The First Trimester

Our little bean at 12 weeks.

Some personal news: I'm pregnant, due in mid-December! When this post goes live, I'll be in my 15th week of pregnancy, just past the first trimester. K and I are so excited to become parents. I also feel incredibly fortunate that everything's been going smoothly so far, according to my OB/GYN it's all proceeding as expected and low-risk.

Today's post is about my first trimester. Be forewarned, I mention some detail about things like ovulation tests, irregular cycles when coming off the pill, side effects of pregnancy, and that sort of thing. Along with that, an important disclaimer: I am not a medical professional, but I always take seriously the advice of the team at my OB/GYN's office.   

Life Lately

Pulling out a long-ago personal photo because the weather's warming up and it's starting to feel like spring here in NYC! And with all New Yorkers aged 16+ becoming eligible to receive the vaccine on April 6, I think life will start looking better here very soon. 

Before I say anything else, a note about the events in Atlanta on March 16 and other recent examples of violent crimes with Asian American victims, including one very close to home: As you've probably noticed if you've been reading this blog for a while, I write somewhat regularly about my Asian American identity and about certain forms of discrimination against Asian Americans. It's an issue I think about often and one that is very real to me. But I've been unequal to the task of knowing what to say about the more recent spate of violent crimes against Asian Americans, particularly people who are elderly and vulnerable. 

I do not fear for myself, but I do feel some fear for my mom and for K's parents. And I do not know what an effective solution would be, cannot even begin to propose something intelligible. When I write about Asian American issues, it's important to me that I always be conscious of the position of considerable privilege I occupy - by virtue of my economic class, where I grew up, and all kinds of other criteria - and that I not take away from people more vulnerable than me, or usurp their pain or their stories. That makes it difficult to articulate a response to the events of March 16 and from the past year. 

- - - - -  

Whew, I've had an extremely busy few weeks at work, so I haven't been able to publish anything here on the blog since March 16. Things should be a little more quiet at the (virtual) office now, through at least the early part of April, so now I can get some rest. Here are two smaller, lighter things that have been on my mind since I last wrote.

1. // As of March 30, and as someone over the age of 30, I'm officially eligible to sign up for a COVID vaccine in the state of New York! (And on April 6, all ages currently FDA-approved for the vaccines will become eligible.) 

Unfortunately - but not too surprisingly, given that it's barely been 24 hours since we became eligible, and given how dramatic the expansion of eligibility was on that day - K and I have yet to have any luck actually signing up for a vaccine appointment. (A few of our fellow newly-eligible age 30+ friends have managed it, though.) There are lots of providers out there, including pharmacies, city government-run sites, state government-run sites, public hospitals, etc. etc., each with their own sign-up websites, so it might take a lot of madly refreshing several different websites to finally secure our appointments. 

Given that new appointment slots are always being released, I'm generally reasonably confident that K and I will have at least our first shots by the end of April, even if it might be a pain to find and book our appointments. I expect I'll be back in the office full-time almost as soon as I'm fully vaccinated. 

2. // That rather fancy Nespresso Aeroccino 4 (affiliate link) I bought earlier this month has turned out to be an excellent purchase for our household! Both K and I find ourselves using it for at least one tea or coffee "latte" a day, most days. It really does make our at-home caffeinated beverages feel quite a bit more special. As we've only had this Aeroccino milk frother for around two weeks, it's still far too soon to really vouch for its long-term durability or anything like that, but we've been finding it very functional and easy to use and clean. 

And that's it for now, just a very quick post for today. I hope that everyone has been well. I'm expecting to resume a more typical posting schedule next week, and I don't currently have anything else on my work schedule that I think would cause serious disruption to my typical blog-writing pace in the next few months. (But my work schedule as an attorney can be very unpredictable and big projects can come up on short notice, so it's hard to say for sure.) 

Link List: Lunchbox Stories

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Although it's currently too early for me to start writing my end-of-month reading reflections post for February, I needed to mention the novel I just finished because it was just too good! Susanna Clarke's Piranesi is really special, an incredibly beautiful, immersive story that I was completely swept up in and stayed up late to finish reading in one day. (It's not a particularly long book, but I started reading after dinner.) These days, not many books are able to capture my attention so fully. 

Please note that this post contains affiliate links that could result in my earning a small commission - at no extra cost to you - if you click and make a purchase. Thank you for your support!

And one definitely doesn't need to have been a fan of Clarke's first novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell to enjoy Piranesi. I tried to pick up Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell years ago, but never quite managed to get into it. The experience of reading Piranesi may inspire me to try reading Clarke's first novel again. 

1. // I enjoyed this insightful Eater article about "The Limits of the Lunchbox Moment." You've probably heard the story at least once, about the first or second-generation immigrant child whose ethnic food is declared gross or smelly by other children in the school cafeteria. No doubt that's happened to and been hurtful to many. But it's also not a universal Asian American or Chinese-American (or Taiwanese-American) experience, and that may be obscured by how ubiquitous the lunchbox story is in American media (a space that might not have room for all the complex, nuanced Asian American stories out there). 

In my case, I've never had a lunchbox story. Throughout elementary school, I ate cafeteria hot lunch almost every day. On field trip days when school lunch wasn't available, I generally got Lunchables. I only rarely brought anything else to school for lunch, if I did it'd typically be a sandwich with a somewhat Taiwanese bakery spin like this. 

And because I grew up in the Silicon Valley Bay Area, where the large-ish public schools I attended always had majority-Asian American student bodies - we may have been as much as 75% of the population at every school I attended, to the point where a notorious-in-our-community Wall Street Journal article from 2005 claimed we caused a "New White Flight" by scaring off white families - it was unlikely anyone would have had a "lunchbox moment," where they were shamed for bringing ethnic food. Our Asian American student population skewed heavily East Asian and South Asian. On any given day, one saw a wide range of both western and Asian-style lunches brought from home. No one really had reason to comment on anyone else's food, we'd seen it all before. When I shared this article with a close friend who attended public school in a midwestern state with a much smaller Asian population, she also had no lunchbox story. She observed that different schools have their own culture, and not all children learn to behave cruelly in this specific way. 

One theme in this article is that, for many of the people interviewed, published articles, essays, or books written by other Asian Americans often aren't accurate to their personal experiences. There's some frustration that a more diverse range of Asian American stories isn't being told, and that's likely at least in part because certain stories are seen as more marketable or "sellable to an editor" than others. 

It's difficult to find other stories about the Chinese-American or Taiwanese-American experience that truly resonate with me. Throughout my childhood, and even in college, I was sheltered from being made to feel "less than" because of my racial or ethnic identity, I was always at schools where at least a significant critical mass of students looked like me. With regards to race and identity, my personal story is therefore dominated by experiences of workplace discrimination and implicit bias that are specific to the legal industry. To the extent I look back further in time, issues of economic class and my parents' marital status - divorce being rare amongst the Asian American communities I grew up attending school with - weigh far heavier than questions related to my race. 

Link List: More About Workplace Discrimination

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Of late, I've been preoccupied with some of the smaller topics that have come up in connection with recent conversations about race and discrimination in the US. Because of certain of my own less happy professional experiences, and because I've experienced firsthand how difficult it is to truly and meaningfully challenge discrimination in the legal profession, I have a deep interest in discussions about workplace discrimination across various industries, not just in the law. 

1. // This first article, from Vice, is not technically about workplace discrimination, though my personal encounters with its subject matter have tended - distressingly, and somewhat creepily - to occur in the biglaw workplace and the law school recruiting process to get into said workplace. The article is about a joke t-shirt displaying the message "I Don't Need to Know About Your Asian Wife" and about the experiences with racism and sexism that caused the frustration and anger leading to the creation of said t-shirt.

One recurring theme to my personal reflections about all these discussions is that I'm fully cognizant of the relative privileges I've experienced as an Asian-American of East Asian descent - solidly within "model minority" stereotypes - and this is true here too. Within the article, the most distressing and sexually objectifying experiences with "Asian wife guys" are generally not from interviewees or Twitter users of East Asian descent. 

This is consistent with my personal experience. My biglaw and on-campus recruiting encounters with a number of "Asian wife guys" have all been comparatively... benign. They're definitely not making a pass at me, they genuinely just seem to think - perplexingly - that... it's a good way to make friendly small talk with the Asian-American junior associate or law student. And if this "Asian wife guy" is someone at your firm and in your practice group, this particular trait is probably going to be part of a combination of things that clearly show you over time that this person - almost always a partner, ugh - is likely... not going to be a particularly good professional mentor or sponsor for your career development.

2. // This next article from The Cut is actually about workplace discrimination in biglaw. Specifically, it's about how "Racism at my Job Literally Gave Me PTSD" (archive.is link, if needed), from the perspective of a Black woman and former associate at a prominent biglaw firm in NYC. (She's previously written at least one other article about her time in biglaw.) 

Here's another instance in which I recognize my comparative privilege as an Asian-American of East Asian descent, one with many markers of the "model minority" stereotype. While I had no real chance to succeed from my very first days in biglaw, well before I had a chance to prove myself a good or bad worker (so it had nothing to do with my merits as an associate) - and while I also felt some of the emotions the author describes in The Cut article in my first months at my subsequent jobs as a result - what I experienced is still nothing in comparison to what my Black and Latinx colleagues face. In the end, no one ever actually said anything to me that could form the basis of a Title VII discrimination claim, and people from my demographic are extremely well-represented in the biglaw junior ranks.  

I'm reminded of a moment from my summer associate days: A well-meaning - but somewhat graceless - white classmate questioned how the firm described our summer class as extremely diverse; if almost every attorney of color in the class was Asian-American, that isn't exactly meaningfully diverse, is it? For context, the summer class consisted of several dozen people (I'm being intentionally imprecise to protect my anonymity). Almost half of us were attorneys of color. (And I can further confirm that most Asian-American members of the class happened to be of East Asian descent, to add to the sense of lacking genuine diversity.) My classmate probably shouldn't have said this thing in front of me, it resembles the "there's too many Asians here" type of racism that's reared its head a number of times in my life, in descriptions of communities I'm a part of - commentary often affirmed by fellow Asian-Americans, it's a very complicated thing - but this classmate also wasn't wrong. 

The author described her entering law firm class in her office as counting only four Black women among its roughly 60 members. My entire firm's newly entering class my year - including robustly-sized classes in several other major-market offices besides NYC, for a total of well over 100 new associates firm-wide - barely had more than that. 

3. // Going back to discussions of workplace discrimination in other industries, here's a Grub Street profile of Tammie Teclamarian (archive.is link, if needed), a.k.a. @tammieetc on Twitter, who can fairly be described as an important food media whistleblower. Teclamarian played a significant role in revealing the misdeeds and problematic behavior that led to the departure of Adam Rapoport, former Editor in Chief at Bon Appetit, and also of Matt Duckor, former head of video at Conde Nast, as discussed in one of my July blog entries.

Teclamarian has also been a major player in the discussions that led to the resignation of Peter Meehan from the Los Angeles Times food section. In the weeks since, it became clear and was well-corroborated that Meehan was often an emotionally volatile and terrible person to work under, just like Teclamarian reported before his resignation. 

Sadly, it's now clear that Conde Nast won't fix the pay disparities associated with the Bon Appetit YouTube channel, which became public knowledge in June and which has since caused the departure of a large percentage of the individuals previously appearing in their videos. As I stated, I personally committed to never again viewing another Bon Appetit YouTube video until this problem was fixed. So because Conde Nast doesn't ever plan to fix it, the Bon Appetit YouTube channel is now dead to me forevermore. Good riddance! 

Complicity and Discriminatory Workplaces

via Unsplash

With all the recent discussions about employment discrimination and racism in media and journalism, including at Bon Appetit and Refinery29, I've become troubled by one particular question: To what extent can a person fairly be considered complicit in a discriminatory system in which they have no, or minimal, power? It's a question I've been thinking about when I see Asian-American women writers around my age respond to recent conversations about racial discrimination at certain publications. 

This question first occurred to me when I saw Christina Chaey's post on Instagram about Bon Appetit (she was one of the nonwhite employees featured semi-regularly on their YouTube channel without extra compensation for appearing in videos). In it, she apologizes for her "complicity in a system that made me feel lucky that I got a seat at their table," explaining that she "hold[s] [her]self responsible for not doing more to support my BPOC colleagues past and present." She then goes on to state that "I've been complicit in - and at times have contributed to - the toxic white culture these men [Adam Rapoport, former Editor in Chief of Bon Appetit ("BA"), and Matt Duckor, former head of video at Conde Nast, both of whom have now resigned due to past racist behavior documented on their personal social media] and many others have cultivated at BA. Like so many Asian Americans given some level of power and voice within predominantly white institutions, I haven't checked a system I benefited from at the expense of other BPOC colleagues."

By her own account, Ms. Chaey has not been given a raise or promotion since she was hired in 2017 as an associate editor at BA for a salary of $68,000. In other words, it does not appear she had any real power within the company.

About the Alison Roman Thing...

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By now you've probably heard that Alison Roman recently did an interview where she said some rather unkind things about Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo. Among other things, Chrissy Teigen was originally going to be an executive producer on a television show that Roman had signed on to do. (No official word yet on whether recent events have put an end to that.)

About Chrissy Teigen, Roman had this to say:

Like, what Chrissy Teigen has done is so crazy to me. She had a successful cookbook. And then it was like: Boom, line at Target. Boom, now she has an Instagram page that has over a million followers where it’s just, like, people running a content farm for her. That horrifies me and it’s not something that I ever want to do. I don’t aspire to that. But like, who’s laughing now? Because she’s making a ton of fucking money.

Roman's tone was quite vicious as to Marie Kondo, who isn't even a direct competitor to Roman in the food writing and cooking space, which makes this turn even more bizarre to me: 

Like the idea that when Marie Kondo decided to capitalize on her fame and make stuff that you can buy, that is completely antithetical to everything she’s ever taught you… I’m like, damn, bitch, you fucking just sold out immediately! Someone’s like “you should make stuff,” and she’s like, “okay, slap my name on it, I don’t give a shit!”  

That’s the thing — you don’t need a ton of equipment in your kitchen to make great food. “For the low, low price of $19.99, please to buy my cutting board!” Like, no. Find the stuff that you love and buy it. Support businesses and makers. It feels greedy. Unless something just simply didn’t exist that I wish existed, but that would make an inventor, which I’m not. 

There's been some confusion about the "please to buy" wording and why it was there. It was also briefly edited out of the interview by the publisher, but then replaced (see the editor's note at the end of the interview). Roman herself indicated it was not a typo, and claims it was an inside joke about a cookbook titled Please to the Table. 

This is all happening, by the way, in the context of an interview where Roman promotes an upcoming product tie-in that she herself is doing: 

I have a collaboration coming out with [the cookware startup] Material, a capsule collection. It’s limited edition, a few tools that I designed that are based on tools that I use that aren’t in production anywhere — vintage spoons and very specific things that are one-offs that I found at antique markets that they have made for me.

So, you know, on top of all the other issues, there's a distinct lack of self-awareness. And by the way, this is what Roman said when Gwyneth Paltrow's "Goop" brand was brought up by the interviewer in the same interview:

And I do sort of have ambitions to figure out how to channel everything into a site. But I’m really sensitive to oversaturation, again. And does the world need another Goop? It also requires so much money that I would have to take from people that I don’t know. 

Oh and Roman says that she singled out Teigen and Kondo, and not any male chef with a mega-brand and various licensed products (despite the existence of the likes of Wolfgang Puck, Emeril Lagasse, and so on) because: 

So yeah, big yikes all around. I found this Twitter thread to be the most complete accounting of why I found Alison Roman's interview so upsetting and why racism is likely at least part of why she singled out Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo, as opposed to someone like Ree Drummond or Rachael Ray.

This incident has also inspired discussions about larger issues with some of Roman's recipes and how she approaches ingredients and recipe inspirations from non-Western cultures. I thought this article did a good job explaining that angle. 

Longtime readers might know that I'm kind of a die-hard Marie Kondo fan, all the way back to January 2015. As such a huge fan, I naturally get quite upset about wrongheaded and racist criticisms of Kondo and her ideas. Remember that hullaballoo last year right after her Netflix show premiered, which included the extraordinarily spurious claim that she apparently wanted all of humanity to limit themselves to the ownership of 30 books at the absolute maximum? (That particular claim had no basis in her actual writing or anything she actually said on her Netflix show.) Around that time, there were also instances of rather explicit racism and xenophobia in some of the criticisms of Kondo's show.

There are so many things wrong with what Alison Roman said about Marie Kondo that it's difficult to know where to start unpacking it all. That I was able to learn about and become interested in Marie Kondo's first book all the way back in January 2015, after reading a New York Times profile of her that had been published way back in October 2014, certainly shows that the growth of Kondo's brand did not happen overnight. (This was years before her Netflix show eventually debuted in January 2019, and before "The Shop at KonMari" opened on her website in November 2019.) Roman's accusation that Kondo "[expletive redacted] just sold out immediately" clearly has no basis.

Plus, it's really quite obvious that, whatever else one might feel about it, the official Marie Kondo shop offers an extremely curated set of products. Given the current selection at the shop, it's probably also clear that there will likely never be a $19.99 cutting board sold there. (A carefully-selected $199 cutting board might be more consistent with the kitchen products currently stocked.)

ETA 5/12/20: Approximately 14 hours after I published this post, Alison Roman issued a new apology on Twitter and Instagram, addressing both Chrissy Teigen and Marie Kondo, unlike her initial attempt at an apology on Friday night, which only addressed Teigen (and only after it became clear that Teigen was one of the executive producers for Roman's upcoming show). I believe this apology meets a minimum bar of professionalism that was not apparent in Roman's initial reactions on Friday. The new apology is also close to comprehensive in that it at least tries to address how (1) she chose to call out two Asian women in a space filled with white women and white men with larger, more longstanding product lines and (2) her use of ingredients and inspirations from non-Western cultures. A cynical person's interpretation would be that while Roman professed to not have a "communications person" before, she's almost certainly working with one now.

It's hard for me to accept this apology as particularly sincere, given how unprofessional Roman's initial handling of this situation was, but well, I had never actually bought anything of hers before - only watched some of her YouTube videos and used her cookie recipe from online - and I will probably not be buying anything of hers in the foreseeable future. The real test is whether she changes her behavior going forward. 

My Favorite Books of 2019

2019 was a year of fits and starts when it came to my reading habits. I didn't have the greatest luck when it came to picking books. And anytime I selected too many relative duds in a row, or otherwise went too long without a book I enjoyed in hand, I started losing momentum with my reading habit very quickly. 

Perhaps because of all the work-related stress this year, I also felt like I was generally a far more fickle and picky reader in 2019 than I typically was in the past. I'd get into these strange moods, where books I would normally enjoy - some of them by longtime favorite authors, such as Guy Gavriel Kay - just weren't clicking with me. These days, I'm quite ruthless about dropping books I don't like and moving on to the next. Out of the 39 books I tried to read this year, I dropped and ultimately did not finish eight, most of them in the last quarter of the year, when things got truly hectic at the office and then stayed that way. 

My strange, capricious moods when it came to books may also have made me more receptive to works that many readers might find polarizing or odd. This is mostly seen with some of my "honorable mentions" for the year. A lot of those novels start with a fascinating premise, but even if I enjoyed the books greatly, I can acknowledge that there may be issues with the execution. 

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But with my main list of favorite books for the year, I can vouch for their excellence to any reader, or at least, to any reader interested in the relevant genres. As you'll see, my list is dominated by memoirs, which occupy two-thirds of the spots. (And in past years, my most enthusiastic book recommendations have generally been for other memoirs, including for Educated by Tara Westover and Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. Clearly, I have a favorite genre!) A lot of my favorites for 2019 won't come as a real surprise, as I generally can't help but recommend good books shortly after I first read them. So I've already sung the praises of most of these works in other blog entries here this year. 

All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung: This was a lovely, understated book, one that nonetheless packs a huge punch because of the difficult family experiences that the author describes with great sensitivity and empathy. Through her experiences as a transracial adoptee and growing up in a predominantly white town, Nicole Chung also has some sharp, insightful things to say about race in the USA. 

Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant: I'm traditionally a huge sci-fi/fantasy fan, but haven't been reading as much from that genre in recent years. Seanan McGuire's series under her Mira Grant nom de plume are always delightfully creative, and they have a good sense of humor. This book is my favorite single volume yet from any of her Mira Grant series. Before reading this book, it had been a long time since I wanted to stay up hours past my usual bedtime to finish a book, because the story was so exciting and fully swept me up, and I really needed to know what would happen next. If you're a fan of sci-fi/fantasy, I highly recommend this book.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman: I really enjoyed this novel, and found it charming and quite original. In the titular Eleanor Oliphant, Gail Honeyman created one of the most vivid, sharply-drawn, and intriguing characters I've encountered in any book in years. And I like that it has an uplifting, positive ending, one that Eleanor works hard for.

The Unwinding of the Miracle by Julie Yip-Williams: I first learned about this book from Kathy. It's an extremely powerful memoir. Julie Yip-Williams writes in such a direct and honest way.

Born a Crime by Trevor Noah: I'm quite a few years late to the party when it comes to reading and recommending this book. It's as great as everyone says it is. Trevor Noah has an incredible life story, and an incredible writer's voice. I didn't want this book to end, and if Trevor Noah ever publishes another memoir covering other periods of his life, I would buy it immediately. This book was that good!

Heavy by Kiese Laymon: I think I waited for this one longer than I've ever waited for any other ebook from the New York Public Library ("NYPL"), more than six months.* And it was absolutely worth the wait. Out of all the memoirs on my list, this is by far the most unflinching, the most unrelenting, and the most challenging, particularly when it comes to discussing racism in the US.

And now for those "honorable mentions," of novels I greatly enjoyed, but that I can't recommend quite as wholeheartedly: The Incendiaries by R.O. Kwon, My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh, and The Farm by Joanne Ramos. I found The Incendiaries delightfully strange and surreal, but I'm not sure that mine is an entirely accurate reading of the novel, since my experience of it seems inconsistent with a lot of reviews out there. As for My Year of Rest and Relaxation and The Farm, they're very different books, but they're similar in that they both started with an intriguing, creative premise, but there were significant issues with execution. Both novels also happen to have weak endings that sort of just fizzle out. The Farm, in particular, is a book that might not be what readers expect based on the summary. It starts with an idea that could easily go in a more dystopian, Handmaid's Tale-esque direction, but ends up being a sometimes-clumsy novel focused more on class inequality than anything else, without really examining the many other themes implicated by the novel's premise.

What were your favorite books that you read this year? How's the ebook selection at your local library? (The NYPL's is pretty good, but there are also a number of popular works that they never end up buying as ebooks.) What's the longest you've ever been on the library waiting list for a popular book, whether hard copy or ebook?

* Admittedly, this isn't the most accurate measure of a book's popularity, since the NYPL doesn't order the same number of ebook copies for every hyper-popular or well-reviewed book. Most similarly popular books have much larger orders. The entire NYPL system only has 11 ebook copies of Heavy, but typically has at least 30 to 40 copies of other popular ebooks, and sometimes a lot more than that. (I'm also aware that libraries may not be able to immediately buy ebook copies of every bestseller. There are also many hyper-popular bestsellers that the NYPL doesn't own any ebook copies of.) 

Industry Practices

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I've had a lot going on at the office recently, making it a bit difficult to find time to blog! I've also been finding this summer rather languid and listless-feeling, I've been wanting to laze around every weekend instead of writing or going out and about. I haven't even really been reading that much either, just watching a lot of TV shows or Youtube clips. (For the latter category, I've recently been obsessed with the delightful "Gourmet Makes" series from Bon Appetit. Claire is the best!) Between all that and my recent bout of writer's block, I don't think I'll be posting here too often in the next few weeks, unfortunately. Hopefully I get inspired to write more soon! 

There's recently been a bit of industry gossip, thanks to yet another employment discrimination lawsuit against Jones Day, a biglaw firm well-known for a somewhat... atypical... approach to associate compensation, which had also been a central feature in another high-profile gender discrimination lawsuit. The full complaint for this newer case can be read here, brought pro se (without the formally assistance of another attorney) by two former Supreme Court clerks, who are also a married couple, and who both previously worked at Jones Day, with some overlap in their respective tenures at the firm. The firm has made a possibly unwise public statement in response to this newer lawsuit. 

This particular firm is perhaps becoming a bit well-known for arguably heavy-handed responses to employment  discrimination litigation brought against them. Their full answer to the complaint in the other, larger-scale case can be found here, and it's... a lot. The firm is representing itself in that case, rather than hiring outside counsel. I suspect that means they'll do the same in this newer case as well. 

One of the primarily allegations in this new case is that Jones Day's parental leave policy, which sets different caps on the maximum amount of paid leave available based on whether the associate is the mother or father to a newborn, discriminates on the basis of sex. Mothers allegedly get a maximum of 18 weeks, while fathers allegedly get a maximum of 10 weeks.

In practice, most biglaw parental leave policies for attorneys have the same practical implications as this alleged Jones Day policy, though they're often framed in more gender-neutral language. A longer period, often in the zone of 14 to 18 weeks, is available to new "primary caregiver" parents, while a shorter period, as little as four weeks - the number at my previous biglaw firm - is available to "non-primary caregiver" parents. As an aside, regardless of the amount of leave available, it's also not uncommon for both primary and non-primary caregiver parents to take less than the maximum time allotted, for fear that it'd harm their future prospects at the firm. During my time in biglaw, one of my "non-primary caregiver" colleagues ended up taking four days. There are a lot of distressing facts about how parental leave is treated at biglaw firms.

Link List: The Farewell

This past weekend, K and I watched The Farewell, the new film from director Lulu Wang, starring Awkwafina. I hadn't realized that it was only released in four theaters nationwide last weekend, so I guess we were very lucky to be able to see it! The movie is really good, all the actors and actresses are excellent, especially Awkwafina. Although the subject matter is quite sad, with clear parallels to things that have happened in my own family, there are also surprising moments of levity. 

1. // I couldn't imagine creating a piece of art that's so personal, it must be incredibly nerve-wracking to see how audiences will react. This article in The Atlantic about Lulu Wang and the movie is great. One particular quote from the director was especially poignant, I thought, and really captured something I think about whenever I recommend something that speaks to facets of the Asian-American experience I find familiar and that resonate deeply with me: 

“I was just really hoping people didn’t hate it, because it is so personal, and it is my family. If they hated it, then they hate us, in a way, you know?”

That's even a sentiment I've expressed, though it was only buried deep in the footnotes of a post focused on something else. 

Whenever I recommend Kathy's novel Family Trust (affiliate link), I always do so with some trepidation because it's about people so much like me, my parents, and the community I grew up in. It's not exactly the same (there are some substantial differences, including in socioeconomic class), but before I read her novel, I would never have dreamed of seeing something so much like my lived experience depicted in a creative work, one that was receiving a fair amount of positive buzz and attention. To the extent that anyone out there found the characters in the novel absolutely loathsome or completely irredeemable, I would take it a bit personally. Such a strong negative reaction would suggest to me that the reader might not be inclined to show empathy to people a lot like like my parents and I, and that would make me sad. 

2. // Because I so recently wrote about my past notebook-hoarding habits (which did not go hand-in-hand with actually using said notebooks), I was a bit tickled when I saw that Vox's The Goods recently published an article about that exact phenomenon, of how difficult it often is for people to use up their notebooks and journals:

“A new, unused, good-looking notebook represents pure potential. The words we inscribe into this beautiful notebook will be words of pure genius, we tell ourselves,” Korkki says. “A used notebook is sullied — it shows how we attempted to achieve something impressive and fell short. [] I hate to continue writing in a journal I have previously abandoned months or even years before because that journal represents the ‘old’ me. A new journal represents the new me, who will always be disciplined and inspired.” 

But what about actually finishing the notebook once you’ve started? 

Korkki believes that “people lose steam because the idea of perfect writing in their heads never matches what they end up putting on the page, and they become discouraged.” 

I can certainly relate to all that! It's only now that I've accepted that notebooks have the most utility to me when I'm not too "precious" about them, and when I prioritize using them frequently over needing the words I put in them to be particularly high quality (or to be done in especially neat handwriting), that I actually can use them up. With my writing and journaling style, anything I handwrite tends to be in a very stream-of-consciousness style, and I never really go back to read over it. Once I've written out whatever I was thinking, the words are no longer as meaningful to me. 

3. // I was glad to see that one of my favorite bloggers, previously at To Universe, with Love, is back and newly blogging at Of a Certain Vintage. Recently, Luxe did a good entry about the importance of knowing one's values when making money-related decisions. In some ways, at least to me (a major homebody and also a fairly shy introvert), it was also an entry about introversion, about choosing not to do (or spend money on) certain kinds of social outings. 

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4. // There are a few small items from the Nordstrom Anniversary Sale that I have bought in the past, and that I think could be a good deal: I got these Nordstrom-branded cubic zircona stud earrings last year, on Kathy's recommendation. They're a solid choice, and more importantly for their being a good value, Nordstrom does not seem to discount them at any other time of year. 

A lot of the more interesting items in the sale are from the beauty section: I recently bought one of those Slip silk pillowcases to see if it would help reduce the tangles and split ends my hair's been prone to. (It helps noticeably, but it definitely isn't a miracle product either. I'm satisfied with my purchase, but I won't really be able to compare it to any other silk pillowcase because I don't plan to buy any others to try.) Nordstrom is offering sets of two Slip pillowcases at a substantial discount, in white or beige. 

Link List: A Sense of Duty

A photo I took of someone else's super-fluffy, super-cute, and super-friendly dog on the commuter train to the suburbs. It seems that my M.O. with finding photographs for these link lists posts is basically just to use photos of other people's pets!

1. // Along the lines of some links I shared a few months back, on the theme of people around my age who prioritize and factor in the need (whether present or future) to financially assist their parents, and/or some of their extended family members into their money management plans, here's a recent article from The Cut that I enjoyed. It's based on an interview with Lily, who also blogs. Although our life circumstances might be substantially different (among other things, I also chose my undergraduate school due to its offering me, by far, the best need-based financial aid package available to me, but I was also a second-generation child of immigrant parents who had become fairly well-established and prosperous while I was small), and the same is true about the nature and extent of our expected future obligations to our parents, a lot of the ideas she shared still resonate with me.

When I think about what steps to take with my career in the long term, I feel on occasion that some of my desires conflict somewhat with my sense of duty. In the abstract, and completely separately from this topic, I feel some obligation to try and stay in certain more intense segments of my profession, the kind where Asian-Americans are extraordinarily underrepresented, to try and pave the way for future generations of attorneys like me. More concretely, and far more relevant here, whenever I consider the prospect of making future career decisions that would likely result in significantly lower compensation than some of my other viable options, I wonder slightly if I'd be doing a disservice to my hypothetical future children, my parents when they need me someday, and also potentially to some of my extended family members of more modest means, for whom a relatively small amount of money by US standards could make a big difference in Taiwan. This sense of duty isn't necessarily enough to substantially change my plans, and there are tons of other factors also at play, but it's on my mind.

2. // Speaking of things to do with my profession, there was a discussion on Corporette recently about law school student loan payoff timelines, particularly for people working in biglaw and biglaw-ish. 

The discussion also turned to the always mysterious and never particularly transparent norms and practices surrounding when biglaw associates eventually get the "up or out' discussion, generally with very little warning and often when the firm has pretty much already decided to give you your walking papers. Both of these topics are ones where it's hard to get reliable, "real talk"-style information, so anytime there's an opportunity to get more insight, I pay attention, even if I always take anonymous internet comments with a grain of salt. 

3. // This article at Vox's The Goods about the author's affection for, and memories bound up in, the soon-to-be-shuttered Dressbarn, and about the store's role in her transition, is lovely. 

4. // I'd been holding on to this r/femalefashionadvice link, to a discussion from an experienced leatherworker about his trying out a handbag-making class, for a while now. He noted that, with all the time and labor required to make a medium-large-ish bag by hand, it'd only be viable for him to sell them if he priced them at ~$2500 to $3000, and that the raw materials by themselves cost ~$600. 

When I saw Jess's recent post about getting started with leatherworking and her first few projects, I thought hey, it's a great time now to share these links! I'm always in awe of when people are able to make and create things. (At present, I definitely don't have the physical space to get into sewing, the creative hobby I'm most interested in. There's no room for a sewing machine in my apartment! Even if I only ended up learning some basic skills, like how to hem my own pants, I'd be thrilled.) 

5. // And now for a few interesting things over at other blogs I follow: Elaine's recent post about starting to use a safety razor is helpful, this is one of those small moves to lower-waste that I've thought about, but have put off because it's sort of intimidating; Revanche hosted a good discussion regarding how our views on money can be deeply affected by how we were raised; Michelle's discussion of some possible reasons for feeling career burn out really resonated with me (I couldn't relate as much to some of the more recent viral discussions about burn out elsewhere online); and I enjoyed M's May wardrobe roundup.

One thing M mentioned was how a social media platform or online community (in her case, r/femalefashionadvice, and in my case, some of the discussions of slow or "ethical" fashion that seem to mostly take place on Instagram, and also various money-centric discussions across multiple platforms) can have its own distinctive culture or set of commonly-held assumptions that can make a participant or observer preemptively defensive, or a little insecure, when thinking or writing about certain topics. This is an idea I've long been interested in, given all the online communities and social media discussions I follow as a mostly-passive observer (it's just on blogs that I'm a super-active commenter!). 

My own writing style has always had a natural tendency towards maybe-excessive disclaimers, lots of extra and possibly-unnecessary context, and things like that. It's just the way my brain works, and I'm also long-winded by nature. Law school may have amplified some of my writing habits that can sound defensive on the page, though law school also made me a more concise and direct writer. In any case, because of work, I can't help but think about and take into account potential rebuttals or counterpoints whenever I write, because I've been trained to always write with opposing parties and the court in mind. 

That Five or Ten-Year Plan

Via the New York Times, from a series where they interviewed a group of women junior associates at one biglaw firm in 2001, and then checked in again with some of them in 2013.

I'm a regular reader over at Corporette, a habit that began around 2016 or 2017. It's a bit of an odd internet community, more a message-board for whatever readers want to talk about rather than anything to do with the blog's actual content. Things get weird sometimes, people occasionally say absurd and unkind things (see, e.g., this discussion), and there's the occasional troll about. But many other comments can be insightful or interesting, and so I keep going back. And hey, to the extent that I still feel a powerful nostalgia for an old-fashioned and "retro" style of blogging (circa 2009), Corporette certainly fits that bill! I specifically remember a college friend recommending the site to me in 2009, but I couldn't quite get into it then, maybe because I hadn't yet started working. In any case, the site has changed very little since.

There was a great discussion there recently about people's five or ten-year plans, both on a personal and professional level. A little over five years ago, in November 2013 (so if one is inclined to split hairs, it's turned out to be a discussion about six and eleven-year plans instead), they'd posted something asking about where readers hoped to be in five years, and then in ten. This year, it was time to check in about whether things had gone as planned. The answers were a mixed bag, which isn't exactly surprising, as life is complicated and unpredictable. When it comes to my own life, things also didn't turn out exactly as I hoped. But that's actually a good thing! If things had happened the way I planned, I wouldn't be in this new job that I greatly enjoy.

The original inspiration for this discussion was a set of New York Times features that had done essentially the same exercise in the decade prior, interviewing 21 women junior associates at one top biglaw firm in 2001, and then going back to some of them in 2013. And the pattern of how things changed between 2001 and 2013 is, in my view, substantially similar to the pattern of changes for the 2013 and 2019 group. That's consistent with how diversity and equality-related conditions have not improved substantially in the legal industry between 2001, 2013, and now. (Things are far better than when Justice Ginsburg was starting out, when many firms openly stated they would "engage no women" as a matter of policy. But it's commonly understood that, at some point in the decades since, things began to stall.)

One theme common to many of the Corporette updates was that people (particularly those on the cusp of starting their career, or in the earliest stages of it, in 2013) often found that certain obstacles in their industry or workplace, particularly ones related to discrimination, including harassment and #metoo problems, were far more powerful than expected. Oftentimes, people who, in 2013, were optimistic that discrimination might not directly affect their own career trajectory or workplace had those hopes dashed somewhat, and would now describe themselves as having been too naive about these realities in 2013. Many who encountered those types of challenges made a choice that it wasn't worth it to stay where they were. A lot of those people were attorneys, and I can vouch for how common that experience is in this industry.

More happily, there were also many who found that, for serendipitous reasons, life moved in a different direction from what they originally planned. And indeed, even for some who ran face-first into discrimination-related challenges and found that they couldn't stay with their original company, or even in the profession they originally planned on, there was also some of this more positive effect at play. That's another thing I've also found to be true for myself.

With that context in mind, this is how I would answer the questions about where I was in 2013; where I am now in 2019, and whether things had gone according to plan; and where I hope to be in 2024:

Link List: On "Wealth" and Other Miscellany

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A post shared by Strange Planet (@nathanwpylestrangeplanet) on Mar 31, 2019 at 8:46am PDT

By now, everyone has probably already seen Nathan Pyle's comics, but if not, I highly recommend them! His Strange Planet series, example above, is cute and clever. His other comics are also good, expecially this one, which I think is too frequently relevant these days, alas. 

1. // And here are some other things on the more light and cheerful side of the spectrum: After seeing her work on the the Pokemon Go subreddit, I've started following @miscellaneousmao, who does some really awesome baking and dessert-making, including some Pokemon-shaped truffles. Her April Fools' "sushi" cakes also look remarkably like the real thing. What a talent!

I don't follow celebrity red carpet fashion and street style quite as much as I used to in my teenage years, though I check in at Tom and Lorenzo a few times a week to get the general scoop. Not much celebrity fashion catches my eye, even if it's often nice to look at, but I just had to share this round-up of Marsai Martin's recent red carpet and public appearance outfits because every look is so fun and awesome. And her upcoming movie, Little, in which she is both the star (along with Issa Rae and Regina Hall) and executive producer, looks really funny. 

2. // I keep doing that thing where I save up a bunch of links related to a general theme, in hopes of writing a longer post about them, but then other current events or viral stories come along and displace my older post ideas. One idea I was working towards, but that I don't think will get its own post anytime soon (it wasn't very focused, was maybe a bit too abstract, and I don't think I have enough useful things of my own to say about it regardless), was about the nature of "wealth", and social perceptions of where the line is at which a person becomes "wealthy." It's a question I don't think American society at large understands. That's probably why we perennially get those really annoying articles about households that make multiple six figures, but apparently feel very middle class and far from "wealthy." I don't have a good answer for that question either. 

My set of links related to this larger theme are, in keeping with the amorphousness and half-formed nature of the idea, a bit all over the place. A few months ago, I mentioned that I was enjoying the money-related content on Glamour's Youtube channel, particularly the "Different Women, Different Salaries" series, where they gave a money-related survey to several anonymous NYC women across a range of different incomes, and then had a set of actresses read the responses. It's not quite as much information as, say, Refinery29 Money Diaries, but I think this small set of interview questions, combined with only minimal additional details about each respondent (just their income, age, and occupation), is still quite illuminating. It's a very interesting series, though one thing to keep in mind is that the way each actress "plays" the "character" of their corresponding interview subject may, of course, not fully reflect the exact tone or "feel" of each answer as the respondent intended. I even got a little attached to the first set of "characters"/actresses, but haven't been able to get into the more recent set they just started.

When I watch the videos one after another, it really struck me that, for the women earning $100,000/year or more, their answers to a lot of the tougher questions often sound more relaxed, more self assured, and a lot less stressed out than for the under $100,000 group. Okay, okay, it's a totally obvious and unsurprising observation, and the reasons behind it are also extremely obvious. But I thought it was still a helpful extra set of perspectives that really drove home the point that $100,000/year is a lot. And it allows for a lot of comfort, splurges, and luxuries, while still leaving room for saving (at least before taking into account children and other dependents, which few of the survey respondents seemed to have yet), even in an ultra-expensive locality like NYC.

As it turns out, the other links I saved may not have been quite as related to the exact same theme. I've also been interested in stories about how people view and manage their money in relation to their obligations to their parents and extended families, some of which are culturally learned. Aminatou Sow's interview with The Cut got into this theme, as did this article about one of the first things Ijeoma Oluo wanted to do for her mom after getting a big royalty check from her book.

3. // Lots of great blog entries to read recently: Speaking of the difficulties society has with identifying the line at which a someone is arguably "wealthy", Kathy initiated a discussion about something that was making the rounds on Twitter. Because the source material for the viral tweet she was referring to was purportedly about two attorneys very similar to K and I, I had to chime in too. As you can see, I was skeptical about the truth of the original personal finance blog source material that CNBC adapted the tweet from (archive.is link in order to not give page-views to something I view as likely inaccurate click-bait).

Two bloggers I follow, Olga and Talia, both posted recently about their perspectives on how blogging and social media have changed over time. They come at it from different perspectives, one more focused on fashion blogging since 2010 and earlier, and the other more about general social media use since that time, particularly on Instagram, and how that interacts with what she wants to accomplish on her blog. Both raise very good points. I always love when Adina goes in-depth about thrifting, resale, and related topics, because she writes so thoughtfully, and from ample experience. This time, she wrote about her experiences with the challenges associated with reselling clothes. And Luxe wrote a great post about the process of choosing how much to pay for housing. I'll contribute my thoughts to the discussion soon, if I haven't already!

Book and Podcast Life Lately

After taking a bit of a break from reading for fun for a few months (I read a few books that were emotionally intense, in a really good way, but I needed some time and space afterwards to reflect on them), I'm easing back into the habit. I've read a few things recently that I greatly enjoyed, and that I wanted to share. First up is Nicole Chung's All You Can Ever Know, a memoir about the author's childhood as a transracial adoptee and the process of reconnecting with her birth family once she was an adult. It's a really wonderful book, she writes with a remarkable sensitivity, and she has a deft and clear-eyed way of describing the highly emotionally complex things she has experienced. She has a somewhat restrained and understated writing style that nonetheless packs a huge emotional punch. It's a very powerful book, and I think you'll be swept away into her story. 

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While the focus is largely on the emotional and other implications of adoption and transracial adoption, and on her family, All You Can Ever Know also has some very sharp, very real things to say about race in America in general, and the experience of living in this country as a person of color. I can't recommend this book enough. 

I've also been reading a lot of much lighter fare. In particular, I recently rediscovered the work of Mira Grant, whose Newsflesh series I read years ago and found quite clever and fun. (Mira Grant is a pseudonym for Seanan McGuire, but I've only personally read her work as Mira Grant.) I found her Parasitology series a bit of a dud, unfortunately. It was a cool premise, but the pacing was really off and it would have been much better off as two books instead of three. The first volume of her new series, Into the Drowning Deep, is fantastic however, a fast-paced adventure with a great sense of humor (and a fair bit of horror movie-type violence and gore, I should warn, in case you're sensitive to that). It's so much fun to read and quite original. 

As to podcasts, thank you again to everyone who recommended some in January! It'll take me a long time to get to all of them, but I've already started listening to some, and they're pretty great. In particular, I wanted to second the recommendations for The Dream. It started off as a slow burn for me because I find some pyramid schemes or multi-level marketing schemes ("MLMs") more interesting to learn about than others, and a lot of the ones they mentioned at the start were ones I'd never heard of. But once I gave the series some time, it really grabbed me. They've done a lot of research, and they did a great job weaving together a lot of seemingly very different, fragmented stories that all fall under the same central theme of pyramid schemes and the way they sell that "dream". The episodes about the history of (ultimately mostly failed) attempts to regulate and take legal action against MLMs were particularly interesting to me. 

Another podcast I wanted to recommend, though this is just part of a single episode rather than a full series, is the second half of the February 28, 2019 episode of Stay Tuned with Preet*, which features an in-depth interview with Bryan Stephenson, the author of Just Mercy, one of those two books that had such an emotional impact on me late last year. Mr. Stephenson is extraordinary, and what he has accomplished through his work at the Equal Justice Initiative is so important, even though the nature of such work is that there is always, always more to be done. 

I can also recommend a few other somewhat new and recent podcasts, both in the "true crime" genre. First is The Dropout, which is about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. The podcast doesn't necessarily tread much new substantive ground that wasn't already covered in the excellent and incredibly comprehensive Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, one of my favorite books from last year, but it is interesting to hear the voices of the people in the story, including the whistleblowers and Ms. Holmes herself. Second is a less well-known story, Over My Dead Body, about a murder case in Florida that may be tried later this year. Attorneys or law students who frequently read Above the Law, our main online news source for law school and biglaw industry gossip, may already be familiar with the underlying events, as one of the writers feels a personal connection to the story (he's interviewed in the podcast as well).

Have you read any great books so far this year? Discovered any new podcasts? 

*The whole podcast is very high-quality, but it's just not quite my cup of tea. I spend so much time thinking about legal topics at work that I don't necessarily want to listen to a lengthy podcast episode about it every week!