East to West

What does it mean to be seen through a stereotype? This essay traces how Asian femininity is racialized and leveraged across borders — from Guam’s “white American dream” to beauty standards that flip between East and West, to the startup world where even race becomes capital. It’s about desire, hierarchy, and the small ways we reclaim agency in a system that too often defines us before we define o...

What does a passport really buy you — freedom, leverage, or just another label? From Shanghai nightclubs to London visa lines, this essay unpacks how mobility acts as social currency. A Hong Kong passport once gave me an “unfair advantage” in China, but now I see how passports quietly uphold global hierarchies, shaping who gets to move, who gets to stay, and who gets left behind.

What if you mapped your entire life into 900 boxes — one for each month of a 75-year lifespan? Suddenly, 6 months of heartbreak, or 18 months of startup grind, looks a lot smaller. This essay explores how careers, relationships, and startups each put a different price tag on our hours — and why time, not money, is the real currency we’re all trading.

From rice paddies to 996 tech culture, from immigrant takeaways to global boardrooms — Asian hustle didn’t appear out of nowhere. It’s part survival strategy, part cultural inheritance, part trauma bond. This essay traces the roots of “work hard” as an identity, and asks: is it ambition, discipline, or something we still haven’t healed?

What makes a venture succeed — luck, market, or people? Ancient Chinese philosophy offers a timeless answer: the right time, the right place, and the right team. From Shanghai’s boom years to family-run empires across Asia, this essay connects Mencius’ wisdom with modern entrepreneurship, and the lessons I’ve learned from both history and my own mother.

Dating apps promise love, but most function like algorithms optimizing for clicks. From Elo scores borrowed from chess to stable marriage math, attraction gets treated as performance data. In this essay, I explore what happens when dating turns into a marketplace — and why swiping might be the biggest distraction from the real work of connection.