relationships Archives - The Cracked Door

Like Dandelion Seeds in the Wind

For my Life Snippet for today, I would like to describe how young women in China navigate marriage works in China – and how young adult women navigate it. Or, at least, I will summarize the perspective of a 22-year old woman I met from Southeastern China. She explained why marriage in China makes her feel nervous.

Traditionally, marriage in China has involved the wife moving into the husband’s family. The wife joins the home of her husband and his parents. This saying describes it well, “A daughter married off is like water spilled out.” In short, when a woman marries a man, they, in effect, leave her family and join his family. Thus, whenever she goes back to visit her biological parents, it should be like a guest visiting a home, not a child coming home to see her family.

They are expected to follow his family’s rules of the house, which can put wives in a very uncomfortable position. In particular, the husband’s parents often have set ways they are used to things being that they expect the wife to conform to. The wife is now expected to take care of the children, his elderly parents, and the house in general, which may involve learning to cook food in a way that matches picky parents’ preferences and following the parents’ cleaning standards. In some previous eras, she said the wives are treated more like servants in the new household without any agency or say in what they can do, even forced to eat separately from the husband and his family.

When they marry, women also loose their original names, becoming simply referred to by their husband’s family name. She lamented that she does not know the full name of her great-grandmother or other female ancestors. Once as a child, she asked her father why they don’t remember the names of her great-grandmother’s generations, but her father scolded her, saying that children shouldn’t fuss over such matters. She never asked again because it seemed “disrespectful.”

At the same time, the family line is passed down exclusively through boys, so boys become seen as the primary children. Daughters will end up in the family they marry into, but boys will be the ones who carry the family line down. This not only means that having boys is often prioritized over having girls but also that boys are more likely to receive inheritances than girls. The One-Child Policy complicated all of this nowadays by limiting the number of children Chinese families were allowed to have (until 2015 when it was ended), but if a family has both a boy and a girl, the parents will often pass down their major resources like their home or cars as inheritance to the boys rather than the girl. They see giving these things to the boy as building their family legacy; whereas, the girl presumably will receive these resources from her husband’s family. Other women told me that many sisters are often forced to give a portion of their paycheck to their brothers or pay for the houses or other major expenses for their brother.

Furthermore, wives are frequently expected to support their husbands no matter what in what she says is frequently an one-sided exchange. “Marry a chicken, follow the chicken; marry a dog, follow the dog.” Basically, in her parents’ and grandparents’ generation, no matter what happens, the wife is expected to follow her husband like a loyal slave. Whether he becomes rich or poor. No matter how often or how badly he may beat her. The idea is that because she married him (which sometimes she freely chose to do and sometimes she was forced into), she must follow him forever. She will be bound to him for the rest of this life and throughout the afterlife.

For her, the same amount of loyalty or care does not always feel reciprocated. Wives often end up as unpaid nannies, caring for both children and elderly parents-in-law while maintaining a whole host of other homecare responsibilities. At the same time, the incredible toil pregnancy has on the human body are often swept under the rug, and they still may be expected to fulfill these responsibilities even when there are complications. She said that husbands often end up being indifferent bystanders instead of relating, comforting, or helping wives. Further if there are any complications that make it difficult to have sons (or children in general), blame almost always ends given more to the wives.

She summarized it in this way:

“So in China, we girls don’t have our own homes; we’re like dandelion seeds, drifting wherever the wind takes us, and by the time we die, no one remains to remember us. No one will recall you. You might say your children and grandchildren—twice that number—will remember you, but the generations after that? They won’t even remember your name.”

What About Marriage Nowadays

All this describes traditional marriage in China, or what she often described as the view of marriage of her parents’ and grandparents’ generation. (To use academic anthropology jargon, traditional Chinese marriages are patrilocal and patrilineal.) Views on marriage have changed since, especially since many women are incredible skeptical about this kind of life.

On the one end, some still practice this kind of marriage. In Southeastern China, some minorities and specific regions follow a form of marriage pretty similar to this. Even worse to her, some older men, especially more powerful older men in a local, rural community, will force younger women to marry as teenagers.

For example, she has a few friends in their early twenties who already have two children, with the oldest being ready to start kindergarten (which often starts at 3 years old in China). They seem happy now, especially since their parents are still around to support them with their kids, but she is concerned about their life prospects when they get older. By the time, they reach their thirties or forties, disagreements and conflicts will likely multiply, and they may find themselves significantly more vulnerable. (Even though this is a different culture, here is an example of an Indonesian friend I talked with who found herself in exactly this situation in her forties: https://crackeddoor.com/putri-story/.)

She said that many other women born in the twenty-first century feel incredible skeptical and anxious about marriage in China, because they see how it has become an unequal arrangement for them. She thinks everyone has the right to be happy in life, so if a marriage is not able to support that, she will get divorced or not get married in the first place:

“If you marry well, that’s just good fortune; if you marry poorly, that’s bad fortune. That used to be the case, but now we’re the post-2000s generation. I don’t care about sayings like, ‘Marry a chicken and follow the chicken, marry a dog and follow the dog.’ As long as I’m unhappy, I have the right to choose—and if things don’t work out, we’ll divorce. Living on my own is perfectly comfortable. That’s why, in China today, our divorce rate is quite high: women are becoming increasingly self-aware.

We won’t think like the older generation: ‘I’ve married you, so my whole life must revolve around you; otherwise, I’ll be plagued by rumors and lose all face.’ People born in the 2000s and beyond don’t hold such views anymore. Life is something we all have to experience, and no matter what, we live our own lives—not someone else’s. I won’t cater to others’ expectations; I’ll live however I choose.”

What About Others?

How contemporary women navigate this is a bit complicated, but many I have talked to do are also apprehensive about marriage because it does not seem to serve them. This can range from women who have told me that they do not want to get married at all because of how bad they find the institution to women who enjoy dating but sense that they must be very picky with any guy they are considering marrying to make sure they do not fall into this kind of trap with him (or his family). Also, nowadays, many grandparents help with childcare while both parents work.

Finally, I will also see significant variations in different regions. For example, on the one end of the extreme, many women from Shanghai especially and a few other bigger cities seem to have a very similar approach to dating or marriage to what I tend to find in Western countries, and others in some other regions (especially rural communities in Southeastern China) tell me their families them pressure to do something more akin to the above.

Since many couples have jobs in the cities before they get married, they end up staying in the city where those jobs are. This can breakup the family dynamic of moving in with the husband’s family and encourage couples to develop their new homes where the economy is booming. Although this is not always true: some families are originally from the big city anyways and still live nearby, and sometimes grandparents will move into the big city with the couple in order to take care of the children.

My friend’s take on marriage helped me understand how women experience marriage in China, why many feel anxious and apprehensive about it, and how they navigate expectations put upon them to still live a vibrant and healthy life. I understand why one would be at best very careful about getting married in this kind of family environment. Her approach shows one way to resiliently navigate this kind of context as a woman while building a vibrant life for herself.

Striking the Mirror (A Short Story)

Ethan typed on his keyboard, a set of code for his virtual world. His simulation felt as real as the regular world.

He decided to make one tweak, though. Whenever a human tried to cause violence on another, that human experienced the violence instead.

Fights came to a halt. Someone punching someone else in the face only ended up hurting his own face, and a soldier shooting another person only resulted in those bullet wounds manifesting in his own chest to his death.

Ethan rigged it so that those who ordered or cajoled others to do violence likewise received that violence onto their bodies as well.

Ethan sat back as he watched his world stammer at his newfound change. Battles became immediately ineffective. World leaders engaged in wars died on the spot when their units sought to advance in combat.

He thought this would move towards peace. After the initial shock of the change, it did, but after that, new patterns would begin to emerge.

Some humans would try to provoke their enemies to make them lash out in anger and hurt their own bodies. And other humans became clever, grabbing all they could because they knew there would not be an easy way to take the stolen possessions back without violence. Some ultra-greedy wealthy people started seizing assets, knowing that without the check of violence, society could not do much to counter their acquisition.

All politicians and business leaders endured never-ending torment. Pretty much every law or policy enacted harmed another, which would result in their own harm. No one wanted these positions, but those in them could not quit, lest the action of removing themselves from office would not cause negative harm to others downstream.

Total chaos ensued, hurting those who were the most powerless, until Ethan decided to turn this off, go to bed, and think more carefully about how to best establish peace into his world. Who knew that pretty every decision any human makes connects with violence?

Why I Left NYC to Travel the World—and Why I Haven’t Stopped

In July 2024, I left my life in New York City and decided to travel the world. It has now been two years. So far, I have been to three continents on my way to travel the whole world. Why did I decide to do this, and what makes me keep going?

At the end of 2023, I had five months paid time off work, and I decided to travel throughout East Asia. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I decided to use it to see a new part of the world and its cultures, choosing East Asia more or less at random.

The trip was an eye-opening and transformative experience in so many ways. For example, getting out of my normal rhythm of life for an extended period and seeing the different ways others in other cultures chose to live their lives made me realize the extent to which my life at that point working as a data scientist in New York wasn’t working for me. I would excitedly start a new job at a new organization for a year or two only to then become frustrated and move on to another place. I was stuck in a cycle, moving between job after job. I was not fulfilled. My Asia trip showed me that something has got to give.

I concluded that I felt far more fulfilled while traveling. I really enjoyed both seeing new places and having relationships, but most importantly, I enjoyed meeting new people from different places and learning about their stories. There’s something about hearing the struggles people encounter in their lives and how different people navigate those struggles that helps center me. I wanted to continue talking to people.

I also saw how different people in different cultures experience the problems of life. In my experience, many of the struggles that people have to navigate in life are surprisingly similar in different social and cultural contexts around the world, but the strategies given to them for how to navigate them and the tools they have with which to navigate them vary widely. Over time, different people thus develop different habits and dispositions for how to respond to situations. Because of this, people experience similar patterns across cultures in the problems people experience throughout their lives, but the approaches people use to navigate these problems vary widely.

Another factor that I think contributes to the fact that I am traveling the world is that I have always had a leaning towards breadth over depth. I think I am an intellectual at heart. Some intellectuals have their single area of focus that they love. Academia, in particular, encourages this; for example, PhD programs tend to force people into a hyper-narrow specialization of a specialization of a subfield of the field they are interested in. This is an intellectual depth-focus. I am the type of person who is interested in many things, jumping around between interests and passions. At its worst, it spreads me too thin, preventing me from adequately exploring one endeavor long enough to bear useful fruit, but at its best, it allows me to notice new connections between different spaces.

This breadth has been what I have been pursuing as I travel the world: talking with more and more people from different parts of the world as I travel. Other travelers I have seen, for example, choose one part of the world to travel to for several years, but right now, I think I would get too bored doing that.

The Successes and Failures I’ve Had

As I travel, I talk with people about what it is like being them. I listen a lot and try to enjoy each place on its own terms. Or, that’s my ideal at least. I’m not always successful, but that is what I strive for. One of the biggest compliments I will get is when people tell me that I am not like a typical foreigner who visits their area because I show an interest in their lives and perspectives, asking about deeper questions. Such questions may not click with everyone, but for these specific individuals, they tell me that they appreciate how I want to know them as a person. Evidently, most foreign visitors do not.

At the same time, sustaining that kind of energy long-term is not easy, and I have found that pacing myself is crucial when traveling long-term. I have had to learn to pace myself. This is a constant struggle for me. Because I am highly motivated by my passion and curiosity, I can be the type of person who tries to do too much. I am well-known for getting swept into too many activities until I exhaust myself and need to pull back how much I try to do each day.

A one- or two-week vacation is like a sprint, and traveling for years is more like a marathon. In a week-long vacation, I can do activity after activity if I want, collapsing when I get home, but obviously every single day for months or years can’t be some grand adventure that expands my understanding of myself, humanity, or the universe. My mind would explode.

I have found developing some kind of consistency of one’s daily rhythm helps keep me grounded and centered, probably the single most important thing to do to pace myself. But how that consistency manifests will still vary widely depending on the environment. I constantly rework the details of your rhythm for your day in each new place you visit.

How I tend to work this out in practice is that I have different activities I do every single day (such as writing a haiku a day, journaling, a little bit of other writing, etc.) Having these consistent activities centers me, but how I do them each day varies at least a little, sometimes widely depending on where I am. As a morning person, I strongly prefer working on creative projects in the morning, when I first wake up. I may spend a half hour to an hour working on them before I go about my day. Then some other activities like journaling, I tend to do in the evening after my day has wrapped up. In each place, I work out different details of what incorporating them into the rhythm of the day looks like.

One thing I have learned is that I still desire to do, more specifically to create. Between this blog, my daily poetry, four YouTube channels, publishing a book, and a few other projects, I make quite a bit. I want to create and build ideas as part of my making a mark on the world.

This is a major difference with my first five-month trip throughout Asia: then I put life on hold, exclusively focusing on being in the moment. That was great for five months: a time to pause my life and figure out what I wanted to do. But, if I put everything on hold in life during this trip, it would simply mean I would not get to it. This is my life itself, not a break from it, so I feel a stronger desire (even pressure) to still incorporate the things I want to do with my life into it. And these creative projects are certainly a part of that.

Yet, they also take time and mental energy, pulling me out of the moment of traveling. Sometimes, I focus too much on them and find that I am no longer as in the moment. They can also exhaust me. The most important lesson in how to pace myself while traveling the world has been learning how to effectively navigate between being in the moment in the places I visit while also working on these projects.

The strategy I have found works for me is to split my time: time focused solely on where I am and time focused on my projects. Every week, I spend two days a week working on these creative projects, producing what I need to do to keep them going for that week. Then, the other five days, I spend going on adventures in the place I am visiting and meeting new people there. What kind of adventures I have will depend on where I am (for example, in cities, it may be visiting museums, historical sites, etc., and in a mountain village, it may be hiking or climbing a mountain, or diving if I am near a coral reef).

I used to set goals where I did a little of my creative projects everyday in the morning and then went out and about having adventures, but I found this distracted me: my mind would be split throughout the day. When I went out and about visiting adventures, I would really think about the tasks I did not finish that morning. This left me exhausted. By splitting which days I focused on what, on any given day, I could focus on exactly one thing: on “adventure days,” focus entirely on having adventures, meeting people in the place where I am, and otherwise being in the moment, and on “work days”, focus entirely on my projects.

I also traveled in bursts of a few months with longer periods of rest in between. For example, I may spend one or two months constantly traveling to new places every week and having adventures, and then spend a week or two resting. Beyond that, I find that about every six months I need about one to two months of a longer rest.

I get on what I call an “experiential overload” where I feel exhausted having to navigate new types of experiences and new cultures, and need a few weeks of constancy. Usually during this time, I do not even leave my hotel much, except to buy food and other necessities. I need a break from new things.

When resting, I often work heavily on my creative projects. For whatever reason, these projects give me something to do while I am experientially exhausted. Each type of activity allows me to rest from the other: creative projects allow me to rest from physical and social adventures, and adventures allow me to rest from the mental drudgery of my projects. On longer rest periods, I often do the more complex work of evaluating how to improve or overhaul an aspect of my creative project. During adventure times, I usually simply deploy the plan I set in motion (posting a certain type of videos or articles every week or every other week), and it is during these rest periods that I have the mental pause to be able to reflect on whether that plan is working and what improvements I would like to make to that plan.

Thus, I find my adventures tend to clump. I may have several week- or a couple month-long periods where everyday is an adventure, followed by periods when I have no adventures for a while. Both are necessary parts of my rhythm, allowing me to pace myself. At the same time, I frequently worry that my many projects overextend myself, taking me out of the moment while traveling. I have to pace myself: traveling the world is a marathon, not a sprint.

As I travel, I also find that what I am looking for changes. I have periods when I naturally tend to focus on different things. For a few months, I may focus on meeting people, but then go through periods where time in nature is my main focus. I tend to internally segment my journey into “epochs” based on what I tended to crave more of over those several month intervals. During some periods, I am inherently more extroverted and during others more introverted. If during one period, I focus on my creative projects, that will pull me in a more introverted direction. If during another time I crave socializing and a sense of community, I will become more extraverted.

I have learned to accept these different circumstances: my needs will change over time, and that’s okay. For example, about a year ago, I went through a more introverted period after a breakup, where I preferred being by myself with my emotions rather than spending time with others, and I felt guilty that I was not “getting to know” people in the countries I happened to be visiting at that time. I had to realize that it’s okay to be more introverted for a time. It’s a part of the process of long-term travel.

If I feel especially irritated or crabby in a given circumstance, it is a warning sign that I am likely exhausted from overexerting myself. I most likely need to take a step back by resting and determining what need is not being met and go meet that need (whether that means withdrawing, going on an adventure somewhere else, talking with friends back home, etc.). After that, I can reengage with the context or activity that made me crabby with a fresh mind. In general, I find my internal psychological state is the most significant factor in how I vibe with a new culture: if I am frequently getting frustrated in a new environment, it’s usually because I am exhausted. It’s not usually about that culture or community in itself. My exhaustion is coloring the lens through which I engage the context. I need to rest, rejuvenate, and then go back out, and then suddenly the culture will seem much better. I will be much more attune with what the people, environment, or other things in that specific environment have to offer rather than how they irritate me.

Why I Keep Going

The short answer is that I feel like I am still learning and growing from traveling, and I suspect as long as that feels the case, then I will keep going. I don’t succeed at this every single day, but that may not be a realistic expectation for long-term travel anyways. Overall, I still am and there is promise to do so.

Another important lesson that I have had to come to terms with is that travel can be very consumptive, and any form of consumption is ultimately vacuous. When people think about traveling the world, their minds often go to Instagram stories of the magic of daily adventures in foreign places, which make them think long-term travel is simply one iconic adventure after another. Everything in life is ultimately vanity, maybe especially in our consumerist, capitalist world, and this definitely applies to travel.

When people idealize traveling the world, they really think about the magic of their vacation. Vacations are short breaks from people’s normal lives, often not long enough to really experience the vapidness of travel and tourism. This isn’t bad per se. People go, consume experiences for a few days, and come back home. The temporary trips help them reset themselves and often recontextualize their humanity as they reenter their normal lives, clearly a good thing. This makes sense as a counter to people’s regular lives. For example, they can be in the moment for a few days in contrast to their normal, hectic daily lives; they can relax instead of running around; have adventures they can’t do where they live; and so on.

But when you spend more time in touristic spots, you often realize how superficial they are. They often foster at best superficial relationships with people there with at worst troubling power dynamics. Also, many typical tourist activities in different countries all tend to feel the same over time. For me at least, these environments do not provide good long-term ways to live life or engage with others or other cultures.

I still enjoy visiting places with a lot of natural scenery and/or historical and cultural significance, and often these places become “tourist spots” for understandable reasons. Thus, I will visit such places anyways, if the scenery or history seem worth tolerating the tourism of it. My best solution is to try to ask about and listen to people’s stories in the places I am. By asking about their lives, I often learn what life is like for the people that live there. Even the most artificial tourist spots are regular life for those who live there, and that becomes a practical way to connect that moves past consumption and my own tailored experiences as a “visiting tourist customer” (to some extent at least, not always perfectly).

But I will tend to prefer quieter settings where foreigners do not visit as much. I find it easier to talk to regular people who live there outside the tourist spots. It’s not impossible to have regular conversations with normal people in tourist areas, but sometimes, the “tourist as client” relationship can become the main way people who live in tourist spots are used to engaging with foreigners.

Visiting a beach for a few days allows one to appreciate the beauty of the beach. For some at least, living on the beach everyday makes it seem normal, like the wallpaper of their lives. I constantly travel to new places rather different from settling in one place, so I do not have to see the same beach everyday. But likewise, I can still become overexposed to wonder and to itself new types of places.

Growing up in the Eastern US, I see huge mountains maybe once every couple years during trips “out West” to see the Rockies. I would feel enraptured by mountains. Now, I see a new mountain range every several months and climb at least one mountain a month. Each one is majestic; don’t get me wrong, but much of the magic I felt when mountains were a rare, special experience fades away after I have seen so many.

Now, what I see when I see a new mountain range is how it compares with the other mountains I have seen before in the Americas, Africa, Oceania, Asia, etc. All mountain ranges have certain patterns in common yet also differences, and I think overtime the different mountains form a type of grid in my mind of characteristics: this mountain range has A and B, and the next mountain range I see has X and Y, but a third combines A and Y but neither B nor C, maybe introducing D in a rather interesting way. This applies to wildlife, foods, and many other things I encounter while traveling. It’s different from simply marveling at a new thing I have never encountered before, but it adds a richer dimension that improves my understanding of the world.

The other side of this is that the tourist industry tends to foster a specific, superficial kind of relationship. It may seem welcoming, but that only lasts for a week. Often for me personally, I tend to get sick of it even after a day or two. A crucial part of finding fulfillment while traveling long-term is to move beyond the tourist interaction and cultivate other types of relationships. I tend to do that by listening to people’s stories and trying to be with people in a genuine way. It is possible to do this in highly touristic places, but sometimes, visiting non-heavily touristed areas of a country make this much easier.

At the same time, even if the pleasure-seeking aspects of travel fade, on a practical level, of all major forms of material consumption, experiences fade the slowest. If you compare it to buying luxury items like nice cars or nice clothes, for example, the benefits of an adventure experience last longer (for me at least, but I suspect this is the case for most humans). This is one reason why for someone who dreams of material affluence, of being able to buy a bunch of stuff, once they get enough wealth to afford those things and now own them, they end up wanting more.

Buying experiences are also less likely to saddle someone with debt that they will have to deal with decades later like big single expenses like nice homes or cars, or buying many small materials things often do. Someone who primarily consumes experiences can much more easily cut back if money becomes tight for unforeseen reasons at a later point in life. So, if one is to indulge a little in consumption, for me at least, experiences seem like the best strategy.

At the end of the day, meeting new people and learning new things in the places I visit are the main two factors keeping me going. I am not always the best at receiving and cultivating that, but I am trying my best. I think as long as these forces encouraging me to keep going continue to outweigh the forces that might encourage me to settle down in one place, I will keep traveling. At a later point in my life, this may switch: I may feel greater encouragement to settle down than to continue traveling. And if they do, I will probably stop. But for now, I keep going.

How a Tongan Pageant Queen Reclaimed Her True Self (A Life Snippet)

(This week’s Life Snippet is about a Tongan woman who used to travel around in beauty pageants across the Pacific before having a mental health breakdown from the stress. Now, she is rebuilding her life back home with the support of her family. She explains what the world of beauty pageantry was like for her, why it led to a breakdown, and how she got out of it.)

Mele (not her real name) stopped doing beauty pageants seven months ago. She started when she was 17 and ended by the time was 21.

Being from Tonga in Polynesia, she competed in different competitions throughout the Pacific, but many would treat her differently as a Polynesian woman. For example, in a competition in Manila, Philippines, the pageantry set aside her and all other Polynesian women, treating them as second class competitors from the get-go. Filipino beauty standards tend to favor lighter-skinned women. She got so frustrated she quit the pageant early. Similarly, people in Hong Kong could be rude to her because of how she looked.

She said that she used to cry every single day and experience frequent panic attacks when she did the pageants. This culminated in a mental health breakdown, which was when she realized it wasn’t worth it anymore and she needed to get out. She quit pageantry altogether.

She decided to head back home for seven months and is staying with her family while she rebuilds her life. She is doing a lot better now. She gained back some weight, and she has been dealing with the emotional and spiritual burnout from her ordeal. She no longer has panic attacks or crying episodes nor does she feel randomly agitated by little things like she did when she performed in beauty pageants. Her family has been supportive of her during this time and given her the space to figure out who she is. At the moment, she prefers staying home and being with them relationally to working or doing any other activity.

At the same time, family pressure may be slowly creeping in. She is the eldest daughter of seven kids with many obligations to take care of her younger siblings. In particular, her youngest sister is three years-old, and she acts as a second mother to her. This can be a lot of pressure, but being the eldest taught her how to take care of things and to lead.

She also seems to be experiencing pressure to marry. She said, in Tonga, despite the fact that people cannot legally marry until they are at least 18, many (especially girls) still marry between 15 and 20. There are some changes to this, but as someone in her early twenties, she seems to face pressure to get married and through that transition to a new life. This may disrupt her current respite, and she seems hesitant to do so until she’s ready. How to juggle between her own healing while rebuilding her life and facing family pressure to marry seem to be the biggest question she faces in her life right now.

How to Talk to People in a New Culture

As I travel the world, how do I talk to people in various cultures around the world and learn about a new place? I have a slightly different approach in each place based on the culture, but this is my overall approach as I learn the specifics of the communication style when I arrive somewhere new.

Who to Talk to

First, I figure out who I can talk to. The best people may vary widely depending on the culture, and it depends on whether that person has time. Staff members of the everyday establishments I frequent (like waiters and waitresses, store clerks, hotel workers, store clerks, security guards, etc.) are a low-hanging fruit, but I have mixed feelings about talking with them. They are paid to be around, and in some cases, there can be implied pressure to interact. In others, it’s fine. I find it best to sort that one out by ear.

In some places, asking someone to take your picture can be a way to strike up a conversation. They take your picture, and then you can ask them where they are from and what it is like living here. In a culture where most people don’t speak English, it can be hard to initially approach someone with limited linguistic overlap, and this can be a good way to initiate a conversation. Gesturing that you want a photo is one of the easier things to convey; almost everyone has a photo these days and understands the concept of taking pictures with it. Once done, then you already have your phone out, and you open your translation software and start a conversation. In heavily tourist areas, this technique may lead to you talking more with tourists than visitors, but it can still work well.

Otherwise, I might be simply talking to random people on the street. I find the best way to do that is to start tangible. For example, if someone is wearing a really cool shirt, ask where they bought it. You’d be surprised at how much you can learn from a culture by learning what kinds of clothing people buy and where they shop. If you are at a restaurant and you see someone eating an interesting dish, ask them what it is called and whether they’d recommend you eat it or only think it’s okay.

What to Ask About

I generally prefer asking broad, open-ended questions about their experience living there. That said, I often start the conversation tangibly and use that to open up. Take the examples in the last paragraph: start by asking about their shirt or the food they are eating, and then if they are up for continuing to chat, pivot from that to learn about where they are from and what they think about living here. (And translation apps work wonders when you first arrive in a place; some apps like Google Translate allow you to download a language ahead of time, so you can still talk to people when you don’t have reception.)

The tangible question does a few subtle things. First, it presents a clear starting point in the conversation, especially useful for someone who does not speak the same language as me. Second, it provides me with a clear goal, humanizing me in the process. Humans tend to relate to stories, which we experience through a goal. I am at a restaurant in a new country, trying to figure out what to order, or I am considering buying some clothing. Either of these implicitly present me as a genuine human to the person I am talking to. It also demonstrates that I am interested in learning about the culture and their world here.

So, how do you pivot to broad, open-ended questions about their experience with the place? People’s answers to your specific questions often teach you things that you can then generalize into a broader conversation. For example, if they say, “I bought my shirt in China” when we are in Malaysia, I then ask if they are from China or were simply visiting China. If they are from China, I may ask where, and what it is like living there (or what it is like visiting Malaysia).

If nothing comes up to go off of, I just ask as a follow-up after they walk through the previous tangible topic we were just talking about. The two most common first questions I ask are, “What is life like here?” (or “Do you enjoy living here, or what do you think about it?” or “What are your favorite things to do here?” (or “What do you do for fun?”) The first one makes clear I want to learn about them as a person. The questions emphasize that I want to listen to their opinion or perspective.

The second emphasizes that too but can also trigger an activity-oriented conversation. Often people will go into their personal favorite activities, but some will go into listing the best tourist attractions. This can be fine, but in my follow-up questions, I usually try to keep the conversation about their personal experiences with the places: for example, “What is your favorite part about X place [that they just mentioned]”, “How often do you go where?”, “When was the last time you go there?”

Here are a few other examples of good starter questions that emphasize their personal experience. I often also use these as follow-up questions after asking what life is like:

1) What is it like working as a waitress [or whatever job they do]?

2) How long have you lived here?

If they give me a list of recommendations, I make sure those are written on my phone. Most often, I get out a new page and have them type up the names of the places. This is both because they will often say names of places faster than I can type them, especially when the place names are in a different language. This way I can record them to look up later. More importantly, however, having them write it down confirms that I am really interested in what they say and want to hear every word of it. It is a form of validation.

Being Shown Around

Also, I learn so much more being taken to neat places than going by myself, because I can listen to their take on it instead of only seeing through my own perspective. Even hearing people describe their favorite places is a window into their world. Sometimes, they will simply offer to take you to their favorite places.

Some societies are set up to navigate by yourself pretty easily (such as big cities with intricate public transit networks), but in some parts of the world, having someone drive you around is really the best or even only way to navigate it. In the latter, making friends who then show you around is the best way to approach it (or sometimes hiring a tour guide, although I do not generally do the latter). In my experience, in big cities, people are less likely to show you around themselves. The places where people will show you around tend to be rural, but not all rural areas are like that. It varies by culture.

To determine whether it is safe to go with them, I generally assess two things: 1) how well I know them, and 2) what I sense their self-interest is. On how well I know someone, the most important factor for me is knowing some of their other interpersonal connections. For example, have I met their friends or family? Do I know where they work?

If I met someone at their job, for example (say a waitress or waiter), then I know where they work. If they do something really bad like rob me (assuming I am still alive), then they are now identifiable to the police who can use that to learn their name. That helps me feel secure. But for a complete stranger I met in a big city who could in theory rob me and blend back into the crowd, I may have my guard up a little more.

Knowing their friends and family is similar (although that can be more likely to be deceptive in an extreme situation). Friends of friends are great (say one of your friends knows someone who lives in the place you are about to visit): I now have a social network and can feel much more confident.

The second way I evaluate safety is in terms of what the person’s self-interest is. Everyone has a set of self-interests or motivations. Why are they interacting with a foreigner (me)? These can range from virtuous motivations like wanting to talk with someone from another culture to learn more about the world, hospitality/graciousness, just a desire to be nice, or just enjoy explaining their world. They can also have self-interested motivations like forming connections that can help them find a job in or move to another country, or they want you to pay them to give you a tour. A given person can have a combination of motivations.

Different travelers tolerate different types of motivations. For example, I do not like the motivation of trying to get money from me that much and tend to stay away from interactions where I sense that is their primary goal. In tourist areas, people may offer rides or offer to show you places with the understanding that you’ll pay them for it, and I will generally stay away from them.

At the same time, specifically getting a sense for people’s self-interest is most useful in understanding what they may or may not do. For example, someone who is interested in connecting with you because they want an international friend are a lot less likely to rob you. They may have other interests that you have to navigate, but making sure you have a fun time connects heavily with those motivations. Knowing this provides a type of safety.

Similarly, someone who wants you to spend money for their services generally sees you as a potential buyer. They may try to upsell you or rip you off, but they are less likely to downright rob you. Like I said above, though, I tend to be more skeptical of those with this motivation. I may complete an exchange (getting a ride or buying something I need like water) from someone demonstrating this motivation, but I am less likely to have a longer interaction with them. Other travelers may have a different opinion or strategy for how to respond to people’s motivations, though.

All of this is how I learn about different people from around the world. The people I meet are the real gateways for me into understanding the world and various cultures around the world, much more than visiting the key sites, eating the food, or other things. This is both because learning about how people in a place think about their lives, their society, and their culture tells me so much more about the place than just visiting it myself, but also because they will be quick to show you the best places to visit, the best foods to eat, and the best other things to do anyways.

Freedom Found by Leaving One’s Home and Traveling the World (A Life Snippet)

(This Life Snippet is about a young adult from Barcelona, Spain, also traveling the world. For her, this journey is about leaving the “prisons” of her hometown and finding herself in the process. You can see more of my Life Snippets of different people in different parts of the world here.)

Julia is a 29-year old Spanish woman from Barcelona who is traveling the world. She has spent most of her time so far (about a year) in New Zealand on the work-travel visa program doing various odd jobs (ranging from picking fruit to hospitality jobs). I met her on a short trip to Tonga in Oceania, where she went on a couple day vacation to swim with whales.

She likes aspects of Barcelona’s culture but also felt the need to get out. One reason is the city’s recent rise in cost of living (largely due to the increasing influx of tourists). More importantly, however, she felt constrained by the community there. She wanted space from her abusive, alcoholic mother, in particular.

She likes the fact that Spanish culture is communal, but as a young adult woman, she found those relationships constraining. In her experience, people there tended to have a prescribed model for how people (especially women) should live their lives: find a job, get married, and then build a family of kids. For example, when she tells people back home that she is currently traveling the world, their most common response is, “What is wrong with you that you are not building your life?”, as if the fact that she is not settling down with a job and family is the only way to build one’s life.

One of her most valuable lessons traveling is seeing how many different ways people live their lives in various cultures around the world. She sees a freedom in this that she can’t experience in her hometown. In her experience, in New Zealand, people leave each other alone, and she also finds a freedom in this. For example, she can walk down the street without having to talk to people or implicitly explain herself like she would back home.

She really enjoys New Zealand but sees it as a place to live for a year, not long-term. She plans to head back to Spain in about three months. She will travel to Southeast Asia and/or Micronesia first, though, before heading back. She plans to get her dive master training so that as she travels throughout Southeast Asia she can pay her way working at different dive centers along various beach towns as she goes. She may work at t one for a few months before moving on. To me, this seemed like her ideal lifestyle (at this moment in her life), and even though she said she planned to head back to Spain in three months, I suspected she would end up preferring doing this for several months longer instead before heading back. She seems to gush at the possibilities, clearly excited about it.

I have talked with many Westerners who want to travel the world by working at different dive centers like this. For them, it seems like an ideal way to make enough to get by for those who want to travel and really enjoy beaches and the beauty of the ocean.

As a college student, her first international trips were to other parts of Europe (such as London and Prague). That is when she first experienced how visiting a new country can free you to be someone else: she is not tied down by others in her community and their associations with her. She can explore new parts of herself.

She studied biology with a focus on animals and in graduate school, took a more extensive trip researching how tourists feeding monkeys influenced their behavior in Bolivia. In the specific part of the Amazon she stayed, tourists frequently fed a specific species of monkeys causing them to expect food from humans and become violent when a human they encountered did not feed them.

This reflects a wider concern she has about animal-based tourism. She talked about how many tour companies do not respect the animals, instead preferring to mistreat the animals so that they can guarantee tourists will be able to witness them. For example, she saw tour companies in Indonesia feed whale sharks to encourage them to show up and then bring large groups of tourists who then swarm and frighten sharks. This influences their behavior, causing problems and potentially harming them and the ecosystem in the long-run.

In certain situations, she has mixed feelings about this, however. For example, in Kalimantan (also called Borneo), Indonesia, she went on orangutan tours. Some tour companies seemed to feed the orangutans to encourage them to come, but at the same time, the tours were a key source of income for a relatively impoverished community. If they were not able to do these tours, the people would most likely have to cut down the forest to plant farms (the next option as a viable source of income). That loss of habitat would wipe out the orangutan population anyways. Thus, in this instance, she felt like the tours were a reasonable middle ground for both the local human and orangutan communities, allowing them to best meet their needs. This reflects a tension and complexity I have also felt about animal tours while traveling the world (maybe one day I will write about this topic in more detail, after I have had time to do some more research on it).

She really loves New Zealand, but she does not like how the country seems built on the labor of immigrants, particularly those who come on a work-holiday visa like her. She gets to see New Zealand, but she is also stuck working low-pay, temporary jobs while those in New Zealand who own and manage those businesses receive all the benefits. New Zealanders don’t like to work, instead preferring to rely on immigrant workers such as the pool of young adults on work-holiday visas. Many on this visa are paid close-to break even, especially since rent in New Zealand is high. Thus, they cannot save. She could only save when she bought a camper van, deciding to live camping outside even for several months when it was cold. This allowed her to avoid the high rents, though.

Overall, she seems to enjoy her life. She is not only discovering the beauty of New Zealand but also seems to be finding herself. This experience is giving her a break from her family (especially her mercurial mother) and her confining community back in Barcelona. She seemed content just being and seeing where life takes her.

Life Snippets: Glimpses into People’s Lives

As I travel the world, I have listened to a lot of people’s stories. These “Life Snippets” are glimpses into people’s lives around the world: what kinds of issues they face given their cultural context and how they choose to navigate the challenges in life. Hearing people’s stories helps me understand the rich tapestry that is humanity, and I hope it does the same for you.

Here are the Life Snippets reverse with the most recent first:

Fail, Pivot, Feed: Lessons Learned Hustling in Baguio, Philippines

This is about a local entrepreneur I met in Baguio, Philippines. It’s part of Life Snippets Series, where as I travel the world, I compile glimpses into people’s lives around the world, what kinds of issues they face given their cultural context, and how they navigate the challenges of life. You can find more of these snippets here. If you want to read another story about a woman trying to start a restaurant business in a different part of Southeast Asia with very different prospects, see this.

She is one of eight children: four boys and four girls. She studied psychology in undergrad. One of her brothers, who was a professor I believe also in psychology, committed suicide at the age of 22. She said that she felt like the family did not ask him how he was doing enough or show him positive affection. She finished her degree but decided not to work in psychology because she associated that with her brother. She also said she has had to forgive herself and others and to heal from this, which has been a process.

She loves cooking and serving others food. She much prefers that, finding it very life giving. She currently runs a small, counter-serve restaurant. This is her fourth or fifth business. The others failed, and she finally learned how to be successful in it.

Her first business was a restaurant that she co-started with a friend. She and her friend had several disputes. In particular, her friend bought stuff without her permission, which caused the business to blow through its budget. She said the core problem was that they weren’t on the same page on who would run the business. Her friend wanted to have someone fund her to do her own business, and she wanted to be equals in the process of the business. She also said she had to learn the hard way value of first approaching the person positively instead of accusatorily.

Her friend offered to split the business 50-50 with each person controlling their portion to do their thing or cash out and cut her losses. She chose the second because the lack of an amicable partnership made continuing to work with her seem unrealistic. She said she had to learn to make sure that you and the person you are working with are on the same page before working together on a business.

She then set up an online clothes store with her sister, but she eventually gave this up because it was not generating enough revenue. She also started a food stand near Baguio’s main university, but this too failed because she was not prepared on how to run the ins and outs of making food in a cost-effective manner.

With this business, she finally has success, though. She started in February of last year. On her opening day, she made 3,000 Filipino pesos (about USD $32) and the next day 6,000 pesos (about $64). She broke even from her starting expenses 3-4 months in. She generally makes about 30,000 pesos (or $320) a month, which is good enough to get by on. She tends to sell out on her food everyday with a line of customers going around the corner of her block during peak hours, a clear sign of success.

She said she learned the lessons from her past businesses. She set this restaurant up by herself instead of getting anyone else involved. It’s next to a big grade school and gets a lot of business in weekday afternoons when the kids finish school. Her strategy is to sell significantly cheaper than other nearby restaurants so that she sells more of it, and it seems to be working.

Her restaurant is a single room that’s about a meter/yard wide and maybe 3 meters/yards long. That’s her kitchen full of her stove, cookingware, food, etc. In the front is a little wooden board facing the street where people come up and place their order. Once she makes it, she hands it to them, and they go on their way.

She works practically nonstop. She works six days a week except Sundays, her one day off. She wakes up at like 2:00 am or 3:00 am to buy her food for the day at the market. She then works until around 9:00 pm when she closes (but sometimes she closes earlier, closer to 8:00 or even 7:30 pm if she has already sold all her food).

I suggested she may need to take some time off to rest by eventually hiring an assistant to work some of the time instead of her. She said that moments during the day when she doesn’t have customers is her rest. She took a week-long vacation to go to Manila a few months ago as well.

Her plan is to save money to retire by at least 48 (she’s currently 37), even if that means hustling now. For retirement, she wants to go to the rural province where part of her family is from.

Many of her siblings work abroad, since wages are low in the Philippines. One is in Saudi Arabia; another Japan. Others have traveled to other bigger cities in the Philippines where they can make more money. She had a job offer for a white collar job in Thailand, and she refused it. She prefers staying here in Baguio with her parents. (In Filipino culture, often one daughter – generally the youngest – is expected to stay back with her parents.)

She also said she helps others. She said that when a person asking for food walks by, she gives it to them, giving them whichever dish they want. Similarly, she gives her leftovers to the street cleaning lady who comes by with a broom to sweep the street or sidewalk in the evening. She believes in karma, and that if you help others, you help make the world around you (the community, nature, etc.) a better place for yourself.

What I Learned Developing a Long-Distance Relationship with a Woman from the Other Side of the World

I wanted to reflect on the lessons I learned from dating a woman living on the other side of the world. My ex-girlfriend is a Thai woman who was living in Cambodia, and we met when I took a trip there.

One major mistake we made is that we did not give enough time being together in the same place. For context, we went on a few dates while I was in Cambodia. Then after chatting for a month and a half by text, we met together for two weeks in Vietnam, before I went back to New York where I lived at the time, and she went back to her home in Cambodia. Then three months later, she came to New York for what turned out to be a month and a half trip visiting New York and also Washington state.

After this, we decided to travel the world together, which in effect involved living together on the road. That was too soon for such a step. To be clear, I don’t think touring Vietnam, New York, and Washington state were bad trips. They were very impactful experiences that deepened our relationship. Our problem was that we did not know enough about each other to decide to live together while traveling the world.

That was too big of a jump for where we were at, and it turned out to be the wrong call. Once we traveled together, we realized all sorts of incompatibilities and tensions that eventually destroyed our relationship.

Traveling with a significant other in itself can be difficult. One of my friends quibbed that traveling together is a relationship “on hard mode” as you constantly have to make complex decisions together while also being potentially tired and removed from a stable rhythm or sense of place. But I don’t think that primarily explains why we had the tension. We did not do enough work evaluating whether we were compatible in the first place.

Compatibility is difficult to evaluate when a relationship is long-distance. That’s one of the long-distance relationship’s biggest difficulties. Living in the same city (even if they live on the other side of town) allows you to see the person in your daily routine. You can feel out how you feel with them everyday, how your lifestyles’ overlap or conflict, and what to do about the latter.

Some in my generation insist that couples should move in together before getting married to evaluate whether they are compatible. I would go that far per se, but living in the same town is important. Seeing them as you go about your day and week and doing the many little things together that make up regular life helps you understand whether you fit.

Our long-distance relationship was stuck on the honeymoon phase, where we were head over heels with each other, perhaps naively so. Psychologists who have studied this phase of relationships report that people usually notice our partner’s flaws but do not consider them a big deal. Instead, we tend to minimize potential problems in favor of the positive aspects. It’s in later stages of the relationships that we truly process these flaws and any other tensions in the relationship and actively work through them. It’s necessary to do this to evaluate whether you two really are a good fit.

When a relationship is long-distance, you often communicate on your own terms. Whether it is texting or calling, you interact with the person according to your schedules. You may speak with your partner frequently – for example, at this time, I generally spoke with her twice a day – but there’s something about only texting, chatting, and video-calling that does not help move the relationship out of the honeymoon phase.

I believe the reason is that these virtual, long-distance communications are not a major disruptions to our day-to-day lives. It’s by incorporating the other person into our day-to-day lives that tends to move the relationship out of the infatuation stage and start to show the frictions inherent in the relationship. It both allows us to experience them enough to get under our skin, but it also requires more of a shift into our lives that causes friction.

I remember a priest in my home church growing up once reflecting in a sermon about his experience counseling new couples planning to get married. One of the first questions he asks the couples is, “During your fights, how do you two fight? What do you tend to do?” Some newly dating couples will respond that they have never had a fight before, and he’ll tell them to wait until they get through a major fight and then come back to get married. For him, having had a fight is a sign that they are close and not having had a major fight demonstrates that they are not intimate enough for marriage. Genuine intimacy requires getting under each other’s skin, which necessarily produces friction and tension.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that we never fought while our relationship was long-distance. It was not intimate enough to do so. Unsurprisingly, during our trips together traveling (both in Vietnam, New York, and Washington), we did fight. The longer we were together, the more significant our fights became, precisely because we were sharing more of our regular lives together, leading to greater opportunity for connection and friction. The long-distance phases, though, felt similar to freezing fruit to prevent it from ripening: typical reactions were suppressed, preventing the relationship from moving to the next stage.

What is the alternative for someone in a long-distance relationship? I don’t know. Ideally one should close the gap and move to the same place, but in many circumstances, that is not realistic. This is still what I have noticed at least, even if it can be a hard truth for two people considering dating who do not live in the same place.

When Advancing Seems Hopeless (Life Snippet from Battambang, Cambodia)

This woman’s story seems to be a story of doing all one can to beat the odds and rise above the cycle of poverty. It’s part of Life Snippets Series, where as I travel the world, I compile glimpses into people’s lives around the world, what kinds of issues they face given their cultural context, and how they navigate the challenges of life. You can find more of these snippets here. For another snippet also from Cambodia but from someone with a very different position in life there, see this.

(Caveat: We spoke in 2023. I decided to maintain the present tense tone in this piece, but the present refers to the end of 2023.)

Chivy (not her real name) is from Battambang, Cambodia. Her dream is to start a restaurant, since she loves cooking and hospitality. She and her cousin recently co-founded a restaurant. It’s on the first floor of the same apartment building that her family (her mother, uncle, aunt, cousins, and her) rents the second floor of. But the business has been struggling.

She worked at her restaurant from 9:00 am until 3:00 pm everyday, and to make ends meet, she had a second job working the evening shift at a local bar as a barista from 3:00 pm until midnight. Her cousin works at their restaurant during the evenings until 10:00 pm when Chivy is gone.

The rental for her restaurant business costs $200 a month (Cambodia uses the US dollar as one of its currencies, so she’s paid in dollars), and her barista job pays her about $400 a month. She uses her second job to pay the rent for the restaurant and keeps the rest to contribute to rent for her home expenses for her and her family.

Battambang has been an important tourist destination until the covid pandemic. Then tourism stopped, causing huge hardship as most people in the small city lost their jobs. People working in tourism, food and beverage, and other service sector industries were the worst hit, because there were now few customers to pay for these services. When I was there, the pandemic had ended. Tourists were starting to come back, but not to anywhere near the same numbers they were before in Battambang and Cambodia, so restaurants still struggled to find customers.

At the same time, she is exhausted. She works fifteen hours a day with only has nine hours in the day to split between relaxation, any chores she needs, and sleep. She has one day off a week on Wednesdays. She says everyday she feels exhausted. Her friends have told her that she is slowly killing herself by overworking, and she suspects she can’t sustain this forever.

At the same time, she really wants her restaurant business to succeed. Her dream is to start a restaurant. Her cousin wants to throw in the towel, saying they haven’t gotten enough business to keep them afloat much longer, but she wants to keep trying. She hopes she can make it.

Both her and her cousin have been strategizing the best way to beat the odds and rise economically from their initial position, but they have found this incredibly difficult.

Chivy would like to move to the US, where she would work for at least 10 years. The greater income in the US (even if she works a low-income job in the US where she is barely scraping by while there) would allow her to save far more money than she’ll ever earn here working as, say, a barista. She would use that money to buy a home for her mother. The family would then craft that home into a homestay where they could rent out a few rooms to tourists and through that, build wealth to allow them to advance to the middle class in Battambang. She told me that moving to the US is a dream, though, that she knows will never realistically happen.

Likewise, her cousin has been trying to find a job in South Korea. She applied for a program the Cambodian government hosts to work there. The program pairs Cambodians with companies in South Korea, where they tend to work in a few different types of low-wage blue collar or service sector industries like manufacturing, agriculture, or if their Korean is considered good enough to interact with regular customers, food and beverage.

She had to take a series of exams to demonstrate her competency. She studied Korean for three months in order to prepare for an exam. She needed a score of 110 out of 200 to pass, and she scored 125. She also had to take a dexterity test, placing blocks in holes and other physical activities, which she also passed.

She is waiting to see whether a Korean employer will choose her. She is pessimistic that she’ll get an offer, though. Korea’s program has 400 slots for Cambodians, and about 2,000-3,000 Cambodians apply for these 400 slots. She said they mostly select men in their twenties for factory work, the industry that would be most likely to hire her, so as a 33-year old woman, they may not pick her.

If she does get a job offer, most contracts are for two years, although some stay for as long as five years in total after renewing it a few times. The typical pay is $2,000 a month in Korea, which would also allow her to save to buy a home to use as a homestay. If this doesn’t work out, though, she may move to Siem Reap (a major tourist city next to the famous Angkor Wat) where tourist and food and beverage jobs are more plentiful.

Chivy’s and her cousin’s stories demonstrate the complexities of trying to advance economically in small cities and towns in Cambodia. Other residents in Battambang have told me the area can feel almost feudal with class mobility being very difficult and people becoming locked into their station in life. This shows how difficult it can be to change that.

Even the best entrepreneurial endeavors are likely to fail and options feeling limited, causing them to look to other parts of the world where they can work and save money, but these options are also limited. It’s easy to feel sad and stuck, and even working 15 hour days may not be enough to cut it to create one’s dreams.