Hey friends! Still alive lah, just disappear for a while. Now back with more updates!

I’ve been spending the last two weeks in Singapore and Malaysia, which has been an absolute blast 🙂 

Here’s a few of my recent reflections:

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🫶 Embracing multiculturalism

I want to start out with what’s closest to my heart. I immediately came to love one thing about Singapore and Malaysia: multiculturalism.

Singapore and Malaysia are both former British colonies, with populations that are largely a blend of Chinese, Malay, and Indian ethnic origins. To preserve the peace, both countries have made integrating these groups a priority—something that’s reflected in the language, the cuisine, the architecture, and even government policy.

English is the working language in both countries, allowing people from different ethnic backgrounds to communicate with each other. Singlish and Manglish have become their own creole languages blending grammar patterns and vocabulary from Mandarin Chinese, Malay, Tamil, and Hokkien with English as the base.

As a Taiwanese-American, I felt oddly at home walking and moving through Singapore and Malaysia, where many streets are lined with English and Chinese. At hawker centers, I could start my order with a “hello” in English, specify where I’m sitting in Mandarin, and say thank you with a “kam siah”—in my extremely limited Hokkien. And growing up in the Bay Area, which itself has a significant blend of Asian cultures, I was excited to go from eating a roti canai for breakfast to a laksa or char kway teow for dinner (sometimes both 🤣 ).

I think this blend of language, food, and people is beautiful, and if you’re a third-culture kid like me, I highly recommend visiting both countries to see how it all comes together. Especially if you don’t have as strong of a grasp on your heritage language as you do on English. It’s an amazing feeling to be able to speak Chinglish to aunties on the street, and not just your parents 🙂 

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 🇸🇬 A special shoutout to Singapore

Singapore is the most well-designed and cleanest city I’ve ever seen.

Some backpackers go as far as calling it sterile, but if you prefer breathing in petrol fumes and wading through ankle-deep water actively becoming mosquito breeding grounds… be my guest.

Singapore is incredibly walkable and convenient to get around, and the MRT doesn’t require getting a separate card—any tap-enabled credit card works just fine. Most streets are well-covered with shade from buildings or plants, and an air-conditioned room is rarely ever more than a few steps away. This made a HUGE difference to my mental health, because I was truly suffering from the heat up to this point. It’s crazy how my average daily steps jumped from ~8,000 to ~20,000 as soon as I arrived in the city.

Additionally, Singapore has a thriving startup scene, a highly skilled workforce, and an outwardly-focused business culture. The government invests heavily into the startup scene, offering tax incentives, access to learning resources, and mentorship to entrepreneurs. Many Multi-National Companies (MNCs) have a base in Singapore to manage their Asia / ASEAN operations. And of course, using English as a working language makes it a breeze for Westerners to communicate with Singaporeans.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been making my way through From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, the memoir of Lee Kuan Yew—the founder of modern Singapore. He was the ultimate pragmatist who balanced long-term thinking with decisive action.

It’s made me come to appreciate how all of this development is no accident, it was by design. Singapore’s dominance in global finance, the “greening” of the city, and even the Merlion conspicuously placed on Marina Bay—was a calculated investment by a highly competent and motivated government seeking to pull itself out of poverty while staving off existential threats.

If you’re interested in history, international relations, or urban development, I highly recommend reading the book. I’m still making my way through it, but I feel like it contains a lot of lessons on leadership that go far beyond what your typical business-y book would cover.

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🥱 Overcoming boredom

I’ve been feeling bored lately—or perhaps it would better be described as restlessness.

Now that I’m two months removed from corporate life, I feel the itch to do something that feels “productive” again. However, I find myself questioning if this urge is coming from a place of insecurity over my future career prospects, or if it’s genuine interest in something that happens to seem productive.

Should I lean into this feeling of restlessness, learning to become at peace with doing “nothing”? Or should I listen to my instinctual urge to start creating—to have some sort of output that I can later show off to a future employer, investor, peer and say, “Look what I did during my time off! I promise I’m a good productive worker!”

At this point, I still don’t know. Some of you are probably familiar with the 2014 study where people left alone in a room chose to shock themselves because they would rather feel pain than boredom. I imagine I would’ve been one of those people.

In any case, I’ve got a few projects lined up in the coming months to capture my attention:

1. Learn Muay Thai in Thailand

2. Build an app at a hackathon with AI tools (Cursor, v0, Bolt, etc.)

3. Join a 1-month language immersion program in South Korea

In between these larger, grounding activities, I suppose I’ll just have to figure out what to do with all this free time. If anyone has ideas or suggestions, let me know!

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Closing thoughts

I’ve been reflecting on how I spend so much of my time reflecting. Meta-reflecting, if you will.

It’s truly a privilege to have so much time and space for my thoughts. But I think reflecting alone isn’t fulfilling. It needs to be paired with taking some kind of action or meaningful change in perspective. So here’s to hoping all this thinking leads somewhere useful—and not just more thinking about thinking. 🙏 

Thanks for reading along – stay tuned for more updates! 🙂 

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📖 What I’ve been reading recently

• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky – Yes, I know I mentioned this last time. But I FINISHED IT. I’ve been wanting to read Crime and Punishment forever. It’s a slow burn, but the psychological impact is real. If you’re up for a reading challenge, and want to come away feeling like you’ve unlocked a new understanding of the human condition, you should pick up this book.

• Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum – I picked up this book as a refreshing, heartwarming contrast to Crime and Punishment. It follows Yeongju, who opened a bookshop after burning out from work and personal relationships. Through her day-to-day routine and the conversations amongst the characters surrounding her new bookshop, it becomes clear how the act of reading and the role of a bookshop as a “third place” helps each character process their feelings and grow over time. This book falls under the category of “healing fiction”, which seems to be trending lately. And of course, it felt relevant to me since I’m on my own sabbatical. If you’re someone who often finds themselves wandering in bookshops when you don’t know what else to do, this will be a comfy read.