Filed under: Personal
I believe in listening to the stories of the elders. The stories about their lives as well as about other people’s lives. When I was young I liked to hear about how my mom and dad met. I would force Dad to repeat the story again even though I have heard it a thousand times. When I am older, I would force Dad to tell the stories about other people.
On my 25th birthday, I was in Hong Kong. There my best birthday gift is a story Dad and Mom (yes, both!) told over red wine and lamp chops, about a man and a woman whom I have met before. Like any convincing storyteller, my Dad started off with the disclaimer: “The following story I am going to tell may sound unreal, but it’s all true.”
The story he proceeded to tell is about a woman who was born to an upper class family in Shanghai. This woman’s family are in the educational and art profession, thus she was forced at a young age to practice piano. But this girl is strong willed. She was the type who didn’t like to do what she was told, and did not like to do what other people do. When the communists took over, she came down to Hong Kong by herself, with no money or relations. She maintained her living by being a piano teacher.
It so happened that a recently divorced Italian Ambassador was looking for a piano teacher for his children. This strong-willed girl then became that piano teacher. The Italian Ambassador and her fell in love. They married, and moved to Rome. She then gave birth to his son. But a marriage can never hold a strong-willed girl for long. Soon after, she and the Italian Ambassador divorced. She and her son moved back to Hong Kong, and lived in a remote and quiet place named, Sea Ranch.
As the child grew up, money became an issue. Everybody knows that raising a kid can easily drain your pocket. The woman, now no longer a girl, had to find a steady source of income. She remember how much she had admired the silver wares in Rome. With the upper class connections she had made from her marriage with her husband, she opened a silver ware shop in Central. Business is sufficient enough to provide for the mother and the child.
The child grew up on this quiet and remote island to be an extremely handsome child, being a mixture of Italian and Chinese blood. His mother sent him to study architecture in Rome. He returned to Hong Kong a stately and attractive man, and found a job at an architecture firm.
The mother never remarried. Every morning she woke up at 6am and commute by boat to her silver ware shop in Central. In her porch facing the ocean she planted lines of orchids. She is known in Sea Ranch as orchids planter. You can smell the fragrance on her shirt.
One day she received a letter from her a long lost relation from China. Her mother had left a house in Shanghai for her grandchild — the lady’s son. Recent years have seen a quantum leap in the housing prices in Shanghai. This bequeathed property happens to be located at a prime location. The lady and her son are now, qualifiably rich.
This is a happy story, and it makes my birthday a happy one.
Filed under: Musings
Surprisingly, not only Chicago, but Tokyo Narita begins to get dark at 4ish in December. This statement is the most emcompassing observation I can make of Tokyo, as I sit at my gate waiting for my connecting flight to Hong Kong.
International connecting flights brought to mind lost in translation and lost in airports. The connecting flight traveller is forced to deal with language imcomprehension in order to get to the gate. The completion of this seemingly simple task requires the unwilling translator to decipher codes, not unlike in the manner of Dr. Langton in Da Vince Code. A successful analysis of the glues will deliver the traveller to her destination; an unsuccessful attempt will, on the other hand, lead to some dire consequences, ranging from at best ruffled heartbeat from stress of missing the flight to worst disrupted schedule due to missing flight.
The reward to cost ratio facing a connecting flight passenger truly is unfairly skewed relative to that of a traveller to the stopover country. True, the latter faces the same problem of language barrier, yet he who tries to find the understanding is rewarded later with satisfying glimpses into the culture and lives of the foreign people. But not the connecting flight passenger. He toils as hard as the traveller only for the meager reward of arriving on time for the connecting flight, and as a bonus, a view of the skyline of the foreign city in the airport (blocked by a plane or two) and an amiable smile from the flight attendent. One the other hand, the alternative to not facing the problem is costly: he misses the flight. Then the problem evolved into an even graver matter: stuck in the terminal. That is an another matter and one better consult Tom Hank’s movie, “The Terminal”, for a grasp of the unthinkable consequences.
My above mentioned points have demonstrated my frustration with connecting flights. I tell you, I am frustrated. After hours of incomprehension sitting through exams, I did not plan on being confronted with incomprehension unwantingly. Yet here I am, forced to listen to incoprehensible langages and forced to look at incomprehensible writings with no solution to the problem!
International airlines are all associated with a homebase, and the language used by the flight attendents give priority to the home language; thus resulting in my delayed reaction to the formation of the boarding lines behind Japanese passengers. While I do not speak with perfect English accents, at least my English sounds like English. Japanese accented English sounds Japanese; thus resulting in my delayed reaction to anything the flight attendents say.
After several unpleasant experiences with obscure and confusing instructions, I cannot help but wonder why airports don’t devote more resources to helping these passengers. Connecting flights cannot be a minority, judging by how frequently one has to take a connecting flight when travelling abroad; yet by the amount of space they occupy in the instruction signs, they appear to be minor. In Seoul International Airport, connecting flight instruction are a footnote. In Tokyo, the instructions for connecting flights suddenly disappeared after two brief appearances and before long I found myself in the line for immigration.
And after I did find my way after rounds of inquiries, I found myself the only passenger for the connecting flight security check. This is a conumdrum.
Yet, there are sometimes the good surprises. A good surprise is when you accidentally land in a nice airport that provide good instruction along with good translation, and where you can find a warm and inexpansive local meal, and afterwards you can choose between walking in and out a variety of boutique shops that display local cuisines and items. That is the bonus for the international connecting flight traveller.
Shortly after finding my departure gate, I found a small jelly fiber drink in a small convenience shop next to the gate. It reminded me of some childhood memories. I guess that is the compensation factor for the stress connected with stoping over at the Narita Airport.
Filed under: Musings
Abstraction is our greatest enemy, says the professor.
If that is true, then our greatest enemy is everywhere. It is even in our incomprehension. The usual response of a patient teacher to the complaint from a student of “I don’t understand this!” is: Tell me what you don’t understand, and I’ll help you.
What if you don’t know what you don’t understand? What if our enemy, abstraction, is playing hide and seek with us?
Take my affair with growth model. Really, what is there that is so incomprehensible? The planner maximizes utility from consumption, with depends on the feasibility/output, which in turn depends on capital, which in turn depends on how much consumers put aside to invest today. The essence is the trade off between consumption today and consumption tomorrow. By saving more to invest today, you can eat more tomorrow. The whole deal about growth model is characterizing the path of consumption and capital over time, depending on what sort of possibilities the planner get.
The possibilities are created by: the function of the production function (how capital translate to more goods), parameter that describe consumers’ willingness to trade off consumption across time.
So it all sounds clear and comprehensible.
But, all of a sudden there is one final good which depends on two inputs, each of which in turn depends on two inputs, one of which is capital. So by saving more today, consumers get more of both inputs next period (but of course this depends on the production function of the two inputs; here they are identical, so increase in capital led to more input next period, which leads to more final goods next period (again this depends on how the final good production use the 2 inputs). Then you have additional constraints on the capital, that they have to add up across the two input uses.
The question is then, how do you characterize the time path of capital and consumption?
Chew on it.
