Nikon D810, 200-500mm lens, somewhere near the Farallon Islands
Once or twice a year I try to get on a boat out to the Farallon Islands with birders in the Bay Area. Pelagic birding is my absolute favorite type of birding: being able to get out in the ocean and see a huge amount of sea life of all types is a treat.
In June this year I had the opportunity to head out there again. And this was a lucky shot.
I love the Mission. Specifically, I love the less gentrified parts of it. There's still so much life and culture; DJs spinning records on the street, bands playing live Latin jazz, record stores where you can explore cumbria, and Indigenous dance groups that perform at the many plazas.
Despite its many problems, the Mission is where I default to for food, adventure and fun. And to just generally feel alive.
I took all of these photos on my iPhone yesterday.
Windows.
Universal Bakery has a wonderful torta de carne asada. With a huge block of salty cheese. It's the perfect sandwich for me.
I love the colors of the Mission.
More colors.
Ever since I started shooting medium format on film, I've much preferred square or 1:1 photos. It helps me see the world in a different way.
A few things happened.
The main one being, my soulmate, my soul, the love of my life, Cookie pie, passed away. I am bereft, but not afloat.
It feels like a brand new chapter in my life.
Cookie, born 1 October 2009 in Petaling Jaya, died 20 June 2024 in San Francisco.
She was deeply loved through all 14 years and 8 months of her life. There was not a moment where she was not surrounded by tremendous love, warmth and care. She passed, surrounded by people who love her. She was snacking on treats until the end.
Because of her, I learned to love my new home in San Francisco: fog, rain, cold and all. We went everywhere together. We saw everything. We ate: all the time.
I have a thread on Mastodon with more photos and stories about our life together. While I miss her a lot, I am also looking forward to learning more about how to exist without her. She was such a big part of my life that I'm afraid she was almost central to my identity for almost fifteen years.
I have a weird story about scallion pancakes. It goes like this.
Around this time last year, I was walking down my street in San Francisco when a woman waved something at me. I thought she needed help with something, so I went closer. Instead, she clicked something (she was waving a torch, the kind you ignite gas stoves with), and she held the flame in my face.
I had no idea what she was doing.
She said, "I'm going to burn you!"
"Why?" I was really confused.
"Because you're Chinese."
Oh.
That's what was happening. Until that point, I had largely avoided the worst of that stuff. I had no idea what to do. A bus arrived. I got into it.
As I was leaving, she kept pointing it at me, and she said, I'm also going to burn your dog! She is.. also Chinese!
I know she wasn't well.
I know that she needs help.
But I didn't know what I would do when that happened to me, finally.
Not much, maybe other than a lot of crying. I got to take time off work. I had therapy. I talked to a lot of people. I thought often of the moment, of what had happened, and I don't remember anything else about her now (I am face blind, that helps). If I saw her again on the streets (this happened around the corner where I live), I would not recognize her. But I remember the flame that she briefly lit, and how it changed everything about my life and my experience of the city that I had, up until that moment, thought of as home.
I don't think of her very much now. But it comes up when I least expect it. For example, when I took out a package of Trader Joe's Taiwanese Green Onions Pancake.
Now, it's probably a perfectly fine product for most people, but it's going to be forever remembered in my home now as The Time I Had Trader Joe's Scallion Pancakes and Absolutely Lost My Shit.
Somehow, the act of eating a frozen scallion pancake had unearthed all kinds of.. feelings. Mainly, why the hell am I here? There's racism, and there's frozen scallion pancakes! I would never accept frozen pancakes for any meal back home! Least of all scallion pancakes with COCONUT OIL made for WHITE PEOPLE, that aren't even flaky or layered.. or good!!!
I was inconsolable.
My wife never buys them anymore. She calls it my crying pancakes.
(We really like this one. It doesn't make me cry.)
My pancake nervous breakdown, that probably wasn't really about pancakes, but about immigration, identity, immigration, anxiety, concern about the state of the world and my personal safety, led me to book a flight back to Singapore.
More than anything else, I just needed to know that I was going to have the safety and comforts of home in my family house with my parents and with food I like. Where I was never going to have to eat anything frozen, ever. So I did that, shortly after my pancake breakdown.
And the first meal that I had when I got there was a scallion pancake. From here. Freshly made. By hand. Not frozen. Available for breakfast. For a buck or something. It was really good, and I did not cry.
But my parents could not understand why I so desperately wanted to eat a scallion pancake. It was not something I would crave, or ask for. It's not even really... Singaporean at all.
I could not explain how: between two scallion pancakes, one frozen and one fresh, laid the entire spectrum of my sadness and grief as well as my happiness and joy. I get to be queer, autistic, and to be with the person that I love. But I also get fires in my face, and frozen scallion pancakes that make me cry.
I've been busy. Over the weekend, I launched:
The motivation for doing so is, I am noticing an increasing amount of YOLO and FOMO with regards to artificial intelligence. Government is at once trying to regulate, as well as to determine how to engage.
I'm hoping my perspectives as the director of product management at San Francisco Digital Services, the digital arm of the City and County of San Francisco, as well as my personal interest in the ethics of and latest developments in artificial intelligence, can help my fellow public servants around the world make sense of what's happening and how we can meet the moment. Or not.
Especially if your boss says, we need to use AI! Here are some questions to ask; here's what other people are doing, and what you need to know.
For now, I'm envisioning the site to be a resource on 'what you can do' / 'how you can think about' AI' and for the newsletter to be on 'state of AI / public sector' (there's a lot of news about AI now, and a lot of hype. Which ones are relevant to you).
Let me know if you have any thoughts, questions, feedback.
I lived the bulk of my life outside the United States, where I have been for only 6 out of nearly four decades. There are many things I appreciate about the U.S.; San Francisco in particular, which gave my wife and I a wonderful place to build our home and welcomed us at every step.
One thing that I am not used to though, is the degree of imperial insularity.
Other than Fahrenheit and imperial units, I think it's the first time I've lived somewhere that is so totally detached from the rest of the world. I feel it in my soul as I realized, with a shock, that bars here play only American sports, American news, and on top of that, hyper-regional versions of all of that.
I realized that I was not hearing about the rest of the world, except in very negative terms: like in wars or in other crises. This, I noted, is new. (I grew up in a city-state and I think I had to learn the exchange rate to all 10 major global currencies as a teenager figuring out eBay)
I know it doesn't come from a place of malice. Most of the time, it just is. As the superpower of the world, that's just the way it is.
To keep myself amused, I have come up with a test that I think reflects my past experience as a non-American, interacting online with Americans who are not aware of their insularity.
On Mastodon, I called this the Walgreens test. I phrased it a little less well on Mastodon, so I want to post this here for posterity:
When you are on the Internet, and you ask a question about where to get face wash or shampoo, what do people tell you?
The people who say 'Walgreens' even when you've stated that you're not in America, are the winners of my Internet Walgreens Insularity test. The idea that your local drugstore is available elsewhere in the world is a frame of mind that I personally do not understand. The idea that you are surprised that there is no (insert your local business) in another country is one that can only occur in an empire.
Other people had fun ideas too.
Personally, I was really surprised when I encountered a very educated person here who had no idea that other countries used other currencies, and that other countries used other electrical outlets. They had never seen an electrical adapter before.
I say all of this not to bash anyone, but to really only note that wow, I live somewhere completely different now.
From a late night Mastodon thread about homesickness.
Two years before I moved to the United States, I wrote something called ‘things I will miss when I have to leave Southeast Asia (because I am queer)’. I predicted that I would be deeply homesick, not for Singapore specifically, but for the entire region.
Even though I was born in Singapore, I lived many years in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.
What I could not predict: that even watching videos of people in YouTube documentaries about Southeast Asia, the birdsong is enough to make me bawl.
I have such a deep affection for and attachment to that part of the world. The weather makes sense to me. The languages make sense to me. And oh my god I miss the food.
I’ve been lucky to have such a deep familiarity with so much of it. I went to a hippie run shop in SF the other day and they played ‘mor lam’ on their record player.
It instantly brought me back to long overnight bus rides through Thailand with my mother.
In San Francisco, there’s a neighborhood called the Tenderloin. Looking it up on the Internet will tell you it’s the worst place in the world; apparently a literal war zone.
I live there. There are Thai people, Lao people, Vietnamese people. I walk my dog in my batik pajamas and sandals, just like I would back home. There’s fresh galangal in the grocery store. Sometimes a Vietnamese uncle goes fishing and I’m invited to pick some fish, with other Vietnamese aunties.
Sometimes people ask me why I don’t live in a nicer neighborhood. But I struggle to think of how any neighborhood where I can’t buy fresh galangal, speak my languages, get free soy milk, buy the only tofu I find acceptably good, is possibly nicer in any conceivable way
But mostly I am afraid that if I move, my yearning for home will give way to a bigger hole in my soul. Leaving Southeast Asia is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.
My neighbors go to the food pantry every day. They don’t have money. They came here on a scary boat ride, all those decades ago. The trauma of war and that journey still haunts them in many visible ways. They also insist on giving me vegetables that they get from the food pantry. I tell them I am not poor and I feel bad about taking free food. They laugh and say, they just want to give me something. I am the only young person who still speaks to them in their language. They like that about me.
With the benefits of community also comes the downsides. My neighbors nag at me as though they are my relatives. Don’t order food. It’s expensive. Get a house in Hayward. It’s cheaper. I help them set alarms on their phones so they can wake up to get into a shuttle to go to a temple in San Jose for Tết. They are surprised that I don’t know many traditions, like being vegetarian on the 1st day of lunar new year.
I don’t know how to say, ‘my evangelical Christian upbringing robbed me of my cultural traditions’, in either Vietnamese or Teochew or Cantonese.
Every Vietnamese American old person who speaks to me asks me, ‘why did you come here? Isn’t your country better? Cleaner?’
I also don’t know how to say ‘my country doesn’t accept me because of who I love, so I am here’. In any of the languages that I know. Which is, quite a few.
An accidental double exposure of City Hall, San Francisco.
(Minolta Hi-Matic 7S II, Kodak T-Max 400, Xtol stock @ 12:45, scanned on Noritsu LS-600)
Seen at Crane Cove Park, San Francisco.
(Olympus XA2, Kodak T-Max 400, Xtol 1:1, scanned on Plustek 8200i)
When my wife Sabrena and I first got together in early 2017, she said I was her early birthday gift. Not actually knowing her birthday, I asked her when it was: exactly two months from when we got together.
You must understand, at that time I was a bit of a fuckboi and two months was a very long time for someone like me. I had no idea where I was going to be, who I was going to be with, or what I was going to do even two days ahead of time. Happily, things worked out: we have been together for seven years, and married for six of that.
Happy birthday to the love of my life!
In 2018, she agreed to marry me, and move to San Francisco with me, sight unseen. She'd never even been to the United States at that point.
The life we've built together here is wonderful and comfortable; exciting and engaging; fun and full of laughter. Here's to many more birthdays together.
This is a story about hopes and dreams.
In 2022, I had the opportunity to buy a 1995 Rivendell Road Standard frame—that fit me!— and build it up. I decided to go all out. With the insurance money I got from having my previous gravel bike stolen, I put a plan together with Jay from Scenic Routes.
1995 Rivendell Road Standard taking me to taco trucks and beyond.
Here was the build that we planned together:
| Part | Model |
|---|---|
| Handlebars | randonneur 25.4 400mm |
| Brake Levers | Gran Compe 202 Non Aero Brake Levers, Drilled |
| Downtube Shifters | Dia-Compe ENE Down Tube Shifters |
| Cranks | Rene Herse Double Crank 46-30 - 171mm |
| Pedals | MKS Monarch |
| front hub | Velo Orange 32 hole silver |
| rear hub | Velo Orange 32 hole silver |
| rims | Velocity A32 32 hole polished |
| spokes and calc | spoke calc and spokes and nipples x 64 |
| brakes | shimano 105 |
| cassette | microshift 11-36 |
| tires | 26″ x 1.25″ Elk Pass Tire |
| cables | two brake and 2 shifter |
| front derailleur | dura ace |
| rear derailleur | Shimano deore long cage |
| chain | 9 speed in stock |
After a few arduous months, it was finally done. I rode it, happily, for many months. I even went on a YouTube show with it.
Then early last year, the bike—along with all the bikes in my building—disappeared. My Tesla-driving neighbor had apparently left the garage door wide open, which led to someone coming in and grabbing every bike within sight. I was inconsolable, of course.
A few things gave me hope:
A few friends who know a thing or two about used bikes told me they were certain the bike would find its way back to me some day, because my bike was so unique that it would be difficult for the thief to sell; and it would be difficult for anyone thinking about buying it to not know it was stolen.
4 or 5 months passed, and I continued making sure my post about the bike was updated on Craigslist, Reddit and elsewhere.
Randomly, I got a Reddit message from someone who said he had seen my bike at Laney Market in Oakland, and bought it. He told me that he worked in bike industry and that, when he saw it at the flea market, knew for sure it was stolen, so he decided he would try to find me. We met near a BART station and he returned the bike to me (I Venmo-ed him what he paid for it, and a bit more). I had also received a few calls from people who had spotted it at Laney Market, but by the time I made it out there I could not find it myself. I'm thankful to the community and to folks for looking out for this bike for me. I love it to bits.
The bike was returned to me in a really good condition. It was almost as if no one had ridden it at all. Someone had tried to cover its distinctive lugs with ugly markers. That's mostly faded out on its own. I didn't need to do very much when I got the bike back, beyond the flat tires.
I'm now determined to ride the hell out of this bike. Thank you, bicycle gods, for looking out for me!
Chobanicore: the style of natural, soft colors and airy composition in branding popularized by Chobani's 2017 rebrand is also known as 'paperback chic' and 'Chobanicore'.
One of the things I love most about living in the Bay Area is the easy bikecamping we get 'round here.
Here are some of my usual rides and camps:
The very first place I went bikecamping. While you can and should make reservations, state park rangers are likely to find space for hikers and bikers without any.
"You can camp among redwoods, bike along the creek, explore easy-to-moderate hiking trails, watch salmon spawn, relax in the shady picnic area, and learn the story of its namesake pioneer. When you’ve finished all that, more adventures await just next door at Point Reyes National Seashore." (from park website)
State facilities here are very good: bring plenty of quarters for camp showers. Lots of water.
Plenty of hiking opportunities as well: bring a lock, lock up your bike, and go on a walk.
A very popular camp site near San Rafael. Tent camping in a fairly secluded area with 15 miles of trails. Bring quarters for showers. Definitely book, but they say they have two campsites for hikers and bikers. Firewood available for sale so cooking is relatively easy. Bring a wagon to ferry firewood if needed.
The ground here is 'hard pack' and I found it very difficult to pitch ultra-light tents (the kind you prop up with a hiking pole). I will bring a normal tent next time.
The 'wildest' camping I did (until I did Yosemite in 2021): no water source, very basic facilities (just toilets, no shower; water from some spouts). But right by the ocean (at Wildcat campground).
This is a much longer ride than the other two, so I would break it up unless you know you're a relatively strong rider.
If you haven't ridden long distance, or you're on an unfamiliar bike (like a rental), I would do shorter day trips across the Golden Gate Bridge and try to do 'credit card bike camping' first. These hills are no joke. If you're relatively confident and / or you're going with experienced bikecampers, then it's a super fun experience!
Whenever I can, I make the 45 minute walk to Chinatown in San Francisco to Dim Sum Bistro, my favorite 'cheap dimsum' spot. Sometimes, I take photos too.
I say this every chance I get: dimsum isn't always 'cheap' food. Dimsum can be fancy, and should be fancy, because to make large amounts of high quality dimsum you need a very large team. 'Nice dimsum' is a treat. It's a birthday meal, it's a treat you give your parents, it's going out to linger over nice tea and good ingredients to snack on dishes you probably won't make at home.
Cheap dimsum also has a place. But it should still be fresh and of relatively high quality. The menu should be large and the 'skin' of dumplings shouldn't be too thick. On these metrics, many of the other Chinatown dimsum places don't pass muster for me. But Dim Sum Bistro always delivers. So I'm glad it's here, and I'm glad I can have good, cheap dimsum.
Dim Sum Bistro
675 Broadway (Map)
(Photo taken on Minolta Hi-Matic 7S II, Kodak T-Max 400, developed in Xtol stock for 12:15 min @ ISO 1600)
Spycraft and Statecraft: A new article in Foreign Affairs by William Burns, Director of the US CIA says "China remains the only U.S. rival with both the intent to reshape the international order and the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do so. The country’s economic transformation over the past five decades has been extraordinary. It is one for which the Chinese people deserve great credit and one that the rest of the world has broadly supported in the belief that a prosperous China is a global good. The issue is not China’s rise in itself but the threatening actions that increasingly accompany it. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has begun his third presidential term with more power than any of his predecessors since Mao Zedong. Rather than use that power to reinforce and revitalize the international system that enabled China’s transformation, Xi is seeking to rewrite it"
Listening to your body: interoception, or our 'body's sixth sense' is a sense that many autistic people struggle with. I certainly do. But there is now a growing interest in what these signals actually mean, and how they work in the context of brain-body integration.
Lucas Sin shares how Cantonese chefs gauge water temp: shrimp eyes (80C), crab eyes (90C), fish eyes (99C about to go into a rolling boil). The video is also a good instructional resource on how to prepare and cook shrimp, especially Hangzhou style tea shrimp. Good recipe to come back to and try.
Hennepin County, Minneapolis has reduced its chronically homeless population by 80% in just five years via a combination of funding, deep community engagement and a housing-first approach that’s matched with real housing resources. Besides cutting chronic homelessness, Hennepin County has also managed to reduce its unsheltered population by 22% since 2019, while the country’s totals moved in the opposite direction.
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