Huang Family Newsletter, July 2012

 Lee and the kids spent a week in San Jose with Lee’s parents.  We hiked a lot, saw Lee’s sister and brother-in-law as well as a bunch of old friends, and did a day at the beach and boardwalk in Santa Cruz. 

Upon our return, the kids started summer camp at the Y, which means a lot of swimming, field trips, and other fun activities.  We all also enjoyed celebrating their cousin Nathan’s 3rd birthday out in the suburbs.

Amy is slogging along at work, unfortunately saddled with having to wear the protective splint on her ankle one more month.  Lee continues to juggle a number of work projects, and finished up teaching his summer course at Fels. 

Lazy Linking, 74th in an Occasional Series

What I liked lately on the Internets:

74.1. An unintended consequence of the "one child" rule in China: slacker twenty-somethings who spend an exorbitant proportion of their income on fashion.

74.2. All work and no play makes . . . the Baining.

74.3. You think SEPTA smells?  In SF, they have to deal with poo in the escalators.

74.4. This cover story in Time about active duty soldiers committing suicide is absolutely heart-wrenching.

74.5. Carly Rae Jepsen + Arrested Development = "Call Me Maeby." 

Preaching Next Month

I will be preaching at Woodland Presbyterian Church next month, on Sunday, August 12.  The morning service starts at 10:30am.  I will be speaking out of the 22nd chapter of the book of Genesis, and my sermon title is "Reclaiming Love, Obedience, and Worship: God’s Goodness in the Midst of the Sacrifice of Our Most Cherished Things."  I hope you'll come and join us.

For a Good Cuz

Kudos to my cousin's son Ryan for setting up a tennis program for special needs kids in SoCal: "Special Needs Youth Get a Shot at Tennis." Ryan, who is all of 14 years old, conceived of the program after doing some volunteer work and seeing a need that no one was meeting.  With his mother's help, he stepped up.  Well done!

Lazy Linking, 73rd in an Occasional Series

Stuff I liked lately on the Internets:

73.1. An extraordinary amount of time, practice, and failures go into a Chris Rock comedy routine.

73.2. Nothing against nature, but if you want to get more creative, go to the biggest cities you can.

73.3. What firefighters do (in order of frequency): (1) respond to medical calls, (2) respond to false alarms, (3) respond to real alarms.

73.4. So that's it?  There are no more tech innovations to be had?  I sure hope not.  (You could also label this link, "Peter Thiel lays the smackdown on Eric Schmidt.")

73.5. Even Victoria's Secret models don't like when Victoria's Secret models are Photoshopped.

Captain Kacela Needs Your Help

If you care about things like supporting young entrepreneurs and encouraging healthy body image, I encourage you to check out my friend Kamau Mshale's Indiegogo page, where he shares about his Captain Kacela project (he described it to me as "a statement on gender race and body image wrapped up in a space superhero drama"). There's all sorts of cool schwag that you can also get if you make an investment in this project, so get hooked up that way as well. Kudos to Kamau and please support this project!

What A Rainy Rocky Run Taught Me About Redemption

Yesterday morning, as I try to do two or three times each week, I headed out for a jog to the river and back, with the intention of arriving at the Y just as it opened at 6, lifting weights for about 20 minutes, and then jogging home.  As I left the house, I noticed it was darker than usual, but thought nothing more of it.  But within minutes, it started raining, and minutes after that it started pouring. 

By then, I was too far from home to turn around and too wet to think of ending up at the Y afterwards.  So I decided to lengthen my run, seeing that I could go longer and still get home earlier than usual since I was skipping the lifting.  Instead of running to the river, along the river trail, and back towards West Philadelphia, I went further into Center City, ran north to the Parkway, and the northwest to the Art Museum.  Running the “Rocky” steps in the pouring rain was highly satisfying. 

It took me several rounds of stuffing newspaper into my sneakers when I got home before they dried out, and my wife gave me the stink-eye a bunch of times for various puddles of rainwater throughout the house.  But running in the rain is invigorating. 

And instructive as well.  Earlier that morning I had read from the 4^th chapter of Paul’s 2^nd letter to the church in Corinth.  For many Christians, it is a well-known passage, and I had particularly savored verse 17: “For momentary, light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison.” 

Paul spends much of this chapter, and much of his whole letter, on this theme of suffering having a purpose.  But this verse really cuts to the quick.  Not only can we bear present suffering because of the promise of future glory, but somehow the present suffering helps produce the future glory. 

In other words, it is one thing to tell yourself that while now sucks, it isn’t forever and one day things will be awesome.  It is an entirely different thing to tell yourself that what sucks now is, in some strange way, directly producing what will be awesome later. 

If I see any positive attitude towards suffering in myself and my fellow Christians, it is almost always the former: “I will bear this current ordeal because it is temporary and what awaits me is great and lasting.”  I very rarely see the latter: “This current ordeal is necessary because it produces what is great and lasting.” 

In other words, many of us treat hardship as undesirable – “I suppose I have to go through this, but if I had my druthers I’d rather avoid it.”  This is an entirely wrong view of trials.  The great saints through the years knew better, and said things like “This is hard . . . but this is God’s will for me.  If I somehow could make it go away, I wouldn’t, because that would be less than whatever great thing God has for me through this.” 

Which brings me back to my rainy “Rocky Run.”  Rain is not without its downsides.  It floods basements, cancels picnics, and twice the big puddles it made almost caused me to sprain my ankle.  But it is temporary, and when it is over, the whole place feels cooler and fresher.  And, the good of rain isn’t just when it’s over.  Rain itself, of course, serves a vital purpose, watering our gardens and replenishing our reservoirs. 

There is, of course, a far better and more relevant example of God blessing us not just in spite of suffering but through the suffering itself.  In the redemption story, the suffering of Jesus is not an allegory of temporary anguish followed by eternal glory.  The temporary anguish itself produced the eternal glory, for it was the necessary exchange between the condemnation due us sinful men and the exaltation due a sinless Son. 

Paul’s words about “momentary, light affliction producing for us an eternal weight of glory far beyond all comparison” are fulfilled in the extreme in the life, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  In a very real sense, every affliction we encounter is, relatively speaking, momentary and light compared to what Jesus endured.  And, in a very real sense, every affliction we encounter is an opportunity to be connected to His momentary, light affliction, to be reminded that as His affliction produced an eternal weight of glory, so will ours. 

Whether it is a heavy downpour or something far more painful, sapping, and dark, your affliction need not be the end of your story.  And it need not be a purposeless thing worth only gutting through in order to get to the other side.  There is a way for it to have a purpose, for it to produce something glorious.  God did it with His own Son, and He can do it with you, His child, as well.

 

You'll Find Me Mostly Over at Econsult Next Week

I might be a little light here for the rest of the month, as I'll be handling social media responsibilities for Econsult for one week.  I'm going to try a few things that are new for the firm and new for me, so wish me luck!  And please chime in with advice, reactions, and links.  You can find stuff at our Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages.

From Center City to West Philly

Everyone's commute is a transition: from work to home, from the office setting to the family setting, from memos and meetings to housework and homework. In my case, there is another transition: from Center City to West Philly.

By day, I crunch numbers, meet with high-powered developers and high-ranking public officials, and think on hard problems with some of the brightest minds around. And then I pack up my stuff, hop on the subway, read a book or magazine for 10 minutes, and emerge at 52nd Street Station.  And it's clear I'm no longer in Kansas anymore.

While 52nd Street is many years past its prime, it is still a bustling commercial corridor. And the commerce begins as you exit the station. With hundreds of other passengers during rush hour, I walk through the gauntlet of vendors hawking various wares (DVDs, scents, taxi service), cross a busy auto street (Chestnut), and arrive at the West Philadelphia Y, which is swarming with camp kids and the parents who are there to pick them up.

I sign out my two, go to the gym to pick up one and the classrooms in the back to pick up the other, get their two scooters out of the locker room, and away we go. By now, we've mapped out a relatively smooth path home, but of course many of the sidewalks are cracked and raised, adding an element of danger to their ride. Some blocks are solid but others are sketchy, with higher concentrations of boarded-up homes and weed-choked front areas. Walnut Street is packed with cars heading westward out of town, and the sidewalks and stoops are also pretty busy, as kids and grown-ups are both home and socializing.

It's about a 20-minute walk home from the Y. As we putter down Walnut, the Center City skyline can be seen from a distance. It looks so far away.

My Wife the Blogger

Just months after setting up her own Twitter account, my wife is now dipping her toe in the blogger pool.  And she’s pulling no punches: her first post was about how trauma fundamentally affects the brain, and her second was about the Penn State sex abuse scandal.  Unflinching, smart, and considerate: now you know why I love her so.  Go to ShatteredGlass to read more.  

 

Urban Churches Are a Great Place to Make Friends

Here's another reason to join my church (or any other urban congregation): it's the ideal setting for making friends.

Friendship is, of course, an important part of everyone's life.  And the more and better friends you have, the happier you will be.  Well, according to a recent New York Times article, while it's harder to make friends the older you get, experts agree that there are three things you need in order to make friends: "Proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other."

Sounds like an urban church to me!  In urban settings, it is possible for congregants to live physically close to one another, and to bump into each other outside of formal church functions (on the sidewalks, at the grocery store, in the park).  And good churches foster, both in bigger (worship services) and smaller (small group Bible studies and in-home social gatherings) settings, opportunities to share intimately with one another.

Seeking truth, redemption, and relationship with God are obviously impetuses for getting involved in a church in a city near you.  Just remember that so is making friends.

Lazy Linking, 72nd in an Occasional Series

Stuff I liked lately on the Internets:

72.1. Convert to Christianity: it's cheaper.

72.2. Amazon isn't going to fight having to charge sales tax in states it doesn't have a presence in because it now wants to have a presence in more and more states, because it eventually wants to offer same-day delivery.  Retailers, you may tremble.

72.3. The next time you watch sports, make sure to check out different athletes' butts.

72.4. University City District is now making ads.

72.5. I am in the market for a new smartphone.  Samsung Galaxy SIII or HTC One X?  This may come down to Korea vs. Taiwan.

What the Penn State Scandal Teaches Me About How I Ought to Examine Myself

The recent release of the Freeh report has been a major news bombshell in this region, and justifiably so.  There is so much to say, and so much has been said.  One thing I wanted to share, even as my wife and I continue to digest more information and mull over all of the angles to this story, is to encourage folks to think about what in their life they would put ahead of doing the right thing.

I know it is easy to be outraged at the many people - from the very powerful to the relatively powerless - who knew or saw something and didn't do anything, and I am not excusing their silence.  But I am honest enough with myself that I can at least understand the reasons behind their lack of actions.  Being afraid to speak up, being so tied up with something that you'd rather protect its image than do the right thing, wanting to believe that someone didn't do what you've heard they did . . . these are all things that caused grievous harm to too many people, and yet these are all things I could see myself doing. 

And, in that situation, it would be wrong.  And so I urge you to examine yourself as I am urging myself to examine myself.  What is so important to me that, if put in a similar situation, I would hide and equivocate and divert and shrink back instead of doing the right thing?  For the people involved in this situation, it was good and reasonable things: wanting to keep your job, wanting to protect a respected leader, wanting to preserve the reputation of a hallowed institution.  And yet it was allegiance to those things that kept so many people from doing the right thing, with tragic consequences.

Please don't misunderstand what I am saying here.  People knew, and had the moral obligation to do something, and not only did they not, but they helped make it harder for something to be done.  The point I am making is not that this isn't reprehensible and disgusting and deeply disappointing - because it is all of those things and more - but that those involved did this because they failed to let go of their previous allegiances for the sake of the greater responsibility of stopping further harm from happening.  And those allegiances, while wrongly placed as more important than doing the right thing, were not themselves inherently bad things to have, just bad things to adhere to in light of what had transpired. 

When we take a good hard look inside ourselves to make sure we are right, it is usually to see if there are any wrong things about our lives - bad habits, sinful tendencies, latent evils - that we need to root out.  But one lesson from the Penn State sex abuse scandal is that we need to examine the right things in our lives as well, to make sure we understand when those right things need to be cast aside for a moment in order to do the right thing.  That's a much rarer and harder internal examination, but one I hope all of us undertake, should we ever be put in a similar situation.

Can You Have It All

I wanted to post some of my personal musings on a provocative but (in my mind) largely fair and honest cover article in this month's Atlantic Magazine entitled "Why Women Still Can't Have It All."  The article was written by Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former high-ranking official in the State Department who left the position to spend more time with her family - and actually meant it.  In the article, she attempts to debunk the myth that women who want to have it all but are unable to fall short because either they're not committed enough, haven't married the right person, or didn't sequence their achievements in the right order. 

While everyone can find at least one quibble with Ms. Slaughter's perspective, I salute her for raising the issues and for having some insightful and brace responses to the usual questions. Since I'm too doped up on cold medicine right now to string together more than one coherent argument, I'll react in a more bullety, stream-of-consciousness manner:

First, let's be clear about who we're talking about here.  Some women love only to raise kids, some women have only career aspirations, and most women are not so fortunate to be able to have so many high-achieving positions available to them.  This article doesn't really touch on anybody in those groups, nor should anyone judge anyone in those groups for their preferences and limitations. 

Second, it is not quite correct to extrapolate these pressures to men, since so much of what Ms. Slaughter is touching on relates specifically to what women uniquely encounter.  Nevertheless, I hope that men who desire to be both professionally successful and intimately involved in their children's lives will take notice of these issues and become more empathetic towards women as well as less hard on themselves.

Third, I do think that at the very highest echelons, it is impossible to have it all.  If you want to be reasonably successful, there are enough hours in the day to hone your craft and be an involved parent, so long as you make sacrifices, have a great life partner, know how to manage your trade-offs, and accept that you can be a 90% professional and a 90% parent (but not a 100% in both).  But when you get to the very top of your profession (whether it is government or law or business or sports), you are not usually afforded such trade-offs or such gaps from perfection.  After spending 80 hours in a week on your profession, that next hour may be better spent being a parent, in terms of that hour maximizing your personal productivity and happiness; but it means one less hour spent inching ahead in your profession, which may mean all the difference at the elite levels. 

Fourth, Christians face a slightly different aspect of this tension.  For many of us, we are figuring out how to balance not two but three demands on our time and energy: career, family, and ministry.  For some of us, two of those three overlap considerably (e.g. a person whose career is her ministry), but for many of us, there are very real trade-offs in putting more effort in one at the expense of the other two.  For us, the goal isn't so much how to "have it all" in all three but how to put God first in and before all three.  But, clearly, there is no way to "have it all" in all three, which leaves either settling in one or more or forsaking one or more. 

I wish I had more to say about the last point, but it's where I am and I can't say I've figured it out for myself, let alone for others.  But it is useful to consider such matters, and so I applaud Ms. Slaughter for putting herself out there so that we can gain from her struggles and lessons.

East Meets West

It was a pleasant surprise last week when I gathered some of my old high school friends for a Fourth of July barbecue in California that I was able to catch up with one of them who had recently moved to the Bay Area from Manhattan.  He and I have a special bond because we were among a very small group of graduates from my high school who headed to the East Coast for college (he to Carnegie Mellon and me to Penn).  In fact, I flew into Pittsburgh, with my dad, to see my aunt en route to driving to Philly for my freshman year, so my initiation into being on a college campus as a college student was actually with my friend in Pittsburgh.

Naturally, as we shot the breeze over barbecue, the conversation turned to the stark differences between East Coast living (which both of us know well) and West Coast living (which he is now getting reacclimated to).  It's more than just an east-west thing, since our reference points are not just California vs. Pennsylvania but suburbs vs. big northeastern cities.  Still, it was a fun string of thought.  Here's what we thought of, which is of course by no means an exhaustive list and is not intended to infer that one is inherently better than the other:

* Beautiful weather year-round vs. four distinct seasons

* Driving everywhere vs. getting around mostly by walking and transit

* Spread-out single uses vs. mixed uses mashed closely together

* A more collaborative spirit vs. a more confrontational spirit

* On a related note, a referendum-based, popular participation type of political culture vs. a top-down,
"leave politics to the professionals" type of political culture

* Certain circles dominated by Stanford and Berkeley alum vs. young talent drawn from a much broader pool of schools

* From a racial composition and civic power standpoint, Philly at least is much blacker, while the Bay Area at least is much more Asian and Latino

* Philly is pretty filthy and pothole-laden, while I don't recall seeing any sidewalk trash or road imperfections all last week in the Bay Area

I'd love to hear from others who have had experiences on both coasts (and/or in suburban and urban settings) if you agree with these items or have any others to add.  

Asian Tigers

I just returned from a week in the Bay Area staying with my parents and catching up with friends.  Though our vacation centered on family and fun, I could not help but pick up some distinct vibes about raising kids in Silicon Valley versus elsewhere.   

Two years ago, the signature comparison was that while the children's museum in Philadelphia (the renowned Please Touch Museum) focuses on "play" ("parents, get down to your child's level and interact with them; react to and interact with their questions about various stations"), the analog in San Jose (the delightful Children's Discovery Museum) is intimidatingly advanced ("can you guess the molecular structure of a bubble?").  


This time, I think it would have to be that while Aaron and Jada are spending the summer swimming and field tripping with their fellow city kids at the Y, my cousin's kids (10 and 12) will be attending (wait for it) app camp, where they will learn how to program apps for cell phones and tablets.  Yes, apparently, the joke about there being an app for everything and a camp for everything have now collided.


As a second generation Asian American, parenting pressure is ever present.  Whether it was explicitly or implicitly drummed into us as kids, there is a clear road map for how childhood is supposed to go: straight A's, piano and/or violin, and a battery of extra-curriculars are just the baseline, from which significantly more impressive resume stuffers are supposed to be added.  


Not that clarity makes implementation any easier, or our sense of what is best for the kid any simpler.  Do we adhere to the plan, throwing sanity to the winds?  If we falter, are we not "Tiger" enough?  Do we do an about-face, and shake our fist at the whole thing as a dangerous idolatry?  Do we find a middle ground, or a new way altogether, and run the risk of being looked at funny by our peers and our parents?  


There is never any real manual for parenthood, so I'm not expecting a clean path.  I'm just expressing the unique challenges faced by second generation Asian Americans.  Especially those who grew up in the Bay Area and then chose to forge a new way in urban Philadelphia.

Back from Cali

Just got back from a week in San Jose with my family.  Good times all around.  See pics and commentary at Huang Kid Khronicles.

Thankful for Good Friends

I recently got a chance to catch up with some of my closest friends from high school.  We graduated over 20 years ago and yet I still see some of them on a regular basis, when I take my kids to San Jose to see my parents.  Friendship is a treasure, and in this facet of my life I am incredibly rich.

Now that I am a parent, I realize all the more the importance of good friends.  Good, not only in the sense of being close, but also in the sense of being positively influenced by good people.  I'm glad I know most of my kids' friends and their parents, so I can know my kids are hanging with the right crowd.

This too is another cause for gratitude as I think back to my own childhood.  Among my closest dozen or so high school buddies are four current pastors as well as others who are very involved in their churches.  One of my friends was the one who brought me to church and to faith during my teens, and another had tried to a few years before.  All of my friends are smart, kind, and decent.

As I've gotten older, I've come to realize that this is not necessarily the experience of others around me.  It makes me all the more thankful for the abundance of good friends and positive influences in my own life, and all the more prayerful that my kids will be blessed with the same experiences.

No Pictures, Please

Last weekend I had not one but two get-togethers with old friends.  Many, many kids were involved.  In fact, at one gathering, out of six families, four had had kids in the past 12 months!  Needless to say, it was cute city all around.

Since I am ever the documentarian, it may come as a surprise that I took relatively few pictures.  Maybe I was feeling a little under the weather, or just too tired to move, or hoping others would be kind enough to send me their photos.  I think, though, that some of it was giving myself room to just enjoy the moment - good adult conversation, delicious food, the lasting impression of some adorable kid doing something adorable - without having to layer on top of it the act of capturing it in photo.

My blog and Facebook page are lighter for it, but it was nice to be in the moment for once.  I am far too  future-oriented to change my stripes.  But maybe I'll remember to sprinkle in some "being still" in my rabid shutter-clicking the next time the situation presents itself.

90,000 Hits

We celebrate another milestone here at Musings: 20,000 hits as of May 2009, 30,000 hits as of February 2010, 40,000 hits as of November 2010, 50,000 hits as of March 2011, 60,000 hits as of July 2011, 70,000 hits as of November 2011, 80,000 hits as of March 2012, and now 90,000 hits as of July 2012 since I put a counter on the site in February 2005 (which was two years after I had launched this blog in February 2003). (Counts do not include views at other sites, like Facebook and Linkedin, where my posts also go.) Thanks for visiting, and I hope you'll continue to stay engaged.

Car-Sharing in Hoboken

I've never been to Hoboken, and don't know much about it even though many of my friends have lived there at one point or another.  But I do know it has one thing going for it: density of car-share cars.

According to this article, Hoboken decided that the way to address the scarcity of parking spaces was to take even more parking spaces away.  That's right, they added a bunch of on-street car-share spaces.  When your city is only 2 square miles, that means that 42 cars can make it so no one is more than a five-minute walk from a car-share car.

That means you can get away with not owning a car, and therefore taking up a space 23 hours a day.  That means scarce land can be used for other things, like generating property taxes or providing open space. That's a good thing.