Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 31: Reflection

Reflection of trees and sky in the lake of Ed Levin Park. Due to the drought, the lake has now diminished to a little murky pond, and to get to the water's edge, we had to hike down a ways where bone-white seashells and plant life mark the bottom of the once-abundant lake.

I take this time to reflect upon the last month. Through this May photo challenge and my daily stories, those who have followed along got to see pieces of my past, my likes, my loves, the revelations of my heart. You followed me to Las Vegas and back home again. You were privy to my weekend haunts and daily activities.

I confess it wasn't always easy to write up a piece after long work days and when I was practically falling asleep over my phone as I typed, but I am really happy I took up this daily challenge as I got to revisit my love of creative writing. I learned new things about photography: how to use apps to edit, the importance of composition (and what that even means), and the willingness to keep my eyes open and look at every angle, every object, and every direction to capture the spirit of a photo. In pictures and words, I harnessed the unseeable and the hard-to-express--what the wind looks like, how to describe the complex emotion of love.

Thank you for following along! I hope you enjoyed this and learned from it as much as I did.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 30: What You Read

A Christmas gift that I am still working through. The author, Pauline Nguyen, intersperses her restaurant-owning family's recipes with the story of how they immigrated from Viet Nam after the Fall of Saigon to Australia. It's right up my alley, catering to my love of traditional food preparation with an immigration experience that I can relate to. It's interesting to read recipes you already know versus ones you are using to cook a new or foreign dish. A lot of it feels as familiar as blood and bone, with little tweaks in flavors or preparation methods. I'm looking forward to trying recipes that are new to me.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 29: A Letter

After we met and started dating in college, Tung and I would often write love letters to each other. He figured out that a way to a writer's heart was through a pen and paper. Since we had different majors at San Jose State, Tung would frequent the Engineering Building. The English Department doesn't have a dedicated building like a lot of other majors, so we were orphaned nomads squatting the classrooms of whichever building became available. Tung and I would hardly see each other from our hectic class schedules but for the times we resolved to meet in the communal Student Union or Clark Library.

We'd pass letters after walking each other to class, stick them on each other's car windshield wipers, write notes back and forth at the library. Those were the days when we were living on parttime student wages, split a power-sized Jamba Juice on payday, and dreamed of graduating and owning a house together.

One summer, Tung went with his family back to Viet Nam for three weeks, and it was the first and only time in our relationship that we had to be that far from each other for that long. We used to have nightly phone conversations, and after we hung up, I sat late into the night writing him a 20-page letter the week before his flight to give to him at his departure. In the days before the popularity of smartphones and abundant Internet cafes, it was a way to "hear from" me. In Viet Nam, Tung would spend the hours of insomnia from the time adjustment scribbling out his responses to my letter and telling me about his trip, to be given to me upon his return.

Over a decade later, I still have all our love letters in a binder. We don't write to each other anymore as we spend so much time together, waking up to each other, going to sleep at the same time. It's sappy, but I still keep them for memories, and as a reminder of how we coped with being apart.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 28: Love

My mom baked me a flan today, and my dad delivered it after I got home from work. I'm supposed to flip it upside-down on a plate before serving to expose the caramel-rich top layer. French Colonialism heavily influenced Vietnamese cuisine, and as a result, some of the dishes my mom learned to prepare became my favorites: crepes, flans, eggs "au plat," or runny "sunny-side up," served with a side of French baguette, not sliced-bread toast.

My family was never touchy-feely; we didn't often hug, kiss, hold hands, send each other sappy Hallmarks, or even much verbalized, "I love you." However, like a lot of Asians, we consistently show it through our cuisine prepared for each other, recipes passed down from my grandma to my mom to myself. When sick, a bowl of porridge cooked with minced pork would deliver healing nutrients to our body. For a treat, my mom would often prepare us "che," a classic Vietnamese dessert that I had already craved when still inside her womb. Even on busy nights after a full day of work, she would manage a 3- to 5-course, freshly cooked meal to nourish our family. I went to college close to home, and her meals saw me through many sleep-deprived nights for studying. My youngest brother went away for college, and she'd prepare the same meals as care packages to keep him going strong.

I am a grown woman now, and I put home-cooked food on my table not only for the health benefits, but also to express my love, giving my family the best of me. After a long day at work, I opened the door to my dad and brother. They simply plopped down a cardboard box filled with Thai bananas, Ataulfo mangos, and my mom's unmistakable home-cooked flan. "You just got home from work?" my dad asked casually. "How come your dog didn't bark at me when I rang the doorbell? That houseplant I gave you is growing fast." But experience has taught me to listen not to his words but to their meaning: "We are thinking of you. Here is one of your favorite treats. Eat and sleep well tonight. We love you."

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 27: A Mug

A ninja mug gift from a friend: ninja-star resting platform and "katana" stirring spoon. It also comes with a cloth mask that just exposes the eyes, but I've taken it off for easy drinking and cleaning.

Aside from being a cute novelty, the mug is a reminder that sometimes it takes some serious ninja skills to be a tech writer. You get to know the habits of your target to get your point across and maximize time efficiency; you stalk them to get the answers you need to do your work; you vanquish typos, punctuation, and grammatical errors in your documents. Thus, I drink tea from this mug and get my ninja on every weekday.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 26: Wildlife

I love taking walks in the crisp morning air with Odin, watching the leaves change color across the seasons, marveling at how the sunlight kisses certain parts of the hillside with daylight while shrouding other parts in ethereal fog.

Along Old Piedmont, right at the base of the hill, we'd spot wild turkeys, deer, hawks, falcons, goats, horses, and cows. Odin used to spook or instinctively lunge after the wildlife, but years of exposure to them and he's really calmed down enough to observe them from a respectable distance.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 25: Something Dirty

"The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough."

-Ezra Pound

My family and I toured Stanford campus today, enjoying the architecture, flowerbeds, and manicured lawns. On one of the verandas, I spotted these leaves staining the glass top, creating art with "dirtiness" as the sun filtered through the lacy pattern. This is the view facing up to the sky.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 24: A Corner

Corner of ceiling mirror at Paris Baguette. My husband and I would frequent here for breakfast on a leisurely weekend morning, picking out pastries with silver tongs placed on wooden trays. Contrary to the rush of a work day, life slows down, and we'd have a conversation over an enjoyable breakfast.

Also, this just reminds me of "Hotel California":
"Mirrors on the ceiling,
Cold champagne on ice,
We are all prisoners here
Of our own device..."

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 23: Something You Wore

My old aikido gi, hakama, and belt. Yes, I stopped before black.

"It is my body leaves my love, not I;
My body moves away, but not my mind;
For back to her my struggling fancies fly
Like silken banners borne against the wind."

--Kalidasa: "Shakuntala"

I trained at Aikido Silicon Valley for over 5 years. Sometimes, goodbyes hurt. My attendance became less and less due to work and other life demands, until I found myself no longer practicing, and it didn't make sense to keep going.

I stay in shape by going to the ill-attended gym at work. Gym workouts are such solitary affairs, everyone too lost in their own rhythms, routines, and workout music to form a sense of camaraderie. Instead of feeling and feeding off the energy of a training partner, you focus on only your own movements and improvements, or lack thereof. No ki-ai's ring out into the still night, no epiphany from Sensei's words of wisdom, just rote repetition to burn fat and build muscles. When I take out the earbuds and the music drifts away, I hear only the silence of the room and the soft humming of the fluorescent lights before turning them out and making my quiet commute home.

Many days, I miss practicing. So that I would not have to face the things that hurt me, I tuck away the gi and hakama and belt deep in my closet to soften the sting of remembering joy that I could no longer harness. I dream of buoyant high falls and of the sensation of feeling confident and strong, only to jolt awake, pushing the images from my mind.

Today is the annual Memorial Day weekend "Gasshuku" at Lake Tahoe, three days of intensive, all-day aikido practice. I remember my experiences, my colleagues, and my teachers there. These days, I do a lot of walking, and thinking. Vignettes flash through my thoughts like the spaces between a wooden fence, at once hidden and clarifying. I smell the musk of human sweat in a hot dojo, the scent of wood and varnish as bokken and jo clash against each other. I feel the soft give of tatami mats beneath my bare feet, now bound too often in sport socks and running shoes. I remember the resistance and then blending of a training partner I had worked with in close proximity. I taste salt on my lips and miss the dull pain of bruises and sore muscles after a hard but euphoric training session.

Without the constancy of training and feeding my body what it craves, I lose focus, drop my train of thought, often finding myself lost in reverie. I pause in my walk and look over my shoulder to confirm the voices are just in my head, those that whisper my name like the rattle of the last winter leaves skipping across pavement, calling me back to a place I had chosen to leave behind me. Maybe one day, I will come back.

For now, I turn forward and continue resolutely on my walk. There is resistance in the heartstrings that bind me to that part of my past. I pull and pull in my desire to put distance between us. The strands thin out, stretched like cobwebs, but though parts of them are tattered and flapping, they still hang on and seduce my struggling fancies back to them like gravity, like silken banners borne hopelessly against the wind.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 22: A Stranger

Strangers at the townhouse complex built next to my company. In the evening, they like to come out with their dogs to play in the little park area and spend time socializing.

To take breaks from work, I'd often take walks along the small streets of the complex, enjoying the landscaped gardens and serenity of being away from the busy swish of cars along the main streets.
Sometimes in the afternoons, I'd run into mothers on a stroll with their infants. I'd smell delicious, homemade lunches wafting from the open windows. I'd see lone figures in quiet contemplation on one of the outdoor benches. I'd wonder which of these strangers lives in which of the quaint houses I pass by on my walk. As the Journey song goes:

"Strangers waiting
Up and down the boulevard
Their shadows searching
In the night
Streetlight people
Livin' just to find emotion
Hidin' somewhere in the night..."

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 21: Pets

My silly boy Odin, who secretly loves being tucked in for bed but resents that it gets broadcasted on Facebook cuz he's macho and all.

I've grown up with pet dogs, and each one leaves an indelible impression on certain stages of my life. Odin is one who changed me forever in more ways than one. He is the first Australian Cattle Dog I have owned, an intelligent and energetic herder dog that keeps me on my toes and challenges me daily. He is the first shelter dog I've adopted, as before him, my pets were either bought or given to me from puppyhood. I don't know where he's been, but he's destined to live out the rest of his years with me.

I wasn't sure I was ready to have another dog just a few short months after my 10-year-old Lab passed away, but seeing Odin on display with his then foster mom, hoping for someone to take him in, imagining him being bounced from shelter to shelter as he got closer to the Kill list--I thought, what am I waiting for? Why am I not helping to save another life?

He brought joy and purpose to my otherwise dark and grieving world. Due to having gotten lost in the Mendocino County and left to fend for himself, he developed, among some of his bad habits, the urge to ransack trash bags/cans for food. The instinct remains with him today, despite being properly fed. Tonight he is warm. He is loved. He will not have to wander lost, cold, and hungry. He will never have to survive by going through trash cans for food scraps ever again.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 20. Something Tiny

I used to play with pill bugs ("rolly-pollies") when I was young. We all have our preferred bugs, I guess--for example, my brother Johnny had an obsession with ants. Not having many toys or game systems, we played outside and formulated our own entertainment. I always admired the pill bug, a creature that came with its own home and armor, yet with more speed and maneuverability than the snail or turtle, which have the same advantages.

My husband used to make his own toys in his childhood; he'd collect scrap matchboxes and rubber bands and build wind-up "cars." We didn't have much, but we had imagination and drive; we played in the sun and learned the finesse of crafting and nurturing things with our hands.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 19: Something Red

This is an object I see almost every weekday for the past year-and-a-half. I don't always use it, but it sits in my workplace gym, and every weekday I am there. My weight was in the double-digits well through high school; blessed with a high metabolism and generally too restless and monkey-minded to be sedentary, I never had an issue with my weight, until two winters ago when I had gotten too lax with my eating, too comfortable at my desk job, and too lazy to do much physical activity. I was far from being an unhealthy weight, but I didn't like how my pants fit tighter, or the numbers I saw on the scale.

I made the resolve to do something I turned up my nose at before: work out at the gym, and build up my consistency to 5x/week, making time every day after work, even after those long days when daylight has faded. I know some people prefer to stay away from the scale as muscle weight and other factors could affect the numbers, but I weighed myself every day as a conscious effort to make the numbers go down.

There were days when the numbers went up; I was faced with discouragement, hunger at cutting portions at every meal, laziness to change into my gym clothes, the mind-numbing boredom of exercising alone in an often empty gym. But after 1.5 years of commitment, those numbers went down again, and I had dropped 10 pounds after gaining 8 post-wedding.

Having never had to consciously lose weight, I now appreciate the dedication to stick with something difficult and trudge on. Your mind breaks past the point of resistance, and all you see is the end-goal. Some journeys you have to make on your own. Losing weight is now one of my life analogies for working at something to overcome an obstacle. Those who succeed are the ones who don't give up.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 18: The Road

Piedmont Road leading up to Ed Levin dog park, Odin's weekend stomping grounds. Mustard abounds on the hillside, especially after the rain.

We bought our house in 2009 after years of struggling and losing out on bids. Purchasing a home in the Silicon Valley is a trial by fire. I fell in love with my current neighborhood, a house tucked at the foot of the hill, one part suburban and the other part wild hillside with plenty of deer, turkeys, horses, and cows to see.

The streets on which you have lived leave indelible impressions on your memory, from the ones you grew up on, the ones you lived on temporarily, and the ones you decide to stake out for your own house. Every time my car hugs this road, especially after having been away for a while, I feel that I am coming home.

Month of May Photo Challenge Day 17: Your “Morning Brew”

A cup of Genmaicha (roasted rice) green tea.

At work, I brew myself a pot of tea everyday. I usually stick to low-caffeine types like green or herbal. My current selection of teas at my desk include jasmine, chamomile, blueberry, peppermint, and Genmaicha. I'm not a coffee person, and a heavy dose of caffeine gives me the shakes when it leaves my body.

Roasted rice tea is often served at Korean restaurants as it aids in digestion, especially from meat-heavy meals. Tea plays a big role in Asian cultures, from ritualistic tea preparation and tasting ceremonies to wedding tea pours for one's parents. It represents the coming together of friends, family, and business acquaintances. In Chinese, the direct translation for one of the code phrases for inviting someone to dim sum is, "Let's drink tea."

I enjoy a cup of boba milk tea once in a while, but on a daily basis, I drink my tea hot and plain, a habit I picked up from my dad, who also brews himself a pot of jasmine tea everyday, with whole leaves floating straight in the pot. My tea is pretty diluted as I used to add just a splash from his brew to my water to flavor it. Jasmine remains one of my favorite tea flavors today.

Month of May Photo Challenge Day 16: Your Lunch

Oysters from the Tomales Bay region, part of our barbecue lunch at Lake Chabot for our friend Tennyson's birthday. Also on the menu were hot links, hot dogs, chicken wings and drumsticks, squid in Korean sauce, corn, vegetable skewers, and fruits.

Had a fun time, and Odin got to hang with his buddy Bobby again. At gatherings like these, I think of how many of these meals are made more memorable by the company of family and friends.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 15: Show Some Action

Long week. I'm about to pass out early, but for today's challenge, I tried to capture the wind in this shot, picking up my hair as I took a work-break stroll. It's an interesting thing, photographing the wind--you have to capture things in motion to convey the idea of an invisible force. This gusty day reminds me of Winnie the Pooh author A. A. Milne's poem, "Wind on the Hill," which also speaks to tracking this unseeable force that nevertheless leaves a visible trail in its wake.

Wind on the Hill
BY A. A. MILNE

No one can tell me,
Nobody knows,
Where the wind comes from,
Where the wind goes.
It’s flying from somewhere
As fast as it can,
I couldn’t keep up with it,
Not if I ran.
But if I stopped holding
The string of my kite,
It would blow with the wind
For a day and a night.
And then when I found it,
Wherever it blew,
I should know that the wind
Had been going there too.
So then I could tell them
Where the wind goes . . .
But where the wind comes from
Nobody knows.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 14: Something Blue

"Eye-catching" display in a shop's window.

Today I muse on the gift of sight. In eighth grade Social Studies, I was assigned as a study buddy to a visually-impaired girl named Nancy. She had special stationery with bold rules and brought her head close to the paper when she wrote. I'd read her a few paragraphs out loud and the corresponding study questions, and she'd write down the answers. I was always amazed at her memory as I'd often have to go back and re-read sections to myself before generating a good response.

In high school, one of the teachers had her students pair up, with one wearing a blindfold through lunch breaks, guided by his or her buddy. Clumsy guides as some of them were, and inexperienced with having to give up their sight, I saw quite a few students trip, stall, and walk into objects in their path.

One of the best massages I got was from a blind girl in Viet Nam. Our hotel contracted with an organization that provided jobs for the visually impaired, training you by women to do in-room massages for clientele. I remember how my masseuse would feel the terrain of my back, tickling my skin with soft sensations, before adding pressure to the massage when she had mapped out and memorized my body with her hands.

Month of May Photo Challenge Day 13: Primary Colors - Red, Blue, Yellow

Mini merry-go-round cart in Great Mall, Milpitas.

Aside from inside malls and certain shops, I don't see a lot of these around anymore. It used to be there was one outside grocery stores or strip malls, especially at retailers like K-Mart or old five-and-dimes like Newberry. I was blown away by the merry-go-round I saw the first time I went to Great America; it was gigantic, and each horse or carriage was so ornate with colors and details. But the mechanical horses I more often rode were outside those old stores; as my mom was wrapping up her shopping and in the cashier line, my dad would often walk me to the ride outside, let me climb on, fish out a quarter that had been jingling against the other change in his pocket, and insert it into the coin feed. Whimsical music to the tune of "William Tell" would play, and the horse bucked in place to a rhythmic cadence. For a brief couple of minutes, I was a cowgirl riding across the Wild West plains, or a princess soaring the skies on her trusted unicorn.

My dad could do wonders with his pocket of change; sometimes he'd feed 50 cents into one of those claw cranes filled with plush toys and a mechanical arm you'd control by a joystick to grab an item with two tries or before time ran out. He'd gauge whether the toys in a particular claw crane's cabinet were stuffed too tightly, thereby minimizing your chance of success, something that he called "cheating" on the retailer's behalf. He'd spend no more than a dollar on two tries, and more often than not, he'd win me a prize that would become part of my massive collection of stuffed animals.

At the mall, I watched a Hispanic family gaze at their toddler, who was riding the little doggie carriage merry-go-round, bright with primary colors. It spun in a slow orbit with repetitive tooney music, a ride kids nowadays may consider boring with all the new technology available to have fun. I wondered what was going on in the toddler's head, whether his imagination had developed yet, and thought back to a time when a couple of quarters got me to look up to my dad as my hero and allowed me to ride a horse among the clouds.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 12: Poor

These Lunar New Year red envelopes remind me of a time when I felt both the richest and the poorest in my life. My immigrant parents always worked hard to carve out a living for our family, and there was never spare money for the concept of an "allowance." We children were expected to help out with chores and everything else we can, and our payment was food and often hand-me-down clothes. If you were the older ones, you were expected to look after your younger siblings.

The exception was Tet, the Lunar New Year, where children would receive lucky red envelopes from their parents and relatives, a once-a-year allowance that most of us treasured and saved. I always liked to spend mine on book orders from Scholastic and Troll, bookworm that I was, but I always put aside most of my money for a rainy day and, even at a young age, for when I needed to go to college.
One day, someone broke into the duplex my parents were renting in the seedier side of town, and the thieves made out with our tube TV, along with my entire stash of red envelopes saved across the years and hidden in my sock drawer. I remember counting the money after the three days of Tet and being proud of how well I had saved, how my money was growing, and how it was all gone in an instant through no fault of mine.

These days I give red envelopes to my siblings, nieces, and nephews; we have alarms, gates, dogs, safes, and banks guarding our valuables, so maybe they'll never have to experience the injustice of being robbed of everything they have. But like anything else in life, it is a lesson, and for me, it is the value of saving money, and the resilience it takes to have lost everything, and to build it from the ground up again.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 11: Take a Picture of What You’re Doing at Noon

Every Monday at noon, my company employs an English teacher to come and teach our coworkers visiting from China about English vocabulary and culture. I sat in on today's lesson, which was on dining experiences at a casual vs formal restaurant, as well as a fun lesson on the American bar scene. Despite having English fluency, I still learned something new, like what "sous-vide" and "getting 86'ed" means.

I started Kindergarten not speaking a word of English, and I remember the day I officially "graduated" from ESL classes to the regular English curriculum a few years into school. Students were tested on their vocabulary by being shown picture flash cards and asked to name the object, and the item that got me out was "eggbeater."

The English language is full of borrowed vocabulary from different roots; sometimes the rules of pronunciation makes no sense. I could've excelled at something like math, nestling in the constancy and reliability of numbers. But it was English that I fell in love with, the subject on which I base my current hobby (creative writing) and trade (technical writing). All because I knew what an eggbeater was.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 10: Architecture – Windows, Buildings, Cornerstones

I love how the illumination on the left side of this building taper upward at this photo angle; the slightly concave structure makes for some sleek lines.

Having grown up in one-story houses in San Jose, I've gotten used to being at ground level, but one striking thing about big cities and countries with limited land is how living accommodations are built up. Many houses in Viet Nam are multi-story complexes complete with spiral staircases made of smooth hardwood or marble. Some classier houses even have elevators in them, and families would often live on the higher floors and use the ground-level floor for their businesses or trade.

When my husband was young, he'd pull crazy stunts like jumping across rooftops or climbing along narrow decorative ledges on the outside of buildings. This is what happens if you don't have a TV. Once, his life was saved by a meager clothesline hung between buildings. Sometimes I'm amazed that with all the shenanigans of his youth, he lived to marry me.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 9: Unique Composition Day

For today's challenge, I put together a collage of water's many forms. The central swirl of water is the focal point that expands outward. From the top and going clockwise: condensation (clouds), ice, boiling water, and glacial (snow).

Water has been my favorite subject to photograph so far; though California is in a drought, I could find water everywhere, used as decor and entertainment in the most creative ways, from aquariums to waterfalls to fountains. Vegas's Bellagio has its famous water fountain and light show to the rhythm of music. In the Miracle Mile mall on the strip, a rainstorm experience is created every hour, complete with sound effects and flashes of lightning. Sitting in Caesar's Palace, the clouds overhead change colors to mimic the quick passage of a day within a few hours.

Lake Mead in Nevada, which also provides water to California, has run dangerously low this year. Remember that huge, sweet soaking tub in my Vegas hotel room? In honor of drought awareness, we never used it for the duration of our stay. Here's to water, and the conscientious effort to save one of earth's most precious resources.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 8: Editing Day Challenge

Took this shot in The M&M Store along the Vegas strip. Editing apps used:

• iPhone: Cropping.
• InstaCollage: Side-by-side Before/After collage.
• Color Effects: B/W + Color photo highlights.
• Font Candy: Caption fonts on individual Before/After photos.
• Perfect 365: Adding makeup, facial contour, blemish correction, skin softening (some photo resolution lost with this app cuz I'm too cheap to buy the paid version for this editing challenge).

Fun fact: My mom thinks getting my freckles removed will solve all my beauty problems. Freckles are never cute or endearing--they are considered blemishes. Moles especially can be bearers of bad omens, depending on their location. In Vietnamese superstition, they suggest a vice of excess: a mole near your mouth means you are fond of your food and eat a lot. A mole near your eye means you are destined for a life of woe as you will cry a lot. I used to have a mole below my right eye. You can see it in my childhood photos. Though I never asked him to, my dad took me to a cosmetologist to get it removed. Somehow, I don't think photo editing software for blemish removal would've cut it with my folks. I've had a relatively happy life so far. Thanks, Dad?

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 7: Footwear

Blingy heels from Giuseppe Zanott. Let's be real--I'd die within ten minutes of wearing heels this high. Maybe even five. I've always been a flat-shoes/sneakers kind of gal. Never been in love with shoe shopping. Usually I despise it, in fact--taking them off, trying them on, walking a few paces to assess fit and comfort level.

Here is a fun fact: during a staged martial arts demo for my wedding, I changed from my high heels into slippers. To me, foot pain is one of the worst pains to endure due to all the nerve endings in the feet. I can't imagine that human beings could think up a torture like foot binding and pass it off as a sign of desirability and beauty. In actuality, it is to confine a wife from wandering very far, making her steps slow, small, and measured as she tries to balance on deformed feet and broken toes.
Sometimes I think that the discomfort of wearing heels is not far off, with all the pressure pushing on the toes. It makes me glad to be in a land and time where I can select footwear of my choice: sneakers, slippers, or barefoot and free of confines.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 6: Something Young

I spotted this little fellow while dining at Spago in Caesar's Palace, eating spaghetti that his dad was cutting up into short strips. One of my earliest childhood memories was eating noodles, fed to me by my nanny while my parents were already at their general store in Viet Nam. Nanny would insist that I finished breakfast first before walking me out to my parents' store. She'd roll the noodles around the chopsticks and blow on them to cool them before feeding them to me.

By the time the kid was done eating, he had spaghetti sauce smeared orange all over his face, and his food-catcher bib had bits of noodles in it. It brings me back to a carefree time of childhood when everything was done with reckless abandon: eating, running, laughing, crying.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 5: Water

Water vortex displays at The Shops at Crystals Aria in Las Vegas.

I once read about a debate on which was the stronger element: fire or water. They both can wreak havoc in terms of fires and floods, but in the end, water came out as the winner because fire cannot put out water, but water can put out fire.

I have always admired water's versatility; it can change its form from liquid to solid ice to vaporous steam. In oceans and rapid-flowing rivers, it has the patience and power to erode away tall and rocky cliffs, smoothing boulders through time as it ekes between the crevices of hard things. I have always thought about the lessons that water teaches us: that even when blocked or dammed off, water finds another way around.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 4: A Living Thing

Tulip and cymbidium orchid arrangement at the Vdara check-in desk (right before I mooched off a room upgrade). I like how it's self-contained in its own glass ecosystem.

My mom designs artificial flower arrangements for a living. I learned the names of a lot of flowers as she took me wholesale shopping through my youth. I grew up in her little retail stall, surrounded by all the colors of the rainbow. I've grown an appreciation for fresh flowers even though her arrangements fed us, clothed us, put us through college. Fresh flowers with their unique scents are something that the artificial lacks, along with unique beauty that comes with all organic things, and as they quickly fade, remind us of the ephemeral nature of life.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 3: A Bridge

I've always wondered why the Golden Gate Bridge is red. Couldn't they have at least painted it yellow? On this day, it is partly secluded in mist, and I think of all the drivers on it, passing through a low-hanging cloud. Odin loves frolicking in the waters lapping Chrissy Field.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 2: Fire

At my National Honors Society initiation in high school, each initiate was given a candle, which represents knowledge. During the lighting ceremony, we dimmed the auditorium lights and passed the flame from one neighbor to another until the entire room flickered with candlelight. This symbolizes the passing on of knowledge from teachers to students, from mentors to tutees, from friend to friend.

The Greek Titan Prometheus risked himself and stole from the gods two gifts to give to humankind: fire, and the ability to heal. Giving us the ability to cook food, fire is a symbol of civilization and evolution. With candlelight vigils to commemorate a memorable event, it shows unity and hope. In storms and electrical blackouts, we revert to candlelight, a light in the darkness when all other lights fail.

Month of May Photo Challenge. Day 1: Portrait of a Family Member

I've always adored my husband's feet, with their plump roundedness and top arch like a camel's hump. I always joke that feet like his were destined for a comfortable life, while flat, angular, bunioned feet like mine were destined to a peasant's life of working in the fields. We are actually both tech professionals (make of that what you will in relation to my theory), but today, I reflect upon the connotations of bare feet. 

In horror movies, zooming in to bare feet magnifies the audience's awareness of vulnerability, the feeling of being unequipped, exposed, and unprepared to run. But often, I associate bare feet with practicing martial arts, most done without footwear so that you are aware of the sensations of the ground: textured mats, cool hardwood. It also evokes in me a sense of comfort and relaxation, of kicking off the confines of shoes, of being home.