We've all been here.

If you’ve ever downloaded something off Steam or Bittorrent, you’ve probably noticed the “time remaining” countdown changing inexplicably from days to to hours, depending on what’s using up the bandwidth. This is generated by a linear approximation of the download at hand, i.e. the computer looks at the most recent download speed and calculates how long it will take to finish at that fixed rate. Of course, if your download is exactly linear then the approximation is perfect, but in real life that’s never the case. I’ve noticed that downloads on Steam tend to slow down during the first few minutes, and of course as a result the time remaining increases.

Which makes one wonder: how much would my download have to slow down for my “time remaining” to remain constant for all eternity?

Intuitively, of course, it seems that a negative exponential fits the bill, something that looks like , since it has a horizontal asymptote. But given a specific time that I want it to stay at, say 20 minutes, how do I find my specific download function?

In other words, given a certain amount to download, how do I find a downloading function (where A is the amount downloaded) such that a linear approximation at any given time gives me exactly 20 minutes remaining on my download?

Enter the first-order linear ordinary differential equation. We know that since the time remaining has to remain constant, the download can never finish, and hence our function will have a horizontal asymptote at , so our guess of a negative exponential was more or less correct. Our linear approximation will be a line with its slope given by , and, given the value where it intersects the line , our time remaining is given by where is our desired constant remaining time. We can plug all this into the familiar point-slope formula to obtain our solution.

Explicitly, then, our task is to:

Find such that where and is constant. Our initial values will be .

This simplifies to , which is separable. Specifically:

with initial values.

So we see that if our total download is, say, 500 MB and we want our “time remaining” to remain at 20 minutes, the download function we would require is

, where would have units MB/min. See graph.

It works!

Note how the distance between the point of tangency and the intersection with (here is 20 MB) is exactly 20 minutes. As you can see, the math works out; we’ve engineered a function to our specifications.

As a final remark, I’d like to note that you can replace the constant in with functions of . Negative linear functions, of course, gives you a linear download. Try toying around and see what you get. What if you want the time remaining to grow logarithmically? Or to have itself as a negative exponential?

Have fun!

“Keep me in your prayers,” the nun would write years later to her fifth-grade student, remembering him as a boy on her death-bed. Before she died, Sister Mary Regis sent me a card, a confident, florid verse. Inside, she writes she will not be able to come to the lecture I am going to give in Sacramento, as she has a “chronic illness.” (She is dying of cancer.)

“. . .Keep me in your prayers, and I do you. Do you remember that you carried a notebook and asked millions of questions?”

The same question: Who is more right—the boy who wanted to be an architect, or his father, who knew that life is disappointment and reversal? (Is the old man’s shrug truer than the boy’s ambition simply because the shrug comes last?)

*     *     *

In Mexico my father had the freedom of the doves. He summoned the dawn. Each morning at five-thirty, my father would pull the ropes that loosened the tongues of two fat bells. My father was the village orphan and it was his duty and his love and his mischief to wake the village, to watch it stir: the pious old ladies bending toward mass; the young men off to the fields; the eternal sea.

  ~

I bought Days of Obligation last summer, shortly after returning from China, as part of an Amazon book splurge. It arrived in the final week of August, packed in a one-size-ships-all box along with miscellaneous science fiction, some essays by Franzen, a paperback of Infinite Jest, books about capitalism with Chinese characteristics—without democracy—and a study of Mao’s political intrigues. (Half are still unfinished on my bookshelf.)

But I’m glad I finished this one, several times over. Richard Rodriguez had been on my ought-to-read list for a while—I first encountered his prose two years ago, as the last entry in Philip Lopate’s remarkable anthology The Art of the Personal Essay. Compared to the standards of the personal autobiographic essay his style was somewhat difficult, aloof, baroque, mildly ergodic. But what he constructs on the page, if you can see it, is incredible. More on that later.

Rodriguez is known most widely, as an author, for his first autobiographical collection of essays, Hunger of Memory–as the “scholarship boy”, as a benefactor-turned-critic of affirmative action and bilingual education. He’s known most widely to people my age as a high-school reading assignment, maybe from AP English, a vague memory of a dark face staring out of an orange paperback. It’s taught because it’s easy to test and the prose of Hunger is terse and minimalistic, and because it’s safely controversial enough and has enough literary awards to merit placement in a balanced classroom curriculum. Whatever. Familiar adjectives usually trail his name: compelling, provocative, mature; among critics, ad hominems follow—self-absorbed, hypocrite; pocho, traitor.

Days of Obligation, as a collection of interlocking autobiographical essays, follows along many of the same lines. But the scope—and the lyrical intensity—is so much greater. Here Rodriguez tackles the shifting ironies and contradictions, the complexities that undermine the coherence of a present-day multicultural identity (for him, as a mestizo) in a social survey that ranges from AIDS-era San Francisco to mid-70s Los Angeles to examining the crosscultural exchange, at its most distilled, along the San Diego-Tijuana border. Rodriguez traces the book’s two most powerful leitmotifs, optimism (the comic, profane, Protestant-American) and tragedy (the sacred and Catholic and Mexican), back to the argument he had with his father as a boy, one whose irony he visits and revisits now as an aged man—he the American-born son, and father the immigrant resigned to life’s disappointments and reversals (Nothing lasts a hundred years.): “Life is harder than you think, boy.” “That’s Mexico, Papa.” “You’ll see.”

And the prose—forget, please, for a minute, the controversy, the political debate; forget all that. The prose in Days of Obligation is beautiful, lyrical, poetic, at times achingly so. Rodriguez is a prose stylist whose power lies in poetry, in the powerful image, in the succinct verse, in the jarring rhythm of new paragraphs and indentations acting like line breaks. “The eternal sea,” sighs Rodriguez at the end of his final, descending cadence, leaving his meditation simultaneously resolved and unresolved, a swan song with lyrics were cut off mid-clause. On the unique schizophrenia of life across the San Diego-Tijuana border, Rodriguez writes:

The theme of city life is the theme of difference. People living separately, simultaneously. In all the great cities of the world, as in all the great novels, one senses this. The village mourns in unison, rejoices as one. But in the city. . . In Athens once, I remember sitting in an outdoor cafe amid sun and cheese and flies, when a hearse with a picture window slid by, separated from its recognizing mourners by rush-hour traffic—an intersecting narrative line—which, nevertheless, did not make mourners of us, of the cafe.

Taken together as one, Tijuana and San Diego form the most fascinating new city in the world, a city of world-class irony. . . 

And so with a comma and two dashes Rodriguez parenthetically evokes the idea of metropolis as human nexus, separate and simultaneous lives a confluence of stories and narrative lines.

But it’s not just the prose, the ordering of chosen words in sentences. As a writer, an essayist, I have to admire the structure. That carefully engineered architecture of motifs and themes and interwoven narrative lines—as a writer I have to admire Rodriguez’ aesthetic bravery, the kind it takes to conceive and create such a scaffolding for the story he’s trying to tell, and to follow through with it and pull it off as he did. Days of Obligation revolves around a series of dichotomies, leitmotifs of polar opposites: Mexican versus American, optimism versus pessimism, Protestant versus Catholic, comedic versus tragic, the sacred versus the profane.

(From “Late Victorians”:)

So this is it—this, what looks like a Christmas party in an insurance office, and not as in Renaissance paintings, and not as we had always thought, not some flower-strewn, some sequined curtain call of greasepainted heroes gesturing to the stalls. A lady with a plastic candy cane pinned to her lapel. A Castro clone with a red bandana exploding from his hip pocket. A perfume-counter lady with an Hermes scarf mantled upon her shoulder. A black man in a checkered coat. The pink-haired punkess with a jewel in her nose. Here, too, is the gay couple in middle age; interchangable plaid shirts and corduroy pants. Blood and shit and Mr. Happy Face. These know the weight of bodies. . .

. . .These learned to love what is corruptible, while I, barren skeptic, reader of St. Augustine, curator of the earthly paradise, inheritor of the empty mirror, I shift my tailbone upon the cold, hard pew.

Rodriguez constructs a mosaic of memory, each essay—and eventually the entire collection—held coherent by his motifs, ever varying: in the passage above, San Francisco is presented as a paradise by artifice ravaged by AIDS, and the allusion to Renaissance ideals resonates with a comparison to martyrdom made in the introduction. Here we see optimism ruined by tragedy, and yet a city united by tragedy; consider the ambiguous final paragraph of Days, where we see Rodriguez’ father, tragic immigrant, returned to the innocence of childhood, the final image—the sea eternal—resonating with an earlier metaphor where his father eases his dying brother-in-law into the ocean, to be carried away from paradise. What does it mean?

If anything, Rodriguez’ insistence on ambiguity, on leaving his questions open, on refusing to shoehorn the arc of his memories into a resolution, a harmonious, plagal “Amen”,  where none really exists—attests to his honesty as a writer and his integrity as an essayist. If a personal essayist’s job is to communicate experience—for otherwise, what do we need literature for? Why not replace Fitzgerald and Didion’s essays on New York City with a single paragraph of declarative sentences, SparkNotes style?—then Rodriguez communicates through this complex work a fittingly ambiguous experience with unswerving honesty. The story isn’t the happy ending, the ambiguity and contradiction is the ending. He communicates the immigrant, multicultural experience, the history, the interlocking, erudite ironies that have defined him, he the product of Catholic, middle-class education, of mestizo heritage, product of comedy and tragedy, still considering the same argument: Who was more right—the boy who wanted to be an architect, or his father, who knew. . .

One can’t really blame Rodriguez, then, that in order to tell his story in all its complexity he has to construct on the page a dissonant fugue, a cathedral of words and motifs. What’s incredible is that what he builds, in all of its ambiguity and misgivings, is so breathtakingly beautiful.

It’s been several months since I’ve last written anything seriously. Between here and August there were a couple history essays and journal entries, sure, but regurgitation and woolgathering don’t count for much. My last attempt, about Shanghai and China, didn’t work because it was too ambitious and I lacked the willpower to punch through the walls I had built around myself. It fell apart. Craft an essay about Shanghai and what you saw in that vast metropolis, I told myself. Tie together the threads that you came to hold, all those stories, all those subtle juxtapositions, that sense—of walking through a city after sunset, concrete and asphalt still warm in the afterglow of day—of looking up through a dense cyberpunk sprawl and catching a glimpse of skyline soaring upward—of seeing all those lives, millions of them, persistent; because no matter what, life goes on—all interwoven stories: yours; your father and relatives. I wasn’t ready to breathe life into those memories, not then. I couldn’t finish it. I’ll always have my memories and my journal. But Babylon Rising—as it was to be called (and do you see my hubris, thinking that I could pull off such an allusion?)—now hangs in limbo and there it will stay.

Meanwhile, life went on; college started. I settled in, grew comfortable with the rhythms of daily life: the walk downhill to campus, the simple pleasure of my meals, the hunt for a favorite reading spot in the library (an easy chair near a tall window where the light blooms in the afternoon.) I took two math classes, and the experience was as rigorous and challenging and fascinating as I’d hoped for. I stopped writing.

It shows, doesn’t it? The words come haltingly. The sentences don’t flow as they should. I guess it’s partly because of the math. Over the quarter I threw my mind into it, into the if-then flow of proofs, the Antikytheran complexity, interdependent parts, meshing cogs. To immerse yourself in something is to change the language of your thoughts—how you think is determined by what you’ve thought about before, and there’s only a finite amount of time you can spend thinking about things, after all—and of course I noticed the effects, moments when I couldn’t grasp a certain essay by a certain author, slip as easily into that mode of thought: ah, she’s introducing this motif as part of a larger pattern of juxtapositions that… I found myself fumbling at times for that same easy mastery. While every day I grew more comfortable with my proof-heavy homework, exchanged practiced comfort over one kind of terrain for a novice ease on another.

It again comes down to sitting before a glowing monitor, looking at a blank page, rows of empty journal entries. It comes down to feeling that need to write, the one that comes after reading a great book or sitting down and thinking for a long time, but still asking why bother?—the same question: why should I write? To which I don’t really have a right answer. It’s fun, a thought-provoking narrative-building intellectual exercise. I haven’t a deadline anymore, nor any grand design. Why write rather than why not? Because I still can; because I’m young. Everyone has a story to tell, but at any point one only gets one chance to tell it and then it’s gone forever. I’m young and I’ve got a story to share, that I hope is worth telling. I write because I believe it is.

What now, then? Now, life goes on. Classes start again tomorrow. I’ll keep writing and posting, about books that I’ve read, my woolgathering; math and miscellany. For several days I’ve started and stopped on this essay of a New Year’s Resolution, but it’s good that I finished it and brought it to closure. I’m happy to be back. So here’s to a new year. And here’s to taking back up the pen.

The main terminal

As I write I’m sitting in a vast, dark, and nearly empty terminal on the third floor of Beijing’s South Railroad Station, passing the time, waiting for morning and the arrival of my high-speed train. August starts, at least for this meager quarter-of-a-third-of-a-half slice of the globe, in seven minutes—less time than it takes for light to reach here from the Sun, which means that August is already one minute into space, and the photons that will light dawn over here in eastern China have already struggled to break free, if I remember correctly, for millenia.

I suppose this is what happens when I’m allowed to stop polishing my thoughts into coherent essays and start to blog: an explosion of digressions. All around me the ticket gates grouped in banks of five, with their RFID scanners and green arrows, are blinking in maddening polyrhythm, like being stuck in a turn lane and trying to keep track of the turn signals. I wonder if this was the private joke of the electrical engineer who built them, for his (or her) giggles to forever echo down the years and granite corridors, at the obsessive-compulsive businessmen and autistic drummers no doubt driven mad by the ceaseless bleating of those green arrows…

At least they provide an interesting visualization for this seemingly endless Flying Lotus playlist I’m listening to. It’s interesting how they all seem to coincide with one rhythm or another in these songs.

But yes: August. It’s almost exactly a month that I’ve been here, land of my heritage, caught in the sweep of modernization, promised land of knockoff textiles and cheap toys and dubious food safety regulations, a developer’s dream of rising personal disposable income: I’ve seen much, and I’ve thought a lot, but I’ve written very little. Hopefully that changes. I’m working simultaneously on three essays at the moment, pecked out in my spare time on bus and train rides, before bed and long after bedtime, and hopefully I’ll have the most important one finished before I return to America sometime in the next two or three weeks.

Incidentally, one of the side projects that I’m working on is a review of what I’ve been reading this summer—my usual summer reread of Atlas Shrugged, which always gets more interesting in its logic and structure the nth time around, and various essays, and, most importantly, two works: Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom novels, especially Rabbit Is Rich, and at long last—I’m proud to say that I’ve finally mustered the time, attention span, and sense of humor for it—Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, which is so virtuostically written, beautifully obscene and dazzlingly erudite, that I couldn’t care less if the plot doesn’t make sense: it’s wonderful; it’s hilarious. I’ve found the brain food equivalent of caviar and jalapeno Doritos for the rest of my life.

But while I hammer out my essays, I can’t, in good conscience, simply leave a blog of my rambling thoughts on this website. This is a writing archive, after all. So I’ve decided to include some content.
Today, while sketching a brainstorm, I hit a dead end and I decided to loosen my mental rotator cuffs, or whatever you’d like to call them, with a short exercise: crafting a descriptive short, descriptive paragraph to the best of my ability.

I wanted to portray the sense of waking up, in a cinematic sense, like those York Peppermint Patty commercials that focus on the eyes opening and the pupils dilating and the sound of that first breath.

So I began with this:

“I especially like in the mornings the feeling of waking up, the snap of eyelids, that first sharp breath of cold damp morning air filling the chest like so much ice, like curtains thrown open to a darkroom, or opening a pinhole camera, soft morning light blooms into sunshine.”

Awkward. Here I have the basic images and senses I want to convey: the eyes opening, the first breath in the chest and light filling a room and becoming an entity in itself.

Second iteration:

“I like especially in the morning that moment of waking up, that first sharp conscious intake of breath and the cold, damp air filling my chest like an angiogram of ice, and when my eyes flicker open and the morning light, translucent at first, flares and fills everything like curtains thrown open to a darkroom.”

Better. I set up here the cause-and-effect of the eyelids to the first breath, and I’ve introduced the image of an angiogram, of a sudden dark stain shooting through thoracic arteries, like in House, and the comparison of my eyes to curtains thrown open, and the crescendo of light.

Third iteration:

“I like especially the feeling of waking up in the morning, of that moment when at the first sharp intake of conscious breath a cold angiogram of damp morning air pushes into my chest, and my eyes are thrown open like curtains in a solarium: light flares and touches everything, and the muted dawn explodes into day.”

Much better. Of course there are a dozen small changes and deletions made with each iteration, but these are the stable states, when all the changes I make balance each other into a possible phrase.

Now for the final form:

“I like especially the feeling of waking up in the morning, of when at the first sharp intake of conscious breath a cold angiogram of damp morning air pushes into my chest, and my eyes, thrown open like curtains to a solarium, see: light flares and into the darkness it floods, and somewhere, soundlessly, dawn explodes into day.”

I think the alliteration is a nice touch. Of course I might be dissatisfied with this sentence tomorrow, or in another hour, or in a few months I might want to delete it. But it feels palatable for now.

In any case I’ll get back to work on these essays—I write now so that I don’t forget what I’ve experienced here, so that even when my 17-year-old self is long gone, buried beneath frayed memories and fading photos, I can still read and understand what he saw in this month-long moving snapshot of China. I’ll see you all later.

~

The world ablaze

I’ve always believed in the power of words. As a writer, an essayist, a part of my mind forever kneels with a naive ear firmly pressed against my everyday experience, straining to feel the slightest rumble, the merest tremor—straining, moment by moment, for drops of music distilled from a sea of noise, listening for the perfect words, the perfect phrase. I’ve never stopped looking for those symphonic sentences that ring like bells, never stopped yearning for that moment of rare beauty when, with a single well-written thought, my senses flood with light—and I don’t think I ever will. That part of my mind, kneeling and listening, knows the power of words more deeply than I can express; it knows the fiery, magic secret: with the right words one can set the world ablaze.

Nearly a year ago, with the poetic prose of Annie Dillard echoing in my head, I told myself in a journal that writing was, at its core, an act of self-preservation, and that without my words and sentences I would have no weapons against the shear and tear of the world, that it was my only source of continuity. It’s true, to an extent—with words we take impressions of ourselves, and then we age. I look back at old essays, old reflections, and cringe at the verbal self-portraits. But after a year of writing I’m convinced that, at its core, writing is really about self-creation. I write and I make sense of the world, and my thoughts shape my words, but as I read my words shape my thoughts—I can point, to my words, and assert: “This is who I am—or ought to be!”

As for actual writing—harnessing the power of those words, cobbling them together, imposing my will upon them—it was never quite as easy as that. It never is. There are moments when the words fight me, when I sit, late into night and up into the early morning, staring at a blank screen, unable to write or sleep. But right as I begin to think, This column is going to kill me, I see it. The essay. Mentally, the blocks slide into place, and something clicks, and I can see the structure of it, glimmering and vast, the ideas within it so bright that it seems alive. I find what I have to sacrifice, what I’ve been avoiding, all long—I break off a piece of myself, and drop it in, and it all comes to life. The words come and the sentences lock together, and I feel the joy of creation.

I’ve lived nearly eighteen years and only when playing music have I come close to that joy—when I effortlessly sprint that tightrope between butchering and breathing life into my words. The ideas flow, and words crystallize around my thoughts, and these I cobble into phrases and those I smash into sentences, and I lift them, like steel girders, into place. I am architect and engineer, composer and conductor: I stretch metaphors to their limit, and back, and raise one idea to balance another; I build crystal palaces and crash them back together and pick up the pieces until I’ve constructed a world of words on the page, furnished an entire universe with my mind. And I wait until I need to write again.

But this is the last of my Scroll column-essays. I’ll never write anything like these again, nor face those challenges unique to a high school journalist. For each of my columns I took my thoughts and feelings and pieces of myself for days and weeks and imbued it in words, set it to paper, and let it go—I’ll never be that person who wrote it. Soon, to me, these will be nothing but 12 snapshots, portraits frozen in words, drifting rapidly away. When I’m older I’ll probably read these and laugh—although whether nostalgically or sympathetically I can’t say.

I suppose the greatest gift one can recieve from writing—to shamelessly borrow from Dillard—is that of sight. Words are cheap, after all; words are like empty nets, liable to blow away at the slightest lyrical breeze at one turn and weigh down like a sack of bricks at the other, depending on what you put into them. But have your mind and eyes at the ready and you can set the world ablaze: if you have the right words you can walk the cosmos, peer into the microscopic. There are rare moments, if you’re lucky enough, when you chance upon something beautiful and the words come to life in your ears, drenched in music, and like a distant tuning fork your mind resonates.

To write these personal essays is ultimately a matter of self-exploration. As I write and transcribe my thoughts, and words collect on a page, I inevitably push out along the axis of my memories, in search of answers and insights and little moments. Even as I write now, one memory keeps resurfacing, evoked by the words I now write: four years ago, on a windy, darkening Tuesday in October, I feel a hand on my shoulder. Rubi Godinez, editor-in-chief of the Scroll, wants to talk to me.

She turns and squints at the marqee. “Look up there. What do you see?” The Scroll had been named for a Pacemaker award. “Don’t you want to be part of that? You should join journalism; you’re a smart guy; you’ll do great. I’ll talk to the adviser about signing you up.”

These past years I’ve asked myself if it was worth it, the sleepness nights, the early mornings, the stressed afternoons. And here I am, four years, three editor positions and 11 columns later—and I can now see: it was. Such was the power of her words.

I’m graduating soon—in eight days, actually—and I’m almost sad to leave all this behind, to say goodbye to the journalism room, to my friends, to admit that I’ll never have these experiences again. But I’ll always have my words, and through my words, I build and construct, reminisce, invent, create—and preserve: I write. And as I walk across that stage and into some unsure shimmering future I’ll try to remember what my writing has, at last, taught me: to see, to listen, to open my mind to the moment when the world and my words ignite, and my mind reels, my body rings, and my thoughts take wing and soar.

Keep a weather eye on this blog, though–I’ll still be posting content after I close the chapter on these column-essays. I’ll probably start a “Dispatches From China” section: reflection on my experiences, what I experienced, economic and social commentary from an American-Chinese visiting China and whatnot, and I’ve still got one final column to go: my senior reflection, and I’ve been planning it for a while. The version I’ll post here will probably be longer and more elaborate than the one in print, but that won’t be for another two weeks.

~

My father

My father’s been saying for several months now that he wants to take me to China over the summer, before I leave for college. As always, I simply tuned him out—I never took him seriously, never listened, simply assumed that I’d spend this final summer between adolescence and adulthood adrift in a sea of lazy halcyon days, languid with the heat, basking in golden boredom and maroon sunsets and cerulean skies, in one last great hurrah to youth.

He keeps talking about the trip, though, even when he knows I’m trying to ignore him and don’t want to talk about it—little details, as if it was already planned. It’s important to him. He’s stubborn, the same stubbornness that I’ve inherited from him.

“When we are in China, you cannot talk to me or ignore me the way you do here. You must have respect,” he told me. For as long as I can remember, my father’s been trying to tell me things my whole life, and I’ve usually ignored him. The gaps between us and our parents never entirely go away: generational, linguistic. It was easy to dismiss my father’s words along with his English, to condescend and talk syntactic circles around him, to look past their value, even as a child, to take his words and twist them. It was his stubborn love against my stubborn pride, and we never wavered. Looking back, I suppose I’ve despised my father in the way that only a teenager can—ignorantly and out of the million little frustrations that come with being parent and son.

But I also love him fiercely, in the way that only a child can love his parents, an attachment that ignores quirks, or imperfections, or irrationalities—something that goes beyond simple gratitude and compassion. This was the man who had raised me, had taught me how to walk, how to ride a bike; who, when he had heard that I was to be born three weeks premature, had dropped everything to buy baby supplies—and, even though this was the same man who had told me, at 7, that I could contract hepatitis from eating things I touched with my hands; who, when I started middle school, forced me to rearrange everything in my room according to feng-shui—I love him all the same, as stubbornly as he tries to make me listen and I ignore him.

No matter what, however, the things my father tried to tell me always involved China—his childhood in Shanghai, his adolescence during the Cultural Revolution—some missing piece of a cultural heritage that he always tried to make me understand. As we grew older and I watched his face grow weathered—older and exhausted—he always spoke of returning to China, to Shanghai, the city of his youth.

Then, several weeks ago as I sat, dozing off, during what seemed like an endless car ride home—lost in my thoughts, sun and shadow strobing brilliant red-white across my eyelids, the muffled roar of the freeway slowly lulling me to sleep—I felt my father, who was driving, shaking me awake. He looked at me, then back at the road, and then said: “We’re going to China this summer.” Then, proudly and quietly, he explained that all the preparations were made, and that he, resourceful as ever, had found a youth hostel program hosted by the Chinese State Department for a six-week stay in Shanghai and Beijing, and how, in exchange for an hour’s performance of Chinese music, American Airlines was giving him a pair of round-trip tickets on their new nonstop LA-Shanghai line.

I asked him why he wanted me to go. “You must see your family,” he simply told me. “You must learn about your heritage. You must see Shanghai, where I grew up. You must see how China is developing, how its economy is growing. You need to understand.” A part of me simply balked at the prospect—half of a summer spent in China’s humid heat, sharing a hostel room with dear old Dad and visiting relatives and villages in a blur of gray countryside and polluted cities. And yet, sitting there, seeing his weathered face and his exhaustion, and the hurried insistence in his voice, I sensed something more, something unspoken and much more important—that this would be the last thing that he could give me before I left, his final argument and message: China. That if I listened to my experiences in China I would understand the lessons, the experiences that he’s tried to impart to me. So I looked at him and said, “Okay. When do you want to leave?”

Yesterday, my father called me and told he that he’d confirmed the flight plans. It’s been decided. We leave shortly after graduation. I’ll still get my endless halcyon summer days—about a week’s worth, actually—and then we pack up and leave for the 15-hour flight to descend into the blistering Chinese summer. At some level, my father and I know that we’ll argue and sulk at some point, because we’re alike in that way—but I know also that it’s worth it, and that it makes perfect sense: my father and I, at opposite places on the spectrum of life, going back to Shanghai and China, to see and feel the shifted landscapes of his boyhood and the world of my heritage—and maybe, as I begin to understand everything that he’s tried to give me, I’ll find in his homeland and in his weathered face a piece of myself.

~

The Manhattan skyline

I take my first steps into New York amidst a swirling crowd of jet-lagged businessmen and pushy tourists, each of us shuffling and spilling out of the Boeing 767, then dissolving into the sun-drenched main concourse, Terminal 7, of the John F. Kennedy International Airport.

At this point I’m tired of airports, and of the bland similiarity of terminals, and even of the novelty of walking the wrong way on the moving walkways—a red-eye flight from LAX and a three-hour connection in North Carolina, and here I am, slightly frazzled, bleary-eyed, clutching my laptop bag, rolling suitcase, and a tattered copy of The New Yorker.

Ten subway stops, $9 and one hour of aimless wandering around Brooklyn later, I’m knocking at the door of a brownstone, in the quickly darkening Sunday twilight. I look around. Quiet neighborhood, nice cars; security-conscious. Suddenly the keyhole snaps sideways, the door swings open, and I’m ushered in by a beaming Joe Dirks, retired firefighter, now attorney-at-law and proud, grandfatherly-looking owner of the Inn on Second, a bed-and-breakfast. We move upstairs to my room, a converted study with century-old window frames. I unpack, chat and gesture with the Swedish couple in the other room with much vigorous head-nodding, and page through my travel guide.

Monday morning, East Broadway, Chinatown: I exit a Manhattan-bound F train and ascend, blinking, into the sunlight. Everything around me humming and roaring. As I make my way south to the financial district and into the heart of Chinatown the streets grow so crowded that, in a few points, there are nothing but people for ten feet in any direction. The sheer amount of life is hard to absorb, this writhing tide of people: Entire lifetimes have been lived in this square acre of city. After another block things quiet down and I haphazardly guess my way to Battery City Park.

Grand Central Terminal in the late afternoon: I’m walking down the eastern staircase, and I see the lobby, at the peak of the afternoon commute, a photographer’s time-lapsed dream: somewhere in these blurred eddies and whorls of this torrent of people lies the experience of the city. I descend and weave my way through the mad waltz of commuters, and as I make my way to the Times Square shuttle—laptop bag in one hand, umbrella and city guide in the other—two people approach me, faces lost, speaking Mandarin Chinese: an elderly father and his son. They tell me that they are trying to visit relatives, that they are trying to get to terminal so-and-so—except I can only fluently understand Chinese, not speak it.

I know they’ll find their way eventually—it is New York, after all—and after a minute’s worth of gesticulation they understand, nod, and turn around, disappointed, and slip back into the crowd, to search for another friendly face.

By 8 p.m. I’ve explored Times Square for an hour. I find a Middle Eastern street stand and get in line. I order a falafel sandwich to go, and as the vendor fries the chickpeas, the light rain that had been falling for an hour finally stops, and as I walk down Broadway I find something irrationally beautiful about the way the air is clear but still smells like rain, and how the street glistens and mirrors the Square, and how the moment flees from me as I turn a corner to a subway station.

Midnight—I’ve spent over 12 hours out in New York. I’m riding the Staten Island Ferry on its return trip to Battery Park. I step out onto the front observation deck. A group of college students ask me to take their picture. The wind almost snatches the camera out of my hand. They stumble back inside, laughing. I lean back, breathe in the briny scent of the Hudson, and watch the glittering Manhattan skyline approaching, and I think, this city is alive, these million microcosms, distinct, in flux, that somehow render this metropolis into a distinct experience.

2 a.m.; riding the subway back to Brooklyn, I fight sleep. Everyone else on this train seems tired. The Indian businessman sitting far right, iPad illuminating his dozing face; the Hispanic mother rocking her infant son, speaking softly, under her breath; the Asian youth across me, my age, probably a college student, in a Hollister hoodie, neither awake or asleep, buried in music whose tinny rhythm still manages to escape his Skullcandy earphones. I think, This is the subway experience: hundreds of thousands of lives simply brushing against each other, every day, anonymous. Anonymity is seductive. There’s a part of me that wishes I didn’t have to go, that I could slip into the freedom of this anonymous city, to sink below these shifting tides of humanity.

Tuesday morning, back at JFK—I take my final steps out of New York by stepping into what seems to be the same faceless swirling crowds of brightly-clothed tourists and hurried businessmen at the concourse; back into the flux, the same shuffling chaos. I board. I settle into my plane seat. I suppose I’ll never be able to visit the same city again, to meet the exact same people in the same order, to recreate my experience—and yet, even now, as the plane lifts off the runway: just as my body, not wanting to go, pushes into my seat as I roar into the sky—I know that someday, I’ll come back.

Actually, after looking back and rereading it, I realize I was extremely sleep-deprived when I wrote most of this, and the construction and flow of ideas are very rough. Parts of this seem more suited for a rough draft or brainstorm. Oh well.

~

The Ultimate Rejection Letter

Rejection hurts. Sometimes it stings, like a slap to the face; sometimes it smarts, like a sunburn by surprise; and sometimes it just hurts, like being kicked in the gut. No matter how many things one tells oneself afterwards, no matter how many inspirational quotes in styled sans-serif on refrigerator magnets that one reads, there’s always a little voice that seems to chime, You weren’t good enough—too late; it’s too late.

When my rejections—ten of them, spread over seven days—finally arrived, in hyperlinked e-mails and nicely worded letters thrice-folded into thin envelopes, the way I read them nearly became an absurd ritual. I’d tear out the letter or click on the e-mail as quickly as possible, and skim for the key words: ‘regret,’ ‘deepest sorrow,’ ‘unable,’ ‘sorry.’ After that, it was only so many words and a photocopied signature, and the letter would be crumpled, thrown into the trash, and the e-mail marked for deletion.

The scenes that followed seem to have now grown frightfully similar, like having heard too many covers of the same song, or having seen too many of one’s relatives and becoming unable to tell them apart. If I was home, I’d inform my parents, and the conversation would invariably become a series of disappointed sighs and I-told-you-so glares—if only I had listened to them, had studiously followed their twelve-point plans and their Golden Path of hard work, integrity and American values; if only, if only—and at school, among friends, we’d huddle anxiously around someone’s iPhone or BlackBerry at lunch, checking the websites.

One by one, we’d gasp and grin, or whoop, or clap our hands over our mouths—and some of us, including me, would groan, grow silent and slink away. Friends comforted each other; joy and grief awkwardly mingled. In either case, we were left to make sense of the two contradictory phrases that formed the bittersweet, dissonant coda to our high school careers: ‘Congratulations!’—and—’We regret to inform you…”

Regrets. I have so many regrets about my high school years that I’m already wading waist-deep in them, that I can dip my hand in this ocean of shoulda-coulda-wouldas and bring up some parts of it to examine: that’s the club I should have joined, the cabinet position I could’ve pursued; here’s that class I shouldn’t have slept through, that teacher to whom I could’ve been more polite. There’s the guy I shouldn’t have alienated; and there’s the girl I would have befriended, if only for this or that. I regret sleeping through so many classes; I regret ignoring homework. I pull up one regret and there are twenty at its roots, and twenty more at their roots; an infinity of mistakes and screw-ups.

I’d love to go back in time and meet my fourteen-year-old self, and if only, somehow, if I could, communicate the years! I’m not sure if I’d even listen. I’m not sure if I can even answer the questions I was asking myself then. I can’t remember what it feels to be fourteen, or even fifteen. Those months and weeks, when I try to relive them, feel like a half-remembered song, like a hallucinatory melody that rings just out of earshot and whose lyrics stay on the tip of my tongue. Somewhere inside me, like a Russian nesting doll, is that past self, and if only I could peel away these layers of time and dirt and grime to give myself the answers that I sought, I would.

All I can remember is that somewhere between being fourteen and fifteen the magic of playing the game of life and high school disappeared, and things were bad for a while. I was asking questions that I couldn’t answer. To me, high school became that alarm clock in the morning that would bleat in my ears until I’d wake up and stare stupidly at the numbers, unsure of their meaning, until finally I grabbed and hurled the thing, cord and all, onto my bedroom wall.

Things got better, slowly. In junior year I learned to get up in the mornings, to grin and bear it, to be productive, and for a short while I was self-disciplined and was doing all the right things and participating in the right organizations, and for a very short while I believed in that totem power of hard work, virtue and a can-do attitude.

I’m not entirely sure of when in the last four years that I lost that connection between the person I was and the person I am, but I know that at one point I was posing questions to myself, and after another I began to answer them.

And now, as I sit here, surrounded by my thoughts, and these regrets and rejections, and as I ruminate about the value of all that vaunted hard work and virtue, I realize that I’ll be glad to leave it all behind, to say goodbye to the memories, the prison, the nesting dolls. The coda fades; a new movement awaits. A part of me still sorely wishes that I could ease my regret and give my younger self the answers that I’ve only found now in this mosiac of half-recollected memories, but like so many other things, it’s simply too late.

If that didn’t work out too well, the story about the spider was pretty funny by itself, right?

~

Cool, a spiderweb!

I killed a spider this morning. I was brushing my teeth and I looked down and saw it, and I wanted to scream, but there was an electric toothbrush in my mouth and I didn’t want to get foam on my shirt. I hate spiders.

It was an ugly, brown, little thing, hanging between a can of shaving cream and some used razors. Very slowly, I reached under the sink and brought up a large spray bottle of Windex, pointed it and pumped the trigger until I was sure it had died in the blue ammonia mist. I took a wad of tissue and picked up the body, then folded it over and wiped up the blue puddle. I threw it in the toilet and flushed. I almost wanted, with a comic sense of ceremony, to say a few words of respect—to grin and salute as the fallen spider made its watery journey to some Great Beyond—but my toothbrush, still humming at my molars, began to tickle my ears. I went back to the sink and spat and rinsed, and went on with my day.

I’ve been thinking about death lately, about how and why things end, and about endings in general. In my last column I wrote about feeling alive, about learning how to drink in little moments from life. Well, moments pass. Time marches on. The minutes and hours and years march full circle around the clock and things end. I see death all around me—dearly beloveds in newspaper obituaries, the wilted roses lying my mother’s garden, my childhood; my sanity: I imagine the world turning ashen and rotting before my eyes. Everything ends, passes, dies.

Like that spider. There was something abrupt and tragic about its death, the sudden jet of blue glass cleaner that tore away its life, and maybe I wanted to hear, in that gurgling 1.6-gallon flush, a voice: a message, or a lament, about the cruelty of life, and the injustice of death. What had the spider ever done to me, or anyone? Why should it have died? Why should anything die? What really happens in that watery Great Beyond—what happens after death? I heard a flush.

Science seems to provides answers with little comfort: after we die, after that little spark is snuffed out, we rot. That spider was a bit of biomechanical energy trapped in a body, already decomposing as it zoomed down a sewage pipe. Science had stripped it of any humanlike dignity, and maybe that was why I felt so absurd when I had the urge to salute a spinning wad of tissue—because of what I knew was really happening. I had killed a spider, and I had flushed it. Knowledge kills and dries everything out and cuts it into little pieces. Knowledge silences the mystery of life. Knowledge dessicates.

But even now, as I listen to my “Column-Writing” playlist on YouTube, I know I can’t really believe that. I’ve never really told anyone how I listen to music. It explodes in my mind. I hear it, and the pieces fly apart like a three-dimensional puzzle, like facets of expanding polyhedra. I can see everything—the melodies, the countermelodies, the rhythms—and my mind takes it apart and puts it back together. With my knowledge I give noise meaning, and the music bursts forth in beauty. Even the song I hear now, a pop/dance mix that evokes images of clubs and swaying bodies, I take in and analyze until the images fall away and it’s all sound. It’s why I find Bach so beautiful.

The music, too, eventually has to end. Like everything else, it dies.

I believe in knowledge. The music of thought—science and knowledge and life—explodes around me, because I’ve fallen in love with life and my mind doesn’t want to let go. Outside my window starlight filters through the atmosphere, already millions of years old, to enter my eyes. The roses in the garden are dying, to be fed to worms and entire worlds and universes in a microcosm: a cubic yard of soil. Patterns are everywhere: fractals in sea shells, the stark mathematics of evolution. The enormous city that sprawls around me seems to breathe with its own energy, pumped from furnaces burning plants that captured the power of a Sun millions of years past. I feel small.

Maybe this is what it means to be alive, in the human sense, not just living in the moment, but thinking in the moment. Knowledge affixes meaning to sensation, and the world blooms, and that’s what thinking about death makes me want to do—to breathe in the same awareness, to let the world bloom in my mind, moment by moment.

I don’t want to die. My mind and the same beautiful world tells me that I will, in the next eighty years, stop living—and science tells me that when I do, I will end. I wonder what it means to die, to have these moments stop, to have my body fall apart into the world like a Lego house into the toybox. The prospect of unbeing scares me. I fear nothing.

I think that maybe the spider had it right. It never had to fear its own death, even while it was dying in a blast of Windex—and even though I could see so much farther into the world than it could, maybe it knew what it was to be truly alive because it lived through the moments. The sun’s up now, and it’s morning, and the world is moving. I’m here in this moment, and I’ll be alive for some more moments, and in eighty years I won’t. But I resolve to live. I want to hear the music of life and let the world bloom into every moment—so that when I meet my own blast of blue ammonia, when God flushes me down his toilet into some Great Beyond or simply nothing—I can shrug and smile bitterly at death and know that I’ve truly lived.

~

The flow of time

It’s nearly the end of Feburary now, and I’ve got things to do – places to go, people to see. Interviews. Homework. Scholarship applications. I’m tired, burnt out from senior year. Financial aid e-mails clutter my Gmail inbox and clamor for attention, and I ruminate still about college admissions, even though I promised myself as I submitted my applications nearly two months ago that I would never think of it again.

Everything seems so alive lately: clear, bright, sharp. It’s like new day’s dawned in my mind, and it breathes awareness into the crisp air. Even now, outside my bedroom window, I take special notice of the trees and foliage swaying against twilit clouds and azure skies, and I paused, for a few moments before writing this sentence, to marvel. It’s moments like these when my eye falls on some nearby inexplicably beautiful thing that the rest of my mind comes leaping back through time and space, abandoning worry, halting the infinite playback of memory and information, and comes rushing into the present, the here and now.

Mindfulness, the Buddhists call it. I breathe in, and out. Slowly, the soft roar of the freeway pulses against my ears and I grow aware of the chair cushion underneath me, the tactile rustle of the fabric in my jacket. I drink in the sensations of a moment.

I sense great irony in these little reprieves, that here and now I should finally learn the art of plucking my awareness from the flow of time, at this moment when my future looms larger, and darker, than ever. Time, it seems, has finally decided to slow down at the moment I’m about to be swept away into the current. I imagine similar sentiments in some prisoner, awake on the dawn of his own execution; the mounting worry, the same sense of bewilderment, the final crushing realization: that even though I now finally have learned to count moments instead of seconds, I will never count fast enough, and trampling march of time and the inevitable weight of the future will drop the executioner’s blade no matter what.

In much the same way, I feel as if the world’s been dropping hints that I should be ready to face that trampling inevitability of time. It’s not some memento mori scrawled in blood on my bedroom wall, but more like some snide remark that I only realize is an insult five or ten minutes after the conversation. My future is making snide remarks at me. I see the e-mails from colleges and their financial-aid departments in my inbox, and I see my learner’s permit tacked to a bulletin board in my room – I see my nephews in San Diego, toddlers of yesteryear, now grown into ‘tweenhood. I see my sister entering adolescence and high school. I see the new gray hairs on my father’s head where the dye washed out, and I see earlier pictures of myself lining the staircase and the holiday cards my mother sends to distant relatives, growing taller, fatter, thinner, older; and I worry all the same. I note these things casually and then my mind cries out for time to stay its inevitable blade. I still don’t feel ready to face the world, to enter it and become an actor in some great unfolding drama. Right now I just want to crawl back under the covers and pretend the executioner isn’t there.

As of late, it seems the rest of world, too, is having one of these “what-the-heck” moments, as it sets its eyes on Egypt, the Middle East – a gentle reminder, or maybe a snide remark, on democracy and youth and the startling chutzpah of people-power.

Young, dark, jubilant faces, captured by Time and Newsweek, stare defiantly out of glossy magazine spreads while color-coded maps place bets on which autocratic regimes fall next. Shaky videos shot from cell-phones show protestors marching, chanting, protestors pulling down statues and protestors being shot by mercenaries and government forces.

Worries abounded: would Tahrir become Tiananmen? In the end, it didn’t, and it seemed that the pundits and analysts and politicians shouting from newspaper pages and magazine spreads, proclaimed: “Change! Behold, portentous, momentous, magnificent change!”

A stark realization arises amid the swirling chaos of post-Mubarak Egypt: the Revolution, and the revolutionaries, are young. More than half the people in Egypt are under 30, and most of the protestors were a little older than I am, some younger. Years ago they were dismissed as a complacent generation, doomed to be hammered down under the mailed fists of their rulers – but they chafed under their yokes. The scent of the Jasmine Revolution spread, and they tweeted and Facebooked and protested, and now, half a world away, these people, part of my generation too, hold the gaze of the international community after toppling one regime and threatening others.

The death of idealism lies in disillusionment, and that’s universal too. Those young protestors in Egypt, who grew up with some gleaming ideal of American freedom and Western individualism, now grow jaded, after Obama hesitated while the world watched. Tahrir, or Bahrain, or Libya might still become Tiananmen – Dreams and ideals, along with revolutions die, perhaps inevitably. Maybe my generation and I, disillusioned with politics in America, are simply ahead of the curve.

And yet, as I picture that fragile and myriad link between myself and those young men and women a world away, I still feel a tug of empowerment, of idealism, in my heart: my mind’s eye flashes from the camera in Egypt and into the airwaves, through the satellite feeds, through fiber-optic cables and relays and finally to the lights on my laptop’s screen, where I glance at the headlines of BBC News and share the news on Facebook. From where I stand it feels sometimes as if the world is simply happening around me, while I watch – and I still sit here in my room, worried that the future is coming too fast. More hints dropped by my future, another reminder of time’s inevitable march. A part of me wishes that I, too, could have been part of this great unfolding drama, even now as I feel unsure and suffocated by time.

Then again, maybe that’s the point. Maybe “ready” is just a sense of certainty that I’ll never attain, nor ever need to. Those people in Egypt and Tunisia held in their hearts nothing but an ideal of freedom and an organization that was born on the Web, and they marched and braved police and tear gas all the same. And though perhaps those ideals and dreams are already dying, and the future remains uncertain as ever, those people in Egypt and moven and shaken the world, hopefully for the better. The world is our inheritance; better to march into it cherishing an ideal rather than feeling bitter and disillusioned. And who knows? Maybe the ideals don’t have to die. Maybe as I go to college I’ll understand which ideals to choose for my own, and perhaps I’ll finally discover what it means to become an actor in these unfolding dramas, and face my future and time’s blade. Maybe- but not yet.