Finding My Trace in the Internet
The other day I was googling myself just to see what the Internet said about me. I am not a well known person in any way. But I did leave a lot of traces on the Internet. My own website is a personal blog of my various interests (which is down for the moment). I am also somewhat outspoken and made a lot of comments on social media. I said so much that sometimes a new person I meet would recognize me as the Wai Yip whom they notice from the community website.
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.