Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

The storyline was almost reminiscent of the assassination of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe a couple of years ago. A young man, with no history of violence, was driven to gun violence by a deeply held grievance, a perceived unfairness shared by millions. But this time, it was not the Unification Church and its forced donations that bankrupted families in Japan. Instead, it was the perennial shortcomings of the medical care system in America. Should the ongoing investigations shed more details on the storyline, the American assassin will likely elicit as much sympathy as the Japanese one.

"I cannot believe that people would keep all these ornaments at home for this time of the year." Until my wife uttered these words at the sight of the average Maltese residential area lit up in preparation for Christmas, I had never thought about the material side of the year-end holiday. Indeed, many houses are putting up more than cheap colorful lights. Many are putting up sculptures of Santa Claus, Baby Jesus, the nativity scene, and much else alongside a substantial tree so densely packed with ornaments that the green leaves are barely visible.

"Hey, do you want to grab a seat?" The middle-aged black man tapped on my shoulder as I walked to the back of the bus, resigned to the reality of having to stand for the hour-long ride. He gestured toward an empty seat on the window side in a four-seat configuration facing one another. With the other three seats occupied by fairly large men with long legs, cramping another man into the midst was hardly ideal. Indeed, when the black man announced his intention to have me scootch in, his two seatmates only reluctantly shuttled their feet to make room.

What do you think of when you hear the word "prostitute"? What about "a Russian bodyguard"? The chance is that the former is imagined as a cunning power player, using sex to get money, information, and whatever resources they need to get out of the dire, impoverished environment that they are in. The latter is the opposite, a mindless brute who follows the orders of the rich boss, bestowing violence upon enemies without a hint of remorse or compassion. Thanks to the mainstream media, particularly the depiction of Hollywood movies, accepting such stereotypes has almost in itself become a social norm.

I was casually strolling through the Diwali celebrations of central London. It was 2011, and I was a master's student with little incentive to do beyond the bare minimum to secure my graduation. Rather than burying myself in books, I took short journeys around the city (and beyond ), seeking to understand what makes the city one of the most diverse and attractive for people worldwide. There at the celebrations, I was casually handed a red notepad, the type where each page can be individually torn off. True to the spirit of the Indian diaspora, it was a promotion for financial services provider HDFC.

Spare a thought for American election pollsters. After predicting massive victories for the Democrats in the two previous presidential elections, they again forecasted a tight election with a lead for the Democrats led by Harris. As the votes are counted, they are again proven wrong. Rather than waiting for days for ballots to be counted and then recounted to ensure that slim margins of errors are minimized in tight races, a picture emerged of the Republicans taking a massive lead in places they should not be, most notably in Florida where Trump won by 13%.

As a traveler who is currently too occupied with work to travel much, watching a few travel vlogs helps to quench the thirst. But as I watch these vloggers' well-polished recordings of their day-to-day in far-flung parts of the world, I often cringe at the effort that went into editing. In particular, given that they spend so much time talking into the camera, splicing and reviewing the output will inevitably take repeated listening of their own voice on recordings. For someone who remembers growing up hating my own voice through anything but my own ears, that effort does not sound like a pleasant experience at all.

The American college application is quite unique. Whereas one would expect that a "good" student is defined by good grades, both over years of classwork and one-off exams, the American system demands a student to be much more. So students spend years building up a list of activities outside the classroom. From excelling in the competitive world of music, sports, and academia to the more idiosyncratic leadership initiatives to show that one can change the world, one small impact at a time, high school students should be occupied even when they are not buried in books.

As a lifelong traveler who, due to the meeting-heavy nature of my current job , is unfortunately not able to frequently head to new places, I watch travel vlogs as one way to quench that travel thirst to some degree. With the competitive vlogging landscape that is YouTube today, plenty of people, from all sorts of cultural backgrounds, dishing up their views on the same sites, both famous and mundane. While all are united in their love of travel, how they portray the places they visit, through their visual recording and verbal explanations, illustrates how travel, as a hobby and a job, is seen so differently. 

By the standards of often blank-faced  Japanese politicians, the incoming prime minister Shigeru Ishiba is certainly charismatic. Years of going on TV shows and giving media interviews, not to mention running around rural Japan to shake hands with voters have given him a folksy, joke-filled talking style more reminiscent of George W. Bush than a Japanese bureaucrat in a suit. It is no wonder that he has earned the likes of the grassroots, while attracting skepticism among his fellow politicians, even within the same party. Being different does not help in the subdued one-party democracy that is Japan.

The much-awaited Joker sequel starts with the titular protagonist in prison, pending trial for his murders committed two years ago. The man, frail and emaciated, chooses to remain quiet in the face of constant taunts from the guards, too happy to jump on any perceived infringements to beat up inmates. Gone is the confidence of the clown defending his actions, and inspiring millions who saw him as the symbol of fighting back against the authorities that seem to exist to protect Gotham's powerful bullies. As Arthur, the man simply retreats into an inner world of fantasy, shriveling as he heads to an inevitable death penalty.

The 1960s and 1970s were the height of the decolonization movement. Centuries of European presence across the globe, particularly in Africa, disappeared in years. Sometimes it was the result of sheer violence, such as how the Algerian independence fighters took down an increasingly exasperated colonial French army and drove out millions of white residents fleeing in fear. But others, like Malta, simply saw the breakup of colonial empires as inevitable for the overstretched colonial powers, feigning allegiance to symbols of continued colonial rule in exchange for concrete progress toward self-governance.

There is a commonly served dish among Chinese restaurants in Malta that I have yet to see anywhere outside Europe. Called "crispy duck," it consists of deep-fried duck meat served with hoisin sauce, thin pancakes, and raw cucumber and onion strips. They are meant to be eaten like Peking duck, wrapping the meat with the vegetables in the pancakes, with some sauce sprinkled to give it a taste. Yet, the fact that deep frying and raw onions are involved in the process means that the result tastes quite different from Peking duck.

The concept of an English-language school already puzzled me. These schools, privately run and often have no accreditation from government authorities in charge of regulating educational institutions, propose that students show up in a different, English-language country to learn the language through classes and immersion. Yet, with the tuition and living expenses high and the concept of scholarships nonexistent, students can ill-afford a full-time study lasting beyond a few weeks, especially considering that they cannot make money working on the side while enrolled.

"Ah, Japanese? I love Naruto!" This is a common refrain for a person from Japan when they find a Japanophile in another country. The prevalence of online video platforms, combined with a good dollop of government support, has led to a global boom for the Japanese manga and anime industry. Japanese for power has surged as the popular series in Japan become popular everywhere. With the advent of AI and accurate transcription/translation software, the ability to take Japanese digital content and localize it has never been easier and cheaper.

In some way, time in Malta almost stands still. More than 300 days of sunshine a year means the place's weather never varies across seasons. The centuries-old stone buildings, protected by centuries of renovations on the inside and regulations that guide what towns should look like, mean that the visual look of human settlement here also is unchanged since civilization set foot. Then there are the old men and women who pull up their chairs and sit for hours in front of the lapping Mediterranean coast. One could finish their oil paintings without asking them to stay still.

The Middle East is grabbing the world's attention once more for all the wrong reasons. Months after a war that plunged Gaza into unprecedented destruction and threatened Israel's international standings , the conflict threatens to spill beyond a small part of the Levant. Israel has gone on the offensive to preempt others from reinforcing the embattled Hamas, wantonly bombing Beirut, Damascus, Tehran, and Yeman, seeking to erode the military capabilities of its enemies through assassinating military and political leaders while destroying military hardware and critical infrastructure that could be used to support war efforts.

It has been several months since the end of the Euro 2024 soccer tournament, but I still remember the sheer visual diversity that the event illustrated. As part of partaking in the once-every-four-years event, the Maltese government set up several "fan zones" in major towns across the island. Each offered a giant projection screen, plenty of seats in the shade, and food and drink stalls, bringing together several thousand revelers each time a match was broadcast live. The sheer passion of the cheering fans, loud enough to echo through several blocks contrasted with the fact that Malta has never played in a Euro Cup.

When people start learning a language, the goal is simple: to become more proficient in the target language. But the definition of "proficiency" varies. Some are serious enough to acquire a language to get a foreign job, live in a foreign land, and marry a foreign partner. Some are more casual: just enough to engage in basic banter during short-term travels and the joy of learning some phrases in the process is sufficient. But at all levels of seriousness, the keyword is "interaction": language acquisition is simply not something to be done alone for the sake of being alone.

One of the common refrain for first-time visitors in Japan is that the country lives in the future. An example frequently cited for futuristic modernity is the prevalence of the ubiquity of the heated, bidet-enabled, remote-controlled toilet seat in Japanese restrooms. Even in personal anecdotes, I have heard too often why the piece of technology is not found outside Japan anywhere except in high-end hotels, even though the technology behind it is by no means cutting edge and the price of the product by no means prohibitively expensive even if subjected to export tariffs.

Finding myself on the streets of Shanghai for the first time since 2017 , I was rather surprised by the vibrancy with which the street life returned to the megacity. With major international news outlets covering the popping of the real estate bubble, the high unemployment rates among the youth, and stagnant wages, it is easy to come to the conclusion that people are less willing to spend the decreasing salaries from increasingly precarious jobs. Yet, despite the anecdotal and statistical evidence that would discourage such development, the streets are seeing more and more shops competing for customers.

In the past election cycle, the dichotomy of America's two-party system has been rather simple and consistent in the eyes of casual observers. The Democrats stand for the downtrodden little guys, fighting to survive in a harsh, competitive world. Its policies advocated redistribution, ensuring that big businesses transfer some of the massive financial resources available so that the average Joe and Jane can have what they need to feed, clothe, and house themselves while staying healthy and aspiring to self-improvement through education. The Republicans, in this narrative, would be making lives easier for business owners.

The simplest of addictions can crop up at any time. Whereas being hooked on drugs and gambling requires one to make an active effort to go to the nearby dealers or casinos, there are plenty of ways that one gets buried in an alternate reality for hours and days without having to spend a single dime. A vacant hour between meetings, a sudden urge to procrastinate from an inevitable task, a desire to kill off time without a concrete purpose...something more productive is definitely there, but it is not found.  A few game downloads, watching videos, or even a session of casual banter with  ChatGPT  could all do fine.

I grew up not so wealthy. Being not wealthy usually means that when inconvenience strikes, "let's buy something" is not a viable solution. When shoelaces snap, a piece of string would do well as a replacement. When soy sauce is gone, salt is just fine as an alternative. When the curtain or the windowsill is broken? A piece of cloth would do well to cover up the gaping holes. While my conditions were not often bad enough to resort to such, a mentality emerges: if an inconvenience appears, the priority is to find a workaround with existing resources.

Nature is ruthless. As COVID has shown us, a world that seems to be humming along so well can suddenly be stopped dead in its tracks, borders thrown up and people holed up, by something so small and invisible yet fast-moving and deadly. And an epidemic out of nowhere is by no means the only way that nature can hurt us, very badly. From earthquakes to tornados to landslides to sinkholes, nature will put mankind into a calamity, without any prior warning. Unlike a manmade war, no compromise can hope to halt the disaster. Nature does not negotiate.

People get old. Old people's mental processing power and ability to react quickly to new information are weaker than those of younger people. These are plain biological facts that govern the human body. Absent radical scientific breakthroughs that allow people to retain their brainpower and youth through chemical and biological enhancements, these facts will befall everyone, including the most powerful and important individuals in the world. A more efficient world requires that some older people retire from their positions and let more mentally qualified youths take over.

The concept of time in the Maltese summer can take some getting used to. The cloudless brightness can start as early as 5am, and darkness does not revisit until 9pm. During the day, the sun can be blazingly hot, making any outdoor activity that does not involve jumping into the cold water of the nearest pool or the sea too physically demanding. The result is towns that were empty during the day coming alive with people after 7pm, with the crowds not departing well after midnight, as the loud music and artificial lighting keep the folks jiving. 

Malta's infrastructure is bursting at the seams. An island of narrow streets is now having to handle ever-increasing inflows of foreign tourists enjoying summer holidays and foreign workers lured by the growing economy. The quaint two-lane "highways" crisscrossing the island are now frequently home to snaking traffic jams, with motorists having nowhere to escape amidst the lack of alternative thoroughfares in densely populated towns and rugged rocky terrains of the mountainous interior. As the economy and population continue to grow, Malta will see more frustrations on the road.

There are many good ways to remember and share the memories of a trip. Plenty of people take pictures of sights and food, many others record videos of the sounds, the people, and their reactions, and a few, like yours truly, write down thoughts and reflections in prose. But these remembrances cannot fully do justice to how wonderful or awful a trip was. For all the audiovisual and mental recollections that can be registered and replayed, the tastes and smells of the place cannot. Plenty of storytellers try to do their best job to verbalize the olfactory and gustatory; none can beat the real thing.

"It does not seem like you have native pronunciation" seemed straightforward enough. This is an excerpt from an email from a leading online English language school in Japan, rejecting my application to become part of its roster of part-time tutors. The application itself was simple: I had to submit two separate 30-second video recordings of myself, respectively explaining an idiom and giving a self-introduction. For the evaluator, that one minute of talking, plus my visual looks on camera, was enough to determine that I was not suited for their clientele of many beginners who could not even tell apart accents.

There is something incredibly different about going to the gym in Malta compared to Japan . It is not just that the Maltese gym has a nearly even breakdown between female and male members. But it is how the female gym enthusiasts in Malta dress and behave. many show up only in a sports bra and tight figure-hugging leggings, revealing ample cleavage and their round bottoms for all to see. Many of them, clearly active on Instagram, would pose in front of the many mirrors of the gym, accentuating their flat abs and muscular legs for photos to be shared later online.

I could not take my eyes off the third-floor booth. A family of six, what looks to be a grandmother, a set of parents, and kids, all in matching black T-shirts and dancing together with big smiles to the live performance on the stage they see below. Now, multiply that by some 40 booths, plus 900 seats at the first level, in one of the oldest and continuously operating opera houses on the island of Gozo . It was a sight to behold. From kids to the silver-haired, all gyrating and singing along to the tunes while standing on their feet, one of the most intergenerational concerts I have ever attended.

Twitter (or X, as people are still trying to get used to the new name) is known for its spontaneous outbursts and text-based real-time updates to live events. The fact that it is so short, so easy to type up, and so ingrained into the culture of a community consisting of millions of equally impulsive tweeters ensures that those who have something that they have in their minds would want to record those thoughts and broadcast them into the community. Getting others to agree or denounce your impulses before you forget them yourself has proven to be quite an adrenaline rush for some.

I used to be miffed whenever I heard those who do not come from an English-speaking background get English names. When I worked in an internship years ago in China, I was disgusted that my Chinese colleagues would not call me by my name simply because I did not have an English one. They would address each other by their English names before returning to their Chinese conversations. I found the act highly superficial: having English names did not automatically make them proficient in English, just as their choice of not addressing my Chinese name did not make me less international than they are.

I monitor the viewer stats of this blog from time to time. In recent months, the blog stats have shown some suspicious stats that make me worried about where and how the blog is viewed. Whereas individual blog posts have no more than 20 pageviews each in total in the months after publication, sometimes the blog itself registers more than 500 views in a single day, all coming from Hong Kong, mainland China, Ireland, and Singapore, none of which match my traditional viewership in the past years, the vast majority of which originates in the US, combined with the foreign population in Japan.

The terrorist attacks launched by Hamas against Israel should be a time for soul-searching. The pre-attack Middle East was defined by a cautious embrace of the Jewish state among its Arab neighbors. Despite opposition from their respective populations, the likes of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and others were increasingly willing to see Israel as a permanent political presence in the region, and a useful economic partner to help them diversify away from natural resource extraction. Hamas needed a dramatic measure to remind them, and the world, that the embrace should not come at the expense of the Palestinians.

In his The Bible and Zionism , Dr. Nur Masalha argues over and over that the founding leaders of the State of Israel, despite being a generally irreligious bunch, attempt to leverage religious language to advance the idea that the land of Israel belongs exclusively to the world's Jewish population, while Palestinian Arabs, both Muslim and Christian, are considered squatters who must be evicted to right a historical wrong. By evoking passages from the Old Testament that discuss how the ancient Israelites defeated the Canaanites and the Philistines, the Zionist leaders somehow managed to form an alliance with Christian evangelicals.

The central bus stop at the little town of Marsalforn was inundated with a sense of impatience. The dozens of people gathering in the little square could not stop staring at the road leading to the bus stop, as if a more intense stare could get the bus to show up faster. On the mobile app of Malta Public Transport, the bus was shown as a mere 4 minutes away, but with one bus coming every 30 minutes or so, everyone was getting visibly jittery as to whether the small bus could fit everyone in the bumpy journey to the central bus terminal in Victoria, the capital of Gozo Island, only some 6km away. 

What do you get when you cross a large, thriving city and a constant city-wide tourism campaign? Rome might be something close to the answer. The attraction of the city needs no highlighting: its illustrious history as the capital of a sophisticated ancient empire, the headquarters of the global Church, and a cradle of art from the Renaissance to the modern-day gives enough reasons for enough people for it to consistently be ranked among one of the most visited cities in the world. Rome needs no marketing: opening a book on Western history is sufficient to motivate someone to visit.

Few can argue with the natural beauty surrounding the Popeye Village. The theme park is situated in its own little cove, surrounded by jagged cliffs reflecting the warm afternoon sun into the pristinely clear seawater below. Its remote location, distance from major population centers on the island, the lack of regular public transport connection, and the inconvenient fact of having to pay an entrance fee to enter the theme park, all contribute to the pleasant lack of boorish sun-bathing tourists that have inundated similarly beautiful locations all over Malta.

Neither a teacher nor a consultant is supposed to be picky about the clients they interact with. Business logic simply does not allow for it. As long as the client is willing to pay, adhere to legal regulations, and interact respectfully, there is little reason for the client to be refused service. Moreover, it is often not ethical to refuse service for reasons that are not knowledge, law, or business-related. In the case of students seeking knowledge, the refusal to provide can be interpreted as unfair discrimination, withholding of resources that they have the right to access without valid explanations.

Malta at this time of the year is home to some unusual faces. Whereas the old British long-stay tourists and the Filipino/Indian migrant workers stick out like a sore thumb amidst the Maltese crowds at any time of the year, groups of Japanese youngsters navigate the country's narrow streets, polite, confused, and looking, in general, all-around out of place. It is vacation time for many of them: Japanese school and work years do not start until the beginning of April while the previous year already ended, giving many just a small window of a few weeks to partake in short-term English language programs in Malta.

The little community library in the Maltese town of Mosta was, well, little. But in a small room with perhaps five shelves, a service counter, and a table, every corner was filled with books, many of them quite worn out. The main focus, as is the case for libraries elsewhere , is books that children can read. Picture books, novels, and non-fiction imparting writing skills and knowledge on young adults make up, at a quick glance, more than half of the collection. As adults turn to the internet for their readings, it is clearly the kids without their own digital devices that still carry around paperbacks and hardcovers.

The first Dune movie was beautiful but predictable. Gorgeous cinematography courtesy of endless deserts simply could not make up for the predictable plotline. On the eve of being reassigned to rule another realm, a powerful house of aristocrats was backstabbed and wiped out by another house with the acquiescence and assistance of the emperor. Just as predictably, the native population of the realm was unconsulted, or even acknowledged, in the entire process, leaving the new rulers of the realm, just like the one before it, fighting a constant insurgency that disrupts economic production.

The non-Japanese portrayal of the Japanese salaryman is often an illustration of the unenviable foot soldier of Japanese economic success. Overworked and exhausted, they drag themselves into similar-looking office buildings in their equally similar corporate uniform of black suits with neckties. Admired for their individual sacrifice and hard work as a sign of devotion to help their companies and country grow and prosper, the non-Japanese observants would nonetheless loathe to emulate the way these salarymen worked and lived.

It was only when the taxi sped out of Malta International Airport that I realized the meaning of the word "development." I had just spent a weekend in Tunis, only a short one-hour flight in North Africa. Fascinating as the capital of Tunisia was, with its combination of colonial French and medieval architecture interspaced with the hustle and bustle of everyday life, the city was clearly rough on the edge. Streets were overrun with trash, watery sewage, and feral cats and dogs. The pavements, buildings, and markets were crumbling from the lack of repair and random touts following tourists for a quick "gift."

Watching the Super Bowl and its (some would call, underrated) Half-Time Show this year made me realize once again just how invisible Asians are in the American entertainment industry. As the Chiefs and the 49ers battled it out on the field and Usher reminded us of his hits from the 1990s, not an Asian face was projected, even for a split second, onto the TV screens of more than 100 million people around America tuning into the biggest sporting event of the year. The biggest representation of Asia in this Super Bowl, sad as it is, is whether prominent visitor Taylor Swift would get there in time from Tokyo.

As someone used to the world-leading obesity rates in America, it is interesting to read about the equivalent in the EU. Malta, with only a quarter of the population classified as obese, is considered one of the most obese in the bloc. It speaks to just how healthy the average European is compared to the average American. But the figures also point, perhaps only marginally, just how the Maltese lifestyle, in a rather unfortunate way, may be much more similar to the American one as compared to other places on the continent. 

I often half-jokingly say that I am way past my peak at age 35. While it is a way to prevent others from setting too high of an expectation for how much further my career can go, it also reflects how I reflect how I see my career so far. As a mere 24-year-old, I was already a Vice President of Operations at Lazada , an e-commerce firm that became a major player in that industry in Southeast Asia. Overseeing more than 150 employees, some more than twice as old as I was at the time, made me realize that corporate management was frankly, not my cup of tea.

My wife made a great observation in our day walking around Malta's historical sites: while the country is a hotspot of globalization , with worker residents coming from around the world, the same level of globalization is not reflected in the country's international tourist traffic. Whereas the country's buses, shops, and indeed, the workforce of tourist hotspots like hotels and restaurants, are filled with people of different colors, the crowds of tourists that come from outside the Maltese islands are overwhelmingly white, sprinkled with some Asians.

In his heavy Maltese accent, the middle-aged man declared, "You know the Europeans give us money, so we get to renovate all this." Pointing at the big construction site in the middle of the historic town center, the man intended to be both comical and proud. As he casually struck up a conversation with me in my little self-guided tour of his hometown, he was clearly glad to see that there were so many foreigners who were willing to walk its winding stone-cobbled streets, gawking at the Instagram-ready white-washed houses fronted with potted plants.

The local takeout burger place was manned by three youngish workers when I last visited. One yellow, one brown, and one black. Clearly from three different countries (none of which is Malta) and they communicate in perfect English amongst themselves and to their equally multicultural clientele and delivery personnel taking orders for various meal-order apps. This little spot is a perfect microcosm of modern-day Maltese society: a society that is, quite literally, full of people from around the world, working and living together to make the island economy tick along.

Walking the narrow streets of Malta, I cannot help but notice a distinct lack of the usual big names in retail. In place of the Walmarts and the FamilyMarts of the world are small no-name mom-and-pop shops specializing in one type of product or the other. From Paul's selling only stationery to the hole-in-the-wall household goods stores peddling towels and plastic baskets, the little towns of this island country remain dominated by small enterprises, the kind that have long been killed off in other countries by major retail chains selling everything from A to Z.