I always imagined I’d have kids at a young age so that my children would know their grandparents in a way I never got to know mine. I never imagined that even if my boyfriend and I had actually started in 2012 like he always joked (year of the dragon!) we wouldn’t have made it. I keep thinking his mom will never see her sons get married, never see her grandchildren. It wasn’t her time.

I learned a little Cantonese. Often someone would tell me, oh, this is how you could say hello to your boyfriend’s mom in Cantonese (阿姨好) and this is what you could say when you’re over for dinner (你太客氣啦 - oh you shouldn’t have!). Now when I think about these phrases I just feel regret that I’ll never get to know her the way I wanted to.

She got me tank tops for me when I first met her, and two boxes of chocolate - one for me, and one for my family, so we “wouldn’t have to fight.” I never would have picked out these tank tops, but now I wear them all the time. I always thought we would go shopping together and I would absorb more of her fashion sense.

And there was food she prepared that I’ll never know the recipe for anymore. All I want to do now is go home and cook with my mom, but I’m in Germany.

Sometimes I absorb other people’s wants. Lately I’ve been frequenting this Learning Japanese forum to pick up some tips on language learning, and was briefly struck with a desire to pick up Japanese. I’m not a particularly big fan of Japanese media, don’t know any Japanese people, and don’t want to live in Tokyo (where most tech jobs would be found). The best reason I wanted to learn Japanese is because hiragana (ひらがな) looks cute. So I’m not really convinced that learning Japanese is something I really want to do.

A good way to figure out what you really want to is ask yourself “And then what?”, as in: “I want to learn to speak Japanese fluently/get a Ph.D/win the lottery.” And then what would happen? What would be different? What would you do? If you actually have a good answer, great. Otherwise, keep asking  “And then what?” and find out what you actually want.

Another question to ask is, “Would I enjoy the process?” (e.g., of learning Japanese). Maybe you just REALLY LOVE learning new languages, and fluency isn’t really the point.

As for me, I’m more practical than that. So I think what I really want is simply more cute things in my life. <3

Once I met a third generation Chinese-American (his grandparents grew up in HK). He said he could say the numbers 1 - 10 in Cantonese and that was about it. It bothers me that that will most likely be the fate of my kids, unless massive action is taken…

awakeismysoul:

When people don’t understand that Japanese and Chinese are basically the same language, with some exceptions. 

The kanji is the same. 

Kanji in Japanese=Chinese characters. 

-_-

No…That’s like saying English and French are basically the same language because they share the same letters.

I had a dream that Google rejected me, and as condolence they gave me a balloon.

And then I had another nightmare that my boyfriend started smoking. He said it was manly. This was by far the worse dream.

Every once in a while I’m really pleased with myself for snagging the domain name, http://www.sarahnguyen.com/ right when it expired. And then I feel extremely mad at myself for missing the opportunity when the same thing happened to my boyfriend’s [lastnamefirstname].com/ domain. T___T Luckily, I don’t think he really cares…