Tag: Ideas

Tada! All my Harvard papers in 1 place.

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Le Petit Prince

Public announcement on the blog!!! : )

There’s now a blog tab apart from Chronicle and Contact called…

Academic 💙🤖📘🧬🌏

…where I’ve pooled together the A-grade papers/creative coursework I’ve written for my Harvard classes. In short, I present to you the intellectual arc of my college career.

There are some that I wish I could’ve done better, but all these intellectual-babies were born out of many frantic stretches of procrastination, mugs of green tea, adrenaline-filled nights, quiet conversations with professors, incredible seminars, and playlists full of stirring film soundtracks and sad Chinese love ballads.

The two things I’ve done most at college? Quite possibly reading and writing. 📚✍️ Very grateful to the professors, classmates, and TFs, who have truly expanded my mind in lecture/seminar and given me the freedom to engage with the ideas that excite me the most — these papers pretty much encapsulate and distill those intellectual experiences into my own words.

So just the other day, when I was trying to find something I wrote in high school (and literally COULD NOT FIND IT!), it struck me how scary it is to pour your mind and soul into an intellectual exercise or even crafting something from scratch (paper-writing is akin to creation) BUT then consign it to some spartan, dusty corner on the Mac, before they get carelessly deleted and lost forever someday down the road. In fact, apart from the eyes of my professors and TFs (Teaching Fellows), these papers have just languished unread.

(travesty!!!) (i feel so guilty to my past self, the one hunching over the Mac and punching furiously on the keyboard with six dog-eared books beside her) (it’s like having a short-lived passionate affair before negligence and then eternal limbo)

Therefore, I’ve finally decided to salvage these papers from the black hole of my laptop storage and to leave them all in one place for easy reference.

Happy reading! If you actually finish reading any and would like to talk about it, I would be very EXCITED to!!!

tom and jerry

Lots of love,

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A day ft. Jeff Zucker, Fareed Zakaria & Amanda Lee Koe

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🌟 07/10/2019 🦄

Just want to mark this date on the blog: July 10, 2019 (even as the minutes slowly tumble into July 11, 2019).

If there’s one day I want to carve into my memory from this entire summer thus far, it’s July 10. It’s the most exhilarating and stimulating day I’ve had in a long, long while.

In the morning, all the CNN interns (around fifty or so) met Jeff Zucker, the President of CNN. It was really cool to see him in person. (He’s a Harvard alum!)

A few hours later, rather spontaneously, Fareed (the host of the show I’m working for — Fareed Zakaria GPS) asked the other intern and me to join him for lunch. Like WOW. Seriously one of the most thought-provoking conversations I’ve ever had. You might not feel it that keenly watching him on TV, but hearing him respond unscripted to your questions in person is clarity personified. The astute insight and the brilliance in the way he articulates how he thinks about the world really do inspire. He even mentioned the time he interviewed Lee Kuan Yew (😭😍*) for Foreign Affairs and LKY’s brutal frankness.

(*which really makes me wish that I could have had the chance to talk to LKY in person before he became buried in time and referred to in past tense. Because he had one of the greatest, brightest minds, but now he lives on in history books, the institutions he built, and conversations like this.)

Straight after work, I took the subway to SoHo for the book launch of Amanda Lee Koe‘s Delayed Rays of a Star. Her Instagram account is so witty and personable, with little nuggets of stories and flashing snippets of life. Since reading The Ministry of Moral Panic in one afternoon (standing for hours in Kinokuniya), I’ve been following her life on Instagram.

And now I’ve met her in person!!!

THERE IS NOTHING LIKE SEEING A YOUNG SINGAPOREAN AUTHOR ACTUALLY PUBLISH A BOOK (with a creative, glorious, cosmopolitan premise) TO PUSH YOU TO WRITE YOUR OWN NOVEL.

It took me around four years to write this novel. For the first year, I was just paralyzed by the archive, she said.

Also, there’s something special about observing the author in her process (at least from the fragments on Instagram) / knowing about the author before something gets published. You somehow realized that a book isn’t conjured but born through the minutiae of research, drowning, actually sitting down and typing away (quote Amanda, When I work, I’m like a crazy nun. All I have before me is a comb of bananas and black coffee and the only time I leave is when I need to pee.), and that it takes time time time time time. But it somehow happens. And a book is born.

Selina Xu Amanda Lee Koe

Amanda Lee Koe and me at the book launch!!!

Oops it’s 1:33AM. GOOD NIGHT.

Lots of love,

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April is tough. And brilliant. ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ

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Easter Egg: Screenplay at the end of the post. 🥚✨

team

♪(๑ᴖ◡ᴖ๑)♪

🌏 Harvard China Forum 💡

April 12th to 14th, Harvard College China Forum happened.

Remember last year when I was the Programming Associate in charge of the Culture Panel (ft. Fang Wenshan 💕)? As the Programming Chair this year, I oversaw how my amazing team put together an entire conference’s worth of content together. China’s growth will be one of the defining stories of our time and perhaps, we have shaped that narrative somehow.

Nothing beats months of brainstorming, invitation-writing, cold-emailing, drafting of panel descriptions and discussion questions, numerous color-coded spreadsheets, coordination of individual speaker logistics (400+ WeChat notifications and overflowing inboxes every day), the introduction of panelists to each other, staying up late at night at the GSD (Graduate School of Design) reviewing design details, and of course, the three forum days when everything came together — like the greatest show, painstakingly and lovingly built, scripted, and performed by numerous hands; like something that seemed to pass too fast but still endures, gathering minds and presenting ideas like cradling two brilliant continental halves of an earthly heart before a thousand people.

The number of speakers:

120+ (including Kevin Rudd, Jin Liqun, Yu Zheng etc.)

Kevin Rudd at Harvard China Forum

With Kevin Rudd, the 26th Prime Minister of Australia, who spoke at our Closing Ceremony ✨

The number of panels: 

11. (Finance, Entertainment, Pharmaceuticals, Technology, Arts, Culture, Philanthropy, International Relations & Development, Music, Philanthropy, and Entrepreneurship)

The number of keynote ceremonies:

3.

 

Welcoming 4/12
Opening 4/13
Closing 4/14

The number of attendees:

1085.

Thank you to each of you who made this another great year. ❤ I’ve learned so much from this journey that never ceases to amaze me — at what other institution in the world would this be possible? The incredible caliber of speakers, the sheer depth of dialogue, the commitment from everyone involved, and the team that handles this professionally demanding role outside of our busy Harvard lives.

The other day at an IOP (Institute of Politics) dinner, I met another student who asked me intently, “Do you think we should be afraid of China? Like with their One Belt, One Road initiative?” It is moments like this when I’m convinced that there is a great need to bring thinkers from the U.S. and China in dialogue on all fronts, at a place of learning where misunderstandings and stereotypes really do still exist BUT, at least, where people are curious and seek more answers beyond the reign of media and the limits of historical subjectivity.

Blessed to be here and I hope I can keep growing alongside this forum.

(´･ω･`)

paper-writing woes 😪

In the dimly lit DeWolfe common room, I’m curled up on the couch against the floor-to-ceiling windows. I felt timeless. It could be 2AM or 5AM. The hours are collapsing into one other.

In the hours spent typing away, tiny black letters crawl over the blank page on my laptop screen like an ant army, expanding the boundaries, encroaching on the ever-expanding territory of whiteness… My thoughts flowing and flowing, like a stream punctuated by soft, rhythmic punches on the keyboard.

It’s a draft for my History & Literature sophomore essay — 3000 to 4000 words in length, on any topic that has to do with ’empire’ or ‘imperialism.’ My topic of choice? Kevin Kwan’s Crazy Rich Asians (not the movie!!). What does CRA have to do with imperialism? At first glance, not much. After two days of reading, knee-deep in literature, all kinds of thoughts jump around my spinning head: what does the novel tell us about ‘Chineseness’? How can we understand class — in particular, the elite Chinese diasporic subject? How are capitalism and mobility in interplay? In the background, against which all the drama, catfights, and ostentatious displays of wealth are set, there is the postcolonial city-state of Singapore, where I grew up in.

Behind me, tiny filaments of light are seeping through the blinds, painting my bare legs in stripes. Bleary-eyed, I press one finger on a blind and peer out of the window. Gentle, pale sunlight touches my cheek.

I look at the digital clock. It’s 6:28 AM.

Here marks the first time in college I’ve stayed up all night writing an essay. It’s not cool — the big, red pimple on my chin will be a battle scar — but it feels like a college ritual that has finally happened. Here’s what happens when you have three papers due in one weekend.

April is tough, tough, tough!!!

ʕʘ‿ʘʔ

🤖 what have i been reading? 🧟

For the latest paper in one of my courses, “Forbidden Romance in Modern China,” I’ve decided to write a screenplay adapted from the most violent scene in Yu Hua’s Classical Romance 余华的《古典爱情》— it’s a short story that parodies the literary archetype of the Scholar-meets-Maiden romance (think: Peony Pavilion 《牡丹亭》) by subverting it with irrational, absurd violence that recapitulates the trauma of the Cultural Revolution. A climactic moment in the story is when the scholar is in a tavern and discovers that his long-lost beloved is being chopped alive for consumption in an adjacent room.

I decided to re-write that particular scene of monstrosity and bleakness into the format of a screenplay. (Scroll to the bottom of the post for my short 6-page screenplay. Hands down, the most violent thing I’ve ever written.)

How to represent the unrepresentable? How to imply violence? How to avoid explicit gore, yet still create suspense and dread?

As someone who is adamantly and unabashedly terrified of horror and thriller films — the scariest movie I watched until I turned 16 was Spirited Away (imagine your parents turning into pigs?!) —  I decided to approach this academically. I researched the best thriller films (they had dreadful names… Like Texas Chainsaw Massacre… And some that were more normal like Hitchcock’s Psycho.) and read their screenplays to study how they conveyed violence. 

The result? I was shivering in broad daylight and was terrified to turn off the lights at night. (My roommate also happened to be away. T_T)

In the meantime, to relax my English-addled brain, I also fell down the rabbit hole of Chinese novels which are CRAZILY GOOD. The genre of choice has been a mix of mystery and speculative fiction — one that I really liked is about being infinitely suspended in a Matrix-like game that simulates real-life unsolved cases.

Sigh, happily reading while floundering in a sea of deadlines. Now I’m five days away from leaving campus and ending my Sophomore year. Books are time machines!!!

Lots of love,

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Brevity: Renaissance Woman

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Yuri

“Dark” by Xuan Loc Xuan

Brevity features short posts on the interesting, incisive, or inexplicably moving ideas I encounter at Harvard. It’s a record of the detail in those intellectual and creative moments, as well as an exploration of the curious questions that keep me up at the midnight hour. Here’s an honest snapshot of my mind.

Sometimes, I realize how much more I have to go and then —

limits.

I saw on Facebook that someone in my year won the Wendell Prize (congratulations!). It’s awarded to one Harvard sophomore annually, who is identified “as the most promising and broad-ranging scholar in his or her class.” We were Facebook friends but I don’t think we’ve ever met in real life. I Googled his name. What came up first was an article he had written for the Harvard Independent, titled “Getting In.” It was beautiful — a portrait of a young artist rendered more evocatively, gently, and vulnerably than most writers on campus (myself included) could have.

How to be a modern-day Renaissance woman (or man)? In a few seconds, I just knew. This was it.

Returning to the page of search results, I clicked the second listed site. It was a Physics department page. He was an undergraduate researcher in the Department of Physics, doing “statistical and semiclassical analysis of thermal distortion potentials.”

Before me was a vague outline of someone who was not just good but excellent at many things. I felt a burst of wonder and respect, but also intermingled in a tide of wistfulness, a dim sense of loss. It wasn’t self-negating. Yet, this brief internet encounter with a silhouette of brilliance made me rethink why I found his straddling of fields so surprising.

Our instincts are honed by stereotypes. Somewhere along the path of my education, I must have subconsciously internalized the distinctions between the literary arts and the sciences, took their gulf for granted, and happily embraced specialization. Why should scientists not be able to write beautifully? (Carl Sagan and Paul Kalanithi come to mind.) Why would it be impossible that a writer be a scientist? (Like Nabokov and his butterflies.) Are their objects of inquiry — nature and culture — all that different? The universe and its truths. The human condition. A story with different building blocks.

With the platter of liberal arts options, I have thus far chosen to do a grand zero of problem set classes at Harvard. Truth is: I’ve willingly, single-mindedly boxed myself in a rigid taxonomy of disciplines, the boundaries of which might actually be more nebulous than I think. The divisions between fields that we presume as perennial are often recent constructs — e.g. philosophy and the natural sciences (for instance, phenomenology started as psychology under Brentano).

Not sure how I will move forward with these thoughts. After all, I count myself blessed to have found an irresistible love for the humanities and the opportunity to study them at a place like Harvard. But, honestly, where else could I have had such a close brush with the contours of a renaissance man, or this acute of a realization?

(Typed this in a flurry, during a break from writing a paper that’s due tonight. Back to more practical tasks on hand!!!)

Lots of love,

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Interning at Venture Capital in China

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Before I get swept up in the semester, let me close the chapter of winter break. I’m writing down my internship thoughts in the polar chill of Cambridge, MA. January has ended. Everything’s days and continents away.

Did you do anything meaningful over the break other than drink bubble tea?

Yes!! (Doing meaningful things and drinking bubble tea are not mutually exclusive, after all.) I went to Beijing during the last two weeks of break for an internship at Northern Light Venture Capital (NLVC).

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Interns + Michael – Harry

What on earth is venture capital??

To be really honest, I had a pretty vague idea before going. But, here’s the textbook definition:

Venture capital is a type of financing provided to private, early-stage companies deemed to have high growth potential by investors in exchange for equity, or partial ownership of the company.

Here’s what I now think after two weeks: although VC is about returns, it can also be about creating social good through innovative (perhaps, disruptive) ideas that improve lives and efficiency. When you have lots of money, you can mold the future. You will also want to be richer. So you become a Limited Partner (LP) at a firm with knowledgeable people to invest your money in startups with lots of potential (which also happen to be hungry for capital). VC is a risky asset class. But, high risk, high returns. In some sense, it’s a win-win.

Why did you want to do a VC internship in China?

I wanted to immerse myself in China’s unique startup ecosystem. As a storyteller by heart, I’m intrigued by China’s burgeoning “content entrepreneurship” amidst its media revolution (from Wechat public accounts to Zhihu to Ximalaya FM podcasts to online fiction publishing).

I’m also fascinated by the media sector, which might be disrupted by new formats of how we experience content (augmented reality, livecasts) and communicate with one another (what’s after the mobile phone?). How the real and the virtual will merge in content consumption is a ripe area of growth.

In learning first-hand about NLVC’s portfolio companies, and how people who have one foot in the future and one in the present conceive of these possibilities, I sought to draw insights for my own career. My mantra is: Do something different every break!

What did you do?

We met with investment and legal professionals, visited start-ups (ranging from autonomous vehicles to data analytics to fashion to e-sports to teleradiology to AI+ entertainment), and sat in on New Horizon VC’s in-house team meetings in different sectors (TMT, Healthcare, and Risk Control & Portfolio Management).

What did you learn?

Here are some unexpected takeaways and nuggets of information:

  • You can only truly understand ‘consumer demand’ when you are in the field. Example: It’s really easy to be idealistic at a place like Harvard that online education is going to be the next big thing and to take the thirst for knowledge for granted. But, beyond a certain point, is knowledge really value-adding to most people’s lives? From the investor’s perspective, the future of pay-for-knowledge startups (知识付费) is extremely uncertain.
  • What’s the next big thing after PC/Mobile? The traditional keyboard/touchpad model might be rendered utterly obsolete. Here’s speculation from a VC professional we met —  perhaps, mobile phones might be separated into different devices according to function, e.g. watch, augmented reality glasses, fitness devices, or even soft screens (which is totally new to me).
  • Sometimes, the best indicator of how far a startup can go is the founder.
  • The big challenge for autonomous vehicles is one of generalization (beyond particularization — an operational design domain, and localization after data collection).
  • Many technologies seemingly far away from our lives are actually already all around us. The commercialization of autonomous vehicles is upon us — from airports to valet parking. AI is being used in product placements on variety shows that I’ve watched — many of the products and advertisements on Singer (歌手) were augmented!
  • In China, Wechat mini-programs are very crucial to many startups’ creative strategies.
  • For many e-commerce startups, the focus is now on a streamlining of the offline and the online retail experience. This concept of ‘new retail‘ can engage online data to make the physical consumer experience individually tailored. Here’s a read of Alibaba’s pivot.
  • What’s important to a startup? Ideas, leadership, funds, timing. An oft-overlooked aspect is the importance of a talented team who will leave their high-paying jobs to join you to develop your start-up idea at the drop of a hat and will stick with you and stand by you even in times of hardship. That’s what really takes to make a sustainable startup.
  • Augmented/virtual reality sports matches! Imagine The Hunger Games in the virtual realm. Kind of like Ready Player One. Maybe a good story idea.
  • While a typical EM (emerging market) crisis, as triggered by withdrawal of foreign currency, is unlikely in China due to its low external debts, one can only be cautiously optimistic about how the Chinese government will rebalance as the market undergoes structural reforms. While smooth rebalancing is currently the most probable medium-term outcome, the second most likely outlook is that China may encounter Japan-style stagnation (without its wealth).

Ultimately, I learned that it’s very hard to be the number one in any field. But, this internship has really taught me to think in terms of intersections — if you can become the top 10% of multiple fields, there may be a niche intersection where you can make an irreplaceable and maximized impact to the world.

That’s so cool! How can I get to know more about VC, entrepreneurship, and China?

Here are some interesting articles shared by everyone in the internship:

Some career guidance from wiser people I met:

I read so much. How about some photos?

A snapshot of some happy moments. Most of the time, I was so busy that I didn’t have time to take pictures.

Exhibit A: I tried a Rachel Zoe jumpsuit at the offline experience store of 女神派 Ms. Paris, a designer clothing rental platform — a Chinese version of Rent the Runway. Of the four main pillars of human life — clothes, food, accommodation, and travel (衣食住行) — the sharing economy is finally starting to take off for clothes (after Airbnb, Uber/Lyft/Didi, bike-sharing, etc.).

Exhibit B: I’m sitting on a gaming chair at e-sports startup, 9eplay.

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Exhibit C: Harry and I met with our Harvard & Singapore senior, Zara! She is currently working in venture capital at GGV Capital’s Beijing office — fun fact: aside from being a blogger, she also co-hosts 996, a bi-weekly English podcast featuring the movers and shakers in China’s tech industry. Writers put themselves out there, she said, that’s how opportunity comes knocking. 她说：“肯定会迷茫，但是专注于把眼前的事情做到极致。” Really inspired. ❤

Exhibit D: My internship roommate, Olivia!!! We are at some door in the Forbidden Palace’s Imperial Garden. 

Coming up next: shopping week, figuring out classes, and crazy little things.

Lots of love,

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