Two years ago, I made a new friend while waiting for a cat burger restaurant to open. I had been in Taipei for a week and was desperately craving some western food. This happened to the closest one. Now, I should mention that this was a restaurant that had a couple of cats on the premises, and not, as my initial description might imply, a restaurant with cat-meat burgers.
Burgers weren’t the only thing that I was craving. I had also spent the last few days saying nothing more than “ni hao” and “okay.” And unlike when I previously traveled solo, my tolerance for loneliness was in the gutters this time. In other words, as I dodged the afternoon sun and sized up the other western-food fanatics, I tried to make conversation. It took a few false starts, but soon, I was chatting away happily with a new friend. We compared notes on what burgers to get and then strayed towards personal topics. He seemed suitably impressed by what I had done, and I was similarly interested in his take on life.
Before long, we ate two very good burgers and went to explore a night market in a remote corner of the city.
Food has always been a great fascination of mine.
No two ingredients are ever the same. Take meat for example. Each slab of beef is different from the next with different marbling, connective tissue, and fibers. They’re also never cooked in exactly the same condition. One pan might be a bit thicker than another and thus cook its contents slightly faster. Or even in the same pan, differences in moisture and ingredient contact area can make a large difference. On top of that, no two palates can entirely agree with each other. I get destroyed by even the smallest of peppers, but millions of people around the world have evolved into a spicy-loving species.
So most restaurants, whether fast food or fine dining, have become food factories. They churn out roughly the same exact dish again and again and hope that enough people find their version tasty. In fact, the training curriculum at CIA starts with an “ideal” palate that likes rich and deep flavors, and tries to teach its students how to prepare each dish to that level.
Yet, as I discovered in the night market, there were still chefs who tried to take into account both the ingredient’s own quality and the customer’s preferences. One of them was selling grilled meat.
This particular chef took orders from two customers at a time. He would learn their preferences while placing the back of his hand above the grill and fanning the charcoal. Once he understood their order and the grill was at the right temperature, he’d carefully place thin slices of beef onto the mesh.
Then, he changed.
He would stare straight down at the meat. His right hand slowly swept over each slice of beef as he coated them with a thin layer of lard and sauce. Once done, he would flip each slice around with a pair of chopsticks, starting with the thinner ones and gradually moving towards tougher cuts. Every so often, his left hand would disappear below the grill and a burst of intense heat would wash over our faces. His gaze never strayed.
I watched, mesmerized, as he did this for customer after customer. My friend ordered once, then went back in line to order again.
As we waited for the second order, my friend nudged me and whispered, “跟你一样，这也是个极致的人.” Translated to English, that would be, “This person is like you; he’s also an extreme person.”
In the moment, I didn’t think much of the phrase. I agreed and the conversation drifted to new topics. As the night wound down and I was riding the Taipei metro alone, I began to think more about what my friend had said. My life has been characterized by extremes, and it’s easy to make the assumption that I am an extreme person.
But I am not an extreme person.
The summer I turned 18, I wished for three things: to join a frat, to find a girlfriend, and to get a job.
For the next year, I worked 80-hour weeks. I would correspond with fellow translators and editors in the morning, take far too many classes during the day, and then translate/code/sell during the night. Being a freshman with his first taste of freedom and the gift of youth, I began to stay up until three or four in the morning and wake up by eight. Problems came up. I solved them. Life happened. I toughed them out. I was an extreme person, mostly because I didn’t have another choice.
One year later and while I was still 18, I sold my company. A few months later, all three wishes became reality.
Since then, I’ve been wandering. I’ve sampled multiple different industries and sometimes even gone back to old ones. I started off as a programmer, went into product operations, then operations, pivoted to writing, and now am trying to become a professional badminton player.
Even I’m a bit impressed by the breadth of my experiences, but very little of it is my own doing. I think of my journey since then as just following the path of least resistance. I inherited an insane work ethic from my father and an eclectic perspective from my mother. So each time I started something new, I made fast progress. But I never inherited my father’s persistence or my mother’s patience. Each time, I hit a wall where the learning curve tapers off. Soon, I’m off chasing a new path.
I lost the faith.
It’s tricky talking about the idea of faith. Each time I started something new, I did so with the idea that I could and would become the best. I wanted to see the view at the top of the mountain, and I wasn’t going to settle for some halfway cabin. Anything worth doing at all was worth doing well. And anything worth doing well was worth doing to absolute perfection.
Perhaps that’s why my friend thought that I was an extreme person.
The problem, however, is that there’s a chasm impossibly deep between wanting to be great and actually being great. Reality is unforgiving. I could work until my fingers bled (which happened both when I was an author and when I played badminton) and still find myself lacking. I would lose a badminton match to someone who gets winded after a few points or read a book so great it seems divinely inspired. And afterwards, I would wonder if I was truly made for this.
Most of the time, I would pick myself back up and renew my spirit with a fanaticism that could rival the Inquisition. On second thought, perhaps not that much, but close enough. I would work harder and smarter and push myself more.
That perhaps is the first hint that I’m not an extreme person. Fanaticism is fueled by a lack of faith rather than the inverse. There’s a quote from Eileen Gu, the skier, that I think a lot about. She once said, “I train like I've never won, and I compete like I've never lost.” I can do the first part of that sentence easily, but it’s the second part where I get lost. And that’s where all the trouble starts.
I can push my mind and body to the brink day after day, but I can’t shake off the losses as easily. Without true faith, the losses stay with me. Each time I’ve picked myself up, I’ve done so with a bit more baggage than when I first started the journey. In programming, I lost the curiosity and joy I once felt. In operations, I felt it dull and uninteresting once I was fired. In authorship, I doubted that I could produce the beauty that other authors created so effortlessly. And in badminton, I wondered if I simply didn’t have the talent to become great.
As evidenced by my pivots, I always stopped at some point. Despite my attempts, I never became great at anything.
And so, I wish to become an extreme person. I don’t wish to become great because wishes don’t work that way. I wish to become like that chef who tried his best with every single customer and slice of beef.
Perhaps he woke up one day and wondered about the futility of it all. No matter how much care and attention he put into a single slice of beef, it would be consumed in a matter of seconds. The customer might not even care or notice if the slice was slightly overdone or didn’t have enough sauce. But each and every day, he set up his night market stall and endured the heat to create the best that he could.
I wish to live up to my friend’s words. I wish to be someone who can tough out the lows as they come, and continue to strive for the best every single day. I yearn for success, but more than that, I dream of a good life. I want to look back upon all this one day and say, “That wasn’t such a bad life.”
Despite all of the times that I gave up over the past ten years, there’s one that has stayed with me. Almost two years ago, I bought a one-way ticket to China to train badminton. At the time, I had a bit of a crazy dream: to represent the US in the Olympics. Then, I got injured and strayed from the path. I let the baggage pile up and lost faith.
More than anything else, that “failure” has stayed with me. I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the most talented player, nor am I at a particularly good age. I still want to become great.
So a couple of months ago, I quit my job and moved back to China. I’m doing two to three workouts a day and trying intensely enough to have already partially torn my Achilles tendon. Even with my foot in a cast, I tried to swing the racket 1,000 times a day. And I recently returned back to training.
I’m not sure if I’ll make the team. There are only a few more months before I need to be going to competitions. I’m up against people who have trained since they were kids and put in far more hours than me. There’s no reason why I should win. But I will still try. Perhaps I fall short of it, but I aim to try my best before I let the years pass by.
For my 28th birthday, I wish to be an extreme person.