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On this day I finished my classes at noon and ran to the student cafeteria as quickly as I could.  When I stepped into the office, I looked for a director named Jane per the instructions of the advertisement.  When I walked in, I saw a white woman a bit over 40 sitting behind a desk and staring at a computer screen.

I asked her, “Who is Jane?”

She looked up and checked me out from head to toe and said, “I am, do you have a question?”

I said, “I saw your advertisement for a student worker at the cafeteria.  I am here for that job.”

She asked me, “Do you have any kitchen experience?”

At that time, I thought to myself,  America really requires experience for everything.  My readers might remember that when I went to Duke’s Lane   to find a sales job my boss Peter’s first question to me was a “do you have sales experience?”.   They don’t seem to realize that if everyone needs experience, then someone without experience must be given the chance to learn and gain experience.  If no one without experience is given an opportunity, then everyone without experience will never gain experience.

However, America is just a society that forces you to gain work and social experience from contact with the world starting at a young age.  It is commonly said that, “what you learn in school on books is rarely applied”.  In America, we need to add a line and say, “you can never have too much experience when you try to find a job.”

When it comes to the kitchen, I actually have many years of experience.  When the Cultural Revolution began, I was just eleven years old.  My dad was jailed in a cow pen since he  was accused as being a descendant of a landlord and later sent to the countryside to be “reeducated” and “recreated”.  He was sent to the cafeteria as an accountant.  I often went to that cafeteria and watched Chef Zhang cook.  At that time there wasn’t that much great food to eat.  However, my dad always tried to ask the chef to do the best he could.  Chef Zhang supposedly was the stable boy for General He Long during World War II, and did not have a lot of education, and so he received a job in the reeducation camp as a chef.  Later on, I don’t remember for what reason, he almost committed suicide and died, but my dad somehow saved him.  This happened a very very long time ago.

After I finish writing about these fifteen years, I may write about the previous forty years and slowly tell these tales.

Anyway, I was familiar with a kitchen in a cafeteria because I encountered it at a young age.  Truthfully, I really love the art of Chinese cuisine.

The reasons I love Chinese cuisine include the following:

First, “the people worship food as they worship the sky”.  I really love to eat.  When I was young, everything was rationed.  We could only cook food differently to satisfy the four values of Chinese food: “color, scent, taste, and shape”.

Second, I had two neighbors who were experts in Chinese cooking.  One was my dad’s old friend.  After the Cultural Revolution, he researched the history of Chinese cooking and published many books.  When I was teaching in the university he would always give me a free copy of his book whenever he publishes one.  I would follow the ancient recipes he collected and cook the Weiyang style of Chinese cuisine.  Another one of my cooking teachers is an experience chef.  He grew up with me and went to a famous cooking school at the age of fourteen, and later served as a chef at the banquet halls of the Central  government.  Later on he went to Japan as a chef in a great restaurant.  Every year he would come home for the Spring Festival and teach me a few techniques.  Some of the famous dishes I have learned are ““, “Great Boiled Tofu Strings”, “Yangzhou Fried Rice”, and “General Crossing the Bridge”.  Could you say that I have no cooking experience?

To be continued!

I have only two cousins because of the . My older cousin is named Yang and he is three days older than me. Before I left China, we were sort of like twins and played with each other quite often. Last year, he finished his masters in wireless engineering in Nanjing and recently my mom told me that he got a job as an wireless engineer in Shanghai that pays about 5000 yuan a month. I thought that was great news because jobs in China are very difficult to find for young people since there are just too many college graduates. Then my mom started to name all the things she thought were negative about this job because it is her duty as a Chinese mom to report all the bad things in a gossip session.

First of all she said that my cousin is paying over 1000 yuan to rent a small apartment in the city of Shanghai even though he is only paid 5000 yuan. Second, the company he works for does not provide job security. They fire anyone at anytime they please, and some employees have committed suicide because of long work hours. Third, she said that my aunt told her that it is impossible for Yang to afford to buy a place in Shanghai on his salary. I pretty much laughed at this and said, “you think my life is so different?” When I just graduated, I was paid exactly 5000 dollars a month, and I also had living expenses of nearly 1000 a month. If I lived alone I would also have paid rent of over 1000 dollars a month. So on the expenses front, the difference between my cousin and I is that one of us uses dollar and one of us uses yuan, but our expenses are pretty much the same in terms of percentage of income. I also do not have any job security because California is an at-will state that can fire anyone they want at any time for any reason. Finally, on the real estate front, I can’t afford a place in San Francisco on my salary either! (I am using San Francisco as a parallel to Shanghai because they are both big and densely populated cities with very expensive real estate). The only thing I don’t have is the long work hours, but that is because I choose to not work long hours.

After talking to my friend Mary who goes to China often, we both came to the conclusion that the struggles of young people in China and America are very similar. Financially, we are all dealing with rising prices, stagnant pay, and unstable careers. There has also been a housing bubble in China since the Chinese Communist Party allowed personal ownership of real estate. Politically and socially we all do not have much of a say in  governments that are ruled by the generation before us. Sure, America is supposedly democratic, but honestly how many politicians actually care about our generation? Even Obama, who is supposed to be “young”, is proposing a tax proposal that eliminates taxes for seniors making under $50,000. What about the young people that make under $50,000? Anyway, I could write a whole other rant on this issue, but basically the challenges American young adults face politically are not so different from Chinese youths who are under a totalitarian regime. American youths are taught to believe that they can affect the decisions of the government, but in actuality the government is controlled by an older generation that could not care less. In a way that’s more frustrating than knowing for certain that your government will not listen.

One thing that is marked different between the lives of Chinese young adults and American young adults is that many of the urban Chinese youths we know have quite a bit financial and physical support from their parents. For example, some married only children have all four of their parents taking care of their kids. On the other hand, American young adults have to deal with costly childcare or just not have children at all. I don’t know of any non-Asian households where all four grandparents are taking care of their grandchildren full time. A lot of Chinese parents also buy houses for their children, and again, that is rare in America.

So having said that, I think my cousin is doing great in China. He has officially become independent, and that is a great achievement for any young adult.

Recently my mom was trying to convince me to buy a house again, and once again I had to tell her that San Mateo is ridiculously expensive and renting costs one half or one third of a mortgage.  I have said this about 10000 times already.  Yes, , but it still costs around $640 per square foot in my zipcode.  So I said that investing my savings in the stock market is better at this point, and to this she retorted, “You think it’s easy to make money on the stock market?  There has been no returns on the SP500 for the last 10 years while real estate doubled and tripled!”

Superficially, my mom is right.  According to , the returns for the last 10 years is 2.85%, and that doesn’t even beat inflation.  In the same time period real estate prices did double and triple at least in California.  However, this doesn’t mean that the SP500 gave no returns during any of those years.  If you look at Vanguard’s fund record, the return for the last 5 years is more than 7%, and that handily beats inflation.  Most people I know who invest in the SP500 do so through 401ks and IRAs and contribute money as time goes on. So even if the money they put in 10 years ago did not earn money, the money they put in during the lowest years of the market would be earning quite a bit.  The only situation where someone would be earning 2.8% on all their money is if they put in all their money 10 years ago and left it there and that is hardly the case with most investors.

Additionally, investors in stocks are not restricted to buying stocks in the SP500.  In the last ten years international stocks in South America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania have been performing quite well. Investors could have bought REITs which get their dividends from real estate and participated in the real estate boom. The possibilities are endless.  Even in the current down market, it is possible to make money in the stock market.

Ultimately, hindsight is 20/20, and I think my mom is wrong in saying that stocks are the lesser investment because she is cherry picking a decade where real estate appreciated abnormally. Don’t get me wrong, I think it is possible to make money in real estate, too, but worshiping one asset class as the ultimate holy grail is a bit short sighted.  I like stocks for their liquidity and hassle-free nature.  For example, I never have to mow the lawn of my mutual funds or fix their roofs.  If I can get enough return from my funds to come out ahead, then I am happy.  Basically, I still believe that having a diversified portfolio of low cost funds is the way to build wealth.  Eventually I will buy a house, but I will and the amount of cash I spend won’t exceed 25% of my portfolio.  I would do it this way so I don’t overload my portfolio with real estate.

As many of you bloggers already know, this weekend is the BlogHer ’08 conference in San Francisco. I was planning to attend, but got lazy and missed the registration deadline. Additionally, these couple months have been kind of crazy in terms of having free weekends. Nevertheless, several bloggers are flying in so we will be meeting for dinner in San Francisco tomorrow! I am pretty excited about meeting , , , , and . Anyway, I’m sure the conference will be awesome and they will be spreading the word for Wise Bread.

Besides that, we found out that our rent is not increasing. This is the advantage in finding a nice landlord. I know that his HOA fees went up a little bit, so keeping the rent the same actually means he is losing a little bit of profit, but having good tenants that pay on time like us is very valuable to a landlord, too.

As usual people are asking me when I will have babies. Honestly, that is up to God and the hubby. Obviously I can’t have a baby on my own, so I don’t know why I get the most queries about this subject. So I tend to say, “ask my husband” now. As I have said before, I prefer to have the first kid before I turn 30, but it is not totally up to me.

Finally, my husband and I are playing in the . He named our team Team Chimerica. It’s a combination of the words China and America, and also looks like the word chimera. He has been chronicling our battles against ancient evil . If you have never played before then my hubby’s posts may sound like insane nerd babble, but this cooperative game is the only board game where we don’t try to kill each other but instead work together to fight an Ancient One and other monsters.

That is all for this really random post. There are more personal finance topics to write about and more evil to fight, but for now I must figure out what to have for dinner.

Today I read the story of Terry Childs, a bonafide of the City of San Francisco. Apparently he was disciplined for poor performance and so he took matters into his own hands and . Now San Francisco’s networks are in his control even though he has been arrested and the city has set a $5 million bail.

First of all, I find this whole story bizarre because since the perpetuator is in jail and the city has physical access to the machines then they are able to reset the passwords or reinstall the systems. Second, what the hell were they doing by giving this guy so much power over the network? It doesn’t even seem like he was the IT director from the report. Third, I find the city’s reaction to this mischief to be quite overblown. The network is still running, but other admins cannot access the system. This shows that perhaps the other admins ARE more incompetent than Childs. They could have resolved the matter in a more civil manner than arresting the guy. That probably just pissed off the guy more.

Anyway, this guy was paid $150k last year, and since he has pulled this stunt I doubt he will be getting any new job offers soon. I don’t know if he did this to spite his employer or to keep his job, but it is safe to say that he probably would be fired soon enough.

Instead of doing this, he could have just told his superiors the security flaws and problems he sees at work. If they don’t listen, then there are other jobs out there he could apply for. If I were really angry at an employer I would just pack up and leave. I have left jobs before where someone or something pissed me off, but I just don’t think it is worthwhile to plan some kind of revenge. Terry Childs may have embarrassed his employer, but he also embarrassed himself by being so unprofessional.