it's also extremely common to say, go out for a roti canai at 2am

or a freshly made naan and nihari

or nasi lemak

or all of them at the same time

like actually leaving your home at 2am to meet people to do it

i don't think people understand:

when i go home to my parents' home, i can go 'downstairs' (from the 40th floor) of their building, and there are 3 supermarkets, 2 wet markets, so groceries from 5am to 2am, and probably hundreds, not even exaggerating, of food stalls at all hours

so going from that to.. whatever it is other people do, is very very challenging

i once met a young singaporean who had never lived abroad and she was living briefly in a suburb outside palo alto for a work thing

she was deeply anxious about having to get into a car to procure any kind of food

it was so bad that she decided she couldn't live there and she moved to new york city

it reminded me a lot of me ahahhaha

This is not the same thing as ‘Asian restaurants cannot be fancy’

I LOVE fancy Asian food. High end Chinese restaurants are a passion of mine. They tend to not exist outside of major global cities with huge Chinese populations. Indian too. You’ll likely get above average fancy Japanese lots of places but

Yeah it’s a dearth of those types.

But you know what I’m talking about: the nice Asian restaurants with a pan Asian menu that does things from all over the continent and none of them too well (or even edibly really). I hope they go away (or shape up)

And now that I live where I live, where there are so many people like me: I recognize in it an interesting theme.

Almost all of my friends around my age, from all countries and backgrounds, who are super mobile and successful in international careers, were almost all, like me, staunchly middle class kids with parents who invested all their resources into education, who were good with technology and lived through a very specific time. (The people who grew up rich are their own thing)

We all kind of would up having similar lives, access to migration, similar types of jobs. I was recounting my friend group and I was like, wow, there is this similarity.. across culture, passports, languages, backgrounds.

I don’t even really know if that’s possible today. Hopefully, those of us who have won the globalization prizes can choose to do more meaningful things for the world than to work for companies that now clearly actively tries to destroy it.

For the first few decades of my life, I think the overwhelming script / mode that I was in was, ‘no one can tell me what to do!’ Which was, at the time and place, a difficult position to take as a woman.

I was stubborn and headstrong but most of all, I think my family trusted me a lot. They always say that no matter what it is, I’ll figure it out. And I do.

Sometimes my friends say I have tremendous courage and resilience, which is, I think, only really possible because I have so much trust, and so much of a safety net. There’s always a place for me to live. I’ll never go hungry, to be honest. If things don’t work out in Murica, I’ll be fine. Etc.

I think I used to mistake the risks I took for something else, but I now know it’s safety. I have never once felt unsafe in my life. Even in all of those places that I mention above.

As I get older, I’m increasingly cognizant that that’s such a privilege. And that’s also why I care a lot about trying to be that safe person for people who don’t have it.

I don’t think I knew what I was doing, but I do know that I’ve been extremely lucky to have been able to say: I’ve never had to do anything I didn’t want to do. An acquaintance, from a far more repressed cultural background, once said that he really admired me for having that freedom. I don’t think I understood it at the time.

I graduated with no college debt (part of the reason I stayed home for college), expressly with the idea that I was going to travel the world after that and not be held back by anything.

I was, and am, lucky to have family that supports me. My folks are used to me calling them from Yemen or Syria or wherever and they’re just like, cool, be safe. They like that I have a life they couldn’t have. I don’t have the responsibility of having to provide for them, the way many of my friends do. They’re not rich, but they’re fine.

More than anything, I feel immensely lucky that every choice I have made, from where to live and who to marry, has been mine and mine alone.

Sometimes it’s hard to understand that not every one has the agency to do those things.

Life is good again, after a period of struggle (relating to immigration), and I’m only slowly embodying the person that I used to be: a highly mobile person who has too many things to do everywhere.

I’ve missed it, but I also feel despair knowing that it feels as if something has fundamentally changed. There are just way more closed doors, than open, compared to when I was a younger person.