This past weekend Dora and I ‘celebrated’ our 1-year wedding anniversary together. ‘Celebrated’ is in quotations because we didn’t really do much – in part because we were hosting a friend until this week and in part because we were also busy traveling ourselves (SF-Singapore-LA). Hopefully we can do something this weekend, but I think we’re both content to take it easy for a bit.

To anyone wondering what being married feels like – I’m happy to share that this past year really hasn’t been any different than the previous 10, which I take is a good sign since that’s the version of each other we chose to marry. It has, however, felt like the start of a new chapter as we moved to a new country, found new jobs, and adjusted to new routines.

Statistically most high school sweethearts don’t pan out, which puts us in an exclusive club where everyone assumes that we have the relationship^TM all figured out. The reality is that no one in high school really knows who they are or what they’re looking for, and Dora and I were no different. We just happened to luck into a certain compatibility as we grew up to share similar views on the big topics in life such as money, children and religion. Anything else we could either compromise or indefinitely hold a differing view on without much consequence.

But despite the affinity, our challenges came in a different form. At about the 3-year mark, we realized that we wouldn’t be in the same city for the foreseeable future and have to either break up or endure long distance for the duration. Dora had planned to move back to Hong Kong after her graduation and I had already begun taking internships in other cities with the hope of eventually moving to the states. A relationship felt like a cruel risk to take if only to delay the inevitable.   

Thankfully our emotions bettered our pragmatic selves and we decided to give it a shot. We didn’t go into it with a vision of what a long distance relationship would look like, and the first few years were definitely a bit of trial and error as we calibrated to each other’s expectations.

Many people contemplating a long distance relationship would ask me how we made it work, but I think the answer is pretty anticlimactic. Sure you need to start with strong fundamentals built on maturity and trust, but in the end it comes down to your personality to thrive in the independence. Some couples try to bridge the gap by seeing each other every few months, but over time I find that to be too financially and operationally taxing. The chance of success (unfortunately) really comes down to what you already know – it’s how you interact with or without the distance.

Dora and I eventually established a cadence where we would see each other 2-3 times a year, likely once in Asia and once in North America. We would communicate mostly through texts and have calls maybe a few times a week. I find the most difficult part to be being emotionally supportive during particularly tough moments, as there are only so many things you can say and do on the receiving end of a sobbing exchange.

Things started to simplify in May 2019 when we finally got engaged. It was both a major milestone on its own and also a commitment to each other after all the years apart. It would be a few more years before we moved together, but at least now the end was in sight.

I visited Hong Kong that summer on route to Taiwan and decided to pop the question there. I had brainstormed a few locations with my friend for a private proposal but quickly realized a problem – anything indoors in HK was too crowded and anywhere outdoors was too hot. It didn’t leave me with many choices. I even contemplated for a moment to propose in her house. In the end, I carried the ring in my backpack and just hoped that the right opportunity came up.

It never really did until my last few days in Hong Kong when I saw the Ferris wheel while waiting for her to get off work. It wasn’t my first choice at the time since it felt pretty cliché, but I’ve grown to like it over the years. I think Dora knew the moment I asked to buy out a private cabin and had to watch the attendants awkwardly scan each one of the 10 or 12 tickets they gave me.

I don’t remember what I said in the actual proposal (no lie) except that it ran long and she asked if I was going to put the ring on her or not. I said yes and we got engaged!

Because of this whole other thing called Covid, we couldn’t get married until 2021, but I felt like the time in between went by in a blur. We moved back to Vancouver together, squeezed a bunch of stressful things in a few months (prepping for a career change, planning a wedding, preparing the move to the States), and came out of it mostly unscathed.

Like many others, Covid normalized our desires to have a small wedding, and it turned out better than I could’ve imagined. My old manager from EA mentioned to me once that there are really only two occasions where all your friends and family come together to celebrate your life – your wedding and your funeral. Seeing how I can’t attend one of those two, I felt like having a wedding is as much for us as it is for those we want to thank in our lives.

I still remember most of my speech to Dora because those are the same things I would reiterate today. That I admire her for her resourcefulness to navigate through the many years of uncertainty and distance, while still speaking of our future with the same enthusiasm as if we had just met. I feel very grateful for the past year and I’m glad that the future we always spoke of is here.

Happy Anniversary…!

What I’m reading: It was taking me way too long to get through Chuck Palahniuk’s ‘Rant’ that I finally accepted that I wasn’t really enjoying it. It’s a story about a murderer told through the eyes of others, but it jumped around a bit too much and the subject matter felt only as interesting as they were bizarre. Started a new series last week AKA Dune – my wife’s Christmas present for me last year :). I saw the movie recently which made the visualization easier, and it’s squarely in a genre I enjoy – sci-fi with political intrigue and with some cool characters/factions.

I’ve been so busy procrastinating packing for my move back to the Bay Area that I only realized this week that my flight back is almost two years to the day I left. I flew back to Vancouver on April 7, 2020 for what I thought would be a few interesting months. And here I am, two years later, making the return trip on April 15, 2022.

It’s obligatory to mention how fast time has gone by, but I especially resonate with it on two levels – first by how quickly we were able to find our new normal and develop an entire perspective on the future of work, and second, more personally, how quickly my 30s are coming for me.

Some say the anticipation of the weekend is better than the weekend itself, and I kind of feel that way about my age, only in reverse and slightly negative terms.

There’s a lot more to say about what my 30s mean, but I’ll save that for when I actually turn 30 next year (!!). For now, I just want to take a moment to reflect on a place I’ve called home for so long, and one I probably won’t get to come back to beyond a few weeks here and there.

Even before thinking about anything in specific terms, I realized that my impression of Vancouver is drastically different between the first 10 or so years when I grew up and went to school, versus to the last 2 where I unexpectedly found myself back home after the outbreak of Covid. 

Growing up I was busy enough struggling through school and early adulthood that I never really cared for the identity of the city. But in retrospect I realized the ironic truth that I (and my family) contributed verbatim to the stereotypes of Vancouver – a beautiful coastal city that’s expensive, unfriendly to outsiders, and perfect for retirement.

I didn’t care to make new friends because I had a core group from high school. I didn’t care for the college scene because I always came home after my classes. And I didn’t care for the foreigner-centric culture because I was an immigrant like many others and never planned to stay long.

Perhaps the worst offense of all – my parents were foreign investors who bought property in the city without contributing meaningfully to the local economy. It’s especially ironic that Vancouver became my safe-haven during Covid, knowing how unattainable the market is for most.

So with all that said, it feels a bit tone-deaf for me to pile on the echo-chamber for all the things Vancouver isn’t. Instead, it’s more pragmatic to say that Vancouver appeals to a specific type of personality, but with an unfortunate pre-requisite that you must also be able to stomach its costs.

The city is consistently considered one of the best places to live because of its mild weather, scenic mountains, and safe neighborhoods, so it was always going to attract real estate investment and people looking to settle. The unfortunate part of the equation is that Vancouver’s industry cannot really compete with the powerhouses on the east, which means that wage growth remains stagnant and perpetually under the cost of living. All metropolitans are expensive to live in, but Vancouver takes the crown with the highest home price to income ratio than even San Francisco or New York.

It goes without saying that I wouldn’t be here today without the financial backing of my family. But recognizing that and setting it aside, I’ll really miss the city once I’m gone.

Compared to the first 10 years, I was basically a tourist in my second time around. I drove out of Richmond to see friends more often, took advantage of the nearby mountains and got back into skiing, and dedicated nights to try out interesting restaurants with my wife. It’s no understatement that Vancouver is one of the most livable cities in the world.

I’ll finish my post with a few memories of growing up here, in no particular order:

• Going to Steveston with my parents to buy live fish, and then playing tennis at the shed
• Grabbing a bag of snacks and fruits after school to watch the Blue Jays on TV at 4
• Taking “Guitar 12” in the last few semesters of HS when grades didn’t matter anymore, but really just learned to play Poker with all the Chinese immigrants.
• Being downtown during the 2011 Stanley Cup riots, risking my life for a sport I don’t care about
• Playing online RTS games with my brother before he moved to Europe for good
• Planning a few murder mysteries with my friend Sam before Escape Rooms were cool
• Nursing my fish tank comically placed in the middle of the kitchen
• Hosting monopoly parties weekly for a stretch of like 2 months (please no more)
• Meeting my wife and getting married 🙂 – more on that in the future

I told Dora the other day that it’s really bittersweet in hindsight that we do a lot of things for the last time and never know it – like playing on the playground, living with your parents and siblings under one roof, or setting foot in a place you’ve always loved. I definitely feel that way now.

What I’m reading: Recently finished “A Killer in King’s Cove” by Iona Whishaw, a local author from Vancouver. It’s a mystery novel where the world building and character development felt more emphasized than the “who and how”, which was surprisingly pleasant. I kind of like it as a break over the usual Agatha Christie or Sherlock Holmes style where the payoff is largely in the last few chapters. The next book on my list is “Rant” by Chuck Palahniuk. It’s not particularly well-rated but I have heard that it’s a pretty mind-blowing book that’s either a 1 star or a 5 star. I’ll have to try it and report back.

Man’s Search for Meaning is a memoir by psychiatrist and philosopher Viktor Frankl chronicling his experiences as a Nazi prisoner during WWII. It’s probably the third or fourth book that I’ve read on the topic, but this one is quite different. Unlike other Holocaust related literature, this is less about the horrors that took place but rather the mindset of people as they went through the various stages of their imprisonment.

The first part of the book dealt with Frankl’s observation of the prisoners who started off being alert but quickly grew hopeless and indifferent as their lives were normalized by death and disease. Frankl commented that the key factor to survival was not food or the lack of hard labor, but the will to live. He quoted Nietzsche saying: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

Finding a reason to live for became both a constant theme during his time in the camps as well as a part of his broader theory on Logotherapy, a therapeutic approach coined by Frankl himself that focuses less on the past (introspective and retrospective) and more on the future. The approach was conceived before the Holocaust, but it must have been extremely relevant during those years when the only way to stay sane was to be optimistic about what comes next.

As to be expected, a book titled Man’s Search for Meaning should at least attempt to answer that question, and Frankl does. According to him, the meaning of life is different for everyone at every stage in their lives, but it can be found in three different ways: through work, through love, and through our attitude towards suffering. This book focused primarily on the latter.

Specifically about finding meaning through suffering, Frankl clarified that suffering isn’t required for there to be meaning, but just that meaning can be had despite it. So my first takeaway in this book is the power of attitude – being able to control our perception towards a situation we inherit.

In the camps it means to overlook the temporary hunger and imprisonment and think about what each person had irreplaceably lost. Frankl reckoned that it was just a few. Health, happiness, professional abilities, social standings, and many others were all things can still be restored, and therefore most people had a very good reason to live on.

Frankl also provided another anecdote in less extreme times. As a psychiatrist an old man came to him once with depression after his wife passed away. And while Frankl couldn’t bring back his wife, he asked him to imagine what would have happened had he passed away first. Of course, he said that she would be heartbroken. By shifting his attitude a little, the old man realized that his own sacrifice relived the suffering of hers and that gave him the ultimate comfort to live on.

I don’t think these were Frankl’s words but he quoted another philosopher that life is a constant oscillation between boredom and distress, and I kind of agree. In the past I’ve tried to live life by being content, or being in a satisfied state of homeostasis, but I think that’s almost impossible in reality. Life has its ups and downs, let alone your hormones who can decide that for you. It would be much more predictable to acknowledge this and try to see things from another angle.

The second takeaway is the power of purpose. In the book Frankl repeatedly discarded the idea of collective guilt. He recalled that some of the worst people were prisoners that were given jobs in the prison camps. And in contrast, there was the story of the prison warden who used his own money to buy medicine on the black market. By the end of the war, this warden was hidden by the Jews until they could secure a promise from the Americans that he would not be harmed.

The power of purpose is an important one as it relates to discovering your life’s meaning. Again, they were through work, through love, and through our attitude towards suffering.

To find meaning in work is straight forward; it is our professional accomplishments and fancy job titles, but it is much harder to think about the other two as equally significant. Choosing to focus on your family or your loved ones is usually seen as a detriment to your career, rather than both being acceptable choices to fulfill your own purpose and happiness.

The same is also true for finding purpose through suffering. It makes a lot of sense once you think about it, but how many people would say out loud that the meaning of life may be as simple as coming to terms with your differences, may it be trauma, sexuality, religion, or anything else.

But even as I’m writing this, something doesn’t really add up. Even though we know that being a stay-at-home parent is an exceptional assignment, or that overcoming trauma is an exceptional achievement, most people would still place their respect for others based on their work accolades.

So why is that the case? I don’t really know, but I guess part of it has to do with the money that only a successful career can give you. Being really (really) good at your job may be as rewarding as raising a good family, thus making them equally worthy life “purposes”, but only one lets you buy that fancy slice of ham. It’s a bleak thought, and maybe one that will change as we get older.

At the end of the day, having a good career is universally understood: the status, the wealth, and the respect. But if I learned anything from this book, it’s to not over-index on it so much that you discount the meaning of your family, your relationships, and your life experiences. After all, not spending more time with others is one of the most common regrets in life.

Man’s Search for Meaning is a short memoir at <100 pages, so I found myself going back and re-reading some passages. The difficulty in reading Holocaust literature is that the very idea of the Holocaust is so abhorrent that no human experience I’ve been through can even come close. But despite so, I thoroughly enjoyed this book as a study of our motivations.

When I first started this draft, it was titled 2020 in review. Though now that we’re almost half a year in, I guess I’ll have to settle for something more generic. I’m not sure what I want to write about yet, but I really can’t justify paying for my own web hosting each year to not have written anything since 2018.

Part of it was feeling like I ran out of topics to talk about (at least somewhat intelligently), and so I pivoted a bit more into fiction. I ended up writing about 10,000 words in a D&D story before my progress kind of slowed. I just wasn’t very good at it. I write too slowly and have a hard time coming up with interesting plot ideas. My wife, on the other hand, has no trouble charming hundreds of readers with her regal x manga-inspired romance fiction.

Like seriously. Her fiction has over 150,000 words and more than 12,000 clicks. And even though I see her writing most of the time, I still have no idea what her secret sauce is (I don’t have them).

All that leads me to my next point: what have I been doing for the last few years? The short answer is not much. Even if the last year was mostly a write-off due to Covid, my life was settling into a routine long before that. I would work M-F and then take some time on the weekends to try new restaurants or go to coffee shops to read my books. It wasn’t bad by any means, just a little stale.

Thoughts on COVID-19

Lockdown in North America started in March. In hindsight, I made two decisions right before it that could easily classify as both the best and the worst. On the plus side, I took an extended pilgrimage back home to Taiwan with my wife and her family that December. It was nice to see everyone for 3 weeks, live a slower-paced life and install match-3 games for my grandparents. It’s an annual trip that helps me put my life in perspective, sometimes as simply as looking out the window into a very different city.

When I returned to the States in January 2020, however, my brain had the genius idea that Covid was just a flu and that going to New York to see some friends would be a good idea. It was only my second trip to New York. The weather was a bit colder than I thought it’d be, but by far the most surprising fact was that I didn’t personally pick up Covid. New York would turn out to be the first hotspot in America where the virus was likely spreading as early as January.

I definitely caught a break with the timing. And by the time I flew back to the west coast and gone back to work, it wasn’t long before the world turned into something none of us would recognize.

From the onset of shelter-in-place, I felt a sheepish joy which I can only describe as a very understandable aversion to commuting in the Bay Area. I didn’t think the virus would be that serious, and I was glad to get a few weeks where I could just wake up and roll into a meeting. Except the weeks turned to months, and soon I was on a flight back to Vancouver with just a small luggage of my essentials.

At this point I must go on a tangent to thank my roommate Kyle, who not only turned the negatives of a Covid-driven work situation into an absolute career-defining win, but took the time to help me clear out my belongings as we came to terms with the fact that Covid was going to last a very long time. I’m not sure anyone else would’ve had the patience, and I can’t be more grateful.

Today would mark almost exactly one year since my flight back to Vancouver, and what a year it has been. Even now I don’t think I fully grasp the magnitude of change that Covid will impart even once this is all over – the way we work, the way we share information, the way we interact with our governments. It’s kind of overwhelming, but on the balance I think a lot will be for the better.

My life now fits another set of routines, but not without some big differences. For one, my wife and I are finally reunited. We’ve been living apart for most of my time in the US (she worked in Hong Kong) without a clear goal of how our lives will come together. Covid accelerated that timeline. And even though our future is still up in the air, at least we’ll worry about it together.

Coming back home also means seeing some old friends, and that was something I missed in the Bay Area. I generally see myself as a pretty solitary person, but there are some things much easier to do with friends than doing alone – like starting a small business! Over the last few months, my friend and I worked on a felt crafts hobby together, eventually deciding to launch it as a small business. It’s in pretty early stages, but I’m excited to take on a brand new challenge.

All in all, I would say that I’m beyond fortunate that Covid hit me at the time it did. I’m not a college senior trying to get that first internship or someone trying to re-enter the workforce while shouldering financial or familial burdens. My challenges were at best inconveniences, and often times not even that. I hope that by the end of 2021, we will be able to find the new normal, one that weaves in our multi-faceted needs honed by the reckoning of this global pandemic.

One of my favorite hobbies is playing video games, which for a long time just screamed a lack of foresight in life. The one thing career counselors ask you to leave off your resume, and then nudge you after the workshop to cut back on. Yes, organizing a raid is hard, but no – no one really cares.

So imagine my surprise when a string of good luck got me an actual job at a gaming company. Now instead of waiting for your disapproval, I can just toss it up to some good ol’ market research.

It was the perfect plan, except for that one memo I missed.  Unknown to me, somewhere in my 20s, gaming became cool again. 

It’s hard to say when or how it happened, but I suspect a lot of it had to do with overcoming that social barrier. I still remember my dad’s surprise when my tech-savvy older brother told him that we could play Age of Empires II together over thin air. It was magical and hours of fun.

Gaming then became a central part of my life. Despite my parents’ lectures about how I’ll have no time for it once I start high school/ college/ my first job, I always came back to its charms. In no other medium can you create a fictional world and live in it. And in no other medium can you immense yourself as part of a story, one that grips you with its joy, sorrow and many surprises.

I don’t plan on stopping any time soon, especially knowing what’s lurking just over the horizon. Alongside technical improvements that gave us an entire spectrum from stunning realism to vivid fantasies, new network capabilities expanded the entire playing field. What was once an individual activity can now be shared by all, and that opened the floodgates for deeper game development.

Connectivity ushered a wave of innovation that led to sell-out stadiums with huge viewership stats, but we’re already on the cusp of another one. This time, it includes all the buzzwords you’re already tired of – cloud computing, AI, subscription, and being the (big company) of video games.

EA recently announced Project Atlas, which is a futuristic development platform powered by AI and cloud computing. You can read about it here. The technicalities are above me, but there are two takeaways that I think spelled out the future of not just EA, but the entire gaming industry.

The first point is about being cloud-native. We know the cloud as some abstract space where we store and backup our data, but the cloud can also be used to process and stream an entire video game directly onto our computer or mobile devices. In other words, it’s a system where the game client does not reside locally on your devices, but on EA servers around the world.

This sounds like a convenience thing, and it is, but there’s another subtle point here. In a world where the hard processing is done elsewhere, developers can ignore the constraints of minimum spec. Traditionally, studios concern themselves with making games that can run on as many systems as possible, but now they can focus solely on creating the best experiences. We are about to see an explosion of creativity bound only by the frontier of game development.

The second point is about being in an even more connected world. From having spent thousands of hours in Warcraft III custom games (where DOTA originated), I am convinced that community content is the longevity of a game. However, since all triple-A titles cost $60 in the store, there is a real scalability problem due to the demands of creative hours and their associated costs.

A cloud-native system would look to address this. As game content workflow gets moved online, developers can more easily break off parts of a game for creative people to experiment with. They can use moddable asset databases to create something new, and then use that same platform to share or market it with the world, building a new ecosystem altogether.

And as that line between developer and content creator blurs, we would be one step closer to the ambitious goal of having “game-as-a-service” (please don’t call it GAAS). Imagine that instead of having to buy an iterative copy of Madden or Call of Duty every year, now a subscription pass gets you that access alongside periodic content updates by both the community and the developers.

The mainstream shift is well underway, with many exciting developments just around the corner. If gaming hasn’t been a part of your life, this is the perfect moment to dive in. Genres have never been richer, and there has never been as much freedom as we do now on how we choose to play.

The influence of gaming will continue to expand, and it won’t be long until we’re hit with the next set of questions around how we want video games to portray our society. If it’s anything like what we have seen in the TV or films industry, then here’s a suggestion to start. Maybe next time we go dungeon crawling, let’s not have the ugly troll guard the hero’s treasures.