Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

"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.

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. 

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"Political correctness" seems all the rage in modern social discourse. Whether or not one supports its aim to punish any and all public figures found to have engaged in any wrongdoing in the past, plenty of individuals, both famous and not-so, have had their careers derailed due to their dark secrets revealed to the masses. The power of what some come to term the "cancel culture" have ensured that everyone thinks twice before saying or doing anything in public, lest their actions and words be interpreted as hurtful to any social group in the future.

People have stereotypes about other countries. These stereotypes help people make sense of countries they have no first experience interacting with. It can be exhausting to navigate the almost endless nuances of sociocultural, political, and economic differences. Shorthand labels, however crude and oversimplifying they may be, provide, at times, practical starting points for people to build knowledge of a topic that they have little background in. For those who are emigrating to another country or coming into contact with people of another nationality for the first time, having a starting point is certainly better than not having one.

This blog has had a persistent issue with how Asian men are portrayed in American mainstream media. To this day, the post about the perceived lack of "manliness" among Asian men is the most viewed of the blog's history spanning more than a decade. In subsequent years, this blog followed the rise of K-pop as a phenomenon that gradually changed how Asian masculinity is defined in both Asian and non-Asian culture, sparking a boom of clean, often non-muscular Asian men being perceived as a more down-to-Earth alternative of the domineering, violence-prone attitude of the Western "alpha male" trope.

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.

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 ...

What do you think of when you hear the words "Bollywood films." Perhaps singing? Dances? Beautiful actors? Exotic locale and clothing? A simple good guy vs. bad guy storyline? These are indeed all very important elements. Indeed, they are the most obvious visual factors that contributed to the global success of Bollywood films in recent years, especially where in locales as diverse as Southeast Asia and eastern Africa, where a large number of Indian expatriates reside and have created vibrant ethnic communities that have gradually pulled in the local majority populations through a distinctive cultural imprint. 

Foreign residents make up a little more than 2.5 million of Japan's 130 million people, making up less than 3% of the country's population. And these 2.5 million foreigners include many that have been in the country for generations, born and raised to speak no other language fluently than Japanese and identify their cultural allegiance with no other than the mainstream Japanese one. Among those who do not identify themselves as culturally Japanese, the foreign community is diverse, spanning dozens of nationalities and ethnicities, not to mention professional, social, and religious affiliations. 

For those with some familiarity with the Japanese language, honorific language is one of the big challenges of using the language for daily interactions. Sentences with the same meaning can be written and spoken in multiple ways, with different wording used to show differing levels of respect for the intended audience. When speaking to those of more advanced age and higher social status, one is expected to use honorific language that shows deference and respect. Failure to do so is not just rude but makes the linguistic output feel awkward and out of place. 

Today, the Philippines ushered in a new political age as the country elected a new president with a controversial background. Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos, the son of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos and his famously shoes-loving wife Imelda, was elected in a landslide victory, with analysts predicting the continuation of the outgoing president Rodrigo Duterte's attempt to create more balance in the country's foreign policy between the US and China. Indeed, Rodrigo's daughter Sara was elected as the vice president in a transparent partnership with Bongbong all but ensuring policy consistency under the new administration.