One of my favorite pastries of all time. I literally grew up eating these. The sweet egg custard filling with a buttery outer crust is like an explosion of goodness in your mouth. Nothing like a warm egg tart fresh from the oven.
Photo taken in Hong Kong Winter 2011
Sometimes, I feel quite bird-brained. Shiny objects garner my immediate visual attention. There’s just something about that twinkle in the sky that commands your vision.
Photo taken in Macau Summer 2011
Living in the hustle-and-bustle of Hong Kong, where long work hours are the norm and efficiency is king, life can be quite stressful to say the least. Sometimes you really just need to relax and laugh; enjoy the whimsical spontaneity of a smile. Many thanks to my good friend Stephanie for being such a willing model!
Relax, Laugh.
Photo taken in Hong Kong Summer 2011
I love it when I can see blue skies. Being able to see across the harbor to TST allows you to see the contours of Kowloon’s skyline. The factories were closed for a week and a half since Shenzhen was hosting the Summer Universiade. The last time I saw skies this blue was during the 2008 Olympics when they closed down the factories for the games. In both instances, the conclusion of the games brought the blanket of haze back to Hong Kong’s sky.
Sunrise at the Peak
Blue Skies at the Peak
Photograph taken in Hong Kong 2011
Food can be such a powerful medium that expresses the mundane and exotic. Here’s a selection of food related objects found around my house on a lazy summer afternoon.
Seashell
Grapes & Berries
Chinese Knife
Potato Peeling
Grape Drink
Photos taken in Hong Kong 2011
It’s easy to get caught up with your ego and forget how insignificant our presence is.
We are merely a statistic in the greater scheme of things.
Anon.
Photo taken in Washington D.C. 2009
Some things hit you like a train, others like an invisible dense fog slowly engulfing you without your knowledge. My relationship with money is the latter.
Growing up, money was a means to an end, a tool to achieve a goal: the acquisition of goods and services. Thankfully, money hasn’t been a great concern to me so I’ve never really given it much thought other than a device to acquire things. Sure I was restricted by how much other people valued money and thus restricted by the constraints of a budget, however I’ve never been to the point where I couldn’t get by. That all changed with the advent of college and actually having to take care of my finance and learn to budget and watch my spending. At one point, I literally only had a sum of 10 dollars to my name in all of my US accounts. It was at that moment where I came to fully realize how money shapes almost every facet of life. As the saying goes, you don’t realize how much you miss something until you are without it. With only 10 dollars to last me half a month, I was undoubtedly missing days with fuller coffers. With the onset of junior year and the realization that graduation will come much faster than expected, the issue of getting job, or more importantly, the issue of making money is taking greater precedent. Listening to some accelerated masters students, alumni and seniors discuss jobs-and more importantly-the salaries they bring, made me fully realize just how inescapable and all encompassing money is.
With the advent of the market system, money developed as a means to better value goods and facilitate transactions. Money in and of it self has no intrinsic value. The only reason why money has value in our society is because we give it value. We put our faith in money, but more importantly the belief that other people also have faith in money, as a means to secure our future. Unlike finished products or commodities, money is practically useless. Case in point, when the rubble was devalued in 1998 and Russian economy suffered hyperinflation, people received greater utility from burning their money for warmth than value of goods which it could purchase-nothing. But yet, we still manage to recover our faith in money. They say faith is difficult to create but easy to break, but this doesn’t seem to apply to money. No mater how many times it has let us down, we still manage to foster faith in it once again.
This thus begs the question, why are we such a slave to money? Why have we put so much faith and power on an artificial construct humanity has created? I personally believe its because we’re all lazy fucks. Money establishes a system of conventions and predictability which lends itself to stability. Why mess with the system when it seems to be working?
Although the recent financial crisis has shaken humanity’s belief in this system, it has, not by a stretch, destroyed humanity’s greed for it. The recent market rallies and and corresponding big pay checks to Wall Street warriors is a testament to our desire for wealth through capital gains. To a critic, it seems like people haven’t really learned their lessons. Even with shaky fundamentals, risk appetite is back up and people just want to make up for their losses. The so called logical and efficient markets seem to be giving way to a wild Monte Carlo escapade and it seems like we’re addicted on gambling. Its a wonder how we don’t have any more of these market crashes…oh wait we actually do…ever since more laissez faire, Reaganomics policies were implemented. The recent Goldman inquisitions is a good example of the inherent problems with market systems. As this article from The Economist puts it, “If we agree with him that Goldman’s actions were indeed inappropriate, but also lawful, what does that say about the politicians who were tasked with making the laws?”
Money, and the concept of money is so ingrained in our society that addiction to it seems inevitable. Life really is an irony. The very thing that gives us stability is a drug so addictive that humanity would collapse without it.
Money & Wealth
Photo taken in Hong Kong Summer 2009
Our perception of an acquaintance is often only skin deep. What we perceive of them is through that initial visual impression we have. What does a face tell us about the person? Is it truly revealing or simply a masquerade of pretension?
I’ll let the faces speak for themselves.
Aditya
Adrienne
Alex
Aliesha
Brianne
Elyssa
Eric
Hannah
Page
Parinya
Pooja
Sarah
Shing Yan
Photos taken in Pittsburgh 2010
Summer breeze; the warm glow of the afternoon sun.
.
Lazy Afternoon
Photo taken in Hong Kong Summer 2009
Rewatching Memento (great movie, highly recommend to anyone that has not seen it yet) I came to think about the concept of memory and how it affects our life as we know it. Out of the many memorable lines in the movie, the one that pertained the most to memory in relation to our livelihood was: “So how… how can I heal? How am I supposed to heal if I can’t… feel time?”
Our short term memory is what makes an experience visceral and well…memorable. An event is memorable to us when we develop emotional ties to it. How do we develop these emotional ties? By attaching emotional content to the little details of the event. Thus it is the little details which you remember which makes things significant. Certain smells which reminds you of the comfort of home or an apprehensive place. Certain objects or scenes which we associate with an uncle’s or aunts place or certain places you have traveled to. The drip of a faucet, the laughter of a child, the fragments of a conversation. This is especially true with childhood memories where all that remains are shells of a memory. As Leonard puts its evocatively in memento, “You can just feel the details. The bits and pieces you never bothered to put into words. And you can feel these extreme moments… even if you don’t want to.”
If this defines our memory, then our feeling and concept of time is simply a string of these emotional attachments over a set duration. Taking this concept of memory and its relation to time, it answers Leonard’s question quite succinctly: you can’t. Without out these memories, you can’t feel time. Without feeling time, how can you heal? How can you heal if the last memory you had was of a traumatic event. How can you develop distance from that event if is the last thing you remember every time you wake up? It’s hard. As Leonard eloquently sums it up, “If we can’t make memories, we can’t heal.” In essence these visceral memories is what we remember. And sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever. That’s what stories are for. Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can’t remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.
People really do take the memory and the ability to create new memory for granted. It plays such an integral role in our life and our defense mechanism yet we easily dismiss of it. As cliche as it sounds, we really don’t learn to appreciate it until we have lost it.
The visceral details
Photo taken in Hong Kong Summer 2009
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