I had forgotten that Americans didn’t all look as flawless as the actors on Friends. And that they weren’t all 20 to 30 year old, well-educated, well-off, well-dressed globe trotters.
So when I arrived in Chicago after spending over a year in China, I felt like I had walked onto the Starship Enterprise. There were teenagers. With real live acne. Continue reading
Last week in New York, people asked me over and over, “What’s the biggest culture shock coming back to New York after 14 months in China?”
It was the plumbing, for sure. Continue reading
At some point, I went public. Not sure when or why, but turns out I have shareholders (or should I say stakeholders?), and responsibility to them to accomplish, well, something. Oddly I’ve had a lot of conversations recently about the little things, like what are we supposed to do with our lives, and whether we should try to save the world (and pandas) or just enjoy life as it comes (like pandas). As much as I loved the laid-back panda life in Chengdu, I found that I couldn’t just loll around all day. I had the ambition chip planted in me a long time ago, and still have a deep sense that indeed, with great privilege (thanks mom and dad!) comes great responsibility. In short, I feel I owe it to you, my stakeholders, to do something meaningful. (Eeps!)
And of course, I want to live a reasonably comfy life back in good old New York one of these days, which doesn’t come cheap.
So I’ve settled on energy and pollution Continue reading