commencements

It's the graduation season again. Here are excerpts of some recent commencement speeches posted on New York Times that I find interesting...

Steve Ballmer
Chief executive, Microsoft 
University of Southern California

People think passion is something you either have or you don’t. People think passion is something that has to manifest itself in some kind of explosive and emotional format. It’s not. It’s the thing that you find in your life that you can care about, that you can cling to, that you can invest yourself in, heart, body and soul. Finding passion is kind of your job now.

Toni Morrison
Nobel Prize-winning novelist 
Rutgers University

I have often wished that Jefferson had not used that phrase “the pursuit of happiness” as the third right — although I understand in the first draft it was “life, liberty and the pursuit of property.” Of course, I would have been one of those properties one had the right to pursue, so I suppose happiness is an ethical improvement over a life devoted to the acquisition of land, acquisition of resources, acquisition of slaves.

Still, I would rather he had written “life, liberty and the pursuit of meaningfulness” or “integrity” or “truth.” I know that happiness has been the real, if covert, goal of your labors here. I know that it informs your choice of companions, the profession you will enter. But I urge you, please don’t settle for happiness. It’s not good enough.

Personal success devoid of meaningfulness, free of a steady commitment to social justice, that’s more than a barren life; it is a trivial one. It’s looking good instead of doing good.

Daniel F. Akerson

Chief executive, General Motors

Bryant University

I do have a few final bits of advice:

Acknowledge your mistakes, learn from them and move on.

Don’t be afraid of new ideas; be afraid of old ones.

Be faithful to your family and friends. You’ll get the same in return.

Tell the truth and always play by the rules.

If you think nobody cares, try missing a couple of payments.

It’s cool, again, to buy American!

Happy Commencement... of Summer!

a matter of mind

What is mind, and what is matter?
How free is free will?

When traditional (classic) physical laws can no longer explain how elementary particles behave in sub-atomic world, a new set of physical theory--called quantum mechanics--takes its place. It states that in sub-atomic world, the elementary particles (electrons, protons, photons, etc.) can behave like waves and their location is no longer deterministic but only describable through probability, and is affected by the behavior of the observer. 

Just what does this mean? Physicists use the "double slit" experiments to explain it:

In these experiments they try to observe particles of light (photons) fly toward a screen, one at a time. The screen has two slits. If each photon goes through one slit (particle-like behavior), they form two bright spots on the blinds beyond the screen. If each photon somehow goes through both slits (wave-like behavior), however, they form black-and-white stripes when they land on the blinds. Physicists have found, as the experiments show, if they put a device to observe the slits, bright spots appear in the blinds; but if the observation device is taken away, the blinds show the black-and-white pattern. It is as if the particle is aware it is being watched or not, and decides to behave particle-like or wave-like, respectively.

Elementary particles thus appear to possess a certain degree of "intelligence" and awareness of the environment. Some scientist, such as renowned plasma and particle physicist, David Bohm, thinks "In some sense a rudimentary mind-like quality is present even at the level of particle physics." Some go even further, suggesting since the elementary particle's behavior is in direct response to the experimenter's (to observe or not to observe), it actually has the same "free will" as the experimenter's. ("If experimenters have a certain freedom, then particles have exactly the same kind of freedom," wrote mathematicians John Conway and Simon Kochen, of Princeton University in New Jersey, in a paper published in Notices of the American Mathematical Society last year.)

Flip the coin to the other side, let's examine the physiological center of human consciousness--the brain. It is consisted of billions of nerve cells with their axons (output fibers) and dendrites (input fibers) being linked together into complex networks. An electrical impulse travelling onto a dendrite makes a cell "fire" and send an impulse out along its axon so setting some other nerve cell into action. Though the attempt to explain the human thought, feeling, intuition and complex behavior with a picture of a web of axons and dendrites of the nerve cells interacting with each other has been abandoned as too simplistic, it is becoming recognized that these events on the membranes of nerve cells are often triggered by shifts in the energy levels of sub-atomic particles such as electrons. In fact, at the root of such interactions lie quantum events, and the central point within our consciousness can now be seen as an entity that can work to control quantum probabilities. 

Thus it can be postulated that our consciousness at times musters energy to align the particles in our nerve cells to a temporary quantum state that together manifest a thought, emotion, etc., before it is forced to jump and move to other regions of the brain. This explains why our thinking is fleeting and indiscernible at its most infinitesimal level, as quantum mechanics laws dictate minuscule particles to behave, while at a grander level our thoughts can have all the qualities of predictability and solidity, as classical mechanics laws allow things of larger scale to be.

So, what is mind and what is matter, and how free is my free will?

Sometimes when I travel, I look down from the plane and see all the cars moving on the roads, smooth and orderly, going high speed when the road is straight and wide, slowing down when the road curves or narrows, like well behaving physical objects. If I didn't know better, or if I were a physicist out at the N-th dimension observing this physical experiment of mine, I would most legitimately call these "lifeless particles behaving perfectly according to some pre-defined physical laws..." Yet, there are human beings inside each and every one of these physical objects, each with his/her own consciousness, emotions, thinking mind, and yes, free will...

what differences a day makes

It is a slow day in the small Minnesota town of Marshall, and streets are deserted. Times are tough, everybody is in debt, and everybody is living on credit.

A rich tourist visiting the area drives through town, stops at the motel, and lays a $100 bill on the desk saying he wants to inspect the rooms upstairs to pick one for the night.

As soon as he walks upstairs, the motel owner grabs the bill and runs next door to pay his debt to the butcher.

The butcher takes the $100 and runs down the street to retire his debt to the pig farmer.

The pig farmer takes the $100 and heads off to pay his bill to his supplier, the Farmer's Co-op.

The guy at the Farmer's Co-op takes the $100 and runs to pay his debt to the local prostitute, who has also been facing hard times and has had to offer her "services" on credit.

The hooker rushes to the hotel and pays off her room bill with the hotel owner.

The hotel proprietor then places the $100 back on the counter so the rich traveler will not suspect anything.

At that moment the traveler comes down the stairs, states that the rooms are not satisfactory, picks up the $100 bill and leaves town.

No one produced anything. No one earned anything... However, the whole town is now out of debt and now looks to the future with a lot more optimism.

one morning in taipei

Every time I travel to Taiwan, I stay in the apartment house that belongs to my father's (before he passed away last October, that is). It is just a few alleys away from where I lived before I went abroad and settled in the USA, and also just a few alleys away from another residence where I spent my kindergarten and junior high years, and a few more alleys--across a now high rise expressway--from the place where I was born 53 years ago. 

Partly due to the jet lag, and partly due to my incurable need of daily exercise that has been programmed into my living gene through the years, I will walk out of the house in the early morning, to a community park nearby, and do some exercise there.

I will walk past that little Presbyterian church that my two elder sisters said they'd been to a few times when they were little, mostly for the fun and candies they gave out. I will walk past a police station, seeing some well suited-up patrol cars and motorcycles lining up to the curb, a good indication of the better clout the policemen get nowadays. I will also pass by that little 4 story corner building where I lived during my kindergarten-junior high school years. It seems just yesterday when the little kindergarten van would come to pick me up and my dear young mother would wake me up from bed; and when all kids in the block would gather after school to play dodge ball, chase and hack each other with "hand swords" in the evening and sometimes late into the night, with all the energy and rowdiness kids of that age could generate--the sounds of "baby booming" of our times, so to speak. 

I'll then cross a major street, a hundred yards to the left after the crossing is the elementary school where I went for my basic education. It was one of the most "populous" elementary schools in Taipei at that time, hosting over 60 students per classroom, 26 class units per grade, for a total of around 10,000 students. It had some tiny green belt surrounding its exterior walls that we had to take turn cleaning as students. Now it's all torn up, replaced by brick walkways and a new subway station entryway nearby.

Then I'll pass a "mansion," the only single family, detached home (using the housing terminology we are familiar with in the US), with its own front yard and driveway, that you can find within kilometers around in this part of the town. We'd often wondered what kind of people lived there or who the owner was--must be pretty well off, we thought. It is still the only housing of its kind around here, but now the building looks a bit tired, and the garden not as well manicured as it should be, and there are so many real grand "mansion" homes (豪宅) in this affluent city today that it looks like an old relic from an olden time.

A few steps down, there is supposed to be a girl's home-making vocational school since I was a kid. I said "supposed to" because I never knew where that school was--probably hidden behind some walls in some nearby alleys. But I do see many young girls in uniform stepping out of the bus or walking around this area during early morning hours. Their dress reminds me of some pretty, classy high school girls I secretly admired and hoped to bump into during my morning walk to school when I was that dreamy, dumb little lad at my teens.  

Then I am at the park. It has been transformed quite a bit since I was a kid, mostly positively. From just a wild open field with grass and bushes, beetles and dragonflies, it then had circled gardens, a labyrinth maze, a soccer field, some tennis courts, and a jogging trail. But none of the changes is as big as the one brought about by this International Floral Expo thing the city started building up for a couple of years ago. It basically overhauled the whole park with several exhibition houses and new landscaping. It was a great, successful redevelopment, but it disrupted the daily use of the park during the construction--the majority of the park was cordoned off limit and many exercise groups had to relocate outside the park to continue their daily workout; the jogging trail was so carved up by the construction zones it left each jogger jumping their own hoops around the park if they hadn't given up the idea of jogging there altogether. But now that exposition is over, it is gradually reopening itself to the public, and to those exercise groups in particular.

I walk in the park, and see those same groups of people I have been seeing for the past 10-15 years well back in action again: A Zen-style qi-gong (氣功) group practicing the simple inhale-exhale, leg-and-shoulder movements; a mostly women group doing aerobics with American pop music; and a Tai-Chi group, which subdivides into 3 small groups, each to its own proficiency level, gesturing along with taped instructions.  

Though I know I shouldn't be jogging again--taking cues from the painful experiences of recent years with my inflammation prone feet--I can't help but try trotting just a few steps when I get to the spot where I used to start jogging, and I feel fine. So off I go again. 

The old jogging route had meter marks painted on the ground and traversed the park all the way. The meter marks are now gone and part of the route is now occupied by new buildings and plant plots, but without any debris or fenced-off area, this is definitely a joggable park again. I see a couple of old faces who I know have been jogging here for years, and meet a friendly "foreign maid"--woman from southeast Asia who comes for domestic work here on work visa--who smiles at and says "good morning" to me. By the way, I have seen more and more old people on wheelchairs accompanied by these domestic workers strolling in the park in recent years. Though I haven't seen any of them today--probably because they haven't heard the park is open again--I am sure they'll come back gradually soon.  

When I approach the corner of the park where the Tai-Chi groups are practicing, I sneak a view at the crowd and find someone I have been looking for--my elementary school teacher Mr. Lin. I first met Teacher Lin at the park back 10-15 years ago, a surprise teacher-student reunion so many years after the elementary school. I then saw him from time to time through the years when I came and did my jogging at the park. I haven't seen him for the past couple of years, though, and was a bit concerned that he might no longer be around--he's about the same age as my parents after all. But now here he is again, looking as healthy as he was 10 years ago. Doing Tai-Chi must have done him good all these years, I figure. 

I decide not to disrupt his Tai-Chi practice and continue on with my jogging, and finish it with the usual 3 rounds like before. No pain or discomfort on my feet or any part of the body. I can live to jog for another day now.

Then I head home. Strolling down a bigger street than the one I came from, I start thinking, whether I should have my breakfast at one of the soymilk joints (豆漿店), or pick up an oyster noodle soup (蚵子麵線) at a street peddler, or some hand-made sandwich at some new generation breakfast stop or a convenience store, or sit in and eat pig-tripe noodle soup (冬粉豬肚湯) at an old style noodle shop... 

Tough decision to make to start a day,

greg mortenson

Greg Mortenson is a Minnesota born (in 1957) American who grew up in Tanzania since 3 months old when his Lutheran parents moved the family there for missionary work. He returned to the States at 14, finished high school, then served in the army for two years before entering college and graduated from University of South Dakota in 1983. He's athletic and sporty but particularly passionate about mountain climbing since he was a kid in Africa.

In 1992, his younger sister Christa, who had been struggling with epileptic since a childhood infectious disease and whom Greg had been giving extra care for, passed away at 23. 

To honor his sister's memory, in 1993, Greg climbed K2, the world's second highest mountain in Pakistan. He got lost on the way down and was rescued by local village people. After spending time with them he was moved not only by their poverty in general but their desire for children's education in particular. He made a promise to the village elder that he'd be back and build a school for them. Thus began his one-man, one-school-at a time mission till this day. 

He's been caught in crossfire between Afghan warlords, kidnapped by the Taliban, issued fatwehs (death decrees) twice by Islamic mullahs, investigated by CIA, and sent death threats from fellow Americans after 9/11, for helping Muslim children with education.

All these are told in the book "Three Cups of Tea," co-authored by Greg Mortenson himself and a journalist. I first heard about this book from my college fellowship reunion group in Taiwan who were setting up a tele-book-study through Skype for it, and then I heard one of my men's group members sharing about it, and then, lo and behold, I saw it right at my bookshelf, in Chinese translation, as one of those monthly reads selected by my wife's book club (so these gals actually read some good books, not just eat and chat when they meet, like we do in men's group :), so I picked it up and got on with it.

It reads like a venture story, except they are all true stories. And the main character himself, Greg Mortenson, seems just like a big ol' American boy you could find out here on the streets. Yet with a simple determination and a big heart, he set out to deliver a promise he made and accomplished so much more than anyone would have thought possible. 

The last few chapters of the book, besides its usual story telling, address the rise of Taliban and extreme Islamism in the Pakistan and Afghanistan where he was trying to set up schools, and the US's military reaction to it. Here I have a couple observations to make. The first was what impressive effect money and organization can accomplish in a short time: For all that much hard work and effort Greg had put in from 1994 through 2007 (when the book was written), virtually single-handedly, all he could accomplish was 60+ schools in rural northern Pakistan; but with tens of million dollars of oil money coming from the Persian Gulf, the Taliban and other Islamic fanatics had set up thousands of mosques and religious schools in the same region within a couple of years. The US's military reaction to it, however, was as swift and powerful: Within a few weeks after the Afghan War started, the Taliban regime and their establishments were wiped out from most of Afghanistan.

Herein lies my other observation, i.e., how slow and ineffectual real solutions to real problems seem to ordinary eyes. As Greg keeps pointing out in the book, the root problem of extreme Islamism is poverty and ignorance--poor villagers receive no resources other than those from the Taliban's; young, xenophobic Islamic militarists think all the problems and humiliation their people suffer are from invasion of the western culture. And the real solution is education and mutual understanding. Even the US military knows that--Greg's book has become required reading for US commanders and troops deployed to Afghanistan since 2009, and I recall reading a TIME magazine report last year about how one US army platoon in Afghanistan tried to build a school for the village they stationed by, and had to go through great bureaucracy and bribe local gang lords without end, and I thought to myself then: what a waste of military resources for such "hopeless" job in a foreign land! 

     

One thing I was quite curious about, when I first heard of this book, was how Greg's Christian belief must have played in what he does: the internal conflict he must have felt while dealing with the Muslim beliefs and practices, and how he would draw on his faith to get the strength and power to overcome the obstacles he faced. I saw none of that. Instead, you get the feeling that he's doing all these great things just because he made a simple commitment to a simple need he sees for the people he cares about. Or, maybe the generous, unconditional love to all people had been passed on from his Lutheran parents and cultivated in the loving environment he grew up with long before he started the mission.

In any case, this is a story of a doer, and a very extraordinary one at that!

japan

I met Todd Newfield, a Canadian national living and working in Japan, in Las Vegas in early 1993, at a "Computer Telephony" trade show where I set up a little table inside the booth of a voice communication hardware manufacturer whose state-of-the-art boards I used for my application development back then. He showed interest in what I did and told me he had some upcoming tele-promotion projects in Japan that he's considering using such technology for implementation and asked if I would be interested. I said I like Japanese food and Japan the country and the projects seemed interesting enough to me. A couple months later he asked me to come over to Tokyo, airplane ticket paid for, for a trial project with him, and go I did, thus started my two-and-a-half year, 23 trip stint of programming-gun-for-hire life experience in Japan.

Todd was actually an MBAer who came to Japan in the mid 80's when Japan's economy was at its height (when they were the number one US debt holder, buying Rockefeller Center and Columbia Pictures and other trophy US properties and companies, and everyone thought they were going to take over US economy someday soon). He first worked in the hot Japanese stock market as trader/analyst, then for big Japanese and international firms as marketing liaison. He was actually starting out his own business with these projects he hired me to do, using the business relations he had built throughout his previous years in Japan. 

The first couple of campaign projects were easy, using phones/computers to collect customer demographic and preference information for some Japanese food/candy companies, yet they were the first of its kind in Japan. He got confident with me and the technology and got bigger and bigger projects from bigger and bigger clients to do while building up his business in the following years.

For example, one major project we did was for Philip Morris Corp. (yes, that big, evil tobacco company of the world, and we helped promote cigarette smoking for them :) It was a combined $40 million dollar campaign that included TV commercials, highway billboards, newspaper ads, and our telephony gig with one same theme story line--A floppy disk was stolen by a bad guy, your mission is to get it back... what vehicle do you want to use for the chase--press 1 if you want a helicopter, 2 if you want a Porche... now he's right in front of you, press 1 if you want to cut in front of him, 2 if you want to ram him from behind... sorry you missed him, try another time... etc. I had to design a scheme to verify the legitimacy of the PIN the caller enters per their cigarette box, collect their sex/age information, and when and what little prize (a cap, a T-shirt, or a cigarette lighter) to give out when they make a move selection. I also had to keep tally of where the calls fall out and wrote a separate utility program that fetches such data from all different sites and compiles them so Todd can input them to his Mac to come up with a pie chart and other presentation graphics to show his client, in this case, Leo Burnett, the top ad agency in Japan for Philip Morris. Also the data of winners of little prizes need to be kept so they can be entered into a lottery at the end of the campaign for the chance to win the top prize of a Toyota truck.

The programming itself was not that hard, but the pre-campaign testing and preparation was the real drill, because once the campaign started, it ran 24/7 all over major cities in Japan--from Sapporo to Hiroshima, Tokyo to Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, and Sendai, for a whole month and a half non-stop. If my program hangs, or gives out excessive amount of prizes, or allows ineligible people to get them, by contract we (Todd) were liable for all the damages created.

The crew we used for testing, logistics, and customer support were all Japanese, 6 or 7 of them, men and women in their early 30's. They were actually the core staff of the former exclusive distributor in Japan for the US company whose communication boards I used for the projects until the Japanese economic bubble burst and their company disbanded in the early 90's. I can still remember Todd and I and all the Japanese crew sitting in a crammed, smoke filled office, telephone simulators at hand, making calls all at once, pressing different selection keys to go different scenario routes, then pulling out the result printout to verify if they were 100% correct according to the designed program flow and test schemes, over and over again.

Here I have to give praise to the Japanese work ethics I saw there. The typical Japanese workers were dedicated, detail minded, straight shooters. No cutting corners, no skimming the surface, no smart second guessing on their own, just honest to God rule following and execution. The result is then, as we liked to say there, "If Mori san says it's OK, then we know it's OK." Mr. Mori was the chief tester and technical support guy we had there (and the heaviest cigarette smoker I have ever met in my life--that's why I sometimes nicknamed him, jokingly, "Mr. Morijuana").

I also remember on the eve of the campaign launch, a few minutes before mid-night April 30th, we all sat in front of the rack-mounted computers in our tiny Tokyo office, nervously watching the screens that were running a generic screen saver program I wrote, wondering how the "grand opening" would look like in a moment. Then the clock turned 12 AM May 1, all the screens brightened up, status lines flashing with call status and call count updates, without a glitch... We stood up and joyously congratulated each other with cheers of champaign Todd brought in, for all the hard work we had gone through for weeks prior.

Weird things still happened during the campaign, though. For example, a few days after the campaign started, we noticed from the daily reports Osaka sent us (we contracted with NTT--Nippon Telephone and Telegraph, the AT&T of Japan--to have our computers and telephone lines set up at their local offices and asked them to fax in the call report my program automatically generated every morning--Mind you, this was the day before Internet was born, oh well, Al Gore had invented it by then, but we just didn't know it :) that it didn't seem to be taking calls for a few days. Todd had all the Osaka phone lines rerouted to Tokyo and sent Mori and me over there to check it out. We couldn't find anything wrong and even replaced the computers there to see if that made any difference, but no dice, the problem persisted. We then re-examined the call reports, and noticed the calls seemed to stop coming in around 7 AM every morning, about the same time when the office cleaning lady came in and started her daily work. We suspected when she plugged in and turned on her vacuum cleaner, it triggered a power surge that knocked down our computers in the office. So we told them to move the computers to a different location where it had its own power source, and the problem went away. Case of mystery solved!

Living in Japan, or Tokyo in particular, was not a hard thing to do. The city was very foreigner friendly, with safe streets, clear signs, polite people, and a superb subway/train system that after a few trips and a couple weeks living there, I not only could go around the city by myself without problem, I also knew how to go straight from metropolitan Tokyo to Narita international airport 40 miles away using the cheapest route possible. But living there was expensive. During the Philip Morris campaign, Todd rented for me an "apartment mansion" that was about 10' by 7' small (I hesitate to use the word "big"), bathroom, stove top, and a pull-down bed all included, for the equivalent of $1500 a month, and you--or actually the company you work for--had to go through a credit check and pay the real estate broker "gift money" that's about one month's rent worth to get it!

In that sense, Japan was not that foreigner friendly a society. Take Todd's example, he had been living and working in Japan for over 7 years by then, spoke fluent Japanese, married to a Japanese woman, and got his permanent residency, and still, he told me when he sometimes had to wave for a taxi at night, he had to cover his face so the taxi drivers wouldn't recognize he's a foreigner and not stopping for him, and when he was buying an apartment house there he had to use his wife's name for it because otherwise as a foreigner he could not get a mortgage or own a house there (the rules may have changed since then, though).  

I did get what I came to Japan for, a lot: I got to eat great Japanese food every day, literally. The after-work group dine-out "ritual" is part of Japanese work culture, as you may well know, and the restaurants in Tokyo were basically all mom-and-pop shops, each with great specialty dishes of their own, using the freshest and best quality food ingredients to begin with, to woo their precious customers in one of the most competitive metropolitan culinary markets in the world. And indeed sometimes you feel the happiest hours the Japanese workers have every day is when after they have a few beers and good food in their stomach, they talk to you heart to heart, or show you their wild side that you don't usually see during the day. At an on-sen (溫泉, hot spring) retreat we went to after the campaign, for example, the sha-jo (社長, President) of the former distributor company jumped on the dinner table almost half naked, danced around, then landed on my lap and hugged me. And the girls sang and danced great Karaoke all night long after the dinner. Hardy workers, hardy partyers, I suppose.

I tried to memorize all the Japanese alphabets (Katakana 片假名 and Hiragana 平假名) and learned a few useful Japanese phrases during my stay there. For example, when in a restaurant, if you don't know what to order, just say "o-su-su-me" ("your special/recommendation of the day?"). Or when in a store, point to the thing you are interested in, and say "i-ku-ra" ("how much?"), then "ta-kai-de-su-ne" ("too expensive!"). Or when in a packed subway train and you need to get off right away, just say the magic word "su-mi-ma-sen" ("excuse me!"), and the crowd will part way for you in no time! Finally, the kill-all phrase for all your Japanese communication trouble: "ni-hon-go-wa-de-ki-ma-sen" ("I don't speak Japanese!").

One day at a train station, though, a westerner came over and started speaking fluent Japanese to me that I had no idea what it's about, so I said to him in fluent English that I am not Japanese and don't understand what he said, but if he can speak English then maybe I can try to help him. He got a little surprised at first but quickly switched over to English and told me he just needs to find out where and when to take a train to a certain station he needs to go. I told him if he tells me the station name then maybe I can tell from the train's schedule board which is written in kanji (漢字, Chinese character) what he needs to know. So he told me the name of the station, but then, unfortunately, I had no idea how that pronunciation relates to its kanji writing. He finally gave up on me and turned his way for a real Japanese to solve his problem!

In light of recent disasters in Japan, I decide to try to contact some of the people I know there and see how are they faring. I Google'd and then LinkedIn'ed Todd Newfield through Internet--the last time I met him was in year 2000 when I brought one of my programmers to attend a trade show there in Tokyo and we had a lunch together. He is actually now living in Canada, teaching international business and going for a PhD program of his own at a university in British Columbia, with his little boy that his Japanese wife just gave birth to around the time I last met him, so to give him a flavor of his native country before the boy grows up, he said. He said he misses Japan and still prefers living there to his native country Canada. I believe him, because I could tell while working with him in Japan that he really enjoyed the excitement and the pace of things that were happening around his work and living life there, and I remember he told me when he went back to Canada to visit his parents or friends, they said he speaks English with a funny Japanese accent. And he does sound that way.

I also called another Japanese friend who had been sending me postcards with his family pictures for a few years until about 10 years ago. I found his mobile phone number and made a call and left a message with my email address, and voila, I got his email back right the next day! He said his family and friends are doing all right, but the city of Tokyo is undergoing rolling blackout nowadays, and he has to help out some friends/customers of his who live in the Sendai area. We exchanged a few emails since and are both glad we get reconnected again!

God bless my friends and all the people in Japan,

maryknoll sisters

Had a darn good outing Sunday.

The plan was simple, out to a Chinese delicacy restaurant in LA for brunch with two couples, a stroll in Huntington Library, then a visit to and dinner with some Catholic nuns who had spent their lifetime in Taiwan and recently retired to Monrovia, a little town in the foothills of San Gabriel Valley.

That Chinese delicacy restaurant is an offshoot of a famous noodle-and-dumpling place from Taiwan, 鼎泰豐 (Din Tai Fung Dumpling House). I remember being there once when it first opened shop here in Arcadia 10-15 years ago, and now it has added another site right next to it, and is doing great business apparently--it opens at 10:30, and scores of people were waiting around the front door already when we arrived there around 10:20.

The food was actually pretty good--better than what we remember it was 10-15 years ago. The dumplings were tiny but finely made and tasted delicious, whether it's pork, shrimp, or veggie inside; the chicken soup and hot oil wonton were wonderful too; and the sweet dumplings with red bean or taro pastry inside served as great dessert substitute at the end. The service was exceptional as well (the son of the 鼎泰豐 founder comes in daily and manages this site himself, they say), and the setting and decoration was bright and shiny, unlike some Chinese restaurants that may serve great food but in a dim and dingy environment.

Huntington Library is another place we had visited yet the last time we were there was some 10-15 years ago. It's the same old grand mansions and beautiful gardens as before--like the fine art collections inside, good, valuable things don't grow old, they just grow more gracious with time, like our wives. I felt a bit sentimental when I reminisced one time my parents were here with me, and now they are both gone. We strolled through the gardens, then went inside the mansions and galleries to see all the fine things Mr. Huntington left us. One thing new I found is they now provide audio ear pieces for exhibit guides. I took advantage of that and learned the stories and details behind the paintings, furniture, and artifacts in a more efficient and enjoyable way than the many times I had been here before.

We also visited the new Chinese garden for the first time. Not too impressed, though. The bricks looked so new and tidy; the poles and gazebo too faux; and the overall scenery just seemed barren and without charm. When leaving it and returning to the main campus, I couldn't help but had a surreal feeling that we were leaving a wild New World (China) and entering an elegant Old World (America). Call it ironic, or maybe symbolic of the new economic powerhouse China coming to upstage old guard capitalist America nowadays. 

After a layback chat at the court yard outside the gallery hall under the mellow late afternoon sun, we headed out for the final and main destination of the day: the Maryknoll Sisters' retirement compound in Monrovia.

Briefly, Maryknoll Sisters (http://www.mklsisters.org/) is a Catholic missionary organization founded about 100 years ago in New York State. They are the first US based Catholic nuns group devoted to serving overseas. The 3 sisters we were visiting, Pauline, Andree, and Maureen, now in their late 70s and 80s, all spent the majority of their lives living and serving in Taiwan, and speak fluent Hakka, Taiwanese, and Mandarin. Shining, the girl who arranged this meeting for us, knew them since she was a little girl in south Taiwan when her mom, a devoted Catholic, acquainted them through the work they did together. She had visited them a few times here since she came to the US and knew their whereabout, but this is the first time for us. 

We met them at the parking lot of the retirement compound. After a jolly, open hearted welcome greeting from both sides, we took them to a nearby Taiwanese cuisine restaurant for dinner. Pauline, 87, the oldest of them all, was from North Dakota. Her ancestors were German farmers on Russian land when they were evicted out of there and came settling in America a couple generations ago. She was born Catholic and committed herself to the Maryknoll Sisters congregation when 18. She came to China when she was 23, got jailed by the communist party and kicked out of the country 3 years later. She then came to Taiwan and spent 53 years there, until she retired a couple of years ago.  

Maureen is 79, the youngest one, and was from Georgia State, a Catholic family of 7 children, with a bit French ancestry on her mother's side and a bit Irish from her father's. Like Pauline, she committed herself to the congregation at a young age, and was assigned to Taiwan in 1964, and had since lived and worked there until retiring a couple years ago. I asked what she remembers most about her life in Taiwan, she said during the early 70's, when many young people worked away from home in factories nearby Hsin-Chu where she was stationed, she helped organize a support group for them, along with some Catholic priest, providing living quarters and giving life guidance to them, etc., for over 10 years.

Talking to these old, sweet sisters, you don't hear any boastful things or tall tales from them, though I am sure they have lots of great stories to tell for their life long services in Taiwan. All you get is a sense of peace and contentment, the loving smiles and gentle voices. They are truly humble and happy with what they do for the Lord, I must conclude.  

And, as I commented to them, though I am from Taiwan, 53 years old (probably born a couple years after Sister Pauline first came to Taiwan), I spent my past 29 years in the US, meaning I had only lived in Taiwan for 24 full years, way less than the 40 and 50 plus years these sisters have lived among and done for the Taiwanese people. "You are more Taiwanese than I," I said to them, only half jokingly.

God bless these dear sweet lady angels,

* To read Sister Pauline reflecting on her life long services in Taiwan:

http://www.maryknollsisters.org/catholic-mission/index.php/community/missioners/192-Sister%20Pauline%20Sticka