Random Writings about Media

White Suburban America

There was a time in 2016-2022 when I was genuinely fascinated and obsessed with the white middle class America. I read hundreds of English books, far more than Chinese books. Back then had I came to an American university and sit in those exact "artsy" groups, everything would still have been interesting. My favorite authors were Ann M Martin (I read at least 26 books), Barbara Park, Judy Blume, John Green, and all the Newbery books, the exact white, suburban, middle class America. It was genuinely my favorite books. When I was in 6th or 7th grade, going to America genuinely felt more exciting, and Barnes & Noble or local bookshops were my favorite place.

On the other hand, I never quite liked Chinese novels much because they felt boring. I mostly liked Classical Chinese and the author I read the most was probably Jin Yong. I only liked a few modern Chinese classics. Why would I want to read a cheesy, boring, bland Chinese novel about middle/high school? I wouldn't finish one chapter.

Then I reached full fluency in English in 2022. I had more free time in university, hopped the firewall, watched several hours of YouTube a day. I changed my internal language to English in China. Then when I went to California for an exchange year, I didn't even notice any language frictions anymore. I tried to go to Barnes & Noble in Emeryville and some bookstores again, and everything suddenly became very boring - I didn't buy any books. I gradually stopped consuming much English media and I stopped reading in 2023.

Now let me explain. White middle class America didn't "go bad" - it was never that "good" in the first place. The glow was an illusion from the start. It was only bright and glowing because of the linguistic friction/stimulation when my English was still not native. It's all about you, your high effort of running towards it, and how English made you special in China. It was a very difficult language grind for me in middle school to brute force English fluency, while the native kid was simply passing time. When you reach full fluency, English books turn into Chinese books. When I picked up a Sarah Dessen or Jenny Han book, I couldn't finish a chapter. The American small activities and the cozy foreign teacher classes I used to enjoy in primary school and middle school suddenly became extremely boring and meaningless. Nothing about the book or the "artsy clubs" on campus had changed.

When your brain uses most of its power to decode the language, you feel the "deep soul, magic, cozy warmth". But it's all a projection from the inside. When you are obsessed with doing something, every other desire is your brain's projection of that ideal. When you read low-density content and absord the meaning instantly with no effort, and you find out the clubs are just people wasting their time with mumbling small talk, you feel it's just bland and empty. The language friction and the novelty itself was your ego validation.

And now if someone tells you that your English is good, you actually feel annoyed and you be like, "No thank you." And you want to say something like, "I'm from a bilingual part of China. Some parts are Chinese only and Shanghai is bilingual." or "Russians also said my Russian is good."

The "Liberal" Dialect

Ok, disclaimer, I am just hallucinating anyway. It probably works in New England, who knows, but it doesn't work in Arkansas.

"Slightly pretentious, performatively authentic, vulnerable, privileged but hide your privilege" vibe

• "I am looking for a safe space for neurodivergence. I am new here, I struggled sometimes with socializing before, but I genuinely want to connect with people!"
• "I read the news and I am a bit worried about the political climate these days. There seems to be a lot going on and policies that I do not understand. This is the kind of safe place for me, right? I have struggled with rigid systems before and I am just trying to fit in and be kind." (inverse looking for confirmation)
• "I would go to the Shanghai Foreign bookstore every weekend alone in middle school - 3 subway stations awa - begging my parents for some pocket change. It's not the best bookstore but I knew almost every shelf and there is this shelf with Newbery Medals! I liked Louis Lowry, Lois Sachar, Kate Dicamillo, and a lot of other books! I remember when I saw a book on the book shelf in fifth grade and suddenly half an hour later I was reading about an eighth grader Kristy Thomas planning a part-time job!" (Nostalgia hit and "I am one of you")
• "When I was young, a kid from a village in the provinces came to stay with us for a week. He was a little malnourished, and deeply fascinated with everything we had. That moment was when I understood the systemic challenges and rural economic disparities. Under the rigid system is a real human being sitting next to me being suffocated and how impossible it is to navigate such a system. I decided to volunteer/teach English.... When I was backpacking alone in... I was suddenly short on money. Panicked, a man working in the restaurant kitchen bought me food, and I could never forget the empathy and kindness I received from the working class stranger." (The condescending, patronizing gaze)
• I am a man and not queer, so I can't play the feminism card, but, "I am deeply alienated by certain environments filled with toxic masculinity - even I feel like this, imagine the sheer exhaustion of someone disadvantaged."

Ok, a dialect requires practice and I am currently low on the hours.

Similarly, there are also the southern church dialect, the non-elite democratic anti-intellectual dialect (Brian Tyler Cohen, David Pakman, Sanders, Reich, Kimmel), the MAGA redneck anti-intellectual dialect (any Trump rallies, Tucker Carlson, but there's also Brett Cooper, Candace Owens, though slightly different), the Telemundo/Univision Latinx dialect, and the black AAE dialect (Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry? Calpurnia in TKMB? I don't know the current black culture). I am in love with Russian and I don't have time for them now!

Books on Ebay and Russian

I was trying to find Russian books on Ebay. But then I searched Nancy Drew or Baby sitters club on Ebay out of curiosity and there are 20k+ results. I would've cried for it if I was in 5th grade or middle school. Many books weren't available on Taobao and Shanghai Foreign Language Store and I had to convince my parents to buy it for me. When I look back at it, there is still the faint scent of nostalgia, the feeling that I cannot possibly go through again. And that feeling is completely fused with my teen years - it was my second childhood.

It was not a loss after all! It is only a loss if you still cling to that illusion. The thing is, most first-gen Chinese immigrants have terrible English even after living in the west for many years! If you don't speak good English, it becomes a career barrier. The paradox is, they desperately want to speak better English, but most of them won't pick up a YA novel!

And now I want to read Galina Shcherbakova, Asya Lavrinovich, Daria Dontsova! And everything in Russian, news, radios, Dzen articles, Russian TikTok, and Telegram channels are still very interesting to me. If you are born in Moscow or 100% fluent in Russian, what would these feel like?

На eBay все еще можно купить ТДС-6, очень интересно! Я хочу такие купить, но я не знаю как они работают, и хочу просто посмотреть, какие они. На eBay есть атлас СССР. И там много плакатов. Но они обычно не очень дешёвые, поэтому я сейчас их не купил. Но всё равно, думаю что это очень интересно. Например, Ленинград Историко-географический атлас 1981 года. Но если вы просто поищете в Яндексе, то на Озоне все есть за копейки. Хоть я сейчас не в России, и вообще я очень редко бывал в России. На eBay также есть будильники СССР, Витязь и Слава.

Кроме работы, в основном время думаю что будет уходить на "чтение и медиа". (это включает радио, книги, ведение дневника, и съемку видео для себя). Кроме этого, просто гуляю и бегаю (когда у меня есть машина). Вот и все.

What is Media?

Media, communication, and PR is the other half of my career. I see media as my second major after CS.

Not in the university faculty sense though. In fact, media, PR, or foreign language majors in universities are very terrible and out of touch. I don't know what they are doing if they aren't all trying to become influencers.

Media is different from "real-world clout". Media is global. Offline popularity is very dependent on the local place, local people, non-scalable, and usually requires dealing with the messy human reality. Somehow most people aren't into media, even media majors or the "local popular people". Why did they willingly give up on this? It is confusing that some people maybe really just want to be consumers online. Media is everywhere and you should be in it.

The very first thing about media you need to understand is that: cringe/embarrassment is an entirely internal feeling. As long as you stay "appropriate" and relatively polished, you are fine.

Media sells an ideal and targets your ego, Just don't have delusions about people in the real world you will pay a tax.

For me it was reading English books obsessively in middle school, writing blogs, then learning Russian, then starting a Russian TikTok. In the meantime I am probably going to be blogging about life in Arkansas. I want to start an English channel, but probably later.

20% of the Asian penalty might still apply, the other 80% (media, communication, risk taking) can be flipped into an advantage. So I am still lucky!

The Selfish Erotic Ego

One half of the human existence is going upward. Think about math geniuses, marathon runners. It is about your ego and your identity.

The other half is about validating other people's egos and their identities. And it is not some very mysterious, deeply complex thing. Honestly, for the most part, it is actually quite simple. And most people from different cultures are actually quite similiar.

Basically 3 elements: You have to be competent and stoic, they feel you are fighting and suffering for them, and you show some vulnerabilities. That's pretty much it.

You can't appeal to everyone, you can start by appealing to a selected few. You know you would not appeal to a loud bar for example, because you hate loud noises. That's ok. In fact, humans are tribal and often in conflicts with each other, and one specific target audience is often good enough.

But this feeling is actually quite selfish. Think of a rock singer going on tours - they have to suffer, sweat, sing in agony, sometimes dealing with chemical addictions. You can see this in Russian singers such as Tsoi, Yuri Shatunov, Vysotsky, and other people who took different political stances after 2022. Do people actually care about their health? Probably not for most. They see the musician as a medicine they take so their life can get easier. If an artist dies or suffers for political reasons, people actually feel an even stronger high while grieving because they think the artist died for them.

Что касается современного Запада, поп-культура иногда говорит вам совершенно противоположные вещи. То есть, если вы смотрите Мосфильм в 70-80 х, кино например, "Ирония судьбы", "Москва слезам не верит", вы думаете что это прекрасная страна с глубокой душой, без знания что в это время люди стоят в очередях за хлебом, а у партийной элиты было все. Звуки акустической гитары и поэзия не останавливают застой. Но это только для посредственных людей.

Ok, I don't know. I am not an expert here. I am just randomly mumbling. This is just one idea here and many people live long, peaceful lives without burning themselves out. But the "selfish erotic ego" is roughly the idea here. It triggers an erotic high for some people when they watch you suffer for them. You reminded them of their youth. You reminded them of their cultural significance. You validated their grievances in life.

About Your Own Ego ("I don't know, but I have to care")

Some things are like, "I don't know why I have to care and I can't do anything about it but I have to care", like your height. If you are living completely alone, it doesn't matter if you are 5 feet or 6 feet. But if you are socializing and living your life, it does matter a lot. Also like seeking validation in other people or sex for man.

If you are caught in a thinking problem, just distract yourself from it. A "thinking problem" is when you try to use logic to solve an emotional problem, such as loneliness, boredom, or shame. ("How do I compare to other people", "What is my true identity?", "What's the possibility of marrying at some age?", "Put a counterfactual in my life, what happens?") You can't think your way out of an existential question or an ego problem.

You only learn to deal with the damage and keep going forward in your life. And then you have fatalism - sometimes you see something coming at you and there is still nothing you can do.

And the thing is I am the "selection bias" for kids with rich parents. I realized that the normal expectation for a child like me for two high-achieving parents would be to either suffer a mental breakdown or tap out through an easy path. To choose this path myself, I had this ego in the first place anyway. And I don't want to retire and I want to work until late 70s and 80s. Turned out even my parents aren't who I thought they were! I came all the way to the US instead of staying in Shanghai! Now that I'm here, I can't be bribed with wealth anymore.

You cannot love someone if they violate your ego, unless you drop your ego and submit to them. There can only be hatred or transactional coldness. (that's why normal people don't fall in love with lone geniuses!) If you like yourself or your job too much, you can't like other people. But there isn't a "right" or "wrong" here anyway.