control. The player navigates the many lawless frontiers, visiting planets that are home to civilizations menaced by economic difficulties, civil conflict, or simply isolation from trading partners.

Outside the imposing, vertical stone walls that enclose the hilltop fortress jutting into the sea is another Valletta. There, the few tourists battle crumbling passageways hugging the rugged coastline, cold sweat breaking out as they come face to face with narrow paths where their feet are inches away from a steep drop into the raging ocean below. But they also come out into a small seaside community, where small fishing boats lie next to wooden houses and storage units, unchanged in decades. Families gather, surely away from their main inland houses, to barbecue, feed stray cats, and greet intrepid travelers passing by.

The 30-year-old man in the black-and-white photo smiled at me, his happiness at perhaps his first time in Beijing for work still visible more than 60 years after the fact. Yet, moments later, I found myself ripping the beautifully preserved photo in half; the arbitrary split in the brittle paper ran through that very smile, a stark reminder of a sudden but entirely unceremonious goodbye. By the hundredth rip, I had become mechanical, pieces of old photos, alongside scraps of diary entries with neat handwriting and certifications of all kinds, so unemotionally falling into the black garbage bag below. 

The three-story house lit up like the entrance of a high-end mall. Yellow string lights run the vertical length from the rooftop balcony to the garden below. A velvet red bow tie runs the horizontal length across the second floor, while a balloon snowman and a Christmas tree bookend the whole spectacle on the top and bottom. The fact that the house is surrounded by the characteristic beige stone houses of Malta, with not a decorative light in sight, only serves to accentuate its visually prominent place in the quiet residential neighborhood on an average night.

"You shouldn't see parenting as self-sacrifice so that your kids don't see love as depletion." That line from The Fax Club hits a little too close to home. The book, which documents a year-long experiment in which 100 anonymous participants answered a weekly question that arrived at them by fax, showed just how deliberate contemplation, uninterrupted by the quick dopamine hits of social media, can create real philosophical gems through the most ordinary people. The best, like this one, came out of everyday observations about human relationships.

There goes the spring travel plan . That was, selfishly, my first reaction when I read the news article last week that soldiers in the country of Benin showed on a live broadcast on national television, declaring that they had overthrown the civilian government, stripped the president of his powers, and closed the country's borders. Despite the government's declaration a few days later that an attempted coup was thwarted and people could go back to "business as usual," for the foreign traveler, the uncertainty was enough to put off casual visits.

After three years working in college admissions consulting and speaking to more than 100 high school students worldwide, this is my biggest learning. Skills are easy to pick up. For those who can afford it, professors are willing to mentor, NGOs can be set up, hardware prototypes can be built, and diverse cultures can be learned firsthand. Even those without money can pick up skills through free online courses, bugging adults to share their expertise out of the goodness of their hearts, and run small projects to help out in the community.

Read some posts on online forums about Malta, and chances are that one would soon come across complaints that the prices do not match incomes. The ever-increasing costs of newly constructed condominiums and hotels aside, the biggest peeve among posters seems to be the country's restaurants. Despite the island being home to more than half a million residents, the eateries seem to cater exclusively to the influx of tourists with deep pockets, putting together posh dishes at posher prices, while giving those on a budget slim pickings beyond fried chicken and kebab shops. 

I still remember all the praises that veteran development professionals showered on Paul Kagame. It was 2015, and I was landing in Tanzania for my work at the One Acre Fund, an American microfinance NGO. The Rwandan president was the darling of Western donors, creating a country of political stability, clean streets, and a transparent welcome for foreign investors in a neighborhood often characterized by opaque shakedown, hidden costs of doing business, and unpredictable, sudden changes in policymaking that risk leaving people, assets, and money stranded.

AI has arrived at the audio age. Only years after robotic voices dominated the test-to-voice space, AI producers are investing substantial resources in humans willing to contribute their voice recordings to equip the latest generation of chatbot conversation partners. The result is an ever more natural set of sample voices that can recite textual responses, to the point that a blind listener would not be able to distinguish the machine-generated from the human original. Days are not far away when voice transcription, as a human job, becomes entirely obsolete.

"Could I...ask a completely unrelated question?" One of the attendees hesitantly spoke up in our online discussion session. As I saw him lower his head in the grainy video thumbnail, he quietly muttered, "How...does your life end up like that?" And before I could inquire what he exactly meant, he intoned, his voice a bit louder and even angrier, "I'm interested in living in different countries too....but it just doesn't seem like it plays out that way." I opened my mouth and closed it again before I could say a word. I had to think for a moment after realizing it was a much more sensitive question than I had expected.