Middle in the North

Worry The mental state between January and Mid-March. Checking on your parents every 8 hours. Reading every chart on Netease News or TouTiao news App every 30 minutes. Wanting to talk to your grandparents but could not find a way. Asking everyone you know to find facemasks to send back to China and cleared the last one on the aisle at Ace Hardware store. Read posts on Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter), marked some of those, only to find they were deleted after 24 hours. Your critical thinking skills went numb - rumors after rumors, from individuals, scholars, and media. Fear Intensified over time. You sensed it when you were asked to sit on the backseat by the Lyft driver and then being asked to leave. News clips started to emerge. Microaggression started to brew. You feel it when you wear a mask while others are not. You feel it when Trump tweeted about the Chinese Virus. You feel it when the spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry started to bullshit and sprea...

There is no better summer than Minnesota summer. There is no better moment when bathing the breeze on the balcony right after the sun went down. This could be late- the sun refuses to cede until 9:30pm, leaving much to spend on meaningless joy without guilt. After sitting on the balcony for almost two years, the table that I got for free was finally dressed in a table cloth. I found the wooden tray from the corner of the balcony, decked my withering parsley, half burnt candle, and my childish pink pitcher. On a workless Friday, I grounded myself on this side of balcony for everything. An hour of reading a novel with a pink cover, an hour listening to the lecture, and another hour doing absolutely nothing.  Yes, I finally found the peace and courage to spend my time on absolutely doing nothing.  Chilling seemed to be a mission impossible for me. Though I could spare time chasing waterfalls, I found it difficult to just "chill". I come off intense and serious to most...

This is a year that I am far behind my goal of reading, but fortunately, among the few books I've read this year, there are some great ones. I always struggle to star-rate a book. How do you condense the holistic experience into one to five starts? I can give a book a 5-star for the first half, and a two-star for the second. I can give the beautiful writing a five, but the impact on my life a one. I can give the profound thought, the interesting perspective a five, but what if the writing style is dry and unbearable? It is just so compounded. But giving a start review is motivating, I love to see my Goodreads "read" shelf growing with the books I reviewed It empowers the readers. After all, I decided that I have three criteria that I expect the author to hit. I will award my stars based on these three: Is the book beautifully written, in terms of flow, style, and voice? Is the thought, perspective, and information interesting? Is there an impact on me after hav...

It has been almost two years and three months since I moved to Minnesota. In a way, I stranded myself from all kinds of familiarities from the day I moved, almost intentionally. At that time, I grew tired of the never-changing, almost toxic sunshine in Northern California, the self-segregated cultural circle, and knowing that I would never become the best researcher in the lab, I was happy to escape. What I was going to embrace excited me. I was going to become a breakfast cereal developer. This sense of excitement is hard to explain: For one, I did not grow up in a culture eating cereal for breakfast. For the other, we all know cereal industry has passed its peak (at least in the US). But the excitement trumped my personal reality and industry reality. I knew I could make something impactful in the "mainstream" American culture and lives, as an immigrant, as a non-citizen, as a hot/savory breakfast loving Chinese. Two years after I landed in the North Star state, a h...