Hey friendos!!

Happy Monday! Hope you had a restful weekend and enjoyed the outdoors, indoors, doors, whatever your vibe is. This week’s essay is inspired by the book /Crying in H Mart/, chatting with Vinay from Two Sigma for Prism, and scrolling through Twitter.

On Appreciation

I spent the past week and a half reading /Crying in H Mart/ by Michelle Zauner. If you haven’t checked it out, I highly recommend it. To be quite honest, it’s pretty heavy. I was sniffling on the plane ride from LA to SF and had to physically put the book down a couple times. If you’re not familiar with it, the book describes the author’s experience with her family, specifically as a half Korean half American child who grew up in the farmlands in Portland. Her mother had recently passed from cancer and the book narrates through her thoughts, feelings, regrets, and understandings as she navigates through her own grief. It’s beautifully written and a little haunting.

Stories like these hit a little too close to home. It forces you to reconsider your worldview, that everything in life isn’t always roses, that life is unforgiving and punishing. But it also makes you consider the things that did work for you. And for many of us, that’s the opportunities that we were given.

I had the chance to chat with Vinay Iyengar the other day. I already know what you’re thinking. “god Ivan, please find a personality besides venture capital.” And my response to that is that I’M TRYING. But anyways. One of the questions that I asked him (which I shamelessly stole from /Invest like the Best/) is asking him what the nicest thing someone has done for him. He promptly responded that he was appreciative of his family, that as a queer POC first generation immigrant, he was given the opportunity to live his best life, pursue the things he cares about, and have the optionality to choose something else. To be honest, I cried a little bit at the end. Living as a queer asian is hard. You’re constantly conflicted between being appreciative of the life that you’re able to live because of the sacrifice that your parents made to give you the opportunity to thrive but also resentful of the fact that they won’t be able to understand you, that the hetero-normalized jokes being made are uncomfortable, that there’s so much divide in politics on some of these topics some people post jokes about it on TikTok.

We live in a society. A society comprised of people living in diasporic communities, where we go to H Mart, Ranch 99, or other ethnic supermarkets so that we can relive the memories we have with our parents, cooking food in the kitchen, peeling snacks or learning about their childhoods. But as we grow up in a society deeply unfamiliar to our parents and our values shift, I keep coming back to these two emotions: frustration and thankfulness. Someday, I hope that they can live together in harmony in my mind.

If you’ve made it here, thanks for reading! Sorry I was very much in the feels this past week so this week’s essay is a reflection of that.

Things that I’ve been up to:

• Move to SF for the summer! If you’re in the area or have recs on what I should do, lemme know!
• Currently working on a bot to post Daniel Craig every monday. Yes this is stupid. No I will not explain further until I finish it.