“Legacy” is Such a Strong Word

A good friend of the family passed away last week. I didn’t hear about it until today because, well, I live far away from home and I’m very bad at keeping in touch. Okay, that’s a bit selfish; it’s probably because my father was still coming to grips with what happened and didn’t feel he wanted to update my sister and I on it until after he was feeling better.

It was all very sudden; he was on the golf course with his wife when he suddenly collapsed. He could not be resuscitated and died without regaining consciousness. Cause: massive and sudden heart attack.

My parents sent me a copy of the memorial booklet that was put together for his funeral, which took place in Hong Kong. It contains letters in both Cantonese and English written to him by friends and family containing the last words they want to say to or about him. Reading through this booklet amidst tears, it brought some things to mind that I want to write about.

It’s a common question: what do you want people to say about you or to you when you do, inevitably, pass on?

Read More

Professional Regrets and Their Rectification

Perth, you’re SCREWED. I just got my hands on a student visa. That’s right, for the next two years I will be working on my Master of Social Work right here in Western Australia.

I am excited about this for a multitude of reasons. I get to stay in Perth, for one, but just as important, I finally get to make the career move I always wanted to.

I did my Bachelor’s degree in Finance, mostly because I managed to talk myself into thinking it’s what my parents wanted (it’s not; turns out, they just wanted me to happy!). And because I went into that degree with that idea in my head, I approached the degree with a severe lack of passion, dedication, and interest. I honestly looked forward to my elective courses far more than I did my major ones, and maybe I should have recognized the warning signs then.

I’ve always wanted to do Psychology (or a related field), but I think I scared myself away from it when I was younger. I convinced myself that it was a soft option so I didn’t go for it. I told myself that it wasn’t a field that would get me into a Fortune 500 company that would make my parents proud of me. That, and you know, the constant questions of “what about THIS career” or “what about THAT career” that I got from my father probably had more of an impact than they should’ve.

Still, should’ve/could’ve/would’ve, that’s all in the past now. On better days, I like to argue that without going down that road, I wouldn’t be as committed to shifting my career as I am now. I wouldn’t have known what I really wanted to do with my professional life, and now that I go into it full-force and hungry, I would likely get more out of it than I would’ve when it was just an interest that I let myself play down.

Read More

Home

I am looking forward to writing about this trigger, which was suggested to me by my good buddy at Pipe Dream Graphics. Even now I wonder how I will approach this one. Will it be fiction? Something personal? In the end, I decided to just sit down and tell you why this particular trigger is an excellent one.

I am what is known as a Third Culture Kid. I was born in one place and grew up in cultures completely different from my home culture and those of my father and mother. The places I have lived include:

  • Hong Kong
  • Peoria, IL
  • Singapore
  • Manila, Philippines
  • Beijing, China
  • Urbana-Champaign, IL
  • Shanghai, China
  • Perth, Australia

That’s not sequential, either; in some cases I went backwards or returned to a previous place for a while.

You can probably begin to see where I’m going with this. How do I define what home means to me?

Read More

It’s been a while

but I have started writing again. That’s not saying very much because even though I know I have some skill as a writer, it pales in comparison to the talent that’s out there and, perhaps worse, I seldom finish anything I start.

I’ll make it perhaps halfway through the fiction I’m working on, only to think of a better way to write it and then start over. Or I will read something so great that I have to pause and wonder why I bother. It’s a mix of envy, self-improvement, and more than a little boredom; I write when I have time and I seldom make time to write.

The fact that I also severely lack a creative talent at all hinders my ability to come up with something so clever and original that the writing doesn’t matter.

Still, I do have projects that subscribe more to the “write what you know” mentality, and the big project is of course my book on long distance relationships. While moving slowly, it is definitely moving.

So why am I here? I suppose I need a place to dump all my thoughts and this is a good place to do it. It’s also a way to force me to write anything at all, be it verbal diarrhea or an opinion piece on the benefits and dangers of sleeping with a teddy bear. I feel that once I get in the groove, I may actually begin to be a bit more loyal to my existing projects.

One way to do this is to use what I’ve come to call a “trigger.” Something—a word, object, place, or person—that I then use to trigger the writing of a post. That post may be a personal piece, a story, or even something less than conventional. We’ll see how it goes.