wandering the wide world in search of wonders
(Pyongyang subway station) Maybe I should be a journalist instead.
I recently submitted my thesis to the political science department for honors consideration. I wrote about political competition in autocracies, using the natural or accidental deaths of dictators as natural experiments for succession conditions. My findings weren’t earth shattering – statistical significance is not practical/policy significance – but what I learned through the process was valuable.
Posted in College Life, Essays & Writing, Politics.
– April 14, 2010
(Beijing) It’s been a fun ride
My final semester, in full quant gear. It’s time to man up and math up. If I have to get out of school, I’m going out with a bang, not a whimper.
Posted in College Life, Economics, Politics.
– January 14, 2010
(Dandong station) The path to the Dandong train tracks was full of advertising (e.g. GOG sneakers). However, the equivalent in Pyongyang station had none.
I heard them chattering away even while getting through security screening at the Dandong station entrance. Thirty to forty (2 busloads worth) of middle-aged mainland Chinese people old enough to be my parents were clustered on hard plastic seats around the tour operator’s flag. I was the only ‘foreigner’, but thankfully I don’t look too different. Just younger. Hopefully if I kept my mouth shut, my crummy Mandarin and accent wouldn’t betray me.
Posted in Business, Korea - Pyongyang Diaries, Politics.
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– March 26, 2009
(Metro station, Washington DC) Seems like I’m always chasing after missed trains…
In retrospect, it was unrealistic to think that I could do much reading or homework while attending a conference, much less running one, but things turned out fine on Monday despite having to skip lectures to catch up on sleep. I had a great time, even if it was a weekend with an average of four hours sleep a night.
Posted in College Life, Politics.
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– February 23, 2009
(Metro station, Washington DC) Making my way to the top just to be on the ground floor…
So I’m off to DC for the weekend to run a conference at George Washington University. The last time I was in DC, I never really got to see the interior of GWU (I saw Gtown, SAIS, and GMU), so this will be a new experience, and I get to see all my friends in DC again too. If only I didn’t have midterms next week and problem sets due on Monday, or I would be able to fully enjoy the conference. Conferences are best enjoyed during the summer… but that’s also when its hardest to take time off work to go.
Posted in College Life, Politics.
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– February 19, 2009
(Beijing station) The Dandong express gets you halfway there.
It was a time-tested trail: Get to Dandong, join a tour group, and cross the border. Geoffrey had done the same, and before him, different groups of Singapore students at Beida. All I had to do was follow in their footsteps. A Korean friend who studied in Beijing had went up to Dandong but decided to stay on the Chinese side of Mt. Baekdu, peering across the border into the land of the morning calm. That was probably the closest she could get with an ROK passport, at least before the Hyundai Asan tours started.
Posted in China Trip, Korea - Pyongyang Diaries, Politics.
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– February 7, 2009
(Arirang Mass Games, Pyongyang) I wonder what they thought seeing all these fat Chinese tourists.
I try to avoid telling my Korean friends in school that I went to the North, because they always look at me strangely and ask why I would ever want to go there. I don’t blame them – some have family histories and bad memories of the place. The immediate assumption is that I’m some kind of sick tourist that delights in seeing the suffering of others, or worse, that I perpetuate it. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Posted in Development, Korea - Pyongyang Diaries, Politics.
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– January 1, 2009
After a mad eleventh-hour cramming session, I sat for my final exam in statistics. I think the worst thing to possibly think during an examination is “Please let the curve be awesome”, next to “How many points do I need to not get a D?” (As it turned out the curve was pretty good, and I got an A) I staggered out of the stats department back to my room, picked up my suitcase, and made my way to JFK. My summer of adventure and discovery had just begun, but it would not be without obstacles.
Posted in China Trip, Politics.
– May 20, 2008
Although my op-ed has finally been published in the Straits Times review section as a joint submission, I can’t help but feel a little upset that they rejected my original piece but took this one when the only differences are that 1) it is less critical of the state and 2) more conversational.
Posted in Economics, Education, Essays & Writing, Politics, Singapore.
– October 9, 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
Nothing is more precious than freedom.
Yesterday I went to see the NYC premiere of Journey from the Fall with one of my surrogate-mothers on campus and other members of the Vietnamese Students Association, and after the film ended I knew that the long list of film festival awards was well justified. The film tells the story of one family’s journey from the fall of Saigon in 1975. When we were in the ImaginAsian cinema I was looking at the table of posters outside the theatre when I noticed several boxes of tissues available – It’s not possible to watch the film without crying a river. Perhaps seeing it was therapeutic for me since I’ve been holding back tears for a while now. Here are some thoughts on the film.
Posted in Film, Other Asia, Politics.
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– March 24, 2007
So I won the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Culture of Enterprise essay contest, which I heard about from a friend at the Institute for Humane Studies after I won one of their essay contests. The topic was “Can Character and Communities Survive in an Age of Globalization?”, and while it sounds a lot like a moral standards or social capital issue I wrote about cultural factors in economic growth, which is closer to my arc of competence. My title “The Culture of Success: Cultural Foundations for Competitiveness in the Global Economy” was a little tribute to my dream (well, at least one of my dreams) employer at 80 broad street. There should be a proper press release with all the winning entries posted up soon on the ISI website.
Posted in Economics, Essays & Writing, Politics.
– March 7, 2007
