Friday, October 9, 2009

The Best

Since I returned to work, I have been going back home for lunch every day to feed Winston and also to check up on the nanny. As a result, I have not gone out for lunch for a long time. A business friend in shanghai will be visiting Bay Area later this month, and asked to have lunch together. He wrote, “Well, if you feel that your nanny has not passed due diligence and you don’t want to leave the baby behind, I will certainly understand. After all, given the parents, a Nobel prize or two could be at risk!”

I wrote back immediately, “ as long as he does not get sick, I can still make it to lunch. Besides, since his parents are not going to get anywhere close to a Nobel prize, I would not want him to harbor such ambitions!”

As funny as ever, my friend replied, “ well, Dad still has got a chance at physiology/medicine, as he worked for a Nobel laureate. Mom could become a nun, go to Africa and try for the prize in peace.”

Quite a few people have asked me what I would like Winston to do in the future, and I have always answered that I just want him to be healthy, happy and do something that he finds interesting while supporting himself. Frequently, that answer would meet incredulous looks. One of them flat out said that my son would be under a lot of pressure from his parents to achieve excellence in everything. As he tried to convince me to buy a house in South Palo Alto, he mentioned that the high school there is ranked among the top 100 in the nation. I said, “but it is too competitive and there will be too much pressure for the kid.” He laughed, “I bet your kid will probably raise the pressure level!”

At this moment, I am still fretting over his eczema (the nanny put too many layers of blanket on him again! Ugh…) and his stuffy nose (is it due to acid reflux or the fact that he kicked off all the blankets?) so it’s hard for me to imagine putting pressure on this chubby baby for him to be best at something.

Besides, he is already the best boy that I could have imagined…

Life is Beautiful... For Some?

This morning, I woke up to the surprising news of President Barack Obama winning the Nobel Prize in peace. My first reaction was, “the Clintons must be really pissed off.” After all, as Obama said correctly and objectively, he has NOT done much to be deserving of a Nobel prize in peace, if we believe that the prize recognizes significant accomplishment in bringing peace to humanity. - Unless we count the fact that his election has brought some peace to the minds of many frustrated die-hard Democrats who agonized for 8 years straight during George W. Bush’s presidency.

Obama has lived too charmed and too easy of a life so far, according to many people, especially those who belong to the baby boomers’ generation, such as the Clintons. Michael has always had a pet peeve on the stereotypes of generations. “The baby boomers got everything without having to earn it, “ argues Michael, “whereas we Generation Xers have got the reputation of selfishness. See, the baby boomers experienced the post-war prosperity, had a wild time in the 60s defying authority, and when it was their turn to be the older authorities, the political climate had changed decisively to the more conservative. They were at the peak of their game during the booming 1990s, and never had to experience a big setback in the critical years of their career paths.” To a large extent, I agree with Michael. Therefore, I feel rather indignant that many baby boomers would complain about how the younger people did not earn their places, when they perhaps more than earned theirs. Besides, it looks like that the most productive years of us Generation Xers are going to coincide with a long recession!

Clearly, that was how the Clintons felt with Obama emerging as a presidential candidate, and especially so after he eventually was elected. Here is a freshman senator who has not been around the block, but he thought that he could run the country better than more experienced people. He went to Ivy League schools, but did not seem to get looks of resentment from those who take pride in being “unintellectual”, as the Clintons did; he was inexperienced in national politics, but did not seem to meet as much criticism as the Clintons did when they first came to Washington; he never seemed to have had one bay day in his life, and yet people believe in his ability to deal with adversity and uncertainty with equanimity. Life is surely beautiful for him, and why does he have such a charmed life? With Bill Clinton globe-trotting for the past 8 years championing various causes in the world while Obama just started to learn about national politics, why didn’t Bill Clinton get the Nobel prize instead?

It is usually Hillary Clinton, of the two Clintons, that has given the impression of carrying chips on the shoulder. For a while, she was unhappy to be regarded mainly as Bill Clinton’s wife, and frequently reminded people that she was her own person and had her own opinions. She was understandably annoyed when she was asked what her husband would think of an issue, but her icy response that she could only speak on what she thought perhaps has reduced people’s confidence in her as opposed to enhance it. Bill Clinton, having been in the position of a “wonder boy” for years, has finally found himself in the honorable but nonetheless uncomfortable chair of “elderly statesman”, and is giving the impression that he really felt that he got the short end of the stick, by comparison to – Barack Obama. How can this young guy get everything so easily?

I have learned that we should never assume we know how easy or difficult others’ lives have been, unless we know them intimately. True – Obama did not have to fight in the trenches of a bloody war; he did not have to serve his many decades in the senate before winning the presidency; his family seems picture perfect; and his health seems to be in great condition. So life is just too beautiful for him, right? People say that because they ignore the following facts - that he was raised mostly by his mother and grandmother, that he met with racial prejudice as a black man; that his run for the US congress was an utter failure; and that there were probably heartaches and headaches in his life that felt just as painful to him as the ones we have encountered in our own lives.

The bottom line is that the Clintons’ lives were perhaps even more charmed than Barack Obama’s. But they felt that they deserve more than what they have, when they can’t have more or when others are not willing to give them more. Barack Obama, on the other hand, believes that he can do more and be more than what he is, and therefore he becomes more than what he is.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

The Happiest Time of One's Life

My mom has been telling me that she’s currently living the happiest years of her life. At first, I was incredulous – she’s almost 67 years old after all. “Well, think about it,” she told me, “I used to shoulder the burdens of taking care of you and your sister, as well as your grandparents who were getting old and sick, while working full-time as a teacher to support you both. I was spread so thin that I could not relax at all. Now, you and your sister are grown up. My own parents have passed away. I don’t have too much money but I have enough for myself, so of course I am having the time of my life.” When I asked her whether she was happier when she herself was a kid, she definitively said no, “ I never liked the idea of exams, and I really did not enjoy being a student, having to prepare for exams all the time. No, I was not that happy as a student. Now I do not have to take any exams!”

Then I had a chat with a friend on how our observations have led us to think that many people in our circle are a lot less happy than before, or just not very happy in general. Her comment was, “perhaps it is mid-life crisis, or having too many responsibilities for kids, parents, work, etc.” So my mom was right after all…

With my particular obsession with Winston, I am probably an outlier as opposed to a typical example of a working parent. This morning, when Winston woke up a lot earlier than usual, looking miserable and crying in pain (but I did not know what’s wrong with him at the time), I felt that my heart was going to break, and that I burst into tears myself as well. Maybe it is the acid reflux? Maybe it is the eczema? Or maybe he’s caught a cold since his nose sounds stuffy? After giving him his Zantac and his milk, he gradually quieted down, but looked rather subdued and totally not like his usual laughing self. I find myself thinking about him the whole time at work. The worry for one’s kid, I have been told, will never go away. So I can’t say that I am having the happiest time of my life, despite how completely I am in love with Winston. In fact, perhaps it is due to my excessive love for Winston that I have always reacted too strongly to any little discomfort of his. When he’s laughing, he looks like the happiest baby on earth. And seeing him laugh makes me believe that probably the happiest time of one’s life is infancy and childhood, although we remember nothing about our infancy and very little about our childhood.

Perhaps it is ironic that when we are truly happiest, we are not even aware of it. On the other hand, that gives me some sense of comfort that Winston will forget about all the pains and discomforts in his baby years as well. He will not have any memory of his baby years, good or bad. But I should do my best to provide that memory to him when he is older, so that he knows that he was so deliriously happy as a baby.

And if my mom is correct, Winston will know that he will become extremely happy again when he’s retired. It is when he has to care for his family while building a career that he might feel stress. But that is many years from now, so I do not have to worry about that, do I?

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Winston at 15 weeks

Winston loves laughing. He does it when being changed, being kissed on both cheeks, being bounced up and down, or clapping. Or maybe he is just laughing at his silly parents.



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Silly Baby, Sillier Mom

When I heard that Michael had set up a website for his newly established lab at Stanford, I went to take a look (http://linlab.stanford.edu/people/). Under “Future Lab Members” is a photo of a cute chubby baby boy – Winston Lin. Next to the photo Michael wrote, “Baby Winston was born on June 16, 2009. He has yet to receive a degree in anything, but is currently receiving training in sitting and eating. He may be contacted by email, but may take a few years to respond.”

People say that babies are silly, but mothers can be even sillier. I clicked on Winston’s gmail address, and wrote him an e-mail, “ my dearest darling little boy, mommy loves you the most.”

I can’t wait until I get a reply from him!

I Want Everyone to Love Winston

Before I had Winston, I would often yawn at people’s offer to show their babies’ photos. True – babies are in general very cute and funny, but do I have to look through that many photos? Almost 10 years ago, Michael and I were asked to take care of his colleague’s two kids for a weekend, aged two and four, respectively. They were super cute and well-behaved kids, but I still found myself breathing a sigh of relief when their parents finally came home. I remember distinctively not wanting to get anywhere close to the two-year old when Michael was changing her diaper.

Therefore, I must have come across as a completely different person now that I am obsessed with Winston. I notice myself paying attention to other babies I see in stores or on the street. I even think to myself, “oh his mother should have been more careful with his hands”, or “her mom should put a layer of blanket on her since she’s napping”, or “oh why is she crying so hard?” Any thought or knowledge of anything bad happening to any babies in this world could make me shudder. “Now you have finally understood,” wrote a friend who once told me how a kid would bring a lot of joy to my life while I wrinkled my nose – that was about 10 years ago.

Indeed I have finally come to understand why parents in general can be so annoying in pushing the pictures of their kids onto others. To some extent, it is as if Winston could feel happier if I can get more people to say how lovely he is. I know that it sounds completely silly and irrational.

That is why I cannot help but copying down here a friend’s e-mail response when I asked her to take a look at Winston’s photos and videos – yes, I am just another annoying parent, tirelessly trying to gather as many loving aunts and uncles for my darling sweet little Winston –

“After getting your email, I immediately went to Michael's picture website and your blog, to see baby Winston. Oh Sofie, he is so adorable! I am totally enchanted by him! It's hard to keep my eyes off him, he has such tender smiles and such innocent look in his eyes. It's so amazing that now he is totally communicative and has so many facial expressions.

Compared to the first photos you sent me right after his birth, Winston has grown so much. What 100 days can do to a new life! I giggled at Winston's grabbing of the Daffodils, and his wonder at the piano's sounds. I was also very moved by the essays on your blog, especially "Mommy's Baby," and "What every mom needs to have". I loved how you described Winston's movements -- words can indeed rescue what the camera has omitted. And I felt with you when you said you were crying uncontrollably when your mom left for Beijing. I would do exactly the same. In many occasions I had done the same, unwilling to let go of the most important intimacy in my life. You are a wonderful personal essay writer, Sofie! I think many people at our age, away from home, would find these essays expressive of our shared feelings.”

Perhaps it is a primal thing – I now feel that I almost cannot be friends with someone who does not find Winston adorable!

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Following One's Own Advice

Most of us have noticed that we are often capable of offering sound advice and even wise suggestions to others, but incapable of following our own advice. That in itself is no revelation, as it is easier to identify a problem and offer suggestions without emotional involvement and without personal stake. Therefore, I wonder, why we do not simply consciously try to take our emotions out of a situation and pretend that we do not have any personal stake. Wouldn’t that lead to better decision-making for us all?

The truth is that we subconsciously believe that having a huge personal stake makes us better decision-makers, as we would then try to be most responsible. We strongly believe without even realizing it that we make the best decisions when we are most emotionally vested. So we keep ignoring others’ advice, because they do not care enough, or they do not know enough, etc.

In reality, I have come to realize that many of us make the best decisions when we are vested and involved, but not overwhelmingly responsible. Like many other things in life, if one can strike the perfect balance of just enough care, it will be ideal. That explains why big parenting mistakes often were made because the parents cared too much and did not allow the kids any room to grow, freedom to explore, or chance to fail. As a new mother, I have noticed that I care way too much about every little thing regarding Winston that I run the risk of overprotecting him. And I am perhaps not exactly an outlier in new mothers! The take-home message, I suppose, is for us new mothers to relax more, trust more and care less, as that might be ultimately what is best for the kids. In other words, I wish that the community should teach the new mothers to care less as opposed to point out everything that one should or should not do.

On the other hand, the bankers should be made to care more about the money they are playing with, as it is not their money after all. After Robert Rubin published his memoir, “In an Uncertain World”, I would frequently tell friends how I admire his life-long philosophy, “if an action carries a tiny probability of failure but I absolutely cannot afford this failure, then regardless of the potential upside and the high probability of success, I will not take this risk. If an action carries a significant degree of risk but I can afford the failure even if the worst happens and the potential upside is very big, then I will be willing to take the risk.” I thought that he was so wise.

But he did not follow his own advice when he directed CitiGroup down a path of recklessness. Did he care too little, or too much?

Do Not Overlearn Your Lessons

One day, I was chatting with a friend of mine who is a venture capitalist. I was talking about lessons I learned from starting this company, and how I have made mistakes that have turned out to have long-term consequences. He said, “Don’t overlearn your lessons. I don’t think you will ever run the risk of not learning your lessons, but I think you might end up overlearning them. Let’s face it. Most of my wins in this business happened when I invested right before the market run-up, and most of my losses happened when I invested as the market was going down. Therefore, these bigger market forces affect the outcome a lot more than you think they do, and are entirely out of your control.”

There are people who never take responsibility for anything that has gone wrong. They always point to a lot of reasons on why it is “not their fault”. Those people will never learn for sure, as they always think it is someone else’s fault, or it is just bad luck. On the other hand, there are people at the other end of the extreme, who always look at ways they could have done better. I belong to this latter category, as I believe that the right attitude to have and the right mentality to maintain is one of constant self-evaluation.

Hearing my friend’s advice on not overlearning my lessons has made me pause to think for a while. Is it possible that in my constant pursuit of self-improvement, I have actually NOT learned the one area that needs the most learning – i.e. gaining perspective and mature perception of the world and life as they are and will be – imperfect and problematic, with mistakes, germs, viruses, illnesses, accidents and even some tragic events, but nonetheless interesting and joyful. My laser-sharp focus on learning lessons from mistakes so that I do not make them again makes me a perfectionist, as my implicit goal is to not make mistakes in the future. That, of course, will not lead to an infallible person. Instead, it will result in a highly dissatisfied person, as he/she makes more mistakes as time goes by.

In fact, overlearning our lessons is learning the wrong lesson. For example, if I do not recognize that the macroeconomic environment affects the future of any startup companies, I will end up dwelling on some harmless mistakes of mine, thinking that I must not repeat those mistakes in the future. And that carries an implicit learning that as long as I do not repeat those mistakes, everything will be fine, which completely ignores the importance of the external environment. Of course, it is entirely possible that if I had not made those mistakes, the outcome would have been a little better. But thinking that things will turn out perfectly if I do everything perfectly is hugely naïve, and is absolutely the “wrong” lesson to learn.

There is a Chinese saying that says, “ it is easier to move a mountain than to change a person’s personality.” Therefore, perhaps I should not attempt to change my own personality as yet another self-improvement initiative. However, that does not imply that I ought to take a resigned attitude towards things that I can change. As my own personality tends to “overlearn” lessons, perhaps one area where I should “learn my lesson” is to not learn/think too much about learning lessons, and not to attribute any negative events or outcomes to mistakes, as many things are indeed out of our control. Instead, every time I make a mistake, I should simply stop at “not making this mistake again”, instead of beating myself up for making mistakes in general. Overlearning my lessons has perhaps prevented me from realizing that life can go on with a lot of mistakes. In fact, if one is so focused on not making mistakes in all the categories big and small, she is going to be spread so thin mentally and physically that she will end up making mistakes in the biggest category of all – to live and to let live.

What Every Mother Needs to Have

Today I was talking with a friend of mine on the phone. We had not been in touch for almost 3 years, since around the time she gave birth to her son. Obviously back then I did not know how to relate to people with babies, and she was busy with the newborn.

Her son will be three years old soon, and she said that it had been the best experience in her life. That is – even though her son was hospitalized twice for serious infections within a 2-month period around the age of 9 months, even though he woke up every 2-3 hours for a few months (until she adopted the “cry-it-out” method to train him to sleep), and even though her life “no longer had the flexibility that it once had before”.

She said that she had a revelation when she adopted the “cry-it-out” method – the baby cried like crazy and she really thought that he was going to die, but he did not. Then it occurred to her that she ought to have faith that things will turn out fine, and she should not worry about things for which she has no control. Knowing, and more importantly, accepting that there are things out of your control, can be a liberating thought, if you do not constantly anticipate doom-and-gloom. “you can’t prevent bad things from happening to your kid. But you can always give him love and care.”

She gave me another piece of advice, “ when you are in the middle of it, you probably do not realize the importance of remembering everything. But write down everything, take lots of photos, as you will forget. And the worst is to have no memory of what happened.” I thought to myself – indeed I would write about my baby a lot, but mostly in the form of emails to friends asking for advice or suggestions or just to express how I am worried. But do I write about his latest skills and favorite toys? How would I remember all these things in a few years? For example, I already regret not ever taking a photo of him showing hunger and getting ready to eat during his first two months – he would lift both arms to an almost horizontal position and bend them, with the fists almost meeting each other in front of his chest. He would start eating in that position, and as he got fuller, the arms would relax and drop naturally to his sides. Oh I never remembered to take a photo of that, and he is now too big to do that silly thing again…

So I am now taking up my “pen” (i.e. my keyboard) to write about him – yesterday, the nanny had put two layers of blankets on him for his naps despite the room being fairly warm, and his face flared up in eczema. After a whole night of sleeping in a heated room, it had got even worse. The nanny was all worried that he had developed some serious allergies, and being a worry wart myself, I also fret over his eczema even at work. I find it hard to look at his red face without feeling an ache in my stomach. His pretty plump face is now covered with red patches that are obviously very itchy so he kept scratching his face. Oh how I wish that I had known better to not have kept him too warm…

Again, I guess what I have always lacked and what every mother needs is faith – faith that babies will turn out fine, faith that despite mistakes I make and others make (which will happen on an ongoing basis for sure) my son will not be damaged, faith that while I will never stop worrying about him which is overall a negative sentiment, I will emerge a better, happier and more positive person, more mature, more understanding and more resilient. In short - faith that things will be just fine.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Winston at 14 weeks

Winston is 14 weeks old now. More videos!