I realized this morning on my last day in Ottawa that I have never actively wanted to move towards something or arrive somewhere with thoughtfulness, preparation, and with prior research for scouting.

I moved to Singapore when I was 18 because I wanted a better education and a life outside of Vietnam. I had no idea what Singapore was like as a country. I had no idea what NUS was like as a university. And I got on a plane with a one-way ticket and I did that anyway.

I moved to Philadelphia for NOC program because I wanted a different way of thinking than in NUS. I was depressed and under a lot of pressure in the crushing weight of Singapore and the feeling of isolation and loss in Singapore. I had no idea what Philadelphia was like. I had no idea what Upenn was like. And I got on a plane with a bunch of strangers that would be friends and I went for it anyway.

I moved to California so I could meet someone and that I could be authentically me. I had no idea what living in the US would be like and how challenging it would be. The relationship didn’t work. 

I moved to Canada because I was tired of the US, of Vietnam, of places where I had to hide, of the isolation and of the lies and the shame and the challenges I had as a young gay immigrant. I didn’t know what Canada would be like. I only knew in Canada, I had the opportunity to be free. And I tried. 9 years later. I am here.

I think I am the same way with my job. I don’t go towards new jobs, I quit old jobs. I work until I burn out and then I seek a new experience until my next burnout. I have never really learned deeply about what the next one will entail. Perhaps until this change.

This time, I didn’t intend to leave. I gave it a try and I asked in-depth questions. I weighed the pros and cons and I actively chose the new job. I move forward to something that I want (from something quite great, actually), instead of just running away screaming from what I didn’t want.

And I’m starting to feel the same about Calgary, and Ottawa. I don’t want to leave Calgary because I’m tired of the people, the politics, and the policy of Calgary. I don’t want to just move to Ottawa without intent. I want to be in a place, with thoughtful preparation and with intention, and with a clear vision of what a life would be.

And in every vision of what a life would be, I see a person in that view. In every vision of happiness, there is a flawed, but sincere, serious, but compassionate, analytical, but sentimental, responsible, but spontaneous, person. We are still young(ish – I know Gen Z-ers have said 35 is the new boomer). I don’t know how our future and our life will turn out to be, and it is very anxiety-inducing if you read the news. But I know in every vision of a future we will have together, as long as we have each other, we are home. 

Mảnh đất giữ chân một người, khi nơi đó nằm xuống một người thân, hay đang sống một người mình thương yêu – Đất Khách, Lý Lan.

Picture this. A 36-year-old standing in the middle of a busy Ottawa junction – smiling ears to ears. He remembered this feeling of 15 years ago when he was first here. A student from Penn. On a shoestring budget. No smartphone. No GPS. Just a sense of endless wonder and a fearless wish for #pureadventures. 

 The only constant in life is change.

So, as you can imagine, when the change comes unintended, and it comes with the burden of the unchanging, for a restless heart, it’s… confusing. 

I made up my mind about moving out East for a job, after 6 months of struggling to find an opportunity that would suit my background here in Alberta. I adapted and mentally prepared for that move. I started a new job in January. I built a great team (90% productivity in a sprint delivery). I released software and we shipped products into new marketplaces (Scandinavians, US, etc.). 

And then I took a job in Alberta. 

To the team and the management team, it was confusing. Sure I worked 50-60-hour weeks at times but I was very cheery about it (Because I was trained in Singapore for the arts of the overworked). Sure there were tense interactions with customers, but I used to work in Oil and Gas. I constantly whined about Alberta. And I guess it is confusing for me too. I’m leaving a place where I built the team myself, to a much bigger organization, taking a smaller role in the org chart, building unreleased products. 

And then I look up at my value statements. Specifically. 

1. “It’s all about the people”

I know me moving out East has caused a lot of anxiety for my close circles. My partner, of course, but also my brother, my friends, and the network I have built here in Calgary. I have moved my whole life and I have never understood why people are so reluctant to move. Now I do. I have never found true belonging in my life and so leaving was always so easy. Now I find belonging.

2. “Comfort and Growth do not co-exist”

Maybe this confusion, this discomfort, it’s a sign of growth. Yes, I’m launching headfirst into a new organization, reporting to a boss that is yet to be hired, heading a team I didn’t hire. All that is stress-inducing. But I strive on stress-inducing challenges. Releasing a new product can be a catastrophic failure, but it will look very sexy on life’s legacy. I’m all for #pureadventures.

So here we are. 2 job changes in the pandemic. I’m still a little anxious, a little confused, and a lot heartbroken to be leaving the 15 people I hired, trained, and coached behind. But knowing them, they will achieve great things.

I do take comfort in the fact that people have been exceptionally nice to me, showing concerns, sharing good memories, telling me I’ve done a great job. After all, that’s all a leader can ask for in the modern workplace, validation from the people he leads and the impact he imparts that stays with them beyond his tenure. 

So Alerbta, here I come (back) again. Don’t break my heart again this time.

So in a joke to my coworkers, I said “Well, I’m almost 40 so you gen-Zers can just suck it”. The fact is, 36 is still a way yet, but rounding up and exaggerating is my jam. We’re in a culture obsessed with youth and beauty. So I’d be lying if I said I’m not a tad obsessed with my spare tire and my receding hairline. Every TV and movie ever made about women in suburban life is that they have this hidden boredom or sadness or that their husbands don’t desire them anymore (even the feminist ones where she rebels). It’s tired and old. I wonder whatever happens to the graceful but feisty woman in the suburb, she is with careers and with a life so mundane and undramatic that we all miss it. Guess that’s why no one made it into a movie.

The truth is I love my mundane suburban life. I like my garden. I like my home office. I like the parks and the bike paths. On most days, I like my husband too. (OK, kidding, I love my husband all day). As the world goes back to “normal” – i.e. we are all pretending that Covid never happened; there is this growing anxiety of me in the pre-pandemic life. The “normal” world was built for extroverts. It was built on the back of working-class people and exploitations. The “normal” work is built on dirty politics and polarizing elections. You escape the “normal” world by traveling to destinations like third-world countries where we exploit the locals for our escapism fantasy. 

People always say that marriage is about “waking up next to someone for the rest of your life” like it is always about someone else, always someone else’s responsibility to make you feel happy, feel whole. Aging is about “waking up with yourself for the rest of your life”. You are fully responsible for the happiness and the wholeness of yourself. Self-care is more than bathtubs and candles. It’s the admission to yourself that you’re flawed and broken and that is ok, as long as you continue to invest in yourself long enough to fix all those broken pieces. 

So I guess my life turns out nothing like I’ve ever imagined. I’m like a moderately interesting housewife living in a moderate size house with moderate size savings and a moderately successful career. I’ve come to terms with the fact that no one will make a movie about my perfectly moderate life. And that’s ok.

Part of aging is you are giving so many opportunities to acquire grace, and grief the parts of your youth wild imaginations of what it could be. 

And all the opportunities and tools in the world to build a world that is moderately resemblance what our human psyche allowed to be called “Happiness”

If you are in Canada/are Canadians, by now, you would be familiar with this story: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/751-unmarked-graves-discovered-near-former-indigenous-school-canada-180978064/  

There are no hot takes here (well, aside from the racist ones, thanks, National Post). But there are calmer, nuanced take that I have seen, such as this https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6815509761619062784/ 

I’ve reflected a lot (and discussed a lot with people on both ends of the spectrum). But as an immigrant to Canada, I want to offer a deeply personal, deeply emotional take on the issue. 

Can we still celebrate Canada, and Canada day, knowing this land not only offers opportunity, equality, and prosperity for people like me while burying and excluding the people who were here first? 

Let me start from recent history, my history. 2 of my uncles are Boat people. They fled Vietnam, back then a country post-war. My grandfather went to re-education camp. My mother was barred from university. My father was not allowed promotion in his job (he works for the communist in public train) because he married my mother. At least that’s what my mother believed. My grandparents believed it wasn’t safe for my uncles to be in Vietnam. One of my uncles got caught trying to flee the country as a refugee. He was in jail. 

Growing up, I would hear stories, saw pictures from my uncles. I imagined Canada to be of mountains, of rivers, of lakes, and of beautiful people, people who helped 2 young immigrant men, one of them teenager, to survive brutal Quebec winters, and supporting them to learn French, and allowing them jobs and careers and beautiful families and lives.

In 2006, when I first visited Canada, Montreal, back then, I was just a 21-year-old young man, deeply, deeply in the closet. My uncle took me downtown, and I saw 2 men holding hands. They kissed. And at that moment, I realized, Canada is more than just endless mountains, boundless rivers and lakes, and kind beautiful people. Canada means I can live my truth. 

I made the mistake of making the assumption Canada was perfect.

And I moved here in 2012. Stephen Harper was the Prime Minister. I fell in love with a (hot), public policy-obsessed, stubborn, argumentative Conservatives. In order to impress him, I started to read the news. In order to have intelligent conversations with him, I started to read history books and analysis. And I started to form opinions. And I started to unearth dark, horrible horrible truths, about Canada.

Of course, I can always take the easy way out of this, like many immigrants. “I wasn’t here.” “My ancestors didn’t do this.” “Hey, I’m oppressed too, you know.” But the day I stood in front of the maple leaf flag, swearing allegiance to the Queen, and willingly wishing to be a Canadian, I inherited all these wrongs that have been done, all these traumas that we as a nation have inflicted, to the very people who have been here first. I don’t need to have a degree in history or political science to dance around all this technicality of words to call all these injustices what they were: genocide, kidnapping, murder, broken contract and treaties, systemic incarceration, and systemic discrimination.

And let’s start with “It’s utterly shameful and totally unacceptable.”

I don’t need to be Indigenous to grieve and fight for the rights of our Indigenous Canadians who are still at a disadvantage and fighting injustices today. I don’t need to be a parent to be outraged at recovered children’s corpses. I don’t need to experience injustices to fight injustices. Far from it. The privilege to not suffer demands more responsibility to fight suffering in others. 

It is easy for me, as a newcomer, to know that I am a guest on this land. It is easy for me, as a person who didn’t have the baggage of a “settler” guilt and white guilt, to pass on the mic to the people who need it.

So, where do we go from here? Can we still celebrate Canada? Can we still love Canada?

Loving a nation is like loving a person. Loving a nation is accepting that a nation is a collective of myths, of identities, of histories. Loving a nation is loving it in all of its triumphs, all of its flaws, and all of its darkness. Loving a nation is desiring to make it a better place, for all, for the people who were here first. 

Loving Canada is loving the people who were here first, long before Canada was Canada, and in all their suffering and all their loss and all their grief, allow us to share and flourish on the land that their children were buried, hidden from them.

It’s ok to love and grieve in the same deep breath. 

It’s ok to look forward, as long as we know our foot walk on the same earth the children were buried, and swear the same old tragedies, the same old hates, the same old rhetorics, are never repeated. 

It’s ok to celebrate, as long as we know there is always darkness in every morning, and there is light in every dark sky preserve, and that our fellow Indigenous friends, family, coworkers, and even strangers, need us to amplify their voices, their truth, their trauma, respectfully and carefully.

As an immigrant, I will never have the same deep love Indigenous people have for the land. But as an immigrant, I know and I appreciate and I celebrate the people, the culture, and I want to hold and hold and hold all the trauma that they have suffered.

Because, once again, the Indigenous people were here first.

P.S: If you haven’t read it, I highly recommended this book: 

Happy Summer Solstice!

There’s this duality about Solstice that always gets me. Winter Solstice is the day when the days start getting longer. So while it’s the darkest day in Canadian winter, it offers the most hope. Summer Solstice is the longest day of the year, with the most sunlight, but it offers a hint of sadness as the days are getting shorter. 

Yep, “Sunshine boy” is literally moody based on the cycle of the sun. 

As Chester finished “Mass Effect” – the trilogy, I realized what we have missed in part of our childhood. The queer romance of the protagonist and his crewmate. We didn’t know it was even an option. In the second game, if you didn’t play the first game, said crewmate is defaulted to be dead. If at any point in time, you take on the countless advances of members of the opposite sex, this option is closed to you forever. Yes, in 2013, and even in 2021, being queer is an act of rebellion. You can shoot up aliens, save humanity, commit genocide in video games at a press of a button, but having authentic representation and authentic relationships is still an act of defiance.

 I know it’s not quite as romantic as one would imagine putting your husband and the pandemic in the same sentence. But hey, love transcends all grammatical barriers. 

The past 15 months of the pandemic, job changes, global racism wakening, world ending, life-altering, earth-shattering events, the only constant in my life has been waking up in the morning, looking over the snoring, bearded being next to me and thought “How lucky I am to be here.”

I have my garden for peace. I have tomatoes and squash and cabbage and cauliflowers and wildflowers and tulips and nautilus. And no matter how shitty the weather is, they continue to grow, to sprout, to fight against the pest, the wind, the snow, the south-facing sun. And life goes on. 

Happiness is a moment next to your husband, a moment in your garden

 John Donne proclaimed “No Man Is an Island” in an uplifting saying that we so often stole without attribution. With Covid, and work from home, and bubbles, and the political climate that we are in now, I am not so sure. 

The truth is, it feels increasingly like an island lately. I work from home 7 to 4 most days. I go for 2 walks, mostly with my brother, in relative silence. I exercise by myself. I haven’t read the news or Facebook in days. Linked In is my source of updates and social contact (I know, I’m becoming a boomer). 

My partner is back at work (physical, in-office) for an organization that I, well, let’s just say severely disapprove of. I am proud of him and all the great work that he is doing. I want to be the supportive cool hubby. I do. But it’s straining and it’s exhausting and it’s lonely when he wants me to approve his organization’s work, too. I know it’s straining and it’s exhausting and it’s lonely for him that I don’t love the work that his organization is doing. So as best as I could, I don’t talk about it. I don’t read about his organization anymore. It can get lonely.

My friend from the US (that I made in California, he’s back in Chicago now) reached out after the shooting on Wednesday to check in on me. I didn’t know what happened (again, haven’t read the news in weeks). I was with him during the George Floyd period last year. From my short time in America, racism and misogyny against women were very real to me. Especially for Asian and Asian Americans, it is that much darker because it was silent. Men fetishizing Asian women. The media demasculinize Asian men. We are seen as the silent model minority, as laundromat workers, tax accountants, software nerds, among other stereotypes. 

If anything, the events in the past years have created a silver lining – the Black community and the Asian community coming together. As Eddie Huang’s book once recalled, his black friend and he fought in a monumental moment in their childhood, when the black boy slashed out at the Asian for being good, quiet, and over-achieving. We, as Asian immigrants, are taught by North American culture that our indigenous and black brothers and sisters are brass, rude, and lazy. That is changing (at least from what I’ve seen). In the troubled fabric of North American society, woven by immigration, colonization, and slavery, the colors of our humanity are blending with the blood of our ancestors. It’s not perfect, but it’s vibrant in the sun.

From the movie – Minari