Goodbye 2016, Hello 2017

Personal photo from a long weekend in Cape Cod.

2016. What a year. I was getting really exhausted at the end of it, for various reasons. There's some amount of fear and uncertainty when it comes to what the next year will look like in the world at large. In general, I'm feeling less chipper about things than when I wrote last year's New Year's resolution post.  

Looking back onto last year's goals, things were alright. Although my financial goals morphed a bit, I consider my work on them to generally be a success. I wasn't great about reading books this year, despite the ample time that I now spend on a commuter train every weekday. I'm often too sleepy in the morning and too mentally drained in the evening, and I haven't found many books that really captured my attention. I stuck to a nearly three days/week gym habit for almost the entire year, though there were gaps. I continued doing substantial pro bono legal work, at least another 80 hours for my months at the firm. It's easier to prioritize relationships with friends, family, and K in my current job, as I'm able to completely disconnect from work after hours. So on this front, things are pretty good. 

I have a few personal goals for 2017:

• Continue getting my financial house in order. Among other things, my food budget is maybe a bit excessive, even for a NYC resident. I'd like to cut that down. There may be a few other categories where I can also reduce my budget, though identifying which ones will take some more analysis. I'm expecting a fairly substantial tax refund this year, which will hopefully allow me to come through the last few months of my clerkship (and its attendant pay-cut) without having depleted the emergency fund I accumulated in my first ten months at the firm. 
• Get back into the reading habit. I miss reading! I have so much time on the train, and that would be a better use of my time than just mindlessly browsing on my phone . I don't have that many books that I'm excited to read at the moment, so getting started on this goal might be tough. 
• Take more ownership of my work and hit the ground running at my next gig. My first stint in biglaw was a bit of a strange in-between time, given that I had already committed to a clerkship due to start a little less than a year later. Especially with how much work there was, I didn't always do a great job of seeking out additional opportunities for more substantive work and to build skills that were new to me. I'd like to do much more of that at my next position, whatever that may be.
• Focus a bit more on healthy eating. Throughout the year there were a few periods of time where I was eating too much takeout food and relying too much on Grubhub, which tends to result in meals with very low fresh vegetable or fruit content. It's not the healthiest way to eat, and not especially good for my wallet either. 
• Write more. As I mentioned in this year's "blogiversary" post, I have so much fun writing here, and I am truly grateful to everyone who reads along with me. I'd like to stick to a more regular posting schedule this year, and hopefully write some things that are interesting and fun to read.

That's a fairly modest list of goals, I think. This time last year, 2016 looked like it was going to be an intimidating process of adapting to the "new normal" of working life. This year, I feel a lot more settled in and adjusted, even if some things are still challenging. Do you have any New Year's resolutions or goals for 2017? Any favorite books to recommend?

At a Loss for Words

The United States Supreme Court, via.

I've struggled for days to figure out what to say. One obstacle was that, as a judicial clerk, I have an ethical obligation to abstain from all political activity (save for voting), as well as any commentary that suggests a lacks of neutrality regarding issues that may come before the court. I'm bound by that obligation for several more months. My writings that predate the start of my clerkship may strongly imply how I feel now.

This is an unsatisfying post, and I know it. I thought, for a while, about whether I should or could say more, but concluded that it would not be proper. Over the course of the past few months, with all of the election discussion on social media and elsewhere, I've realized that I am perhaps overly strict in my reading of the ethical canons, more cautious than the rules require. There are clerks who, doubtless with their judges' permission, post political articles on social media with the disclaimer that they themselves "have no opinion" on the contents, for instance.

The ethical canons had affected my writing before this. I read them so broadly and take them so seriously that, between when the clerkship began and this moment, I've been refraining from touching anything that could be remotely construed as political. I've stayed away from topics beyond my shopping and personal finance management.

I believe in the importance of our judicial institutions, in the values embodied in our laws, and in the ideals of what our laws could or should be. It isn't much of an exaggeration to say that I do, in my heart of hearts, believe the federal courts' role to be nearly sacred. This is true even if I do object to some (many, even) of the resulting outcomes, which means that I know all too well that the institutions are fallible. A courts' role is, after all, typically to apply the law (no easy feat, oftentimes), not to create it.

The Constitution, as it is written, stands against racism, hate, and bigotry. It stands for tolerance and equality under the law. That much is explicit, even if I know - as does everyone else with the barest knowledge of American legal history - that there have been so very many times throughout our history where the law has nonetheless fallen short of the ideals that we now know they should protect. That much, I think, is fair for me to say. Anything more will have to wait. 

Weekly Reading 6/5/2016: On Asian-American Identity

Asian-American identity and representation are topics I'll likely return to again and again in these weekly reading posts. I'm a big believer in the general importance of diversity and representation for all minority groups in elite institutions of higher education and in different industries like my own, and I also care deeply about issues of racial equality in the United States. On a more micro level, I enjoy reading about different aspects of the Asian-American experience. My awareness of Asian-American issues was ignited very late in life, and I likely have to credit the controversy over the whitewashing of the Avatar: The Last Airbender live-action movie for it, strange as it might seem. It might seem like a petty or minor problem, but I don't think it's revolutionary to suggest that diversity and representation in media is a valuable thing. I always go back to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's wonderful TED talk on "The Danger of a Single Story" to explain that.

Full disclosure, I've never actually read Eddie Huang's first memoir, Fresh Off the Boat, though I would like to. A copy of it sits on the bookshelf at home, bought as a gift for K (who has read it). Huang also has an additional forthcoming book, Double Cup Love. I find the ABC sitcom adaptation of "Fresh Off the Boat" enjoyable and charming. I was, however, initially apprehensive: I grew up in a majority-Asian-American community in California. Among ourselves, we shared many jokes about our lives, our parents, and our culture, but those are born out of affection and an understanding of shared experiences rather than stereotypes. I was concerned that many Americans wouldn't see anything but jokes about "how weird Asian people are" (Huang's family is Taiwanese-American, but American society at large is not always good with distinctions between different Asian-American groups).

Huang himself once hated the show, though he's less vocal now than he was a few months ago. I'll have to read the book myself to truly know what he's talking about when he says that the show is an "artificial" and sanitized version of his real life. A recent New Yorker article describes the contrast between ABC's show and Huang's real life (as seen in a recent episode of his Vice show, "Huang's World") as such: "I began to think of Huang's two shows working in tandem: 'Fresh Off the Boat' answers the question of what life looks like when the cameras are on, and 'Huang's World' answers back with what life looks like with the cameras off."

I suspect that my own lived experiences better resemble the ABC show than Huang's real life, despite some similarities: Taiwanese-American, went to law school, and he even had a job just like mine for a time. I dream, someday, of writing (and selling, with hopefully at least some minor success) a book about my own life, but it'd sound a lot more like Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother than anything else. (I've said before that I find her portrayal of herself sympathetic, whatever that says about me, but I find her other quasi-academic work highly problematic, likely to fuel racism even if the work itself skirts the right side of the line.)

I was lucky, in many ways, to grow up in a place were most of my classmates (at public schools, no less!) looked like me, understood what it was to be Asian-American. That doesn't protect you forever from the realities of America's many issues with race or of the challenges that come from being Asian in America. But that's a story for another time.