#14. Cymri Chang: The Kool-Aid
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What's up everybody? Welcome to The Honest Drink. Justin here. Our guest today is a producer. She produces commercials. From photo commercials you would see in magazines to video commercials you would see online and on TV. She is also involved in the Shanghai film industry and is a feminist. Raised in Hawaii, she moved to China several years ago and we caught up with her over some drinks. It was a really fun conversation between her, Howie, and myself and we just let it roll.

So today we talk very casually about race, society, culture, politics, government, language, and all in the larger context of the United States and China. So full disclosure, all three of us in today's episode currently live and work in China, but were raised in the U.S.,

And I also just wanted to throw a disclaimer out there. We usually don't get political on this podcast, but we don't censor our conversations either. So today we do touch on some political ideology and share some thoughts on democracy and communism, for example. So please, if you disagree with anything we say in today's episode, or any episode for that matter, just

Just remember, it's not about taking sides. There's no agenda behind the things we say. And it's okay to disagree without bursting into a ball of fire. You know, one indicator of intelligence that I believe in is the ability to passionately disagree, yet still be civil and kind.

And to be honest, I normally wouldn't even bother with a disclaimer, but in today's world, you never know. So I just wanted to throw that out there. This was a truly fun conversation. We had a really great time, finished that huge bottle of Glenlivet. So without further ado, please welcome our guest, Kimri Chang. ♪ She's a little girl, she's going by ♪ ♪ She's a little girl, she's a little girl ♪ ♪ With her ass in the sun ♪

Oh yeah, exactly. Jack of many trades, master of none kind of feeling. You know, like I admire people that have known since 18 what they wanted to do with their life. I really admire those people. Oh yeah. Because they dedicate it and they're a master of it and they can speak at length. Those are like the lucky few people that I feel. Yes. Yeah.

But I mean, like even people, like I'm 34 and I'm like, what am I going to be when I grow up? You know? I'm in the same boat. Genuinely. Oh, I'm in the same boat. Welcome to the show. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Oh, that's nice. Hey. Like now that you come like, okay, you're mixed. I look at you, I'm like, okay, I can see it. But if I just ran into you on the street, not for a second. What do you think? What would you think I would be? Just white. Caucasian. Yeah, Caucasian. But not like from a particular area.

If you ask me, you could pass in my mind for Spanish. Okay. Yeah, I get that a lot. Brazilian, you know, even. That's a new one. I haven't heard Brazilian in a long time. Or just plain Caucasian. Okay. You would be able to pass for that as well. Okay.

I guess, depending on... Because you just have a tan, you know? Well, this is the... Thank you. That's very kind of you. This is pretty white. Depending on where I am, especially in the United States, will change what people think I am. Yeah. So if I'm in California, I'm Mexican. Really? Yeah. And if I'm on... I can see that. Oh! I can see that. Now that you say it. I can totally see that. And especially when I wear, like, the earrings. Yeah, where there's, like, the top you're wearing and the earrings, like, you look very Spanish. You have a top you're wearing. Yeah, definitely. And a top you're wearing. Yeah.

But if I go to like... Put on a sombrero. Yeah, that's all good. Yeah. If I go to Washington Heights, I get PR a lot. Really? A very small subsection of Beverly Hills. I've gotten like people come up and speak Farsi to me.

Yeah, I don't feel the Persian look, but then I meet some Persian girls, I'm like, oh, okay, I guess, kind of. Yeah, that's what's interesting about you, because you can mention all these ethnic groups, and I'd be able to look at you and be like, okay, yeah. Ethnically ambiguous. Yeah, she's like, Mali, Africa, yeah, yeah. Like, once you said Persian, at first, I was like, nah, and then I looked at you, I'm like, oh, okay, yeah, like, if you told me you were Persian, I would completely believe it, I wouldn't even... They wouldn't blink. I wouldn't even, yeah, I wouldn't even second think it. A lot of the actresses that are mixed, that's why they can pull off what they do, I mean, uh,

who is named Rashida Jones has a whole like thing on her ambiguity Olivia Munn has the same thing we're like are they Asian yeah they come together in this like sweet spot like kind of where you're in where they can just be whatever you want yeah anything you want yeah yeah plug me in I know

So where did you grow up mostly? In Hawaii, in Honolulu. Okay. Like townie as townie can get. Yeah. So that's the big island, right? No, no, no, no. So the Hawaiian island chain has hundreds of islands that like kind of scale all the way back. Yeah. And most of them are uninhabitable. They're atolls, things like that. And then the state of Hawaii has eight islands. But of those eight islands, only seven of them are inhabited. Mm-hmm.

One of the islands is a little koolabe. It's like a natural reserve. It used to be used as bombing practice for the military, so now it's a protected zone. And out of those seven islands, only six of them are public. One of those, Ni'ihau, is owned by the Robinson family. They bought it back in like 1850 or something like that. And now it's a preserved nature reserve, but it has families that live there that are 100% Native Hawaiian who are guests of the Robinson family.

So people speak Hawaiian on that island, everyone's Native Hawaiian. I can't remember if there's electricity or not electricity, but it's pretty rural. And the kids have to travel by boat to the next closest island for school. So do they have a special residential status there in terms of you're actually a guest of it? On that particular island, you are a guest of that family. The family owns the island.

So you cannot land there. I can't go on a boat. I have to be like 100 or 1,000 yards away. But people live there. People live there as guests of the family. And they've been there for generations. And the ownership of the land is controversial, just like any white ownership of non-seeded land is controversial. I mean, that's what Hawaii is, is non-seeded land. It's essentially why...

it was so terrible that it took so long for Hawaiians to receive national recognition because there was an overthrow. You know, it wasn't like, "Hey, here's our land, please take it." They kidnapped the Queen of Hawaii and they said, "We're gonna kill your people if you don't sign this abdication of your throne."

So it's this whole controversy of should the chiefs of ancient Hawaii have sold this land to white-owning families? We have what's called Hawaiian homesteads. There's like a Hawaiian Homesteads Act. I'm not super well-versed in it, which is protected land essentially akin to a reservation on the mainland. But it's not big. It's not huge. And there's so many different trains of thought as to...

What the future of Hawaii looks like. There's still people that call for complete secession, like we want our freedom, we want to become the kingdom of Hawaii. It's not going to happen. It's impossible. The U.S. government has intertwined themselves so closely

deeply into Hawaii. It's never our biggest outside of tourism, military is our next biggest moneymaker. Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah. I think wherever you go, you're always going to have like that small, like that minority group that just wants to, like even in mainland America, you still have a minority party there that wants to be its own. Yeah, its own sovereign, right? New Yorkers. New Yorkers' own thing, yeah.

As a New Yorker, we've talked about that. But that's the thing with Hawaii. I don't know anything about the Hawaiian history, but I know it has a really, really crazy history. Even to this day. If you go there, just like you said, there's certain places where you can't go without getting permission to go into. Correct. Certain territories. I mean, that's a very specific. And especially because this entire island, it has this kind of, wow, one family owns a whole island of this size in the state of Hawaii.

It's so it's so difficult to even speak about it with any kind of confidence Because you're still speaking about it for me as an immigrant. I'm not native Hawaiian. I have no native Hawaiian blood I have cousins that have Hawaiian blood, but I myself my line doesn't have Hawaiian blood So you go to that idea of well, what right do I have to say one opinion or another? You know, I can't really support one thing or another so so I'm curious

Just jumping off of what you just said, having that voice or wanting to have a voice or opinion on a certain aspect. Being in China now, from the States, from Hawaii, being of mixed race, do you feel like, let's adapt it to now your position in China, do you feel like you have any type of limitations in terms of how you want to express yourself here?

or how you live day to day or anything like that? - I kind of live with the mindset that I am a guest.

the People's Party. I am a guest in this country. I don't really try to assert much of my rights. I know there's a lot of people who are very angry with some of the law changes that have happened recently. The scooter law is not having two people on a bike or little dumb things like that. And for me, it's like, well, I'm a guest of this country. That's just the way it is. And I don't know if it stems from the idea that

I've kind of felt like that way my whole life. That's one. Yeah, like I'm not, I'm not Chinese enough to be Chinese, but I've been raised in a Chinese culture. Like it's not a new concept for you. No. So it doesn't, it doesn't make me angry or upset me. It just, it's just the way it is. I think that the only thing that, the only true, you know, group that I can stand for is I'm a woman. So I'm a feminist, you know, I support LGBTQI, um,

But in terms of like identifying as someone who has rights in this country or something like that, probably not. But it doesn't make me angry. But do you feel like, you know, being from, I was part of the expat community, I mean, you meet all sorts of people. Don't you feel like a lot of expats are sort of, they want to push their own agenda, like on whether other people,

in the community to, like, come together and be like, come on, you know, fuck everything. You know, we should, we should, you know, we should live the way we live, you know what I mean? Like, in this country, you know? I don't join that. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. It's kind of weird.

It's well, it also feels like sometimes it comes from a place of negativity. Like I've never plugged into China rage. I don't know if you guys... I have. Yeah? Yeah, but it's just like minor things. Okay. You know, like on the street, like traffic, pedestrians, like shit like that. But is that any, is that different from how you would feel like if you were in New York? No, exactly. It's not. It's not a China specific thing. Okay. Yeah.

In LA, I had road rage all the time. Right. Okay. But it's like some of these expat groups that do that, the communities that come together, like this is how much we should get paid in this industry. And, you know, I've never subscribed to that ever in six years. Goodness. Well, because they're taking their standards from home and trying to apply it to a different society. Exactly. A different culture. Exactly.

And they're not, they may not be taking into account, you know, because everything has to be balanced. So if they feel like as an expat, I do this in this industry, I need to get paid this much. They may not be considering the balance with, you know, how much a local in that same position, in that same industry, same job.

same qualification, let's say, but just not an expat. He's a local Chinese person or she's a local Chinese person. How much they would get paid. But I don't think they're taking that into account. But as from, if you're looking at it from the standpoint of China, they have to take everything into account. You know what I mean? They have to balance that whole scale. Yeah. You know, it can't just be because you're an expat and you were getting paid that much unless you are, you know,

You qualify for a higher pay. Unless you're at that level or you're coming in with a specific set. Yeah, because of your skill set or whatever, right? And the state has that too, except we call it a legal visa process. We absolutely qualify the worth of an individual, whether or not they can be paid in our country and even just enter the country and pay.

I look at the pay scales here and I know some people say you cannot compare the two, but there's no reason why I should be getting paid four times as much. I mean, sure, if you want to give me that, I'm not going to complain. But there's no reason why I should be getting paid four times as much as someone who not only has an equal skill set, but probably speaks more languages than I do. You know, it's so I don't I can't join those groups or I can't I don't identify with some of the things that they plug into here. Mm hmm.

I'm very easy going. When I first moved here, I was sort of like that. In a different way. More in the social kind of connotation where I would always argue with locals on social standards, way of living, value system, that kind of stuff. Like, argue. And it wasn't until after a couple of years, after integrating myself into the culture,

That I sort of step back and kind of look from both sides and understand that yeah, I just grew up in a different environment and

doesn't mean that that environment is right. You know? Yeah. I mean, I'm not saying that the environment or the way of thinking here is right. I'm just saying that there's checks and balances. There's yin and yang. There's, you know, good and bad. Yeah. So, yeah. I mean, I think what a lot of people do, because the reason why I feel this is because I had to catch myself before, right? So people think of it just in terms of right and wrong.

Oh, this is the way it is here. I don't agree with it. It's wrong. It's just wrong. So morally, they draw a line on their principles, right and wrong. But they're also not taking into account time. Because a lot of the things that you say people are against or don't like or are complaining about here, they might be right. A lot of them, they have a point. It is wrong. It does suck that it is that way.

But then I think China's developing, it needs time to catch up on a lot of kind of social, socially, in a lot of ways to kind of mature and develop and it gets better year by year, generation by generation. It takes time, these are things. But people are applying the standards, let's say the standards of the West.

Like, oh, in the U.S. it's like this, so why isn't it like this right now? Yeah, but go back 50 years. Exactly. Go back 50 years in America, it was kind of rough around the edges itself. You know what I mean? It wasn't like it is today. So it takes time for cultures and societies and masses of people and countries to kind of come up and mature. When is that line, though?

That's always the question that I hear a lot. It's kind of similar to when are you an adult? When can you serve in the military and smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol? And we decided as a society in America that this age was the age that you can...

- Smoke, cigarette. - Yeah, it's a very arbitrary line. - It's arbitrary. So my question, I use that as a comparison to how many years have to pass from the Cultural Revolution? Let's just use that as our marker, right? Let's say everything started from zero. Phoenix rises from the ashes, everything starts from zero. How many years have to pass before we-- - Before, like, hey, we're behind schedule, guys. We're behind schedule, guys. - Like, I've been caught, I've been here not, I've been here off and on for nine years, and for good for six years.

And I've seen myself change to adapt to the culture here. That when I go back to the States, I see myself bringing it back. Biggest example is lines.

Oh, I'm like elbows out. My mom caught me. I went on a trip with her and my sisters a couple years ago. And I did something. And my mom, who is super chill and we're adults now, so her and I are friends, she caught me by my shirt, which she never does. And she's like, I taught you better than that. What were you about to do? I don't know. It was something pretty bad, though. Crossing the street without any kind of like, fuck you to the cars. I'm going to do what I want to do. Or like, you know.

not letting an old lady pass me. I can't remember what it was. It was something significantly rude that my mother would be like, "What the fuck, dude?" - "What are you doing? Who are you?" - Yeah, and I carried that back to the States with me. And I know that I've learned that not from old people here, I've learned that from the new generation.

So you talk about people need time, these new generations, terrible, need to die out for the new generation. The new generation knows this. They're already acting like this. And so 40 years from now, are we still going to be making excuses of, well, they're only 80 years. Yeah. So where is that line where we can actually... Exactly. There has to be, the time element has to be in some sort of context. Yes. Right. I agree. Yeah.

But I think, and I agree with you. And where that line is, I don't know. I am not qualified to say that. But I do feel that now.

It hasn't really been that much time, especially with a country as big and as diverse as China with the size of the population that it has. Right. It needs a lot of time. And it was coming from it wasn't coming from just kind of like a budding, you know, nice, you know, economically sustainable country where it was like it was.

People were starving here, really, just a few decades ago. You know what I mean? It wasn't really that long where it was just really bad here, right? And the kind of growth that I experienced just in a short period of time, obviously we all know it's crazy, right? It's astounding.

So it's like that social element that needs to, that's always gonna kind of lag behind the infrastructure. Because the hardware, the infrastructure, that's the easy stuff, right? As long as you have money, you can build it. And it goes up right away. Especially here in China, everything gets built so fast. But culturally, socially, people need to catch up. And they need time for that. I would give it like maybe another...

Let's speak in terms of generations instead of years. So maybe I would say another three generations. So our children's children's children. Our children's children's children. So maybe two generations. Our grandchildren. Can I just put something in perspective? You've been here for what? Like off and on nine years? Nine years, yeah. Okay, so let's call it 10 years. Let's compare Shanghai 10 years ago to now.

Software-wise, there's already a huge difference. Do you remember QQ? Let's be clear about what you mean by software. We're talking about software as in culture. Oh, culture software. Not software that way. For example, let's call it driving manners. It's already a huge difference. You're on the road.

Even like four years ago, like the drivers are just nonstop cutting people off, just like wild, wild west. And which, like let's compare it to New York, which is still like that. But here already, you feel like when I'm in a car, it's a lot better now. It's a lot slower. I don't know if it's a lot better compared to the way it was. I don't know. I really don't know. Really? I feel like in the manner of driving, that specific example from my experience right now,

It's better, but it's very incrementally better. I drive here too, you know what I mean? And so my road rage level has reduced. Than it used to be. Before, you might remember me, I was like, I hate driving. I still hate driving, but it's a little bit more tolerable now. But to Kimmy's point, it could just be that there's so many more cars on the street now, so that's why traffic is moving slower. And because it's moving slower and more congested,

there's really nowhere else to go. People just have to go in their lanes. Well, also, too, they're also enforcing the

The rules? Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot more law enforcement. They started that, this whole train with the scooter laws, and I can only talk about scooter laws because that's what I drive, last year, about April last year. And it was okay, very slowly, for like six, seven months, and then all of a sudden when I came back in January, I think I got like six tickets within the space of 24 hours, 26 hours. Like stupid, stupid reasons. Like...

reasons I should have gotten that ticket to be honest but it was to the point where I was like oh fuck I gotta start following the rules exactly and it was a switch for me I wouldn't care before you were spoiled by it absolutely we were all spoiled by like I think when we all first got here I'm not sure when did you get here 2010 was my first time so we're about the same time I'm 09 and he's a little bit before that so

We were all kind of spoiled about the kind of like the shit we can all get away with when we first got here. Like we got away with a lot of shit. It's the wild west. Yeah, exactly. The wild west. As like Eric likes to put it, the wild east. You know what I mean? Right? So we got away with a lot of shit. We were very spoiled in terms of kind of like the amount of freedom that we had here. That's true. And to a lot of people who've never been to China, when you say that, when you use the word freedom, I think for them it's counterintuitive. They think like, well, you have more freedom when you went to China?

But for the folks that don't know, when we offer this guy here for several years, you could really almost do anything you want and get away with it. Can I just say, I mean, going back to the whole mixing, you guys are Asian males. As a white-looking woman, I walk with enough confidence into any fucking building, no one stopped me. No one stopped me. Like, at all.

Any place I went to. Like a club could have like a big line, a waiting list. You would just walk in. Walk in. No one would say anything. Absolutely. I walked into construction sites. Wow. And no one said anything. I still walk into construction sites, but I'm a little bit more subtle about it now. But before, especially if you are very, very clearly a foreigner, whatever you wanted. Yeah. And I don't mean like things, but like the access. Yeah.

So things and opportunities. Because either people would be too shy to even approach or they'd be like, well, they must be someone if they're going to be coming in here like this in this situation. Do you remember when they used to hire foreigners to sit at businesses for like six hours and pretend to be workers? Yeah.

pretend to be like VPs or whatever. - They did. - I did that like one or two times. You would wear something nice and they would bring the investors in and they would see a foreigner in the back and be like, da, da, da, and you would just be like-- - So you would just be at a desk or a cubicle-- - For a day. And they would pay you X amount.

So you would just be pretending to work? What would you actually be doing? You've never heard about this? No. You were literally just acting? You were acting and pretending to work. I know so many white people here that have been hired to just be the VP of whatever. They don't need to talk. Just do a handshake, a photo. Have like a business card or something? Yeah, or some shit, yeah.

Wow, is this still going on? No. People don't give a shit now. People don't give a shit. And also too, I feel like, and this is so, I mean, we talk about the irony of more freedom and stuff. China's become more nationalized in the sense of like the China pride, you know, a single person like that too. Before, they would think nothing of hiring a foreigner or someone with a green card or a work visa to hire, but now they want to hire someone

They want to push those people up. China and Singapore are very similar in that sense. It's not the opportunity for foreigners to be immediately up there in that space.

agency is not there. They have much more competition now. Yeah, I mean it's the same idea why the government wants to bring all of their finances home. They want to bring investment back. So they've leaned heavily on the wealthy here, the big businessmen, a lot of the big business corporations here have started selling off their international properties so they can reinvest it in China, but you know someone leaned on them.

You know, China's just trying to keep it. It makes sense though, I mean... I'm not against it. It makes sense. I mean, if you were running a country, your own country, you would do the same thing. I mean, your job is for the best interest of the country, right? Can I ask, do you guys drink the Kool-Aid here? Which Kool-Aid? A little bit. I think I know, so we're saying a little bit.

Like the political Kool-Aid? I didn't realize how much I drank the Kool-Aid. I was at a New Year's gathering with a couple of my sister's friends. And one of them is a super great guy who works in the Navy. And he works on like, his clearance is pretty high. Is it Chinese Navy? No, no, no. The American Navy. And his clearance is pretty high. And he worked a lot in the South China Seas. Oh, man.

And him and I get along beautifully. Except for this 45 minute period where him and I were just like... Going at it. Going at it. And I'm like, China is number one. All right? They can do what they want because their country is supporting people. They can build those islands. It was their islands. It's called the South China Sea. And I do that. I find myself defending communism a lot.

a shit ton I mean yeah in that sense I can say the same thing you're welcome because I have been doing the exact same thing I have been doing the exact same thing and I don't know when it happened but I'm like well it's a billion people what do you expect they have to do what they have to do like fuck what's wrong with me they have to do what they have to do I know

It takes an open mind in order, I feel, to come from the kind of places we came from, countries we grew up in, areas we grew up in, to live here and start kind of drinking the Kool-Aid, as you say. From a place of privilege. We are in a place of privilege. Obviously, right? So...

But it takes a very open mind to think that way. And like you, because what you're saying, I 1,000% understand. Because I went through, and am still going through in many ways, the exact same thing. I find myself defending communism now. Not as an overall method of governing in terms of you can just apply it to every country and it'll automatically be better than what they have. No.

But I'm saying specifically for China, right? If you had a democracy here or it came up during the Cultural Revolution with a democracy, this place would still be a wasteland. Like, it would not be the China we know now. It would be completely in mess. It would just be a huge mess, right? It would be like the Middle East right now in many ways. Or South America. Yeah. South America who has democracy. Or probably even worse if you think about it, if you think about where China came from. So...

I find myself kind of defending it. And the analogy that I use all the time

And I use this with my friends back in the States, right? And they don't really have a response for it, so I know it gets under their skin. Because they're all very pro. Like, obviously, when you grow up in America, you drink the American Kool-Aid. Yes. We all drank the American Kool-Aid. You're surrounded by it. There is no stronger Kool-Aid. There is no more spiked Kool-Aid in the world than, I think, the American Kool-Aid, to be honest. Yeah, I know. They probably watched us real early. I didn't realize that yet. Real good. You know what I mean? So, yeah.

The analogy I always use is, take a big, let's say a Fortune 500 company, a big corporation, right? And you're running that corporation. So you have thousands of people under your employ, right? And let's say you're the CEO or the chairman. Would you, and you were gonna hire, you had to find a replacement for the CEO. - Okay. - And you were supposed to bring on a new CEO, right? A person to kind of run the whole company.

Would you relinquish the right to choose that CEO to the whole company? So that includes the interns, that includes the janitors, that includes the night security men, that includes all the staff and managers and everybody, right? Everybody that's involved in that company. No, it's too emotional.

But it's not only emotional. They wouldn't be educated enough to know what's going on with all the companies. They're not qualified. But that's the thing is that when you're not qualified, you go into motion. Exactly. It's when you're not qualified, I vote for, well, I like their red shirt. They look good on them. They seem like a nice man. It's an emotional reaction. So, no, of course not. Yeah, of course not. And that's why companies are not run like that.

In reality. Yeah. Or anywhere. You know what I mean? There's a board, right? There's shareholders, but it's really just a board. And they all are very qualified to be there, or most of them should be anyway. And it's in a room where you decide who the next CEO is going to be. That's what America does. We just don't call it that.

Okay, so... You don't think the next president has been chosen already? You don't think this group has been hand-selected by the DNC and the GOP 20 years ago? I am completely open to that idea. I just didn't know you were okay. You were going down that path. Obama was hand-selected from the time he was 32 years old. He was on the radar.

You know, I've worked with a lot of people that have worked with the Republican National Congress and the DNC. And that's their job is to identify rising stars and future politicians. You know, they had a whole joke on Parks and Rec about like, we've seen what you do on TV. We think you'd be a great candidate for X, Y, and Z.

They're hand-selected. My president has been hand-selected for me, which is fine. I accept that. So you don't believe in the power of the vote in America? Or do you feel it just does so little? I feel that people have a false trust in the process. I think that if people were—I think if the process is more transparent and people really knew what they were voting for, I think that the vote might be a little bit different.

But true democracy, absolute democracy doesn't work unless you're in school camp and they're saying, hey guys, do you want carrot sticks or grapes for snack?

That's true democracy. Other than that, but even that's not true democracy because I've already chosen your options. True democracy never existed. Just like true communism never really existed. No one actually executes it. Well, that's the thing. People have tried to execute true communism and it's been, I mean, Pol Pot tried very, very hard. The Bolsheviks. People try to apply true communism. Communism on paper...

Actually, it makes sense. Makes total sense. Total sense. But there's only one way that it doesn't make sense is why would a janitor make as much money as a doctor when a doctor has to put in all this schooling? And we're also kind of equating jobs as this is all equally important when they're not all equally important.

kind of thing. But it's true democracy doesn't exist. I really believe that. And so what you're talking about in communism, I just feel, and the reason why I started drinking the Kool-Aid, is that at least they're honest about it. At least they're open about it. At least they're open that this is not my choice, that they're deciding this for me. Versus America, where they're telling me, oh no,

"Oh no, you have a choice, you have a voice." Not really. - They're kind of hypnotizing you. - Yeah. No, there's other, there's I'm allowed to protest openly, I'm allowed to criticize government openly. There's a lot of other ways that, but in terms of this specific topic, no. It's exactly the same, but America tries to pretend, tries to influence me into thinking that I have a choice and I have a voice in this process. But I don't believe that.

Is that bad? Is that like, is that very bitter? No. I mean, I agree. There's a, I think there's a bit that, who was it? I think George Carlin. I don't understand this, but I think it was George Carlin that he did. And he was basically, and he was doing this bit and he was talking about, he was talking about the United States and he was talking about democracy and our freedoms, right? And everyone believes in we're the greatest country in the world because everyone here, we're all free, right? We have freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom. You always hear that. It's such a key word.

And he's like, if you really want to know about your freedoms, you know, go back to like the 1940s. If you were Japanese, you know, you can ask them about your freedoms because they were American citizens. They were all American citizens. They were just ethnically Japanese. All got sent away to concentration camps. Didn't have a single right to do anything about it. So, I mean, at a flick of a switch, if they want to, they can just do what we feel the communist...

will do and have done just as easily if they wanted to. Despite your quote unquote freedoms they have. So at that point, what do you do? Do you subscribe to a particular system? Do you find a country that ticks off at least most of the boxes? Or do you evolve and accept? You just pick a place based on other factors and say, okay, well, I just have to accept that.

Well, I think without getting too deep into it, it's more about, you know, if you're making a personal decision for yourself or your family, let's say, then it's just about your quality of life. Like if you find you have a better quality of life here versus there, then you go there, here. You know what I mean? You stay here. Well, how's your quality of life here? It's good. You think it's better than it would be in the States? I don't know. I don't know. I'm not quick to say that it will be.

But I really don't know because I don't think it'll be any worse. Okay. I don't think, I feel confident that it wouldn't be any worse. I'm just thinking, would it be any better in the States? Like, would it, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Like, there's a baseline that I'm confident I would have in both places. And that's, it's the same baseline.

It's just like, what's the ceiling? You know what I mean? Let's say I was to move to the United States for an extended period of time, and let's say, what would my life be like in terms of the potential it has there versus the potential it has here? And where is that ceiling, right? Now, obviously, that's an answer that it's impossible to answer, but...

That's what I'm, that's where I'm thinking. Okay. Okay. And so that's why I'm saying I don't know. Okay. But I don't think China would, the quality of life here would be any worse than if I were to live in the States. No, I would agree with that. Yeah. Yeah, it's...

I 100% agree with that. As a matter of fact, when I do talk with my friends back at home, there was a period in my life a few years ago where I was considering moving back. And I did go back for a little bit when I made my short film back in New York. And I was considering. I'm like, okay, well, at the same time, I'm going to feel it out. I'm living here for a couple months. I'm going to feel it out. What's it like to be back in the States, back in my hometown with my old friends, all that stuff.

And I mean, did I enjoy myself? Of course. It was nice to see old friends, back in my old city. But at the same time, I was pretty happy to come back. You know, like, where is that ceiling that you're saying? I feel like the ceiling here is higher, whether professionally or even non-professionally. I feel like

Being in Shanghai, I can only compare it to New York City. I don't know about other suburbs, second tier, third tier cities. That may be a different story. I'm only going to compare Shanghai to New York City. So here, I feel like friends my age or younger or older, in general, tend to be more outgoing or driven or...

I don't know. It's just a different energy. It's a different energy still, right? That's one. Two, professionally, it's a lot more open in terms of growth, growth route. Filmmaking, for example, commercial industry, you have a lot more opportunity. You have a lot more aggressive investment opportunities.

to expand the business. Access. Access. For example, if I'm here, maybe it could be because I've been here for a while, but if I wanted to, let's say, access a celebrity or if I wanted to do something or find money or whatever, I feel a lot more confident here to be like, I'm going to figure it out and it's going to happen. Can I ask on that celebrity note, and this is very interesting, you've been here 12 years. About. About.

So you're saying, I say, Howie, I need a celebrity in this place. And you say, okay, yeah. Give me a couple calls. It's, you know, Kevin Bacon. What is it called? Six Degrees of Separation. Yeah, Kevin Bacon and shit. And I get it for you and you feel confident in your ability to do so. Now,

and I think about this all the time, if you had lived in New York for 12 years, also just as dedicated, also working towards the thing that you were working on here, is there a chance that possibly you would have the same network to access Kevin Bacon? I haven't answered to that. Maybe. But I feel like the chances are still higher here because of cultural differences. And what's the cultural differences? What do Chinese people rely on here?

I feel like this is a puzzle. Hold on, I really want to get this answer right. What do you mean? Like in general? Or like, can you be a little more specific? When doing business or working with friends. Guanxi. Exactly. Oh, okay, yeah. So do the guanxi. As long as you play the game right and you've been like building your guanxi, you've been building your network, there's nothing you can't do. LA is like that. New York is like that. But not to the degree of... Well, it's not an accepted open topic of...

Yeah, it's not okay. I would say it's like yeah. Yes, it's there but it's just like the political system It's like America. It's like as you were saying, yeah under the radar It's like yeah, you think you're free but hands it's got some other shit going on here Well, do you think that the what you guys are talking about right? Do you think that has something to do with maybe? More of like the industry you guys are in because you guys are both in the kind of the filmmaking entertainment industry here and the reason why I say that is I

because different industries are on different competitive scales depending on where you are. So in the industry that you're in, if you're in America, let's say you're in California, obviously, the competition there is just going to be so much more crazy, right? I mean, that's fucking Hollywood, right? So versus here where it's still crazy, but it's not Hollywood, right? Let's be real, right? So maybe you guys have, like,

like i hate to use because it's not it's it's much more than the cottage industry here obviously but it's more of that kind of feeling i guess where you guys are it's like it's kind of like this groundswell especially now creativity and artists and filmmakers and writers kind of coming together so there's that energy kind of buzzing and people are kind of it's like the whole industry is kind of coming up together right and you guys can ride that wave with it so to speak

Whereas if you were to be in Hollywood, I mean, it's set. The rules are set, the structure is set, the hierarchy is set, everything is set. - People don't leave, that's why. The reason why it works here, especially here, and we talk about the access, is that people leave. If people stayed,

I would be at the bottom of the total pool. I wouldn't have access to anyone, but people leave here. And so as they leave, these spaces become created and these vacuums that you fill, maybe you're not qualified to fill that vacuum. Maybe you shouldn't be jumping up those. But there's an opportunity. There's an opportunity and you jump and you're there. And so I have access to that person faster. In LA, no one leaves.

People stay and they sit and they build on those relationships. And they hold on to it with dear life. And so you're never given, there's no vacuum that you can fill because that guy's been working there for 30 years. You know, he's built his way up since he was 22. Here, people are here, yes, for long periods of time. But I can name on one hand the people I've known that have been here for 25 years. Mm-hmm.

Maybe, if that. And they're not in my industry. I've definitely jumped the gambit of, you know how you have those tiers of friends? So you have people that have been here for zero to three years, and then three to seven, and then seven to 12, and then the people who are 12 plus.

And then as you move from tier to tier, you start associating with the tier people in the lower tiers less. The people who tell me they're here for a year, I'm like, oh, so nice to meet you. Have a nice life. We're very different. Why am I going to invest in you? Come talk to me in at least five years. Yeah, I'm not going to get my heart broken when you leave. It's too much. I've been to too many goodbye parties. You don't know yet. You don't understand yet. Come talk to me. And so it's...

Maybe it's an industry thing here, but I think it applies to all these industries. People that, especially foreigners that move here, very few foreigners, unless they get married to locals and this is their life, are here for life. And so you come into it knowing that at some point, an opportunity is gonna be created for you. You just have to wait for it. And you don't get that feeling when you move to New York or LA or any other city.

I know that if I just wait long enough, something's going to happen and I can jump into that position. That's a really good point. Yeah. Never thought about it like that before. Well, especially in our industry. Which goes back to the whole ceiling thing. That's why the ceiling here, I think, is higher. So if I'm just going to talk about this small bubble of industry of filmmaking, yeah, I mean, it's one of the biggest...

growing fastest growing sectors of business here right filmmaking so yeah that ceiling is definitely gonna be higher because the hunger is there the investments there the eyes are there all that but I mean I feel like you can switch it to anything you know I feel like you can switch it to let's let's say I don't know restaurant business because we have some friends doing restaurant business and stuff like that like I feel like if we if we if you and I were like okay let's open up a restaurant tomorrow

Forget about the reason we have, forget about the connections we have with other restaurateurs. But like, I feel like if we didn't have connections with restaurateurs, we would still have that confidence to be like,

let's just figure it out, we can do it. But I feel like if we were back in New York, we would have a slight hint of maybe hesitation, of be like, but how are we gonna do this? We gotta figure out how to do this, right? You know what I mean? It's just a little different. I just feel like the mentality is different. - Can I ask, and I'm really curious about this, I didn't grow up with, I mean, I had a very middle class lifestyle. I wouldn't say my family is poor.

But my parents sacrificed to send us to good education and I definitely didn't have as much money as my friends' families did, but I definitely had more money than other people did. If you grew up with money,

there's a built-in confidence there that you could do that like if i grew up with a silver spoon in my mouth and someone said you need to get a hold of this restaurateur i'd be like oh yeah sure easy done yeah because i think i think a lot of it comes from you see like the people before you see people around you or your parents kind of have those kind of resources and you have you have a con i mean i've had people disagree with you on this money gives you a confidence that

Yes, you still have insecurities, but money gives you certain levels of confidence. I think that's case by case. Do you think so? I think it's case by case. I mean, not to say that I've met people with money that are not insecure. Most people I've met with money that I know are insecure, but I'm talking about in terms of feeling confident enough to know that you can go and find someone if I ask you to go and find a celebrity or restaurateur.

you know immediately because you are in a certain class of society that you can find this person. I won't feel like that in the States. - Let's swap out that word. Do you feel it's confidence? You feel confident enough? Or do you think it's because they feel privileged enough? - I don't even think they think of the word. I just think that they've, it's in their-- - No, but how would you describe it? - If someone asked me to find a restaurateur,

If you had asked me this when I was 16, I'm like, "I don't know any people that own restaurants. What are you talking about?" But here, because I've been around that world, I feel confident that I could find that. Now I know people that at 16,

whose parents were restaurateurs or they were in that field, it's not, they don't think about the fact that it's privilege or access or confidence. It just is. It's just something that's in their life. - Well, they have just those resources floating around them. - It's there. Of course my mom knows the ambassador of Bulgaria. Like, you know, it's like,

It's very casual. It's not like a, it's not an act of privilege. It's not them being pretentious. It's not a brag. It's just like, this is a fact for them. It's just stating a fact. It's absolutely not a brag. It's just a fact. And not to say that I'm, I feel like I'm in a different tier here, but I wouldn't have that confidence back home because I still feel that I'm competing with the fact that I don't know anyone, that a fact that I didn't,

I didn't go to an Ivy League college where you have all these networks. I didn't work in a finance industry. I didn't work from, if you want to talk about from grassroots, I didn't work in one particular industry from the age of 20 on. I've had like 900 different jobs just from coming to Shanghai. But in Shanghai it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter. Someone could come into the movie industry six months from now and they will have nearly as much access as I do within a year if they work hard enough. Really? Yeah, I feel that way. If someone, like I had an intern come and work for me and they kept their head down and they worked hard and they met people and they did the job, they would have just as much access as I would. It's funny you're saying that. It's like the whole idea of the American dream.

But it's almost like the Chinese dream. Like a lot of people here, I mean, as friends or non-friends in our circle, whatever, it's like, you know, they want to do something, they put their mind to it, they try to do it. And I'm not saying that these particular friends are super successful or anything, but they do it. Yeah. You know, and that's just the... It's just funny to me where if you're only living in America in the bubble, and you look at China as this communist country,

You hear me say the China dream. Like, if you want to do something, you can do it. I think so. Just do it. And we're all in agreement that you can do it. You can do it. I'm not saying it's going to be easy, but yeah, you can do it. I feel like a better person here. But you only discover that or you only know that by living here. Living here. You know what I mean? Unless you've been here...

And really understand what it is to live here. Like, you're never going to know that. And you're going to refuse to accept to even believe that. You know, especially if you're, like, raised in somewhere like the States. Right? Like, before, if you were talking to me, you know, like, 15 years ago as a kid, raised in the States, and you were telling me everything you're telling me now, like, fuck you, man. Like, I mean, like, I wouldn't believe you. I would think you're trying to brainwash me. You know what I mean? But, you know, having been here and really understanding, it's true.

I mean, it's 100% true. But you're not going to know that until you just live here for an extended period of time. That's true. I will say for me, it's a little bit of vanity. We talk about that transient society and people leaving. Every person that leaves makes me more powerful. That sounds like I'm a superhero. It gives me more legitimacy in what I do and I know. Every person that leaves, I know more.

I know more than the next person that comes in. - Because you become that senior. - Yes, exactly. Like as a senior, I mean look at your difference when you're a senior in high school and a freshman in high school. My God. - You're talking about like a totem pole of seniority. - Exactly, even the most insecure,

geek as a senior in high school could feel a sense of superiority because that's what it is. Let's not sugarcoat it. And seniority and knowledge and success and confidence over someone who's their first day of freshman year. And that's literally how I feel Shanghai has been for me. Every person that leaves and I go up a little bit more. Every person that leaves and I go up a little bit more. And for me, internally,

my self-confidence is tremendous. It's been tremendous for me in terms of my confidence and how I interact with people professionally. And you know what's amazing? I'm just gonna interject for a second because we've talked about this before. And you have this confidence and you're doing your thing and you don't speak Chinese fluently. Nope. How broken is it? Pretty broken. Pretty broken. Yeah, broken like you couldn't, you had to be escorted up to this

Okay, so when you put me on the spot, it gets very difficult. People speak to me, and I will get probably about 80%. Now, that is not consistent. I understood everything that woman was telling me with the exception of a couple of words. She wanted to know whether or not you were the foreigner or the French foreigner that lived on this floor. She wanted to escort me up because someone told her that strangers in the building needed to be escorted up. That's not true. It's fine. It's fine.

But I understood what she was saying, and I was responding to her in Mandarin. Now, if you put me in another situation, that doesn't mean I'm going to understand 80%. And people, they watch it. They're like,

That's not 80%. That's not 80%. Like, fuck you. Like, I know, I know. And when I've tried to take classes, and I've gotten off about this, I can only do private tutoring because two reasons. One, it doesn't work for my schedule to commit to days of classes. It's just I'm a freelancer. I can't do that. But the second is I cannot go into a beginner's class because I know more than a beginner's class.

but I cannot go into a more advanced class. - So you're kind of like no man's land, right? - Yeah, 'cause I can't say the most basic shit. Like, literally, on the spot right now, I can't ask you what country you're from. And that's 101. - In Chinese you can't say that? Okay. - Something guo, guo is your country. - Guo zha? - Ni de guo zhou, guo, okay, your home, your home country. - Oh, country, yeah. - Right, but I mean like, the proper sentence that they teach you in Chinese, Mandarin 101,

it's lost on me right now. If he told me, I'd be like, okay. But you understand more than speaking. Yes. 100%. I hear that from my neighbors all the time who only speak Shanghai dialect and Putong dialect is you understand really well, you just don't speak it very well. But that's pretty, I mean, I think that's a general... I think that's most people. You're going to understand it before you can speak it. Speaking it is, well, not speaking it, speaking it is the next hardest thing. The hardest thing is probably writing it.

Writing is very hard. Don't forget, I came into Shanghai with knowing nothing. I knew Ni Hao. That's it. My family didn't grow up speaking Mandarin. Even if we did, Mandarin wouldn't have been the language. Well, from zero to 80%, that's pretty fucking good. No, I'm very loose with that percentage. It's a very flexible 80%. I have survived and I have survived...

I've succeeded more than I thought I could without knowing the language as well as I have. Yeah, I mean think about it, you've been in and out or, I mean solid for like six years, but in and out nine years comfortably, like living in this country. Well yeah, but I really took off like two and a half years ago, but even then we're still at the same level of language. But you're okay, like you're cool. I'm okay. Like my chef friend Audrey, who we had on this show before, right? So she was raised in California, right?

And she's thinking about... She was here on our show last time because she was looking for jobs here. She was looking for kitchen jobs here. And her biggest concern was the language barrier. Because she speaks zero Chinese. She's not Chinese. She's Filipino. So she speaks zero. Understands zero. So probably like what you were like maybe when you first got here. So that was like her biggest fear. She's like, I don't know how to speak Chinese. How am I going to just...

be in this business and thrive and even just get around normally just like without language. And you're like, look, they'll come. There's plenty of people here.

expats and foreigners here who don't speak or didn't speak a lick of Chinese who've been living here for over a decade, you know, I mean like there's I'm embarrassed six years I thought when I was here for two years I would meet people that were here for five or six or twelve or fourteen that didn't speak and I'm like I'm never gonna be like you. Yeah. Well, I'm like that person and I can't deny the fact that if I spoke even

Not fluently, but even if I spoke 50% better. The conversational. Oh my goodness. Did your father speak any Chinese? No. No, okay. Yeah, like my father was from the South. We spoke a very specific dialect. Okay.

to the south, not even just Canton, like a specific dialect. My baby sister speaks Mandarin, but she also studied it from age 11 to 22. She went to Beijing for a year, like didn't come home. Like back in 2007. Is she a translator or something? No, she works for a theater group in Minnesota. Okay, cool.

But I remember when she came to visit me, and I didn't realize how good her Mandarin was, and she would argue with me. I've always noticed this actually, on a side note. People who learn Mandarin when they're 11 versus as an adult, you meet an adult that learns Mandarin and they learn it to a degree of success, they're always all like, "Get out of the way. Watch me speak Mandarin." And they're very confident about this.

People, and this is not just her, people I know that learned it from Eleven, for some reason it gets, especially our generation, it gets drilled into you, you're never going to be good enough. It's never going to be fluent. So they're always like, oh. They're all self-conscious about it. Oh, no, no, no, I don't know how to speak. And so I remember her being here, the IEs in my compound would come up and be like, oh, I need to meet my son. They wanted to hear her speak, and people who spoke Mandarin would talk to her, and they would come to me later and be like,

her tones, I mean, because she wrote memorization, her tones were flawless. And she herself didn't feel super confident. Plus at a young age, I mean.

It's it, yeah. But she hasn't practiced it in a while, so she didn't feel as confident. But I remember this one particular moment where she couldn't remember the name for bike handlebars. And she was really upset with herself because she had ridden a bike in Beijing for a year, and she couldn't remember how to say bike handlebars. I still don't. If you ask me, I don't know. But I was all like... How do you say bike handlebars? My big joke is that if someone said, hey, you have 10 fingers, you lose a finger, not my thumbs, because I love my thumbs. You can...

But if you had to lose a finger to have half your sister's Mandarin ability, take them. Take it. All your fingers? Not all of them. Just like one finger. One finger. Take my pinky. But take a finger. I would lose a finger. If I could speak fluently and read and write, I might consider losing a spleen. Is that bad? No, a spleen's useless. I'm going to have my doctor friends kind of arguing with me that that's idiotic. Let's up the ante. Kidney. You have two kidneys. You can live on one, but not as well. Fluent Mandarin.

Writing and reading. Fluent Mandarin, writing and reading, would you lose a kidney? Go. Yes. Yeah? I mean, like, look, that's a big trap because knowing... Would you lose six inches off your height? I mean, I'm 5'1". Exactly. What have I got to lose?

Like, Jesus Christ. Actually, no, not for that. So you feel like you have nothing to lose in height? Can I just say, you know how hard it is? Six inches is a lot. My life is actually more hard with my height than it is with not speaking Mandarin. Okay. Why, just like reaching things? Yes! Stupid shit. I tried to put on a scrim the other day at a photo shoot, and I was like,

like a bee like a t-rex like it was ridiculous like it was so embarrassing it was really bad but like yeah i don't know if i would lose height that's a lot of height to lose no but being fluent in another language that's like akin to a superpower yeah that is now that being said i have not decided to say hey this i'm gonna spend four months three months six months dedicating myself to learning this i have not done that that's

And for a number of reasons. You don't have to lose a finger to do that. I didn't have to lose a finger. I didn't expect to be here as long as I have. I did not expect that. When I first came here, I thought two years, three years max. Well, the advantage you have if you decide right now that like, I'm going to put in the commitment, I'm going to put in the work to just kind of realizing my potential in terms of being how fluent I can be in Mandarin, let's say, right? Reading and writing. You have the advantage of you're living here.

so that you're immersed in that environment all the time. So that you can apply what you learn immediately. So your rate of learning is going to be so much quicker. There's nothing more useless in my opinion, because I went through this, in trying to learn a language outside of that environment in another country that doesn't speak that environment.

So, okay, let's say I'm trying to learn Chinese in the United States, right? And I don't have any other Chinese friends. All my friends, between my friends and my parents, we all speak English. In my daily life, it's all English, right? Let's say. So let's say I go to a Chinese class maybe two times a week for an hour, an hour and a half, two hours, whatever it is, right? And you learn the words, you try to learn the grammar, and you try to memorize it, right? And then, so you're in there for an hour and a half. You learn. You walk out of that classroom, right?

All the hours outside of that one hour and a half in your day, you're hearing, you're speaking, you're singing English, not Chinese. So it doesn't get reinforced. There's not that subconscious of it being kind of like... Yeah, so you're not forced to use it and to hear it and to listen to it and to say it all the time. So then everything, or at least a significant percentage of what you learn in that hour and a half class...

goes out the window. That's true. And you have to relearn it the next. So it's so slow and useless to try to let go. Unless your work ethic is ridiculous. And I do know people like this. Like Kobe Bryant work ethic. Then maybe you can be okay. Unless you make it like a passion and you're so honed in on it. You immerse yourself into it. Yeah, then you immerse yourself into it. Because then outside of that class, you're going to be thinking about it. You're going to be speaking it. You're going to be writing it. You're going to be applying it, trying to apply it in class.

all facets of your life, right? But that's what it takes.

Right? Because if you're less of doing that, you have to totally just jump in to the deep end, kind of, and live in that country. And even if you're not even taking classes, just like you, you're gonna start picking it up. Yeah. And you do. I use myself as an example because when I moved here, I really didn't speak Mandarin. Yeah. And I had a job interview in Hong Kong where they tried to speak to me in Mandarin, and I was like, "I maybe understood 15% of what you said." And I could not, like, you know, respond in Chinese.

And he's like, "Okay, we gotta learn it." So I moved to Shanghai, I got a tutor. I told you this, I had a tutor for about four months. Only four months. It's still a while though. Yeah, four months, but like three times a week. And two hours each time. But obviously I put in a lot of work, my own work ethic into it.

But after that, I mean, there's a reason why I didn't have a tutor anymore. It's because I could do conversational Chinese. You were here, yeah. You know, like, I was like, okay, well, I'll just continue growing that way. And yeah, if you go back then to after that four months, I would force myself to talk. I constantly got laughed at because I would say the wrong shit or I'd be like, I couldn't do it. But yeah, eventually it became...

Like nothing. Nothing. Because that's the thing, I'm in the environment. And I force myself to be embarrassed. I force myself to use that. I force myself to... Exactly. You had to get over that hump that I had to get over too. Because being like ABCs, right? And so the difficulty that I think not a lot of people realize on this, you're kind of like ABC like us, right? Is that because we look Chinese, so we walk down the street, people think, well, he's another local kid, right? Yeah.

But we can't speak with the flu or at least we weren't at that time able to speak with the fluency of a local and our Chinese was broken and stupid sounding, right? Um,

it made it that much worse. Because let's say someone looks like you or a Caucasian, right? People come in, they see you, they meet you, they already have an expectation. Oh, this person is not going to speak any Chinese. So no matter how little Chinese you can speak, any amount of Chinese you can speak is impressive to them. It's very true. Because they were expecting zero. And any little, they're all like, well,

But see, that effect is completely opposite with us. Yeah, I know. They come up, they expect you to be completely fluent. I did have an experience once like that where I was with a white friend of mine and this is the only country that they've ever identified that I was Chinese.

I mean that being said, I've been ethnically... That's impressive. This is the country... I would never have said you were Chinese. They see Hapa kids all the time here. Like Hapa, do you know Hapa? Yeah, yeah. They see Hapa kids all the time here so they manage to hone in on that particular part of Asia. So they can recognize that I'm Chinese. I only got in trouble in 2010. I was with a white friend and they would speak to me and then he would respond.

And then they would speak to me and then he would respond. And after about five minutes of that, they finally went to him and apparently this is what they told him. It was like, "What's with this bitch? She's not talking to us. We're talking to her. She's not responding." - They didn't put two and two together. - They didn't put two and two together. And I had one father, or one father, I assume he was a father because this is what he asked me, was like, "Are your parents disappointed that you don't speak the language?"

It was a very casual conversation in an elevator on my apartment, like going down 20 floors. I was like... As a tear rolls down your face. Like, ouch. We're going to go there? Damn. You can have your knife back, please. Yeah, I know. I think that I've never felt that sense of embarrassment that you talk about. And so that motivational push to learn...

wasn't there, not to mention that if it was super apparent that I was losing jobs,

Because of the fact that I didn't speak Mandarin, maybe I would be embarrassed. But I am, I am definitely losing jobs because I don't speak Mandarin, but it's not in my face. You know? It's behind the scenes. It's behind the scenes. Behind the scenes they won't even consider me and that's fine. I don't see it. You don't really know what's going on. If I went into an interview and I talked to them and like, we're not hiring you because you don't speak Mandarin, that's direct. That I feel. But I don't get that.

I'm never going to get there. But you know what's happening. Oh, of course. A hundred percent. We talk about this all the time. I would have hired her so many times. A million times. And I talk to him all the time. I'm like, how about now? You just need an English speaker now? Just pure English. 100% English. But it's unfair because I can get jobs done.

Yes, maybe it's not as efficient as I could be but that's not on them. That's on me. My life is harder. My chores and tasks are harder in my position because I don't speak Mandarin. But my clients don't feel that. All they care about is that the job is done. It's just my life that's more difficult. But I think that if I had it in my face, if I was embarrassed all the time,

Yes. I am surprised that I've lasted six years. I am surprised that I've gotten the jobs that I've gotten without speaking Mandarin. That doesn't mean I don't want to speak, but the motivation to speak is different. I don't want to speak it because it's going to improve my life. I want to speak it because I want to speak it very badly. I think that's important. Very badly. I want to learn so badly how to speak it. It makes me feel...

very successful and good when I can speak to people in the language that they themselves speak. I also think it's a sense of accomplishment each time. Well, no, it's more than that. I've spoken to people in English and a lot of people here speak English and English is great. And then they tell me or other people told me, "Oh man, you really should hear them speak in Mandarin. It's beautiful." I mean, it's just

you know what well-spoken people sound like. And then when you're forcing a well-spoken person to speak in a language that's not theirs, it's broken. And I want to be able to understand that person on their level. Well, that's why I was about to interject and be like, okay, so we speak Chinese conversational and obviously not scholarly, but we can speak Chinese. Yeah, absolutely.

And when I hang out, because I really enjoy hanging out with local people. And because it's a very different atmosphere. And sometimes it's just a different vibe. And I like to be around that. I've been around situations where I'm with...

quote-unquote scholarly Chinese people or people with a with a lot more like deep-rooted culture that have a lot more topics to talk about That's not just about modern topics and I've been in those situations where they get really deep and they get like Whether it's political cultural historical whatever they get really deep about it, and then I'm just like I'm lost like I can't even be a part of this because I

Number one, I cannot join in. I can ask questions. You can't contribute to the conversation. I cannot contribute and I'll ask questions. But even with their responses, it would be hard for me to comprehend because they'd be like, blah, blah, blah, blah. Do you know this? I'm like, no. Are you talking about cultural differences or just the fact that the vocabulary? Vocabulary. Because they'll use words that it's not common conversational.

So whether it's historical figures, movements, artifacts, whatever. No, no, no, but that's different. There's a lot of people in the States where if I talked about a certain topic, people who aren't interested or haven't studied it would be like, what? So one thing is what you're saying is vocabulary. I think what you're saying is, let's say, and this happens all the time, so this is a real thing. A lot of the Chinese students in school, they learn the very su mian hua.

Right? Which means literal, like book, like vocabulary, like English book lessons, like how to speak literally. - Literary vocabulary. - Yeah, like how to speak formally and like 100% correct to the English grammar rules or whatever, right? So you speak in a very formal way. So they learn that and they think that's English. Once they go to America, let's say they're on the streets of New York.

you're chit-chatting with some guy and we're gonna be talking street talk so using you know pop culture slang or this and that right the way we talk is me very casual they're not gonna understand it to them it's always gonna it's almost gonna be like a different dialect can I tell you why no one speaks like the formal English the King's English but you know I saw I do educational voiceover work like I do the gal call in Shanghai province okay

They don't learn American, I mean just even classic American. We do slang, but they don't learn American English. They want American voices for voiceovers, but it's all British. It's all British, right? It's like the King's English. So when I do, for example, yesterday I did dictionary words. Like what words? So it's not always like this, but every once in a while you're doing just like words, right, for the chapter. But you have to pronounce them

in the British way. What? Yeah. So they want my voice because I come from Hawaii and I have a very neutral accent. It's not like, oh my God, guys, like, oh my God. Like it's very, it's a very neutral accent. But they want me to pronounce it with a British way.

So instead of colon cancer, and I mentioned this only because I remember this, it's colon cancer. Colon. Colon. Colon cancer. What? That's so weird. Why would they ask you to do that then? Because the way, I mean, you look at the scale of international students from China that go to the UK. Like every kid that I know, except for like one, went to the UK for university. But they want British students.

English with American voices. So I don't, the rest of it, I speak like the conversations I speak in. So instead of like aluminum, it would be like aluminum. Can I ask you something? Would you be able to pull it off if you wanted to, for example, colon cancer, would you be able to pull off and be like, oh, you want me to say it in a little bit of British? Sure.

Colin Canker. No. And then they'd be like, okay, cool. Actually, it depends on the studio. Yeah, because would they be like understanding? So there's some studios... Can you get away with like... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like how much they know? So most studios have the phonetics. The phonetics are next door. Yeah, yeah. And the phonetics are in the British phonetics. Oh, okay. So they can listen to it. Oh, absolutely. Like, Colin Canker. Yeah. And there are some studios... That was hard. I can't do it.

This guy was trying to do a Tracy Morgan impression. Oh do it do it, please. Oh I can't I can't. What was I doing? *music*