Yanwen’s blog

Happy New Year!

Today I read a news story on social media about people returning Christmas trees to stores after the holiday. The comments were harsh. Many accused these customers of abusing generous return policies, arguing that if they couldn’t afford a tree, they should simply go without.

The story brought back a memory from my own life.

When my son was little, his daycare and elementary school required children to wear costumes for Halloween. A costume would be worn for a single evening, yet the next year he would want a new one. At the time, we were graduate students living in a small college town in Ohio. One costume cost roughly the same as a week’s groceries for our family.

So I did something similar to what those customers are now being criticized for—I returned the costume after Halloween.

As I read the comments condemning people for returning a fully used Christmas tree, I understand why the practice feels wrong to many.

Still, I don’t condemn people for returning Christmas trees after the holiday, just as I wish I could be excused for returning that costume years ago. For some families, this is not entitlement but calculation—a decision made under financial constraint. Moral judgment is easy when one has never had to weigh groceries against a costume.

Back then, I wished there were a way to rent a costume for one night, much like people rent tuxedos for job interviews. Today, I think rental services should exist for anything designed to be used only once—for interviews, ceremonies, holidays, or school events.

This isn’t only about helping low-income families. It is also about reducing waste and questioning our reflexive attachment to ownership. Not everything needs to be bought, stored, and eventually discarded. Sometimes, the more responsible choice—for families and for society—is temporary use rather than permanent possession.

Perhaps what unsettles people most is not the return itself, but what it reveals. When someone returns a Christmas tree or a costume, it shows that for some families, joy and celebration must be carefully budgeted.

Finally, this suggests a responsibility on the part of retailers. When an item is expensive, seasonal, and meant to be used for only a few days—like a Christmas tree—it makes sense to rethink the model altogether. Offering rental or buy-back options would acknowledge how people actually use these products, reduce waste, and remove the moral ambiguity that return policies now create.

Today marks the end of 2025—and with it, the close of the first quarter of the 21st century. I can't believe that 25 years have passed since the new millennium.

This morning, I chatted with my daughter and asked her to imagine who she might be at the end of the second quarter of this century. It was a simple question, but can be a disorienting one. Time, suddenly, felt less abstract and more personal.

Many of us want a better future, yet fail to make choices that truly support it. One reason is that we often see our future selves as distant strangers—someone we vaguely hope will be fine, but not someone we feel responsible for today.

Hal Hershfield, a psychology professor at UCLA, explores this idea in his book Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today. Drawing on more than a decade of research, he shows that when the future feels remote, people are far more likely to favor immediate gratification over long-term well-being.

His findings are strikingly consistent: people who can vividly imagine their future selves tend to make better decisions. They are more willing to save money, to exercise, and to invest in themselves—professionally, financially, and physically. In short, they behave as if their future selves are real people worth caring for.

The key, Hershfield argues, is to build a stronger connection with that future version of ourselves. When we do, we become better at balancing present enjoyment with long-term planning.

One simple method is to have a conversation with our future selves—by writing a letter to them. In studies, participants who “interacted” with their future selves showed a stronger inclination toward long-term saving and self-discipline.

Another method is to change how we measure time. Years feel abstract and forgiving; days feel concrete and finite. When we think in days rather than years, time stops stretching endlessly ahead of us. The future begins to approach, one day at a time, and with it comes a sense of urgency.

So try this: imagine yourself 1,000 days from now—your 2028 self. Write them a short message. It can be a promise, a hope, or a reminder.

Three years from now, when you read those words again, you may discover that the future did not show up suddenly. It was shaped patiently, day after day, by the choices you made daily while it still felt far away.

I came across a book a few days ago with a quietly unsettling argument: Privilege Lost: Who Leaves the Upper Middle Class and How They Fall by Jessi Streib.

Drawing on 10 years of longitudinal interviews with more than 100 white American youth, Streib follows her subjects from adolescence into young adulthood. Her finding is stark: nearly half of those born into the upper-middle class eventually fall out of it. The book asks—who falls, how they fall, and why they don’t see it coming.

Streib’s central claim is that downward mobility is rarely caused by sudden misfortune. Instead, it results from unequal inheritance of resources: academic skills, institutional know-how, and financial support. Young people who receive these resources tend to reproduce their parents’ class position. Those who receive less enter paths of gradual economic decline.

In theory, these young people could compensate by acquiring resources through school, work, or community. In practice, most do not. Instead, they internalize identities shaped by what they lack—identities that discourage further investment in skills, credentials, or income growth.

What makes this process unsettling is the absence of drama, no scandal, no catastrophe, no obvious failure. Their parents are doctors, lawyers, corporate executives—people who seem to embody stability and success. Yet through a series of choices, their children slip slowly and almost imperceptibly downward.

Streib summarizes this as a mismatch between identity and resources. These young people inherit a middle-class sense of self and lifestyle expectations, but lack the concrete tools—financial, academic, or institutional—to sustain them. It is not so much what they do wrong, she suggests, but what they do not have.

Yet as I read the book, I found myself questioning what was left unsaid: the role of parenting.

A few days ago, I told my daughter—half joking, half serious—the story of our family’s migration across states: from Ohio, where my son was born, to Indiana, where my daughter was born, then Virginia, and finally Kansas. I told it like an epic journey, four people moving again and again in search of the American Dream.

My children grew up and are doing well—not because they inherited elite networks or abundant resources, but because they learned something Streib barely mentions: how to turn freedom into responsibility.

They were encouraged to pursue their dreams, but they were also taught how society works—its rules, its constraints, its trade-offs. They learned early that passion alone cannot put food on the table, and that dignity often comes from sustained effort, not self-expression alone.

They did not inherit social capital; they learned how to build it. They did not expect protection and safety net from their parents; they learned to create their own net and footing.

This makes me wonder whether the real problem is not identity–resource mismatch, but identity without substance, dream without hard work. While people celebrate independent thinking, rebellion, and “being yourself,” they often fail to learn how systems function—or how power is accumulated, negotiated, and sustained in a work place where there's no place for willfully "being yourself."

What Streib’s work reveals—perhaps is that class is not automatically reproduced by simply staying within one's comfort zone, but by hard-earned competence, not by baseless self-confidence, but by the mastery of rules of the society.

Streib is right about one thing: class decline is never a cliff; it is a sequence of choices. But what gives those choices direction is not identity or resources alone, but the formative discipline that precedes them.

A friend I often chat with at the YWCA once shared something her 37-year-old son had said. He told her he would rather raise a dog than a child, because a dog would never argue with him the way a child would. She asked, half-jokingly, “So you think I should have raised a dog instead of you?”

That question stayed with me. It captures a choice many people embrace today. This is not a debate about dogs versus children. It is just different ways of living, and different level of efforts and different expectations of what we want from life.

Raising a dog often reflects a preference for clarity and emotional stability. The labor and responsibilities are well defined, the affection is steady and unchanged over time, and the relationship offers companionship without deep psychological strain. A dog does not challenge your worldview or your authority. For many people, this simplicity is a conscious choice.

Raising a child, however, means choosing a life characterized by growth and change, surprises and challenges. A child, if raised well, will not remain compliant or predictable. They will develop their own mind, question you, disagree with you, and sometimes argue with you. These moments can be difficult, but they are also signs that the child is becoming an independent person.

For me, this is where the difference lies. Precisely because a child grows into someone separate from you—someone who can surprise you, surpass you, and even inspire you and reshape how you see the world—the emotional and intellectual rewards can be deeper and greater. The relationship might evolve over time into something closer to mutual recognition and respect.

While I fully accept that raising a dog and raising a child are different choices of life, and both can be valid, I also believe that when a child is raised with care, patience, and respect, the long-term emotional and intellectual richness of that relationship can exceed what a pet relationship can offer. The rewards are less immediate and far less predictable, but they are, for me, more enduring.

In many areas of life, the amount of what we receive is often related to the amount of what we are willing to give. Raising a child follows the same logic. It asks for sustained attention, emotional investment, and the courage to stay present through uncertainty. Because the investment is so large, the potential return—emotional, intellectual, and human—is also larger. Nothing is promised, but the scale of possibility expands with the scale of commitment. As with most meaningful pursuits in life, the outcome is shaped by the effort we choose to make. 

Finally, here's a Chinese saying, “种瓜得瓜，种豆得豆.” That is, you reap what you sow.

When we moved to Beijing in 1974, our apartment was not far from the Soviet Union’s embassy. As children, we often took walks outside its compound. What struck me most was its sheer size. It felt endless, stretching far beyond what an embassy, in my mind, ought to be. I later learned it covered about 40 acres, about one-third of Vatican City. By contrast, the U.S. embassy in Beijing occupied roughly 10.

At the time, I didn’t have the language or knowledge to understand why it was so big. I only sensed that something about it was unusual. The Soviet embassy felt less like a building and more like a city.

Years later, as I began to understand the history of the early People’s Republic of China, that childhood curiosity started to make sense.

The Soviet embassy was built in the mid-1950s, at the height of Sino-Soviet friendship. The new Chinese government had been established only a few years earlier, and the country found itself diplomatically isolated. Western powers, led by the United States, refused to recognize the PRC. After the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, China faced military pressure and blockade at sea, strict trade embargoes, and near-total exclusion from the West-dominated international system.

At the same time, the Soviet Union and its allies quickly recognized the new government. For China, the Soviet Union was not just a friendly state—it was almost the only major ally. In the 1950s, thousands of Soviet experts were working across China, involved in industry, infrastructure, culture, education, science, and defense. Their presence was extensive and deeply embedded in China’s early development. So much so that my mother told me that the popular foreign songs were almost all from Russia and the foreign language taught at school was also mostly Russian.

Under those circumstances, the embassy had to serve many purposes. It supported a large diplomatic team, technical advisers, and their families. It housed cultural and educational events and exchanges, political coordination, and daily life for a community that could not easily integrate into the surrounding city. It was, in effect, a self-contained diplomatic enclave.

Seen in that light, the vast compound no longer feels excessive. It reflects a particular moment in history—when China, with few international friends and connections, had to rely on a single partner, and when that partner occupied an outsized place in China’s political and diplomatic landscape.

As a child walking past those high walls, I could not have known any of this. I only remember the embassy’s vastness. Only much later did I understand that those forty acres were shaped not only by friendship, but also by exclusion. 

As China was shut out of the Western-dominated international system and denied recognition by the United States for decades, its room to maneuver and development was made narrowed and limited. With almost all doors closed, China naturally turned toward the one major power willing to recognize, engage, assist, and stand beside it. The Soviet Union filled a space created as much by political and diplomatic isolation as by ideological alignment. 

The embassy’s size was, in that sense, a physical trace of that moment in history—a reminder that when options are limited, the relationships that remain must carry far more weight than they otherwise would.