Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

It is around 8pm on a weekday in a big shopping mall in Chiba. A few shoppers walk through its wide corridors and most shops, selling everything from high-end fashion to tacky knick-knacks, predictably feel rather empty as the peak New Year's shopping season has already come to an end. Yet, in one corner of the mall, next to all the cheap eateries, some two dozen people are lined up in front of a boisterous restaurant behind a food court. While the other shops in the food court served the usual Japanese and Western cuisines, this one made sure its Chinese background was both seen and heard loud and clear.

A regular theme of this blog is self-reflection. Just a few months ago , I was looking back on my past year as a 33-year-old, wondering what is the next step now that I had my fourth anniversary working with Blackpeak, graduated from my Ph.D. program at the University of Tokyo, got married, as well as became certified in Teaching English as a Second Language, Fraud Examination, and Anti-Money Laundering, all in the matter of one year. A new life project beckons, but at the time, I was unsure what that would be or where it would happen.

It has been more than 16 years since I graduated high school. Many memories of my old days as a public school student in San Diego are fading, not the least because I have practically never lived in the city since graduation. But a recent request to summarize some tips on how I managed to get from a no-name high school to Yale has triggered a need for me to do a relatively rare self-reflection on my four years. It is not an easy one since so many other things that happened in my life since 2006 have been much more memorable and noteworthy than anything I've done back then.

Many Western, immigration-centered societies, from the US and the UK to Australia and Canada, claim to value diversity steeped in equality. Laws are in place to mandate the equal treatment of ethnic, gender, and religious minorities in the workplace and everyday life, often enforced with a strong social taboo against visible, public, and blatant displays of discriminatory behavior against people of different sociocultural backgrounds. Of course, plenty of discriminatory incidents, some of which are well-known and questionable, occur in these countries, but there is a broad consensus at the grassroots level that discrimination is undesirable. Part of how the anti-discriminatory consensus came about in these countries relates to the educational system. Elite universities in these countries are well-known for their student and staff bodies made up of intakes from around the world. The Harvard brand name, for instance, is valued just as much in other countries as in the US, leading to the

Any first-time visitor from Japan to Taiwan should be forgiven for thinking how the two are so different superficially. Whereas small standalone residences dot the landscape in rural Japan, in the more urban, densely populated west coast of Taiwan, personal homes, if not in high-rise apartments, tend to be bunched together should-by-shoulder, head-next-to-head. And whereas Japanese houses can be demolished in a few decades to make way for new replacements, Taiwanese ones sit continue to be fully utilized even as their exteriors are covered with black soot and grime.

In the age of COVID-19, finding a romantic partner is no longer a niche activity. Starting with Tinder, dating apps gradually went from a novelty for digital natives, to a commonly accepted way to meet strangers, supercharged by various physical distancing guidelines during the pandemic that restricted changes for real-life encounters in physical events. While social desirability bias means precise data for prevalence remains unavailable, anecdotal evidence shows that many youngsters now see dating apps as the primary method to go beyond their immediate social circles in the quest for love. With their increasing popularity, dating apps have induced their own sense of fatigue among both newcomers and long-time users. The ease of expressing affection and initiating conversations with new people means that the cost of acquiring new opportunities for dates is drastically reduced. As a result, the value of each opportunity is decreased in relative terms. After all, if it is so easy to meet

Every few years, a movie would come out that extols the need for people to relax, escape the dog race, and enjoy the moment. As unrealistic as the prospect of workers, living paycheck-to-paycheck, suddenly being freed from the daily grind might be, the idea of being somewhere else (really, anywhere else) is such a commonly dreamt dream that such escapist movies continue to be made. To ensure that the remotest prospects of freeing oneself from the capitalist system of labor have at least some sort of tantalizing feasibility, the escapist genre would add familiar storylines and twists to bring the exotic down to earth.