The program’s final Monday was sobering and reaffirming for me. I told my story of being sexually assaulted by a young Buddhist monk on Mount Koya and all those muted emotions unbottled like outpouring champagne. My mind and body were quickly embraced by humanity and genuineness from the people whom I have spent 21 days seeing, roaming the city with. The next day was on a completely different wavelength inside teamLab borderless exhibition (I documented it here); lovely how light design and music in symphony could lift anyone’s heart space. Is the existence of this corporate an assertion of social media’s vanity and capitalistic ventures? Or were there honest intentions to further the question on humanity using technology the essence of these grandiose artworks? Traveling for me is the constant questioning of the underlying meanings of things, building a complex web that truly represents life, but also coming back to the simplicity that’s the essence of life.

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The whole Wednesday was carried away with researching and editing for my blog post, I was in total deep flow: underpants on, dress off, camping on NYC’s bed like a ravenous hermit until 3 next morning. That equated to deprivation of sleep and 3 hours of panicking and hectically composing the final presentation. Oh, it’s funny how I make life choices sometimes. The presentation was unsurprisingly regrettable, but I remain an optimist. An hour later us 20 sentimental beings had an appreciation dinner together. When I looked up the sky that night, it was sprayed with colors of shared laughter and loving tears. We then had a blast dancing and singing until 2 the next day, swaying home, talking discreetly like mischievous kids until daylight. Being pushed by this intensive program, we took on the role of critical learners and careful observers, nevertheless at the end of the day, we are still the romantics looking for a beautiful closure to a strain of memories so fond. It’s not rational, but it makes one feel warm inside the chest.

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That last Friday in Japan, I stumbled on a cozy vegan restaurant hidden in a calm residential neighborhood. We chatted for 3 hours even after the closing time. Empowered and inspired, I met a few other vegan cooks over the weekend then traveled to Ayabe, a countryside snuggled in Kyoto prefecture and learned from a vegan baker there. Sometime in the future, I can recreate the lines that stroke my heart on these summer days more beautifully than I can now. One stroke is by pen, one stroke by accidental charm. And on days like this one, I am perfectly content with caressing this happenstance in my chest space.​

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From being on this program that’s centered around a personal research project, even though without a sensible strategy, I did realize incrementally how to ask questions and gather the information that shed insights through roaming around with generous curiosity. “Interview” is a cold and fear-provoking word, what we all really did was having compassionate conversations that were important and spoke to the heart. Through all of these vamped up nights and dreamy mornings, I learned the complicated web that makes up life but also the simple essence that all humans regardless of nations and backgrounds share. Through struggles in defining friendships, strokes of identity crisis because of my insecure needs to fit in, through the talks with people who seem to tango with my psyche, like a bamboo shoot I am flourishing with hope and reaffirmation of my inner strengths. Learn and relearn and relearn, a lost person at the subway station will tinker his way to the destination no matter how many hours it takes, but he has to choose to leave the house in the first place.