I Believe… That just because two people argue, it doesn’t mean they don’t love each other. And just because they don’t argue, it doesn’t mean they do love each other.
I Believe… That we don’t have to change friends if we understand that friends change.
I Believe…. That no matter how good a friend is, they’re going to hurt you every once in a while and you must forgive them for that.
I Believe…. That true friendship continues to grow, even over the longest distance. Same goes for true love.
I Believe…. That it’s taking me a long time to become the person I want to be.
I Believe… That you should always leave loved ones with loving words. It may be the last time you see them.
I Believe…. That you can keep going long after you think you can’t.
I Believe…. That we are responsible for what we do, no matter how we feel.
I Believe… That either you control your attitude or it controls you.
I Believe… That heroes are the people who do what has to be done when it needs to be done, regardless of the consequences.
I Believe…. That my best friend and I can do anything or nothing and have the best time
I Believe…. That sometimes the people you expect to kick you when you’re down will be the ones to help you get back up.
I Believe… That sometimes when I’m angry, I have the right to be angry, but that doesn’t give me the right to be cruel.
I Believe…. That maturity has more to do with what types of experiences you’ve had, what you’ve learned from them and less to do with how many birthdays you’ve celebrated.
I Believe….. That it isn’t always enough, to be forgiven by others. Sometimes, you have to learn to forgive yourself.
I Believe… That no matter how bad your heart is broken the world doesn’t stop for your grief.
I Believe…. That our background and circumstances may have influenced who we are, But, we are responsible for who we become.
I Believe…. Two people can look at the exact same thing and see something totally different.
I Believe… That your life can be changed in a matter of hours by people who don’t even know you.
I Believe… That even when you think you have no more to give, when a friend cries out to you – you will find the strength to help.
I Believe… That credentials on the wall do not make you a decent human being.
I Believe… That you should send this to all of the people who you believe in, I just did.
The happiest of people don’t necessarily have the best of everything; They just make the most of everything they have.
Rick Chong is currently an independent financial consultant working in San Francisco. Over the past 20 years, Rick has been active in the Silicon Valley venture capital business, first as a General Partner of Sycamore Ventures and later as a Director of Pac-Link Ventures. He was formerly CFO of JL McGregor & Co. LLC, a start-up investment bank focused on investment s in China. He served for several years as CFO of Amber Kinetics, a utility grade energy storage company based in Silicon Valley & the Philippines.
Rick Chong
Rick is the Chairman Emeritus of the California Asia Business Council, a member of the Board of Trustees of the World Affairs Council, and past Treasurer of the Katherine Delmar Burke School in San Francisco. He has also served as Chairman, President and a member of the Board of Directors for the 1990 Institute. He has guest lectured at Stanford University, University of California Davis and University of San Francisco. Rick received both his M.B.A. and undergraduate degrees from Stanford University. He has been married to Beverly Chong for 37 years, and together with her has proudly raised two wonderful daughters, Alyssa and Stephanie. They have lived in Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, and San Francisco together.
I was born & raised in the United States. Identifying as nothing but middle American, I still recall the first time that my parents moved our family to Asia and how much I didn’t want to be there. Even after living in Taiwan & Hong Kong for a total of 6 years before my senior year of high school, I still couldn’t speak Mandarin or Taiwanese, ate mostly American food, and hung around with the other students from the United States.
Finally, on my father’s third assignment to Taiwan, he had enough of living in Tien Mou, which had become the ghetto for the American military back in the 70’s. For the duration of my senior year of high school, he instead chose to have our family move to downtown Taipei where it was no longer possible to live in the American expatriate bubble. Eager to continue to play basketball, I soon learned that there was an unsanctioned outdoor high school pickup game at the hospital nearby our downtown Taipei home. Everyday after taking the bus home from school, I would climb over the wall and join other teenage boys playing basketball. The only issue was that none of them knew how to speak English and I couldn’t speak Chinese, so it wasn’t easy making friends. Still, there was one teenager who consistently reached out to me. His name was Su Chung-Hwei. Since he couldn’t speak much English, I just called him “Su”. My siblings & parents loved getting to know a boy named Su.
Photo of Su in the Taiwanese military
Many times, after basketball, Su would take me out to eat & drink at the local food stalls and show me what it was like to be a teenage boy running around Taipei. He taught me how to cuss & swear in Mandarin, and I reciprocated by teaching him how to cuss & swear in English. We soon became inseparable even though we couldn’t discuss much except short phrases about basketball, food & electronics.
After that year in downtown Taipei, I went off to attend Stanford University as a freshman. Each summer, I would return to spend time with my family back in Taipei and always looked up Su. His English continued to improve, my Mandarin got better, and we started to hold dance parties together, swim at the local club, run around Taipei electronics stores and always manage to find pickup basketball games. Our friendship deepened as our mutual language skills improved. We shared in each other’s highs & lows. I watched Su get into National Taiwan University and then get drafted into the Taiwanese military.
Eventually, Su did come to the U.S. and today runs his own very successful garment importing business in Los Angeles. He took the English name “Daniel” but I remain one of the few people who still call him Su. I consider Su one of my oldest and dearest friends. I don’t get much chance to see him in person these days with him living in Southern California raising his family, and my family being up here in Northern California, but when we have the chance once or twice a year, it’s just like blasting into the past and re-living our youth.
I’ve learned that friendship is really a result of acceptance – appreciating differences and finding mutual passions. Su & I communicated in our odd language born of sports, movies, and chasing girls. Over the years, Su would become fluent in English, and I would become fluent in Mandarin which has allowed us to deepen our friendship, but it was the initial acceptance by Su of a foreign kid on his basketball court that opened the door to a lifelong friendship.
How have you been? Tennis? Hoping all is well in the Lee family. I was thinking about “Making Friends” the other day and thought of the below. As you well know, in the age of Covid 19, making new friends will be a bit more challenging. You may add this to your website if you like. Be safe, Phil
”My Friend” Because of our past, we are friends. Maybe it was the hobbies and interests that bonds us. It could be the weakness within us that we seek in each other’s strengths. Us, thinking alike and often finishing each other’s lines conjures familiarity. We can always count on each other. The color of your skin is unlike mine brought curiosity or of the same, brought commonality. We got each other’s backs. We never surprise each other, we expected it. We are a brother/sister from a different mother. We shared each other’s joys and sorrows. Our opinions are understood never to hurt but to be helpful. Yes, it is all of the before mentioned that made us friends. Thank-you for giving me permission. It was that very act that spawn our’s and all friendships. “Every day is unique and special”.
During the Warring States Period in ancient China, there was a man named Boya Yu who played the Qin (a kind of string instrument in China) very well.
One day when he was playing the Qin in a remote forest, a woodcutter named Ziqi Zhong came by. Boya used music to express his thoughts on climbing mountains. Ziqi would chime in and suggest,” As lofty as Mount Tai “.
Boya used his music again to express the running water. Ziqi complemented: “What a mighty river it is !” What Boya placed in music, Ziqi always responded with powerful understanding. Thus the two became bosom friends.
Later, when Ziqi died, Boya lost his bosom friend and was extremely sad, he threw his Qin away and vowed never to play again.
From this historical story, a special term “知音（zhi-yin)” in Chinese is thus created, which could be translated as “recognizing your music, inner feelings and potential impacts.”
This term “high mountain-running water” in Chinese is often used today to suggest the rare fortune of having friends who can really appreciate your passion, recognize your talents and endeavors, and further encourage and inspire you to reach a higher level.
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Billy’s Comments: Prof. Wang Lili was the first Vice President of Ningbo University and an esteemed Material Scientist in China. He was responsible for getting me back to teach Architecture at Ningb U. in 1991. He is certainly one of my most admired, respected, and loved cousins – we are related as his maternal grandmother was the youngest sister of my paternal grandfather. I requested that he write something for my Friendship & Friendshipology Website, and within a week I received his response:
“Dear Ming Sing, It’s quite difficult for me to write a story about ancient Chinese Friendship in English as you requested. I tried my best due to the deep Friendship between you and me. I wrote a story here about “High Mountains and Running Water “Please see the attachment. I hope you like it. Cheers, Lili”
Wang Lili (Lili WANG, Lilih WANG), male, born in 1934, the Professor and Honorary Director of the Mechanics and Materials Science Research Centre at Ningbo University in China. Since 1956, he has worked in Institute of Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Institute of Chemical Machinery; University of Science and Technology of China. In 1985 he participated in the founding of Ningbo University and served as vice President. He was the Chairman of the Explosion Mechanics Committee of CSTAM, and has been the Chairman or Co-Chairman of several international conferences.
His research interests are stress-wave propagation, dynamic response of materials and structures, rate-dependent constitutive relation of materials under high strain rates, dynamic fracture, adiabatic shear localization, damage mechanics and impact engineering. To this subject, he has contributed immensely, with more than 300 papers. His books entitled “Foundations of Stress Waves” and entitled “Dynamics of Materials” are widely used in China as textbooks for graduated students since 1980s and the corresponding English editions have been published by Elsevier.
Over the past 60 years, he cultivated a number of outstanding students (including academicians in China) engaged in this field.
His scientific research achievements have won the National Science and Technology Conference Award, The Gansu Province Science and Technology Achievement Award, the Zhejiang Province science and technology Award, the Ministry of Education natural science first prize. In 2013, he won the Second Prize of National Natural Science (the first prize is vacant).
Billy’s Comment : Indeed, Prof. Wang’s ideas apply to Building Friendship Globally – Person to Person, People to People, as well as Country to Country.
Prof. Ban Wang – Stanford University
Perceptions and relations between America and China have gone through good times and bad, depending on the geopolitical barometers. In 2001, the US intelligence plane intruded into China’s air space and got intercepted and forced down by a Chinese plane, aggravating mutual tension and sable rattling. Since then, America’s strategic pivot to the Asian-Pacific regions, the ongoing trade war, the conflict over the South China Sea and Hong Kong, and the Covid-19 crisis are now fueling the tension to a boiling point. But a moment’s reflection should quiet the horrible drumbeat: the US and China are inextricably interdependent and interconnected. All the existential anxiety about mutual threat and zero-sum game cannot diminish the prospect of the intertwined fate of the twin in the same boat. You do not have to look further than Stanford to realize how much mutual learning and joint ventures are going on between the two countries. China and US. are involved in deep partnership in many areas: economy, trade, technology, health care, supply chain, the environment, etc. A strike at the other means shooting at one’s own feet.
The destiny of America has intertwined with that of China—a record of curiosity, sympathy, and understanding. America came into being, they say, because Christophe Columbus discovered America. Actually, it was the search for sea routes to China that the explorer stumbled on the new world. At his death Columbus still believed that the American continent was Asia. An American minister wrote 400 years ago, “We people of America may be said to owe to China the discovery of our continent. I often advise my students, you come to Stanford not just to learn computer science and to embark on a tech project. You come here to build bridges between Chinese and American people. One of the most effective ways is cultural and intellectual exchange and learning from each other. Students and scholars are in a good position to carry out and fulfill that noble mission. If the governments of two countries often face off in confrontation, the people of two countries have always sympathize, connect, and befriend each other.
Sino-US cultural exchanges date back to the dawn of modern China. In 1901, Lin Shu, a well-known writer, translated Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and commented on the tragic fate of black slaves that paralleled Chinese subjugation under colonialism. Titled 黑奴吁天录 (black slaves’ outcry for justice from Heaven), the translation invests the American novel with a classical Chinese call for Heavenly justice. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was adapted to a spoken drama by an overseas Chinese student group in Japan, headed by Li Shutong. In the Lu Xun Academy in Yan’an during the revolutionary years, George Washington, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and many other Americans were admired as heroes for building a democratic nation and modern culture. Some American even joined the ranks of Chinese fighters in the War of Resistance against Japanese invasion. In the 1960s, Chinese support of the Third World movement resonated with America’s civil rights movement, and the Martin Luther King assassination in 1968 sparked huge street demonstrations for days in Chinese streets against racism. Reading King’s “I Have a Dream” and reciting Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech were a routine practice for English learners in China. The Chinese leadership and people understood very well what the multi-ethnic, civil rights groups in America were fighting for: minority rights, human rights, the call to end the Vietnam War, and demands for social, gender, and racial equality.
By the time Nixon visited China and the Sino-US diplomatic normalization in 1972, many Chinese began to study English the way they had studied Chairman Mao’s little red books. National and provincial radio stations broadcast English lessons day and night. I learned my first English lessons mostly by listening to Voice of America. Based on a very popular English conversation primer English 900, the lessons were broadcast from VOA’s station in Hong Kong, usually in the midnight. At the risk of being accused of listening to the “enemy” radio, I got up in the dark of night, wrapped myself up with a quilt, and listened to the lessons, almost suffocating inside. There was no headphone at that time.
By the time Nixon visited China and the Sino-US diplomatic normalization in 1972, many Chinese began to study English the way they had studied Chairman Mao’s little red books. National and provincial radio stations broadcast English lessons day and night. I learned my first English lessons mostly by listening to Voice of America. Based on a very popular English conversation primer English 900, the lessons were broadcast from VOA’s station in Hong Kong, usually in the midnight. At the risk of being accused of listening to the “enemy” radio, I got up in the dark of night, wrapped myself up with a quilt, and listened to the lessons, almost suffocating inside. There was no headphone at that time.
In my undergraduate years in Beijing Foreign Language Institute in the 1980s, things American swept through colleges and society. The English Department, the largest of all, was nicknamed “British Empire” for its capacity of the winner in sports, theater activity and other contests. But few English majors liked the Oxford or Queen English taught by British teachers. Instead, most students would favor American teachers, listen and imitate the accent of VOA. Everybody tried to sound like the Yankees. It was China’s honeymoon with America, which was an image for young people to dream and to strive for.
But America was also marred with flaws unworthy of the democratic principles. The TV series Roots, a saga of the slave trade, Africans’ journey to America, and racial exploitation and oppression in plantations, left a deep impression on me. That did not stop us from admiring America’s “power.” Watching the movie Rambo: The First Blood, we all became big fans of the macho hero played by Sylvester Stallone. But Prof. David Crook, a Canadian anthropologist and “foreign expert,” came out and put up a small poster on our classroom building to dissuade us from this deplorable mindset. We were being poisoned by imperialist ideology, he protested. Professor Cook urged us to be critical of the film, which was a propaganda of American military action in Vietnam and colonial conquest.
After graduation in the mid-1980s, most of my classmates chose to come to America to study or work. Those early birds were the envy of all.
Since then, America has presented a mixed image to the Chinese people. China, on the other hand, also has also been cast in mixed images: it is either a monstrous capitalist juggernaut or an evil Communist power. Recently the Cold War narrative of China and US. Is being updated, fueling the conflict and misperception. Academic area studies during the Cold War targeted specific geographical areas of strategic relevance to the US, presuming an authoritarian rule behind the iron curtain. This approach says, here we had democracy; over there was totalitarianism. This rigid divide blocks mutual understanding and communication and mystified people about the values and goals shared by all Chinese and Americans; it leaves people mystified as to why Chinese have long loved for Martin Luther King and held up so many Americans as champions of democracy and as icons for China.
Today, what fatally obstructs mutual understanding, sympathy, and communication is the myth of the absolute difference that divides America and China and places them in different universes. The myth declares that two countries have entirely different cultures and systems, that the difference is so huge that the two countries cannot co-exist under one eaHeaven and on planet Earth. This is a lie. The history of China-American cultural and intellectual exchange has constantly proven it to be a lie. People of both countries have always been able to understand and sympathize with each other and share certain values–as human beings and even in their distinct identity as Chinese and American. The Chinese revolutionaries admired George Washington, Martin Luther King; Chinese citizens applauded and supported America’s civil rights movement and anti-racialist movement. Chinese English learners love and appreciate a vast array of American writers, Hollywood and pop songs. Chinese consumers love myriad things American from Apple I-phone to cars. So, what is the real difference?
For people trapped in the myth, China’s lockdown and ubiquitous masks in response to the Covid-19 reflects its deeply entrenched “cultural difference” rooted in totalitarianism and conformism, which are unacceptable to freedom loving Americans. This irrational obsession with “cultural difference” is destroying the fabric of the global community and leading to more disasters and hatred, until people realize that lockdown and masks are not about Chinese culture or the American way of life. These public health measures are human and universal; they reach into a deeper and ancient core of human civilization that transcends the so-called cultural, national or political differences. It is a human civilization rooted in moral empathy, obligation, and care for your own safety and the safety of your neighbors.
Ban Wang is William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies in East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His major publications include The Sublime Figure of History (1997), Illuminations from the Past (2004), History and Memory (Lish yu jiyi) (2004) and China in the World: Culture, Politics, and World Vision(forthcoming 2021). He has edited 8 books on Chinese film, memory studies, Chinese studies in the US, the Chinese Revolution, socialism, and the New Left, including Chinese Visions of World Order: Tianxia, Culture and World Politics (2017). He has taught at SUNY-Stony Brook, Harvard, Rutgers, East China Normal University, Yonsei, and Seoul National University.
