Blog

Short blog posts, journal entries, and random thoughts. Topics include a mix of personal and the world at large.

The amazing Amazon

I don’t see how anyone can boycott Amazon. When you absolutely need that one thing quickly and you cannot be bothered to go anywhere to get it, Amazon always comes through in the clutch. Prime free next-day shipping is an amazing feet of logistical engineering. Labor exploitation be damned if I can replace a broken water bottle in less than 24 hours, for the cheapest price, with just a few taps on the phone.

Good luck getting that convenience genie back into the bottle. I have to wonder those who claim to boycott Amazon on Reddit: do they really do it? Often times, people’s actions do not back up their words. Those who rail against higher education have gone to college themselves, and will send (or have sent) their children to college. Those who advocate for leniency towards the homeless invariably do not have mobile homes parked in their neighborhoods. Women who claims partner income doesn’t matter have never dated someone who made less.

Talk is easy and superficial when you don’t have skin in the game.

I returned from Korea late April. The trip marked a two week hiatus from weightlifting. I then got sick the week after - as one does. So in earnest I did not pick back up the weights until the start of May.

It then took an entire month for me to get back to where I was - in terms of strength numbers - before I went on vacation. I guess that’s about normal? (I lift three times a week.) That’s the thing about traveling when you are chasing the gains on a barbell: you have to accept the regression. You work so hard to gradually reach a certain weight for a certain amount of reps. Then, like the Itsy Bitsy Spider, you go back down and have to do it all over again.

I’m not saying don’t go on vacation. But if there’s a target weight goal you’re chasing, it’s going to get prolonged.

The grand return

Hey, good news: they let me back into this country! I guess that bus fare evasion ticket from over a decade ago isn’t enough to have me deported to a foreign country. (Tongue in cheek obviously, but for the record I am a full citizen of these United States.) It’s always lovely to hear the immigration officer say “Welcome home.”

It’s indeed great to be home. Over the course of two weeks in China and South Korea, I somehow managed to lose 10 pounds. You’d think with the overwhelming amounts of delicious foods over there (cheaper, too) that I’d return home with more flubber. I was fully ready to work off the extra poundage until I stepped on the scale and found out I’m actually lighter. I guess cardio is a very effective weight-loss lever: 25,000 steps every single day is enough to overwhelm all that I ate whilst on vacation.

Good to know that next time I can eat even more.

What isn’t so pleasant after my return is the intense jet lag. For the week afterwards I was struggling to stay awake past 10:00 PM, even though my scheduled bed time is 11:30 PM. Multiple days of sleeping over 9 hours wasn’t enough to break the spell. It probably didn’t help that soon after I came back to America, I contracted a nasty cold. A double whammy.

Happy to report I am now mostly recovered.

Whenever I go on these multi-week excursions outside of the country, I carry with me the gratitude of being able to take paid time off. To be able to go on vacation without worrying about the job, and knowing that any slack left behind will be taken up by my colleagues. That’s worth everything. In a time of great uncertainty and change, I try not to take for granted the fortunate position I find myself in vis a vis employment.

Many more happy returns.

The Healy travel luck

I have what my friends jokingly refers to as the “Healy travel luck.” It seems that when I go on vacation, things go very smoothly for me. And I’m not the type to obsessively plan things out into a rigid schedule. Serendipity has been kind to me, it must be said. Weather seems to cooperate where ever I go. The restaurants I encounter are all fine and delicious. A local immediately appears whenever I get stuck in a quandary when I’m in foreign countries.

In 2025 I wanted to make the annual trip home to Guangzhou, China during the QingMing Festival. It’s a yearly event where Chinese people visit their family burial sites to pay respects. I’ve never done it for the family on my father’s side (all residing in China), so the excitement was considerable.

But there’s only one problem: early April in Guangzhou can be rainy. And it’s the sort of tropical rain that you’re hopeless to defend with an umbrella. Never mind performing the rites: the rain is so heavy that you’d never get out of the car. My attention was glued to the weather forecast in the weeks leading up to the trip, with the unfortunate prediction that it was going to rain on the day of the visit to the graves.

Enter the Healy travel luck. It did rain that day, but it started in the afternoon. By that time, we were completely finished with the ceremonies in the morning. Funny enough, the sky opened up like crazy soon as we got back into our vehicles for the trip back to the hotel. It cannot get any more fortuitous than that.

Of course, I’ve completely jinxed myself just by typing out the previous paragraphs. Farewell, good fortune!

Reward without the work

In conversations with my aunts and uncles back in my home country of China, I’ve come to understand the supposed ennui of Chinese millennials (and younger). The “lying flat” movement that’s been popular on social media (until it got taken away). Young adults of the country are dissatisfied with the high-pressure achievement culture, and therefore are instead opting out of contributing to society (and themselves) in any meaningful way. Let’s just work enough to sustain.

I now see where the dissatisfaction stems from. Retired folks like my aunts and uncle are really living the good life. Government pensions are relatively generous, and retirement age relatively low (60 for men, 50 for blue-collar women workers that my aunts belong to.) Back in the day, these people were also provided with government-sponsored housing, or were able to buy a flat when it was insanely cheap in comparison to the real estate bubble of this millennia.

Chinese retirees own there flats outright, and are drawing a healthy monthly income from the government. This legion of folks goes out to eat all the time, and travel domestically and abroad whenever they fancy. We’ve all heard of the “Chinese dama” phenomenon: middle-aged Chinese women going on a tours and wrecking havoc on the local citizenry.

The younger generation see this with great envy. Principally because the price of a home - as it is anywhere in the first world - is astronomically unaffordable in China. And honestly, who doesn’t want to eat out at restaurants all the time? Traveling is also best done when you still have some youth and vigor. (That’s why I don’t regret spending a ton of money on travel this past decade of my late 20s and early 30s.)

You can see the problem: Chinese millennials want to skip right to what their parents have - without putting in any of the (long) time and work. This is the same reason people gamble on the stock market by throwing it all in on GameStop. The slow and steady growth is too boring and not fast enough. Now is a good time, not tomorrow. Social media showing the highlight reels of everyone else certainly doesn’t help the situation.

But monetary physics doesn’t allow for instant, overnight wealth generation. So in the face of an immovable object, it’s the easy way out to instead hate what you want. Who needs to own a home? That’s stupid. Working long hours to climb a corporate ladder for wealth? That’s just some societal bullshit. Travel? The home is where it’s at. A smartphone with an unlimited cellular plan is all that’s needed.

That’s lying flat in a nutshell.

Do not pass go

One thing I realized as I was leaving Guangzhou (China) heading to South Korea: the United States don’t care when people are departing for international. There’s no customs check, there’s no immigration check. America is probably so ecstatic at you leaving the country that they don’t want to spook you into changing your mind with additional barriers.

The only stamp on your non-U.S. passport when you visit the States is the entry.

(Countries I’ve visited) China has immigration control on exit. So does, Thailand, Japan, and Taiwan. This creates a need for travelers to get to the respective airports earlier. The security check presents enough of a choke point - why add another one? Homeland Security - or whatever a country’s equivalent - should only care about what’s coming in. You know, protecting the homeland. It’s the destination country’s problem to handle if a traveler ends up being the unsavory kind.

Surely a flight manifest is enough data for a country to determine if a person has left the country. Unless of course your name is Carlos Ghosn, and you had to smuggle your way out of Japan in a cargo box.

The way America handles this is the right way - immigration upon entry only. Unless of course the government of a particular country wants to prevent its citizens from so easily leaving its borders. Though even North Korea wouldn’t need immigration check upon exit? Because I am (hopefully correctly) assuming that there isn’t an airline in the world who would sell/operate a flight out of the upper Joseon peninsula to a North Korean citizen.

Look at that, America doing something outside of international norms, but it’s actually good.

You can track me

To log in to the WIFI at Guangzhou Baiyun International Airport, you must first scan your passport to authenticate. This is completely different from all the other airport I've been to, where they let the public login freely. (Pro tip: use a VPN when you’re on public WIFI.) It seems to me like the authorities there care about what the public browse on the Internet. Would you get hauled right to jail should you Google a topic not in favor with the current government?

What I also do not understand is the need to go through security screening before entering Guangzhou subway stations. I don't see the need for yet another extra layer when the city is already massively surveilled upon. Are cameras in the subway station not enough? (This isn’t full autonomous self-driving!) I don't remember hearing about any subway bombings in China these past decades. Who the heck would be dumb enough to commit anything when you are so easily caught? Word on the street is that people don't even dare to pick up abandoned wallets full of cash.

Contrast that with our situation here in the States, and it might as well be barbarianism. We can't leave anything in our vehicles without hugely risking it being taken. There's spots in any American city where no one in their right mind would wander through past midnight, unaccompanied.

Of course, there's heavy bill to pay for that safety. American culture would never tolerate the sort of overbearing surveillance system in China. A central government knowing our every move is the stuff of dystopian action films.

But those are the tradeoffs. It cannot be argued that you feel absolutely safe in China. No matter where you go, at whatever time, no one will rob you. Nor will anyone pilfer from the convenience store you're currently shopping at. In the abstract, isn't this what governments - with sole power of the police - should aim to provide for its citizenry? I certainly want to live in a city where quality-of-life crimes are negligible to zero. (Hi, Japan!)

The methods to get there matter a ton, obviously.

What in the *r/tragedeigh* is going on here?

Direct flights, baby

As a member of the jet-setting class entirely reliant on credit-card points (rather fake-rich if you ask me), I've had the pleasure of sitting in the various classes on an airplane. (Right to privilege jail, right away.) As obvious as it may be that the further front you sit the more comfortable, in my experience it doesn't ease the pain of the truly long-haul flights. 15 hours from San Francisco to Hong Kong is arduous no matter if you are wealthy enough to lie completely flat to sleep. A pressurized metal tube with superbly dry air is a bad combination no matter what.

I think the lever to pull in terms of comfort is shortening the time spent on an airplane. It's a shame there were never follow-up to the sound barrier shattering Concorde. For the rest of plebs in the real world, direct flights are absolutely worth the extra costs.

Since 2014 - only interrupted by the COVID pandemic - I've flew back (birth) home to Guangzhou, China every single year. 2025 marks the first year I took a direct flight from San Francisco. Previously I had to make a transfer at Hong Kong, entailing another four hours of travel time on top of the 15 hours I just continuously spent on an airplane. Usually I am completely spent by the time I reach home.

Let me tell you: direct flight is magnitudes better in experience. This year I was back in the heart of Guangzhou by 9:00 AM (previously it would have been at least 1:00 PM). Not only that, it's a slightly shorter flight to CAN compared to HKG. For the first time, I actually had energy in reserve on arrival day, rather than zombie it through until I can properly sleep on the first night.

Let's hope China and United States relations remain amiable enough that the direct route from San Francisco to Guangzhou remains viable. But honestly the next three years is super difficult to predict. As I write this there's a 145% tariff on goods originating from China into the States. It does feel kind of weird to be a former Chinese national with a U.S. passport traveling between the two countries…