Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

In one week, my vacation in San Diego will draw to a close. The airplane ticket to London is purchased, the registration for housing is completed after that endless wait for visa is finally finished. Most importantly, that day of enrollment as a grad student, anxiously expected since my moment of acceptance back in March of this year, will finally come. As I continue to lounge around my home in San Diego, doing little besides writing this blog , I wonder, am I really ready for studying again? It is a question that I thought about time and time again, under different circumstances, with different suppositions, and for different rationales. A part of me keeps on reminding myself of how difficult the upcoming year will be. After a year being outside of school, doing work that requires little critical thinking along the lines of regular schoolwork, I know that the massive amounts of reading and essay composition will give me endless headaches. The ability to concentrate on little d

Recent few days saw the celebration of two major Asian holidays of the fall: the Mid-Autumn Festival (中秋節) in the Chinese-speaking world plus Vietnam, and Chuseok (추석) in Korea. Essentially, both traditional holidays calls for temporary reunion of families to celebrate good harvest and share the bounties of the land in the form of traditional food. It is a time to return home, both to visit the tombs of clan ancestors and to meet with families, relatives, and childhood friends. As people become more mobile in the developed societies, the visits during these holidays are bound to be one of very few during the year. And to make the visits more meaningful, people are bound to bring some gifts for each other, traditionally as signs of sharing the harvests with neighbors and extended families. Logically enough, traditional foods are the mainstays of such gifts, but in recent years, their contents have become increasingly lavish. From "specially decorated" mooncakes worth hun

The Chinese proverb goes, "禍不單行" (disasters do not come alone). Just as today the world remember the ten-year anniversary of 9/11 , some people are also recalling the equally shocking and much more lethal Quake and tsunami in northeastern Japan exactly half a year ago . For the many people like myself who experienced the chaos, the strength, and socio-economic impacts of the Quake firsthand, its immediate aftermath is something that is bound to be never forgotten in our entire lives. In many ways, many parallels can be drawn between the two events. Both came suddenly to a completely unprepared populace. The Americans believed in their military superiority meant 100% security of the homeland from "foreign attacks." The Japanese thought their decades of experiences in dealing with quakes and their negative effects meant the casualties will be limited. Both "woke up" on the 11th to the emotionally damaging realization of helplessness and vulnerability

Development of the world economy has not had equal effects on all people. Some countries with strong governance and suitable policies grew much faster than those that do not, leaving massive wealth gaps across national borders that are still now being enlarged. And within national boundaries, those with the right social connections, high education, and access of economic means of production benefit disproportionately from growing wealth, leaving behind many compatriots who are still struggling to cope with economic changes. And at the bottom of those coping with economic changes are who the society ruthlessly calls the "homeless," those too poor to afford permanent housing even in the shabbiest of the neighborhoods , scrapping by what little wealth they can find on the street-sides of the world's wealthiest and most developed cities. Furthermore, the municipalities that these homeless reside generally have relatively well-established social welfare systems. It only ad

The ceremonies are certainly as solemn as they have ever been. Across the nation, people remembered that pivotal day exactly ten years ago, when America bore witness to a whole new kind of terrorism. As buildings collapsed and lives lost, the Americans everywhere were forced to come to realization that the mighty economic and military strength of the only remaining superpower are not enough to protect themselves against a few skilled and determined “foreign operatives.” Shock and sorrow are bound to be accompanied by a certain degree of irrationality. In the wake of the disaster, the Americans became blinded by their emotions. They simply entrusted the government with handling any responses to 9/11, thinking that perhaps, amid their own sense of helplessness, their political leaders can come up with solid plans for revenge, for compensation, and for comprehending what was really going on that day. With the emotionally distraught constituents casting aside their usual doubts of gov