zhoyoyo

[zhoyoyo]

Nineteen months later

Unbelievably, I still write here. 

The last post was written in June 2021 when I just left the New York after a long period of lockdown. I went back to my home in Shanghai, initially thinking I would stay for a few months. 

The few months stretched to eight months, during which I experienced stress, anxiety, conflicts, illness, friendship, excitement, hope, and love — a lot of love. 

I came back to New York to take a new job. My friends and I went on our long overdue trip to New Mexico. I planned my dream hiking trip in Zion. I started dating again, and it magically worked this time. I went to Estonia for a reporting trip. My words were published in Chinese. I left the job short of one year. 

2019 was an exciting year for the abundance of hope and growth. 

2020 was a fruitful year for gaining independence and building confidence. 

2021 was a turbulent year during which I embraced love and multiple anchors of life (besides work.)

2022 was a recovering year. I looked back at the road I came along, identifying the precious stones I neglected when walking too fast last time. Luckily, they were still there. I picked them up. 

Now, I feel ready for a restart. 

[zhoyoyo]

Who gets to enjoy the open streets in New York City?

The city government voted last month to make the open streets in New York permanent. It’s great news. I biked countless times along Willoughby St and 5th Ave in Brooklyn over the past year. I liked the open sections along Prospect Park and Fort Greene where I could sense a reduction of car traffic gave back the neighborhoods to people living there. There were neighborhood concerts, popup gatherings with chairs and tables on the streets. One day Ali asked me a technical question on finding the most demographically diverse neighborhoods among the open streets locations. Curious to find the answer myself, I looked into the data and did some analysis. 

There were close to 250 sections across the city designated as open streets blocks, according to data in January from NYCDOT. Some are blocks opening partially to local car traffic, and others are completely reserved for pedestrians and cyclists. I found that overall these open street locations are distributed well across racial and income lines, but there are more locations in richer neighborhoods, and in more diverse areas.

The chart below shows the findings.

See a full-sized version here.

I made two decisions in the process of the analysis that might be interesting to some:

To assign a diversity score to each neighborhood, I calculated how likely it is that two people chosen at random from the neighborhood would be from a different racial and ethnic group. (I initially used a more involved method that calculates diversity based on even distribution. It produced very similar final analysis results, but I think the simple probability calculation serves my purpose better.)

To get an average score of surrounding neighborhoods for each open street block, I took the Open Streets data, the demographic information, and the NYC Neighborhood Tabulation Area (NTA) map data into QGIS. I first dissolved the Open Streets layers to unify sections that belong to the same block (which I could specify the conditions for unification), and then used the Intersection tool to get the demographic data onto the layer. The Open Streets data have are so segmented that it was easy to get at least one section for each NTA. That made the later aggregation much easier. 

[zhoyoyo]

My year in 2020

Inspired by Alix’s beautiful farewell to 2020, I decided to write mine. 

2020 has been a year of introspective thinking, a year of returning to myself.

For the first half of 2020, the lockdown took away the pressure—which for most of the time I had been unconscious of—of socializing. Absent of the external pressure, I lived on my own terms, only reaching out to people when I felt like to and hearing from people who likewise took the effort to check in on me. I used to socialize a lot more and thought I wanted to. Needs and obligations were not always distinguishable. I felt happier, calmer, more grounded when the external force went away. I identified the relationships that meant more to me and set aside time for them. I also came to realize that the work I'm doing and will continue to do requires less chatter and more time to myself.

My self-contained lockdown experience was disrupted by the layoff in late May. The convoluted event couldn't be traced back to a single day. My priorities in every sense shifted as it unfolded. What it did most to me, looking back, is that it freed up my mind for more wandering thoughts and provided the conditions for experiments. I had worked a full-time job since graduating college eight years ago. The longest break away from work was no more than two weeks, including job transitions. I have always pursued jobs and positions I liked or I thought I liked—that's probably why I'm still doing journalism. But even a dream job comes with restraints tied to the institution and industry. My rationing (of what I want to do, what I should do) has always been bound by the existing and potential paths I could see myself take within the institution and the industry. The loss of a full-time job and day-to-day obligations forced me to erase the rough strokes on my preplanned future canvas and think about what I want to paint next without institutional constraints. In the weeks and months since the layoff day I reexamined the questions that had always existed with a different state of mind. Do I want to code more, draw more, or write more? (The answer: do more creative work and get better at articulating myself.) Do I see myself following the subject area I've been reporting on in the past few years (immigration, global migration) or have my interests shifted? (I don't have a definite answer to the question yet, but I would say based on my thinking over the past six months: It didn't shift, but narrowed.) Do I want to spend 14 hours a day binge watching anime and Chinese reality TV show? (Yes, and I've got some time to do that. The magical effect of pure entertainment content on myself always amazes me.)

***

I went with some friend to Acadia NP in mid-December for a short restful weekend. Having never hiked in the snow, it was surreal to see various formations of water molecules along a lake loop hike in below-zero weather, and later on the cliffs. The wind combed through the snow on the rock, brushing these white soft sands into the sea, and left its traces. The snowflakes fell onto the icy rock crystalizing into half ice. I admired the unbelievable oddity and beauty of the nature and took photos. I didn't think much of them until one day when I was lying on my yoga mat and the images came back to me. I started to visualize the formation. What were the weather conditions that turned water molecules into different forms? How did the rain drop, the wind, the uneven temperature, and the water in the lake come together to transform the view? The scene at the moment of the hike totally absorbed me. It took days before it came back and I started to visualize the process. On that yoga mat I realized that’s how my mind works. Many things that happened in 2020 surprised, amazed, or stunned me at the moment. But it would take some time for these moments to come back and sink in. And only then can I truly understand what really happened. Some moments of realization have occurred already; others will come in the future. There’s no way to capture all of them by the artificial year-end mark. All I can do is to document what has happened, hoping that with a gaze from the future a new moment of realization will come.

***

I started the year with the goal of developing a subject area of expertise in data storytelling. Most of my work this year is to fulfill this pursuit. The pandemic provided some great opportunities to examine the community of "global migrants (immigrants, expats, foreigners)" and their relationships with their home countries and host countries.

I analyzed the announcements by US universities on how they treated international students under lockdown (like most public policies rolled out dealing with migrants amid Covid-19, they were mostly an after-thought and all over the place);

I showed with data that US immigrants were disproportionally affected by the pandemic as more worked in high-unemployment industries and had less access to health insurance;

I looked into how the severe outbreaks in high-income countries affected low-income countries due to the plunge in remittances;

... the impact of the global pandemic on the value of passport at the beginning of the pandemic, and later on, why it's not a good year to be an American.

As the data became available, a reverse globalization could be seen around the world. Foreigners have left the US and other western developed countries.

For one more evidence of the global shift toward favoring skilled immigration, I built a calculator for UK's then-proposed now-enacted points-based immigration system to see who's qualified to migrate to UK post Brexit.

In another story, I charted the global inequality of mobility—a theme I could explore and talk about endlessly—by showing that citizens from richer countries had a higher chance of getting their US visas approved.

After the layoff, my work in the area switched from short-burst newsy stories to more creative, in-depth research and analysis. My ex-coworker and friend Dan Kopf allowed me to visualize the history of Chinese immigrants in the Bay Area on his newsletter (which is in itself a data feast of curious unknown facts about the Bay Area. Highly recommend!) I decided to tell the story through the lens of occupations, dug the data, and created something I'm proud of. The abundance of creative freedom made it a liberating experience. Then entering October, I started working on two longer-term projects—in one I was fortunate enough to be selected as a McGraw Business Reporting fellow to report on the story of the effect of immigration policies on US multinational companies, in the other I enrolled myself in the DCrit at SVA to deepen my knowledge and do research on the evolving forms of citizenship (something I had been contemplating of doing for a couple years). Both of them are still ongoing.

Another significant change in my work of 2020 is that I started freelancing. It was such a different (and educating) experience from having a full-time job. Aside from logistics, technicalities, practical dos and don'ts, what I learned the most is care and love. The few months of freelancing after the layoff made me realize how fortunate I am. This community of friends and acquaintances who reached out to me, helped make connections, and provided me with opportunities is something I did not know existed before. I was filled with warmth that I was not left on my own. Their love and action planted something inside me. I wanted to be like them, capable of loving others and taking action—an ability maybe natural to some, but one I cultivated more this year. My dear Quartz family, my friends and acquaintances from The AP and Graphicacy/Timeplots, from the larger JoC family, from the data visualization community (Data Viz Society), from journo-coders (NICAR, IRE, News Nerdery), and my fellow Chinese storytellers... If I need to name names, the list of people I'm grateful for would be long. I owe a great deal to you. ♡ 

Some stories I contributed to and loved from the short period of freelancing:

I worked on a number of data visualization stories explaining Covid-19 for Vox.com 

One examined the effect of mask mandates on containing the spread of the virus (Masking is effective, but mask mandates do not fit into a single narrative.) 

We surveyed the US population on their behaviors of wearing masks in various social settings. The individual decision of wearing a mask is often times a negotiation with the environment. The survey results revealed the danger of small gatherings. 

Another story looked at the rationing of vaccine priorities among the U.S. states when the first Pfizer/Biotech vaccines just became available and there were a number of approaches of distributing the limited doses. While the consensus was health workers should get vaccinated first, the actual distribution did not follow that rationale. 

I charted how Covid-19 became the third leading cause of deaths at the end of September for Scientific American.

Centro de Periodismo Investigativo investigated the excessive deaths in Puerto Rico after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic with expert analysis and local context. I helped analyze the data, build the charts, and put together the package.

CalMatters investigated toxic chemicals in California's water systems and how a regulation change affected communities living on the water supply. I did the data analysis and created visualizations for the investigation.

2020 has indeed been a year of failed expectations. Most of my plans fell short. I did not fulfill my goals for work or my travel promises to my parents and friends. I did not read more books or learn a new language. My races throughout the year were cancelled and my guaranteed entry to the NYC marathon was wasted. But it is also this year that I started doing yoga and grew more plants. I can clearly picture the multiple moments when I was showered in love and felt the urge to become a more loving and caring person. I learned more about myself and my values and embarked new journeys that I had always wanted to give a try. 2020 has also been a year of warmth and courage, and I would like to think it made me a better person. 

[zhoyoyo]

Workism as the new identity

The company behind China's domestically popular live-streaming app Kuaishou announced that it would be shifting to a work schedule that alternates between a five-day work week and a six-day work week starting in 2021. I read some online reactions. Among expected sentiments such as surprise, frustration, and anger, many who seem to be working in the tech industry in China expressed a sense of normalcy. Why news? It's already been like this in other market-dominating tech companies such as ByteDance, Pingduoduo, Little Red Book. One person commented: "I just turned down an offer to a company that requires a six-day work week and told them the practice violated the labor law. The HR interviewer replied 'Good luck finding a job that guarantees a two-day weekend.'" 

Tech in China is a labor-intensive industry. Working in it today perhaps doesn't feel much different from working in a shoe factory half a century ago despite much better physical working conditions (as a result of the evolution of the labor laws) and much higher salaries (as compared to cost-of-living.) The economist theory that the increase in collective productivity would lead to a significant reduction in work hours and more leisure time doesn't hold true in reality. It did not happen in the US, did not happen in Japan, and is not happening in China. The excessive wealth was not redistributed to those who need it the most, but consumed by the artificial traps created by the capitalist society—The emergence of bullshit jobs, the consumer society feeding on people’s excessive material desire, the financial market that reproduces wealth, etc.—that overtimes become an evil circle, a magnet that makes sure the most productive keep producing, and the least productive are left behind. The purpose of work has changed from sustaining a living in the age of industrialization to the purpose of life in contemporary times. Work has become the end to itself. (This year, when people are left at home without much to consume, they work more.) The organizational cultural of Kuaishou—and that of many other tech platforms in China—is built on the idea that workism is the new identity. It attracts young people to work days and nights, weekdays and weekends, without a break for a collective imagination of the product-empire building by claiming successes in product launches, marketing campaigns, and battles that crushed competitors. 

The capitalist trap in China today are two folds: The leisure time that individuals can use to self-actualize on individual terms is almost nonexistent when faced with the sky-rocketing price of owning an apartment, offering a quality education to kids, and affording expensive hospital bills. High societal pressure and a fragile safety net keeps the mule on the wheel. But when there's leisure time, people fall into another trap: One can mindlessly spend hours online, buying gifts for idols, shitting on social media, consuming endless short video content on Douyin (Chinese version of Tiktok) or Kuaishou. Different from the traditional entertainment industry that offers one-way content that can be easily turned off, the current attention-grabbing economy is a constant reaction-feedback loop always on. 

Unlike the fisherman who fishes to eat the fish—eating the fish has always been the goal and guidance of the finishing activity, in today's society, tech workers work to make money so that they could afford the life’s necessities and have a bit of leisure time to themselves. But then they spend the earned leisure time on the product they created. It would only make sense for someone to work in the tech industry if their joy of life comes from living online (why not talk to people in real life?). For the majority of people who work in tech for the sole purpose of good money, they are trapped by their own production. 

And in a sense, we are all trapped. 

[zhoyoyo]

Reading “China, Africa and the future of Internet” amid Covid-19

While the book talks about China’s business activities in the internet, communications and technology (ICT) sector of African countries, the sticky thought inevitably goes to a scary future of the internet not only the Chinese government, but almost all governments want to make happen—a future where speeches can be monitored, controlled (censored) and punished within national borders, under the name of national security. Gagliardone called it the sovereign internet.

China has already been doing it. In addition to enacting real-name policies that require social network users to provide unique govt. IDs to register, and creating a social credit system to award good-citizen behaviors and punish bad ones, China requires that all foreign business entities in the China market store data related to its Chinese users in China. There is, of course, the great fire wall. There are internet polices under the disguise of regular netizens.

Other countries, Western of African, would want to do the same if they could. This played out as, when Chinese aid and Chinese tech companies help accelerate the internet capacity of African countries without putting conditions regarding how the technology may be used, governments all seek to increase their control through technical means. Some dictators saw successes, while countries with a stronger civil society faced obstacles.

This also played out in western countries, where The War on Terror gave resources and support for increased national security. China has gotten such a bad reputation that African countries know they need to avoid any mention of the China model of the internet. Instead, African countries say they are combatting terrorism, as Gagliardone wrote:

A veteran computer scientist who had observed the evolution of the information society in many African countries put it: “In practice many countries copy China, but when they explain what they are doing they mention the West.”

This have turned out to be a very special year, even as we’ve only lived the first four months. China is now going through a delicate post-lockdown period. Contact tracing has become such an inseparable part of life that the elderly are lining up in front of electronic stores to purchase smartphones. In some residential neighborhoods, one needs a “healthy” QR code on an Alibaba-developed contact-tracing app to get in and out of their buildings, get into supermarkets, postal offices, or use public transportations such as the subway or trains.

Covid-19 is giving a good excuse for voices advocating for stronger control of the internet and bypassing lengthy legal and public scrutiny. This is played out by different actors with different procedures in different parts of the world. A recent piece by The Atlantic points out that digital surveillance and speech control in the US has shown many similarities to those in China in the past two decades. While the paramount force comes from the government in China, the private platforms in the US, their deep pocket, their strong political influence, and their technical capabilities are driving the ever-expanding intrusion of privacy. Internet speech will never go back to the previous after Covid-19:

What is different about speech regulation related to COVID-19 is the context: The problem is huge and the stakes are very high. But when the crisis is gone, there is no unregulated “normal” to return to… The surveillance and speech-control responses to COVID-19, and the private sector’s collaboration with the government in these efforts, are a historic and very public experiment about how our constitutional culture will adjust to our digital future.

What digital future? At least there's one we know we don't want to live in. A metaphor, quoted from a research journal in the book, depicts vividly how the internet might be like if governments can monitor not only the content flow, but the content itself on the web:

Now imagine a postal worker who… opens up all packets and letters; reads the content; checks it against databases of illegal material and when finding a match sends a copy to the police authorities; destroys letters with prohibited or immoral content; sends packages for its own mail-order services to a very fast delivery truck, while the ones from competitors go to a slow cheap sub-contravctor.

What if, everyone thinks that's normal? Does the potential fact that millions, if not billions, of people would be going through the same process as you would, normalize the experience?

[zhoyoyo]

The kind of globalization we want

This is a review for Empire of Borders by Todd Miller

The book opened my eye what a country the US really is. Disillusioned? I never "dreamed of" the greatness of the country in the first place. My own experience, my friends’ stories, and daily exposure to content produced by the main stream media have already taken away any rosy filter. But the historical perspective and figures presented in the book have power beyond anecdotes.

The powerful friends of the US formed a coalition. Together they built border walls that prevent outsiders from getting in, while allow businesses within the coalition to expand beyond borders, take home resources, and benefit from cheap labors provided by outsiders.

The coalition-building is a costly, long-term project. US exported its immigration enforcement model, trained border patrol agents on foreign lands, and contracted Israeli companies to build surveillance and intelligence systems for them.

One aspect of CBP training is streamlining the agencies in foreign countries, getting them to work together in a whole government approach to immigration policing. It’s also about pushing countries to give border forces a type of authority and power that follows the model of US enforcement.

...

In total, since 1948, the US has provided Israel $134 billion in bilateral assistance, out of which $95 billion has been military equipment and arms.

It’s mind-boggling to think that working in the US and paying taxes is in a way financing the tyranny of some foreign countries and displacing communities. It also wakes me up to the double standards US media have been using when covering China’s global expansion and US’s foreign policy exercises.

The China-rise narrative is often negative and cautious, along the line of an authoritarian nation’s forceful and merciless expansion. For example, China-in-Africa stories often go like: China invests heavily and loans heavily to African nations; it's exploiting the natural resources of Africa; it exports authoritarian and surveillance telecomm infrastructures to African governments; what China is doing in Africa should be understood as neo-colonization. I don’t think any of these, backed by solid reporting, is wrong, but the abundance of these stories contrasts so sharply with the rare media mention of US’s foreign expansion or military activities around the world. Essentially, what US has been doing in the past century is similar to what China tries to do today. The imbalance in reporting is alarming.

“When Washington talks about “investment, it often is really talking about taking natural resources from other countries.” Multinational corporations are doing exactly what nativist groups accuse undocumented people of doing in the US: invading, taking over swaths of territory with little local consultation, and destroying the well-being of local people."

Reading the extreme-vetting section, I had to pause to read a few news articles on the dehumanizing experiences with US customs officials at port-of-entry airports, a Constitution-free zone. No rights or privacy was respected even for US citizens. The CBP officials had guns. They took out everything in your suitcase down to underwears. They examined each photo on your phone album and read through your emails and text messages. They could crack the passwords after confiscating your devices if you didn't voluntarily provide them. A few friends have told me that I need to be careful going through the customs into China as Chinese border agents may target Chinese journalists working for western media. Well, Chinese border agents don’t have guns.

While often finding it insightful, I do not completely stand by the author’s point of view. NAFTA caused economic distress for small farms and local factories in Mexico, but it also created jobs for many others. Among other benefits, it reduced the cost of avocado and shoes for consumers. It increased productivity. It fostered immigration. The consequences shouldn’t be blamed on a policy that aimed at removing barriers and fostering cross-culture integration. The economic distress could have been avoided if better complementary policies were put in place, policies that would protect local businesses or incentivize collaborations. It's undeniable that globalization is the reality we live in, the question is, what kind of globalization should it be?

[zhoyoyo]

Who is a migrant?

--A review for The Dog: A Novel by Joseph O'Neill

Criticism aside, the book has the migrant voice I’m looking for. In fact, the entire book is a monologue of the protagonist who doesn’t belong, has to prove his value, and yet often finds himself stranded, lost, ashamed, looked under, unloved, questioned, mostly, by himself. The protagonist is “a normal guy” in a sense that he made a decent income not too long ago as a Manhattan corporate lawyer, transitioned to make a, likely, even-bigger salary as the family treasury trustee. He’s not the typical struggling migrant making life-death choices that prevail news reports. He’s in a position to live a satisfying life, with his experience and knowledge of the field and compensation. The protagonist is so much more representative of today’s migrants, a 3% of the world’s population.

The home disappointed him. The convenience of an escape, aided by globalization or technology development or the rapid expansion of capitalism or a combination of all of the above, provided him the means of porting himself to another country. The life of a migrant worker may not convey a pretty picture. The life of an expat doesn’t always look good, either.

Money, the amount he gets rewarded based on how he’s judged in the society, doesn’t bring freedom. In a mind email -- an email he imagined of writing but could never send out in real life -- to his employer, he reflected on a conversation they had, when the employer said "If you don't like it, you're always free to leave.":

“Always free time leave?�� You know as well as I do, it’s not that simple. And suppose I were “free” to leave—well you were likewise “free” to help me out, and your freedom preceded mine, and the cost to you of exercising your freedom would have been much smaller than the cost to me of exercising mine. So let’s not kid ourselves. You were the chooser, not I, and you chose to strong-arm me to maximum degree permitted by your bargaining position.

Money also doesn't bring friendship or any meaningful relationship. Dubai is designed to separate its population based on where they come from and their functions in the country, an extreme example many countries sadly want to copy. The gap of understanding between locals and migrants (expats, immigrants, foreigners) is unamenable. When you argue with someone who thinks differently from you, the start of the conversation becomes the end of it.

International outrage has no effect on our domestic outrage, except maybe to reduce it, because we disidentify with the fingering holier-than-thou crowd who look down their noses on Dubaians of every stripe, always unaware, in their anxiety to piss on us from a great height, that they have forgotten to wipe the shit from their shoes.

The experience of being a migrant is a process of alienation. It's the wrong solution to the problem of a broken heart. There are still legitimate reasons to migrate. Some go for the money, some for the skills, and some for union with loved ones. They surly experience a similar process of alienation, but their motivations could make that struggle more bearable.

[zhoyoyo]

A Seventh Man, a review

What a surprise, an outdated anti-immigration book I recommend. 

This is a book about (eastern) European migrant labors who left their home countries to wealthy Western European countries (Germany, Swiss, the Netherlands, etc.) to take repetitive manufacturing jobs at a salary that native workers would not accept. It makes a strong argument that immigration is used as a tool by the capitalism world to exploit labor. Immigration increased inequality. It increased global productivity and as a result rich countries became richer and poor countries remained poor. 

My life as an immigrant, as distant from the life of eastern European migrants described in the book, in so many ways resembles theirs. 

Immigrants, be the high-skilled, the low-skilled, the temporary visitor, the permanent resident, have their fate linked together. “The migrant worker comes to sell his labor power where there is a labor shortage,” John Berger wrote. The metropolitan country wants migrant labors because they fulfill a need of the country. 

The points-based skilled workers program that’s the main vehicle for labor migration in Australia, UK, New Zealand, South Korea, and Canada—with Trump considering one—is cruel. There are age limits, college degree and language requirements. Anyone over 55 would be out of luck. So would someone who doesn’t speak English. Some of my colleagues found out that they wouldn’t be qualified to move to Australia. I became angry just by looking at the numbers. I was angry because I came to realize the institutionalized inequality. “The principle of natural inequality rests upon judging men and women according to their abilities… What determines a person’s position in the social hierarchy is the sum of his abilities are required in that particular social and economic system,” Berger wrote in the 70s. Immigration systems are designed to prioritize productivity over individual human beings.  

My editor suggested I cut a paragraph at the end of a recent story. I went briefly into a discussion with perhaps too strong an opinion that even though the US isn’t giving immigrants any support during the crisis, it wants more medical workers, more farmers, just more workers in areas of national labor shortage. 

"So far as the economy of the metropolitan country is concerned, migrant workers are immortal: immortal because continually interchangeable. They are not born. They are not brought up. They do not age. They do not get tired. They do not die. They have a single function - to work. All other functions of their lives are the responsibility of the country they come from.” 

I hope the authors are happy about where Europe is today. Perhaps they were happier ten years ago. With Brexit and the emergence of right-wing politics, it’s difficult to predict the future. Europe still gets better than the US, where capitalism takes priority with the value system centered around profitability. However, the global north has improved, at least rhetorically. Nowhere in the developed world today would tolerate the way immigrants are examined in the book. Political correctness is mainstream and is here to stay. The progress the Left politicians have been able to make was extraordinary. It would be unthinkable to go back to that world now. But in the developing world, in China, India, (What powered China’s continued market growth is extreme capitalism!) things are worse. The economy is booming. Urbanization is accelerating. Inequality is even more stark. Migrant labors are discriminated against in big cities. They live miserable lives. They come for the sole purpose of making money, leaving the elderly, women and kids behind. 

The migrant labor story is similar across time and geographies. It’s a reflection of a historical period that every country seems to have to go under for development. Then how about Chinese labor in Africa? They are migrant labors by motivation but expats by how they are treated home and abroad. The African countries are benefiting from the export of human labors in infrastructure and manufacturing. What does it mean for Chinese workers? They bring more money home because they are mostly paid by Chinese companies overseas. How on earth is that a reality now? 

Such a nice way of telling stories. I miss film.

[zhoyoyo]

Open borders, a review

The pro-immigration book that I don’t recommend reading. 

Using economic rationals to back open borders in a comic book is a nice attempt. The author reframed immigration from an act of charity to an act of justice and abundance. I liked how Caplan lays out how immigration is used often as an excuse (scapegoat) for many social problems, to which the real solutions are never immigration restriction. The anti-immigration arguments are shallow and can be easily debated over.

But perhaps Caplan picked the easy target. The case against anti-immigration is an easy one to make. The case for open borders is a much harder one, and mainly because of a lack of knowledge of the reality, he did a very poor job of making it. Coming from a perfectly pro-immigration standpoint, I was looking for a strong economic argument from an economist for immigration/ open-borders, I finished the book without finding one.

Caplan’s arguments for open borders are flawed because for one, he based his arguments entirely on the demographics, the policy and politics,  the fiscal system, the history… of the US. He asked people not to worry about the cultural differences because he has an extraordinary level of confidence for the American culture (he called “magic culture”.) And for two, his math is entirely based on data points of the past. A change in immigration policy could vastly change the scenarios he listed. He argued that a welfare state and open borders can co-exist because immigrants pay for themselves, based on the current demographics of the foreign-born and the native-born. He didn’t see that picture only existed because of the long-lasting immigration restrictions.

The biggest problem of his pro-immigration arguments is that Caplan has little understanding of how the current immigration system in the US works, but he's well-versed in theoretical frameworks, value systems and arguments for or against the current reality, a reality that he has little knowledge about. He used “an immigration system loophole” to describe the situation that research universities in the US can hire foreign nationals of any country without restrictions. This is just wrong on so many levels. Not to judge how he came to use the term “loophole” when he wanted to make a case for immigration, attracting global research talents is a clear government intention in policy making, not “a loophole.” Both US universities and foreign talents still face the standard list of restrictions that come with hiring a skilled-worker in the US. US universities have to pay loads of money to get the researcher, who’s basically tied to the university with a work visa. Later in the book, Caplan mentioned the restrictive skilled-labor programs that US currently runs--namely, H1B, H2A, H2B--let immigrants in but do not grant them any social welfare. This is again not true. Skilled-workers get social welfare—definitely not as much as citizens, but they do. He told the history of immigration in the US, but the history told by him isn't the history memorized by the immigrant community.

If what listed above hasn’t raised enough of a red flag to me, the solutions Caplan presented are really alarming. He came up with a list of “keyhole solutions,” basically, what could let him comfortable stand in the middle and convince the immigration critics to open the border a little bit to let in a few immigrants. The solutions are hardly innovative to anyone with the least amount of knowledge of how nations are restricting immigration. He argued, as long as keeping the name of “open borders,” how we actually do it can be negotiated. 

Some of the keyhole solutions:

Restrict immigrants eligibility for free and subsidized government services

Require fluency on a language test

Require a full-blown rest of cultural literacy

Exclude individuals with criminal records

Limit immigrants to the most vital services

Impose a wait period (before migrating to the US)

Require immigrants to pay xx amount in taxes before they can apply for benefits

Oh well, Caplan laid out how open borders can co-exist with restrictive immigration policies. Remind me, what’s the point of the book?

And, as he initially argued that inequality would diminish with open borders, a bit knowledge of history would be enough to show that measured immigration policies, when established by economists (like Caplan!), almost always benefit the native wealthy much more than the native poor.

The most disconcerting aspect of the book is only implied: it’s written from the vantage point of a privileged American, who thinks that American value is superior (the magic culture), that the act of open borders is to help the global poor, and by writing a rational (economic) argument for open borders, the author made himself feel better.

I found that string of thought in the book review by The New Yorker, which mentioned, “In a recent piece for Foreign Policy, Caplan praised the Gulf states, such as Qatar, whose temporary-worker programs, which don’t offer paths to citizenship, have made them ‘more open to immigration than almost anywhere else on Earth.’” The problem of having a libertarian economic tell you the benefits of immigration? It’s a perfect rational model without concerning reality or externalities.

The reason that the for-immigration argument is hard to make is exactly that—you cannot come up with a non-radical approach to immigration if you think it through and want to be on the side of immigrants.

~~~

Though the book failed me on so many levels, I liked the thought experiment. Caplan says the economic effect of open borders on a global scale would be just like the recent economic development in China and India due to their urbanization.. I strongly doubt the validity of the argument. Nevertheless, it made me think how a similar restrictive model of China’s Hukou policy might work for citizenship on a global scale. It’s radical, an overhaul of the world order, and not at all a humanitarian approach. But if we treat radical approaches more seriously and try coming up with different models, this could be an interesting one to explore.

Two other better examples to look at are the EU block and how Germany changed since the reunification of the East and West, both he mentioned a little bit in some chapters. One thing Caplan pointed out that resonated with me is that opening the border doesn’t change things all at once. Many people will choose to stay where they are. The cultures and values will change, but slowly. 

[zhoyoyo]

The private photos of public figures

Looking through my phone there are photos of me and somebody famous, at a movie screening, a comic-con, a book signing event. In the frame was me and the director, the model, the author. It never occurred to me that I needed to send the photos to this other person there. They were part of the scenery, dissolved into the background, no different from wax portraits. They are not the owners of the photos. For the choice of living a public life, the right to their own images is taken away from them.

Do they want a photo of themselves with someone they only had 10 seconds of interaction with? I can only suspect that they don’t care. To be a public figure is to give part of themselves to something they do not have control over, to accept it as part of the profession, and not to mix it up with the private side of their life. For them to care about a random photo they take with a stranger is too much of an ask. 

[zhoyoyo]

My favorite podcast of 2019

For a more balanced 2019 podcast recommendations I suggest you read this wonderful list put together by my colleagues. Mine has nothing to do with objectivity, popularity among a general audience or educational value. 

And it goes to F1: Beyond the Grid. 

You only get to know the true power of Formula One, by which I mean Liberty Media, in 2019 by looking at the names of the guests on this podcast. From the legends, Mika Hakkinen, Jensen Button, Damon Hill, to the current team directors Guenther Steiner, Cyril Abiteboul, to the current drivers Daniel Riccardo, Valtteri Bottas (another proof Mercedes has better media policy than Ferrari...), Alex Albon, and Kimi (glad he’s no longer at Ferrari :S), to Max’s dad Jos Verstappen and Bernie Ecclestone. Oh My. If Michael Schumacher could talk, he’d have a good chance being invited to the podcast. 

Which media gets access like this? Who would ever talk publicly about their whole career, reveal career highs and lows, personal favorites and enemies, for an hour? The podcast is a treat for real fans. 

My memories of the podcast was intertwined with my year of long distance running. The hours and hours of conversations filled me with joy and knowledge that made me feel more intimate to the sport. 

I ran uphill at Prospect Park--the last mile--in a deep sadness listening Alex Albon talking about the death of Anthoine. I looked over the lake when he brought up the wonderful years Max, Charles, Pierre and he competed and grew together. 

I ran right past the Grand Army Plaza into the park when Valtteri mentioned that he couldn’t always bring his dog to race with him--I had never thought about the situation for a driver with a dog! With Lewis’s huge presence, I sometimes forgot that he was competitive from a young age, that he decided to eat porridge everyday so he could grow tall enough to qualify for a karting race. 

I just passed the first mile in the Central Park loop with the smell of fresh horse shit in the air when Jos attributed part of Max’s success and maturity to his short, sometimes naive yet exciting career. He was fast! “My career was meant to bring success to Max today. [paraphrasing]” I got to the 4th mile when Cryil said that he saw the sport as tech companies competing every other week on a race track. I was fascinated by it. I ran along the Brooklyn piers when the host Tom Clarkson mentioned readers’ warm feedback to the episode by Damon Hill. I nodded in silence. I was so moved by Sergio Perez’s watches (that he buys a new watch for a special event in his life) that it changed my impression of him from watching races and post-race TV interviews. It also happened, just once, that I really didn’t like the guest. It was a day when I ran on treadmill. I was disgusted by Bernie Ecclestone’s dodged answer on the importance of making money in his career. It doesn’t take away the fact that it was an insightful episode.

The generally opaque nature of the sport might also be the reason that a podcast like this could ever exist. It serves the organization and the sport. The host was friendly to the drivers and the teams. Though he tried to dig as many as he could the interesting anecdotes and individual opinions of the sport, it remained uncritical. It doesn’t get to the business side of the sport, the gender inequality, the environmental impact, the cultures of the teams at all. In a way it’s propaganda. I don’t hate it.

[zhoyoyo]

What we like about Noah Baumbach is all about ourselves

I didn’t feel the urge to watch Frances Ha when it came out for a reason that seemed evident but wrong in hindsight: I’m not aspired to be a dancer. I thought I wouldn’t find myself in the movie. 

I watched The Marriage Story last week, the story of a married couple going through divorce. Did I find myself in it? Yes I did, again. 

That’s how Noah Baumbach works for me. He writes ordinary stories that can be overheard at dinner tables, at the bar next door, on your friend’s couch. After a long day with chats and drinks, you go back home thinking how you can put your life together and move forward, and you see his characters doing exactly the same thing. 

The reviewers said it well. Frances was optimistic despite her circumstances because of her unspoken confidence in her own ability and her imitation of greatness. Her education and upbringing had set her mind straight. She knew she was doing some sort of free fall—and was fully aware that it couldn’t last and that it needed to change—but her inability to get out of it, or rather, her delay in getting out of it, was by choice and just phenomenal to watch. The reviewers had to conclude that while she heard people saying 27 was old, she didn’t really come to terms with it. It’s natural to like her and fall in love with her spirit, but it’s also painful to think that it only works for a girl like her, who’s only 27 and has the means to go in debt with a trip to Paris and sleep at some friend’s upscale empty apartment. 

And of course I identify with her. I identify with the girl who runs so freely on the streets of new york (instead of having the background music, I’d sing out loud to the entire street), who feels so awkwardly reflective yet not entirely miserable when bumping into the guy who used to want to date her but now dates someone else, who's so attached to her girlfriend only to learn that the girlfriend has a life and she’s not her priority, who thinks herself is undateable not because she’s in any ways flawed but because she is just different, and who gets laid off and tells her boss she would in no way take up the secretary’s job. The girl who doesn’t accept compromise because she’s not built for that. It takes so much confidence and privilege, and I indulged on them. To love her is to love the person that lives inside me.  

The same can be said for The Marriage Story. It was painfully easy to identify with the couple—more precisely, some aspects of their relationship—that it’s hard to dislike them. They are so authentic. The story’s ending, just like the ending of Frances Ha, was so optimistic that it made us feel good about ourselves. The audience need to be told that Frances would mature into this successful young lady, and that the divorced couple would find their new love and still be able to maintain a warm friendship with each other. 

The rest of the plot, the story development, and the relationship with supporting characters become trivia. Once we identified ourselves, we determined the worthiness of the movie.

[zhoyoyo]

Creators and Commentators

Nowadays it seems you need to be either one to get a sense of self fulfillment. It might look like it would take a certain kind of personality to be good at either, but in most cases, the personality is a product, not the cause of one becoming a doer or a sayer. And in the end, one leads to another. 

[zhoyoyo]

One Child Nation

A few colleagues watched the movie and wanted to discuss it with me. I didn’t watch until yesterday. A few quick comments:

1) It’s well researched and educational. I learned and was shocked by the prevalence of practices used by Family Planning officials in rural areas. Growing up in a big city, I’m a beneficiary of the policy. 

2) The movie made a point that the villagers, and everyone the filmmaker talked to, were brainwashed by the government -- including the younger filmmaker herself. On one hand it’s true: this is how we make judgements based on today’s moral and economic standards in a free, open, well-off society. On the other hand, it’s cruel to judge. The grandparents’ generation of single children lived through wars, famine, and revolution. My grandpa initially had six siblings. Three of them died in the war against Japan in the 1930s. When that generation became the executors of the one-child policy, they’d been through deaths so often that they normalized it. They didn’t have the same respect for human lives so much because they were brainwashed--wars happened before CCP came to power--but they saw deaths as normal. The parents didn’t want to let their kids go, but people around them would force them to. You think the apartheid in South Africa is cruel. The conditions during my childhood was worse. Love is luxurious when there’s a scarcity of resources.

3) The movie seems to suggest the policy created a humanitarian crisis, but don’t mistaken the will of the people. The villagers wanted to have more kids not because they wanted to execute their wills freely. Rather, they wanted to have boys. They saw population control as a problem not because they were not allowed to give births, but they were not allowed to have sons. That’s why the abandoned and left dying were girls. I’m not trying to justify the policy, but I’m not totally convinced when the filmmaker mixed the problem of gender inequity in China with the problem of the one-child policy. Tragedies happened with multiple forces at play: the policy itself is problematic; the family planning officials in rural areas took the worst approach to enforce the policy (that didn’t happen so frequently in urban areas.), and the villagers aren’t so innocent in prioritizing boys over girls. I blame the government, of course. What’s a good policy, how does the central government monitor execution at local levels? People didn’t care 20 years ago. Now time is different.

4) The filmmaker isn’t afraid of inserting her own opinion about policy by asking certain questions, interviewing certain people and creating certain visual scenes. It’s by no means a balanced examination of the policy and its consequences. It wasn’t intended to be. (For example, while there were propagandas like “One Child makes a happy family,” there were also ones like “Girls are the same as Boys.” The latter had an unintended consequence of improving gender equity. The filmmaker has a brother. She didn’t get that kind of experience. But many single-child Chinese women did.) I fully enjoyed getting to know her family and where she came from during the film. It just reminded me the limit of any non-fiction works. 

[zhoyoyo]

On Hong Kong and more

I ran with a friend tonight and we circled Prospect Park talking about Hong Kong. Over the weekend I ate chicken wings, ice-cream, shake shack, went climbing, attended a birthday party, had drinks at home with friends visiting, and for all the time we talked about Hong Kong. I thought about the terrible opening of my story, how it needed to be tweaked. Then I was pulled into some fight, had to find my place, stand firmly on my grounds, argued with myself, and someone punched my face. I woke up before the alarm ran, my face aching. Lying on bed I started searching Twitter for developments of the Sunday protest. It was fine. I reached out for my laptop. I had a superb editor. 

We had hypothesis. We discussed about friends, families, recent developments, historical lessons, how times changed and what remained the same, and possible outcomes. Shall I praise Twitter or Facebook? They just picked easy targets. Now they acknowledged that platforms were not neutral. They tried so hard to find the right policy violation that they coined a new phrase “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” What’s use consuming news, arguing, or even thinking about it? It really doesn’t matter. People move on. News doesn’t last long. One week is enough. 

[zhoyoyo]

On Hong Kong

I read about political polarization, economic inequality, the rise of online media, the spread of fake news. I read about their severe consequences. Elections lost; democracies fell; people died. I didn’t think all these combined would one day happen to a city like Hong Kong. 

Hong Kong has been the most economically developed city of China, to a large extent because it never felt like a Chinese city. It uses a different currency. Chinese mainlanders have to apply for a border pass to go to Hong Kong. Young people there speak fluent English. You make a lot of money in Hong Kong, and you spend a lot of money there. It’s a working model of market economy that Deng Xiaoping wanted Chinese cities to learn from in 1997.

Twenty years later these still stand true. Some other things have changed. There’s a firewall. Mainland China is inside the wall, while Hong Kong outside. A majority of Mainland Chinese have seen their wealth grow rapidly, while a majority HongKongers staggered. The wealth mainlanders started exercising their material power followed by splashing newly-established confidence, those fiddled with social problems and staggering economic status felt hurt, feared about their losing status, their independence, as well as pride. 

I couldn’t keep up with the never-ending stream of tweets on HKProtests. I do not understand what people are shouting in video clips and had to rely on English description. But even with that, it’s hard to tell who’s fighting whom. The ones in black are supposed to be the protestors. The ones in white may as well be, sometimes. The protestors are supposed to fight against the authorities, but the police may also disguise themselves as protestors. The locals may be protesting, but sometimes they may also argue and fight against the protestors. There are people who sided with the Chinese government (CCP), those who sided with the HK government but not necessarily the CCP; Some locals just wanted Hong Kong to return to the status quo, while some wanted radical changes. Sometimes the escalations were real; sometimes people came up with conspiracy theories and called them fake news. 

It’s easy to stand by the protestors and advocate for democracy. Then how would I explain the situation to my families and friends in mainland China, a majority of whom-- no joking-- would say: HKers are fierce and irrational. They are attacking the police! They are interrupting businesses, schools and airport traffic! They are in terrible economic conditions. As a revenge, they beat mainlanders! They are responsible for the entire situation. The Chinese government will have to step in to tame the situation. 

Chinese mainlanders have limited access to information outside the wall and get flooded daily by heavily censored information inside. In addition, the culture and history of society rewards collective thinking and punishes out-of-the-box ideas. How can I blame them? 

Even for HongKongers who have access to information outside the war, is it possible to remain calm and clear-minded in an influx of misinformation and disinformation online? Collective action like protests doesn’t encourage that, either. 

I have a lengthy argument with a close friend on the subject. At a point he wanted to say I was “brainwashed” by western media but couldn’t speak out that word. Knowing me, my value, my work, he would never put something so harsh on me, but apparently that’s where his thoughts went. Nice people can jump to conclusions; smart people can launch personal attacks. It’s not about the facts, it’s about emotions. I helped him finish that sentence. 

How to contain--not escalating--the situation? I let myself pause. I have learned the technique long time ago. When there’s an argument, the first thing to do is to fix the emotions, whatever that takes. Then I seek common grounds, followed by an explanation of where I come from and an understanding of his. 

China can do that too.