Thinking about things

People write more when they are sad than when they are happy.

Maybe it’s because negative emotions demand to be processed. Anger, sadness, paranoia—they insist on being felt before they loosen their grip. They sit heavy. They breathe through words.

Happiness feels different. Joy is light. Almost fragile. As if naming it too loudly might scare it away. Writing about joy requires looking at it directly. And sometimes, looking too closely risks overthinking it, and overthinking has a way of thinning even the brightest feeling.

I hope this isn’t too bleak an introduction for a birthday reflection.

Most people call Hong Kong the Gateway to the West, which it has earned from its inception as a British colony and decades after its transition back to a Chinese territory. It’s a label that still fits, depending on where you’re looking from. It’s a city that thrives in preserving culture with an openness to innovation and a vision for growth. But on my second visit to the city, I started to see it less as a gateway and more as a layover.

This, of course, is a visitor’s perspective. I’m not here to stay. My relationship with the city is brief and circumstantial. Marked with impermanence. Transitory.

To me, it makes sense: Hong Kong thrives in the in-between. It’s one of the busiest business hubs in the world, a linchpin for the Asia-Pacific operations of global conglomerates. Think of the world’s biggest companies, I guarantee that three-quarters of them have a presence in Hong Kong.

Its airport alone is a machine built for movement: 85 airlines, over 150 destinations, a nonstop churn of passengers and cargo. Even at rest, Hong Kong is on the move.

Borrowing a proclamation from a dear friend, The White Lotus can be distilled into this thesis: rich white people doing awful things and getting away with it.

I couldn’t have described this show any better.

Over the course of three seasons, we’ve followed a rotating cast of characters whose intertwined stories each begin with a mysterious corpse and then rewind to unravel the events leading up to the death. But the show is less about whodunit than about who these rich assh*les are.

It’s a social satire dressed as a murder mystery, where privilege and indulgence collide with tragedy.

The show’s brilliance lies in its ability to hold up a mirror to its audience, forcing us to confront the very systems we simultaneously disgust and envy. It's easy to pass judgment on these characters, but would we be as callous, rude, and audacious as these people if we had the same money and privilege that they do?

“The author is dead.”

This comes from Roland Barthes’ seminal work where he describes the author “dying” with the birth of the text and no longer holding authority over its ultimate meaning. In the practice of literary criticism, this means that the writer submits the meaning of the text to the reader.

Of course, this is a figurative death—authors don’t literally die upon the release of their work; though there are times when we might wish they did.

With the advent of the internet, smartphones, and social media, we can get news from across the globe within seconds. As the wildfires across Los Angeles spread, so did the news about its extent.


We watched as people uploaded scenes of their homes being engulfed in flame and called for aid. We heard about celebrities who lost their mansions to horrific fires that burned everything they had worked for in a matter of minutes. We viewed aerial shots that showed the gravity of damage through before-and-after comparisons; entire neighborhoods were reduced to ashes.


As climate change intensifies the frequency and severity of natural disasters, witnessing their destruction has become a common experience worldwide—delivered directly to us through the screens in our pockets. One day, it’s wildfires in Los Angeles or snowstorms in the southern United States; the next, it’s typhoons and earthquakes in the Philippines.