The Mid-Point

Hitting The Existential Point of No Return

Aging

There’s a specific scenario in my mind that I’ve replayed almost daily since I was probably around 12 or so, when I first started having existential thoughts. It’s a simple one, where I am getting up in the morning or about to go to sleep at night and I’m peeing. And in the middle of this pee, there’s a moment where I think to myself about how old I am and am always surprised that it’s not 12 anymore but 18, 21, 25, 33, 40. And then projected forward, what is this thinking this thought going to feel like at 42? 50? 65? 87? Am I going to be surprised at how old I am every time? Am I going to still think I haven’t changed from my middle school life?

Growing up, I never imagined life after 30. My conception of being adult was so fraught with anxiety and negative anticipation that I simply chose not to even imagine it. And because I always looked young for my age (I got mid 20s recently, I’ll take it), part of me might have been deluded into thinking that I might be the Asian Peter Pan.

So when I turned 30 ten years ago, I thought that was it: the moment I would start to feel different. I planned accordingly, started trying to see doctors regularly, getting into powerlifting for the first time, etc. But to my surprise, everything felt pretty much the same as before.

Until I hit 35.

To this day, I still have bad habits that I made since I was a teenager, procrastination, staying up extremely late with little sleep, etc. In the past I was typically able to bounce back when I needed to, having the focus and will to power through anything without sleep if my back really was against the wall and accomplish what I needed to. But when you combine physical aging with those bad habits, “I’ll do it tomorrow” turns into, “eh, let’s just not do that thing ever” when the deadline for what I wanted to do finally arrived.

At 35, my life was pretty much at a crossroads. For over a year I had been campaigning for a TV show I had created and produced to not only see if I should remain in Hollywood pursuing an entertainment career, but really to capture what it meant to be an Asian American in Los Angeles. Looking back, I feel that I have succeeded in the latter but failed in establishing the former for a myriad of reasons I now understand with a fuller understanding of both Hollywood and American history.

On top of all that, in early 2019, my dad on the other side of the country experienced a ruptured artery and needed an emergency open heart surgery. Under his own estimations as a physician, going into that particular surgery, he had a 10% survival rate and so before going under anesthesia, said a final good bye to my mother. He survived thankfully, but the nagging “what would a good Asian son do” thought that kept popping up in my mind in the aftermath, coupled with the physical toll of my age and the anxiety of not being where all of my peers were in life, I began a hard pivot into figuring out what the next phase of my life was going to look like.

The year of soul searching wasn’t all bad for me, I finally felt comfortable in my own skin and became assured with a layer of self-confidence in my life I had never had before. This would become extremely important in the following few years, as it mentally steeled me against what was to be levied against me, a barrage of hatred online that would have been too much to handle for a neurotypical.

By the end of the year I had finally settled on leaving my Hollywood dreams and contemplated reentering “normal” life: studying for business school while also simultaneously learning a bit of coding and composing EDM for fun. That all lasted for about two months, when COVID-19 first hit American shores. (My Novation Launchkey Mini MIDI controller has still never been used.)

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Chaos

In my last entry, I covered my political journey from turning into a fairly apolitical libertarian into a Marxist Leninist. My personal journey was rife with a lot of anxiety and stress, as one might expect from someone in my position. Most of the people in my life were from the elite areas of America, whether it was academia, journalism, entertainment, medicine, law, technology, finance, you name it. Leading up to the pandemic, the majority of my existential stress was being amidst people like this my entire life and feeling like I not only didn’t fit in, but that I was being left behind.

All this changed after 2020, after deep diving into American history, western philosophy and Marxist theory. My life had comprised of trying to find truth in so many different fields of bourgeois academia and culture and finding it now underneath the metric tons of American propaganda, I felt for the first time a certain sort of freedom, a mental clarity of being able to see every media piece under a different light, seeing the elements of propaganda and being able to quickly translate and dissect media in real time. On Twitter, I was downloading exabytes of information and propaganda tactics into my brain by sparring with all sorts of people all over the political spectrum. And after a decade of failing to have any sort of voice in the entertainment industry, for the first time I felt that my opinions, and really the opinion of the Asian American man, was being heard.

Of course, since I now decided that Marxism Leninism was the only way path forward for humanity, my views clashed with virtually everyone in my life up to that point, which as everyone who knows me well knows, meant that there was inevitably going to be chaos. My personality is shaped by my dad’s goofy trolling and autistic obsessions with random interests with my mom’s hyper OCD goal oriented never give up or back down Korean mom stubbornness. While I had mostly softened up the latter as I got older, all my disgust at liberalism (and most specifically, boba liberalism) even before I became a communist bubbled to the surface and I started to accept my new role as the “bad boy MRAsian” of Asian diaspora Twitter.

While most of my close personal relationships remained intact, many of my relationships on the periphery started to fade into the background as my views became more “extreme”. I suspect that I am muted by at least 80% of my IRL mutuals, if they have not already unfollowed me. Part of what makes me an effective Marxist is precisely my breadth of experiences from every arena of bourgeois academia, I know exactly how the system maintains itself with its fraudulent intellectualism. Unfortunately, that also meant that I was connected with many people I was now calling out, most notably in the industry I just left, entertainment.

As I was already somewhat disillusioned with the industry and on my way out, I didn’t feel any real pressure over being “cancelled”, but I do remember at the time still feeling a bit of social pressure not to offend. But as the pandemic wore on, and socialization became limited while fear over the virus and hate crimes against Asians continued to rise, it was easier to give less fucks as the emergency of the situation kept mounting. In 2021, after a year of nonstop informational warfare, after the Atlanta shooting and several other personal events, I became disillusioned with the political situation for the Asian diaspora and briefly thought about trying to plug back into the Matrix with a corporate data science gig.

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Rebirth

Late in 2021, as I had decided to return to Los Angeles after a year back in New York, I had read an article about MRAsians that snapped me back to reality. In response, I sprung to action writing this response within a few days, like a man possessed. The Substack entry was a mini success, cementing my notoriety within the Asian diaspora internet sphere. It confirmed for me that a voice like me still needed to exist, and that I was getting closer to not only my own personal truth but the truth of the world that eluded me for decades.

My activity online would also catch the eye of the CEO of Radio Korea, who would tap me to direct a documentary for the 30th anniversary of the LA Riots in April 2022. As a first time director and given less than two months, I believe I did a pretty good job in providing a perspective of the Korean narrative of the riots that had never really been explored before.

No one caught my Fiddler on the Roof reference (pogroms!).

I connected with many more Asians not just in America, but around the world and in China, learning about history and Marxist Leninist theory at a pace unfathomable for someone who never ever heard of Vladamir Lenin just a year prior. As the pandemic was also starting to wind down, I was able to finally start traveling again in 2022, visiting Vancouver (an Asian hate crime hotspot), Vietnam and Singapore for the first time.

Traveling to Vietnam was a particularly eye opening experience, my first trip ever to a communist country. While only there for less than a week, I was able to visit all around Ho Chi Minh City as well as Hanoi, taking in as much of the museums and monuments I could fit into my limited schedule. From feeling the energy of the bustling youth in HCMC to soaking in the communist liberation particles in Hanoi, I felt a sort of at home-ness I had never quite felt anywhere in America, even though I wasn’t Vietnamese. HCMC reminded me of Seoul in the late 1980s/early 1990s when I was a kid, which probably means Pyongyang probably would resemble Hanoi in my estimation, if I ever get a chance to legally visit.

It is my firm belief that there is no profit for Asians immigrating to America anymore, especially since both the economic opportunities are drying up in America while the gap between the economic differential between our home countries and America has mostly closed within the past 30 years. The smart move now is to make a good amount of money in America to save while you can, and then move back to Asia where your money goes much much further. But even outside of money, being familiar with some of the richest Asian Americans (including a billionaire or two), I’ve come to terms that the E/SE Asian man will never be regarded as “a true American”, as long as the current imperialist government is in power.

So one of the things I felt most deeply about when I was in Vietnam was that very feeling of home-ness. Riding along in a rideshare scooter among packs of scooters on the streets (it’s a pretty insane experience when there are 100s of them around you), I felt like the locals viewed me in a positive and friendly light, a definite upgrade than the constant derision or more recently during COVID, antagonism you feel as an Asian person in America. Growing up, the only real communities that felt like this were at my Korean church or college Asian communities, but here I felt that the people really were all trying to work together for a better future for their communities and their city, and that I could be part of that community if I wanted.

Going to Singapore was also an interesting experience, as I got to talk to a fair amount of Asian intellectuals who were much more well versed in geopolitics than the average Asian American. Singapore, although a capitalist state, is friendly to China, knowing the history of British colonialism itself a former British colony. Lee Kwan Yew, Singapore’s founding leader, had close relationships with Chinese leaders, while also giving a balanced opinion on China to the west.

Asian capitalism is even superior to America, while I was in one of the most expensive areas of Singapore, products were still cheaper than their American counterparts, and much better quality. I had by far the best Shake Shack in Singapore (I have been to nearly every location in the NYC and LA areas), and a massage from a medically trained professional that knocked me out immediately. While it did have a bit of tackiness to it (it reminded me of a mix between Las Vegas and NYC’s Times Square with none of the degeneracy), I couldn’t deny that everything felt cleaner, safer and almost dreamlike compared to the “top tier” American cities that I regularly visit.

If 2021 and the pandemic sent me into a dark place from the isolation and anxiety, visiting SE Asia did the opposite, rejuvenating my spirits. I fully intend on returning when I am able, and believe that I will spend the second half of my life there. But before that, I was encouraged to return to America to try to bring to the Asian diaspora the vision I saw of Asia being the future. I was ready to hit the ground running with excitement.

But little did I know what awaited me back at home, where I would spend the next month at my parents place taking care of my dad after another one of his surgeries.

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Mutiny

Under the pressure cooker of the pandemic and the insanity of the 2020 election year with the decaying American economy and now not one but two significant wars we are a part of, the political discourse that had already been emotionally charged after Trump’s election went nuclear. I soon came to realize that every political faction in America hated Asian people, surprisingly with even more vitriol coming from the American left than the American right. I would find that even nearly every American group that called itself communist was fraudulent in nature, as most of them were anti-China as well, and worse, either was indifferent to or even cheered on anti-Asian hate. Left-wing anti-Asian racism is a much more insidious form of racism, as many western leftists are clear virtue signaling narcissists who cannot stand the idea that another nation, let alone a nonwhite one, could possibly lead humanity into a progressive socialist future.

So while I was making noise in the Asian diaspora political media sphere, I brought into the fold fellow outcasts of the Asian diaspora mainstream those who I thought were like minded individuals that resonated with the things I was saying and felt similarly about Asian Americans and politics. In fact, many of these people would later meet through me, as I tried to create a network for alternatively thinking Asian diaspora.

Over the pandemic on Twitter, I had come to have a reputation. As most of my primary adversaries were other Asian Americans that were typically in establishment journalism or western political organizations, there was a distinct disadvantage in the communication and information warfare battlefield, so it’d be easier for these larger accounts to use their influence to bury me under general western consensus, which was already primed to hate China and by proxy, Asian people who didn’t toe the line on hating China.

As such, the methods that I employed were uniquely, for lack of a better term, autistic. When westerners would use typical ad hominems they usually do to silence Asian men (incel, gay, gook, zipperhead, chink, cuck, MRAsian, bat eater, white supremacist, Hitlerite, etc.) I would lean into their entire posting history and any publicly available information with a microscope to essentially construct a psychological profile and a narrative of their agenda and motivations to expose them as liars, hypocrites, imbeciles or a combination of all three. While some may call these methods underhanded, as someone who’s not only been gaslighted his entire life but knows that Asian men as a whole have been with an overwhelming narrative disadvantage from all political factions in America, I simply did not give a fuck. I had tried every other diplomatic method of messaging for years and none of them even came close to being as effective.

This is what attracted these same Asian diaspora to me, in that they saw that not only was I outspoken, but that I had the intellectual ability to defend my positions with facts and clarity that had never really been done before by an Asian American. They would enjoy and cheer me on every time I took down a boba liberal (succinctly, an Asian person who supports the western liberal establishment) and every single fraud there was in Asian America.

Until I went after a certain group of self-styled Asian leftist “intellectuals” who were really just smarter boba liberals in disguise.

While I may go over the details of what happened the summer of 2022 at some later date, suffice to say that much of the drama when I was off guard after returning from my trip from Asia. Coming off a high but also coming back to New York to help take care of my dad after a major surgery, I was somewhat off my typically sharp game and had a lot else on my mind to deal with. To make a long story extremely short, I essentially had infiltrators of this organization in my circles, jealous individuals of my growing influence with the Asian diaspora outside of the mainstream, that I should have purged a long time ago due to suspect behavior. They had managed to convince the rest of the group of my supposed mental instability and erratic behavior, the same behavior that they had been praising and cheering on for the past two years during the pandemic.

In addition, with even more drama unrelated to me happening simultaneously, the group that I had brought together fractured and disbanded. Other Asian liberal/leftist factions outside of the group that had already been targeting me for a while joined the mix and soon I was mass reported for specious offenses (“cry more, bitch” earned me a permanent ban) on Twitter and was suspended from the platform. Though I had been suspended before, this time I felt much more targeted, as future accounts would quickly be suspended by reporting. Over the next few months, I was slandered and even lied about by those who I had trusted and met in IRL and supported.

All of the momentum and hope I felt from my Asia trip was reversed in an instant.

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Exile

I had never been a popular person growing up, nor was I ever really popular as an adult, save for superficial popularity based on my accomplishments that I didn’t really care about. Spending time in any sort of social isolation was not new to me, and I soon regrouped with more Asians in Asia and around the world outside of America, who gave me a broader perspective of geopolitics and what life was like in China and other Asian countries. I kept a relatively lower profile online for the following few months, while also reconnecting with much of the real world as it was finally shedding the last vestiges of the pandemic behind it (masks were still very much a thing and still are in much of Asia. Ironically, I would catch COVID for the first time at the end of the year).

And since I finally decided to claim my communism, it was time to start doing the work. Reading and finishing Capital took me a year, but because of my expertise in mathematics, economics, behavioral psychology, game theory, philosophy and other relevant subjects, I became more confident in my belief in the truth of Marxism Leninism as a science and a lens to understand and analyze human societies. I also read more of Lenin during his time in exile himself, to fully understand the forces he was up against and his tactical maneuvers and thought behind his plans.

One of the Lenin’s ideas that stuck out to me was that the first step in building towards a socialist revolution was to gather and educate the masses about history and theory. Before his infamous October Revolution, he started Iskra, a newsletter to spread the ideas of Marxism to the masses in a more digestible form, as Marx’s Capital was and still is fairly esoteric especially back in the early 1900s, where literacy in Russia was 20%. In response, I created The Yellow Knight, a YouTube channel where I wanted to educate the Asian diaspora about our history, our politics and really our true narrative in context of American imperialism of Asia.

Theme made with some help with some Asian American artists.

Once Elon Musk took over Twitter late in 2022, I was able to unsuspend virtually all of my accounts that were banned with ridiculous charges, while also creating a brand new one that I use today. In retrospect, divorcing myself of everyone that had betrayed me served to be a good thing, as I no longer felt tethered to anyone and started to feel fully comfortable in voicing my true opinions and thoughts about the world, as I threw the last vestiges of political correctness to the wind.

In 2023, I had started my “long march” back to the discourse, by skirting on the periphery and gaining new ground in the most niche corners of the internet, absorbing even more viewpoints about political thought not only in America, but internationally as well. As my YouTube channel was going, I also started to speak more Radio Korea, and even took an LSAT course as I briefly considered going into law to further strengthen a political or journalist career (though I did well, I decided not to go for various reasons).

In less than a year, I had been able to capture the audience metrics I had before my umpteenth cancellation attempt, and I was rolling again. Over the summer, I even started to enjoy doing things I had done before the pandemic, including venturing back to Vegas for EDC and playing in the WSOP. Even better, although I busted in the first day of the tournament, I no longer felt tethered to the result as I had in the past. I was ready to work on a new project for my channel, what I will probably consider to be my magnum opus (until the next one, of course).

However, duty would once again call, as my dad would fall deathly ill in the fall.

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Family

Oh wow, you look surprised, it looks like the doctors haven’t been updating you guys. What I am trying to tell you is that it is extremely unlikely that your father is going to survive this hospital stay.

An interesting fact I learned recently is that the reason men start to develop ear hair when they get older, is that men’s levels of testosterone, which regulate that sort of thing, start to drop significantly. As someone with OCD and was already removing nose hairs, seeing myself get ear hairs in the past few years was something of a shock, as I obsessively would then tweeze those suckers as well. I suppose it shouldn’t have been too much of a shocker, since I would always comment on my dad’s ear hairs and annoyingly pluck them whenever I got the chance to his unamusement.

Growing up as an immigrant family in America, I had no real relationship with my grandparents, one of them already having passed by the time I was born. The remaining three spoke no English, and my Korean, and foreign languages in general, had never been my forté. They all eventually passed away, and it was a strange experience as though I attended my father’s mother’s funeral, who was probably the closest one to me, I still felt little to nothing overall, as I had only interacted her a few times in my life.

And even one’s relationship with their own parents isn’t quite normal as an immigrant family, as language and cultural barriers create confusion and misunderstandings at times while also preventing any sort of connection on a deeper intellectual level. As someone with autism, this created another layer of distancing, where I didn’t fully appreciate my parents until more recently and later in life, when I lived with them for a year during the pandemic.

So nearing the age of 40, I had never experienced a death from someone close to me that hit me in a significant way. This was somewhat a double edged sword, in that in conjunction with my relatively good health and exterior aging, I had slight delusions of immortality. Of course, logically speaking, I knew that I would die someday, but the experience of death seemed so far removed from my total life experience that on a subconscious level, death seemed like a concept rather than a reality.

Since his major surgery in 2019, my dad’s vascular health was going to be a chronic condition he would need more surgeries and treatment for the rest of his life. After suffering a bout of COVID at the end of July while visiting Scandinavia (against my wishes of a deteriorating condition in Eastern Europe) with my mom, which then corrupted all of the previous surgery work he had in the past. While initially his condition seemed to be somewhat manageable, by September, complications had arose that made the situation critical and I flew back to New York to visit him in the hospital.

When I arrived, I was under the impression that while my dad was likely going to be in the hospital for a while, that he had a 80% chance of surviving. But things took a turn for the worse a few weeks later in October, as his condition was not improving ahead of a major surgery which would be required to save his life. My mom and I had been taking turns visiting my dad at the hospital, and I was on duty that day, receiving the bad news from the attending physician of the ICU at the time.

In that moment a lot of competing ideas and emotions came bubbling to the surface, as death now became a sudden reality. Besides obvious shock and grief, thoughts of how I was going to break it to my mom and sister, how to prepare for a funeral, would I have to move back to New York to be with my mom, my own health and mortality due to heritable conditions and with my birthday a month away, would wondering whether my father would live to see my 40th birthday.

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Time

During the pandemic, I often contemplated what the worst time of someone’s life to experience the pandemic would be. While the worst would probably be during the last two years of high school and the first two years of college, as a single person in his late 30s, I felt like losing the last years of your youth into middle age having to quarantine was possibly a close second.

During the summer, coming alone to my room at the MGM Las Vegas at 7am from the last day of EDC, as I Theragunned my entire body in preparation for the drive home, I remembered thinking to myself, “I’m getting too old for this shit.” Although I had started my rave career somewhat late (around 8 years ago), I had never felt this sore and washed until that moment. Throughout my life, I used to be able to pull of ridiculous feats through pure force of will, and now I felt paralyzed even trying to drive a car. While I’m not sure it will be my last rodeo in the desert, I definitely vowed it would be on the drive home.

Over the pandemic, I neglected to take care of my body physically. Because I hadn’t done much straining of my body with partying in my youth, that delay hadn’t hit me in my 30s as it does for most people who do, but it was starting to now hit me like a ton of bricks. I had last ran and trained for a half marathon in 2011, which I tried in 2023 with disastrous results, by ending up too unprepared to even run the race. White hairs were showing up not only on my head but in my beard so I decided to return to my clean shaven baby faced look in my vain attempt at running up the down escalator of life.

When my dad was my age, my sister and I would pick out his white hairs one by one, as if we were keeping him young. My mom told us not to do that since according to her, two more would grow back instead. By college, my dad’s hair would mostly be white, showing me a precursor of what I could come to expect.

After the initial scare given to us by palliative care at the hospital, the surgeon came the next day and told us that he could perform the much needed surgeries, but that there would likely be a high chance of fatality, and even with success would lead to a long and hard road to a full recovery. I don’t know if it’s a strange western custom to play it safe and just extend a limited amount of given time or not, but for my entire family, the choice to proceed with a surgery that could extend his life by years instead of months seemed like an obvious one. We rolled the dice of life and we managed to not crap out.

During the past few months in the hospital ICU, waiting rooms and other areas, as our family willed my dad back to life, I started to contemplate not only the past few years, as I have in this entry, but really the focus of my entire life. From visiting Asia last year, I am pretty confident that I would have a much happier life if I moved and as soon as possible, before shit really hits the fan here. My biggest concern however are my parents, as this country does not treat the elderly well, let alone the Asian elderly. But other than that, I still feel compelled to stay here, perhaps some sort of warped megalomaniacal savior complex that I have in feeling that if I left, I’d be damning the rest of the Asian American community to an unpleasant fate as this country self implodes.

But what Asian American community? Even though we are considered by most non Asians to be a homogenous all looking alike personality less borg, westernized Asians who are 2nd generation and above usually have chosen westernized groups outside of Asian enclaves, and are thus more likely to have fit in with different ethnic and political factions, none of which have Asian American’s best interests at heart. Sometimes I feel like an Asian Moses, questioning whether or not these Asian Israelites even deserve being led out of American Egypt in the first place, considering the lack of collective introspection that has led us to this point. We have all tried assimilating and even in failure, we try assimilating harder, trying to stuff this Asian square peg into the American round hole that will never quite fit.

My own family tires of hearing me extol the virtues of the DPRK and Kim Il Sung, having been propagandized their entire lives by the ROK government, and by proxy the American government, about how America were always the good guys when it came to Korea. If I can’t even change my own family’s views, was there any hope in changing the views of the entire diaspora?

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Ikigai

When I was on the streets of Singapore walking down Orchard Street to the Marina Bay Sands Resort, I ran into a Sikh guru (or so I thought) who scammed me out of money ostensibly to pay for an orphanage he was a part of. Through clairvoyance or some other sort of magic trick, he fooled me into thinking he could see my past and therefore my future. Coming off the spiritual high of Vietnam, perhaps I was more susceptible, but nevertheless, his words put my life into perspective, that the first half was filled with a constant search for truth and that now that I was transitioning into the second half of my life, I knew what I needed to do now that I knew how to find it. I’d say at this moment, I found what my therapist would call my “ikigai”, or I suppose in my own words, my life’s purpose and drive: to discover the real truth of the world and use it to create a better reality than the one I found myself in, not just for myself, but for everyone around me, a vision I had discovered really through my unconventional life path.

A friend of mine who has been working class for most of his life somewhat was in awe of how unhappy I was with the life I had lived up to that point, remarking that so many people would kill to have the life that I had. Another writer friend suggested that I should start writing a memoir. (I responded, “Only douchey people like Obama write memoirs.”) And if you knew what happened in my 40 years, it really was and still is a wild trip, all things considered. But I suppose when I looked at the greener grass of all my acquaintances and friends in life, I wanted all of the comfort and trappings of a nice and stable family life and community that they had while also having the freedom to find whatever answer I had a question for in the moment. The thing that kills me the most in life is being able to let go of situations where my ultimate question is “Why?” The why of human emotions, the why of human relationships, the why of human societies, and the why of how everything could be so much better if more people asked these whys. I lose interest quickly when I’ve “figured” something out, which causes me to move on from place to place, person to person, idea to idea.

Around a couple decades ago, the midway point to this midway point, the closest person to me in the world asked me a question as we both were headed in new but diverging directions. I knew in real time that this was probably the last serious question she would ever ask me ever again.

“Wow, so you’re finally an adult now huh? What do you think you’re going to be up to when you’re 40?”

As I took this moment in, I stalled as I tried to come up with an optimal answer.

40, huh? I don’t know it I’ll make it to 40.

“Oh come on…”

I guess I would say, I hope that when I’m 40, I’d be happy with who I’ve become.

“What a cop out. Lame. You’re not already happy being a big shot millionaire? When was the last time you were happy?”

At the time, I thought my happiest moments were ahead of me, but looking back now, the honest answer to this question was when I was with her in our small little solid church community in my adolescence, even though at the time, I thought it was flawed and too small for me. My thirst for adventure led me to leave the bubble entirely, as I continually tried to find answers for what else is out in the world and why truly it was the way it was. So I answered:

I’ll let you know when I get there.

Until fairly recently, I was definitely not happy with who I had become. I constantly measured my self-worth against other people, against accomplishments that I racked up, against people who were the same age as me and at what time they hit certain benchmarks or milestones. In a way, I was unhappy because I was striving for something that was already in front of me, a sense of meaning and purpose. That meaning and purpose was essentially the truly belonging and supporting a community that was tied to an ideology that was bigger than ourselves, no matter how small that community might seem to the outside world.

As a result, I very much seemed to most people to be an oddity, a sort of paradoxical cynical optimist who wanted the world to be a better place so that that community could just exist, but continually saw all the ways in which it was impossible to achieve. But when I visited Vietnam, although the cities weren’t as developed as other nicer cities in America and even other parts of Asia, I found exactly what I was looking for my entire life. And when I traveled to New York to help take care of my dad over the past few years, I rediscovered how fulfilling it is to be part of a tight family, no matter how insane we all drive each other.

It was finding these things that let me to understand why people who have conviction in an ideology of community, whether it be political or spiritual or scientific, are able to do incredible, almost superhuman feats. As Nietzsche comments, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” Even though I had many successes in life that might seem significant to the outside observer, because many of them were inwardly focused, none of them fulfilled that specific “why” to my satisfaction. My vision for a reunified Korea, to live in a nation of people who are in close community with each other and discovering the science of Marxism Leninism that shows the way in achieving that vision, was the first time I really felt that why start to come together. I could confidently tell that friend if I ever met her that I was if not happy, at least content with who I had become and how my life turned out.

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Future

It seems presumptuous of me to even call turning 40 the mid-point. In third grade, after learning that MLK was assassinated at 39 (though I now question the narrative as to why now), I became paranoid that I would have the same fate, as I could tell at that point that I had many unpopular opinions. A very small irrational part of me is thus surprised that I made it this far, after having been threatened many times for those unpopular opinions in the past few years. Who knows if I’ll just croak from a random accident or a health condition?

Many times in the hospital over the past few months I wondered whether there was a point in what I was doing. The constant confrontation with the idea of death made me reevaluate the orientation of my current life path. I ultimately came to the conclusion that the best, most productive way to live life was to live it as if you were going to live forever as if you’re playing an infinite game, since worrying about death merely makes you want to live life as if it was going to end today. The latter was how I lived most of my life thus far, which made me fearful of dying before I accomplished something “significant”, which then fed back into worrying about dying early. As a result, my accomplishments never resounded with me, as I was limiting myself by playing a finite game, chasing after goals that were only inwardly focused and for self-aggrandizement.

Lenin himself believed that the revolution would not occur in his lifetime. Kim Il Sung believed that it could take centuries for Korea to reunite but that he should pursue this goal regardless. While my conviction is definitely not as strong as either of those leaders, my belief is now strong enough that were I to die tomorrow, I’d be fine with the way my life was as long as people might be able to learn from what I had done and written. But in the event that I stick around for a while, everyday I become more and more convinced of the path that lays in front of me, and I hope that I can make any sort of impact on shaping the world that aligns with a better vision for all of humanity.

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Postscript

I didn’t quite like ending the entry there, so I wanted to add a little last thought.

Rereading what I wrote here, it seems odd that I’m writing in a way that seems bombastic, something a much younger person would write, not something who has been humbled by the vestiges of time. Indeed many of my newest supporters on this journey have been much younger, probably drawn to the fact that I still chat online like I’m in my AOL Instant Messenger days, flurries of fast quips and trash talk with the knowledge of an encyclopedia.

I think it speaks to the condition of the west, and America in particular, that even being truthfully optimistic or hopeful feels corny. Perhaps this is another form of propaganda, a layer of nihilism that is just so palpable in the zeitgeist, that makes it hard to take anything seriously that feels toxically positive, especially in the liberal sense.

But the message of Marxism Leninism is ultimately positive, that communism is inevitable, just as human society progressed from primitive communism with hunter and gathering, to a feudal economy to a bourgeois capitalist one, into socialism. This is what kept the great communist leaders going, and allowed them to achieve incredible things for their countries despite the aggressive actions of the west and the United States.

As what is almost guaranteed to be an insane year politically approaches, I am hoping to be able to at the very least, be a positive force for hope and guidance towards the truth, and to be able to steel myself personally emotionally for what I know is going to be a turbulent time to come.