Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

"So, do you get paid in Ringgits or Euros?" a coworker casually asked over a quick lunch at the local hawker stand outside the office building.  The nonchalant air he tried to project as he suddenly blurted out the question betray a damning curiosity that is nothing but nonchalant.  Indirectly, he just spoke volumes about the internal division within the company: the difference between foreigners and locals working in the German company here in the remote corner of Kuala Lumpur is not simply a matter of skin color and national origin, it is a matter of financial status that could have deep ramifications.

Looks like the traveler is ready to pack his bags and hit the road once again...to another place, full of unknowns, and full of excitement.  This time, the destination is Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and with it, my very first time heading into the Southeast Asian region.  What awaits me is a business development internship in a local Internet start-up, bound to be filled with unpredictability and sudden changes in a emerging market of god-knows-whats-gonna-happen-in-a-few-years.  Balancing the ever-changing tasks of an internship as well as writing my dissertation in a whole new country is going to be a wild ride...

On one side, it was a Japanese giant ready to make its mark on the global stage after its sheer dominance of the domestic market.  On the other side, it is the world's largest potential market for online shopping, massive even though the penetration rate is a mere 3% of total retail but growing at a pace unheard of in the brief history of the Internet.  There seemed to be some sort of synergy.  Its potential meeting ambition, backed up by the trust the Chinese consumers placed in Japanese products combined with what the Chinese see as diminished by still significant wave of that "cool Japan" pop culture .

"by the way, I was reading your blog the other day, and you say..." the interviewer, whom I met for the very first time a little more than an hour ago, inserted the comment in the most casual fashion as he went on to question my view toward Asia's economic future. As calmly as I received the statement as nothing but the continuation of the discussion we have been having for a while now to gauge my background and interest for the job, I cannot help but be slightly surprised. This blog, as the product of my pure hobby of opinionated writing , for all its apparent bias, lack of formal structure, and full of grammatical errors, have become taken so seriously as to become a part of judgmental criteria for who I am, how I think, and what my views are toward contemporary issues across the world and around my daily life. For something that is openly accessible and searchable on the Internet, I suppose for complete strangers to access its content is no doubt unavoidable. But, a

We all concede that drunk people tend not to watch what they say when they are drunk (and surely they will not remember what was said a day later), but sometimes certain drunken comments can simply destroy a good "drunkenly euphoric" moment in, literally, an instant of time. The speaker tries to bolster his own credentials by sprinkling some, what he himself conceives to be, strips of pure gold on a night of gradually built up good impression over hours of genuinely friendly conversations, only to destroy that image by, well, trying a little bit too hard. Few comments can galvanize a group of young professionals and grad students to resort to pure hatred and the most vulgar profanities being used in their minds as talks of the "future." Whoever that touches the topics of what we are going to do after graduation and/or few years of entry-level work better keep the conversation focused on the general, non-personal, humble variety...or the result is a walk straight

The smell of the ooze being squeezed out of the massive lump on my face was simply nauseating. The milky yellow juices of the oil gland, trapped in a bubble for more than two weeks, burst out when the doctor's knife slashed across the soft lump. The whole scenario, even with painful local anesthesia that took away all sense of pain, still was discomforting enough to make me cringe, frown, and pinch myself just to have my attention transferred to self-induced pain from the discomfort. My face turned sharply white, and the mental toughness I am so proud of suddenly became completely nullified. And the doctor was not done. "To stop further infection," he calmly and nonchalantly mentioned, "we need to cover the cut with some anti-infection liquid." What appeared was a a foot-and-a-half-long piece of surgical tape soaked in a purple liquid. He proceeded to shove the tape, bit by bit, into the empty space left behind by the squeezed out pus. Slide in, twist, s

Amid the ongoing economic downturn, it is easy for people to start believing that a certain degree of globalization has to be temporarily rolled back. Ever since moving to the UK, we the foreign students have been living the fear of not being able to remain on the island after graduation due to the recent government decision to stop automatically issuing 2-year Post-graduate Work Visa. Every time one sees "do you have full authorization to work in UK?" on a job application, an overwhelming sense of anger often boils over, leading to practically meaningless self-blame of living in a wrong country in the wrong age. It is, however, a bit premature to conclude that a country's ruthless reduction in acceptance of foreign labor, even highly educated (and hopefully, skilled), is equivalent to a country becoming more "selfish" and focus on concerns for her own citizens at the expense of others living within her boundaries. After all, the tide of human migration, in a

Three weeks into classes, and it seems like the level of stress among the newly enrolled graduate students are reaching its first peak. No. It is not because of the hundreds of pages assigned to read for weekly discussion seminars. The reading lists, so far, have been largely neglected by the students, who instead, have been busy wondering around the exhibition rooms of the LSE and various high end luxury hotels of central London. Ubiquitously, they spot freshly ironed suits, their newly purchased LSE decorated folders, and, most prominently, an unchanging anxious facial expression. The biggest event of the school year, the great hunt of post-graduation employment, is already underway among a population that has barely gotten used to the life of a studying "academic" here in London. Oddly, even the professors seem to have accepted such a phenomenon as a "necessary evil" distracting students from course contents. My person 5-minute chat with my adviser in the

More than a year ago when I was solo backpacking through central China, I argued that the illegal underground markets for imitation products provide an economic way for increase material consumption and employment of relatively poor areas. But the argument back then was still much too deviated from the legal reality to make much of a difference. After all, the value of expensive brands exist because of high quality and restricted supply, both of which are undoubtedly disturbed by the very existence of such markets for imitation goods. And people have the perfectly legal alternative to buy cheaper, non-branded, legally produced goods serving the exact same functions. The closure of the imitation market should not fundamentally reduce the standard of living for their consumers. The illegal markets fulfilled a "want" (most likely for "face" and bragging of the consumers to fulfill a standard Asian mental desire to out-compete others in everything ) rather than an

The quietness of my home in San Diego can sometimes get quite addictive. With only the sound of wind in my ears and the whole world accessible via the Internet , I can not only think about anything I want without anything to disrupt my train of thought, but also find plenty of materials to add on to that train. Left alone with the entirety of the two-floor real estate, I can pace through the confines, lost in my own mind, without awkward stares or forced conversations. Perhaps that would be the thing I would miss the most as I am set to depart for London in less than a week. Although I do have a single dorm room, much of the dorm life will revolve around what happens outside the room itself. The need for "harmonious" interaction with fellow hall-mates, even at the very superficial level, will define the entire atmosphere of the building, for better (to provide a crisis-free, quiet study environment) or for worse (make room for all those mentally stressful gossip and "

Some say we should not write essays for fun. However, I believe we should write essays for our own entertainment. I base my examples on personal, historical, and cultural reasons. In fact, if people can write essays for entertainment, they can also continue every aspect of their education simply for the joy of studying. The overwhelming sense of self-accomplishment, the merits of being simply knowledgeable, and the increased social status due to education can all serve to justify a person pursuing education not for practical benefits of getting better jobs with higher salaries. Higher level of education can bring a person greater sense of achievement in life. The pride and self-confidence associated with having a respectable degree from a respectable university can boost a person's stature in front of others. For instance, as I finally received my student visa to UK today, I am officially on my path to continue my one-year master's degree in the London School of Economics.

Labor Day celebrates the hardworking men and women that made America the rich country that she is. But as America increasingly depends on her continued control of the world financial system for sustained wealth (keep issuing debts, printing paper money, and buying up foreign-made products), one can only wonder what the role of these "hard-working men and women" really is today. Evident enough, by the looks of a rusting industrial capital of Detroit and the enthusiasm new college grads have for dubiously "value"-generating sectors of investment banking and consulting, the positions of the traditional working class has been in steady decline in he this country. Gone are the days that even a senior worker in the factory can be considered "middle class" by definition. And increasingly, their decline in social status to mere "working class" has been accompanied by increased social gap with the new middle class of professional white collars, some of

The times are tough and the jobs are hard to come by. The grave situation of the world economy is certainly not news, and can be easily seen even with a casual visit to the neighborhood Chinese restaurant . For newly graduated college students of the past couple of years, there could not have been tougher times for starting up a professional career. With little work experience, little practical knowledge, and little professional connections, it is no wonder that many are left behind in the increasingly competitive job market, here in the US and across the world. While the anxiety and the sorrow behind not being able to find jobs after four years of hard work in college are definitely understandable and worthy of sympathy, the amount of depressing rhetoric that is accompanying the whole situation has been getting a little too hard to stomach for even (newly) jobless new grads like myself. Public sentiment, echoing the gloomy expressions of the printed media, has been convinced th

This blog is about criticism. I have spent probably more than half of the blog scolding Japan to the very details of her people's attitude and daily life . At the same time, I have not forgotten to keep up a constant rate of fire on the often politically originated indecencies of Chinese mentalities . And do not even get me started on America. The arrogant attitudes of the American people is and will always be a subject of constant scorn. Add a few criticisms of the countries that I have briefly traveled to and even briefly lived and worked in , and out comes the perhaps the darkest, most unfriendly sounding blog on the entire cyberspace. Many a faithful reader has questioned whether the incessant criticism really means something. As I mentioned from the very beginning of the blog's existence , I intend the blog to be something of a personal diary, a forum for my thought to be jotted down, along the same lines as wherever my mind decide to land at those very momen

The cobbler quietly worked on the dress shoes, right before my mesmerized eyes. He put glue into the sides of the shoes that were opening up, pounded in mails to the bottom to keep the glue in place, applied new bottoms to hide the nails, and finally polished the shoes to give them a brand-new shine. All this happening within 30minutes for equivalent of 20 US dollars in a shipping container-turned-personal workshop placed smack on the sidewalk of the busiest financial street in all of Seoul. After admiring Asia's superb public transportation system as well as cost-efficient and convenient compactness of her urban areas , the lingering existence of many traditional service professions in Asian cities also becomes a phenomenon worth a few words of praise. While the likes of such humble shoe cobbler can be rarely seen on the streets of the US, in Asia they continue to provide their, indeed, still popularly used, services to the general populace. But, alas, as Western conce

The Japanese and South Koreans never stop bragging about how they have the fastest Internet connection in the world. Nor do they ever stop making fun of the Americans or the Europeans only switching out of dial-up years after they started using high-speed broadband. Surely, the ubiquitous Internet cafes with their hordes of online game-playing teenagers do show the need and existence of high-speed connections, but for the travelling foreigner only concerned with news and basic text-based information searching, the difference seems quite minimal. In fact, if anything, living in Korea or Japan occasionally would make the foreigners feel like there is SLOWER Internet connection than they can get back home, for the contents they wish to obtain. After all, especially in the case of Americans and Europeans, their favorite sites from back home can only be viewed after the data travels thousands of miles below the Pacific Ocean, no doubt slowing down the processing speed. And it is doub

The monsoon rains of July turns into the sweltering heat of August, and the life of everyone began to progress again after going through half of laid-back summer vacations amid definite signs of lethargic slowness. For some, it is already a season of tearful goodbyes, and for some, the tears of separation are also mixed with anxiety, and hope, for the somewhat unknown, yet exciting future. The same faces and personalities, so familiar after what seems like an eternity of constant interaction, begin to disappear one by one, without any promise of future reunions... People speak of their "best friends forever," they speak of love that last forever, and they vow to never leave others behind or alone. Unfortunately for all of us who chose to spend different parts of our lives at different corners of the Earth with completely different groups of people, such so-called promises can be nothing beyond empty words. We have have to go. We just have to. New chapters of our lives aw

Another weekend and another train trip back to Seoul. Sitting at the bench on the platform of Chuncheon Station, waiting for the next train to the metropolis, I am becoming more and more anxious to whether these trips are becoming some sort of emotional escapist behaviors out of the real Korea that I was so excited to see and live within . Chuncheon, for me and as well as all students and teachers, has become a place we are forced to be during the weekends. To be perfectly honest, I, among all people, have been struggling to find my social place within the enclosed environment that is our camp . As Korean continues to entrench its position as the official language of the camp , those who are struggling with understanding of the language, whether it be the foreign teachers or some students who grew up outside Korea, have been feeling the continued spiral toward social isolation. And what the most irritating in the situation is just how little effort the Korean staff, who, supposedl

With this week drawing to a close, the isolated boot camp at Chuncheon has officially passed its "1/4 completed" mark. As the students began to get accustomed to the study environment, schedule, and the routines of daily life here in the camp, we all have began to shift attention to things that are much more conventional in any social environment. As the same group of people interact everyday, they are bound of get to know each other deeply, and with the knowledge, a whole new level of communication beyond "Lets play" and "Lets study" sprout among the populace. And with the increased communication comes increased drama. The stories of who likes who, who hates who abound, and precisely because no one has anything else going on in their lives besides studying/preparing for the SATs, such "exciting" rumors spread like wildfire, often leading to intricate subtleties in relationship among individuals and social subgroups. Well on the surface ever

"But, see, you are old and you don't understand what we are talking about..." the eager female student inadvertently blurts out as we hold up a random conversation during a short break from class. To be honest, over the last two weeks, I have been getting way too many of these sorts of comments that I should really feel absolutely indifferent to them...but unfortunately, even now, each time I hear them, I cannot help but twitch a little bit on the inside from the slight, painful emotional shock... "You get older, but the kids stay the same age..." I always respond to people who ask me why I just do not be a full-time teacher in the lucrative private education industry. I am currently in it not primarily for the career, or the money (although that is also important for my next step at grad school ), but because I can actually meet people (students and other staff members alike) and be friends with them. It becomes much harder as I age and the generation gap w