wandering the wide world in search of wonders
(Wudaokou K-town, Beijing) The wrong question?
She’s very pretty, big sister said. She was, and had an unconventional charm, with the features of those pigtailed red-scarved proletarian heroines rallied from rural mountain villages in the middle provinces to hold up half the sky for the great helmsman. She was strong, productive, innocent – As if she stepped straight out of the kitschy Socialist Realism propaganda posters that adorn his dormitory room.
Posted in Bildungsroman.
– June 8, 2009
Please excuse my poor photoshopping skills…
NEW HAVEN, CT – “Love Story in Yale” (2009, SBS) is the long-awaited sequel to “Wharton Sonata” and “Tsinghua Spring (semester) Waltz“, starring Geoffrey See as the dashing and brilliant business strategy consultant, and Kim Tae-Hee as representative sample Yale girl.
Happy Birthday and Congratulations on getting into Yale! Through our five years of friendship and mostly-healthy competition 
I’ve been inspired by your ceaseless diligence, prudent foresight, deep compassion, elegant style, love of life and adventure, sheer determination, your exponential rate of accomplishments, and the humility you’ve held onto throughout it all. You’re one of my favorite people in the whole world. Here’s wishing you every happiness and success in the years to come! (incl. w/ hot Yale girls 
)
Posted in Bildungsroman, TV Dramas.
– April 20, 2009
(Seoul Metro) There’s only one good reason to watch this drama, and it’s their preppy outfits. Well, okay, there are two, and the second one is not in the ad.
My grandmother took care of me for most of my childhood. She wasn’t aware of any Mozart Effect and let me watch hours and hours of daytime television with her, which back in the early 90s was mostly trashy soap operas on the state-operated Chinese-language channel. (Oddly, my Mandarin never improved very much) Due to the heavy regulations and high economies of scale in the industry, the state channels never faced any competition (outside of TVB imports), and as such they made some truly horrific pablum (they still do). In retrospect, this may have been why trashy soap operas are permanently seared into my psyche now.
Posted in Bildungsroman, TV Dramas.
– March 31, 2009
(Hong Kong tutoring agency ad) No tutors can compensate for a lack of personal motivation.
My little cousin recently received her O-level grades, which were disappointing to say the least. I wasn’t close to her, but I did try my best to make a difference: I emphasized the importance of attending a good JC and getting grades at least good enough to ensure admission to the highly subsidized local universities, if not secure a taxpayer-funded ride to the Ivy schools. I even gave her my extensive collection of college admissions guides – yes, I was that insane about it.
Posted in Bildungsroman, Education, Singapore.
– January 22, 2009
It was the precise moment the universe shattered.
The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Posted in Bildungsroman, Essays & Writing.
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– January 24, 2008
What does it mean to ‘be yourself’? I keep hearing this kind of advice. Be true to yourself. Don’t be something you’re not. Do what you love. But upon some reflection, I’m not sure whether there really is this constant self. Today I am not who I was yesterday, and yesterday I was not who I was the day before. With new experiences every day, over time the differences in worldview, values, interests become stark, and a conscious effort to move in one direction leads to something else entirely.
Posted in Bildungsroman.
– January 22, 2008
As I wonder where my life is going, I look to where others ahead of me have been. I love reading the profiles of the incoming Lauder class of 2009, or Columbia’s Chazen fellows, or the 2008 Acumen fellows, or the Echoing Green fellows, because their life stories chart paths of achievement that inform not just where one can go, but how to get there step by step. I was inspired by Rory Stewart’s ‘extreme MBA‘ in postconflict Afghanistan in the new HBR issue. But at the same time, these role models seem so far ahead of me that it is sometimes hard to see how I could follow in their footsteps. Their first steps are like marathons for me.
Posted in Bildungsroman, Business, College Life, Development.
– November 18, 2007
Why is my reflection someone I don’t know?
— Mulan, ‘Reflection’
I participated in a pilot career guidance program run by to b-school alums now at Mckinsey, and one of the program requirements was to do a self-assessment to describe myself in five adjectives from a list, and to compare that assessment to what a select group of 3-5 close friends picked. The point is to 1) externally validate identified strengths and 2) work on identified problem areas and 2) any discrepancy between self-image and the one that people see. But the problem was that I couldn’t really come up with five adjectives on my own, because it was very difficult to mentally separate who I am, who I would like to think I am, and who I want to be. Also, I couldn’t think of anyone who could do this assessment – I have few close friends on campus and the people from home who used to be my close friends haven’t seen me for ages. So I asked both.
Posted in Bildungsroman, Business, College Life.
– November 1, 2007
ALADDIN: Well, it’s not much, (he pulls back the curtain and exposes the palace) but it’s got a great view. Palace looks pretty amazing, huh?
JASMINE: Oh, it’s wonderful.
ALADDIN: I wonder what it would be like to live there, to have servants and valets…
JASMINE: Oh, sure. People who tell you where to go and how to dress.
ALADDIN: It’s better than here. Always scraping for food and ducking the guards.
JASMINE: You’re not free to make your own choices.
ALADDIN: Sometimes you feel so–
JASMINE: You’re just–
BOTH: (in unison) –trapped.
The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Big Sis: “So what do you like about her?”
Lil Bro: “Everything. It’s hard to explain.”
Big Sis: “If you can’t even explain it to me, how are you going to explain it to her?”
Perhaps the reasons for my affection can be explicated by turning to my twin philosophies, economics and liberty. Economics considers it perfectly rational to love someone who maximizes my utility across the indifference curves of life. ‘Why’ is thus merely a complex cost-benefit analysis of tradeoffs and compensating differentials. But economics says nothing about what that someone is loved for. To economists, de gustibus non est disputandum – tastes are usually exogenous to the models and taken as a given. If economics has no answers here, neither does libertarianism which has its highest expression in Rand’s novels, who writes of D’Anconia’s love for Dagny in Atlas Shrugged: “He will always be attracted to the woman who reflects his deepest vision of himself.” However, Rand’s description of that vision is her own, and to give the standard libertarian answer derived from John Stuart Mill about individual conceptions of our visions is to say nothing about what mine should be.
Posted in Bildungsroman, College Life, Economics, Essays & Writing, Politics.
– April 8, 2007
But he did not understand the price. Mortals never do. They only see the prize, their hearts desire, their dreams… But the price of getting what you want, is getting what you once wanted.
Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
So the results for the regular decision round have been released, and some have rejoiced while others did not, as an article in yesterday’s Times reports. (The headline “For Girls, It’s Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, too” is very irritating, as if it’s somehow any different for guys) I had advised one of the girls I met at APEC Korea on her college applications, and she did get in, though it is likely not to be to my credit at all. Yet she seems reticent to come to what is clearly not her first choice. I know others who had applied, and had their hearts set on the idea of coming here, yet were not accepted – perhaps they should have asked for my advice, or perhaps not – some factors simply cannot be changed within that timeframe. It could well be a simple case of sample bias, where people who care more about their college applications, and thus more likely to be stronger candidates, are also more likely to seek advice than others who don’t care enough to, which says more about the individual than about the quality of my advice. I had written earlier on college admissions strategy, but did not focus on the actual decision to choose a particular school. Here is some advice for everyone regardless of their admissions offers, from someone who learned the hard way.
Posted in Bildungsroman, College Life.
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– March 31, 2007
The past month or so has been an unbroken string of disappointments, most of all with myself. I constantly wonder whether I am learning from my mistakes.
Posted in Bildungsroman, College Life, Economics, Essays & Writing.
– February 21, 2007
This post isn’t really about honey and clover.
In episode 16 in the first season of Honey and Clover (you can watch it here but its with mandarin subtitles), Yamada’s gang of childhood friends decide to propose to her simultaneously, which she runs away from without giving an answer. When Hanamoto-sensei asks why she is avoiding her friends. She cries, saying “do I have to tell them what hurt me to hear?” – that she will never see them as more than close friends no matter how hard they try or how long they wait – realizing that refusing to lower her expectations and accept her suitors, while still holding on for Mayama who sees her the same way, would be hypocritical. She finally realizes how Mayama feels, and cannot reasonable blame him for not changing his mind however dedicated she is to it. Hanamoto-sensei tells her that she should just be honest about how she feels, and let the guys decide between making an effort to change her mind (however futile it may be) or giving up – as that is the same choice she has with chasing Mayama. Later on, Hanamoto-sensei cryptically notes that there is a third option, which he doesn’t state, as if one believes that there are only those two options to chose from (fighting on or giving up), one can ‘open pathways’. That option, as Garten at Memento notes, is to long from afar, contenting oneself with friendship while always holding on for the possibility that it might become something more. By never letting go of a futile love, while never acting on it, we can never move on with our lives. That appears to be Hanamoto-sensei’s own choice with regard to Rika and later, Hagu.
Posted in Anime, Bildungsroman, College Life.
– January 28, 2007
Honey and Clover, my favorite anime series, employs plenty of wheel imagery – the circularity much like the endless back and forth of its love triangles that seem never to come to a conclusion.
Reading Geoffrey’s retrospective on 2006, I felt it necessary to write my own, as if I must articulate to myself the lessons it taught me in order to truly internalize them, now that the wheel of time has come full circle.
Posted in Bildungsroman, College Life, Conscription.
– January 10, 2007
I think the optimal strategy in the market for love is emotional volatility arbitrage. Much like LTCM’s strategy of convergence trades, the aim of emotional volatility arbitrage is to reduce the risk of destabilizing shocks in one’s life. If happiness in life is a function of expectations, then to expect too much is to invite disappointment and be unhappy. In view of the inevitable regression to the mean in life, we should have low expectations that are almost always pleasantly exceeded, rather than high expectations that always lead to disappointment.
Posted in Bildungsroman, College Life, Economics.
– November 23, 2006
I made this into a 1400×1050 wallpaper for my thinkpad so I will see it all the time. Hopefully it will remind me of the things I keep forgetting. These days I think #3 has been really helpful (instead of saying to myself it’s not going to happen I can instead pretend it doesn’t matter), otherwise envy, that green-eyed beast, would consume me with bitterness, and the last one #11 is supposed to help with my bitterness. It goes without saying that #1 is the most important. I don’t want my future self to be a failure that regrets what his past self, ie the present me, did or didn’t do. #2 and 4 emphasize individual responsibility. #5 and 6 are to try to make me less selfish and disinterested in other people. #7 and 8 are to inoculate me against the status games of prestige/tournament things like private equity and strategy consulting.
1 Don’t fail the future you.
2 Be the person you’d like to be with.
3 You don’t have time for girls.
4 It’s up to you to make it happen.
5 Everyone has one interesting life story.
6 Don’t be superficial.
7 The best things in life are free.
8 Don’t take life too seriously.
9 Smile even when you’re tired.
10 Apologize even when you’re right.
11 Life is not a competition.
12 Things will work out. Be optimistic.
Posted in Bildungsroman, College Life.
– September 2, 2006
As I write this I can see the frat party across the street from my window that my roommate is at. I can hear the chatter from a few doors down, and the dance beat from another floor. I feel like I should be there but I’m not. Instead I’m in my room trying to read the Iliad for tomorrow’s lecture.
Posted in Bildungsroman, College Life.
– August 30, 2006
Please update your links and feed aggregators to the new address at www.quitacet.net
Posted in Bildungsroman.
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– July 18, 2006
Tonight I attended the dinner at the annual CAP seminar. My initial reason to go was to see someone I hadn’t seen for a long time, but the person wasn’t there. Not all was lost: It was a reminder of everything that went wrong with my misspent youth, all the wasted opportunities and failures. I really wanted to be part of that happy family, but somehow it just didn’t happen. It reminded me why I have to work harder at making sure that never happens again.
Posted in Bildungsroman, Singapore.
– June 1, 2006
Tyler Cowen’s symmetry thesis:
A given person likes (loves) you as much as you like (love) him or her.
Do I want to know how much you like me? It is simple. I imagine how much I like you. (If you do the same, are we circular? Or does some kind of fixed point theorem apply?)
Perhaps we like other people for their intrinsic qualities less than we pretend. Mostly we like people for liking (loving) us.
If the theory is correct, then not being loved is entirely my fault. I’m the selfish shortsighted one when the optimal strategy for the iterated prisoner’s dilemma is preemptive reciprocal altruism. This is actually quite compelling because it purportedly explains why efforts to improve my prospects have failed.
Posted in Bildungsroman, Economics.
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– May 23, 2006
I was wrong to write the unnice things that I did earlier, and I recognize the valid concerns that were raised. Though I felt some responses were uncharitable, they nonetheless exist and should be addressed.
The fact is that I will be leaving this island soon, and with it, all my friends and family, to a new life. Like KH says, it is a chance to leave the past behind and start over. But I would prefer to also leave behind all that is lacking in me: my own behavior patterns and traits that made my years here less wonderful than they should have been. My years in the army, which in taking away many of the safety nets that allowed these behavior patterns to develop, have helped me to see that. Still, some of them remain, poison in the wound. I will work harder on rectifying them.
What can change the nature of a man?
An elderly man was sitting alone on a dark path, right? He wasn’t certain of which direction to go, and he’d forgotten both where he was traveling to and who he was. He’d sat down for a moment to rest his weary legs, and suddenly looked up to see an elderly woman before him. She grinned toothlessly and with a cackle, spoke: ‘Now your third wish. What will it be?’ ‘Third wish?’ The man was baffled. ‘How can it be a third wish if I haven’t had a first and second wish?’ ‘You’ve had two wishes already,’ the hag said, ‘but your second wish was for me to return everything to the way it was before you had made your first wish. That’s why you remember nothing; because everything is the way it was before you made any wishes.’ She cackled at the poor berk. ‘So it is that you have one wish left.’ ‘All right,’ said the man, “I don’t believe this, but there’s no harm in wishing. I wish to know who I am.’ ‘Funny,’ said the old woman as she granted his wish and disappeared forever. ‘That was your first wish.’
The answer is, of course, regret. I’m sorry.
Posted in Bildungsroman.
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– April 19, 2006
Friendship (or any other relationship for that matter) can be seen as a transaction between two parties for mutual benefit, in an enlightened-utilitarian perspective on benefit that takes into account subjective preferences. This model scales upward – acquaintances trade only at the lowest levels of recognition, friends trade in shared time in a common hobby, partners in shared effort to a common goal, and beyond that trading in levels of intimacy. They need not necessarily be trades in the same commodity (husbands and wives traditionally contribute different things), but for equal value – a fair trade. X gains the same amount of utility as Y does, even though X and Y may contribute different quantities of different resources.
In an efficient market, the market for friends clears perfectly and everyone matches up to everyone else in a fair trade. But the market is not so efficient – geographical distance, some measure of exclusivity inherent in relationships, informational asymmetries – results in unequal friendships. Simply put, X needs Y more than Y needs X. The utility gains of Y are less than the utility gains of X. Or vice versa. Transaction volume decreases to the point where utility gains are equal again.
Actually I haven’t really thought this through very well. But suffice to say that my initial conclusion is that individuals should aim to possess the highest utility-value and thus be able to trade at the top levels.
Posted in Bildungsroman, Economics.
– January 21, 2006
It’s probably hypocritical for me to subscribe to an ideal of hyperrational utility-maximizing individuals yet be unable to live up to the same standards.
The dilemma that has plagued me for the past week is compounded by my inability to ascertain future decision spaces or project future lifestyle valuations – the limits of cognition when it comes to introspection and so-called ’soul searching’. My utility functions extend beyond the monetary material to intangibles. Unquantifiable, unqualifiable factors that may or may not sum to unity. I’m simply not able to perform this complex calculus of determining the distance between the ideal future self and the projected future self to any satisfactory, meaningful degree.
I liken the dilemma to the love triangle in Suzuka (at least up to episode 13 it is a triangle) where the protagonist, having been rejected by his first love, finds solace with the girl-next-door – the next best alternative – yet is getting (mixed) signals from the first girl. Should he risk it all to be with the one he wants, or settle with what he could be happy with? Of course my dilemma has nothing to do with romance – that would be a welcome distraction at this juncture.
In the end, it matters little whether or not the decision was made perfectly rationally – it’s as rational as it’s going to get – but rather, whether it was made based on risk-neutrality or risk-aversion. Which is more about strength of character than intellect.
Posted in Anime, Bildungsroman.
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– October 3, 2005
Good news for weight-watchers: Seth Roberts from Berkeley has discovered a new, mostly painless method to lose weight. Check out his paper on self-experimentation for the full details, but if you just want the executive summary, Dubner and Levitt do a pretty good job. Kudos to Marginal Revolution, as usual.
Something to keep in mind as I don’t quite need to reduce intake as much as increase activity. My sedentary lifestyle must cease at once.
Posted in Bildungsroman.
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– September 12, 2005
A bildungsroman (German: “novel of education” or “novel of formation”) is a novel which traces the spiritual, moral, psychological, or social development and growth of the main character from (usually) childhood to maturity.
It feels like I never left secondary school. My unpleasant secondary school/JC experience somehow carried on past graduation.
Posted in Bildungsroman.
– August 11, 2005
Vox has returned after a long hiatus – mainly because it took me quite a while to learn how to use CSS and template tags properly. We’ve been listening to our audience and have reconceptualized the site to what we hope will be more relevant and interesting. The story of our lives is one that meanders between the agora and the acropolis, the town square and the ivory tower. Here’s to keeping it real.
Posted in Bildungsroman.
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– July 31, 2005
