Beautiful quote: "Men don't get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things... What kills them is erosion; they get nudged into failure. It's slow. It rots out your guts." https://twitter.com/krishraghav/status/1274896778844725248

Another beautiful line: "My father urged us to strain towards the future so relentlessly that we left no past behind us. His ambivalence towards tradition ran partly in the family... But was also tempered by his life's own idiosyncrasies."

My father grew up during the cultural revolution. After graduating and working in China for a few years, he and my mother saw a bleak future. He quit his job and managed to claw his way into a EE/CS degree at Utah State through smarts and sheer force of will.

In the China of the 1990s, you needed both. And when we moved to America, as Raghav beautifully said, we left no past behind us.

China had raised a generation of unsentimental pragmatists. My parents packed what could fit for free on an airplane, and we left home, family, friends - all of it behind.