Climbing Mountains
May 30, 2017
I called my dad. “Hi, Papa. I’m at the airport in Chicago.” I was on my way back from a weekend trip to the Bay Area, and during my layover, an email from Bank of America alerted me that there was less than $25 in my checking account. The taxi fare was something like $30 from Boston Logan to my dorm in Cambridge. “Would you be able to transfer money to my bank account?”
In many ways, this phone call marked the beginning of my adulthood. Three months out of college, two weeks into graduate school, one day before my first paycheck, I was returning to my new city after a weekend of wine at the first wedding that I would ever be invited to. I was 22, and my college classmates and I laughed about how broke and grown up we felt.
By the time I landed in Boston, my dad had transferred me money, and I took a taxi home. This happened before public transportation from the airport was free, before that one time they tried to extend T hours past 12:30 am, and before Uber. On the ride to Cambridge, I was going through a mental to-do list for the next day: prepare for recitation section, set up an appointment with the professor whose lab I was interested in joining, and respond to a message from a middle school friend who had also just moved to Boston and wanted to meet for dinner the following week. The MIT campus lights shimmer in the Charles River the brightest at 2 am.
Khayelitsha
March 24, 2017
“Are you connected to the wifi?”
Startled, I turned around to see a redheaded white man standing next to me. His eyes were sunken into freckled cheeks.
In between a morning tourist activity and a lunchtime yoga class, I got into a routine of sitting at the window bar seats at a restaurant in City Centre, people watching, and drinking a smoothie. I replied to him, “What? No.” I was connected to the internet but wasn’t sure what he meant by the wifi—the restaurant’s, probably? I was also nervous that there was a stranger talking to me.
He quickly fired, “How do you get around the city? Do you take Uber?” This time I noticed that he had an American accent.
Woodstock
February 28, 2017
Over a year has passed since the inaugural post to this website, and I wish I could declare something here that musicians sometimes say about a hiatus between releasing albums. “I had to live some life between this record and my last one.” Usually they refer to having a child or going through a divorce, which gives them material to create songs. I indeed lived some life, a year and a month or so, and maybe you could say that this and future entries represent some of that life. Nonetheless, no kids and still no relationship to divorce.
I’ve been hesitant to publish a post—I call “personal essay”—mostly because of a matter of branding. Among Facebook updates that are meant to be inspirational, Instagram photos that commemorate/brag about where I’ve traveled, and quotidian Snapchat videos that say, “Hey, I do cool stuff sometimes,” I still struggle to figure out what message I’m trying to convey exactly through the internet. My work as a researcher doesn’t require my having an online presence, at least in a social way. I don’t have fans to reach out to. I do it to connect with friends and family, but phone calls and text messages also accomplish that, and perhaps better.
Introduction
February 1, 2016
Last week, I received a friendly Facebook message from a stranger named Toshiki Nakashige. He, who I learned had attended a school called Yamaguchi University, was thrilled to have met—or the online equivalent of meeting, I’m not sure if there’s a term for that yet—another person with his name. I assumed that he had recently joined the social media platform because, just as I knew where he went for university, I saw that he only had four friends. I know that people who share the same names sometimes create online communities to congregate, and perhaps he was curious to see if he could find someone else in the world with our name, maybe even interested in starting a group of our own. His message read, “I was so happy to find you. Nakashige is an uncommon family name. So I have not met same name even in Japan!” I guess he figured out that I lived in America, and he probably also knew where I went to school.
I responded saying hello and telling him that it was my first time meeting someone with my name, too. Since Japanese names can be represented as kanji or Chinese characters, I wondered whether Japanese people only considered names with the exact same kanji characters technically to be the same, or whether it mattered, that sameness at the phonetic or Romanized level was sufficient. I know that users can set their Facebook names to be written in different languages, but Toshiki Nakashige of Yamaguchi University had his in the Roman alphabet. I then wrote a note to myself in my phone to ask my mom, “Are there ways to write the names Toshiki and Nakashige in other kanji characters?”