I wish someone had told me these things. Not in passing, not through social media. But sit me down, eyeball-to-eyeball, telling me what I am about to say to you. It probably would have saved me many unproductive and unsettling years.

I just turned 50 three weeks ago. Okay, I said it. I want to look at least 15 years younger, but to have a teen whom I call “son” towering over me ages me instantly. Unlike the Boomers, Gen X did not want kids too early. I spent the first five years of my marriage alone, with an occasional company of a husband. We live in a typical single-family house. Before sharing the space with the little tykes, the two of us had enough stuff to occupy all the rooms. By the time I was pregnant with my first child, I already qualified for an amniocentesis.

My Milestone Birthdays

I was wacky when I turned 30. I threw myself a birthday party and packed our 900 square-foot, one-bedroom rental with friends. We played silly games where my guests put stickers all over their faces. Inadvertently, I was preparing for motherhood.

Ten years later, my church threw me a birthday party in a Japanese buffet restaurant. I still remember what I wore that day and everyone that showed. I felt loved…and young.

As the big Five-O loomed in the corner, I wanted to disappear. I was tempted to sail away so I could ponder on this question: what on earth have I done in half a century? Lamentably, the only way to sail for the land-dwelling city folks is through a cruise vacation, and the once-popular cruise ships are now Petri dishes for the deadly virus.

Before I go on, I want to apologize to those of you who have already crossed this milestone. You probably think my monologue this far is melodramatic. Or maybe you have found it to be oddly profound.

Well, someone did sit me down, eyeball-to-eyeball, and told my husband something about turning 50.

My Dad’s Advice

More than ten years ago, my father came to visit me from Taiwan. I was very eager to please him, so I took him to a sushi restaurant after printing out a coupon from my husband’s employee perks program. He would not know the meal would cost us no more than $50. I secretly delighted in my brilliance.

The sushi restaurant was literally a hole in a wall as our party of six took over half of the space. Instead of politely waiting for a waiter, my father made his way to the sushi chef. He said in broken English, “Everything. One.” He raised his index finger and swiped it across the display case, indicating he wanted one piece of EVERYTHING.

“Quán bù dōu yào?” The sushi chef responded in Chinese, asking if my dad indeed meant EVERYTHING.

EVERYTHING would include a piece of fried egg on a lump of rice. The sushi chef took full advantage of my father’s request. A platter quickly arrived with so many sushi pieces that the value of our employee perks coupon began to diminish until it was no longer valid.

Some families might start a banter over a ridiculous order and an unredeemable coupon. But we simply bled and fumed on the inside – practicing a form of most exemplary Christianity.

My father then asked to speak to my husband privately. My head was spinning. Did I mention I had three preschoolers that were about to start a war with chopsticks?

The two men then moved to sit across from each other while I kept an eye on the kids. A few seconds into this awkward arrangement, my father realized they had a language barrier. “Translate for me. I have something very important to say to your husband.”

Maybe my father felt he was left out of the party when a young man came knocking on my door. Perhaps he never had a chance to show his disapproval of a Cantonese boy who wanted to betroth his only daughter. Maybe it was not too late to show his clout.

“Do you have a plan for when you turn 50? Because most likely you will not do what you do now,” my father asked.

I am sure my husband was murmuring on the inside about the insane amount of sushi he had to pay. He kept quiet because he couldn’t speak Mandarin intelligibly. But it was not meant to be a conversation anyway; it was a lecture, and I dutifully translated for my father.

He preached the message of the Second Act. For my father, oil painting was his second act when he turned a hobby into a professional gig at 50. In thirty years, he was recognized, won awards, and showcased his work in many art galleries. Then came his final act at age 80 – he published his entire art collection in bonded leather volumes. Each copy weighs a ton, and my brother refused to put two of them in his suitcase when he flew back to the U.S. from Taiwan. 

My husband will reach 50 next year, and he is still doing what he did when he was 25. I doubt he will have a Second Act because there is no way he can turn his hobby into a professional career. Is there any Asian Baller League for the old, grey, and feeble? He is a diehard basketball junkie and injury-prone, shamelessly playing with those thirty years younger than him.

What would be his Second Act then? Hopefully, it is growing old with me.

The Grim Reality of Big Five-O

Some people say life begins at 50, for the 50s is the golden age of happiness. The famous French writer Victor Hugo wrote, “Forty is the old age of youth; fifty the youth of old age.” My initial shock of the onset of old age came not when I reached for a magnifying glass. It came when I checked off “49+” as an age bracket to accept greater risk for injury before I could put on a ski boot.

Being 50 gives us more than thirty years of qualitative and quantitative data to analyze how well we have fared after adolescence. I am not a fan of comparison; in fact, I despise it. On the other hand, it is humbling to track down the cronies you grew up with. Choose your sample for comparisons carefully – I must warn. Select only those who share your family’s economic and social backgrounds. I made the mistake of looking beyond my immediate circle. I read about women my age who are at the peak of their careers in broadcast, academia, and politics. It made me weep! I am in awe of their accomplishments, and I wonder how they spent their 20s, 30s, and 40s while replaying in my head what I did in those years.

Diapers, lots of diapers, wiping, lots of wiping. I ran a full-time daycare of three in my home. From dusk to dawn, I cooked, fed, and schooled my kids. I then poured all the little free time I had into my church. Philanthropical volunteerism turned into grinding, full-time work. Twenty years later, this close-knit Christian community was doomed to implode, and it did.

“I have nothing to show for” would be the most honest disclosure for those in the 50s. The quiet desperation would show up in the form of a mid-life crisis. Suddenly awakened from a bad dream, we feel the urgency to make our marks before losing all mobility and cognitive functions.

Searching for a Childhood Friend Who is Turning 50 Too

An old hanging folder labeled “Memory Lane” exploded on me a few months ago. It came undone as an avalanche of notes, cards, souvenirs, pictures fell like confetti onto the floor in my kids’ bedroom. This room used to be our “corporate office” and “conference room.” My children who ended up occupying this room would grow up right next to a wall of outdated, grown-up reference books, along with my derelict, alphabetized filing system. 

In this pile, I saw love notes from an old boyfriend (whom I did marry), handwritten birthday cards for my baby son and me, as well as long letters from our parents that we vowed to read one day. Then, a card caught my attention. In handwriting that I immediately recognized, I saw these words: “May we each find the man of our lives.” We were two lost souls looking for love in all the wrong places. She was in Taipei, and I was in New York.

That was more than twenty years ago when we wrote each other letters, not even e-mails. As our world has turned into a virtual village, I felt a stirring to look for her. 

And it only took five seconds. A Google search of her full name quickly brought up a whole page of credentials as photos of her stared right back at me. Named as a distinguished Google scholar, she looked exactly the way I remembered.  Still image-conscious, she’d only allow the most flattering photos of her to be found online. I recalled her youthful shenanigans and how she would get in trouble in the all-girl class in our uptight, stuffy private school. Her brilliant mind was stifled in a rigid academic system. I believe she experienced her break when she made a move to study law in the U.S.

Mustering up some courage, I contacted her at her professional e-mail address. Within hours, I received a reply. In flawless American English, she told me she’s been looking for me too. I have taken on my husband’s name, and there is no digital footprint under my former identity. She told me our reconnection was the best early birthday present for our 50th birthday.

Disappointing My Parents

My mother was supportive when I told her I was leaving a lucrative career to be a stay-at-home mom, even more unconventionally, a homeschooling mom. “Oh, that is good. You have been working too hard, and you have been overly stressed. Don’t give yourself so much pressure,” My mother saw how I was stretched so thin juggling a 60-hour week, a small group, a worship team, and a new husband. My mother saw me battling chronic fatigue and knew I went to see a neurologist. Years later, she would sing the Lord’s praise for saying we are a “perfect” family. “Your husband works to take care of the ‘outside,’ and you stay home to take care of the ‘inside.’ Husband and children are well taken care of, and everyone is happy.”

On the other hand, my father was not so amenable. While staying in my home, he told me how proud he was when he saw me in my professional attire, riding down the escalator, carrying a Coach leather briefcase as he waited for me. What he saw that day in my house, albeit a meticulous one, was a woman in a stained apron, leery-eyed, sullen and irritable, catering to his every whim like a housemaid. He then went on to lecture me on the deceptive notion that parents make the best teachers.  

I was a trophy child. Growing up, I felt embarrassed whenever my parents bragged about me or exaggerated my accomplishments. It’d take being a parent to realize all the boasting was an equalizer as we show off our kids to compensate for feelings of inadequacy and even failures.

My parents’ equalizer took a nosedive. I recently found out, very unexpectedly, that my mother was disappointed in me too. 

As soon as I got my two jabs of Covid vaccines in May, I booked a flight to see my family in Texas. Due to limited mobility, my mother has a full-time home aid. One day, her home aid and I chatted while my mother was resting in her bedroom. In our conversation, I learned about her life as a new immigrant. After moving to the U.S., she took on any work to pay the bills, doing what no one with an education would do. Her son just started college, she said. I told her I, too, immigrated here as a teen, and with hard work, her son will have a great future here in America. Then she replied, “Yeah, your mom said you had very good grades and what a waste (很浪費 hěn làngfèi) that you don’t work…” As if catching herself saying more than she ought, she stopped mid-sentence. 

That was not what my mother said to me. She said I had a perfect life.

Their trophy child has disappeared into the obscurity of full-time motherhood while they faced their demise of aging and oldness. Even if I suddenly decide to get a doctorate or run for office in my golden years, they would no longer have the cognitive ability to understand or care.

My Advice

Now I am 50, I have much to say to Gen Z. You were born between 1998 and 2010. Your parents are part of Generation X, who defined the 80s and the 90s by rushing home before 8 p.m. every Thursday to watch Friends and Seinfeld. As I am raising three Gen Z’s myself, I witnessed firsthand a peculiar and enigmatic breed that lives and breathes Google search, and a spotty WiFi would trigger a tantrum. Whatever they want to know, they ask Google; whatever they want to eat, they ask me.

I am not successful by the world’s standards. Far from it – even my parents think I have squandered an education and productive earning years. However, I retired at age 35 and have not needed to make a dime. I can afford to work for free for the good of others. We know we are not wealthy because we qualified for Covid stimulus checks and advanced child tax credits. Our parents came to the U.S. with just enough cash until they landed their first job. We received no inheritance, and we spent all that we saved on our wedding.

If your goal in life is not a Malibu mansion with a fleet of luxury cars, I may have a few tricks up my sleeve to show you how I was able to pull it off. Here are my seven golden rules.

1) 10-10-80

I once heard the following, and I have yet to test it out through my children. 

It matters not how much you make – as soon as you get your first paycheck, save 10%, give away 10% and spend 80%.  After twenty to thirty years, you will have at least a million dollars in your bank account.

Who came up with this principle? It was John D. Rockefeller – one of the richest men ever lived.

The 10-10-80 plan is built on the premise that you live on 80 percent of your income for food, utilities, rent or mortgage, clothing, and other necessities. You then give 10 percent to charity. The rest goes into a savings or investment account.

It sounds quite daunting, doesn’t it? Most Chinese would instead save 80% and spend only 20%!

My younger daughter made her first $10 by tutoring a friend’s child. She will gladly put $1 in an imaginary piggy bank (which is at random places in the house), another $1 in the church offering basket, and splurge $8 on frozen yogurt in Red Mango.

What if you make $100,000 a year? Tell the same kid to save $10,000, give away $10,000, and live on $80,000, and you might hear an uproar. Who on earth can live on $80,000 after paying an exorbitant 25% tax to the IRS? How to fund vacations to Venice and Maldives with kids? 

My husband and I learned the 10-10-80 principle early in our 20s, and we listened. For the past twenty years, we gave away at least 10% and saved and invested the 10%. With one income, we own our home and have consistently lived on the 80%. We don’t ever put our vacation on the credit card. Granted, that is why we have not visited Venice and Maldives with the kids.

For most of my adult life, I have kept a meticulous record of our spending. What kept us afloat when we went from two incomes to one was cash flow management. Our current monthly budget is based on the income earned three months earlier. This practice prevents us from having to dig into our savings. The only time we had to dig into the savings was buying a 2-year-old preowned car after trading in a 14-year-old used car (for a meager $900).

If you have read my post, Field Trip to the Wild, Wild West, you’d know we booked a trip in the fall of 2019 on my husband’s whim, not mine. We did not set a budget to fly all five of us across the country. We did eventually “pay off” that $6,000 Las Vegas vacation with the stimulus cash and the money we did not spend during a prolonged shut-in. Because of adequate cash flow and savings, we did not put this trip on the credit card.  In other words, we “borrowed” against ourselves and paid ourselves back.  

I often wonder how parents pay for their children’s many, many extracurricular activities. We are talking about having excess in our monthly income. I can tell you how we do it on one income. As soon as we get our tax refunds or bonuses, I freeze the money in advance to cover my children’s extracurricular activities and private lessons.

And here is my last money secret. Before Covid, I had my house professionally cleaned every other month. I am a big Marie Kondo fan – I believe a minimalistic, tidy, and clean home is a key to operational efficiency. It saves money and helps us create wealth in the long run.

2) Get Religion

I am about to sound like the biggest heretic to all of my Christian friends.

“Join an organized religion. Just pick one as long as it is organized. Whatever you choose, don’t choose Atheism.”

My Christian faith is unapologetically exclusive – it preaches only one way to God through His Son Jesus Christ. Therefore, I shall place all my bets, crossing and knotting up all my fingers, and hope upon hope that you will choose Christianity. Feel free to compare and shop, though. Apply the same strategy and rigor of house-hunting to religion-hunting. Cross your t’s and dot your i’s. If your physical body needs a home, your spirit and soul need one too.

People say Jesus doesn’t need our defense. It is a relief because that statement takes a load off of our back. However, even though Jesus can stand on his own, Christianity as a religion may need a bit of explanation.

Throughout the centuries, theologians from eastern and western parts of the world have looked at the evidence accepted into the canon we now call the Bible. They carefully studied its content and formulated a system of beliefs. There are a few unshakable doctrines Christians – both Protestants and Catholics – can agree on, such as the divine nature of Jesus Christ and that he rose from the dead. Yet, Christians of all stripes practically disagree on everything else, such as bread or cracker, juice or wine, pop or hymnal, pews, or metal chairs.

We held a sprinkling ceremony to baptize a friend’s mother at the height of Covid. Given her age, it was convenient yet meaningful. Then in the past summer, my husband and I dunked our teenage son in a lake. I didn’t bring him back up until I made sure his entire t-shirt was baptized too. If we had insisted on one form of baptism because of the doctrinal differences, we would have allowed tradition to get in the way of deeper joy and meaning of the occasion.

We are not all-knowing, and we can never be perfectly objective. Since we don’t know it all, we can only believe what we know in part, and humbly we ought. I am grateful for the forerunners of the Christian faith since its founding. We now have in our hand interconnected doctrines so that what was once mythical is now practical. Anyone that wants to pursue spirituality now has a starting point. 

Granted, taking on a life of a believer can be challenging. This life requires time that most people do not have or want to give up. There is weekly Sunday worship and small group fellowship, prayer meetings, and Bible studies, not to mention the not-so-subtle, in-your-face bill collecting. Yet, practicing religion with a few good men and women has a great potential to form lifelong bonds that are rare in our culture today. In a church, it is harder to block people or walk away whenever you run into conflicts. You are taught, against all inclinations and impulse, to forgive and to reconcile. Like soup stewed with various ingredients and spices, friendships that have weathered the tumults of life storms will leave a rich, savory, and complex flavor. And that is life worth living.

Next time when a friend invites you to church, don’t be a killjoy. Be a good sport. Go and check it out. In fact, they don’t expect you to return. But when you do go back, not only will you make the church a better place, but you will also discover how you have desired to seek God all along.

3) GET MARRIED

It is easy to fall in love, but it is difficult to stay married. Young people continued to buy diamonds even during the Covid-19 pandemic as the jewelry industry came out unscathed by the economic downturn. All the second and third marriages only mean more business for the jewelers. No decent man would ask his ex-wife to return the diamond that had once cost him two months of salary.

Staying married is hard, but it is even harder for young women to lower their standards and marry any average bloke who would put up with their attitudes and idiosyncrasies. It took me fifteen years to realize I was lucky to be married. I can be impossible to live with. My disdain for clutters often works its way to make stuff magically disappear.

“Where is my fork?! It was just here a second ago!”

“Where are my socks?! I only wore them three times!”

“Where is my cup of water?! I just filled it.”

Anything that is not in their designated place is gone as soon as I see it. Such idiosyncrasies have caused my family to change their behaviors. They wrap rubber bands around their cups and post sticky notes on their plates, telling me to think twice before putting them in the sink. They roll up their socks and toss them under the bed so I won’t see them. And they seem happy when I hunker down in the basement while they spread out and take over the whole house. 

You get my point. If you do live with others, stop whining and appreciate these people for putting up with you.

I was once told to marry WHOEVER that is in front of me at age 28.  It turns out to be a piece of great advice. I snatched the last good guy standing a month before I turned 29.

It’s easy to buy a diamond and propose, even easier to book a banquet hall and dance your night away. To stay married, somewhat happily, is a different ballgame. If this is an area of immense pain for you, you might want to scroll up and re-read the part about 10-10-80 and GET Religion.

Instead of signing a prenuptial or vow to never enter into a marriage contract, you might want to consider an agreement with your potential spouse by agreeing to the 10-10-80 rule before saying “I do.”

I also highly recommend you find a church to join if you are not already in one. Don’t worry about your Buddhist and Taoist tradition and heritage, or your mother dedicated you to a temple goddess as a bargaining chip. These things have no bearing on the church membership. Once you join a church, you get free, sometimes unsolicited, marital advice and counseling, as well as occasional free babysitting. It is not as easy to split up when you and your spouse and children have the same friends.

You might object and say, “But I am not a Christian. It’s wrong to join a church. It’s disingenuous.”

Here is a sad truth. You are probably a better human being than most churchgoers. They can use the perspective of an objective outsider to address the many systemic problems in the church.

4) FIND YOUR GROOVE

Most Chinese parents care a lot about prestige and dollar signs when it comes to their children’s college and career choices. They steer, push, and coerce their academic-oriented children into either medicine or law in top universities. Even if these parents have poured gold into all the extracurricular lessons in art, music, and sports, they only expect their children to dabble. These activities make great social media posts, but they all know none of them will go pro. While the parents proudly post their children’s sketches and recital videos, they do not want art ever to become more than a hobby. What they need is a real degree and a job that will pay the bills.

K-12 education, both in Taiwan and here in America, is like a processing plant. Children are “processed” from grade to grade and are rarely encouraged to discover and pursue their gifts. Even if they have a natural knack for leadership and have a 4.0 GPA, they are groomed to sit on the conveyer belt of the school system.

This conveyer belt routed me to major in Mathematics in college simply because I did not feel confident enough to study any other fields in a second language. I managed to graduate with a math degree, but I’d not see another quadratic equation until my kids took Algebra.

My twenty years of formal schooling, including three years of kindergarten, would blind me from discovering one of my greatest strengths until I got hitched. I planned my wedding covering the most insignificant details, such as finding the suitable elastic bands to bind the wedding program, a wedding program made into a small booklet with a crossword puzzle, and a comic cartoon (that I paid $45 to use with permission.) I’d go on to plan and manage many more weddings and watch my friends effortlessly say “I do” as I looked on from afar, clenching not my husband’s hand but a clipboard as I heave a sigh of relief. No mishap. No blunder. No military drone mistaking the wedding party as a terrorist cell.

Why would you spend the rest of your life doing something that does not come naturally for you? Why would you make a living, albeit a decent one, doing what you dread? Have you experienced what it is like to be in the zone, lost in another dimension, unimpeded, as you paint, write, compose and create what the world has never seen or heard?

5) ELIMINATE (DIGITAL) DISTRACTIONS

It was possible to focus on a task without any interruptions back in my 20s. I owned a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) and a “brick” phone. I then wished my PDA was also a phone. Why carry two clunky pieces of hardware when it can be just one? However, as a slow and skeptical adaptor, it took me five years to give up my very slick flip phone. My first phone was an Android, generation-zero Samsung Galaxy powered by a free data plan. I experimented with my new gadget until it failed me. Imagine the frustration of not being able to get hold of your ride after a facial and a haircut in Flushing? And imagine your “Uber” driver is also your husband who owned a flip phone? It was a recipe for disaster.

Getting a smartphone is like bringing a newborn baby home from the hospital. Every single app starts its relationship with you by asking this question: “Allow Push Notifications?” Just like a baby, the phone constantly wants your attention with an intent to monopolize your time. If you don’t disable these notifications, they will be on as by default. I even get random reminders to tune the guitar when no one in the house has touched one for months.

A phone that constantly buzzes or beeps does not confer one’s worth and importance. It’s a fool’s trap for never getting anything done as people allow themselves to be constantly distracted.

Turn off all push notifications, except for phone texts. Tap on “Do Not Disturb” if you are having a meal or in a meeting. If someone needs to reach you urgently, tell them to call or text you on the phone. I use a pre-canned text message to respond to calls from people I do not know. Even though I am notorious for not answering my phone, I am surprisingly accessible during the hours designated for work and distraction.

Unless you are waiting for a call from a roommate that has gone missing, everything else can wait. I check my chat apps only after I complete important and deep work of the day. I am fully engaged once I show up in a virtual chat room, just like attending a social function. I don’t think I “text” – I write essays in speech bubbles. I don’t know many cyber-slang, and I intend to be thoughtful and expressive. Every word would be spell-checked, and every emoji accurately reflects my emotion.

But I can use some lessons from a Gen Z to text and use emojis properly.

6) TRUST THE PROCESS

Habits are important, so work hard to develop a process in your schedule to do most of your work effortlessly.

Effortlessly?! Here is an example.

A woman sells Japanese sweet potatoes door to door. For eight hours a day, she laboriously walks the same streets. On a good day, she makes $100 from selling 100 yams.

What if she can put in the same number of hours and make $1,000? Let’s develop a plan to help this lady. Hopefully, she will have some money in the bank because she will have to accept days and weeks without income while waiting for the process to be put in place. After all, we all need to exercise a little faith and take a bit of risk, right?

Step One: Find someone that can bake these yams in a large quantity in a similar kind of stone oven.

Step Two: Find a driver or two who will deliver them quickly.

Step Three: Build an app or website or open a brick-or-mortar storefront to make these yams accessible. Make sure people can find you easily.

It may take months to develop a new process, but the sweet potatoes sell themselves once the process is in place. The customer base is already formed, and it will only grow. People will always be hungry for these heavenly delights, and you have to make it easy for people to find you to buy from you. The sweet potato laborer is now a sweet potato queen who can stay in an air-conditioned office and run her business in the same hours while making more than ten times her income. 

Buying directly from a street vendor is fun for us. But for the lady, I doubt she would ever want to go back to the backbreaking labor.

(7) DEVELOP A WORK RHYTHM

I do my deep, focused work in the morning. Before I check my e-mail and chat apps, before I open up Facebook or YouTube, I guard the first few hours of my day to read, write, study, pray and reflect. As much as I enjoy writing, I still need discipline. I set my timer for twenty minutes and start to type. Slaying the giant of perfectionism, I intend to write – rubbish or not – dumping my thoughts onto the screen. More often than not, I would get into a groove or find myself in the zone. Riding on the momentum, I would produce more words than I thought possible.

For the remaining hours of the day, I am a typical mom that shops, cooks, pays the bills, Swiffer the floor, organizes the closets, grades the kids’ assignments, and chauffeur the kids to and from their activities. I get so busy that I don’t have the time to be distracted. With the day so full, I am usually worn out by the end of the day. Reading two pages on Christian Theology can instantly induce sleep, much more effective than wine and melatonin pills combined.

And I’d do it all over again the next day. As insane as it sounds, I am deliriously fulfilled.

AFTERWORD

We watch enough N.B.A. basketball games to observe unhinged humanity. Whenever a player makes a big shot, he would emphatically point at himself as if to say, “LOOK.AT.ME. I am the G.O.A.T.!” 

It is an exhausting way to live, and such boasting is shallow. If we have ever accomplished anything in life, it’s because of God’s grace that He put the right people in our paths. To think otherwise makes a very arrogant, even narcissistic person, not to mention a very lonely journey. Be humble and work hard. Remember, any success you enjoy was founded on someone else’s sweat and blood.

It is time for me to seek advice from the Boomers – those in your 60s and 70. Please show me the guiding principles to live out the rest of the golden years with no regrets.