Be Like Mike (Or Mishima for That Matter)

There’s nothing quite like meeting the day with a breath of fresh air. Which is exactly how I leave my apartment every morning. The daily one-and-a-half-mile walk to class that I once met with trepidation now feels almost luxurious. Never before have I had such an opportunity to process my thoughts and get myself mentally prepared to start my day. I am thankful that despite Ithaca’s famously erratic weather, each day starts out almost exactly the same way—sunny, very mildly humid, just the slightest bit chilly, and damp from the morning dew. It reminds me, almost uncannily, of my dad’s house in the summer—birds chirping, breeze rustling tree branches overhead, overgrown brush, an eternal sun—not too surprising, given that he only lives about three hours south of here.

That feeling I get in the mornings is rivaled only by the rush I have after a workout. I don’t consider myself to have a very addictive personality, but endorphins certainly rank among the relatively few things that I need in life in order to stay sane. It would hardly be a stretch to say that without exercise, I would probably fall apart emotionally. Not only is it great for combating stress, but it does a number for personal problems too. There’s something about making my body work hard that seems to preclude any room for negative thoughts—in essence, if my body is happy, then my mind is at peace. No matter how badly I’m feeling, I can absolutely count on the fact that after lacing up my sneakers and jogging to the gym, I’ll inevitably feel like myself again.

It’s an outlook not too dissimilar from that of a man I can only tangentially claim to know a modest bit about: the 20th-century Japanese author, Yukio Mishima. Particularly astute and long-time readers of my travel chronicles will no doubt recall that I made mention to Mishima in one of my many missives from Japan—likening my fastidious penchant for working out with the writer’s own. I learned about his life most notably from an essay he published in 1968 called Sun and Steel and the 1985 BBC documentary, The Strange Case of Yukio Mishima, both of which I was exposed to in my Modern Japanese Literature class in Japan. Please excuse me as I quote from Japan 23, my two-month reflection entry (notice how little my writing style has changed in almost two years):

It seems like the two things that kept Mishima going in the later half of his life were the exorbitant amount of writing that he did and the lengths to which he worked out. Needless to say, I have not gone to such extremes in either respect (you should see pictures of this guy—I never thought bookish author-types could get so buff!), but it is just funny to me that two of the things I have derived a great deal of joy from recently are the very two that this guy made a life out of doing. With that said though, there are some key differences between us, including the fact that he died by committing ritual suicide with his gay lover at an anti-extremist government protest (of which he was an extreme right-wing conservative), all of which are not currently on my foreseeable agenda, but it’s still kind of interesting to think about all of this and its relation to me.

According to Wikipedia, Mishima took up weight training in 1955 and his workout regimen of three sessions per week was not disturbed for the last 15 years of his life—certainly a pretty high achievement. Perplexed by what seemed like an odd fascination for a highly-celebrated author, I went on to write my final research paper in that class on Mishima’s interpretation of light—and how it compared with that of another famous Japanese author, Jun’ichiro Tanizaki. I discovered that Mishima ultimately credited light as an enlightening, restorative, and masculine presence that gave him the tools necessary to obtain a certain amount of strength (steel) in his life. He wrote in his essay Sun and Steel that, “The sun was enticing, almost dragging, my thoughts away from their night of visceral sensations, away to the swelling of muscles encased in sunlit skin. And it was commanding me to construct a new and sturdy dwelling in which my mind, as it rose little by little to the surface, could live in security.”

What’s strange is that despite Mishima’s accolades for natural light, Osaka, quite like Ithaca, doesn’t really get all that sunny. Long stretches of day are consumed with ominous cloud cover and smoky fog, and by the time afternoon sets in, I, eternally umbrella-less, am often poised to get wet. In fact, weather is one of the main reasons why I find myself comparing the two places in the first place (as well as my subsequent experiences therein). For one thing, I’m devoting myself to learning a foreign language for several hours a day. Secondly, my schedule is relatively high school-esque in that I have classes that start early in the morning and run all throughout the afternoon, with lots of time to myself at night. And thirdly, I find myself wanting to exercise and write all the time (sometimes to the abstention of other things). I like to romanticize this notion at times—that here, as in Japan, I can walk out of the gym on a rush of endorphins, sidle into the adjacent cafeteria completely absorbed in my own thoughts, and help myself to a pleasantly stoic meal, all before rejoining the real world on my walk home.

The gym at Kansai Gaidai University in Japan. Unless it's changed radically, Eric and Mariko, this is what you can look forward to next spring!

I believe that despite some of the negative stereotypes associated with working out (or at least weight lifting), like Mishima, my ultimate goal is to provide a physical receptacle for my thoughts that can rival their potential merit. Like living in a room that is perpetually unkempt, I find myself unable to think or concentrate well when I know that my body isn’t happy. It is only when my physical well-being is temporarily accounted for that I can then move on to other matters. Of course, like all things, there are exceptions—midterms and finals being a few of them—but it’s an adage that I have lived with ever since 10th-grade high school track. What started as a friendly challenge between friends quickly put me on a life-changing path with regard to my fitness goals.

I learned that although I am not cut out for competitive running, ever since then, I have taken stock of my physical condition and made it my business to maintain the good health I am fortunate to have. I have a relatively old-fashioned view when it comes to strength. Assuming for a minute that it were even possible, far from aspiring to become one of those ripped athletes or body builders (who, in reality, kind of creep me out), I want to build strength for the practical purpose of survival skills—being able to lift my own body weight, carry a heavy load, or hoist a person up from a precarious position—not because I think that I will really ever be in that predicament, but so that in some ways, I can feel more self-sufficient in whatever tasks I will inevitably have to encounter on my own.

What’s great is that unlike at Oberlin, I finally have the free time to really get a decent workout everyday here—and don’t have to lie when I say that I go to the gym five times a week. Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday are for weight lifting and Tuesday and Thursday are reserved for cardio; a routine that I have consistently tried to stick to for the past four years. I can credit most everything I know about weight lifting to Men’s Health and an Australian named Robert who I met when I was studying abroad in Japan (and who I later tried desperately to adopt an Australian accent from). Sprinkle in some advice from my friend and gym advisor Seyeon, and that pretty much rounds it out. As far as facilities go, Cornell’s fitness centers are more than sufficient. Although I really only go to one of them because it is so much closer than the others, I have visited all three that are open during the summer. Each has its own specialty—one has a rock climbing wall, another has a swimming pool and a bowling alley, and the third has squash and racquetball courts. As mentioned in my first post, they do charge a flat-rate membership fee, but it’s far cheaper than it would have been to go back to my old gym in Manhattan anyway.

I’m pretty happy with my routine overall. As the title of this post would suggest, I’ve been playing a lot of basketball. The courts are usually quite crowded, but everyone is really respectful and good about rotating out teams, making it an ideal set-up for pick-up games. I also recently started doing a 6-week push-up program, the goal of which is to eventually enable you to do 100 consecutive push-ups. It’s been super-grueling and I’ve been waking up to sore arms every morning, but I’m on Week 5 now, and it feels so cool to take the weekly progress test and see how many more push-ups I am able to do than in the previous week. And thanks to my roommate, I’ve also gotten quite fond of squash. As far as workouts go, it doesn’t get much better—I am absolutely covered in sweat from head to toe by the time I get out. I had only played squash once before coming here, but already I am hooked—and trying to best my roommate using the pointers that he himself taught me on the side. On the drive back home, we make it a habit to blast Beyoncé’s “Halo” at an embarrassingly high volume (though this is nothing compared to the entire evening we spent eating ice cream and watching the better part of Season 2 of “Gossip Girl”—true story).

The basketball courts and weight room (located upstairs through the glass windows) at Cornell.

Of course, we all know that the real reason I work out is so that I can eat a lot of food afterwards, not to mention impress the swarms of high school girls that I’m forced to dine with on a daily basis. I must say, though, that if nothing else, being in college has made me so appreciative of the fact that I am no longer in high school. However, I do admit that eavesdropping on their conversations makes for some fascinating hypotheses into the inner workings of the teenage mind. As far as nutrition goes, since I’ve been able to eat so much meat lately in the dining hall, I’ve been off the white stuff (that’s whey protein)—though it is largely because I wasn’t able to lug the absurdly large container up to Ithaca in my suitcase. But generally, I feel better about the situation, especially because I was always worried about my protein intake when I was eating in a co-op. Despite it being cafeteria food, I’m doing my best to eat a balanced diet—lots of vegetables and meat, light on the starch, and fruit for dessert.

I daresay that I feel healthier and in better shape than I have ever felt before. I feel stronger, have more energy, and for a small nominal fee, I also do infomercials. If living in Japan taught me anything, though, it’s that I really have to watch myself in China. I’ve been largely fine in the states, but apparently being around a lot of cheap, delicious food that I don’t have the willpower to stop myself from consuming can become problematic. I gained about 7 kilos after four months in Japan (about 15 pounds), and that was by a conservative estimate. Everyone’s heard of the “Freshman Fifteen,” but really, we’re forgetting the true scourge at hand here—the “Chinese Forty!”

Free: It's What's for Dinner

Well, it finally happened. But when you think about it, it was inevitable really. Ever since I got to Ithaca in June and started cooking for myself (not counting, of course, the three years I spent dining in Third World Co-op), I have found it strangely comforting to listen to National Public Radio, a pastime I had previously thought reserved for liberal-news-hungry forty-somethings, like my father. It comes as just the latest in a long line of interests I have adopted from my dad over the years (poetry and photography included). Growing up, it was as simple as fact—when it came time to cook dinner, my dad would crank on NPR, and my sister and I knew that we would be in for an hour-and-a-half of boring (that’s BOR-ing in kid speak) talk radio, stifled only by the sounds of clamoring dishes in the kitchen.

It took some time, but eventually I got used to it—and daresay even came to enjoy it. First, it was Garrison Keillor’s “News from Lake Wobegon” that struck a chord with me, nothing if not for Keillor’s eminently soothing Midwestern drawl and the rousing “Guy Noir, Private Eye” segment that even as a youngster I found incredibly entertaining. In my teens, my focus shifted to This American Life, thanks in large part to Mr. Kawano, my high school Creative Writing teacher, who played segments in class and put the content of obscure archived shows on our final exam. He long contested that there were only two things one needed to do to be a well-informed citizen—the first was to listen to This American Life, and the second was to read The New Yorker. On long car rides up to my dad’s house in Rosendale, NY from the city, I sat buckled in the backseat, keeping one ear locked on the radio program and the other on my sister, whose weekly gossip spread whisper-soft across the seats.

Nowadays, it hardly matters the NPR program—I find almost any show worth listening to, especially because a lack of TV reception up here prevents ready access to the day’s news. I often cannot work without at least some kind of white noise, even if that simply means putting on a mindless TV show to have playing in the background. I first flipped on NPR’s live webcast hoping that it would serve a similar purpose, but I found it impossible to concentrate on work because I became so engrossed in the program! Finally, I thought I’d give cooking a shot with my computer-turned-radio humming in the background, and it worked like a charm. I love listening to the live stuff (mostly All Things Considered) because it is reassuring to be on the same frequency as other human beings, but with the advent of podcasts, I am constantly checking out other content as well. Above all, I have come to really appreciate Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!—a weekly news quiz show that is as informative as it is hilarious.

It’s so nice to be able to learn something in time that otherwise might go to waste (I assume the same might be said about driving, of which my four-year hiatus prevents me from forming a solid judgment), which is why I imagine my dad started the ritual to begin with. All I can say is that it is one that I will certainly continue to explore here in Ithaca, and will definitely take with me on my culinary endeavors abroad in China.

Cooking itself has been great, even in spite of the somewhat redundant selection of ingredients. Coming from a co-op background, I have been slightly reluctant to change my old ways, which means that weekly grocery trips often net the same basic staples—mushrooms, peppers, broccoli, bok choy (when it’s available), tomatoes, carrots, onions, potatoes, eggs, yogurt, apples, peanut butter, and of course, white rice. But with a more flexible budget, I have been able to substitute out the tofu that I would largely eat en masse for some meat—largely just chicken and ground beef, with the noted exception of hot dogs as elucidated in my previous post. I’m not too big into the “instant” variety of food, but I debated buying some pre-packaged Thai meals just to have on hand, only to wonder whether I would be offending my roommate if I did. A part of me wants to break the mold and start doing some culinary experimentation, but thus far, I have been a little too nervous over the outcome to try.

My cooking abilities are far from refined—owing partly to the fact that I often stray from using spices and seasoning in favor of the food’s natural flavors—but I am perfectly content with cooking for myself. The problem lies in entertaining others, a difficulty that I hope to overcome in the near future. I have, though, cooked for my roommate on a couple of occasions, and thanks to his selection of sauces and spices, I was able to conjure up something decently appetizing. It’s handy to be able to use the various pots and pans he has on hand, not to mention all of his bowls and silverware, because god knows I don’t own any of that myself. Of course, it would help if I used a cookbook every now and then—improvisation, though wonderful, might not be best employed when it’s the only tool in a relatively new cook’s arsenal. I haven’t used one in ages, but I imagine if I actually had to follow a recipe, I would be less scared to try out other types of food and styles of cooking. If anyone knows any good ones, I would be happy to take suggestions.

Pictured throughout this post are some of the various dishes I have made for myself. It was my friend Alisa (much more talented than I, mind you) who first got me hooked on food photography, a hobby I have not put down since, much to my father’s feigned dismay. But it may be catching on with more people that I would have expected. My friend Jannine here at Cornell was described by a mutual friend as “the only other person besides [me] who likes to take pictures of her food.” Even my friend Eric from high school and his brother started a blog dedicated solely to postings of food photos. It’s not even that weird anymore when my roommate walks in to find me hunched over the kitchen table balanced precariously above a plate of fast-cooling chicken. I can only imagine what an amazing job it would be to be a food critic and photojournalist all at once.

In terms of shopping for food, the selection has been great. I’m glad that I don’t have to frequent the local Wal-Mart and can instead hand over my money to other large, thriving, and probably equally corrupt conglomerates located conveniently nearby. We have a Topps and a Wegman’s within easy driving distance and I’m fortunate to be able to call on my roommate if I’m ever in need of supplies. There is also a small Asian market in town—the place where I buy all my Chinese broccoli, tofu, Korean BBQ sauce, and taro tapioca popsicles for dessert. Though I had scarcely ever even heard the name before coming here, Wegman’s has attained a certain cult status in town, as various friends and acquaintances have talked up the great amusement of spending an afternoon (or a Friday night) perusing the seemingly infinite number of aisles, leaving the store with much more than you expected to buy in the first place. And I don’t blame them—the store is set up expertly in terms of food displays and marketing. I heard that a trick supermarkets sometimes use is putting the fruits display right in the front where the customers come in. It would seem pointless as fruits don’t generally make for a huge draw, but when busy customers stop into a grocery store in a hurry to get out, choosing the right fruits takes time, thus slowing down the rest of their visit too.

The trick is to come in with a list—thereby weeding out those aisles you know you can bypass. Of course I have yet to follow my own advice, but surprisingly, I have discovered an unusual source of will power, at least when it comes to buying food. I have seen far too much of it go to waste in my lifetime to know the value of being able to eat something before it spoils, thus saving money and conserving the already scarce resources on this planet. It helps too that I am only buying for myself, and so I know the extent to which I can and cannot eat a given amount of food in a week’s time. Thus far, I haven’t had to throw away a single thing, and I hope that it stays that way.

Which is good news for Shansi, as they are footing my grocery bills for my time at Cornell. In these tough economic times, I am trying my best to stay within my budget— regrettably evading the assorted selection of fine wines, lavish desserts, and fresh-caught Alaskan salmon. Hell, it’s even a splurge when I decide to buy the 90% lean ground chuck over the 80/20. I guess it says something about me that I am even frugal with spending other people’s money. My own economic situation, though, has also been quite interesting. I seem to find few qualms about paying close to $100 to visit NYC for a weekend, but I fret endlessly over whether to buy a green pepper or a red pepper at the store for just a dollar more (of course, I went with the green pepper despite the bitterer taste). Seeing friends in the city has been undoubtedly worth it, and I will definitely have to dedicate a post to that in the near future.

But when I’m not cooking on my own, I eat at Cornell’s dining halls. Their “award winning” food has lived up to its name in many respects. I am actually quite excited to go there every once in a while when I don’t feel like cooking at home. They offer a pretty decent selection to choose from—“chef’s table” specialties, soups, salad, grill, pizza, and a dessert bar. They locally produce some of their food, including select fruits and vegetables, at a student-run farm not unlike George Jones Farm at Oberlin. Cornell also has its own dairy outfitter on campus, which makes everything from milk to lemonade to whipped butter. I say “whipped butter” and not ice cream because Cornell's ice cream is so high in fat that the FDA refuses to certify it unless it goes under that much less flattering pseudonym. As a result, the ice cream is not FDA-approved, but it sure is delicious nonetheless. I wouldn’t be surprised if they also raised cattle on the side—their burgers are quite tasty, if a little overcooked, but you can never be too careful with salmonella these days. They also run their own orchard located on the so-called “Plantations,” which I have yet to visit.

The only downside to the meal plan is the cost. With thirty meals and 200 Big Red Bucks (essentially Flex Points) for $500, it works out to about $10 per meal at the dining halls. Ten bucks is pretty expensive, considering it usually costs me less than $50 to buy groceries for all my meals for a week—and I eat a ton. However, as you might expect, I have devised a way to maximize every meal that I take at the dining hall. With a cleverly discreet backpack, I manage to walk out with no less than the following items after nearly every meal: bananas, bagels, hard-boiled eggs, plums, apples, and a plastic Chinese takeout container’s worth of the day’s specials. It all goes toward my six-meal-a-day diet—having many smaller meals spaced out throughout the day rather than three big ones. I eat a PB&J bagel every morning for breakfast, a banana in between my morning classes, the pre-made take-out container for lunch, and the rest of the food at various points during the late afternoon and evening. Factor all of that food into the cost of a single meal, and the price drops to about $3 or $4 per meal—certainly a much more reasonable cost. Best of all—it’s totally sustainable! I reuse the take-out container, Ziploc bags, and even the plastic silverware I take with me to eat.

Today's leftovers are tomorrow's lunch!

And there are other avenues at Cornell for the discerning freegan. Much like DeCafe, I learned that when the Olin Library Café closes at 5pm every weekday, all of the bagels and croissants are left up for grabs. In addition, I was shocked to learn that Cornell also boasts a co-op housing and dining system. Though much less extensive than Oberlin’s, it has nonetheless found a niche on campus to rival that of the burgeoning Greek powerhouse. I recently reconnected after ten years with my 5th-grade crush (she just graduated from Cornell), who is living in one of the co-ops called 660 Stewart. Walking in to meet up with her was like being plucked back down in Oberlin—communal bulletin board in the living room, Hobarts and giant woks in the kitchen, and labeled leftovers piled up in the industrial fridges. Of course, Ithaca’s certainly got its share of restaurants too, and it would be foolish not to sample some of the many cuisines in the area. With all the money I'm saving, you would think Shansi might even include it in the budget!

A Korean box lunch at "Four Seasons."

Extreme Makeover: Room Edition

For anyone’s who ever stepped foot inside a living space of mine, you know, as well as I, that “interior design” is not quite my strong suit. Try as I might, ever since I’ve been at college I just haven’t figured it out. There is something about my room being slightly too big, my possessions being too few to fill it, and the wall finish being a little too white that makes for a brutal combination. In fact, my sophomore year at Oberlin marked the first time in my life that I had a room to call my own. It should come as no surprise then that I am uniquely bad at figuring out how to live in one.

Me and my younger sister shared a room my whole life up until I went to college and I spent my first year in an open double with a roommate who, let’s just say, I didn’t get along with all that well. That experience spurred my desire to want to live in a single and become an RA, which took me through my sophomore year and the second semester of my junior year after I returned from Japan. But I wasn’t all that keen with a room to myself either. Sure it was nice to have the privacy, but instead of a personal oasis, I found it lonely and stifling to be there for any significant period of time. As a result, I made it a habit to be out as much as possible, and my room quickly became more of a docking station than anything else, a place to sleep, shower, and occasionally sit down in between doing other things.

This mentality took me through my senior year, and even though I was living in a house with three close friends, those old habits were hard to break. I was rarely home, never used the kitchen or the living room to any large extent, and hardly saw my housemates. I thought that it might have something to do with the quality of my living space, and finally, halfway through my senior year, something snapped. Sure my room was neat, but it also had the aesthetic appeal of a county prison cell. I decided that I was fed up with staring out at my bare walls, marked in any distinguishing way solely by the globs of blue sticky tack that remained after a previous failed attempt at hanging posters. I went to Bead Paradise and bought a mosaic tapestry, borrowed Chloe’s hammer and pushpins, rescued my poster tube from the depths of my closet, invested in some decent affixing materials, and got to work. In a couple days’ time, and thanks in no small part to Chloe’s help and the friends who gave me the keepsakes that I used to decorate my room, I came up with this:

My wonderful old house at Oberlin, complete with bike (on "loan" for the last three years) parked out front! (photo courtesy of Hannah Tam-Claiborne).

Though still short of anything spectacular, at least, as a friend so nicely put it, I had something on my walls. I don’t know to what extent the change in room décor actually influenced how long I spent at home, but I certainly appreciated going to bed under the shielding, yet gentle gaze of Mulan, staring out at me from across the room. At Cornell, I unfortunately wasn’t able to bring much of anything to give my room a personality, but luckily my dad had something up his sleeve in the way of a housewarming gift. It was amazingly thoughtful—a very practical teapot and a few different selections of tea, all wrapped in a beautiful package—to aid with long nights of studying, and adorning my dresser.

For an apartment that I found on craigslist, I have been amazingly impressed living here for the last four weeks. Though it’s not very big at all, the place is incredibly homey. The apartment consists of a kitchen, a living room, a bathroom, and two bedrooms. I sublet my bedroom from an unbelievably hospitable grad student from Thailand named Thanasin, who has one year left in his Economics PhD program. For the first three weeks, we also lived with his girlfriend Orn, who graduated in May and just recently moved back to Thailand to start her job. Whoever had the foresight to cosmically pair the two of us certainly had a sense of humor—two men in Ithaca who care deeply about women on the other side of the globe.

My roommate Thanasin and his girlfriend Orn. Aren't they adorable?! (photo courtesy of Thanasin Tanompongphandh).

The only real gripe I have about the apartment is how far it is from where all of my friends live. I guess I should be used to it by now, having been the only person in my high school class to commute to school from Brooklyn. Not having known the layout of Cornell before deciding where to live, I judged craigslist listings solely by their proximity to the building where I take my Chinese classes. And since it is located on Central Campus, it was about the same, distance-wise, to live either on North Campus or South Campus (also known as Collegetown). The apartment where I live now looked the best and I knew that I wanted to have a roommate so I ultimately went north, not knowing that almost all of the young people in Ithaca for the summer live in Collegetown. If nothing else, it makes for a nice long walk in the mostly clement weather this time of year to visit people from my class. And recently, my group of friends has acquired an automobile, which has made it more convenient to get back home after a long night out. Though I may miss out on some of the fun happenings in a scene dominated by restaurants, bars, and daresay even a nightclub, I at least have a peaceful room to come home to at night.

Most everything else about the location is great. I love the feeling of stepping outside in the morning when it’s still chilly out and getting a deep breath of cool, fresh air to start my day. I run into deer almost daily, most coming within ten or twenty feet of me which has been both jolting and surreal. There are tons of other wildlife too—birds, chipmunks, squirrels, and yes, even an entire family of wild turkeys that I saw crossing the road the other day. With the exception of traveling to Collegetown, the apartment is also well placed within my nexus of daily destinations—the gym and the dining hall are about fifteen minutes away, and class is not too much further than that. Finding shortcuts to get to places feels better than discovering the Northwest Passage—I have been decidedly too eager about shaving extra minutes from my commute. I’m finally getting better at estimating distances and beginning to feel safer walking alone at night.

Ironically, despite the pervading quiet of my neighborhood, the apartment complex where I live is surrounded by fraternities. In the summer, the presence is definitely not as strong, but every now and then, you can still pick out a bare-chested frat boy like a lesion from 50 yards away. If nothing else, I at least have the entire Greek alphabet practically memorized at this point. Over alumni weekend a few weeks ago, the frat right next-door hosted a barbeque for returning Cornellians. But over the course of the following week, I still saw the remnants of the cook-out—hot dog buns, mustard and ketchup containers, stacks of American cheese—strewn about the front porch (astonishingly, the beer was noticeably absent). I finally became so frustrated that I sauntered up after class one day and cleaned them out—not even wanting half the food but knowing that it was just going to go to waste otherwise. Eventually, I had to buy myself some hotdogs for dinner to make use of the giant condiment bottles still sitting in my fridge.

Though I’m still not used to spending a great deal of time at home, the time that I do spend here has been good. Weeks pass with every new issue of the Economist that shows up in the bathroom, and the apartment maintains the constant smell of rice, Thai food, and newly upholstered furniture. It is clean—cleaner even than I keep my own room, which is certainly saying something. I feel the way about this apartment that I felt about my house at Oberlin before we all stopped caring—I do my dishes after every meal, clean the stovetop after cooking, wipe down the table every time I use it to do homework, take off my shoes when I go in, and turn out all the lights when I leave.

As mentioned earlier, my roommate has been nothing short of amazing. It was a little awkward at first in terms of communicating, but now we get along great. He has been generous enough to let me use practically everything in the house—spices and sauces for cooking, detergent for laundry, the stereo, toaster, microwave, rice cooker, etc. Though he and Orn are about seven years older than me, we have spent a lot of time together without a hitch. We watch Netflix movies, make weekly car trips out to the handful of grocery stores in town (including the 24-hour Wegman’s and the Asian market!), and occasionally eat dinner together. I just started getting into a routine of playing squash with Thanasin, and Orn even made a profile for me on their Wii Fit! When it was pouring outside one day and Thanasin knew that I didn’t bring an umbrella with me, he called to volunteer to pick me up. A couple of weeks ago, they even introduced me to a couple of their friends from Thailand and I went over to eat a delicious dinner and dessert at their house that lasted well into the evening. It’s so refreshing to come home after a long day and just be able to hang out and talk with someone at the kitchen table. Just hearing stories from them and their friends has made me really want to visit Bangkok during the time I’ll be in China.

Thanasin is doing research over the summer for his PhD work and waits tables at a Thai restaurant in the Ithaca Commons on the weekends. Before she went home, Orn gave piano lessons to a handful of students at a local music center in town. In fact, Orn graduated with a Master’s in Piano Performance from the Eastman Conservatory at Cornell, one of only four people in all of Thailand to hold an advanced degree in piano. Not surprisingly, she knew Oberlin well, and had actually been there to visit friends from Thailand some years ago. Even stranger, one of her students is actually an Oberlin alum living in Ithaca—a physics major named Casey Dreier who graduated in 2005. As if it could get any weirder, when I went to see her final piano recital, I met Casey and it turns out that I took Japanese with his sister Virginia during my first year!

Orn and her students at a piano recital. Can you spot the Oberlin alum?

As much as I do like my little apartment here, I miss my old house at Oberlin constantly. More than that, I miss the people I lived with (both officially and not) and everyone else who came by on a regular basis. It makes me wish that I took advantage of living there a little more, hosting friends in my room, cooking more often, creating a profile on Rock Band. I do know, though, that it will be in good hands next year. My friend Caitlin will be living there with three girls she’s been roommates with for the past two years. There may not be as many people living with me now, but our litttle apartment is certainly still full of warmth.

中文看起来容易，做起来难 (Chinese, Not As Easy As It Looks)

Routine is a tricky thing. At once, it is something that I can’t live without, and yet, is always asking to be tampered with. At Cornell, it is proving to be as integral as ever, but I’m finding that there are considerable wholes, wholes that at Oberlin would scarcely exist. But for all intents and purposes, it’s been a good thing—I finally have time to smell the proverbial roses, get a chance to make long-overdue phone calls to friends on my way to and from places, and walk around campus without the stress of constantly running late for one thing or another. With wonderful detours to the daily grind aside, my life largely revolves around four things: studying Chinese, working out, cooking food, and seeing friends. Since trying to become proficient in Chinese is the primary reason for why I’m at Cornell in the first place, I’ll dedicate this post strictly to that.

The FALCON Program (short for Full-year Asian Language CONcentration) is surprisingly ranked among the best immersive language programs in the country for Chinese and Japanese. Though I am only participating in the summer, the Chinese program typically runs the full academic year, where students learn Introductory Chinese in the summer, continue into Intermediate in the fall at Cornell, and finish up with Advanced in the spring at Peking University in China. Because the pace is so fast, students can theoretically attain a degree of fluency in a third of the time of traditional study, which is useful for students and professionals looking to study or work in China.

Despite the questionable biases of the coverage in Cornell’s own daily newspaper, I can certainly echo its accolades. The program is structured with four classes a day, five days a week. English is greatly discouraged and is almost never spoken in the classroom. We have officially switched to using simplified characters over traditional, which, though a bit jarring at first, certainly makes learning them that much easier. Classes run in 55-minute chunks from 9-11 and again from 1:30-3:30. During the time in between, we are expected to spend two hours doing any number of related exercises—worksheet pages, translations, readings, short essays, reviewing vocabulary, and memorizing passage excerpts—for the afternoon’s class. The process is then repeated every night for the following morning. Every day, I spend that “break” in the library with a couple of other friends from class, tirelessly chipping away at our work while grabbing a quick bite to eat for lunch.

The class itself runs like a well-oiled machine. We are utilizing the same textbook as I would have been using had I taken 200-level Chinese at Oberlin, but the only catch is that we are ripping through it at four times the pace. We are doing an entire year’s worth of language study over the course of nine weeks—they didn’t call this program “intensive” for nothing. Thankfully, reading the stories in our textbook hasn’t become too much of a chore. It is refreshing to know that in Chinese, as in English, some things are just intrinsically funny. These include: getting ripped off by a Chinese shopkeeper, taking issues of Playboy magazine through customs, the number of times one suffers from diarrhea after eating watermelon, whether or not a person can contract an infectious disease from a squat toilet, and the reasons why someone might walk their caged bird through a Beijing park.

Instead of one or two professors, we have five, all with distinctly different quirks and teaching methods. Of the five, only one is a man—noticeably more laid back, but also more apt to mumble his words. Aside from class, we have weekly “Tea Time” every Friday afternoon, which is a great way to talk informally with professors and students in a (mostly) relaxed environment. I feel that it is the best way for us to practice—not having to worry too much about structure or grammar, and simply trying to communicate. It was there that I learned that the Chinese FALCON Director is actually an Oberlin grad, who was pleased to know that I was participating in the program!

There are currently eleven students enrolled in the class, out of a group that started with thirteen. Of them, all are Cornell undergrads save for me, and most are first- and second-year students. Ironically, the two that shared the most in common with me were the two that dropped—one, a fifth-year at Cornell who needed a few more credits to graduate, and the other, an undergrad at Vassar, who was moved down to the 100-level class for failing to perform. In fact, it originally appeared as if the class was designed to weed outsiders out. In the first week, I had to put up with a ton of unfamiliar vocabulary, partly as a result of Oberlin’s using a different 100-level textbook, and partly because of the specificities to Cornell’s campus. I quickly got used to the words for “slope,” “gorge,” “Ithaca,” and “snow.” There was also a lot about the format of the class and the teaching style of the professors that I had to acquaint myself with (notably, Cornell doesn’t use the Honor Code). But the whole initiation, much like a fraternity’s ritual hazing (I’ll get to fraternities in another post), made me that much more driven to succeed.

And so far it’s paid off. I’ve done quite well on all the homework and tests that we’ve had, despite that fact that I’m not taking this class for the grade (my transcript is over and done with until grad school) or the reputation (I presumably won’t be in class with any of these people again). Like most things, I like to think that I’m doing it for myself, and in this case, the hope that adherence to the rigid structure of the program will allow me to be better prepared for the next two years in China. As I mentioned briefly in my first post, I’m very fortunate that I’m still very much in an academic mindset. Had I been at home for a solid three or four weeks prior to arriving, my motivation for learning would no doubt be staggeringly low. As it is, I often have to find the energy and the impetus for studying or doing homework every night, as opposed to say, writing another blog post. The workload is about as difficult as one might expect from a program of this caliber, but thankfully, not overwhelmingly so.

Even though the subject matter at Cornell is of a slightly different nature, my study habits are almost completely unchanged from my undergrad years at Oberlin. I always opt to do my homework early in the morning over staying up late, and as previously mentioned, I now spend every afternoon, as I did every evening at Oberlin, in the library. My housemates can certainly vouch for me that I spent more time there than I did at my own house senior year. Much to my complete surprise, Cornell has more than 20 libraries, most focused around the niche subjects that it offers as majors: engineering, law, hotel, fine arts, math, and ornithology, to name some. Although I haven’t found a place quite as academically stimulating (and aesthetically stultifying) as the infamous Classroom, I now oscillate my time between a little café much like Azariah’s and a computer corner much like, well…let’s just say that I really am a creature of habit.

A view of Olin Library, just about as physically unappealing as Mudd, which I frequent nearly every day.

Though I’ve been very happy with FALCON thus far, taking it has made me wish that I started studying Chinese earlier. When I was a first-year at Oberlin, I knew that I wanted to study language, and with Spanish all but ruined for me by my AP Spanish teacher in high school, I decided that I would either stick with Japanese (which I had been taking for three years up to that point) or make the switch to Mandarin. The placement test was to be the true deciding factor for me; if I placed into second-year Japanese, I would take it, and if not, I would start out fresh with Mandarin. The rest, as they say, is history.

It’s funny, though, how such a seemingly insignificant decision shaped the whole course of my studies. Had I not taken Japanese at Oberlin, I would never have spent a semester in Japan, nor have become at least moderately proficient in the language. As a result of studying abroad, I knew that I wanted to continue to explore Asia but did not want to spend two more years in Japan, resulting in my decision to start taking Mandarin during my senior year. Had I gone the China route, I may never have wanted to pursue Shansi at all. Even if I had, I would almost certainly have had to spend this summer doing a language program in China rather than the states because my level would have been too advanced for the strictly beginner and intermediate level Chinese summer courses offered at Cornell (and most other American universities). Needless to say, had I not been doing Shansi, there would be no chance that I would find myself at Cornell for the summer either. First, continuing to study Chinese would seem negligible, and second, I wouldn’t be able to afford the cost of tuition, room, board, and transportation that Shansi has generously subsidized (one of the many perks of the fellowship).

I’m really glad that I decided to start learning Mandarin. Though a lot of my impetus came from the hopes of doing Shansi after graduation, much of it was aimed at trying to bridge the generational gap between me and the Chinese side of my family. I have always felt slightly ostracized among my Chinese relatives because my sister and I are the only two people in the family who can’t speak Cantonese. It has been a point of contention for us our whole lives, and I feel that in a lot of ways it has stilted our relationships with cousins, aunts, and uncles on that side. Though they were very happy to hear about my upcoming trip to China, in some ways they knew, like me, that I would still never really be able to talk to them.

Cornell, in addition to tons of other Asian languages including Vietnamese, Korean, and Sanskrit, also offers Cantonese, something that I was sorely remiss for at Oberlin. Other half-Chinese friends of mine have griped about not wanting to study Mandarin for its lack of utility among family, and I certainly share their sentiments. Hopefully one day I will be able to pursue Cantonese (maybe when I go on a trip to visit Guangdong), but if nothing else, both languages are still written using the same characters, allowing me the ability to communicate with family, armed with a pen and paper in my hands.

Calligraphy, Middle School Flashbacks, and the Miracles of Rice

Thinking about where I was last Friday made it difficult to imagine how these past two days in Ithaca could possibly hold a candle to my time at home in the city. I spent last weekend in New York after a long ten-day hiatus, splitting my time between Julie’s barbeque at her house in Queens, my cousin’s post-wedding reception with family in Brooklyn, and as much time as I could with Chloe, on this, the last weekend I would get to see her before her two-month trip to Korea. But inherent in my pessimism was also the hope of avenging the previous weekend at Cornell, a long two days where I relegated myself notably to sitting alone in my room and feeling sorry for myself. Since then, I had bridged a couple more friendships and was hopeful that this weekend could make use of the new phone numbers I had had the foresight to acquire. In the back of my mind, I knew, at least, that these two days couldn’t be any worse.

And right I was! Far from a spectacular weekend, this weekend was also not abysmal, a favorable tradeoff to be sure. Following the tenets of TGIF, Friday was met with another short day of class, but this week we had the choice of going to an optional calligraphy lesson that our professors promised would be fun. An over-achieving bunch, the entire class made an appearance, and we spent an hour-and-a-half after lunch listening to the talented, if not slightly crotchety, local artist and calligrapher of over 40 years, Jim Hardesty, lecture us on the merits of his craft, taking most of that time to actually wow us with some demonstrations. With the stipulation that we would all practice and come back to the next class, we all got to keep a brush and some practice paper along with what he called “The Bible” for learning how to paint characters using the correct strokes. We also got to chime in every time he was finished with a piece to reap the spoils of his labor. Trying to hold out until his most “advanced” work, I was fortunate to get the last of the paintings that he demoed for the day.


A Jim Hardesty original—now proudly adorning the blank walls of my room! The Chinese proverb on the right has something to do with the moon’s reflection on the water.

It made me think a lot about my own experience with calligraphy. For those who didn’t follow my email blog missives from Japan, I took a sumi-e Japanese calligraphy class at Kansai Gaidai University during my semester abroad. I originally thought that it would simply be a class devoted to the practice of making our characters look artistic, thus better enabling me to memorize the scores of kanji for class. But quite to my surprise, we focused very little on the actual writing, and instead spent the semester learning the various elements comprised in landscape painting—trees, leaves, branches, rocks, cliffs, different types of flowers, etc. It was the first art class I had taken since perhaps middle school, and it completely made me rethink my relationship to it. I don’t know what this class at Cornell has in store—sadly, we only have four sessions scheduled over the course of the summer—but if it’s anything like the brush painting in Japan, I’m in for a treat.


My final project from my sumi-e class in Japan, on display at a showcase of student art at the end of the semester.

Calligraphy was followed up by the weekly tradition of “Tea Time,” a nice outing despite my being the only member of the 200-level class to attend. If nothing else, I at least made up for my peers’ absence in the staggering number of cookies and cups of tea that I consumed before heading home. The afternoon was followed by a nice evening out—my first real jaunt into Collegetown to eat with a group of friends. We dined at what might rightly be called the Olive Garden equivalent of Mediterranean fare, and grabbed some bubble tea at a local café afterwards for dessert. Despite the tea being exceptionally sweet (unfortunately not up to Chinatown standards), conversation flowed effortlessly until it eventually became too chilly to brave the outside deck any longer. Afterwards, we left to go play video games at a friend’s apartment, and with the lack of Rock Band notwithstanding, it was enough to make my old housemates at Oberlin proud.

I woke up late on Saturday, my body’s way of needing to repent for a week’s worth of under-seven hour nights of sleep. It felt a lot like coming home from Oberlin on school breaks—requiring at least 10 hours to feel remotely charged, and even then needing an extra effort to actually get out of bed. I think it’s a product of knowing what there is to wake up for. For the most part, I haven’t been able to replicate what became a routine six hours of sleep per night rotation at Oberlin. Even when I was working during the summer, a certain part of me was cognizant of the value of going to sleep early to prepare for a full day’s work. On the weekends at Cornell, it’s especially hard because there isn’t anything at all pressing that needs to be accomplished between the hours of 8 and 11am. If anything, that time falls by the wayside anyway, lost in some bizarre combination of daydreaming and Facebook stalking. I have always held fast to the belief that, if all else fails, food is one of the only true incentives for waking up, which is why on the rare occasions that I do nap, it is always before dinner.

And so it came to pass that shortly after waking up, I headed to the dining hall for lunch. Saturday was the first day that the Cornell dining halls were open for the summer and I was curious to check them out. Having not given my dining situation too much thought before, I originally signed up for the meal plan concurrently with my enrollment in the FALCON Program because I figured that it would be an easy way to keep track of my meals, save me from spending a lot of time in the kitchen, and make it easy to bill Shansi for the costs. However, after two weeks of cooking and grocery shopping, I have come to really relish my newfangled mealtime ritual. But thankfully, at least for the sake of Cornell’s meal plan, I am in dire need of a trip to the supermarket, so it was fortunate that I had a meal waiting for me. When I arrived in the vicinity of the dining hall, I was immediately met by a swarm of parents and young students. Unbeknownst to me, Saturday was also the start of Summer College, what I have come to gather is a program designed for select high school students to take college classes prior to their enrollment as undergrads. What I also didn’t expect was how intimidated I was in a place dominated by people four years my junior.

It wasn’t the first time that this sort of thing has happened. Take middle school for instance. It scarcely mattered how old I was—eleven, twelve, thirteen—but every day on my way home from school I’d have to pass through Carroll Park, notorious for the ruffians who would linger out by the basketball nets and the baseball diamond past dinnertime. Often there was no trouble at all—a stiff-faced, nose-to-the-grindstone Daniel would walk briskly from one end of the park to the other, trying to prevent eye contact at all costs. But occasionally there was, and more often than not it came at the hands of 4th- or 5th-graders just looking for something to do after school. For some reason those memories still stick with me, the fear that I was so powerless to hold my own against kids seemingly half my age. To this day, there are still certain articles of clothing that I refuse to wear—sweatpants, jerseys, bandanas, baseball caps—all from simply reaping up that past. I guess to a certain extent your inner child will always be with you, a reminder of the insecurities and fears that you harbor, no matter how badly you try to forget.

Needless to say, though, the situation at the lunch table didn’t result in my need to prove myself to a group of high school juniors and seniors. I realized instead, though, how hard it must be to hack it as a kid these days. Everyone around me looked so incredibly grown-up and hardly fazed about their upcoming summer away from home. Was I the only one feeling the least bit lonely and insecure? Looking around the room, many once-strangers were already starting to mingle, discussing class schedules and meeting places, and lamenting about the fog and rain that still hung in the air like an omen. Meanwhile, my primary concern was snaking around the oblong dining sphere, trying to investigate all of the many food options and guard them greedily on my plate like a rabid animal. Maybe I’m just shy. Or just especially shy when I’m hungry. In any case, the food actually proved to greatly exceed my expectations. Out of the comfort of familiarity, I headed straight for the "Asian" counter first, helping myself to a plate-full of steaming white rice. It hardly mattered that I have a twenty-pound bag of the stuff at home that I dig into almost every day (this tidbit will prove useful later). I must say that their generous spread made me a bit jealous of the somewhat hackneyed selection offered at Oberlin’s dining halls, but thanks to eating in a co-op, I didn’t have to travel there too often as it was.

Fortunately for me, the dining hall at Cornell was located squarely across from the gym. Thinking ahead, I packed all of my necessary work-out accoutrements before I left my house, but as I was about to go into the gym, I chanced upon a familiar face. A guy from my Chinese class was followed by an eager pack of friends, brandishing a Frisbee, and generously offered if I wanted to join them. What the reader needs to know about this situation is that it was still raining out—as it had been almost continuously for the last 48 hours up until that point. The ground had also just been aerated, and with the onslaught of rain, was now peppered with soggy, pulverized clumps of soil. In the unending quest for friendships, I hastily agreed despite my better judgment—namely, because I am terrible at throwing a Frisbee and I am not often inclined to running around in the mud.


This weekend also marked the first official day of summer, a welcome respite from two days of bitter rain.

The game turned out alright for the most part. We played “Asians” versus “Whites” and despite my silent “But what if I’m half?” plea, I got clumped in, for perhaps the first time in my life, with Team White. Cornell has such a robust population of Asian Americans that I would surely have felt slightly inadequate as a mixed-race person had I gone to school here. In many ways, I am fortunate that Oberlin has a relatively small but close-knit community that helped to foster my identity formation and enabled me to get so involved with Asian American causes on campus. No one’s really said anything to me about race here yet, but it just feels like the general attitude is somehow different.

Long story abridged, I quickly learned to play Ultimate, after strangely avoiding it for my four years at Oberlin, all while getting pelted with falling rain and upturned earth. Despite my griping, it was strangely refreshing to get that dirty, even if it now means putting up with the horrible stench those clothes emit until my next laundry cycle. But much to my distress, when I finally left the field, I realized that my sweatshirt had been eviscerated from under the safety of an umbrella and was steeping in a puddle of water. Amongst the waterlogged contents was my cell phone, which would not turn on at the time I fished it out of my pockets. Slightly panicked, I remembered perhaps the most valuable nugget of information I had gleamed from my summer internship at Popular Mechanics last year: how to save a wet cell phone. I immediately went home and got a nice bowl of dry rice for my phone to wade in. The next day, when I popped in the battery and turned it on, miraculously the phone worked like a charm. I’m convinced that doctors should start trying to devise a curse for cancer out of this stuff.