Thursday, August 25, 2011

The Age of Innocence

Now that I have been working in the business world for a few years, I know that people take "maturity" and "experience" very seriously. One might think that there are some objective criteria for "maturity", when in fact often people go by a first impression. An executive that is "inscrutable" is often considered mature, in that he/she does not reveal his emotions or thoughts and is never too happy or too upset. Those who react immediately or respond spontaneously are definitely too green for the treacherous business world.

Interestingly, what I find most lovable about Winston is how he is utterly transparent with his emotions, thinking and needs. If he gets something he wants, he is so ecstatic that he will jump up and down. If I tell him that he could have some of his favorite cereal, he runs to his high chair and climbs up and waits eagerly with those big eyes for the cereal to show up. If he gets pushed by another kid, he is immediately upset and often crying with big tears rolling down his chubby cheeks. He does not just wear his emotions on his sleeves - he reveals everything he feels and thinks without any pretense. He is at an age of innocence, when innocence is rewarded as opposed to punished.

Friday, August 19, 2011

Driving Dangerously

Michael is into all the new gadgets whereas I am all about being a "fast-follower" - true to my philosophy in small molecule drug discovery, I never like the idea of adopting a novel device.

But now that we have a Nissan Leaf, I have to drive it, since Michael either bikes or takes the shuttle to his office, which is about 1 mile away on campus. This morning, as I read that there were 72 miles left, I figured that it was enough for me to drive to San Mateo to have lunch with a friend, with a stop on the way to do some shopping.

The minute I started driving towards the freeway, I noticed that I already lost 5 miles, when I certainly had not driven more than one mile. By the time I got to 101 southbound, I only had 55 miles left! Of course I did not dare to make a shopping stop, and went straight to San Mateo, making sure that I did not brake suddenly or accelerate fast. It was reading 26 miles when I finally pulled into a garage in downtown San Mateo. How could I get home? I called Michael, who told me that in Redwood City there is a Nissan deal where I can charge the car before coming home. I asked him to email me the directions.

When I finished lunch with my friend, I started gingerly driving the car, making sure that I was the smoothest car on the street. By the time I got on the freeway, I never went above 60 mph, making the grandmas on the freeway all too impatient for me. And I could not find the exit that Michael wrote in his directions. Needless to say, I could not afford the electricity to search for a Nissan dealer, so I decided to gamble on it and drive home. I was holding my breath all the way until I reached the intersection between Embarcadero and El Camino Real, by which time it was reading still 13 miles. Yes, I would definitely be able to drive this car home to be charged. This car is driving me nuts!

I miss the good old car which I can refuel almost anywhere. I think we can only take so much risk in our lives. With my startup effort, to some extent I already "live dangerously". I don't want to "drive dangerously" as well...

Thursday, August 18, 2011

The Talent of Ang Lee

I have been a fan of Ang Lee's films, but I had never really paused to think what kind of director he is, until I saw "Lust Caution" for the second time.

Perhaps no film directors would like to be branded, just as actors do not like to be typecast. Still, I believe that each director has a certain talent that gets best leveraged in a specific category of films. No one is talented at everything, although often when people become successful, the most they want to do is to venture out into new horizons and prove to the world that they can do new things - which often leads to dismal failures. Perhaps that is why Margaret Mitchell did not write another book after "Gone With the Wind" and why Qian Zhongshu did not write another novel after "The Fortress".

My beloved Chinese director Zhang Yimou had a talent for portraying the repressed and ignored ordinary people struggling at the bottom of the Chinese society in the 20th century. He was absolutely phenomenal. When he decided to branch into other territories and eras with "Hero", "Curse of the Golden Flowers" and "House of Flying Daggers", he lost many of his admirers including myself.

Woody Allen in recent years has moved his movies out of New York to London, Paris and Barcelona, but he has remained in his comfort zone - i.e. relationships of neurotic intellectuals. Therefore, I love him still dearly!

Ang Lee has made such a wide range of films, in both Chinese and English. I do not love everyone of his films, but I love most of them. When I saw "Lust Caution" for the second time, it finally dawned on me where his talent lies. That also explains why some movies are better than others.

His talent is to portray viscerally - more so than anyone else - feelings of melancholy and regret, in either a tragedy or a comedy. "The Wedding Banquet" was a hilarious comedy, but it ended appropriately on a melancholy note. "Eat Drink Man Woman" was a comedy with many bitter-sweet moments. "Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon" showcases his talent at its very best. While the movie was full of actions and humor, the audience was drawn to the sense of loss felt by almost everyone in the movie. Even "Sense and Sensibility" ended with Marianne showing resignation and Willoughby showing regrets at the end, although the wedding revealed a happy bride in Marianne as expected.

Maybe that is why his movies feel so close and personal. When we experience melancholy or feel regrets, it is often a most private moment when we are most vulnerable.

How Much Is Your Brain Worth?

The other day, I saw "Good Will Hunting" again on TV, which brought back a lot of memories of Harvard and Boston. At one point, Will Hunting's love interest, Skylar, who was attending Harvard, made fun of herself by saying that her brain would be "worth over $250K" in the end, referring to the total cost of her private school education. With inflation, if the movie were made today, she would have said "half a million dollars" instead!

While Will Hunting is a fictional genius who did not have to go to school to be better educated than the Ivy Leaguers, we all have read about Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropping out of Harvard to start Microsoft and Facebook. A friend of mine was invited to a conference at Harvard recently, and his fellow panelists were encouraging the student audience to "believe in themselves and live out their dreams". When it was his turn to speak, he said, "you may think you might be the next Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, but chances are that you are not. Therefore, don't drop out of Harvard, as your hard-working middle-class parents invested all that money into giving you the best education. You can't just quit, do some crazy startup, and when things don't work out, go back to your parents' safety haven. That is not fair to the parents." I was highly amused to hear his rather unusual speech, or shall I say, a speech that is unusual for a conference, but perhaps all too common for a private conversation between a kid and his parents?

Because I received a full scholarship to attend Harvard, and graduate school is free for natural sciences anyways, my brain really is not worth much money at all. I grew up in China during the destitute years. In fact, I think the amount of money I have paid in nannies and daycare centers for Winston has already exceeded the entire amount that has cost my mom to raise me until I left China. Of course, that is not a fair comparison. But it did make me wonder - with all the heavy investment in schools, tutors, extracurricular activities, will I be able to make Winston a better and happier person than I have been?

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Equality vs. Sameness

As a woman, I am naturally interested in the debates on women's rights. As an immigrant Chinese, I am naturally vested in the discussions regarding minorities. Interestingly, when I was growing up in China, I never thought of either topic for two different reasons. I never thought there was an issue for women, because the prevailing propaganda was all about "women holding up half of the sky" and there was no mention of prejudice against women in the society. In addition, I never heard of stay-home mothers when I was growing up. I never thought there was any prejudice against minorities, because I was the majority and therefore never noticed anything. In fact, if anything, I thought that the minorities in China were getting much better deals because they could get into schools with lower scores than the general public. Only when I became sort of a minority did I understand how it feels to be a minority - we often cannot think from others' perspectives because we really do not know from personal experience what it feels like to be in their shoes.

When I first came to this country, I was baffled by many things I saw. There were so many stay-home mothers, which would suggest that China was more advanced in the feminist movement than the US. On the other hand, the girls I met at Harvard were much more free-spirited and bold than the Chinese girls I knew before. While in China there are no girls-only schools, there are a lot here in the US. When I looked closer at these women's colleges such as Wellesley, I realized that the girls often grew up to be more out-spoken and confident than those from co-ed institutions, including of course Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright. The endless discussion and debates on feminist movement, women's rights and how to balance career and family as a woman would sometimes seem a bit too much. I gradually understood that the China where I grew up tried to institute a notion of "sameness" between the two genders, when in fact there was far less gender equality. Here in the US, many of the ongoing discussions are precisely about the difference between equality and sameness. One of the mistakes that the radical feminists made was to push for sameness instead of equality. The two genders have not been the same, and will never be the same. B

Recently a friend came to visit from out of town. We had lunch, followed by a leisurely walk through the woods at the nearby Foothills Park. We had not talked much since Winston's birth, as she has been immersed in building her academic career while I have been learning (often unsuccessfully) how to best raise Winston while having a career. She's been enormously successful in her research, and has received many awards and distinctions. While her research field is in biology, she was a physics major in college, graduating top of her class from a leading university in Canada and decided to make a switch to biology in graduate school. I heard of her even when I was in middle school, as she was winning math and physics competitions from that early on in Beijing. I often describe her to others as perhaps the smartest woman I know. How many people can switch to a knowledge-intensive field such as biology after college and be extremely successful?

That description makes me realize that inherently even those who whole-heartedly push for women's rights and equality view women as different from men. Does it mean that she is the smarted woman I know but not the smartest person I know? Or does it mean that she should be compared to women first and then the population at large? In the end, I realize that my categorization of her is the result of a combination of factors. First, she is after all one of the few women I know who have pursued a most rigorous and challenging academic career, while I know plenty of men in that circle. That alone makes her truly stand out. Second, I do think that the psychological environment for an ambitious woman is much tougher than that for a man, because a man can have a couple of kids while building up a career while a woman cannot, at least not in the most intense period of her professional life. Therefore, in order for a woman to achieve equal distinction and success, it takes either more work or higher IQ, or a combination of both. After all, women are not the same as men. There may be policies in Sweden mandating fathers to take paternity leave, but in the rest of the world, men are going back to work the day after their wives give birth. And those men will always stay ahead of women who have kids, if they are equally smart, hardworking and lucky.

Double Standards

I have read with great interest and admiration Peter Hessler's book "River Town" as well his New Yorker articles on China. He first went to China as a Peace Corps volunteer to teach English in a small town and subsequently stayed there for years to write about China, with a very good understanding of China. He wrote in one of his articles that one thing that vexed him tremendously is that a Caucasion (with a Chinese name Da Shan) could become a celebrity in China solely because he could speak Chinese with almost no accent, while having no other skills. In the US, it would be the equivalent of a Chinese person speaking English without accent - which of course does not catch anyone's attention.

Today I received as part of a mass mail an email announcement of someone joining a big investment bank as their head of China pharma in equity research. This guy was a Harvard undergrad, who went on to get a MD/PhD, followed by a brief stint at McKinsey and another even briefer stint as a junior business development person at a small biotech company. I met him because he reached out to me to seek career advice, since he spent several years of his childhood in China, when his parents were teaching English there. Therefore, he has an interest in Chinese life science industry. I first talked to him on the phone for an hour, and then I agreed to meet him for coffee for another hour or so. He was well-spoken and friendly but was prone to exaggerated flattery. His movement from one company to another was so fast and frequent that he asked to meet again for career advice and more introductions for him to meet the "movers and shakers" of the industry. I found that a bit egregious and hence did not respond. He did a few months of independent consulting. In this email announcement, he said that the demand for his advice and expertise was so strong that he found himself traveling as much as when he was at McKinsey. Since his wife is expecting now, they want to move to Asia, and he was glad to receive the offer from this top-notch investment bank. While making the announcement for his new position, he wrote a full paragraph complete with bullet points illustrating his few months of independent consulting as nothing but astounding success. It seems a bit baffling to dwell so much on his few months of consulting, during which period he asked for introductions to companies or people who might want to hire him. But then I realized the motive behind it - he wanted to broadcast that he never wanted to look for a job but this job came begging for him.

To be honest, I don't have a high opinion of equity research in general. No one can make money from the stock market by following equity research. Still, it is a highly lucrative position which in this economy must have been coveted by many. I could not help but think of Peter Hessler's complaint.

Since I have met him and talked to this guy, I know about his rudimentary knowledge of the pharmaceutical industry and his limited understanding of Chinese life science circle . I also heard him speak Chinese, which is better than those who learned Chinese in school here in the US, but nowhere near the level of proficiency to conduct business discussions in Chinese. Sure he has a good resume with good schools, high degrees and an interesting upbringing, but clearly that's not sufficient for a position that presumably represents the "expert opinion" of a major bank on a fast-growing sector in perhaps the most fascinating country for now - China.

Many Chinese people I know complain about the double standard set up for the Chinese or Asian immigrants in general, in that they have to work twice as hard and achieve twice as much to gain the same level of recognition. I have always felt ambivalent about these complaints, in that there are good reasons for many people in this camp to not gain the recognition they deserve for various reasons, including lack of leadership potential or interpersonal skills. However, just as I cannot deny the validity of the feminist movement in general, I cannot deny the double standard that does exist for Asians, especially those recent immigrants who cannot speak English well.

On the other hand, it is the Chinese people in China that launched the celebrity career of Da Shan simply because he is a Caucasian Canadian who speaks Chinese without much of an accent. It is so rare to see someone like Da Shan that the Chinese are enamored and flattered - so they showered him with admiration and adoration.

Talking about this guy I know, I guess his English is better than those US-trained Chinese professionals while his Chinese is better than most of his fellow Americans. His position could have easily been given to a Chinese professional educated in the US. But alas, for a US-trained Chinese professional, his/her English will be compared to Americans/Brits, and his/her Chinese will be compared to the those who have never left China, in which case he/she loses on both comparisons.

Yes, the double standards do exist for the Chinese, but they have themselves to blame as well.

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

A Sunday Party

On Sunday we went to a party at a friend's place. Almost all the people there were her fellow classmates from the biology department of Peking University. As I was an undergraduate in the chemistry department for two years before transferring to Harvard, I did not know most of them very well. Still, at least we went to the same military academy for a whole year of military training before starting as freshmen at Peking University, which from hindsight was a year with misguided goals but unintended benefits. It made many of us perhaps a little stronger and more irreverent - the former definitely a virtue and the latter perhaps not so much.

Most of the graduates from Peking University at the time would go onto graduate schools in the US, with very few exceptions. Interestingly, the few exceptions often are most exceptional. One of the girls YL from the biology department worked for a few years in China before starting her own trading company, making millions. I did not know her well before, and after almost twenty years, I could barely recognize her. Still, I could immediately tell that she is smart, capable and shrewd and has a very mature view towards business in general. In other words, the millions she has made is not the only benefit of her entrepreneurial effort. In an ever-changing environment such as China, she has learned to navigate the ambiguities, the changes, and the inconsistencies that would drive most people mad, and emerge a successful businesswoman.

We had a great time chatting about the old times, as well as how things have changed between the US and China. Previously, it would make sense to make money in the US and then retire in China. Now that China is such a wild wild west, for those with both the brains and the guts, it makes sense to make the millions in China and then retire in the US. This woman for example is trying to immigrate to the US through the investment route, as the US government is currently encouraging immigration through investment in the US economy. Indeed, except for labor which is still cheaper in China, almost everything of comparable quality is more expensive in China than in the US. While it is extraordinarily challenging to do business in China, it is possible if one is smart, diligent, persistent and lucky. The land of opportunities is China.

Those of us living in Bay Area lamented how it is challenging to raise kids amidst such wealth around them. YL talked about visiting the poor countryside of Guizhou in China, where the kids could not even afford the $1 per day in living expense to go to middle school. When she and others donated the money to these kids, they held the envelopes with tears rolling down their cheeks. That's the kind of poverty that exists in China just a few hundred miles from some prosperous cities where young people all have iPhones. We talked about taking our kids to visit such places, when they are old enough to understand, or when they start complaining why they cannot have a big house like their friends, etc etc.

"Happiness" is always a topic among the middle-class and the rich. Frequently, it is because of lack of perspective that people grow unhappy. Indeed when we witness with our own eyes the kind of poverty permeating through the world, we cannot help but feel the insignificance of our own complaints. Previously whenever I hear people say that they are content with what they have because there are millions in the world starving to death, I often sense that is an excuse for one's lack of motivation or aspiration. Now that I am older, I am beginning to realize that "balance" is a magic word. If only we could combine the perfect balance of deep appreciation for what we have, while aspiring to achieve more and more, we would be both happy and accomplished. After all, only when we achieve more can we have more impact on this society to make it a better place.

If Obama Had Read More of Machiavelli

Like many others, I was once enamored with President Barack Obama's promise. And like many others, I have grown more and more tired of his conciliatory approach aimed to appease his enemies only to embolden them. As Maureen Dowd wrote eloquently in the New York Times recently, " He thinks he’s doing the right things to crawl out of W.’s mudslide, but he ends up being castigated by the right as a socialist, by the left as a conservative, and by the middle as wobbly."

I have lost my interest in following the events in Washington DC for a while. But as I read "What Happened to Obama?" by Drew Westen (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/what-happened-to-obamas-passion.html), I realized that indeed no one could really not care.

As Westen wrote, "The president is fond of referring to “the arc of history,” paraphrasing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” But with his deep-seated aversion to conflict and his profound failure to understand bully dynamics — in which conciliation is always the wrong course of action, because bullies perceive it as weakness and just punch harder the next time — he has broken that arc and has likely bent it backward for at least a generation. "

And at the end of the article, he lamented, "But the arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise. It does not bend when 400 people control more of the wealth than 150 million of their fellow Americans. It does not bend when the average middle-class family has seen its income stagnate over the last 30 years while the richest 1 percent has seen its income rise astronomically. It does not bend when we cut the fixed incomes of our parents and grandparents so hedge fund managers can keep their 15 percent tax rates. It does not bend when only one side in negotiations between workers and their bosses is allowed representation. And it does not bend when, as political scientists have shown, it is not public opinion but the opinions of the wealthy that predict the votes of the Senate. The arc of history can bend only so far before it breaks. "

FDR once proudly stated in public that he knew he had incurred the wrath of many millionaires and yet he was unapologetic. The irony of democracy is that one has to be popular enough to get elected, and then does not care about popularity so much that he ends up being crippled and impotent.

More and more, I realize that perhaps, just perhaps, the right balance for a politician in this country is to adopt the bi-partisan, eloquent and compassionate rhetoric of Barack Obama when running for President and then once in office, be completely ruthless in pursuing the right mission without fear of creating enemies. After all, the enemies were already there and never intended to be converted to friends. Not recognizing a lost cause is either a sign of stupidity or naivete. Indeed no one loves confrontation or battles, but a demonstration of fear of confrontation is usually the best way to invite even more belligerent confrontations.

It all sounds so Machiavellian - and come to think of it, indeed it's taken us over 2000 years to once again understand that politics remains the same as before - just less bloody in the literal sense. Obama's fault might as well have been due to his naive notion and supreme arrogance that somehow he could transcend human nature.

Sunday, August 7, 2011

The Possible Culprit for Winston's Allergy

The other day, I was chatting with a friend of mine on the phone. When I mentioned that there seemed to be so many more cases of food allergies, he said that he had a theory about it. " It is the adjuvant in all these vaccines that are getting stronger and stronger." Immediately I could see the validity of this hypothesis.

Indeed the adjuvant was there to make the body mount an immune response to the dead virus in the vaccine, but likely at the same time the body might be encountering something new in the environment, such as pollen, or a new food such as eggs, seafood or nuts. Of course, there was never going to be any serious study on how strong the adjuvant should be in these vaccines.

This friend just lost his beloved uncle to a botched surgery. Apparently, this uncle enjoyed very robust health for over 70 years. When he had to undergo surgery, he did not take matters into his own hands by checking out on the surgeon. He essentially let everything be decided for him. My friend said that his practice was to educate himself on all health related matters - reading into the fine prints of all drugs, including the clinical trial results, before deciding to take a certain drug. Otherwise, he said, he would be leaving the decision-making to doctors who often know less than he does about these drugs.

Not that we had any choice, as Winston had to get all the vaccines in order to attend school, but I do wonder if all those vaccine shots he received in his first 12 months of life had made him allergic. We have yet to get him take a skin test for the environmental allergens, but we now know that he's allergic to both cashews and pistachios.

Pragmatism over Ideology

Honestly I have not followed what has been going on in Washington DC over the debt crisis, because I am rather tired of following what has been happening there.

In a way, I feel that almost all human conflicts - be it among family members, friends, colleagues, communities, or countries, can all be attributed to a fatal human flaw, which is to place one's strong beliefs or opinions above pragmatism.

I am a fanatical fan of the Tudor period. I have probably watched all the movies and TV shows about that period. I have read Alison Weir's popular biographies of Henry VIII as well as Elizabeth I. That was a period of much political upheaval, with many people losing their heads for ideology.

From the view of us contemporaries, it must have been unthinkable that people from the Tudor period would rather die a painful death than to simply state that they believe in whatever the authority wanted them to believe. Of course, it is perfectly understandable since these people fervently believed that they would go to hell after death if they were to lie about their faiths.

Thomas More was a true humanist for his time. Way ahead of people in his generation, he believed in the education of women, and he educated his daughters the same way he educated his sons. One would think that such an enlightened scholar would then have a more enlightened view of religion. But no, he would burn those Lutheran "heretics" when he was Lord Chancellor and he himself would get executed simply because he refused to acknowledge King Henry VIII as supreme head of the Church of England. One could not help wondering if "cost/benefit analysis" were to be conducted for him, he would realize how much better off himself, his family and the humankind would benefit from his living until his natural death.

Catherine of Aragon was a famously devout Catholic. While there is no doubt that Henry VIII was terribly cruel and selfish, I could not help wondering how much better everyone would have been if she had simply taken the pragmatic approach which had served Anne of Cleves so well. It was obvious that Henry VIII wanted to marry Anne Boleyn, and one way or another he would get his first marriage dissolved. Instead of recognizing the underlying cause, Catherine of Aragon focused on the technical details which Henry VIII was going through to get what he wanted - whether her previous marriage to Prince Arthur (Henry VIII's older brother) was ever consummated. Once she got hung up by the excuse with which Henry VIII was making to get rid of her, she forgot to reason with herself what was the best path forward, given that indeed there was no great path forward but at least some were better than others. Fighting with the king, while pledging her loyalty and devotion to him, was about the most stupid thing one could think of. If she cared about her only daughter Mary, she could have negotiated with the king that she would agree to an annulment if Mary were to remain Princess.

Apples don't fall far from the tree. Mary would grow up to be as dogmatic as her mother, earning herself the nickname "Bloody Mary" for burning so many protestants. One could argue that Henry VIII was actually a pragmatist, albeit a tyrannical one. Anne Boleyn, whose clever efforts forced Henry VIII to break from Rome and marry her, was altogether too emotional. Had it not been for her inability to control her emotions, she was after all a pragmatist as well. Her daughter Elizabeth I would turn out to be the most pragmatic of all Tudors. She attended Mass when her half sister Mary was queen. When she became queen, she did not persecute the Catholics the way Mary persecuted the Protestants. In fact, she might have been the first person to embrace a "don't ask don't tell" policy which worked beautifully for its time.

Now fast forward over 400 years, I wonder if what we are witnessing today will be viewed with equal amusement by people 400 years from now, as "much ado about nothing", as we view what happened during the Tudor period.