Nevertheless, a major shopping mall, Paseo del Carmen, has opened at one end of 5th Ave. A semi outdoor shopping mall with soaring canopy, here you will find many well known retail brands – Old Navy, Victoria’s Secret, Zara, Starbucks, etc. Even some ordinary fast food chains like Carl’s Jr and Crispy Creme have stores in this mall that are a lot more flashy than they are back home.

The first store you encounter is Old Navy, its name is prominently shown overhead. Moveover, it mentioned Old Navy’s home town – San Francisco, California – in its tagline. It highlights San Francisco to stand for something creative, cool, original.

Back home in San Francisco, the last Old Navy store in Union Square was shuttered in 2023. It was my favorite store. But it could not survive the post COVID downtown San Francisco retail collapse. Afterward, Old Navy no longer has a real retail store in the city of its own headquarters. It was such an irony for me to see the Old Navy here, an anchor in a splashy shopping mall.

Having lived in San Francisco for over half of my life, I feel the city has lost its way, it has let me down. It was a comfort to see it is still a great brand name abroad. The story of its past continues to glow. But will the city thrive in the future?

It was produced by WGBH Boston back in 1992. It is available for free on learner.org for now. Sadly, after running the educational service for decades, the website is announced to shutdown on July 1, 2026. I hope the materials will be adopted by others.

I always think drama and stories are great teaching tools as opposed to text books or classroom learning. This works for foreign languages too. Spanish often perplex learners with numerous variations of forms for verbs as simple as “to be”. One example is “era” (was). Typically, we have to memorize them and drill them with endless exercises. Here in this scene, he said “Era mi amigo” (He was my friend). For me, “era” will be strongly associated with this scene. It will no longer be a random word I have to painstakingly memorize.

Compared to a text book, this line has a context. In addition, there is an emotional connection. The plot was about a search for a long lost brother. They went to his old place, asking any people if they knew his brother. One after another, they all denied. At the long last, they found the man Hector above. Not only did he know his brother, he remembers him affectionately as his friend. This line is a big emotional relief.

While entertaining, telenovela is not expected to be any awarding winning classic. It is a drama nevertheless. There is a plot, key characters, and a mystery to be unfolded. The plot would sustain our interest for us to go through 52 episodes of learning materials. Perseverance is necessary for the success in learning a language.

Another scene I like is Señora Suárez, seeing the picture of her grandson, spontaneously making comments about his appearance (Miguel is so thin!) Often we learn vocabulary individually from text book sentences. In this case, she spoke fluidly of several vocabularies in a series of sentences in a real world conversation. This makes the words alive.

I was also smiling when I saw this. Don’t all grandmas do this? They can’t help but make many comments about the children and their appearance? It seems that this is a cross cultural archetype we can all recognize.

I am about one quarter through the series. I started to be able to hear a good deal of natural dialogs (fast speech compared to classroom dialog). And I look forward to seeing the story unfold.

With a long term decline in enrollment, the district is facing a structural deficit. Simply put, we are spending more than we earn on an ongoing basis. This cannot continue.

Blind to all the crises, the union went on strike and demanded a big raise.

These people really refuse to believe there is financial trouble, the ugly facts they choose to ignore, as the San Francisco Chronicle Editorial Board put it.

I understand the teachers do not make enough to live comfortably in San Francisco. But so is everybody. It is not realistic to expect any employers to pay average workers enough to comfortably afford San Francisco. That’s life. The teachers were not being underpaid. Their pay ranks second among twenty comparable school districts. They received a 6% raise in 2022, and $9000 (about 9%) in 2023. Then another 5% in 2024. Their salary range of $70k to $130k is already comparable or higher than private school teachers, even before considering all the benefits and pensions of being public employees. Asking for another 9% to 14% raise, which the independent factfinding report points out, is just well above the average.

If today’s expense is a concern, it is overshadowed by the SFUSD's biggest liability — lifetime benefit after retirement. This is a very generous offer to your employees — if you don’t have to think about the long term financial implications. SFUSD did just that. They offered the benefit but did not fund them. An audit has found out they have a $649 million unfunded OPEB liability. This is an even bigger problem than the $530 million of pension liability. As there are more retirees the benefits and pension expenses will just keep growing. In 10 to 20 years time, by the time our children run the schools, it is plausible that the total benefit payment would exceed teachers’ salary payment. When most of the money has been designated to those who no longer work for the school, it will be even harder for them to give teachers a raise and to attract talents. You can’t even reduce these expenses by layoff. So it has to fall even harder to the working teachers.

How did we get there, our children rightfully ask? Blame us (and the people before us). We make these promises on your behalf to solve our problem today. Now you will pay the debt that we have incurred. I find this tragically irresponsible.

According to the union, the district can well afford the increase. The shortfall is due to their mismanagement. I really hope they are right, that we do not have a structural deficit, that there is no need for layoff and to shut down schools, that there are piles of money hidden that could have paid for all these.

But I also fear that we have erred, not in the way the union said, but erred on systemically underestimating the extent of the financial problem, using one time COVID relief to plug long term short fall, overlooking warnings that auditors have pointed out for years.

This situation is not unique to San Francisco. West Contra Costa Union similarly struck and won a deal in December. The district now scrambles to cut payroll by 10% or face insolvency. The Sacramento School District is also in a dire situation. They are trying to avoid state receivership by cutting 400 staff and reducing student services.

Making reckless financial decisions is in nobody’s interest. If this pushes the district into insolvency, the school loses, the union loses, and most importantly, the children lose.

But some problems will surface much sooner. With less children born, there will be less demand for schools and teachers. This is already happening. Demographic change leads to structural decline in school enrollment. If you aspire to become an educator, think twice. It will be a tough market in the coming years.

The San Francisco school district has been facing a major budget deficit for years. After much torment, it has worked out a plan to close and merge some under enrolled schools. Only to have mayor London Breed abruptly torpedoed the plan. The result is that the problem is left unsolved, the budget still not balanced. Now the school board is timidly bringing back the topic of “reorganizing schools”, going through the same pain that had already gone through for the 2024 plan. Without enough children enrolling, no financial or political gimmick could have saved San Francisco.

Declining enrollment is also affecting college. San Francisco State has reported a decline of 26% in ten years. Cal State East Bay has lost 30%. While the Trump administration’s hostility to foreign students deepens the problem, the decline is long in the making and is unlikely to be reversed.

An implication is that, colleges are soon going to compete for students. For the longest time, college education is a privilege. Students strive to excel academically, commit to extracurricular interests, and get the best recommendations for the best chance to get into college. The table will soon turn. Colleges must invest in marketing and outreach to acquire enough students while they are under pressure to trim their payroll and programs to balance their budget. Students of tomorrow will have a much wider choice and much lower admittance requirement.

Strange as it seems, the story of the next thirty years has already been written. The demographic shift is as certain as the sun will rise.

Crowded into the flat are a teacher, a courtesan, a taxi driver couple, a family of five, the money lender’s family and the landlady couple. People all knew each other. There was no other way, giving the small space and non-existent privacy. They also shared similar life struggles. Money was always short. Rent and debts were due. Job loss deepened the despair. But the neighbors often stepped in to support and lend money to relieve the problems.

From today’s perspective, we live a prosperous life in our own housing. Our life becomes rather individualistic. The tenement living depicted in the movie seems far removed from today. We should also consider that the movie can be a dramatization and not necessarily a very accurate portrait of real life at that time.

Still, to a large extent, I believe it can be seen as a time capsule to the life in Hong Kong people once lived. My own life witnessed some of this transition. My father fits the Wai character. A taxi driver. Wife expecting a child. They rented a room when I was born (which I have no memory of). Later, in the 70s, we rented our own apartment. We in turn become a landlord to rent out one of the bedrooms to help on rent.

Life was difficult then. People struggled to find work, which barely pays for food and lodging. There was no government welfare. It was inspiring how people count on each other to help ease the burden of life.

A bonus point is to see a young Bruce Lee in the picture playing a responsible son.

Chile has a population of 20 million. It has doubled from 50 years ago. But Chile’s total fertility rate is now 1.2, just below Japan’s. As recent as 2020, it was still at 2.0, 50% higher than Japan at the time. It is coming down alarmingly fast. (Source: World Bank via FRED®)

The population structure is ominous. This chart above is called the population pyramid. It is supposed to be in a pyramid shape with a wide base. A teardrop shape is a bad sign. Chile’s top cohort is about 34. Today, the newborn babies are only half the size of that cohort. In 1990, the country peaked in natural growth with 200,000 more births than deaths. It fell to 40,000 in 2021. Soon this number will be negative.

The quickest fix will be immigration. This too leads to social problems and political pushback. The recent influx of Venezuelan immigrants causes unease in the local population. They are blamed for gangs and organized crime. This is the defining issue when Chileans are going to vote for the new president and parliament today. Both the far left and far right candidates make fighting crime a major priority.

Today, there are 1.9 million foreign born living in Chile. This is about 10% of the population (compared to the US’s 16%). This is a 40% jump from just five years ago. Venezuelans are by far the largest group and the fastest growing group.

As I have said in the Canada immigration, controlled immigration at a proper level can be beneficial for the host country. But a rapid and uncontrolled influx of migrants will destabilize the society and prompt pushback. Chile is at the juncture to fine tune its policy, with the right wing pushing for severe restrictions.

What will the country become in the next 30 years? The fertility decline seems irreversible. Immigration, even if it is politically desirable at current level, can only slow the decline but not completely solve it. Chilean society of the future will be quite different from what they have grown up in.

Not so long ago, the Chinese were worried about overpopulation and pollution. One billion strong, they put tremendous pressure on food, water, and housing. Today, people are well aware of the baby bust and the inevitable decline of their world. India’s demographic profile is still in a good shape. But it is only a matter of time for them to face a similar problem.

Why do people not want to have children anymore?

Aevy TV has made a YouTube show about this. Listen to these young people all say “hell no” to having children. We don’t hear interviews from India often, but their objections sound just like ours.

Among all the challenges of raising kids, the one factor that people worry the most is probably high cost. Start with diapers and pediatricians. Add school and tutoring expenses. The extra real estate price for a bigger house. On top of that, an expensive four year college education. Having a second child doubles the cost. Every estimation tells us having children will be a major burden to the parents. The rational conclusion – we should not have children.

While this seems very convincing, I often question this kind of financial argument. Our parents made much less money than us. I went to government schools and received no extra tutoring. We lived in a cramped house with just enough money to get by. Nevertheless, I grew up just fine. Today we have so much more resources and possessions. Why is raising children so much harder?

People use economics as a rational justification. But deep down, there are more fundamental motivations that remain unspoken. Simply asking the question – should we have children – already makes us behave differently than the previous generations. Back then, people grew up, they got married, they had a family. It is one simple path that everyone follows. There is no need for complex financial calculations.

I really like Aevy TV’s videos. Not only do they have a good topic and good research, they also enliven the talk show with a well made mini-drama. Two characters, Dilip and Dinesh made a different life choice. Dilip’s family chose to have a child. He slaved his whole life to pay for the mounting expenses. Dinesh’s family decided to remain childfree. They lived comfortably with double income, traveled the world and enjoyed life. It is a short drama. But it ended with a poignant finale.

How much does it cost? Are we really asking the wrong question? Perhaps we ought to consider other things, like what is the meaning of life.

Throughout the modern era, the world is searching for ways to build strong economies and thriving communities. Different forms of government, from communist’s state controlled governments, liberal capitalists to welfare states have all tried. Many developed countries already have welfare payment for those who need it. How is universal basic income transformative from what comes before?

Some said the main distinction is it provides for everyone without conditions. It simplifies the system by removing the mean test and reduces the administration cost. I am afraid this differentiates it in a bad way. Instead of the poor, most money is now paid to middle or high income earners. The expense is multiplied. Yet the benefit is minimal. A small amount of cash does not improve the lives of middle and high income earners the way it does for the poor.

How much funding is required? Where do they come from? I often hear of vague ideas like automation and AI will unleash immense productivity, then people can enjoy the economic output with less labor. Presumption of abundance. This future would be an interesting topic for SciFi writers and philosophers to ponder. But UBI will be the largest government cash payout program in human history, it cannot be based on the presumption of abundance alone.

Take a look at the reality on the ground. No government, save some oil states like Qatar, is awash with money. Throughout the developed countries, economic growth has slowed, the population is aging. Our existing welfare system is already under stress. This difficulty is the direct cause of the social unrest and government instability in France today. If we struggle to sustain the welfare system we currently have, how can we dramatically expand it into UBI?

Left-wing intellectuals are often guilty of idealistic thinking. They are infatuated with the utopian vision but barely exercise any critical thinking. So UBI is sold as the scheme to provide everyone with basic needs, freedom and stability, much like “Let them eat cake” will be a realistic plan to save everyone from famine.

The change creates a lot of confusing news headlines. Some say Canada freezes immigration, a very different message than the 20% reduction from the officials. Latest news says Canada achieved almost zero growth in the 2nd quarter. Can anyone immigrate to Canada anymore today?

To clear up facts from confusions, I find RBC’s statistics most useful. The chart below shows 10 years of quarterly population change, broken down to the three components – natural growth, net immigration, and net non-permanent residents. After the COVID pause in 2020, there is a substantial jump in population growth. This is mainly made up of non-permanent residents, mostly as international students. This jump is what causes stress and government reaction.

In a stable world, the net non-permanent residents number should be near zero. This does not mean no new people coming in. But they are offset by the exit of the same number of people from a few years. The large number of net non-permanent residence jumps means the inflow has increased substantially over the outflow, breaking the stable circulation. Non-permanent residents now make up a larger portion of the population of about 7.1%.

Nevertheless, these increases are by definition non-permanent (assuming they eventually leave). If increasing inflow causes population increase, then throttling the inflow to under the outflow will drain the population. This is just what happened. Indeed, Canada achieved near zero population growth by engineering and net outflow of non-permanent residents, probably by curbing the student permits. Even this outflow is short term. Once the influx from around 2022 is drained, the inflow and outflow should return to balance.

When we think of moving to Canada, we are thinking of permanent immigration rather than short term study. The net immigration target has also reduced by 20%. But it is definitely not zero. The door to Canada is not closed. Quite the contrary, after the reduction from the 2022 peak, immigration is still higher than 10 years ago. The immigration target in 2026 is 380,000, or 0.9% of the population. This growth rate is still high, on par with high growth countries like India.

Zero population growth is a news gimmick, a temporary state that does not reflect the long term plan. A better way to describe Canada’s policy is a correction to the post COVID aggressive growth, dialing back to a more sustainable but still high level of growth.

This is a cautionary tale to other countries. Aggressive change causes social stress and backlash. Rather than making abrupt starts and stops, it would have been better to pursue a more sustainable target. In the long run, the destiny is clear. It will be a world of immigrants and multiculturalism. It is best to find a smooth and steady path toward there.

Googling led me to discover some articles where I was quoted. They did not reach out to me first. They just copied what I said. Usually these are from personal websites or unestablished media.

I have also appeared in established media. That’s because I’ve sent them my opinions. Usually I don’t get any response back. I assume they were not interested in using them. This is fine. They probably receive a lot of submissions and only publish very few of them.

But only from Google did I find out some were actually published. For example, this is a letter I wrote in 2023 (behind a paywall).

Cut the red tape

There are many proposals for reviving San Francisco’s anemic downtown. One day it is bringing in biotech labs. The next day it’s artificial intelligence companies. Or, just convert offices to residential buildings.

The truth is, it is not for the city to pick winning businesses. The city should focus on infrastructure and good governance.

The main thing that the city government should do now is to fix its byzantine regulations, the Kafkaesque bureaucracy that forces people to spend years opening a restaurant and inflates the cost to build a public toilet to $1.7 million.

When people are allowed to make changes and do things, creativity and ideas will come.

Pretty sensible opinion, don't you think? Why didn’t they send me a note? a short thank you? if they were going to use it?

In another case, a reporter has interviewed me. The San Francisco united school district (SFUSD) was embroiled in a lot of controversies at the time. As a parent in SFUSD, I voiced my concern to the reporter. After the phone interview, they even wanted to send a photographer to take a picture of me and my son. My son was not available. So I offered myself for photography. They passed.

My interview was not printed the next day, nor the day after. I assume they ended up not using it.

I only found out from Google that it was actually printed. This is how it turned out

S.F. school board strips Lowell High of its merit-based admissions system

“I don’t know what the San Francisco public school board is doing,” Wai Yip Tung, who has two children in the district, told The Chronicle this week. “I’ve lost trust in them. Are children the priority? I just don’t feel it’s a priority to them.”

Are these harsh remarks my own words? Did I mean it? Yes, kind of, but also not entirely. The subject of the interview is the prolonged school closure during Covid. Children could not go to school for more than one year, far longer than what is necessary for Covid prevention. Parents were particularly angry at the school board for their lack of commitment and sense of urgency to reopen the schools. This is the context of my criticism.

The Lowell high school admission change is trivial compared to the school closure. While I disapprove of the change, it isn't something I care so much for me to berate SFUSD in public. That's why I did not find my interview before. It did not occur to me that it should appear there.

An unpopular school district. A testimonial from an angry parent. For better or for worse, I have made a public statement. Other media used my quote indirectly. San Francisco Examiners has picked it up. Even down in Orange county, I become the voice of dissatisfied parents in the troubled school district.

My son is still in SFUSD school. I wish I didn't appear so negative about them in public. Nevertheless, I don’t have a good defense for them either. After the parents pushed out the school board’s worst ideologues, the district became less dysfunctional. It started to focus more on education. But many political, financial, and cultural problems still remain. True improvements are still hard to find.

The story revolves around the three central characters. The couple Lam (Jacky Cheung) and Man-Ching (Anita Mui) lived a modest but harmonious life with their two teenage sons. Until he was tempted by the rebellious student Wu (Karena Lam), the normal life they built over the years were at risk of unraveling.

Classical Chinese literature is hardly a favorite subject of the teenage students who just want to be cool. As their teacher, Lam tried hard to make it relevant and interesting. Perhaps he wants to inspire them to develop a true love and appreciation of Chinese literature just like his.

It is not clear how it started, maybe it was only a girly fantasy. Wu loves his teacher. And she acts flirtatiously toward him.

For this role, newcomer Karena Lam won the best supporting actress in the Hong Kong Film Awards. They must have been mistaken. She, not Anita Mui, should be the main actress. Wu’s character stands out in the whole film. She was audacious beyond her years. Uninhibited, she pursues him, she mocks him, she is a free spirit. Unmotivated in her study, she is nevertheless worldly and self-assured.

Lam, an upright person, duty-bound to his wife and children, is he even capable of going astray? Her cute face, her flirting, does he have desire? His restraint, is there any exception?

The film makes skillful use of flashbacks and memory fragments to tell a parallel story across generations, slowly revealing many family secrets. It very much reminds me of another great film of the same era, Yi Yi by Edward Yang. They successfully created such depth beneath the main narrative.

Classical Chinese poetry, a motif of the film, connects the characters and brings a resolution to the story. These 1,000 year old poems immortalized the passion from antiquity and are still being recited to this day. In “July Rhapsody”, the story of an ordinary life interrupted by a torrent of passion can perhaps be made unforgettable by this film.

This serious accusation hit me close to home. From 2018 to 2019, I was a software engineer working in the Safety team in Uber. I have worked on some of these projects mentioned and I am familiar with many others. We have deployed numerous systems. While they cannot prevent crime 100%, they have made an impact. These were the product of deep research and tireless labor from many talented teams. I am proud to be a part of them.

This is the other side of the story that was minimized by the New York Times in favor of the greedy corporate narrative. I want to tell you this side of the story.

In 2017, Dara Khosrowshahi became Uber’s new CEO. Safety was raised as one of the company’s top priorities. I wasn’t naive. I regarded these messages in part as corporate propaganda. Nevertheless, I decided to answer the call and transferred to the safety team.

Once I joined them, I was quickly convinced that we were in fact taking safety very seriously. Our group is officially the Safety and Insurance Group. From the outside, it is easy to portray Uber as growth obsessed, chasing those $10 fares at any cost. But we have other important priorities. Our goal is to minimize those $1 million insurance claims. With a company as big as Uber, insurance turns out to be a significant expense (Uber uses a combination of self-insurance and commercial insurance).

This corporate structure aligns business interests with safety. You may not believe it. Even in your health insurance or car insurance company, some people are working to improve safety on your behalf . Their financial outcome depends on it.

Journalists emphasize concrete personal stories to build narratives. We data scientists, statisticians and actuaries, work in a world of uncertainties, of probabilities. We try to manipulate the system to improve the odds, a few percent here, and a few percent there. They add up to a better outcome overall. But we have little control over any specific incidents.

This article approaches risk management from a more black and white perspective. Uber was accused of hindering the use of effective matching algorithms, presumably to maintain profit. Saying Uber still dispatched trips identified as high-risk sounds very irresponsible. But take a closer look, if a regular trip has a 0.01% chance to result in sexual assault. A high risk dispatch may be 10 times more risky, i.e. a 0.1% chance that things can go wrong. 99.9% of the time it still turns out just fine. Given these odds, the right decision is not really obvious.

We face dilemmas like this all the time. Algorithms are repeatedly tested and fine tuned. They are only used when it can be shown doing a lot more good than harm. Not every algorithm becomes successful.

The Women Driving Women program seems like a brilliant idea. By matching women with only women drivers, it protects them from unscrupulous men. The New York Times holds it against Uber for not adopting it. But there is a fatal flaw. In reality, driving is predominantly a male occupation. Males make up over 90% of the driver base in many cities. With only a small number of women drivers, women will have a hard time finding a ride at all, if this is a requirement. If this program appeases the safety critics, it will enrage the gender critics.

The biggest misconception is that by rejecting these projects, Uber disregards safety completely. The reality is these are only a few of the many projects developed. It is inevitable that some end up being delayed or rejected. But many more are successfully working in production. Altogether, they target safety issues from multiple different angles. Even a rejected matching algorithm can become the foundation of the next generation algorithm, with each generation improving upon the previous.

The article touched on several of those tools, but they are regarded dismissively because they did not help in those cases. I want to clear this up. While the tools cannot eliminate 100% of the problem, they all contributed. Something as simple as driver review indeed provides useful information. Every trip is also tracked and recorded in a database. These trip records provide such valuable information that law enforcement routinely request data to help fight crime.

One particular tool that left an impression on me is the RideCheck. When the system detects an unusual event, a possible car crash, it proactively reaches out to the rider to check on them. This is a first in the industry. Anywhere else, if something goes wrong in a taxi ride, you call the police yourself. No RideCheck. No one looks out for you. Considerable effort has been put into its development. Not only does it detect possible problems, it also cannot cause too many false alarms that undermine its reliability.

This feature has also appeared in the article. Alas, it did not change the outcome. But it was showcased internally when it was first used in the field. A real life trip ran into a minor distress. No harm was done. But it triggered the RideCheck and an agent reached out. The recorded conversation was replayed in the demonstration (with the rider’s consent).

We heard the rider was initially confused to receive a call. Then she was pleasantly surprised that Uber noticed something happened from afar. She became very grateful that the agent checked on her. The agent was relieved that they were alright. The case was closed in a happy circumstance.

I saw the ability of this tool to reach out to people at the moment when they are in need. I know this recording was chosen for internal PR purposes. Still, to hear it work in a real life incident, it made me feel slightly emotional.

I was only building software in Uber, nothing heroic. But if my work helps save only one life, it is a very meaningful job.

(My letter originally submitted to New York Times on August 10th, 2025)

Someone brought up an urban myth that Vancouver has the largest Chinatown. I doubt this is true. San Francisco’s Chinatown is more well known. New York’s is likely to be far larger. Statistics aside, I wonder if Chinatown is still relevant in the twenty-first century at all. Today, Chinese residences and Chinese businesses are everywhere. They are hardly confined in Chinatown. The 2010 census reports one in five residents in San Francisco are Chinese. With Chinese dispersed everywhere, is Chinatown just a nostalgic idea?

To remember how things were, we have to go back many generations. Chinese immigrants, coming to a new world unfamiliar with the language and culture, find it beneficial to settle in an ethnic enclave. There it was easier to find jobs and mutual support. Elsewhere in the city, discrimination and restrictive law was used to keep the unwelcome Chinese out. With the population confined, Chinese businesses, restaurants, groceries, and cultural institutions were established to serve them. Chinatown is formed due to confinement and social isolation.

In contrast, today’s society is far more multicultural and integrated. Chinese is no longer an exotic culture. The third or fourth generation immigrants are well integrated into mainstream society. The educated new immigrants bring skills and are far more adaptable than before. Chinese businesses, like everyone else, expand out of the urban core to the suburbs. How much money you have, rather than who you are, decide where you can live.

Today’s Chinese businesses blossomed widely. They are modern and convenient. It is no longer necessary to go to Chinatown to shop for ethnic food or go to cultural events. What is the function of Chinatown then? San Francisco has built a Chinatown partly for tourism. But even this prospect is greatly impaired by the post COVID tourist slum.

Being Chinese, I have a soft spot for Chinatown and its history. But I am afraid its future is grim. With its traditional function largely supplanted, it loses the economic resources to renew itself. The blight and urban decay, a heartbreaking sight in Vancouver but is also visible in San Francisco, further put off affluent Chinese and dim the tourism prospect.

Cities are a living organism. They are always in flux. Chinatown, once a unique and bustling enclave, is not destined to remain forever. Should I witness its demise, it will bring sorrow to my heart.

Hong Kong investors’ advocate David Webb was diagnosed with prostate cancer a few years before. He has since winded down his writing and activism. Now in face of imminent death, he anticipates it calmly with no regrets. In this BBC interview, he reflects on his life. I quote some of his interview

I'm glad that I did all the work I did for the public good
It is much better than to dying a rich man without having made any contribution
I think anyone in my fortunate circumstance of not needing employment
having the financial security
to say what they think
and having the skill set and intelligence to do it
should do that
They should speak out and work on public projects

Those having the skills and intelligence, should apply them for public good. This is David Webb’s parting words.

Only until the end that I see something more, that life is a delicate balance between disciplined versus bacchanal, habitual versus impulsive, composed versus vigorous, routine versus spontaneous, calm versus liveliness.

For those who learned to live our lives acting good, is there more to life that we have missed out?

(Spoiler alert: this post contains much plot development)

It started off as a transactional relationship between the exotic dancer Annie and the ultra rich brat Ivan. On an impulse, they got married. The family back in Russia were shocked by the news and wasted no time to break them up.

This story cannot have a happy ending. Had his parents not intervene, this marriage would crash and burn on its own. The novelty and sex would quickly wear out. No sooner would Ivan get tired of her and find new interests. The truth is that they are still children who don’t know true intimacy. Their love and marriage is a mere delusion. I find the Las Vegas backdrop very fitting, a setup of a grand and glamorous illusion.

Feisty and fierce, Annie defended herself alone in front of the brutes sent by the family. She repeatedly asserts herself as Ivan’s wife, an identity outright dismissed by the handlers. To them, she is a prostitute. When his overbearing mother finally arrived from Russia to settle this personally, she didn’t even acknowledge her. After searching for Ivan all night, he was found enjoying a lap dance with another stripper, dead drunk. Despite her frantic effort to connect with him, he barely gave Annie any thought. She thought it was love. It never was.

Ironically, some media describe it as a Cinderella story. Anora is too real to be a fairy tale.

The last point is crucial. No matter how good the editor is, they often don’t do as well in file management. This means organizing the articles into folders, finding them, reorganizing them, and deleting unneeded crumbs. There are tools I use for years that do this job really well. Unfortunately, some editors manage the files themselves inside their own database, thus not interoperable with file management tools.

One of such tools is Google Doc. I have slowly drawn to Google Doc due to its superb spelling and grammar correction function. (I am still writing this piece in Google Doc and then copying it over). Since I make on average one grammatical mistake every other sentence, the grammar checker is a godsend for me. Unfortunately, their file management is the most horrible. It is basically just a linear list that you have little control. The main order is the last modified time. If I open an old file and accidentally add one space, it rises to the top in front of all other docs. There is no way to push it back. If I want to skim and find a file, I have to open it and then close it, which needs multiple clicks and is slow. Deleting is clunky. There is no usable folder structure. Google seems to think you should not organize by folder but to use the search function exclusively. This has never worked for me. The result, once I have added a small number of documents, I start to lose them because it is so hard to find them.

This is my new tool set

• Google Drive - for cloud storage

• DriveSync - Android app to sync to Google Drive

• Markor - a markdown editor on Android

• Total Commander - an old school, Norton Commander style file manager

The documents are managed as regular files. It also works with my own backup system that I am already using. I use a regular text editor (VSCode) on PC and Markor on Android. But it can be any markdown editor. Because it is just editing files on the disk, I can swap it with a different editor if a better one comes along.

Total Commander is an old school file manager I cannot do without even after all these years. I am slowly transfering the dozen of Google Doc documents to individual markdown files. As I move them, I am rediscovering much of my writing that has become “lost” in Google doc.

BBC - Who will replace Boris Johnson?

I do not know Rishi Sunak. What stands out is he is of South Asian origin. Besides Sunak, there were two more minority contenders, Suella Braverman and Nadhim Zahawi, are of minority origin. They were voted out. But that made the original panel of contenders rather diverse. The current London mayor Sadiq Khan is a South Asian. Sunak could surpass him to become the first South Asian to lead the entire country. Would people have foreseen that 2022 would be the year for the UK to select a non-white leader?

I was taken by the scene where Dale’s and his mistress Darcey shared the stage together. Dale was a gifted but washed up musician, until Darcey showed up in Paris unannounced. She, the woman who believes in him with no reservation, drew him back to life. They were intimate on the stage. Affectionate glances were exchanged as if they were the only people in the world. This is the scene where Lonette McKee performed the soulful song ‘How Long Has this Been Going On?’

Anton was a doctor serving aboard in an rural African field hospital. Back home in a small Danish town, he raises two sons Elias and Morten with a shared custody. Christian’s dad Claus brought him back to their native home in Denmark from London after his mother was deceased. He befriended the feeble Elias and plotted a fight back against the school bully. The film contrasts the violence of war in Africa with the more mundane skirmishes in Denmark. Both stories question our approach in resolving conflicts and serving justice.

To put it simply, I see two justice systems. I call them primal justice and enlightened justice. Primal justice is the old way. The key value is power and dominance. Tit for tat is a just response to aggression. In modern times, our enlightened justice disavows violence. We value peace, fairness and collaboration and fairness. Law and police are created to resolve conflict and make peace. Today, we view primal justice as brutal and horrifying. We are to evolve away from the barbaric past to an enlightened system.

The morality is challenged when Christian violently attacks Sofus in retaliation for his bullying. The logic was obvious to him. He has to flight back to establish himself, or he would risk being considered weak and falling prey to bullying. Tit for tat, a perfectly just action in the primal justice system. His father reprimanded him. Yet neither the parents nor the school can effectively police their children. Bullying is a fact of life. Primal justice rules in this world. Christian has a dark character that can be quite chilling. Yet his morality is consistent in this system.

This logic applies to the society level as well. There is no better example than Russia’s invasion of Ukraine today. Russia attacks because they can. The plan is simply to apply superior force to dominate weaker neighbors. All the protests and sanctions from Western government and the UN have limited effect. At the end of the day, if Ukraine prevails, it is due to the Ukrainian people’s valor and sacrifice in defending their country. We might think we are living in an enlightened world. But power still rules. Perhaps we are not as evolved as we think.

In a smaller arena, I reflect on how conflict is managed within my family. As a father of two small children, I am the arbiter of petty fights. I taught them that things shall be shared among all fairly, fighting is not right, and instead of hitting the other to take back what was yours, you should call in adults to settle disputes. Yet fights still happened. The little brother was more often the one who started, never mind being the weaker one. Despite my lectures, admonitions and threats, aggression would break out between them. At times, I decided to use the ultimate means, by force. I snapped the little brother’s hand for beating others.

This might sound counterintuitive. By snapping him, I was protecting him. His brother was angry. He was going to retaliate and he was much bigger. Snapping him would not do him real harm. Getting punched might. To keep peace, I have to deliver sufficient punishment to the offender. If it is unconvincing, he might believe the only way to settle things is to fight back himself.

In a similar way, In a Better World ponders on the limitation and failure of our institutions in maintaining justice. The school investigated and settled the students’ fight by having them apologize to each other and shake hands. It felt like a ritual that’s forced. It kept peace on the surface but did little to confront the underlying social dynamic. Anton was snapped by an aggressive man in a dispute set off by a playground fight. He refused to fight back or to call the police. Instead he challenged him to explain his action, not backing down even though he was slapped again. In Anton’s mind, he has stood up to him. The children were unconvinced. In their eyes, it was an ineffective move that did nothing to deter the impulsive man. In Africa, the warlord Big Guy terrorized the population with impunity, all because he has the fire power. Where is justice?

Before we went away with a dark view, I noticed a few details that were worth a note. Elias intervened in a conflict to avoid harm to a mother and children. It is an honor code to cause no harm to the defenseless and innocent. Not all bad guys are equally bad. The Big Guy is more despised because he sadistically tortured women. Even Christian has a sense of guilt. This set him apart from psychopathic villains like Vladimir Putin.

As much as we believe enlightened justice should rule over primal justice, does it succeed in the real world? The film uses a series of dramas to confront us with a reality we are uncomfortable to acknowledge. The enlightened justice system is limited and failed often. Even today, the primal justice system plays a big and often the more decisive role.