"A More Perfect Union," or, Oprah Sends me to South Africa, Where I did not Meet Charlize Theron - PART ONE

If we've learned anything from this election and subsequent fallout, it is that parts of this country really, really, REALLY, do not understand each other. There is endless talk now of the "two Americas," divided by political party, socioeconomic class, geography, and a host of heart-wrenching social issues. What will it take to the unite these so-called United States back together?

In the darkest moments, it seems pretty impossible. It is at these times that my thoughts sometimes turn, wonderingly, to the country of South Africa - here was a people divided both in law and in practice, who rose above it to form a nation with so much promise, and who still face such challenges in realizing that promise. When I spent time there, the post-apartheid era was not yet 15 years old, and I could sense the raw hope for a better society. What can we learn from their attempts to mend their rifts, so deeply cemented over so many years? I can't pretend to know the whole answer, but during my time there, I did get a sense of what it takes. Fellow citizen, we have a lot of work to do. 

PART 1: OPRAH SENDS ME TO SOUTH AFRICA

I certainly didn’t set out to do HIV/AIDS research in South Africa - it was simply the best option at the time. I was a 2L in law school and determined to go abroad that summer. I had spent the previous summer sitting in a deeply air-conditioned office in Washington DC because I had heard that being a 1L summer associate at a firm was both prestigious and fiscally responsible. However, back at school, I couldn’t help but glow green with envy every time my classmates recounted their inspiring work abroad on human rights or war crimes.

So I started looking for public interest organizations needing eager law students. My best bet was Harvard Law’s Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology and Bioethics (a real mouthful). The Center was a think tank for research at the intersection of science, medicine, and law. As one of the first student fellows at the Center, we met in small seminars with a multidisciplinary network of faculty (including then-Professor Elizabeth Warren) to discuss current scholarship. The level of discourse was high. When I wrote a law review article about the regulation of genetic tests, my advisor was Professor Peter Barton Hutt, the guy at the FDA who wrote the key regulation. Talk about access! I was a bioethics junkie at the time and talking about this stuff was a huge part of the reason I went to law school.

Through this network, I met a PhD economist who suggested that I contact his organization in South Africa. The NGO, Mpilonhle, works to find innovative solutions to health and other social issues in rural northern Kwa-Zulu Natal. In that region, the HIV/AIDS epidemic had wreaked havoc on every aspect of society, so the mission of the NGO was really to better people’s lives through public health. The NGO’s name, Mpilonhle, even means “A good life” in Zulu. I had never even thought about South Africa, but I was game for anything, so I spoke to the director, the demanding but imminently humanitarian Dr. Bennish, and he wrote a grant to one of Mpilonhle's funders - Oprah’s Angel Network. Oprah's people approved funding for my expenses, and so that was that! I was going to South Africa! Thanks Oprah!

My assignment for the NGO was to figure out what laws and policies governed HIV/AIDS matters in rural schools, ranging from health services to sexual education. It seemed like a tall order, but with characteristic law student confidence, I figured I would sort it all out once I got there.

Before I could go, however, I did the responsible thing and summered at the whitest-shoe, most prestigious law firm I could find. The two worlds I inhabited that summer could not have been any more different. As a BigLaw summer associate, I did a fair amount of work but also ate at the finest restaurants in New York (with a generous budget cap) and attended endless social events featuring alcohol (no cap). Only after this revelry in the lap of first-world luxury did I pack up my things and lug myself to JFK airport, carrying two suitcases and several new rolls of fat from rich eating. I boarded my South African Airways flight, ready for an adventure and not really sure what I'd find. 

Rolling sugar cane fields of Kwa-Zulu Natal

It turns out that no amount of preparation can fully illuminate a way of life that is so different from your own - you just have to go and live it. There were many such differences, but perhaps the single greatest difference I experienced was in the general level of civil safety. I'm talking about South Africa's reputation for violent, often deadly, crime. Having grown up in the U.S., I had no way of comprehending how widespread violent crime could be a part of normal life. Yet, in South Africa, it was. I slowly gleaned this situation from well-meaning people who did not want to scare me but also wanted me to be safe. As a result, they would often deliver alarming advice with seeming nonchalance. For example:

1. Here is a keychain with a button on it. Keep this by your bed and if anything happens in the middle of the night, push this and someone will come. But not the police. They stay away until the trouble is over. That man walking by your window is the guard who spends the night pacing around the house and checking in to a sensor every so often so we know he is still there.

2. If your car breaks down, do not get out of your car. Lock your door and windows and contact us. We are listed under ICE (in case of emergency) in your mobile.

3. If you need to lock up the house when we’re out, here are the keys for the gate to the living room, the gate at the bottom of the stairs, and the gate at the top of the stairs. Keep the gates on your windows locked; this room has been broken into before.

4. Try not to walk on that side of the street where the bank is. When the armored van shows up with the money, sometimes robbers and the armored van get into a gunfight and it's best not to be around.

5. Make sure to leave the office and get home before it gets dark. Do not drive in the dark.

I took note of these warnings like a dutiful child, but it took me a while to understand the whys. For instance, my checked luggage had gone missing when I transferred through Jo'burg, and when I got it back a week later, it had been meticulously picked through, documents taken out of folders, computer parts stolen and the packaging carefully replaced. It dawned on me, as object permanence might dawn on an infant, that this was a standard op - baggage handlers could remove a piece of luggage for a week, take their time with it, and face no ramifications.

In my naivete, I sometimes resisted the advisories. One day, I was working alone in the NGO office, keeping an eye on the time but really wanting to finish my task. I got an urgent call from the directors back at the house, asking where I was. I wondered why they seemed so pissed. "I'm just finishing something up at the office - I'll be on my way soon," I told them. The sun was still out. It was not yet 5pm. "Don't go anywhere. We're sending people for you," they told me. Minutes later, a pickup truck with a group of armed men standing in the back showed up at the office and escorted my car home. I followed them on the country roads through beautiful, endless acres of tall crops waving in the setting sun.

Looking back, I was hesitant to accept the warnings because I didn't want to believe what I was hearing: that just about everyone in South Africa had a personal story about violent crime; that the incidence of reported rape was among the highest in the world, and that sexual violence was the norm for many; that lethal force was used with callous frequency in carjackings and robberies (see the US State Department's take on all this here). I didn't want that to be anyone's reality. But over my time there, I accepted the precautions, and by implication, the dangers motivating them. As a woman, I was particularly vulnerable (though not any more or less so than any other woman there). Nor was I immune as a foreigner or one of very few Asians - the violence famously permeates all social barriers, including class, race, and geography. 

As my knowledge grew, I expanded my view of "normal" life and stayed calm. At least, I thought I was calm. However, when my return flight landed at JFK airport, something unexpected happened - the second the wheels hit the tarmac, something in me let go and I exhaled deeply. At that moment, I realized that, for weeks and weeks, I had been holding my breath - driving with my body tensed, sleeping with ears perked, and waking with eyes opened wider and wider. The instant I returned to American soil, I felt a wave of relief like I’d never felt before. I had made it home, intact, with an indelible appreciation for the rule of law and newfound shame at how much I took for granted.

Becoming Genghis - An Ode to Officemates

I ain't afraid of no lawyers. 

The officemate relationship is the arranged marriage of the workplace. As a junior associate at a big New York law firm, you will probably share an office with someone preordained for you by HR.  Because they sit literally an arms-length away from you and because you will both sit there for most of your waking hours, you will see this person more than any other person in your life. Like all arranged marriages, sometimes it goes smashingly and you have a best friend for life; other times, it makes your life that much worse every single day. 

My first officemate was pretty good, as they go. We worked together on my first deal, so he taught me how to do my time-sheets, utilize legal assistants, navigate first-year M&A tasks, and, most importantly, after an entire Sunday of frantic deal-closing work, how to order food from Seamless. In good times, when work was slow, he'd look over and say, "HAN. Entertain me. What you got?" We visited zombocom and watched viral internet videos. We called up other associates to banter. In bad times, we covered for each other. When I had worked a few nights in a row and just HAD to take a nap before my body shut down, I'd give him a heads up, "Hey, if anyone comes looking for me, I'm in a meeting." Then I'd curl up under my desk, set my blackberry to vibrate, drape my suit jacket over my head, and try to catch a few winks.

So in this way we rolled with the ups and downs, sometimes literally. In 2011 when an earthquake hit NYC, my officemate and I appeared to moonbounce around our 46th floor office. It was only a few seconds, but it felt like forever. Afterwards, we stared at each other mouths agape and asked at the same time, "What the hell was that???"

Because of the close proximity, you'd know things about your officemate that no one else did. You would know what they eat for lunch and dinner, how often they go to the bathroom, how often their girlfriend calls and whether she was usually in a good or bad mood, how they talk to difficult clients on the phone, and how they deal with work and life generally. Once a friend was walking by his officemate's desk and happened to see her googling "unexpected pregnancy." She took a leave of absence shortly thereafter.

My officemate certainly had dirt on me. Just prior to starting the job, my 5-year long relationship ended, a demise which included a broken engagement. After the breakup, I moved into a dark, noisy, tunnel of an apartment, started an all-consuming job, and decided that I wanted to be a musician after all but it was probably too late. It was one of the darkest, loneliest times in my life. If you've ever moved by yourself and then, surrounded by your worldly possessions in beat-up cardboard boxes, had to rebuild an IKEA bed frame before you can sleep, you know that every misaligned pre-drilled hole feels like a cruel joke by the universe. In those days, I would sometimes cry quietly at my desk. When it became noticeable, my officemate would ask gingerly, "Yo.... You okay over there?" and I'd answer, "Yeah," and clear my throat. "I'm fine," I'd say, leaning closer to my computer to see whether that was indeed an errant comma or a figment of my tear-blurred eyes. 

The code of officemate-dom was that you stayed out of each other's lives, but could gossip about it if it was remotely entertaining. I had a subsequent officemate who was dating a very pretty legal assistant, and I made a mental note of whether she was still stopping by for no good reason, just in case anyone asked. Another thing about this officemate was that he usually talked in a normal voice but once he got a phone call would switch to bellowing, whether on speakerphone or not. The moment he answered his calls, my secretary (who didn't even sit right outside our office) would instant message me, "OMG. How are you not deaf??"

Idiosyncrasies aside, conflicts between officemates were usually kept under control, because you really did have to get along. But there were some tense times. Once, I had just printed out a document of maybe 200-300 pages - one common junior associate task was to do a final review of a massive document in a short period of time before it was sent out, say to another team of lawyers or submitted to the SEC. As a corporate lawyer, you live or die by your organizational skills, and since I am also somewhat OCD, I started banging the stack of papers on all sides against my desk to neaten it into a pile. Bang bang bang! on one side of the stack. Bang bang bang! on another. I did all four sides and then went through it again just to make sure it was all aligned. Finally my officemate, who was trying to concentrate, looked over and howled, "Enough with the violence! Geez. Enough, Genghis! Genghis Han!!" 

And a nickname was born.

A nickname is, ultimately, a souvenir from a period of your life, is it not? Whether it's a pet name from your parents that sticks even after you have kids of your own, or a college name that indicates some grand victory or magnificent stupidity in your past, names represent an era in our lives and recall the people who gave them to us. 

I've kept the Genghis moniker because it represents many things: a ruthless efficiency, a will to triumph over the seemingly impossible, and an office culture where one of the best things about the job was the people around you. We have since all moved on to different endeavors, but every time someone calls me Genghis, I think back fondly to my officemates and those years that helped make me who I am today. 

Betsy DeVos, and why I quit piano for ten years

Wha...

I threw in the towel at 17. I remember worrying when I was 13 that my piano career was behind - I didn't have a major recording contract, full calendar of performances with major orchestras, or a Grammy. I thought to myself grimly that I had better ramp it up before I became obsolete! Age 16 was that deadline, and, guess what? By 16 I still didn't have any of those things. Furthermore, I wasn't cleaning up at every competition I entered, especially at the international level. To my teenage self, that meant that I wasn't good enough and never would be. Time was up. And so I told my piano teacher that I was not auditioning for conservatory and would be going to college. 

The idea that my performance *at that moment* in a competitive arena was an accurate measure of my abilities dictated how I thought about myself in all areas of my life. In high school, when my brother got a better score on the national qualifier AHSME math exam, even though he was two grades below, I thought resignedly, well, guess I'm terrible at math! 

Luckily, college helped changed that mindset, partially because it was a fresh start - I no longer had to be a good pianist because no one knew I was a pianist. I could study anything, so I picked biochemistry because it was a broad major and I'd always loved learning about the world and how it works. But it turned out in the premed-eat-premed major I'd chosen that I was, in fact, way behind. In my first semester, perhaps for the first time in my life, I saw what a difference preparation could make. For example, I failed my first physics exam. It tested material typically covered in a high school AP class, which most of the class had taken but I had not (it was not offered at my school). The average test score was around a 94%. My score was in the 30's. The professor put up a histogram of the scores on the projector for the hundreds of us to see, circled the three worst scores at the low tail end of the curve, and stated ominously, "If this is you ... come see me."

I went to her office, stunned. Wasn't I good at science?? The professor, a wry woman who was clearly brilliant but also clearly annoyed at having to teach this class, asked me how I prepared for the exam. I said that I read all the chapters covering the material and went to all the classes. "And how many practice problems in the problems book did you do?" she asked. I stared blankly at her. Practice problems? She saw my hesitation and asked, "Do you ... even have the practice problem book?" No. I had done no practice problems. She rolled her eyes. In one of many moments where people change my life but have no idea that they're doing so, she said, "Get the book. Do the problems. That's how you learn science." 

Thoroughly humiliated, I bought the book and did just about every single problem in it. Despite my first exam, I ended up with an A in the class. More importantly, I was empowered. I was NOT bad at physics. I was just not good at it yet, and I could change that with some elbow (brain? brain elbow?) grease.

For the first time in my life, I had the confidence to keep going at a tough challenge. When the all-male study group told me I didn't get the right answer because I was a girl and girls are bad at science (they were serious, by the way, and this was in the early 2000's), I got mad because I knew they were wrong. Some of them had taken the course before (I knew one girl who sat in the lectures for all of next year's classes to get a head start) and others had been doing research in the field (at local universities, etc.). And so I studied more, and I beamed inside when I beat their exam scores. Once I got a 99% on a tough test and a friend happened to see my score. For the next four years, anytime I relapsed into "poor me I can't do this" mode, he'd say, "Whatever, 99." I entered college a failed music prodigy, according to me. But I left college knowing that I could improve at just about anything. 

A few decades later, I'm watching Betsy DeVos's confirmation hearing and it is a disaster. I don't think I would have been hired as a babysitter with her answers, let alone hired to oversee American education. That aside, an interesting moment for me was when Senator Al Franken asked her about her views on proficiency versus growth. DeVos's answer was as incoherent, uninformative and unprepared as her others, but the question was a critical one - should educational success be measured by individual students' growth or by whether they meet a set of standards? A light bulb went off. I was living proof that a growth mentality enhances learning more than a proficiency one. I went from being someone who judged her abilities by some impossible standard, who met challenges with the fear of failure, to someone who believes she can do just about anything with enough courage and effort, and who seeks out challenges. Senator Franken reminded me how important mindset is to the ability to learn. 

For this reason, it's a good thing I quit piano while I did. I needed time to realize my own potential, to have the confidence to tackle harder challenges. And building a performance career is the most challenging thing I've ever undertaken. It grows my mind, body and spirit every single day. I now play piano better than I ever thought I could, and I know I will continue to improve the longer I work at it. We all have real limitations, but over the years I've realized that my attitude doesn't have to be one of them. 

Practice like Steph

Athletic excellence has always fascinated me. One of the most lasting sports memories I have is of Shawn Johnson winning gold medal on the beam in the 2008 Olympics. Doing ridiculous acrobatics on that little plank without falling off is impressive enough, but what stuck with me is that she felt terrible that day - headache, stomachache. I don't know about you, but when I have a stomachache, about all I'm up for is putting on a snuggie and listening to white noise.  

And yet she had to bring it, and she did. 

When I see such focus, consistency, and results, I think of our job as performers. The audience is there to be transported, to hear what we have to say, to experience something extraordinary. They don't care if we had a bad day, if we're having a headache, or if our left pinky nail is falling off. (This is part of the reason why I get annoyed when singers announce that they are under the weather ...). The challenge of bringing it, no matter what else is going on, is why performers have to train the way they do. 

Performance training in music, as in sports, has many components (all of which can and do fill entire blogs and books). There is foremost the mental game, which in music draws upon sports psychology. Noa Kageyama's blog is one of the best out there on this topic. 

Another very important component is preparation, that is, practice. And on this point, I recently saw something that reminded me of the relation between consistency in practice and on-stage: 

STEPHEN CURRY PRACTICING THREE-POINT SHOTS.

If you've never watched this man play on the court, let me tell you it is like dance and sports and a rabbit evading a fox all at once. The man is poetry in motion. He makes three-pointers while way behind the line, while three men are grabbing at him, while on the run, while the shotclock is on its last millisecond ... you name the non-ideal situation, he can nevertheless nail the shot. 

And this is how he practices - taking shots every day from every part of the three-point line. And he has developed an eerie consistency. 

Now music is not about hitting all the right notes - far from it. A performance that only does that is boring as hell. And no one pays or leaves the house to be bored to hell. 

BUT. What Steph shows me is that if we practice with consistency and deliberateness and intent, we build up the physical skills to adapt in the performance situation. That means practicing pieces in tiny chunks (like a four-bar phrase, or even a two-note slur) rather than running the whole piece repeatedly. That means, when something is not quite right in the practice room, figuring out why rather than playing it over and over until we like it better. Ultimately, this deliberate, conscious, deconstructed practicing can allow us to let go on stage and show more freedom, more artistry, more expression. And isn't that the whole point? 

How to stop losing your Airturn

Like a growing number of musicians, I've finally made the switch to digital scores. Storing PDFs of my music on my iPad eliminates a bevy of worries - backaches from carrying around a giant stack of music, forgetting which score I need for the day, not having a pencil to put in markings, losing my scores with my markings, etc. Clearly I am a forgetful person who loses things. 

The process I have now works super well - buy the score, copy it, scan it to PDF (or just download public domain music from IMSLP), and upload to forScore (probably the most popular music reader for iPad). All I need to remember to bring with me is my iPad! I can categorize all of my music in the app, annotate with a finger, and download new scores from the web at any time. I'll take paperbacks over the Kindle any day, but this music setup has greatly simplified my life.

One of the best advantages of using an iPad is hands-free page turns. I finally got an AirTurn Duo, a bluetooth-enabled device which allows you to turn pages with your foot. This took some getting used to, as I'm already occupied with the three pedals underfoot ... Trying to coordinate the two extra pedals with my left foot without screwing up the other foot definitely had a learning curve - like a friend said, it's like learning to play the organ (and I sure have had some epic organ fails). You may flail about and feel clumsy at first, but the only way out is to practice until footwork becomes second-nature. So I did. And now I can turn my own pages at my own pace! No more asking friends to turn for performances or strategizing what notes to leave out so I can do it on my own.  

The only problem ---

I keep leaving my AirTurn under the piano. Remembering to check down there is kinda like driving a car for decades and then suddenly having to check under it every time to retrieve a critical piece of equipment. Just wasn't happening.  

After many embarrassing trips back to rehearsal spaces and lost and found centers, I decided I needed a fool-proof solution. Get a better memory you say? Nah. Enter the SMALL DOG COLLAR. $5 off Amazon. 

Loop the noose around the airturn and clip the other end to something you WILL NOT forget.

Hasn't failed yet.