Moving to the USA

One of the books that deeply influenced me is Antifragile by Nassim Taleb.

Taleb talks a lot about optionality. My interpretation is that optionality in life means putting myself in situations where I have unlimited upside and limited downside.

Limiting my downside has been relatively easy: follow obvious rules like “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket,” “Avoid life-threatening activities,” and “Don’t take leveraged bets that can knock you out of the game.” In short, don’t bite off more than you can chew.

On the other hand, creating unlimited upside has been about thinking strategically and making hard choices. Whenever I feel like my upside has limits, I seek change.

For example, when I was a computer science undergrad, I got involved in many different startups. I learned many skills, but most importantly, I learned that merely being good at programming had a limit. Fortunately, my best friend, whom I met playing football, introduced me to a natural language processing (NLP) lab. I never liked university, but I decided to stay and do research as a master’s student. During these two years, I dove deep into machine learning, deep learning, and NLP. I took baby steps to learn about the field and do research, eventually publishing my work at NLP conferences.

The timing could not have been better. I remember seeing AlphaGo defeat Lee Sedol in my first year of graduate school. Those two years shattered the ceiling that had limited me as a computer programmer.

After postgrad in 2019, I joined an early-stage startup in Hong Kong. After a year, it was evident that things were not going well. Also, the city I’d lived in for seven years was in political turmoil. I needed a change again. I started looking into leaving Hong Kong and joining a bigger company. That led me to interview at the biggest company I could possibly join—Google. My first position was as a Computational Linguist. I never passed the initial screening for software engineer roles, probably because I was just one of thousands of CS graduates. My two years in NLP research made it possible to get a foot in the door of big tech.

One challenge was that the job was in Japan. I had never thought about living in Japan and couldn’t even read hiragana. The job didn’t require Japanese, so I took a leap of faith and moved.

This difficult choice led to the most interesting five years of my life, despite the COVID-19 pandemic. We became a family there—going in as one and coming out as three. I can now converse in Japanese (somewhat). Five years in Tokyo still feels like a long honeymoon.

Despite the great food and lifestyle of Tokyo, I once again had to seek change for the same reason—limited upside. I felt I would need to dive deep into Japanese society to find more opportunities, or else remain confined to one company.

An opportunity to immigrate to California came, so we took it as a family. Now we are in Silicon Valley. As an engineer working on NLP and AI in 2025, I figured this is the best way to put myself in the right place and environment.

Another important factor that influenced our choice was “belonging.” As an international family with a multicultural child, this is an important issue. Unfortunately, our hometowns (Hong Kong and Seoul) and our last home (Tokyo) were suboptimal. After several months in California, we feel we are in the right environment.

Every choice comes with trade-offs; none is perfect. We miss the relatively high-quality, comfortable, affordable, and train-centric life in Tokyo. Our extended families are farther away now, and we need to build our social circles again. However, I believe that hard choices that create unlimited upside eventually make our lives easier in the long run. Let’s see how life turns out.