Life in Asia

After getting a breather this past weekend from work and catching up with friends over some delicious food in terrific weather, I realized: Tokyo may have given me indescribable stress, frustration, anger and my first 6 white hairs, but it also gave me a lot of wonderful people in my life that I truly enjoy hanging out with and lots of delicious eating experiences, which I don't think I'll be able to find anywhere else in the world on the scale available in Tokyo. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I will miss certain things about living in Tokyo. It's a hate-love-hate relationship.

One would think that if I KNOW I'm going to miss things about Tokyo, I should spend my remaining time not hating the rest of it so much, but it's an impossible task. It's impossible not to hate the things I hate about Tokyo, even though it may be ruining my remaining days in Tokyo. It's because the things I hate aren't related to the things I love, so the things I love cannot make up for the things I hate.

It's like...having a puppy you love and an abusive spouse. The puppy makes you happy, but the husband beats and oppresses you. So just because you have the puppy, doesn't mean your life is happy, because it still doesn't change the fact that your husband beats you. That's like the things I love about Japan and the things I hate. Not sure why I came up with that weird analogy, but I think it's a very accurate one.

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In general, there are many aspects of living in Asia that I really enjoy. Before I moved here, I wasn't sure if I was going to like living in Asia, but I find that I really do. I love that there's always somewhere to go and something to eat at all hours of the day. I love that you don't need a car and that the public transportation is set up so that you can get to most places you need fairly efficiently. Except when the crowds annoy me, I love the congregation of lots of people in a big city. I love the ease and convenience of Asia (although in certain respects, the US is easier and more convenient...in different ways though). And to a certain degree, I like being in Asia, where everyone looks like me.

That last bit kind of surprises me, even now, but it's true. The US is amazing in its diversity and there is something great about being able to make friends with people from different ethnic, cultural, racial and religious backgrounds. My childhood in the US included living in suburban, WASPy Virginia to hippie dippie NorCal to New York, then yuppie SF (which I differentiate from hippie dippie NorCal because once I moved to SF, "my" SF was mostly yuppie and not so hippie).

Living mostly in large urban cities where people are generally open-minded (or at least fake it well), I told myself the little white lie I needed to in order to work in the white male capitalist finance & law world: that even though I am an Asian woman, my education and experience makes me the "same" as a white male counterpart. Wrong, no it doesn't. I don't think I let myself realize that in America, there is both a glass ceiling and a bamboo ceiling for Asian American women. The glass ceiling never goes away pretty much anywhere in the world, but at least in Asia, the bamboo ceiling is gone. That, and my American education and mother English tongue gives me an advantage. Which is why I think so many Asian Americans and Asian Canadians are moving to Asia in droves.