It’s not just uncomfortable. It’s also the awareness that the anxiety was irrational and unneeded.

But I felt the deep pit in my stomach anyway. I felt its dark grip—not ever overwhelming, always manageable—on my body, spreading and taking hold of all actions I wanted to take. Like a spider seeping its venom and paralyzing all the nerves that controlled muscles. I could see and hear, but inside, I felt trapped.

In my dream, like many real-life situations, I was in a public space. Surrounded by people I wanted to impress. And whatever the event was, an opportunity suddenly open for my input. Was it make a valid suggestion? Was it to ask a question? I don’t remember.

What I do remember is the dark spider paralyzing those muscles to stand up and speak. A bright light wanted to say something, to shout and release the ideas. But it was trapped. And in my body, to appease the dark spider, I soothed the dark spider by telling myself that it wasn’t important anyway. And the bright light grew softer and softer. Until it was dimmed into nothingness, leaving a small piece of regret behind.

In Brazil, unlike many places, people were satisfied with my answer to where are you from?

I say “Americana” if I want to establish that I speak English fluently and am unsure whether the speaker even understands English. I say “San Francisco” if the speaker speaks English fluently to differentiate myself from other English speakers and to suggest my interests (food), world perspective (progressive in the sense of San Francisco), and professional background (techy).

It was one of the few countries where I wasn’t questioned about my origin. Where limited by their fluency in our “common” language—be it sparse words in English or gestures, they wanted to ask “where are you really from?” Sometimes, I would play dumb and insist that I was American or San Franciscan. But from time to time, I do say, “my parents grew up in Hong Kong” to appease people’s interests. And no, I don’t speak Japanese.

Because of that, I felt at ease in Brazil. While in Sao Paulo, during a lunch break from the conference, I wandered on my own (probably to the fear of fellow attendees who have been educated that SP is a very dangerous place) to local malls. Within minutes, I found myself ushered up escalators to sprawling food courts. English potatoes, the Brazilian style of Japanese food, the grill bbq, the sandwiches, the hamburguesas, the American fast food, the everything. As I walked, there were Asians. They had the ABC look. The kind that wasn’t quite fobby—their manner of walking and speaking was very Western, or perhaps, here clearly South American. Expressive, emotion, nothing held back. But I knew that staring at them, they were at their core, very Brazilian as they chatted with coworkers in fluent Portuguese. Most likely gossiping about work, about their colleagues, about the usual things that I would on a lunch break. I really blended in. And even too, throughout my trip, Brazilians asked me for directions, for confirmation (is this the right line?) and the usual things you would ask strangers. I would always have to answer hesitantly with my poor command of Portuguese: falo ingles

But only twice. And although it seems quite racist, two dark-skinned Brazilians came up to me on two separate occasions and said something. Almost leering at me making me grasp my belongings closer to my chest. The first time I had to ask him repeatedly what he said until I picked up the word that seemed to mean Japanese. The second time the tour guide had to explain that I didn’t speak Japanese and was not Japanese. “Why would he ask that?” I said annoyed.

“Because there’s many Japanese in Brazil,” she said and shrugged.

I wish people would stop and wonder first.

Transportation
Taxis: 4
Taxi called by 99 taxis, the uber of Brazil: 1
Planes (including layovers): 11
Subway: ~8
Buses: 22
Tour buses: 3
Airport buses: 2
Failed attempts to take airport buses: 2
Failed attempts to take subway: 1
Cable Cars: 2
Train up a mountain: 1
Rental car: 4 days
Walking: Moderate in comparison to trips in Italy, Turkey, and New York
Boats: 5
Boats under crushing waterfalls: 2
Passenger ferries: 2
Kayak: 1
Bikes (that were so-so quality): 4

Living Quarters
Hotel: 2
Airbnb: 3
Airbnb that turned out to be a hostel: 1
Pousada: 1
Locations with loud music: 1
Location that lacked AC: 1
Locations with ceiling fan: 3
Locations without breakfast: 1

Activities
Beaches (touching the sand and dipping into the water): 5
Average hours of sleep per day: 5
Times Chris and I were separated for more than an hour: 4
Bitten by mosquitos and the insane black fly: 30+
Expensive meal of $100+ USD per person: 1
Meals less than $10 USD per person: Many
Time tricked into buying something unnecessary: 1

I never thought about my ethnicity that much until I visited Vancouver as an adult a few years ago.

My parents are from Hong Kong. That is, at least, my mom was born and raised there. My dad, like many Chinese at the time, arrived in Hong Kong as a child, fleeing the Cultural Revolution with his family. He has faint memories of mainland China, barely recognizable for concrete real memories. Whatever the case, the language came with them to the United States and growing up, that was the dialect I knew.

It is language of the local chinatown—in Oakland and in San Francisco. But the big difference was to all the people we encountered there was that after we finished the grocery shopping, the dim summing, and hob nobbing…we returned to suburbia. There was barely any Cantonese classmates at my school and granted, it was mostly Caucasian. But the few Chinese classmates, they were from Taiwan. Rich, elaborate and we spoke English of course.

The few that were Cantonese were the ones that made some deal to attend the schools in my area. Whether it was to use a local address to qualify for education even though their house was miles away in a lower income neighborhood. Or that their parents still worked in blue collar jobs unlike the professional jobs of engineer and nurse that my parents worked.

But the differences in my own subtle privilege never came to light until I was in Vancouver. I had always referred to the city as Hong Kong 2. Visiting at the age of 10 and 20 with my family, the city was so annoyingly Asian. It felt like Hong Kong and I didn’t want to be there, being dragged from Chinese restaurants to Chinese restaurants to Chinese relatives to Chinese relatives. But when I returned at the age of 30, it was different. I was around people who were yes Cantonese, and from Hong Kong, but they were highly educated and embedded well in society. They were not stuck in blue collar jobs, forever hoping that someone will break through the barrier. They already had broken that barrier.

Educated people beget educated people.

Perhaps.

I learned that I unconsciously seek people like myself. If I don’t find any, I feel awful and cannot explain why. And I don’t mean just people who look like me, but people of similar background. It explains why when in Berlin, I was stuck with a very uncomfortable otherness that I couldn’t even articulate until I set foot on US soil. That nearly all minorities, even Chinese, were behind service encounters asking me in German, Did I want one or two?

In the usual Jenn-like way of resolving conflict, we took a walk outside. We went up the hills, around the blocks, and back around the underpass. Walking much like driving is one of the few activities where two people can be “together”, but not necessarily require eye contact.

I knew this, because she wasn’t comfortable with eye contact. But I liked her innocent, childlike nature. The kind that was giddy and excited. I could see our male colleagues swoon whenever they work with her—her cuteness robbing their hearts.

I wasn’t jealous of that per se. Rather all I wanted was her friendship. At first, it was gossip about work. But it quickly became crushes and non-crushes, dislikes, likes. We imed each other constantly, our words piercing our laptops through gchats, illustrating vivid stories and our mundane lives. I thought we could be really close friends.

And then one day, it wasn’t. I still don’t remember the exact cause. Was it when I balked at a piece of advice and took it to mean that she thought of me less? Was it when I took photos of her on my phone, she immediately shied away? Or perhaps my recommendations appeared like demands rather than a concerned friend? We were angry and we were essentially stomping across the concrete sidewalk.

“Why?” I demanded. “Why this? Why are you so hard to reach?”

I felt my insides crumbling. It felt too painful to fix and yet there we were. I pushed her to answer, unsatisfied with the silence. She said finally, “I don’t like that you make me think so much. It makes me too aware of myself. I learn things about myself that I don’t want to know. It’s uncomfortable.”

I have returned from a few weeks in Brazil, and the few things that have stayed with me are the food (from bad to good), the Portuguese (tudo bem?!), the culture, and the bug bites.

Floating outside Rio’s Botanical Gardens

The trip, of course, reawakened the desire to live abroad. To travel…but then again…

And so here are the things I learned:

The curly-haired boy thumps in a dino t-shirt and Nike shorts up from the warm suffocating oven-like downstairs with its childlike stuffed animals to the silent bedroom and the laptops humming on the desk and its surface of wood hidden by tchotkes, and pushes through the piles of watched blu-rays, searching for the quick sale, ignoring the roommate’s questions of unnecessary curiosity, through eBay and Craigslist and ecommerce apps growing on the mobile phone toward the silent girl tapping her fingers on a black cushioned chair and smiles at her and looks at the eyes from the girl at the dining table of his home.

“We need you,” they say.

I falter when I hear that. I hear that I am needed, and my heart tickles. A burst of serotonin has touched my brain, and my reaction is to want more. I want to hear that I am needed, and I’ll do anything to hear people say that again.

So what I am doing is making people feel like I am needed?

This is the addiction of work and jobs. The reason why people can’t pull away. They want to be part of something, something greater. And when people call for help, our instinct inside says, go for it, let’s get more of that

It’s risky, because I know that it’s not what I want. But then I hear that I am needed, and I stay. How can I deny that they appreciated me? How can I say that I don’t want to help you anymore? How can I deny that people would suffer if I wasn’t there? There’s a superiority complex and unhealthy dependency at play.

I see it clearly. But I say that I will go. Eventually.

When I hear that, I want to respond, “But you can too!”

Everybody can, I think. I don’t carry luck. It wasn’t within me to have the opportunities appear to me.

You can too.

“That’s not a vice!” a manager after I told him my only vice: sugar.

I always recount that moment, because I felt embarrassed that I had no deep dark secrets like smoking, drinking, or porn. Nothing that the public would be happy to shame without regard to individuality. Sugar? Everybody does it.

But earlier this year, I agreed to help out a startup where I knew some people from previous gigs. It fulfilled one of my requirements for freelance jobs: working with people I know. And it also fulfilled another important one: impacting people beyond the 1% (at least in the near term).

Their pitch: We help people with chronic conditions. Starting with diabetes.

Going into this, I barely knew anything about diabetes. Beyond what I know that Stacy from The Babysitters Club endured. Yes, my grandmother did pass away due to complications from diabetes and my grandfather did have type 2 diabetes for the longest time. But I didn’t know much beyond besides the fact that during special dinner, my mom would say “just have a small piece of cake” to my grandmother. Just a little bit.

And so I dived into the project. Because of my role, I spend hours upon hours talking to people with diabetes. I ask them who they are, what they do everyday, and why do they do that. I take time to understand their choices, their behavior and their motivations. And in it, I hear cries of help, sadness, but hope always for the future.

One said to me, “I want to live happily for the next decade. I don’t want to be an old person.”

Silently with a sympathetic smile, I nod. I can’t truly empathize beyond understanding now what my grandparents had to suffer.

But then all the words, all the statements, all the facts that I learned start touching what I do everyday. In food, I always believe in moderation. I don’t believe in diets. I believe in enjoying what we eat—it should be treated as a pleasure of life, a privilege of being human. Yes, have that piece of candy. Yet, have that piece of cake and ice cream. I believe in savoring delicious food, to extend its lifespan as much as possible on the tongue. I believe in eating slow and being choosy about ingredients.

I have always rejected the guilt that comes with food. Just eat what you like and don’t eat what you don’t like. But perhaps that’s the rub. I have rarely loved bread or even most carbs. Nowadays too, I don’t like the sweetest things, the syrupy headache-inducing things. I love things that are sweet and fresh. Juicy and fruit.

But learning about diabetes and becoming aware of how my body reacts, because that’s what these people do. They feel the sweats, they feel the exhaustion, they feel the headaches when their glucose levels are too high and low. I am moving beyond sympathy and can feel it in my body. And the worry increases. Maybe I will pass out too? Maybe I will have a seizure? Maybe I won’t be able to see?

There’s a phenomenon for this, of course. The kind that doctors regularly get when they listen to their patients. Be cold and distant is probably a defense mechanism. But I can’t do that. In talking to people with diabetes, I want to be warm and welcoming (unless of course, they’re tricking me and pretending to have diabetes just to be part of the studies). So I am there, listening, constantly listening. Then I eat and think: did I eat too much? Will my pancreas fail on me?

But my head feels fine. I see vividly. And the tiredness is due to the heat or probably working all day. I am okay, right? I am okay.