This time no love is what I need

With the universe as my witness, I will never feel the way I did that day again. 

There are going to be some BIG CHANGES in my life. These four changes hit me early this morning while I was in a cafe drinking coffee, and I hurriedly scribbled down what I plan to do with the rest of 2012. Three out of the four are absolutely nonnegotiable, and the fourth I will strive my best to accomplish.

You may be wondering, "Why four? Why not just round it up to five?"  The answer is that these are some pretty ambitious changes, and each goal is a huge task in itself. One should be cautious not to overextend oneself.

You are probably also thinking, "Why be so sly about this? Why even tell us about this change if you won't tell us what they are? Just tell us what these changes are going to be!" The answer is that right now I am absolutely brimming with joy and have all the zeal of a new convert, and I want to record this moment. When I feel this determined to do something, I usually am very good about following through, and I know this will be one of those times.

If you absolutely must know, you may ask me in person, and I may or may not tell you. (And yes, whether or not I give you the answer is directly correlated to how much I like and trust you, so if you have a fragile ego, don't bother.) Some time in 2013 I'll announce here whether or not I accomplished my goals.

Changing Perspectives

I was going through files that I salvaged from my old computer, and I discovered this essay that I had written for a writing class in college. I'm glad I found it, since it serves as a reminder of what I was concerned with back then and how things have changed. It never ceases to amaze me how certain things that seemed so important at one point in my life now seem so trivial. Back then all I cared about was being the best at what I majored in, Chinese Literature and Language.


It's a bit scary how unconcerned I am now with improving my Chinese, even though I have to use it on a daily basis for work. I also don't care about my accent while speaking it, and it's embarrassing to me how one point in my life I thought that one dialect (Cantonese) was somehow "lesser" than another. Maybe I can thank my Linguistics classes for this change in perspective. (First thing you learn in any Intro to Linguistics class: all languages and dialects are created equal.)


On a more positive note, I enjoyed remembering how much fun I had learning Chinese in the beginning. I miss that joy that one has while beginning to master something. 


Anyways, I liked the glimpse into my personal past, and I believe it shows how far I've come. To growing older and wiser!

            My parents were both Chinese, though both of them spoke two different dialects. Though many Chinese dialects are so different that they are mutually unintelligible, the dialects my parents spoke, Cantonese and Hakka, another dialect from Canton province, are very close. Both of them could conceivably have learned to speak the other dialect quite easily. However, my dad, being the Chinese nationalist that he was, insisted that we speak neither of the languages at home and instead speak Mandarin, the official dialect that united the whole country.

            This decision was disastrous for me. While both my parents spoke Mandarin fluently, it was not their native tongue, and they spoke it with a thick Cantonese accent. I inherited their Cantonese-accented Mandarin and this accent has been confusing people ever since. Cantonese Chinese and non-Cantonese Chinese alike hear me and expect me to speak Cantonese, and are shocked to hear that there are only a few lines that I can reliably say. (One of which is, "I don't speak Cantonese.") What little Cantonese I do know is Mandarin-accented. My Cantonese accent while speaking Mandarin is so thick that several times people have heard the way I speak and asked me to teach them some Cantonese. I am a budding Mandarin speaker whose inner sense of rhythm is all Cantonese, yet understands little of it. This brings endless amounts of amusement to my Chinese friends. For those that can't picture how hilarious this is to some people, imagine someone who can only speak English with a thick German accent, yet knows very little German. What German they do know sounds like English. As much as he insists that English is his native tongue, no one believes him, thanks to his ridiculous accent. Replace the English with Mandarin, and the German with Cantonese, and you will have an idea of my predicament.

            I spend countless hours trying to correct this problem. My linguistics-trained boyfriend and master of 6 languages, including both Mandarin and Cantonese, sits with me as much as he can and tries his best to remedy the damage. However, the sheer stubbornness of my Cantonese-inflected Mandarin is eerie, and sometimes in moments of exasperation he says that I should instead focus my energy on learning Cantonese, since, in his words, I am "only a thin curtain away from speaking Cantonese." I nevertheless throw myself whole-heartedly into the task of reform, shrug off his continued jokes at my expense, and comfort myself by mentally likening him to the similarly curmudgeonly Henry Higgins. I reassure myself that his disciple, like Higgins's Eliza Doolittle, will someday speak perfectly too, though she will be the perfect little Beijinger, not Londoner. To this end, I rent Beijing movies and sit and mumble the lines, trying my best to replicate that beautifully peculiar Beijing way of speaking that is at once both graceful and elegant, yet shrill and hard. Many of them star the ethereal Zhang Ziyi, and to entertain myself, I practice her trademark coy arch of the lip along with her northern lilt.

            Repeatedly watching and listening to these movies is no trial to me. They give me an ineffable joy, not necessarily because of any artistic merit, but because of my attraction to the elfin pitches and falls of Mandarin. In fact, everything these days even remotely connected to Chinese elicits my devotion. Boy bands that I would find unbearable in English I find irresistibly infectious in Mandarin. Mandarin versions of shows like Dancing with the Stars that I would otherwise find tedious turn me into a TV addict. Any Mandarin movie I come across is immediately snatched up and devoured, no matter what the topic. Similarly, learning how to write Chinese characters is also a joy to me. Each character is like a tiny abstract picture with clues to meaning and pronunciation hidden inside, though these only become extractable after one has been learning for a while. Every so often, I get an "Aha!" feeling from finally figuring out why this little squiggly line or that little square part appeared in this or that character, and each time it gives me a giddy feeling inside. The physical act of writing them in my character pads gives me the closest feeling to meditation that I've been able to achieve yet. One almost has to control one's breathing as each stroke is carefully formed. While learning new characters obviously requires memory and focus, it is a relaxing activity for me, and I'd choose it over watching TV most days. And the smug sense of accomplishment at every new acquirement is indescribably rewarding. I've become an old miser with my characters, hording them up one by one, yet gleefully showing off each acquisition at the slightest opportunity, especially the difficult ones.  Even the pinyin Romanization method has come to have its charms for me. While originally designed as just a steppingstone to real characters for schoolchildren, the xi's and  qi's, and the little tone marks over each syllable are almost as exotic to me as the characters they represent.

            Sometimes, I wonder about the real origins of this devotion. Deep down, I fear that I am in danger of becoming just another American who is attracted to Chinese because of perceived exoticness. I shiver knowing that I've become a tea-drinking, calligraphy-loving, kungfu-practicing Asian fetishist like so many people in Boston, though I guess my genuine Asian ethnicity negates any sort of creepiness. Or perhaps this infatuation is a product of being just another American-born Chinese who, in her eagerness to latch onto the culture of her ancestors, doesn't truly understand it. Or maybe it's some sort of perverse desire to be one of the elect, to be a member of an elite group that speaks such a notoriously difficult language. It is a telling fact that the State Department gives its students of Chinese twenty-four to thirty months of full-time study to attain the level of proficiency students of French can reach in only six to nine months. The difficulty lies in several factors. Many words sounds the same in Chinese, and are only distinguished by the various pitches of the syllables, or tones. This hold as much meaning as pronunciation, and can mean all the difference between "Chinese characters are interesting" and "Chinese mosquitoes are interesting." Then there's the written language, which requires knowledge of about 6,000 characters for basic literacy. Even the clues to meaning and pronunciation inside the characters aren’t always helpful. There is no secret code to breaking the mammoth that is Chinese except years of arduous study.

            Language aside, as a small child I too sometimes thought that there was something special about being Chinese. At the time, my predominantly Caucasian Georgia landscape was a sea of blonds, brunettes, and redheads, with no Asian in sight. I didn't understand that there were actually lots of Asian people in America, and with my blurry notion of statistics I thought that perhaps the sheer improbability of being born Asian in America had some sort of cosmological significance for me, though I never did figure out what.  As a kid though, this "specialness" didn't appear particularly cool or positive. On the contrary, being Chinese and speaking Chinese meant looking, dressing, and speaking funny. I hated going to Chinese School. The fact that my parents had somehow forgotten to send me there until I was twelve, resulting in me being placed in a lower level class full of six year olds, also didn't help. Most of all I hated being associated with other Chinese kids. By that time I was well inured to the taunts and schoolyard jibes I received in elementary school, and was thus already acutely sensitive to the role race played in society. I prided myself on being polite and well behaved in school among my white classmates, which was a conscious attempt to minimize the negative stereotypes many of them had about Chinese immigrants. My Chinese School classmates I regarded as an embarrassment, since they were unruly and were free to run wildly throughout the halls of the university that housed us on the weekends. Most of the parents never even made an effort to check their behavior. I still remember seeing one portly five year old try to reach up a soda machine to steal a one dollar can of soda, while his father just looked on and laughed, as if his child was the most clever boy in the world. Within a few months, fed up with being grouped with rowdy elementary children, I left Chinese school for good and never took another Chinese lesson again for years.

            However, by the time I was 18, several events conspired to make me nurture a newfound respect for Chinese. The most important of them was my trip to Beijing when I was 17. In China I communicated with the natives coherently enough, or so the street vendors who wanted my American money claimed, but then I always had my mother and father beside me to rely on in case I didn't know how to say certain things. There was also the annoying fact that Chinese people prefer characters over letters which made getting around the city without my parents a bit difficult. Surprisingly though, it wasn't seeing all the ancient buildings and relics of China's 4,000 year old history that caused me to gain a respect for Chinese. Those were all very impressive, to be sure, but what really drew me was the way they speak their language. Beijingers speak Mandarin the way other Chinese people can only wish to, with their exaggerated high pitches and deep dips, and their purr-like retroflex endings that southern Chinese like me can never hope to replicate. I came back vowing to learn how to speak like them. At first, my dabbling around with a few Chinese books and tapes was half-hearted at best, but then a disgraceful event propelled me to learn Chinese for real. I was 18 and planning to move to Boston, and so my friends decided to throw a goodbye party for me at a local Chinese restaurant. When we were there, one of my friends who knew that I was learning encouraged me to speak to the waiter in Chinese. I did my best, but all I received for my efforts was the curt reply, "Your Chinese is horrible. Come back when you can speak better." This embarrassing incident was enough to propel me into learning Chinese by taking classes.

            After several years of hard work and with the help of dedicated teachers, including my sometimes impatient boyfriend, my Chinese isn't terrible. I still have a long way to go, but I know that if I went back to that same restaurant with that same waiter, he probably wouldn't say anything like that to me again. But if there's anything that bothers me the most, it's that darned accent. Years of trying to correct it only serve to confirm how immutable it is. My Chinese friends tell me that I shouldn't be so bent on trying to change it, that I should just accept that that is the way things are, and that I should focus most of all on widening my vocabulary and learning to speak and write more eloquently. But it still continues to bother me partly because I know it shouldn't, and I know that I am bothered by it for all the wrong reasons. To be blunt, I'm downright embarrassed by my Mandarin's resemblance to Cantonese. Growing up, the only other Cantonese Chinese I knew besides my own family were the Cantonese people who lived in Chinatowns. To me it is associated with the coarse language of older immigrants in gritty American Chinatowns who tended to come from Canton province, while Mandarin is associated with the language of the newer immigrants privileged enough to leave the PRC and Taiwan. Somehow these associations always stuck, despite the fact that Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong is an economic and pop culture powerhouse. I know all too well that these ingrained notions about class and language are inaccurate and prejudiced and are just as insidious and dangerous as the one my white Georgia classmates held about me. I just can't help myself though. How can the sounds of my darling compare to all the hard consonant endings of Cantonese, to its rough gutturalness? Can anything outdo the crisp lilt of Mandarin? Is it a coincidence that to be a "mandarin" is to be a member of an elite class, or that something being "mandarin" is something elegant and refined? I know that I shouldn't feel this way, that one should not be judged by one's accent, and that there should be no shame in sounding the way I do. It is simply a result of my cultural background. As much as I wished things were different, I am the child of parents who learned Mandarin as a second language. But sometimes, just sometimes, I wish they had just taught me Cantonese instead. 

Shenzhen's Educational Experiment

I contributed an article last week about an experimental university in Shenzhen, China to The Cambridge Institute of International Education blog. To read the whole article, click here.

An excerpt:

In 2010, the South University of Science and Technology of China (SUSTC) opened its doors in Shenzhen, the Special Economic Zone bordering Hong Kong. SUSTC is the culmination of Shenzhen’s long-held dream to establish a top university within its borders. For years, Shenzhen’s quality of education could not match its strong economic growth, and one study even showed that Shenzhen’s higher education ranked last in the list of similar cities like Ningbo and Dalian that were opened early to foreign investment.

Establishing SUSTC was meant to win credibility for higher education in the area. Shenzen’s administration hoped to emulate the resounding success of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Twenty years after its founding, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology already ranks within the top 50 universities worldwide. To this end, Shenzhen invested $2 billion into SUSTC. Former mayor Liang Xiang, summed up the city’s drive towards establishing a university at any cost by saying, “We have to build a university, even if it means selling our own pants!”

An Ode to Waffle House

Photo by jenwaller // By NCSA 2.0 CC

The first time that we went to Waffle House, it did not make a huge impression on me. I still do not really know why my parents decided to take us that day. I do remember that I was the one who had made the suggestion in the first place, but they weren't always known to follow my suggestions. And they also always had a dislike for much of American food. Perhaps it was because they felt bad that since we were so poor, they were never able to take us out to eat. Or perhaps the friendly yellow Waffle House signs planted every few miles among the Georgia highways had been beckoning too persistently and for too long, finally breaking my parents' resistance.

        My younger brother and I thought the place wasn’t bad. But my mother said that she was not impressed with the greasy food and the questionable sanitation of the interior, and thought that they paid too much for what they were getting. Waffles, eggs, and fried potatoes could be had at home for a tenth of the price, with a far healthier proportion of oil and in a much cleaner kitchen. Our family was extremely poor at the time, poor enough to qualify for welfare, though my parents were always proud to say that they never once used a food stamp. Even as a small child I knew the worth of money and knew how dear every penny was. I knew how every dollar we spent equaled how many hours my mother had to spend working in the frozen food section of the local grocery store, which she hated because it caused her delicate body to catch cold easily. I knew how things were even worse when I was in preschool, when my parents would buy one dollar hot dogs from the gas station to give us children to eat for dinner, and then would eat nothing themselves.

   I knew that my parents' insistence on giving us these small treats was a sign of their devotion to us, their self-sacrifice, and their love. But the knowledge that these things were hard-earned tempered my enjoyment of them, such as the time my mom gave me a small surprise after I had come home from kindergarten. She sat me down on the kitchen counter and told me to cover my eyes, and then gently uncovered them to reveal a small box of ice cream for me to eat.  I couldn't enjoy it since all I could think about was how much my mother had to spend to buy it. To this day I have a strange relationship with food, since I continue to equate it with love in my mind. Or the time I had my little heart set on owning a plush version of Rolly, that chubby Dalmatian puppy from 101 Dalmatians. I gave up after seeing my mother's pained expression looking at the expensive price tag. Months later I was surprised to find it waiting under the Christmas tree for me and felt enormous guilt. I think that stuffed animal cost about fifteen dollars, and my mother yelled at me when I ruined it by attempting to give it a bath.

  Despite the unhappiness of that first visit, in later years the humble Waffle House chain would come to hold a dear spot in my heart, despite the relatively few number of times I've actually been there. There are at least half a dozen other dining establishments I've been to much more often than the Waffle House, yet none of them can compete with the Waffle House in my heart. For those that do not know what Waffle House is, it is a low-end roadside diner located mainly in the American South. According to the Wikipedia entry, the chain claims to be the world's leading server of waffles, T-bone steaks, omelets, cheese 'n eggs, USDA Choice hamburgers, country ham, pork chops, grits, hash browns, patty melts, raisin toast, apple butter, and Heinz Traditional Steak sauce. I agree that being the world's largest grits vendor is a noble title, but to me at least, the Waffle House means more than that.  

Photo by mattw // By NCSA 2.0 CC

I can't quite put a finger on why it is so appealing to me. I'm only able to go there during my infrequent visits to Georgia, so maybe that is what makes it so special. Each trip becomes a bookmark holding a place in the story of my life. I can remember the times I went there with my high school friends, the time I went there on my first date, the times I went with my brother after finally breaking years of animosity, the times I went there alone late at night to mourn leaving China, the time I went there after my father died. Every time I went back to Georgia, I would go to Waffle House to sit and to remember. And each time, year after year, no matter how much my life's circumstances would change, the ancient Waffle House would always be exactly the same. The old jukebox playing such tunes as "Waffle Do Wop" and "There are Raisins in My Toast" would always be there, as was the lanky cook with the cropped pink hair who would smoke outside and then come back in to make waffles for you without washing her hands.

The more things change, the more things stay the same, they say. Funny how every year, no matter how drastically my life has changed, whenever I go back to the Waffle House I realize that I am still the same, just like it is. Sure, my hair is shorter or longer, my belt buckle looser or tighter, my wallet fatter or thicker, and my shoes and clothing changed to match the changing year and season and corresponding fashion of the moment.  Yet, inside I feel as if I am exactly the same, as if all the turmoil and vagaries of life conspired to only bring me again and again back to this place, back into this same state of mind. Perhaps I feel this way because I the same sentiment and mood that drives me there, that unexpected hyper-sensitivity and sudden sadness that had struck me long ago that day in the car, after our first trip to the Waffle House. The Waffle House is associated with those sudden bouts of sadness, introspection, and clarity that hit me with their full force late at night when the solemnity of the empty highway and the glimmering beauty of Atlanta's light pollution strikes me as something to cry about.

When I am struck by that strange wandering mood late at night, I take refuge at the Waffle House. Its trademark buoyant yellowness and huge black block letters of its sign cheers up any midnight Georgia highway, no matter how newly developed and devoid of shrubbery and life, and welcomes me with wide-open arms no matter what. Waffle House is thus the ultimate best friend: a friend who is on call 24/7, who won't upbraid you for calling and waking her at 4:00 in the morning, who always provides a warm place to sit, who is always willing to serve you warm toast and hot coffee, and who outdoes your real human best friend just by sheer numbers. Its tacky green vinyl booths, yellow orb lights and grimy kitchen in full view are comfortingly unassuming, as is the usually older waitress who greets you with an earthy Southern drawl. They’ve seen it all in their long years of serving, and the appearance of a lonely hollow-eyed girl at three in the morning with nothing to do doesn’t faze them at all. Though they tend to lack any superficial Southern sugar, they are usually willing to talk to you if you are in an expansive mood. I usually sit in the same booth towards the back, where I can get a good view of the entire restaurant. Several times a little red cockroach or two has greeted me with its appearance as I sit down, but they are easily chased off with the wave of a hand.

I sit there and drink coffee, or I order food to offset the pressure in my heart. I bring along with me some sort of reading material, but only to give me someplace to rest my eyes. I let myself wander and bask in the steady hiss of food being fried and sound of cooks clanging about in the kitchen. I cycle through the events of the year in between my last visit and the present, and I think about what I felt and thought last time. I think about how this dingy establishment means so much to me, despite all its flaws, and how its dinginess and grime is so iconic of my home state, with its ugly poverty, ignorance, and backwardness. I sometimes actually detest everything about Georgia, sometimes even its redneck diners, yet I need these periodic visits as much as I need food and water. Somehow these visits gave me a place to retreat from the real world and wallow in everything, good and bad, and remember all the love and hate I have given and received. Forgotten emotions that once felt so strong only one or two years ago are suddenly remembered. I remember my childhood poverty and how a ten-dollar meal would have shocked my ten-year-old or twelve-year-old self with its excess.

And at the end of it all, usually after some three hours of drinking coffee and reminiscing, I crawl back home at 6 AM exhausted, where my poor lonely widowed mother, aware of and worried about my late night wanderings, has lovingly preserved every detail of my childhood bedroom for me, down to the pink quilt, shabby chic bed frame, and stuffed Dalmatian. 

Shopping For A New Language

Photo by nofrills // by NCND 2.0 CC

I've graduated from college and started working, but that doesn't mean that I'm done with book-larnin’ just yet. It hasn't even been two months and I'm already thinking about taking a class at night or on the weekends. Somehow life seems so empty if I'm not chronically hunched over a desk working on problem sets or memorizing vocab words, hands shaking from too much coffee.  

Since the firm that I work with does work with East Asia and since I don't want the degree I worked so hard for to go completely to waste, I'm planning on reviewing the material from the Business Chinese class I took a few years ago. I'm even thinking of purchasing the new book that the professor currently uses as well. However, I've realized over the past few years that I can be too single-minded at times and that it is important to be balanced. For a long time, I thought that the key to success in life was to be specialized, or in other words, really good at one thing.  I really believed that learning too many other things at too deep a level was a distraction and counterproductive.

Obviously, there are several problems with this approach. The most obvious one is the problem of burn out, which was something that I eventually met with. You can’t continually work at one thing to the exclusion of everything else – eventually even the very thought of doing it will become sickening to you. As one of my professors told me, “We’re human beings, Shelley. I’m not a machine that does science and you are not a machine that does Chinese.”

Secondly, even if you don’t burn yourself out, it’s self-defeating to limit yourself to only one thing. Part of the key to learning is to constantly produce associations with the material that you want to master and the knowledge that you already know, so limiting yourself to only a specialized knowledge base is shooting yourself in the foot.

Now that I’ve learned my lesson, I don’t want my days to be spent only working on my job and keeping up with my Chinese. So I’ve been thinking about learning a new language, but I can’t decide on which one! I’ve narrowed the choices down to three and am still undecided about which one to choose. My only recourse is to count up the pros and cons of each one. Perhaps then I can take the nuance out of the decision and let numbers do the deciding for me.

A)  French

Pros:

1)      Learned it in high school (but forgot pretty much all of it, so this really isn’t much of a pro)

2)      Sounds nice, and a lot of people think it sounds “sexy”

3)      People think you’re “cultured.”

4)      A lot of good writing is in French.

Cons:

1)      Not very useful in the U.S., except for speaking with Haitian cab drivers.

2)      If I decide to take a class, I’d probably be stuck with a lot of old snooty blue-haired ladies.

B) German

Pros:

1)      I know most Americans aren’t with me on this one, but I really think that it sounds beautiful and cool

2)      Kinda has a “so uncool, it’s cool” factor

3)      A lot of interesting philosophy and writing is in German.

4)      Awesome long words! One of my best friends in China was German and I loved to watch him write out the long equivalents of Chinese vocab words in German.

5)      Pronunciation seems to  be easier for English speakers.

Cons:

1)      Even less useful than French.

2)      Seems more difficult than French, at least to me.

C) Korean

Pros:

1)      Would be useful for the type of work that I do.

2)      I used to work for Koreans and learned some – they said that I picked it up pretty easily and had a good accent. Maybe I have a knack for it?

3)      Useful for if I decide to go to graduate school in Chinese literature. Almost all grad programs require working knowledge of another East Asian language, though most people learn Japanese.

4)      I love Korean people in general. I think that they are a very warm, red-blooded people, though occasionally crazy.

Cons:

1)      Doesn’t particularly excite me the way that French and German does.

Totals:

French

  Pros: 4

  Cons: 2

German

  Pros:  5

  Cons: 2

Korean

  Pros: 4

  Cons: 1

So if I were to simply go with which language has the most pros, German and Korean tie, each with a net total of 3 pros. That wasn’t very helpful.

Then there’s the question of whether or not I should assign weighted values to certain categories, like perceived beauty of the language or usefulness. But that seems overly complicated and requires some decision making in itself in order to decide on what factors are more important. Perhaps I should decide using something less metrics based instead.

Which brings me back to square one. Crap.

Hooray for Earth: New Loves

Hooray for Earth just released their new album True Loves and I can't stop listening to the eponymous single. They're a lot less guitary than they were before and sound a lot more now, with lots of loops and samples and effects. If you like synth-influenced alternative, I recommend that you check it out.

Getting From College to Career

I recently returned from my celebratory post-graduation trip to Paris (more on that later…) to the bleak reality of joining the ranks of the 14 million unemployed people in America. I immediately went into full on research mode and quickly picked up a copy of Getting From College to Career by career adviser Lindsey Pollak. The book isn’t ordered in a completely linear fashion; rather, it composed as a series of numbered suggestions organized into chapters. Job-hunting can be a daunting process, so the author tries to maximize encouragement by adding a check box after each tip for the reader to check off. I’ve only gotten to tip #25 out of 90, but so far I think the book is a worthy investment. She suggests some seemingly common sense ones that little old me never considered, such as creating a business card even if you don’t have a job. Other suggestions are a little less obvious, such as creating a list of three “heroes” that you admire with the reasons why you admire them. I actually thought this would be a fun little exercise and selected the following three people off the top of my head:

Cal Newport wrote three books on study skills, blogged like it was his fulltime job, and completed a PhD in computer science at MIT at the same time, and he’s not even 30 yet! He is now an assistant professor in computer science at Georgetown University. During college, I considered his first two books, How to Become a Straight-A Student and How to Win at College to be my “bibles” and really believed that they contributed to my success. Even though I’m not a student anymore, I regularly read his blog to receive tips on time management and career planning and am continuously working towards being what he calls a “romantic scholar.”

Peter Hessler – I spent the summer before going to China for the very first time reading several different books about the lives of American expats in China. His book, River Town, which chronicles his two years spent as a Peace Corps volunteer in Sichuan, was by far the most sensitive and thought provoking.

James Fallows - He has been a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly for a number of years now. He writes about many topics, but I find his articles on Sino-American relations particularly insightful and interesting. His wife Deborah Fallows also speaks Chinese and is a linguist! How cool!

Looking at the three people I’ve chosen, the common thread between them is that they are writers. How appropriate, since I plan to spend the year I’ve taken off before going to graduate school working on my writing! The next step that Pollak recommends is writing a letter to your three "heroes." Um, maybe tomorrow...

Another tip Pollak gives is to complete the career assessment she offers for free on her website. After answering about 90 questions, the assessment provides you with the “career drivers” that motivate you. According to the test, my primary driver is intellectual/physical challenge:

For those with this Career Driver, the one thing that matters most is being challenged at the highest possible level. Success is defined in terms of winning the war, the game, the contract or the sale, overcoming obstacles, being the best, being first, beating the competition, reaching for their highest, surpassing previous goals, and so on. Challenge-driven people are after the sheer adrenaline involved in achieving a “mission impossible.” In most instances, as the goal comes within reach their interest quickly drops, and they begin seeking the next challenge. Easy or repetitive things are boring for them.

This is the same as what other people have told me. Maybe I should go into law after all, just because it’s supposedly difficult?

My second “driver” is professional excellence:

The Professional Excellence Career Driver describes the quintessential subject-matter expert who values depth of knowledge and expertise above all else. Those driven by Professional Excellence are most likely to be motivated by being known for their work in some field of specialization. These people have a self-image that is rooted in their ability to excel in their chosen field, and just as important, to be recognized in that area.

Here are the rest of my drivers in order of importance:

"Managerial Influence" being near the bottom of the list doesn't surprise me, but what is frightening is the low priority I know I place on "Life-Work Balance." This is something I know that I have to work on.

What I’m curious to know, and what the website doesn’t talk about, is what the most common drivers for people are. What do you think? On that note, I’ll end with a picture of a lovely macaron in Paris that I was only able to hold for a brief moment before promptly dropping it onto the ground.