Avoid carbohydrate as much as possible. I know this is impossible to achieve. I’ve been trying to do this for years, only succeeding in making carbohydrate more appealing to me. It’s with great self restraint that rivals the most lauded stoic figure in history that I stopped myself today from buying sticky rice snacks at HMart. I don’t think such an extraordinary feat can be reproduced next time. I remember years ago I met somebody who’s really handsome. Fortunately he’s not in our Asian team. I was determined to avoid him, but it ended up I thought about him every day. Somehow our brain is capable of interpreting a word in completely the opposite direction you want it too. For example, “avoiding” is interpreted as “being obsessed”.
Never read a book written by a conservative. I know this is just a resolution and it will soon be broken. If somebody writes well and the style is to my taste, I will read it no matter what political, religious, cultural leaning he or she has. Even now, I am reading the book, “The Hundred-Year Marathon”, which is not only conservative, but also paranoid. However I want to know about his experience and what he thinks. So I proceed to read it, despite everything. There are people who are capable of raging campaigns, stretching facts, annihilating opponents, disciplining themselves as well as others for a cause, but I will never become one of these people. I can do things as much as my sense of aesthetics will carry me, but no further.
Do laundry more frequently. I hate laundry, even if I have no right to hate modern laundry which has been made as convenient and painless as possible. Still, every week, it bothers me. When I was young, my grandmother washed a huge basin of clothes every week with her bare hands. The basin is huge–a person could sit in it and bath himself without bending his legs too much. Since the subtropical region is often rainy, she had to listen to the weather forecast–which at the time is not so accurate–and observe the sky in the morning. If it’s a sunny day, she had to act quickly and rubbing clothes on the washboard as vigorously as she could. Before noon, the clothes had to be arranged on huge bamboo sticks stretching out on an iron frame, which is fixated underneath the window sill. Don’t try to walk in the alley ways during a sunny day since the sun bathing wet clothes from the second floor will drench you. Now with the modern washing machine and dryer so conveniently placed waiting to serve me, why can’t I be more grateful, more content?
Try not to watch movies or TV shows from Hollywood with Asian figures, but I know I will continue to watch and continue to complain about it. I love movies and TV shows from Japan and South Korea. I just don’t like shows like “Fresh Off The Boat” or movies like “Crazy Rich Asians”. There used to be an online platform, operated by several geeks in New York, which serves Asian immigrants with Asian shows. The subscription fee is a higher than Netflix, but it is fine and it is popular. Two or three years ago, the omnipresent capitalist machine came in, bought the platform, and stopped its operation. Why? Dear rich capitalists, why do you have to do that? Why do you have to crash every niche market, just to expand your already omnipresence? Don’t you have enough already? Supposedly Netflix will have shows from Asia to cater to the immigrant population, but that’s not the case. Netflix has very few available and most of the audience of this once flourishing niche market are left drying and dying.
Haoyan Do 