As a kid, I wanted to be as American as possible. Now, I want to be more Chinese.
If you'd asked me where I was from 10 years ago — before I moved to Asia — my answer would've been very different.
"Where are you from?" has become the poster question for how Asian Americans are often treated as foreigners in their own country. I used to reply, "Boston," very matter-of-factly. I grew up there. I'm American. I speak English. It was a defensive answer, like: "Don't challenge me."
Now, I just say, "I grew up in the US, but I'm ethnically Chinese." It's honest, efficient, and I'm less defensive about it than I used to be.
American, born and raised
I was born in Ohio but spent my early years in China while my parents studied in the US as part of the first wave of Chinese students to leave under Deng Xiaoping's 1980s reforms.
We eventually settled in Boston, my hometown. I grew up surrounded by other Chinese or Chinese-American kids, and it felt like a little cultural cocoon.
Later, when I started middle school at Boston Latin School, I met kids from around the world — including China, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Mexico. A lot of kids at my school were local to Boston, but most non-white students, like me, were children of immigrants.
That shift gave me my first understanding of how wide the world was.
I grew up in a Chinese enclave and went to a diverse, progressive school where overt racism wasn't socially acceptable, at least not in my circles.
Cantonese was my first language — my mom's family is from southern China — but over time, I stopped using it. One day, I started answering my parents in English, and they let it stick.
Eventually, we became an English-speaking household.
Looking back, I wish I spoke better Cantonese and Mandarin. Like many Asian Americans, I wanted to fit in — and while maybe my parents could've pushed harder, my brother and I were probably just stubborn.
As a kid, I didn't think much of it, but now I feel a growing pull to reconnect with my roots. I was still surrounded by Chinese culture: I went to Chinese school, played the yangqin (a Chinese instrument), and watched "My Fair Princess," a TV drama, with my mom.
Now, there's so much I still want to learn — not just the language, but everything that comes with it.
Next stop: Hong Kong
I studied international relations and economics at Tufts University, then joined a rotational finance program working across departments. My first role was in asset management in Boston.
For my final rotation, I asked to be placed in Hong Kong, and the company made it happen. I'd spent most of my life in Boston, with a study abroad year and an internship in London, so moving to Hong Kong — a city I'd only visited once as a kid — felt like the right kind of adventure. I was 23 and ready to see more of the world.
The transition was surprisingly smooth. Hong Kong is easy for foreigners to navigate — English is widely spoken, and the infrastructure is world-class.
But being Asian American here is complicated. You blend in until you open your mouth — then people switch to English. It's efficient, but also a reminder that you're not quite "one of them."
Culturally, I'm a "gwei mui" — Cantonese slang for a Westernized girl. I used to feel embarrassed by that, but now I've learned to accept it.
Still, I see the value in understanding Hong Kong more deeply through its language and customs. It's ironic: I spent my childhood trying to be fully American, and now I find myself wanting to be more Chinese.
Asia shifted my perspective
When I visit the US now, I feel a kind of reverse culture shock — the streets are wide and quiet, and hardly anyone walks.
Growing up in the States, I was constantly told how amazing it was, but I was rarely told how great other cities around the world were, too.
That's starting to change, thanks to social media showing things like food delivery robots in China, high-tech toilets in Japan, and Hong Kong trains that run every few minutes. You'd never see that in Boston — I don't miss waiting 30 minutes for the subway in the freezing cold.
Things just run more efficiently here. Still, I love going back to the US to see my parents and friends. I appreciate the space and calm.
But these days, landing in Hong Kong feels more like coming home.
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Hamilton Spectator
40 minutes ago
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San Francisco Chronicle
an hour ago
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Osprey came back from the brink once. Now chicks are dying in nests, and some blame overfishing
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The birds, which breed in many parts of the U.S., are failing to successfully fledge enough chicks around their key population center of the Chesapeake Bay. The longtime biologist blames the decline of menhaden, a small schooling fish critical to the osprey diet. Without menhaden to eat, chicks are starving and dying in nests, Watts said. Osprey are an environmental indicator Watts's claim has put him and environmental groups at odds with the fishing industry, trade unions and sometimes government regulators. Menhaden is valuable for fish oil, fish meal and agricultural food as well as bait. U.S. fishermen have caught at least 1.1 billion pounds of menhaden every year since 1951. Members of the industry tout its sustainability and said the decline in osprey may have nothing to do with fishing. But without help, the osprey population could tumble to levels not seen since the dark days of DDT, said Watts, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. 'The osprey are yelling pretty loudly that, hey, there's not enough menhaden for us to reproduce successfully,' Watts said. 'And we should be listening to them to be more informed fully on the fisheries side, and we should take precaution on the fisheries management side. But that hasn't won the day at this point.' Decline linked to menhaden in studies Watts, who has studied osprey on the Chesapeake for decades, has backed his claims of population decline by publishing studies in scientific journals. He said it boils down to a simple statistic — to maintain population, osprey pairs need to average 1.15 chicks per year. 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Atlantic
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Let Your Kid Climb That Tree
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The World Health Organization says that 81 percent of adolescents worldwide do not get enough physical activity, noting that rates of sedentary behavior in young people tend to rise as their country develops economically. In some American cities, the Trust for Public Land says, as many as two-thirds of children lack access to the kinds of nearby parks that would encourage free play. And a report by the Aspen Institute's Project Play initiative, a national program aimed at increasing youth-sports participation, concluded that compared with other activities, such as organized sports, 'free play is all but a thing of the past.' Some kids lack access to woods, fields, and other open spaces where they might romp free. Some have parents who forbid that brand of tomfoolery. In the United States, many parents habitually tamp down on horseplay out of fear of injury to their children (or their furniture)—or because social norms dictate that they get their squiggly kids unsquiggled and into waiting rooms, subways, stores, airplanes, and restaurants, where children are expected to 'behave.' That impulse, however, risks reinforcing the notion that sedentariness is preferable at a time in a kid's life when they really do need to move. Turn over almost any rock in the stream of health research, and you'll find warnings about the dire consequences of idleness, as well as abundant reasons for children to explore free movement. Children who move have healthier bones, muscles, and joints, and lower their future risk of obesity and chronic disease. Research has found that active kids develop superior cognitive skills, get better grades, and are more likely to stay on task than kids who are less active. In a systematic review of studies, researchers found that active children are more likely to report feelings of well-being. And a study published in The Lancet that examined the prevalence of adolescent depression among English youth suggested that increased sedentary behavior in adolescence could affect a person's mental health into adulthood. Childhood might be a particularly costly time to not move, because this is when developing brains prune unused potential. 'One extreme view' of this neurological dwindling 'would be that you start out wired up for every possible contingency,' the Harvard neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman said in an article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences —but as you age, unused connections in the brain get permanently disconnected through a process known as synaptic pruning, leaving you with 'a narrower nervous system.' We're used to the idea that young, plastic brains have an easy time learning to speak Mandarin or play piano; this is also true of learning how to do backflips, balance on a slackline, or throw a fastball. Parents go to great lengths to keep kids safe; it's the core of the job. But restricting kids from encountering tricky movement problems, such as racing at full speed down a rocky slope or climbing high in a tree, can exact a toll. As Marcus Elliott, a physician and one of the world's most prominent injury-prevention experts, put it to me: 'Your fear that your kid will get hurt is depriving them of something they'll never get back.' Elliott runs the Peak Performance Project, known as P3, a movement lab in Santa Barbara, California, where many athletes—a huge percentage of NBA, NFL, and MLB players—have been found to be at risk of injury because of deficiencies in their movement quality. P3's researchers focus on 'kinematic movers,' whose bodies have a ready solution to almost any movement problem: They can land on either one foot or two, jump every which way, and change directions easily. They're not always the highest jumpers or the fastest sprinters, but, at least among a well-studied cohort, they are likely to play for a long time without injury. This is why Elliott recommends that children play like animals: He suspects that every adult kinematic mover grew up playing freely like that fuzzball in my backyard. The robustness necessary to repel injury has little to do with getting in cardio, running fast, or jumping high. Instead, he says, robustness has to do with 'movement quality,' which is to athleticism as fluency is to language. This tracks with an observation made by the journalist David Epstein, who writes in Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World that athletes from tiny towns have irrational levels of success. Epstein's theory is that with a shortage of players, small towns need the best athletes on the football, baseball, and basketball teams. Playing a variety of sports might foster a person's robust movement vocabularies. Thankfully, providing kids with more freedom doesn't require a lot of money. Mostly, it just requires a little creativity. Almost every kid who comes into my house feels a deep urge to romp on the huge yoga ball in our living room (which cost less than $20). They body slam it, Superman across its top, throw a sibling into it, and do other bonkers stuff. Many parents who witness such behavior grow anxious, shout bossy directives, or declare the ball off-limits entirely. Of course, I understand; no one wants to end up at urgent care. But I'm also aware that kids who start out falling down go on to quickly develop new skills. Some blossom into pro-grade yoga-ball surfers. When my son was young, he developed an uncanny ability to perch on all fours atop the ball even as someone (honestly: me) forcibly shoved him this way and that. He's now a 6-foot-1-inch engineering undergrad; we have not outgrown this game. Elliott told me that when work would keep him on the laptop during weekend afternoons, he'd give his kids small physical challenges: Can you hop on your left leg all the way across here, and then clear that hurdle? Can you step off that ledge, land, and leap right back up? One of his daughters remembers earning dessert by hopping a giant lap of the backyard on her left foot. Elliott and his children also wrestle one another like puppies do. In this way, he explained, his kids learn how to perform complex movements while keeping one another safe—by, say, avoiding the corner of the coffee table. All of this free play can help when kids start taking up play of a more serious kind. Many sports injuries come from iffy form when landing. Kinematic movers do well, Elliott's lab has found, because they land with active feet that greet the ground, as well as ankles, knees, and hips that flex nicely in time with one another—perhaps because these movers practiced so much free play as kids. P3's trainers spend long hours putting athletes through the grueling work of mastering landing technique as teenagers or adults, remedial lessons that appear to have a big impact. A 2022 study found that ACL-injury-prevention training, which generally includes landing and explosive movement, reduced ACL tears by an average of 64 percent among young female athletes. (This aligns with research on ballet dancers, among the few groups who train from a young age to land properly. They may sustain plenty of sprains and other overuse injuries, but they also have a striking shortage of ACL tears compared with other athletes who jump as much.) Eric Leidersdorf, a movement scientist and the president of P3, has more than a decade's worth of experience poring over the movement data of elite athletes. He also has an 18-month-old daughter. I asked him if he intends to apply the lessons of his day job to parenting. 'Absolutely,' he replied. He then used the word play 10 times in two minutes. 'My real hope is that she explores the world,' Leidersdorf told me. 'I want her to love moving and find joy in that.' I know a bunny that probably gets it.
