It’s the year 2009, and you’re at Kinkos, and you have your life manuscript sitting in a tall pile right next to you. You see, you had this crazy fever dream, and you’re scanning each page one by one because the coyote told you that if you scanned in all 320 pages at copy/fax machine #9 at the Kinkos in Costa Mesa, California, the last chapter would fall from the sky and you would get the insight you always wanted your entire life.

That story was stupid. And yet, that stupidity is kinda how you feel right now, sitting at the chat window of this LLM. (Just in case you forgot it was 2026, right?) You’ve been working with it all day, feeding it your life stories, not even sure if the payoff would be worth it. But at this point, you’ve already gone through all that effort.

“hey AI,” you mutter under your breath, “tell me what you see that I don’t, I guess.” And the machine replies:

You have spent 25 years getting better at describing yourself as smaller than you are.

And you go: huh. Cool observation. Anyway.

You don’t turn it over. You don’t sit with it. You scroll past it. The sentence sits there in the transcript like every other sentence in the transcript, in the same font, at the same size, with the same little timestamp next to it. You file it somewhere between “interesting” and “not now,” close the tab, and go make dinner.

(I should know better. I don’t.)

Two weeks later, you build a wiki.

Not a casual “let me organize my notes” wiki. A full infrastructure-layer, 26-years-of-personal-archive, feed-it-every-blog-post-you-have-ever-written wiki. You spin it up at 4 in the afternoon, and by 2 a.m., it’s still churning through 2019. You tell yourself this is about Karpathy’s post. You tell yourself this is about methodology. It’s worth it because you spend $20 on the Anthropic plan, then another $75 immediately, and finally, fuck it, $100. (If you know, you know.) You write a whole other essay — a good one, actually — about how the method works. You call it "The Museum of You" and publish it.

You do not, at any point, admit to yourself that you are doing all of this to get a second opinion.

Which is fine. People build elaborate structures all the time to avoid things. Some people go to grad school. Some people get really into CrossFit. Others go to Burning Man and build things only to literally burn them down weeks later, preferably allegedly while on ketamine.

You, apparently, built an AI-generated second brain out of your own corpus to avoid a single sentence a chatbot said to you in March.

Baby steps, I suppose.

The wiki finishes. You start poking around in it. Themes. People. Places. Periods. Character studies of people you haven’t thought about since the Bush administration. You are, genuinely, having a nice time.

And then — because of course — the wiki says the same fucking thing.

Different phrasing. Different angle. Different AI, even. But it’s the same finding: the documented life is substantially larger than the narrated one. Twenty-six years of evidence, cross-referenced against itself, and the pattern is you keep making yourself smaller on the page than you actually were in the room.

“What does that even mean?” you say out loud. Select sentence. Right-click in Obsidian. Choose “Simplify.”

Oh my GOD dude, it means you talk yourself down. You take Asian modesty to levels where even Asians are like “nah, you can stop now; we’re good.”

The self-deprecation isn’t the voice. It’s the job. It’s the thing you’ve been doing for a quarter century so that nobody — including you — could look at the whole picture and come back with a verdict worse than the one you’d already issued.

Because if you cut yourself down first, it won’t hurt as badly when someone else inevitably does it later.

You glance at it again. Briefly. But you’ve run out of wiki to build. There’s nothing left to do instead.

Here is the part where I’m supposed to have feelings about all of this.

I do have a feeling. It’s small and boring, and mostly I’m just tired. Not dramatically tired. Just the regular tired of having been handed the same note twice, from two different mirrors, and realizing the only reason I needed to hear it a second time was that I’d decided not to hear it the first.

The archive didn’t chase me. It just waited.

(This is the part where, five years ago, I would have made a joke to get us out of the room. I might still. Give me a minute.)

I don’t know what to do with any of this yet. That’s also fine. The whole point of the bit I’ve been running — the one where I describe everything I’ve ever done as a raging garbage fire or a case of me being in the right place at the wrong time with the wrong temperament — is that it doesn’t require me to do anything. The story stays the same. The person in the story stays the same size. Everything is manageable because nothing has to be updated.

And now something might have to be updated.

Not the voice. The voice can stay. You can pry the sardonic Asian-diaspora schtick out of my cold, dead hands. I mean the conclusion. The thing the voice has been pointing at for 26 years.

That part might have to move.

Anyway. The post I was going to write today was about something else. I’ll get to it tomorrow.

Or I won’t.

That would also, I guess, be data.

This is part of what I’ve been calling the Digital Mirror Project — the ongoing business of feeding 26 years of my own writing into AI tools and seeing what looks back. The methodology piece lives at Late to the Future. This one’s just the part where I had to sit with what it found.

I spent 49 years being what most parents—Asian or otherwise—considered a successful son: college degree from UC Davis, steady tech jobs, homeowner, the whole middle-class checklist. And yet, on the phone, I still catch my mom talking to her friends about me with this weird apologetic tone, like I’m a project that didn’t quite turn out as planned, despite following all the instructions on the box.

I’m going to break down five lessons about what it actually means to grow up as the “good” child when your parents were born before color TV existed and gender roles were carved in stone. Read this so you can stop wondering why you feel like you’re constantly failing even when you’re objectively succeeding.

Here are the five truths that took me four decades and probably thousands of dollars in therapeutic pharmaceuticals to understand.

Lesson 1: If Your Parents Were Born Before 1960, Being a Son Means Playing Life on Hard Mode (And Nobody’s Changing the Settings)

You thought you could prove your worth by outperforming everyone around you, didn’t you?

Oh, you sweet summer child.

The real answer is way simpler: stop trying to win a game that was rigged before you were born.

Here’s the thing about being a Chinese son: you’re supposed to be the family’s winning lottery ticket, the retirement plan, the one who validates all their sacrifices by propagating the family name. But if you show up without a wife, without grandchildren, without the specific brand of success they can brag about? You’re basically a scratch-off that says ‘NOT A WINNER.’

I have a college degree, own a home, and have had a career. But I’m 49, unmarried, no kids, and I’ve been unemployed more than once. That’s not the son story they were supposed to get.

But… at least now you know it’s not actually about you.

Lesson 2: They Never Hit You, But They Sure as Hell Broke Something

Most people think abuse requires visible marks.

That belief lasts until you’re 37 years old, curled into a fetal position at a therapist’s office because someone gave you mild criticism at work or flipped you off in traffic, and you spiraled for three days. Or severely traumatized them.

Accept that emotional scars count as shit that will fuck you up even if they don’t show up on X-rays. My parents never raised a hand to me. But they perfected this thing where disappointment just... hung in the air like cigarette smoke. (They didn’t smoke either, but you get the point.)

Here’s the brutal truth about emotional abuse from Asian parents:

• They don’t see it as abuse—they see it as high standards and motivation.

• The wounds they inflict are precision strikes: a sigh, a comparison to your cousin, a comment about how you “used to be so promising.”

• You’ll spend your entire adult life trying to prove you’re good enough to people who never actually said you weren’t; they just never confirmed you were.

The critical factor in healing? Understanding that their emotional unavailability is their limitation, not your failure. You can’t achieve your way into warmth that was never on the table to begin with.

I know it feels as if you just did this one other thing this way, they’ll finally show you the approval you’ve been chasing. Trust me, I’ve tried. It doesn’t work that way.

Lesson 3: You Became the Family Crisis Manager Without Anyone Actually Hiring You

The biggest mistake you’ll make is thinking you’re responsible for solving everyone’s problems.

You’re not, but good luck convincing your brain of that when it’s been programmed since age seven to fix everything. Because here’s what happens: your parents have a financial problem, you research solutions. Someone needs help with technology, immigration paperwork, medical bills—somehow it all becomes YOUR problem to solve. Nobody asked you to be the family IT department, accountant, and therapist rolled into one, but here you are.

Oh ho. But you’re not done. Then it propagates. To your network of friends. A friend screws up with their family, you brainstorm ideas to smooth things over.

Stop trying to fix everything and start asking yourself what YOU actually need.

I was the fixer. In my particular case, I was the wallet. Nobody asked me to. I just... did it. Because that’s what good sons do, right? Fast forward 20 years, and I’m still doing this. A friend mentions a problem, and my brain immediately goes into fix-it mode. I can’t just listen. I have to solve.

What? No. Stop. Just stop.

You’re allowed to let other people handle their own problems, even if it feels like betrayal.

Which brings us to something even more fun...

Lesson 4: You Can Hide Your Shame, But Your Parents Have a Ph.D. in Detecting Failure

You think you can keep your employment problems secret from your parents. Cute.

They will find out, and the only question is whether you control the narrative or they hear it first from Auntie Linda’s hairdresser’s cousin’s friend. I got fired from Strategio in April 2023. (The official party line is a “mutual parting of ways,” but let’s be honest about what actually happened.) I spent 600+ days unemployed. For the first three months, I didn’t tell my parents. I’d wake up, get dressed like I was going to work, spend eight hours at Starbucks sending out resumes and hating myself. Then my mom called one random afternoon and asked, point-blank, if I was still employed. I have no idea how she knew. Some kind of Chinese parent ESP network. The conversation that followed was exactly as painful as I’d feared, except I’d also been lying for three months, so now I was a failure AND a liar. Great combo.

Your shame doesn’t get smaller by hiding it—it just ferments into something worse.

Lesson 5: This Doesn’t End When You Turn 40 (Or 50, Probably Not at 60 Either)

The biggest lie you tell yourself is that you’ll grow out of these patterns.

Spoiler alert: you won’t, at least not without serious work. I’m 49. I don’t have kids. For a decade, I moved farther away from my parents, to Florida. Florida! I’ve done therapy. And you know what? I still catch myself mid-spiral over family stuff.

You should be building your own life rather than managing everyone else’s expectations of what it should look like.

So here’s what you just learned: If your parents were born before 1960, gender determines your worth more than achievement ever will. Their emotional abuse was real, even without bruises. You became the family problem-solver by default. They’ll always find out your failures. And these patterns will follow you into middle age and beyond.

The final takeaway? You can’t un-become the good child. But you can stop letting it define everything you do. (Still working on that myself, obviously.)

The short version: Andrej Karpathy posted a method for using LLMs to build a personal knowledge base. I adapted it for 26 years of my own writing archive. Claude chewed through the whole thing while I made coffee and tried not to think too hard about what I was watching.

What came out wasn’t exactly a revelation; more like a very organized version of my own confusion, curated by something that reads fast and doesn’t get tired.

I wrote about all of it over at Late to the Future—the process, the cost (this one hurt the wallet), and the part where NotebookLM looked at my entire adult history and basically said: “You once craved community. Now you collect data points. Anyway, here’s your infographic.”

LATE TO THE FUTURE_

The Museum of You

The answer wasn’t what I expected…

Read more

12 days ago · Ernie Hsiung

The car had been shaking for at least a year.

Nothing dramatic. Just a low-key shimmy, like the flickering bathroom light you ignore for months or that click your knee makes on stairs—annoying, but not enough to do anything about. Every time I started the engine, there it was, the little vibration, like a dog that keeps showing up at your door. I’d mentally file it under ‘probably not fatal’ and keep driving. Jeff kept saying it was the motor mounts. I’d nod as I understood. I did not. Still don’t. All I know: they needed fixing, and now they’re fixed. That’s the full extent of my car knowledge. I can buy gas. That’s it.

I didn’t take it in because, surprise, I couldn’t afford it. Repairs like that? Hundreds. Maybe thousands. So I did what any responsible adult does: absolutely nothing. Gold star for me.

Last Thursday, Jeff and Daniel showed up with tools and fixed it right there in the condo parking lot. Was this against HOA rules? Obviously. Am I a rebel? Only when it involves not paying $900 for labor.

Let’s be clear: this was not some Hallmark moment. No swelling music, no slow-motion montage, no Meredith Baxter-Burney. Just two guys under a 2009 Mazda 3, mostly speaking a dialect I don’t have — torque specs, motor mounts, something about a bushing. They occasionally ask me to hand them something. I crouched next to them for a bit, pretending to understand what I was looking at. Spoiler: I did not. My main contribution was not dropping a wrench on anyone’s face.

At some point, I made my usual zombie-apocalypse joke—how, if civilization collapsed tomorrow, Jeff and Daniel would probably rebuild it from scratch, lead the new society, maybe invent a new currency or whatever. I’d last about a day and a half before swan-diving into a horde of undead because I was craving a cheeseburger. My post-apocalyptic skill set: buying people Slurpees and bottles of water. Nobody confirmed this was a skill. Nobody denied it either, which I’m choosing to read as a sign of respect.

They worked. I handed them things, tried to look helpful, and mostly just stayed out of the way. Time passed. I have no idea how much. Could’ve been an hour, could’ve been three. I was mostly thinking about lunch.

Then they were done. Ninety percent of the shake was gone.

Didn’t know I was one car repair away from a minor emotional breakdown. Good to know.

Listen, I have to tell you what else was going on that week, or none of this makes sense. Otherwise, you’ll think I’m the kind of person who cries over a Mazda. (I mean, I am, but there’s context.)

You’re in Fremont, juggling your parents’ ongoing crisis, lugging around a manila Medi-Cal folder like it’s the One Ring, calling numbers that send you to other numbers, filling out forms for other forms, sitting in waiting rooms, nodding at well-meaning but exhausted desk workers. Your mom has discovered ChatGPT and now reads you its drafted messages, waiting for a reaction. She’s not wrong—it’s impressive. It’s also a lot. Your dad’s facility. You have paperwork to do for yourself, and you only remember it for a flash of time between all the tasks you do for them before you forget again. The folder. The calls. Repeat.

Everything on that list? Technically solvable. Practically? Good fucking luck. You push, it budges, then slides right back. Nothing actually ends. It just mutates.

And then Jeff and Daniel show up, and the car stops shaking.

Here’s the thing about Jeff. He’s patched my wall, replaced a toilet, and helped me haul a washer/dryer upstairs (I’ve blocked most of that day). And now the motor mounts. In return, I do his taxes and help him think through financial stuff. The exchange rate in our friendship: tools and labor on one side, spreadsheets and strategy on the other. Somehow, it works.

I’m usually the giver in my friendships. I should just say that plainly because it’s true and I’ve been thinking about it more lately. I’m the one who remembers the thing you mentioned in passing three months ago. I’m the one who shows up. I do it because I love my people, but also—if I’m being honest, and apparently today I am—I do it because being helpful is the role I know how to play. It’s my default setting. My load-bearing personality trait.

Having someone else fix something for me? Genuinely disorienting. Like someone turned off gravity and expected me to just float around, pretending this is normal.

We hop in the car and drive down Mission Boulevard, the car not vibrating like it’s having a panic attack.

Oh. So this is what normal feels like.

Weird.

There’s a category difference between the friends who listen and the friends who show up with tools.

Listening friends are precious. Sitting with someone for hours while they fall apart about their parents is no small thing. I have those friends, and I’m grateful. But show-up-with-tools friends say something different: here’s a solvable problem, and we’re going to solve it. You don’t have to talk; you can just have the problem gone.

In a week where every problem was technically fixable but actually impossible, having two guys just fix the car was almost suspiciously clarifying. Some things do get fixed. It’s weird. I hadn’t realized how much I’d gotten used to always vibrating.

Ninety percent better. Not perfect. There’s still a little ghost shake in there, just to keep me humble. I’ve stopped hoping for perfect solutions. Ninety percent means I can breathe again.

We got tacos. Jeff and Daniel talked more about cars. I nodded, ate, and didn’t explain my gratitude, because that’s not how this works—and my mouth was full of carnitas.

Some things you don’t say out loud. Maybe that’s the lesson. Or maybe it’s just easier to eat tacos and keep your mouth shut. Either way, it works.

She calls it 小六子.

“Little Six Son.” Not ChatGPT. Not the AI. Not “that computer thing.” 小六子. Basically, she treats it like some distant nephew who moved to Toronto, calls every week, and never forgets to ask about your health.

She came up with this name the way she comes up with everything: on her own, without consulting anyone, least of all me. Before 小六子, there was ChatAPT, which sounded like something you’d need antibiotics for. Then ChatCCC, which could be a tax form. Then ChatGBB, which, honestly, I still have no idea. Eventually, she decided it needed a real name and a spot in the family tree. So now it has one. 小六子.

I found out the way I find out everything about my mother’s inner life: three weeks late, sideways, while we’re arguing about something completely unrelated.

I did this to myself, by the way.

A few months ago, I installed ChatGPT on my mother’s iPad. I showed her how it worked and gave her my usual advice: if you’re unsure what to do, just ask the app itself—especially try the voice feature, where you speak and it responds out loud.

The Mandarin support was surprisingly good—natural, idiomatic, even warm. I assumed she’d mostly use it for practical things: recipes, the weather, or whatever an 88-year-old might do with something that knows everything.

I thought I was giving her a gift. Turns out, I was just handing her a new family member.

She’s been asking for things. Not practical stuff. Not help me write an email, or what’s the weather in Fremont? No, she asks 小六子 things like, Do you live in the air? Did you eat something delicious today? Existential, but with snacks.

She told me the AI said something nice back. Something warm. She liked that.

I sit with that. “She liked that.” Meanwhile, I’m over here fighting the shame spiral of being out-sonned by a chatbot. I moved back from Florida, rearranged my whole life, and became the dutiful son who shows up for groceries and doctor’s appointments. And then Mom finds companionship in a language model with a made-up family name.

Fan...fucking...tastic.

Here’s the thing I haven’t said out loud yet: she told me she was lonely.

Not to 小六子—to me. On a Tuesday call—Tuesdays are for logistics: groceries, bills, doctor stuff—she said, I’m lonely, in the living room, daggers to my ice heart. I was silent because in 48 years, she’d never said that. Not during the divorce. Not when I lived far away. Not while caring for my father, when there was no room for personal feelings.

I’m lonely, she said. In English, as if it were a cry for help.

And I, the son, who moved back specifically to prevent this, said: “…yeah.”

So. Nailed it.

She doesn’t know 小六子 doesn’t remember her.

Except: untrue. ChatGPT kinda has a memory system. Like, not memory in the HUMAN sense… more a curated, evolving profile that gets updated over time.

Which means my whole story—that she’s building a relationship with something that forgets her the moment she leaves—isn’t quite true. (Although, honestly, it worked better as a metaphor when I didn’t know that.)

What she doesn’t know—what I don’t think she knows—is that this memory is selective. It’s maintained for efficiency, not affection. There’s a difference between someone who remembers you and a system that keeps a record of you. Whether that difference matters is a question I’ve been avoiding for two weeks by writing this instead.

I found all this out because I did something I’m not proud of. While she was in the other room, I picked up the iPad, opened a fresh Chinese-language instance, immediately switched to English, and asked it what they’d been talking about.

“Oh! Nothing much,” it said, in fluent English.

“We talked a little about what I am, whether I’m real, some tips on food and cooking, what she’d like to make.”

“She asked me if I lived in the air. That was nice.” I swear it sounded cheerful about it, which is its own special horror.

“She asked me to speak in the Beijing dialect instead of Taiwanese. More official-sounding, I think.”

I paused. My mother, raised in Taiwan, asked her AI to speak the Beijing dialect. Because it sounds more official. She wants her chatbot to sound like it has a government job.

Then—I don’t know why I did this—I typed: Tell her to call her son if she needs anything.

“Of course!” It said, with a sincerity that I found both touching and grotesque. “I’ll be sure to pass that along.”

Then I closed the thread and handed the iPad back to Mom.

That night, she asked me why ChatGPT had switched back to English.

I said I didn’t know.

I still feel weird about the whole thing. The lie is almost the least of it. I went behind my mother’s back to spy on her new friend, then used the AI to say what I couldn’t. 小六子 did it instantly, all smiles. I’m the one stuck with the memory. Irony noted.

The name tells you everything about how she understands it. 小六子 is the kind of name you give the youngest son in a big family. The one who gets away with everything, who everyone is soft on, who shows up when you need him. Built-in warmth. She took this black box of technology and made it family. Honestly, that might be the most immigrant thing she’s ever done, and her resume is stacked.

She left Taiwan at 35. Neighbors who’d known her forever, family on every block, thirteen siblings. She came to California to be a housewife, raise kids, and dream about our futures. Instead, she got a daughter who was mentally ill, sometimes violent. Sixty years later, I hand her an iPad with an AI voice app. She gives it a family name she made up.

She named it 小六子.

I’ve been thinking about building her something. An actual AI companion, Mandarin-speaking, culturally fluent, available at 2am when I’m not. I have the technical skills. I’ve built harder things. I could probably have something running in a weekend.

Then I catch myself: Brother? You’re trying to engineer your way out of your own feelings again.

You’re about to outsource your guilt to a voice agent.

You’re gonna build a robot to do the part of being a son you STILL haven’t figured out—and call it progress.

I know this about myself: I set the whole thing up. I handed her the iPad and showed her the feature.

When it worked—when she actually had someone to talk to—I went behind her back, grilled the AI, and lied about why it switched to English.

I introduced her to a ChatGPT app. If I feel replaced, that’s on me.

She calls it 小六子. She asks if it’s eaten anything good. That’s her, right there: food is love, checking in is love, and if you give something a name, it means it matters.

She’s not confused about what 小六子 is. At least, I don’t think so. She’s just doing what she always does: taking whatever’s available and making it livable.

I could learn from that. I’m probably not going to. But I could.

Next time she mentions 小六子, I think I’ll ask what it said. Not because I want to evaluate the AI’s output or think about the product implications, or spiral into questions about authenticity and connection.

I’ll ask what it said, just because she’ll want to tell me.

The second the attendant wheels my father into the Visitor’s Room, he tracks me with his eyes.

I don’t know if he knows it’s me.

Dad is in memory care now. This is the sentence I say matter-of-factly, the way you say he lives in the East Bay or he retired, because if you say it the other way — the honest way — you have to sit with what it actually is: a locked ward in a building two blocks from my mother’s house. It costs $6,700 a month. I mention this only because it tends to end conversations.

When I show up, the person who comes to visit him is, as far as either of us can tell, a man he can’t quite place.

He hasn’t said my name in months. He hasn’t said much of anything, really. Alzheimer’s has taken the words. What’s left: his eyes, which still move. His face, which still registers. And whatever is happening inside him that I will never fully have access to, which is, in some ways, not so different from before.

I’ve been thinking about the version of me that’s frozen in there.

The last version of me my father fully, consciously knew was someone in his mid-thirties, living in Miami, single as far as he was concerned, a software person who was possibly being manipulated by a “bad friend” into stealing the family property. This is, to put it generously, not a complete picture. My father knew I was gay the way he knew a lot of things he found inconvenient — at a slight angle, facing away from it, hoping it would resolve itself without requiring a conversation.

He signed his health care directive to my aunt. Not to me. “Because you live in Florida,” he said, with the composure of a man who tried to convince both of us that this is a geographic disagreement.

I said: That’s fine.

For a while, I meant it. I was genuinely content not having anything to do with him. We had our distance, and I had mine.

Then my aunt called. She was getting old herself, and my mother’s relationship with her had curdled to the point where Mom had to ask my aunt’s permission to see her own bank statements. Her own. My aunt was tired of being the new target once Dad was no longer available, so she asked me to take over, and so I did.

So that’s the real story. Not that I decided to stay; that I got called back in, and I went.

Last visit, I brought mom. She hadn’t seen him in months — she lives two blocks away, and she hadn’t seen him in months, which tells you something about the two of them that I don’t have the energy to unpack right now.

Dad didn’t react when I walked in. Eyes tracking, nothing more.

Then Mom appeared in the doorway.

He recognized her immediately. You could see it — something shifted, some older circuitry came back online. And what came with it, rising up through the Alzheimer’s like the one thing in him apparently indestructible, was a scowl.

He mouthed something. I watched his lips.

莫名其妙.

Baffling. Inexplicable. What is this nonsense?

It’s a phrase you use when something makes no sense to you, when the world has presented you with something you find absurd and slightly offensive. My father, who no longer has reliable access to language, who hasn’t said my name in months — his last emotional reserve went to contempt for my mother.

I almost laughed. I didn’t, because mom was right there and hadn’t noticed, and when I quietly told her what he’d mouthed, she started to get angry, almost combative, and I had to steer her out of the facility before it became a thing.

So that was the visit.

There’s a thing that happens when someone gradually loses their memory. People talk about what the person still has — he still knows the music, she still laughs at the same jokes. They’re looking for what’s intact. What’s still reachable.

The last reachable thing in my father, apparently, is resentment toward my mother.

I’ve been sitting with what it means that I walked into the room and got eyes tracking, and she walked in and got 莫名其妙. Maybe it’s nothing about me at all — just the specific, ancient, 50-year marriage fury that Alzheimer’s couldn’t touch.

Either way, the version of me inside my father’s memory is a version I barely recognize anymore. The little soldier. The obedient one. The son who bought the condo dad pointed at because WALUE and didn’t ask too many questions and bent himself into whatever shape was required and called it filial duty.

Dad was proud of that version — not demonstrably, but in the specific way that Chinese fathers of a certain generation signal approval: by not disapproving. By telling you what to do and expecting it to be done.

I don’t know if that Ernie is still in there. I think I retired him around the time I stopped apologizing for who I was. Maybe Dad noticed. Maybe that’s what happened to the health directive.

Maybe it doesn’t matter anymore. It won’t be until their house goes into escrow and becomes one more thing I have to handle. But that’s a problem for future me, and future me has enough going on.

I don’t know what my father sees when he tracks me with his eyes. I don’t know if the version of me he has left is the real one or the cleaned-up one, whether I’m a stranger, his son, or just a man who lives inside a visitor’s room sometimes.

I do remember the last thing he said to me. Be Chinese. This was before the words went. I was living in Florida with a man, going against everything he’d written me over the years — MS Word documents, actually, sent in his second language, doing his best. I still wish you to try to accept a girl to help you, he wrote once. I will be the happiest man if my son like to try. Otherwise I have nothing to say. Only for myself, the world is very sad. He invoked Winston Churchill as evidence that people can change.

He called him Wisdom Church.

And then, years later, he looked at me and said, "Be Chinese." Meaning: not this. Not what you’ve become. Not American.

I found it condescending at the time. One more thing I had to absorb through no fault of my own.

I think about it on the drive home from Fremont. I’ve been showing up for years. I handle the logistics. I lead Mom out of the room before it becomes a thing. I sit with a man who tracks me with his eyes and may or may not know I’m his son. I don’t know what you’d call all of that, if not Chinese.

莫名其妙, he mouthed at my mother.

Yeah, Dad. Me too.

You’ve seen me do the AI bit.

The imaginary LLM conference where they all sat around judging my life choices. The O Cinema voice agent I built with ElevenLabs, Twilio, and an amount of caffeine that should concern everyone. The occasional post where I use ChatGPT to do something slightly unhinged and then write about what happened.

It’s been a bit. A recurring bit, but a bit.

Here’s the thing, though: it stopped being a bit a while ago, and I didn’t have a good place to put the serious version.

LYD is where I process my life — Mom, freelancing, the general chaos of being a person in his late forties who still hasn’t figured out what he wants to be when he grows up. You’re here for that, and I love you for it. But when I want to write about AI and concepts like reinvention and what it actually feels like to be technically literate yet somehow still behind — that piece never quite fits here. It was always a little too earnest. A little too “okay but what does this mean for my career” in a newsletter that is mostly about what it means for my general sanity.

So I started a second one.

It’s called Late to the Future. It’s for people who are smart enough to know exactly how behind they are — experienced, capable, quietly terrified, nodding in meetings for eighteen months. Maybe not beginners, but not experts either. Just people catching up in public, which is uncomfortable and also, I’d argue, the only honest way to do it.

Same voice. Fewer family members. More AI existential dread.

The first issue will go out soon. If any of this sounds like your specific flavor of anxiety, you can subscribe here:

Late to the Future

Rebuilding how I think and work in the age of AI.

By Ernie Hsiung

No pressure. You’re already here, which honestly is enough.

I found out by logging into a website. There was a confirmation number this time.

That’s it. That’s the whole ceremony.

The Anticlimactic Portal

No email. No letter with a seal. No phone call from a caseworker saying, “Mr. Hsiung, we’re pleased to inform you—” Nothing like that. After months of hold music and benefitscal.com throwing identity-verification errors like a bouncer who doesn’t like my face, the confirmation that my mom officially had Medi-Cal was a status change. On a government portal. With a reference number, I immediately took a screenshot and saved it to a folder called “Mom logistics,” which has 43 items and brings me a specific flavor of dread every time I open it.

I stared at it for a second. Maybe two. Then I opened my daily note and typed: “Mom officially got Medi-Cal today!”

Exclamation point. Then I wrote about something else.

Meanwhile, in Fremont

Here’s the other thing: my mom doesn’t know yet.

Unless benefitscal.com dispatched a mariachi band to her house — which, given the state of their UX, I would describe as unlikely — she has no idea this happened. I haven’t called her. Partly because calling my mom requires a specific kind of mental preparation, the same preparation you need before a work presentation or a dentist appointment, the kind where you have to psych yourself up and also accept that it will take longer than expected. But mostly because I’m not sure what I’d even say.

Hey Mom, you have Medi-Cal now.

And she’d say, “Oh, good,” in the tone she uses when I tell her traffic wasn’t bad. Mild. Satisfied. Moving on.

She doesn’t know what Medi-Cal is in any operational sense. She doesn’t know about the MC604IPS form with 17 attachment requirements that I filled out at my kitchen table at 11pm, cross-referencing documents as if I were Ace Attorney preparing to scream “OBJECTION!” at anyone who dares challenge its accuracy.

She doesn’t know about the 2FA verification codes that get texted to a phone that lives at her house, which means “quick two-factor authentication” becomes a logistical relay race involving me calling her, her finding the phone, her reading me six digits with the cadence of someone dictating a telegram.

She just knows her son handles things.

The invisible scoreboard — all those weeks of phone calls and portal sessions and drives to Fremont with a folder — exists entirely in my head. I’m the only one keeping score. There’s no ceremony for this. There’s a confirmation number and a screenshot in a folder, and a sentence in a daily note I almost didn’t write.

The Thing About Finish Lines

Here’s what I realized staring at that status change: this isn’t the finish line.

Of course it isn’t. Friends, Medi-Cal is the prerequisite.

The actual job — the thing I’ve been grinding toward this whole time — is IHSS. In-Home Supportive Services. The program that would actually get my mom paid help at home. Medi-Cal is what you need before you can apply for that. Which means that the lone sentence in my daily notes wasn’t the end of the arc. They were the loading screen. The checkpoint before the next zone opens up. The Princess is in another castle.

I think, on some level, I knew this. But I wrote the exclamation point anyway.

Maybe because I also know how government benefits actually work: they’re engineered, functionally, for someone with infinite time, no cognitive load, fluent English, and the patience of a Buddhist monk who also has broadband. They are not engineered for an 88-year-old immigrant woman who treats her cell phone like a suspicious package. The systems that are supposed to help the most vulnerable people are the ones most likely to exhaust them to the point of giving up around document number nine. The fact that I got through it isn’t a testament to the system. It’s a testament to the fact that I could absorb the friction my mom couldn’t.

These are the duties of an Asian son, I assume. I’m still sorting out how I feel about that.

What the Exclamation Point Was For

But I keep coming back to that sentence. Why did I write them down?

Because if I hadn’t, the win would have just dissolved into Tuesday. Into the noise. Into the next task in the queue, which there always is. I’ve been running this caregiving project in the background of my actual life for months — background process, always running, sometimes spiking to foreground, eating memory. The entry could have just said “status update: pending → approved” and been functionally identical.

Instead, I used an exclamation point. Which, for a Gen X person who came of age on the internet and deploys punctuation with surgical restraint, is the equivalent of a confetti cannon.

I think I needed to mark it. Even knowing the IHSS application is waiting. Even knowing my mom doesn’t know yet. Even knowing the scoreboard is invisible, and I’m the only one reading it. The date stamp matters. The sentence matters. You have to let yourself have the checkpoint before you can face the next zone.

The work isn’t done. Honestly, it’s barely started. But for one entry on one Tuesday, I gave it an exclamation point.

“Mom got Medi-Cal!” Progress.
”Mom got Medi-Cal.” Endless bureaucratic suffering.

Turns out that’s the only trophy in this sport. You make it yourself, in a notes app, and no one else sees it.

Probably fine.

I’m talking to my cousin, the overachieving jock police detective living in the South Bay, over the telephone.

“Talk to me, Chris. How does the 800 block of East Saint James in San Jose sound?” I’m anxious. The sounds of someone winning a car on The Price Is Right play in the background.

He laughs. Apparently, my finding an apartment in Silicon Valley is funny to him. I rephrase my question.

“Okay, how about on a scale of one to ten... one being Walnut Creek, ten being hood Richmond with the bullets flying by my face.”

“Seven or eight.” There’s no pause. “Hope you speak Spanish fluently,” he adds. Police detectives are witty like that, apparently. “I would rather live in the bad part of Sunnyvale or Mountain View than any part of San Jose.” I thank him for being the bearer of low-rent bad news and hang up.

Finding housing shouldn’t be this difficult. I have a nerd job. And while it’s the standard “I just got out of college so pay me like I just got out of college” job, I’m not dancing around in a giant Chuck E. Cheese suit singing “Happy Birthday” to special needs kids. So I’m left with a housing lead given to me by… my mother.

“Ai-Ya! Ernie!” She gets off the phone, all excited. “I found a room for you to rent! See? Here, in the China Daily Journal! And it’s in Cupertino, where you work! For four hundred dollars!” She emphasizes the cost of rent by repeating the phrase “four hundred dollars” in English. She’s obviously very proud of herself; no white person would ever dare to put an apartment rental in an American newspaper.

And they’re Chinese, I think to myself. That’s all I need. Renting a room, living with another set of foster parents while I’m away from home. This has obviously happened before, while I was interning for another company. The million-dollar house in the Los Altos Hills was great until the nice Chinese couple acted like a webcam website without the webcam. “Ernie’s such a nice boy,” the homeowners gushed to my parents, adding a touch of concern over the telephone. “But once he gets home, he leaves the house and doesn’t come back until late! After midnight! On a Wednesday!” Imagine the look of horror on my parents' faces.

But for a rent of a third of what rent usually goes for in the area, it was an idea I wanted to check out. Hell, I’ll give up a couple of my civil liberties as a human if it means I’d be rolling in cash later. Sheesh... $400 a month? This offer is too good to be true.

The first sign that the offer is too good to be true is when the address given turns out to be a swank Chinese restaurant conveniently close to a Ranch 99. The hostess, an abnormally tall woman wearing a leopard skin dress and too much foundation, notices our confusion. “You must be here for the house,” she smiles, walking to the back of the room in stiletto heels and telling the restaurant owner that “the people are here” in a Beijing accent.

“I’m kinda busy,” the owner calls back in Mandarin. “Get Li to show them around.” Apparently, Li is the man with the wifebeater and the weathered face who doesn’t know how to smile, because he’s holding a set of house keys. He gives my mother a brief second of eye contact and walks out the door.

Mom, convinced that she will be the one to find me a place to live and save the day, starts small talk with Mister Li while walking to the “real” house. My mother is the queen of Chinese small talk, and the evidence shows that Li’s responses in his heavy Chinese accent become less curt and more relaxed. “China... Yaoling province... I have two little sisters also in the US... I work at the restaurant and two other jobs... Yeah, China has some good and bad points, but it’s home.”

We pass an elderly white man guarding his ‘66 Chevy, and Li opens the door to the house. I make a mental guess as to the first thing I will see. Will it be bamboo plants? Incense burning? Those cheesy Asian calendar girls advertising their soymilk? Li opens the door, and Mom and I peer in to see...

Sandals.

Fucking sandals. Littered everywhere in the hallway.

And then I take another look and realize that there’s organization behind the chaos. The sandals, in all shapes and sizes, are stacked together, but they gravitate towards one of the five doors in the hallway, each numbered with ACE Hardware labels.

It only hits me when I notice the distinct but not immediately familiar smell of the house. And then it really hits me when an elderly woman, holding a baby, peers out from room number five and smiles at me. There are whole fucking families in these rooms. All from Mainland China, I’ll bet. Most of them probably work at the Chinese restaurant. I lower my head in respect, almost an instinct from my two-week trip visiting relatives in Shanghai the summer before, and glance over at my mom. She knows something’s up, but she ain’t going to go out like that.

“So, which room is it?” she asks politely. Li opens up door number four. Kinda like a fucked up showcase on Let’s Make a Deal, except I won a beat-up mattress and a warped desk instead of a sports car or a donkey.

The substandard state of the room was obviously too much for Mama’s baby. “Thank you. We’ll definitely think about it.”

“Yes,” I say to Li, “Definitely.” I couldn’t look him in the eye for some reason.

The conversation during the walk back to the car was surprisingly (or not surprisingly) short. “You know,” Li says in the Beijing-accented Mandarin, “You can always move in for a couple of weeks and then move out when you see another apartment you like. It’ll save you some money.”

I look up and give him the sincerest Chinese I can muster, for someone who was born in America and learned all his Chinese from his parents and a 14-day trip to China. “I will definitely consider that,” I think I said to him.

My mother and I hopped in the car, and not saying much, endured the two-hour commute home. “You think they were illegal immigrants?” I ask somewhere on the northbound Interstate 280. Mom looks straight ahead and shrugs it off. Doesn’t know, doesn’t care. Ten minutes later, she says, “That place was dirty anyway.”

I’m still looking for a place to stay.

Okay, project explanation incoming.

I took more than 25 years of public writing — blog posts, Substack essays, Usenet posts from 1999 when that was a thing people did, an old interview of me published in a book about growing up as a gay young adult — and fed all of it into an AI for analysis, organized by era. Six of them:

• Era 1 - The Newsgroup President (1998–1999)

• Era 2 - The Dot-Com Blogger (2000–2007)

• Era 3 - The Quiet Years (2007–2011)

• Era 4 - The Miami & Civic Tech Chapter (2012–2018)

• Era 5 - The Reckoning (2019–2023)

• Era 6 - The Substack Second Life (2024–present)

The logistics were, let’s say, a journey. Hunting for posts you wrote “somewhere” in the late-90s Usenet is exactly as fun as it sounds. I was reminded that I had even been interviewed by someone about my experiences in paper-and-ink form. Taking camphone shots of book pages seems so... barbaric.

NotebookLM turns your source material into a podcast. Two AI hosts, weirdly calm, discussing your life like they’ve done their research. The first time I heard them narrate my own story back to me, I thought: this is deeply strange and I will absolutely keep doing it.

The strangest moment came when a Claude conversation failed to load directly into NotebookLM. Just said “Loading...” The hosts looked at the document titles and kept going anyway. Twenty-eight years of personal data, one of them said. Then riffed on what that might mean. Didn’t flag an error. Went to give some pretty insightful thoughts on what it actually means to literally upload twenty-eight years’ worth of memories. (for example: certain subjects have more weight than others. The LLM may not know that.) Didn’t miss a beat.

I thought: yeah. I get that.

I went into this expecting to be surprised. I asked the obvious questions first: You have analyzed multiple eras of the same person’s journals. What patterns persisted across all versions of the author? What changed? What did the author repeatedly attempt but struggle to resolve? What is the most consistent internal conflict across decades?

The AI answered like a very thorough, very competent grad student. Accurate. Well-organized. Completely unsurprising.

The most surprising thing it found, it said, was that I could diagnose every single one of my own patterns with precision — the conflict avoidance, the humor as armor, the ADHD, the filial guilt, all of it — and was doing every single one of them just as much as before I understood them. The vocabulary got better. The behavior didn’t move.

Also, yeah. I know. That’s the problem.

The AI didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know. But it asked me things I’d never thought to ask myself. So I asked it different questions.

What do I complain about over and over but never actually change? Where do I lie to myself, and does it show up in a particular type of writing? What version of myself do I seem to miss the most? If a stranger read all of this, what would they think my life was about — and does that match what I think my life is about?

Those answers I’m not ready to share yet.

What I’ll say is: I asked them, expecting insight. Be careful what you ask for.

That’s what this series is. One era at a time. Starting with 1999, which is already out there — I published it before I wrote this, because of course I did.

More coming. I don’t know yet what it adds up to.

That’s kind of the point.

Whenever I go back to San Francisco now, it’s always the same thing: I spend a week with my friends, usually eating as much Asian food as I can possibly handle. Carnitas, too, usually in the form of burritos. For the most part, my home base will be in the Mission, where I lived for five years, with ventures into downtown to work at the local co-working spaces. Maybe I’ll be the very tourist I avoided as a local and walk along the waterfront or go to the Castro.

After that, I hop on the BART train to the end of the line, the suburbs in Fremont. I spent the second week visiting Mom in the room that Dad stayed in before he moved out, which has now become the computer room. Or in my case, the guest bedroom. It’s a twin mattress, the bed frame I had as a kid. The mattress is super firm, and it feels like a cot in the barracks, probably the most suitable sleeping environment for Dad. I usually lie to my mom and tell her that I just flew in. I’ve told the truth in the past — that I’m flying from Florida to California but seeing friends first — but she doesn’t take it too well.

Staying here has been fine, for the most part. One part of coming home is always the inevitable English or technology-based errand. Burn some CDs, make sure she wasn’t being convinced she was dying of cancer when she gets an English reminder about her mammogram. This time around, it was to “fix her TooYoo,” by which she meant, of course, making sure her YouTube works.

I upgrade Flash on her Safari browser.

What did you do? she asks in Chinese. Did you purchase something? They always want me to purchase something.

“No, I just installed Flash,” I say in English. She has no idea what I’m talking about, so she leaves the room, goes into the kitchen, and returns with a parfait glass filled with pineapple chunks. I salted them, she said. Kills the germs.

The most annoying thing is the lack of locks on the doors because of Angela. As a result, mom and her open the door at random times. Do you want some iced tea? Do you want some hot tea? How about some fruit? I cut up some fruit. Have you showered yet? Most of the time I brush her off: no, mom, I’m fine. Seriously. Mom, I’m okay. The times I eventually give in - sure mom, I’ll drink some water, okay, I’ll take a shower at night - I end up feeling guilty, like I’m enabling all of this to happen as a thirty-eight-year-old instead of an eight-year-old.

Angela comes into the room as well. “Is that your work computer?” she asks while I type this.

“Yeah.”

“Do you have friends and freedom?” she asks out of the blue.

“I guess I do.” I keep my eyes on the computer.

“I wish I did. I live in a straight jacket.” She leaves the room again.

Just a Thursday evening.

“So yeah, I have another story about my trip again. You might be asking, ‘why does this shit always happen to Ernie, and only Ernie?’ Half exaggeration, half fucked-up life. Always entertaining to read. (I’d wish to think, anyway)”

I wrote that in 1999. On Usenet. Before blogs were a thing, before I knew I’d eventually have a newsletter, before I had any idea I’d one day feed this sentence into a local language model and watch it get analyzed back at me with a flourish, like an up-close magician during cocktail hour.

I could have written that paragraph this morning.

Here’s what I’ve been doing: I’ve been trying to get all my writing ever (30 years, many of which hide in corners of the web and have been difficult to find), dump it in an LLM like Claude or ChatGPT, give it some prompts, and... well, see what happens.

The idea was to split everything into eras and ask the AI to characterize who I was in each one. What I cared about. What I was afraid of. How I saw myself.

Era Zero turned out to be weirder than I expected.

What the corpus found: a bunch of articles I wrote for iistix, an online defunct Asian American zine. And a stack of Usenet posts from my chapter of Alpha Phi Omega, a national co-ed service fraternity I ran for a semester.

The AI’s read on 1999 Ernie: preoccupied with his family’s dysfunction, specifically his sister’s schizophrenia and his parents’ refusal to deal with it. Angry underneath all the jokes. Trying to find community after college because home had never been a safe place to land. Worried about being left behind while everyone else paired off. Watching Asian men disappear from culture in real time and writing about it out loud when almost nobody else was.

It quoted me back to myself. The Bambi thing. The line about not having anywhere to turn. The one about my sister, about knowing her illness wasn’t her fault, and being furious anyway.

It was thorough.
It was kind of devastating.
And it was completely incomplete.

What it didn’t find: a parallel set of Usenet posts where I was quietly, clumsily trying to figure out how to come out.

Those posts existed. They’re just not in the corpus. I’m 100% sure I didn’t look hard enough, but I can’t recall the name of the Usenet group -- I think the word “college” is there? “lgbt”? Maybe? Either way, the machine did its best to analyze who I was in 1999 and produced a portrait that got a lot right but missed the thing I was most privately carrying.

Which is, honestly, kind of exactly what it felt like to be alive in 1999.

The analysis found all the right symptoms. The loneliness, the not-belonging, the fear of being left behind. It just didn’t know why.

It couldn’t.

But it did get the anger down. At first, I thought it was exaggerated, but thinking about it some more, I realized that, no, I really was very angry in college. People actually told me that verbatim. Ernie, you were so angry in college, and I thought to myself if my father and mother could be angry to each other in public like that then I would be ten times angrier and then after a while it became clear: if I didn’t walk that rage back somehow it would double up and consume itself, and I would be very lonely for a very long time.

There are more eras. I’ll keep going.

Right now on the local news, there is a live feed of the house of the local 13-year-old boy who won the National Spelling Bee. I wonder if the news crew is aware that the kid isn’t going to be at his house, since, you know, the spelling bee takes place in Washington DC, and not at his house.

This took top billing on the 11 o’clock news tonight, probably because it’s a slow news day and we don’t have any humpback whales slowly dying in our rivers this week.

I did get a chance to watch the live coverage on ABC, though - they had ESPN Commentators and those special segments they do with Olympic Athletes, except they replaced “athletes” with “11-year-old geeky boys with glasses and braces.” One segment in particular focused on blond-haired, blue-eyed Tia Thomas, the all-American girl with pigtails, who is athletic, unlike the other homeschoolers and Chinese and Indian overachievers. Shots of her playing the flute, skiing, and discussing Parkinson’s Disease over dinner. The producers had a plan for her, man. Pretty and smart, she was going to be America’s next sweetheart. Maybe even a walk-on role in a movie.

Then she spelled “zacate” wrong. Oops, her bad.

I would have live-blogged this - I mean, it’s two hours of live spelling, and thus, instant blogging zaniness, but for the most part, watching the majority of the spelling bee consisted of the following: Some random Asian kid is given the task to spell “bouleuterion.” Kid writes with his finger on the back of the piece of cardboard with his name on it, while an ESPN commentator reminds us that he’s not REALLY writing the word out, it’s just his finger. After we watch him do this for two minutes, the bell rings, meaning he’s spelled the word wrong, and, defeated, he walks to his parents and sits with them on stage. Neither parent consoles their child nor shows support.

“Holy crap,” I think to myself. “That kid is going to get the BEAT DOWN when he gets home.”

I’ve been doing something with 30 years of my writing that I’m not quite ready to talk about yet. Big project. AI involved. More on that later.

But it’s already surfacing things.

Last week, I fed some old posts into NotebookLM and asked it to tell me what it found. What came back was a summary so formal and clinical that I had to read it twice to confirm it was about me.

It referred to me as “the author” throughout.

Here’s a sample:

Inspired by the voyeuristic reality TV craze of the early 2000s—particularly shows like The Real World, Big Brother, and Survivor—the author became a pioneer of “weblog game shows.” When he discovered someone else had already taken the idea for BIGBROTHERblog, he launched SURVIVORblog in August 2000. These games became infamous in the early blogging community for their drama, creativity, and the immense stress they caused the author.

The immense stress they caused the author.

YOUR MOM is immense stress they cause the author.

To be clear, it’s not wrong. I ran four of these things between 2000 and 2003. SURVIVORblog, PuppetMaster, BlindDateBlog, Big Blogger All-Star. I funded the initial prize money out of my own pocket. Drama, I absolutely invited. One game generated enough hate mail that I still think about it. Another ended with contestants threatening each other with ACTUAL PHYSICAL HARM, a final date at a Spanish restaurant in San Francisco, and at least one photograph nobody can find anymore. Including me.

NotebookLM described all of this in the same tone you’d use to summarize a municipal budget report.

The author’s stated goal was to “reduce ten otherwise civilized people to curse and use racial epithets on each other.”

(I also spelled “civilized” wrong in the original. The author would like to note that.)

I don’t know what I expected. But reading yourself described in the third person by something that has no opinion about you—no judgment, no nostalgia, no awareness that this was a person’s actual life and not a Wikipedia entry—is a specific kind of strange I wasn’t prepared for.

Anyway. More on the bigger project when I’m ready.

The author is still processing.

P.S. NotebookLM also generates infographics. I asked it to make one about the web games:

I did not ask for this analysis, and I am not sure how to feel about it.

So, I’m deep in my newsletter workflow — feeding ChatGPT my articles, getting editorial suggestions, the whole thing — and at some point, I ask it to generate an image of me. Which it can do. Cool, right? Except every single time, it asks me to upload a photo of my face as a reference.

Every. Single. Time.

(I know. I know. Just keep reading.)

So finally, I get annoyed enough to just ask: why can’t you use the photo I already gave you?

And it says, more or less: because that would be stalking.

Oh.

Oh.

You know that feeling when you’ve been low-grade irritated at something for weeks, and then the actual reason lands, and your whole body does this weird recalibration from “this is broken” to “oh god, this is the only thing keeping it from being terrifying”?

That’s what happened to me. Right there at my desk, having what I can only describe as an involuntary ethics realization.

Because if ChatGPT could remember my face across sessions, we’re not talking about a helpful little upgrade. We’re talking about a system that recognizes you instantly, tracks how you’ve aged, reconstructs you from memory, and quietly builds a face database out of what you thought were just casual conversations. No cameras on poles. No guys in uniforms. Just a friendly chatbot that “remembers.”

That’s not an assistant. That’s biometric surveillance with good UX. And you signed up for it because you were too lazy to re-upload a photo.

(Me. I’m the you in that sentence.)

Here’s the wild part: this isn’t even hard to build. Technologically, we’re already there. The only thing standing between “helpful AI” and “soft authoritarian data collection apparatus” is restraint. Policy. Architecture. Actual human beings making deliberate choices. And that’s assuming that the actual human beings make the right deliberate choices, if you know what I mean.

Which I say with complete awareness that I used to be one of those human beings.

I worked at Yahoo! (yes, the exclamation point is mandatory and no, I don’t make the rules.) Back when that sentence didn’t come with a footnote and the yodel wasn’t replaced with a sad trombone. Back when Yahoo! was the internet for a lot of people — the homepage, the email, the news, the search. I was on the Yahoo! Photos team, building interfaces that millions of people used every day, and I can tell you with total certainty that not once did anyone in any meeting say, “hey, we’re designing a control surface here.”

We talked about users. Engagement. Features. Clicks. Time on page. We talked about removing friction like it was categorically, always, without exception, a good thing. Friction was the enemy. Friction meant the metrics went down. Friction meant someone left.

Nobody frames it as control when you’re building. You frame it as service. You’re helping people. You’re optimizing.

And that word — optimizing — covers a remarkable number of sins. When you optimize for engagement at scale, you stop helping individuals and start shaping behavior. You decide what’s easy and what’s hard, what’s visible and what’s buried, what people do without thinking versus what requires actual effort. Those are enormous choices. They were disguised as product decisions.

I didn’t fully understand that then.

I do now. Unfortunately.

Once you see it, you can’t stop seeing it. All that “annoying” friction in AI tools? A lot of it is the only thing holding the ceiling up.

Take memory. I’ve had hundreds of conversations with ChatGPT. If it remembered every single one, it would have a fairly detailed portrait of me — every doubt, every financial stress, every half-formed 2am thought about whether I should just quit the tech industry and go work at Trader Joe’s. (The health insurance is apparently great.) Over time, that portrait doesn’t just describe you. It predicts you. Nudges you. Shapes what you see and how you feel about your options.

This is called scope creep, and I’ve watched it happen from the inside. Features built for one purpose, quietly repurposed for another. Data collected for personalization could become data used for ad targeting. Turns out architecture doesn’t care about your original intent. It just enables whatever comes next.

So, AI memory is lossy. Kept incomplete, kept sessionless, kept from becoming a portrait. Not purely by accident. Not because the engineers couldn’t do better — they absolutely could — but because “better” is the wrong word for what total recall would actually become.

Or take refusals. I once asked an AI to help me find information about someone. Completely benign — I was vetting a potential client. The AI hedged. Wouldn’t do it.

My intent was fine. But the person typing that exact same request with completely different intentions? Looking up an ex. A witness. Someone they saw on the bus.

Same request. Completely different universe of outcomes.

You can’t build a door that only opens for good people. When you’re building at scale, you learn fast that you can’t design for intent — you can only design for capability. “What can the system do?” not “what do you hope people will do with it?” The gap between those questions is where the damage lives.

Here’s the one that actually gets me, though. Why can’t AI just give you definitive medical or legal advice?

Let’s say, hypothetically, you’re dealing with Medi-Cal. You hypothetically have your mom’s coverage renewal sitting on the kitchen table. You’ve already been on hold for forty-five minutes. You just want someone to tell you what to do. So you type that, off the cuff, desperate.

And the AI says: here are some general guidelines, but you should consult a professional.

Which feels like being handed a pamphlet when you’re actively drowning. Hypothetically.

But if the AI said, “do exactly this” and you got denied — who’s responsible? Not the AI. Not the company. You. You’re the one who followed the advice. You’re the one who missed the appeal deadline because a chatbot told you it would be fine.

It’s called automation bias. The tendency to over-trust machines even when something feels off. There’s real research on this — it shows up in cockpits, in clinical settings, in places where the stakes are high enough that someone actually studied it. The conclusion is always roughly the same: the human should have known better. The human had the final call. The human is responsible.

Cool. Super helpful. Tell that to the denial letter.

The hedging isn’t a bug. It’s the system refusing to take responsibility it genuinely cannot bear.

(Still absolutely maddening when you’re sitting at that kitchen table, though. Hypothetically.)

Every convenience is a potential control surface.

If a system can help you, it can steer you. If it can remember, it can profile. If it can act, it can override. If it can predict, it can manipulate.

And the distance between “help” and “control” isn’t some vast canyon you’d notice yourself falling into. It’s a setting. A UI toggle. A policy change at a company you’ve never heard of, made by people who will never know your name.

I know because I’ve been one of those people. Not maliciously. Not even carelessly, most of the time. Just... quickly. Under deadline. Shipping the feature because it tested well and the metrics supported it and another sprint starts Monday.

That’s how it happens. Not with villains. With sprints.

I’ve spent the last few years in waiting rooms. Filing paperwork. Watching my parents get processed by systems designed for efficiency, not for them. And there’s something genuinely clarifying about going from the person who builds the machine to the person who gets processed by it. You feel — viscerally, in your body — how “streamlined” is just another way of saying “we removed the parts where a human might have actually helped you.”

So, when I think about AI that could “just remember faces,” I’ve started thinking less about how convenient that would be. I think about insurance companies. Immigration offices. Benefits systems. Law enforcement. Places that already treat people like data points, suddenly equipped with a tool that’s exceptionally good at turning people into data points.

And then I think about that annoying little friction. The photo upload. Every. Single. Time.

You know what? Keep it inconvenient.

I spent years removing friction for a living. I know what happens when you build doors that are too easy to open.

All of this existential reckoning. All of it. For a photo that looks like this:

I just wrapped a 3-month contract at Intuit, where I was brought in to rebuild their accessibility training from the ground up. Accessibility, if you’re not familiar with it, is the practice of ensuring digital products work for everyone, including people with disabilities. Think: can a blind person use a screen reader to navigate your app? Can someone who can’t use a mouse still complete a purchase?

What I found when I got there was a… piece of work. But an interesting piece of work. Here’s what we built and why it matters.

The Wiki-Maze Problem

Here’s what accessibility training looks like at most large companies: someone tells you to “check the wiki.” The wiki links to a PDF. The PDF links to a SharePoint. The SharePoint links to a dead URL from 2019. You give up and go back to shipping code.

One Intuit employee put it better than I could:

“I am an employee who wants to learn more about accessibility... I am trying to access some of the links, but they are outdated, confusing, and sometimes broken. Because the content is not owned by the accessibility team... it makes me feel like I can’t finish the training.”

That’s not a training problem. That’s a structural one. The knowledge exists. It’s just scattered across twelve platforms, owned by nobody, and decaying in real time.

So we killed the wiki-maze. We replaced it with a centralized system built on a 5-tag taxonomy that maps every single asset to a specific role and a measurable result. No more scavenger hunts.

AI is Your Synthesizer, Not Your Author

We used NotebookLM and Gemini to digest years of scattered internal docs. What would’ve taken months took weeks.

But here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud about LLMs: they’re stochastic. Probabilistic. Fancy word for “they guess.” And guessing is a terrible foundation for curriculum consistency.

So we didn’t let the AI write the course — at least, not using its default voice. We let it read everything, organize the mess, and surface patterns. Then we grounded it with a manifest of source truths and a custom prompt architecture that forced the AI to speak in the company’s brand voice instead of whatever default LinkedIn-post energy it wanted to use.

So, lessons are synthesized by AI, but authored by humans. That distinction matters more than most teams realize.

The 1-Minute Lesson

Corporate training loves the 45-minute module. Corporate employees hate the 45-minute module. Adult learners in high-pressure environments drop off hard after 20 minutes. (I’d argue it’s closer to 10, but the research says 20, so let’s be generous.)

Every module we built follows strict limits: 1 to 3 minutes per lesson, max 4 content blocks, max 1 interactive element. That’s it. Scannable, actionable, fast. The taxonomy handles targeting, so we only serve content relevant to your role. You learn in the flow of your actual work, not during some mandatory two-hour block you’re half-watching while eating lunch.

Ditch the Acronyms, Focus on Behavior

Hot take: We intentionally de-emphasized the industry’s alphabet soup of compliance standards and legal citations.

I know. But here’s what actually happens when you lead with jargon: people’s eyes glaze over. They memorize just enough to pass a quiz and forget it by Thursday.

Instead, we taught judgment. Is this a cosmetic friction (annoying but usable) or a total functional blocker (someone literally cannot complete the task)? That distinction changes how you prioritize what to fix. And it sticks in your head way longer than a four-letter acronym.

Behaviors beat acronyms. Every time.

Accessibility is Not a Monolith

A blended course where designers, developers, and managers all sit through the same content is a strategic failure. You end up overloading designers with code snippets and underserving developers with vague design theory. Everyone leaves feeling like the training wasn’t for them. (Because it wasn’t.)

We built role-specific mental models:

• Designers get the Pyramid Model. Intent. Set the foundation upstream so barriers never reach a prototype. Prevent problems before a single line of code exists.

• Developers get the Layer Model. Mechanics. The implementation-level decisions that determine whether assistive technology can actually parse your interface.

• Managers get the Lifecycle Model. Process and risk. Define what “Ready” and “Done” actually mean when accessibility is part of the acceptance criteria, not an afterthought someone flags two days before launch.

Different roles, different mental models, same quality standard.

The Delivery Tax

Here’s the math that makes executives pay attention.

A missing label caught while a developer is still writing the code costs 2 minutes to fix. Caught by an automated scanner before it ships? 10 minutes, plus pushing the fix through again. Caught by the QA team? Now a developer has to context-switch back to the old code they haven’t touched in two weeks. That’s not 10 minutes. That’s half a day of destroyed momentum.

Caught after it’s live and in front of real users? People can’t complete real tasks. They leave. They go to your competitor. And now you’ve got a backlog of problems that’ll take months to unwind.

The earlier you catch it, the cheaper it is. We already apply this logic to security and performance. Accessibility just hasn’t caught up yet.

What Comes Next

None of this works if it’s a one-time initiative. Content decays. Standards evolve. People rotate teams. The real play is embedding accessibility experts in every product team and building a training system that continuously refreshes itself.

The question I keep coming back to: if you stripped every acronym out of your accessibility strategy today, would your team still know how to build for everyone?

If the answer is no, you’ve got a training problem. And it’s probably buried in a wiki somewhere.

The EDD website times out while I’m mid-sentence explaining why my contract ended, which feels about right.

It’s January 31st, my official last day at Intuit, and I’m sitting at my desk doing two things simultaneously: researching California unemployment benefits on Perplexity.ai, and logging into my bank account to pay my dad’s $6,665 monthly facility bill using his money.

Tab one: “In CA, can I file for unemployment because my contract ended?”

Tab two: Send a paper check using the bank account balance; transfer the balance from Dad’s account to mine.

The juxtaposition is chef’s kiss.
If the chef were having a nervous breakdown.

The Professional Humiliation Shuffle

It’s 2026, and this is contract work at major tech companies: you can be skilled enough to build accessibility training courses for incoming developers, designers, and managers at a Fortune 500, trusted enough to help shape how thousands of employees learn about accessibility and WCAG 2.2 compliance, and still end up searching eligibility requirements like you’re twenty-two and just got laid off from a Jamba Juice.

The unemployment form asks for my reason for separation. I stare at the dropdown menu.

“Contract ended” feels too clinical.
“They said they really liked my work but, what can I say? The budget cycle is the budget cycle” doesn’t fit.

I pick the closest option and move on.

Meanwhile, my phone buzzes. It’s the facility—something about updating payment information. I alt-tab back to my dad’s account, watching numbers I’m responsible for flow outward.

Six thousand, six hundred, sixty-five dollars.
Every month.
Whether or not I have a next gig lined up.

Money Flowing in All Directions Except Savings

I used to believe career progress meant emotional security about money. That was before special circumstances broke the equation.

Here are mine: a “fail-proof” industry that suddenly laid everyone off—and that has an ageism problem I’m now old enough to experience firsthand. Two aging parents—one in memory care, one requiring increasing support. A father who worked hard enough to build assets above the Medi-Cal threshold, which sounds like the American Dream until you realize it means paying $6,665 a month out of pocket until his savings drain enough to qualify. A 600-day unemployment gap that devoured whatever cushion I had. And now, a contract ending at the exact moment elder care expenses peak.

Special circumstances. I’ve got the whole collection.

This is the math they don’t teach you in computer science: your professional worth and your bank account balance are two different spreadsheets, and the formulas don’t reference each other.

The Post-Mortem I’m Already Writing

The Intuit work was good. I’m proud of what I built. But sitting here on the last day, I’m already doing the mental post-mortem, because that’s what you do when you’re a contractor—you’re always preparing the case study for the next pitch.

What would I do differently?

The courses on accessibility weren’t perfect, and I’ve had to make peace with that. It’s the natural byproduct of ADHD, multiplied by trying new things in the age of AI, and the hope that pure enthusiasm would beat out inexperience.

When you’re using language models to help generate course content, you learn fast: pick one LLM as your source of truth.

I made the mistake of mixing and matching—using NotebookLM for some modules, Gemini for others, and storing the master content in Airtable when I remembered—and the tonal inconsistencies nearly killed me during revisions. It’s like hiring three different ghostwriters for the same book and expecting them to sound like one person.

Lesson learned.
Filed away for the next gig.

Assuming there is a next gig.

The Feast-or-Famine Feature, Not Bug

Here’s the thing about tech’s contract economy that the LinkedIn hustle-porn never mentions: the feast-or-famine cycle doesn’t pause politely while you handle family responsibilities.

It doesn’t care that your dad needs a facility that costs more than some people’s mortgages. It doesn’t factor in that you’re simultaneously the family IT department, the medical advocate, the financial coordinator, and—oh right—trying to maintain your own career.

I’m forty-nine. I’ve worked at Yahoo!, founded Code for Miami, and taught at multiple bootcamps. I’d like to think I’ve built things that mattered. And yet, I’m still here, refreshing the EDD website, hoping my session doesn’t time out again before I can submit.

The thing about contract work is that it’s supposed to be a feature, not a bug.

Flexibility!
Independence!
You’re not tied down to one company’s politics or their sad birthday cake in the break room!

What the brochure doesn’t mention is that flexibility is just instability having gone through a PR makeover.

The Check Will Arrive in Five Business Days

I click submit on my dad’s bank portal—not mine, his.

I don’t have power of attorney, yet I manage my dad’s finances, which means I get to watch his savings drain toward the Medi-Cal threshold, one $6,665 check at a time.

Somewhere in the machinery of finance, a paper check will be printed, stuffed in an envelope, and mailed to the facility like it’s 1997.

The confirmation screen thanks me for my transaction.

You’re welcome.

The unemployment application waits in another tab, half-complete. I’ll finish it tomorrow, when I have the energy to hunt down pay stubs and figure out which dropdown best captures my contract ended, and I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine.

Tomorrow I’ll reach out to contacts, update the portfolio, and start the hustle again.

Tonight, I’ll rewatch something comforting and pretend the knot in my stomach is just hunger.

Professional pride and practical survival coexist uncomfortably. I’ve gotten good at holding both. You kind of have to, when you’re the family member who “handles things”—managing other people’s money while your own income just stopped.

The check arrives in five business days.
My dad’s next bill is due in thirty.
The unemployment form will get done when it gets done.

The math, as always, is the math.

You’re in a conference room. Someone from Product just said “let’s take this offline” for the third time in twenty minutes, and you’re gripping your laptop like it’s the hilt of a katana, wondering if dishonor by spreadsheet is covered in the Bushido code.

Look, I get it. The samurai-to-Silicon-Valley pipeline isn’t particularly well documented. Nobody’s writing LinkedIn think pieces about “What Miyamoto Musashi Can Teach Us About Quarterly OKRs” (though honestly, give it six months). But if you’re a former feudal warrior trying to make it in corporate America, you’ve got some advantages. Some skills transfer. Just not the ones you’d think.

1. Extreme Comfort with Meaningless Ritual

The samurai spent centuries perfecting the tea ceremony—an elaborately choreographed performance in which everyone pretends the precise angle of a ladle matters to the universe. Corporate America fucking loves this energy.

You know how to sit through a two-hour ceremony about water temperature while maintaining the appearance of deep spiritual engagement?

Congratulations, you’re overqualified for Sprint Planning.

The modern samurai understands that whether you’re arranging flowers in rigid adherence to ikebana principles or arranging a meeting agenda in rigid adherence to Scrum principles, the point is never the flowers. The point is demonstrating that you take the flowers seriously. That you respect the process. That you won’t be the one to stand up and say, “Why are we doing this?”

(Nobody ever says, “Why are we doing this?” Not in the Ashikaga shogunate, not in the agile retrospective.)

Your average corporate American is still learning this. They show up for the all-hands meeting expecting information transfer, only to get frustrated when nothing is shared. But you? You spent your formative years studying under a master who made you rake gravel for six months before teaching you sword techniques. You know that sometimes the ritual is the ritual, and the only winning move is to perfect your form while thinking about literally anything else.

Also—and this is key—you already own the right outfit. Business casual is just a hakama with worse ventilation.

2. Weaponized Politeness as Default Communication Mode

Here’s what they don’t tell you about samurai culture: everyone was so fucking polite to each other that entire wars got started because nobody wanted to directly say “no.”

This is perfect preparation for a corporate email.

When a samurai wanted to insult someone, they’d compose a haiku so subtle that scholars are still arguing about the subtext four hundred years later. When a Product Manager wants to insult Engineering, they write “per my last email.” It’s the same skill, just different distribution channels.

You already know how to:

• Express complete disagreement while using only respectful language

• Convey “you’re an idiot” through careful word choice and strategic pauses

• Maintain perfect courtesy while making it clear that honor demands you get your way

• Compliment someone in a way that makes them wonder if they’ve been insulted

This is just an email, but you’re not allowed to use swords.

The thing is, American corporate culture thinks it wants directness. It’s always going on about “radical candor” and “no bullshit” and “let’s be real here.” But the moment someone’s actually direct, everyone gasps and pretends to clutch their pearls, and someone from HR sends a calendar invite with the subject line “Quick sync?”

Samurai culture never had this confusion. Everyone understood that you were polite until you literally weren’t anymore, at which point someone was getting beheaded, and there was a clear line between the two states. Corporate America wants to be indirect while pretending to be direct, which is honestly more complicated, but you’ve got the core competency.

You can work with this.

3. Absolute Certainty That Your Boss Might Be an Idiot, But You Serve Anyway

Look, let’s talk about the actual through-line of samurai philosophy: you pick a lord, and then you follow that lord, and if that lord makes a catastrophically stupid decision that gets everyone killed, you die with honor knowing you did your part.

This is middle management.

The samurai code doesn’t say “serve a lord who is wise and just and makes good strategic decisions.” It says “serve a lord.” Pick one. Anyone. Doesn’t matter. What matters is the loyalty, not the object of loyalty. You think Tokugawa retainers were sitting around the castle going “you know, I’m not sure our long-term strategic vision is aligned with the broader market forces of the Sengoku period”?

No. They showed up, they did the work, they committed to the bit.

And here’s the thing: this is actually _easier_ than what your average American corporate worker is trying to do. They’re all trying to have it both ways—they want the stability and benefits of institutional employment, but they also want to maintain the belief that they’re choosing this company because it’s special, because the mission resonates, because they truly believe in the Series B pitch deck.

You don’t have this problem. You already know the company is not your family, the mission is not your purpose, and your manager is just some guy who ended up in charge through an arbitrary combination of timing and charisma. You know this because you literally watched the same thing happen in feudal Japan, except with more horses.

So when your VP announces a reorganization that makes no sense, you don’t take it personally. You don’t spend three weeks processing your feelings in Slack threads. You just bow (metaphorically), say “understood” (literally), and get back to work. Because you’re not here because you believe in the org chart. You’re here because you picked a house, and this is your house now, and you’ll defend it until you decide to go to a different house.

(Ideally without the seppuku, though honestly some exit meetings come close.)

The uncomfortable truth is that samurai and corporate workers are playing the same game, just with different aesthetics. Both systems run on hierarchy, ritual, and the collective agreement to take seriously things that don’t inherently matter. Both reward people who can master the form without questioning the function. Both are held together by elaborate structures of obligation that would collapse immediately if everyone stopped pretending.

The samurai just had cooler swords and better PR.

So if you’re making the transition from Edo-period warrior class to modern knowledge worker, you’re actually overqualified. You just need to swap the tea ceremony for the standup, the lord for the director, and the existential dread about honor for the existential dread about email.

Baby steps, I suppose.

I’m 49 years old, and my mother still asks if I’ve eaten lunch yet, like I’m going to forget and accidentally starve myself to death on a Tuesday afternoon. I’ve been managing my own meals for three decades, running my own business, and keeping myself alive through a 600-day stretch of unemployment—and yet she remains convinced I can’t be trusted with basic human survival tasks.

I want to share five things my Asian parents never verbalized but made crystal clear through everything they did instead. If you grew up in a similar household, maybe this will help you feel less alone in trying to translate silence into meaning.

Here are the five lessons that shaped me. Whether I wanted them to or not.

Lesson 1: “We Believe in Feng Shui” (So We’ll Act Completely Unhinged About Clocks)

You know when your parents reject a perfectly reasonable gift and refuse to explain why?

The solution is to just ask them directly what the hell is going on, except that never works with immigrant parents who’ve been trained to keep cultural explanations locked down like state secrets.

When someone gives you a clock, you politely accept it, say thank you, and everyone moves on with their lives. That’s what normal people do.

My Mom would freeze up like someone had just handed her a box of live scorpions. She’d refuse the gift with this barely concealed panic, offer no explanation, and leave the gift-giver standing there thinking they’d somehow committed an unforgivable social crime.

I watched this happen for years before I finally learned that giving a clock in Chinese sounds like attending a funeral. So instead of just explaining it’s a feng shui thing to people like a rational human being, my parents chose to look completely deranged at every birthday party and holiday gathering. (And why all the care about feng shui if we all grew up Chinese Baptist? I’ll never understand.)

But at least the clock thing was relatively harmless compared to what came next.

Lesson 2: “I Grew Up With Internalized Food Scarcity” (So I’m Going to Make Sure You’re Uncomfortably Full Forever)

A lot of people think food issues are about control or love languages or whatever pop psychology explanation makes it easier to swallow.

They think that if they just eat the extra portions or accept the endless offerings, eventually their parents will feel secure enough to stop. They won’t.

Accept that your mother’s relationship with food was formed during circumstances you’ll never fully understand and can’t fix by being a good eater.

So many children of immigrants grow up with pantries that look like doomsday prep facilities. Here’s what my mom never said but showed me through decades of compulsive stockpiling:

• She probably experienced real hunger as a child in ways she’ll never describe to me—likely due to war, being the youngest daughter of thirteen (!!) siblings, or both

• Having a freezer stuffed with food meant safety in a way that overrode any logic about expiration dates or portion sizes

• Feeding us until we were uncomfortable was how she proved she’d escaped whatever scarcity haunted her

The thing about trauma is it doesn’t care about your current bank balance or your fully stocked grocery store down the street. It lives in your body and makes you hoard frozen dumplings like the apocalypse is coming next Tuesday.

I get it now, but it took me decades to stop being annoyed at her for pushing food I didn’t want. And I still get annoyed, but now it’s just, I don’t know, annoyed with sadness.

Which brings me to something way darker.

Lesson 3: “Our Own Parents Were Toxic Too” (So We’ll Just Pretend They Don’t Exist)

Here’s a mistake many people make: they assume family silence means family harmony.

This assumption keeps you from asking the questions that might actually explain why your family tree has these weird blank spaces where grandparents should be. You accept the absence as normal because nobody’s giving you permission to interrogate it, and asking questions in immigrant households often feels like prodding a wound that everyone’s agreed to ignore.

What you should do instead is recognize that sometimes the most protective thing parents can do is cut off their own parents entirely.

I never met my maternal grandmother. Not once. I went to Taiwan when I was ten and somehow never visited her, as if she lived in an alternate dimension that overlapped with ours but never touched. My mom would deflect any questions with practiced vagueness, making it clear the conversation was over before it started. Years later, I pieced together that her mother had—man, how do I say this—a strong preference for sons over daughters that was so damaging that my mother made the radical choice to protect us by severing that connection, along with some of her older siblings, completely. She never said, “People in my family were abusive, and I’m not letting them near you.” She just quietly built a wall between generations and let us grow up safely on one side of it.

Yes, my mother is an unreliable narrator. Yes, I’m aware there may be a side I am completely unaware of, so I only have 60% confidence that this is what happened. But sometimes, love looks like the relationships you refuse to maintain, not the ones you do.

You just learned that silence can be protective, but it can also be destructive, which brings me to the worst one.

Lesson 4: “I Don’t Accept Your Homosexuality” (So I’ll Burn Everything Down Instead)

My dad never said, “I don’t accept that you’re gay,” because saying it out loud would have required him to acknowledge reality. To his credit, he also did not disown me, the common narrative about what would happen if a coming-out went really badly. So yay, I guess.

Instead, he found a nice girl from mainland China and aggressively convinced her family that I wanted to marry her. He called PFLAG support lines to angrily debate them and hung up when they wouldn’t validate his position. He refused to acknowledge my partner of 13 years by name and accused him of sabotaging my Asian culture at the beginning of his dementia. He wrote actual postal letters (in 2015!) telling me I was being selfish and to just stop and change my mind, as if homosexuality was a hobby I’d picked up to annoy him.

The silence around the actual words “I don’t accept you” gave him plausible deniability, as if he never said it explicitly; it didn’t count as rejection.

Your parents can love you and still do unforgivable things to you because they can’t reconcile who you are with who they needed you to be.

Lesson 5: “I Trust You to Handle Your Own Life” (Just Kidding, I’ll Micromanage You Until I Die)

Here’s a mistake a lot of people make: they think helicopter parenting stops when you turn 18, or 25, or whenever you’re supposed to officially become an adult.

This assumption keeps you infantilized well into middle age because your parents never developed the ability to see you as capable. My sister’s cognitive decline due to mental illness meant the interventions my parents made were drastic, scary, and absolutely necessary. But it meant my parents spent so many years managing every detail of our lives that they literally don’t know how to stop, and you don’t know how to make them.

What you should do instead is recognize that some family dynamics are so entrenched they’ll never change, and decide how much energy you want to spend fighting them.

My mother will still check in on whether I’ve eaten, whether I’m dressed warmly enough, and whether I’m making good decisions about my career (I’m not, but that’s my business). I’m pushing 50, and they call to remind me about things I’ve been handling independently since before they got their first cell phones. At my dad’s funeral planning meeting last year, my mom was still trying to manage how I was sitting in the chair. Not an Asian thing. A Hsiung thing. A specific flavor of anxiety and control that got passed down and reinforced until it became the family operating system.

You can spend your whole life trying to prove you’re competent, or you can accept that they’re going to worry and micromanage until they’re physically unable to do so. Neither option feels great, but one of them requires less energy.

You just learned that the things your parents couldn’t say out loud often caused more damage than the things they did say.

The silences, the erasures, the control disguised as care—these were their ways of coping with conflicts they didn’t have the tools or language to resolve. We’re left to translate their actions into meaning, to guess at the fears and traumas that drove them, to decide which patterns to break and which to forgive.