Welcome to Issue #035 of Zen in the Art of Fighting

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Five Things Worth Sharing

In the spirit of Father's Day, this edition is centers around words, works, and themes involving fathers.

1. One Good Picture: The Tiger Dad

Most of the good pictures of my dad and me predate the rampant expansion of social media: a wonderful thing except on holidays like Father's Day, when I want to steep myself in old pictures and try to remember my better days with a complicated parent.

With the best pictures in photo albums in my mother's house in New Jersey, I searched other digital archives to see if there were any pictures I could share that I haven't already shared in other posts or in writing about my dad.

The picture above was one I found on Facebook that I thought was worth sharing. Taken at some point in Princeton's lengthy graduation ceremonies, the picture is a rare-but-characteristic one of my dad in a jolly mood on a good day: a baseball cap on his head, a colorful shirt both concealing and distracting from his massive beer belly, and a Cuban cigar in hand. We are walking through the gates of Prospect House and Garden, a place synonymous to me with peace, beauty, and loveliness during a challenging undergraduate career where such things were hard for me to find.

Today marks the third Father's Day without my dad, and when I think of what his life and absence mean to me, it is well captured in this picture around gates and gardens. To live without him has been to confront open gates into the unknown and force myself to walk through them. To build a new life for myself in wake of his death has been to tend a garden, determining what of my father's values and legacy I want to nurture, what I want to weed out, and what I want to plant for myself to bring about a life in bloom.

2. Something I'm Listening To: My Recently-Uncovered Father's Day Playlist

In attempts to create a wedding playlist, I dug into my Spotify archives and rediscovered a playlist from three years ago that I had made on the first Father's Day after my dad had passed away.

In heavy rotation for today: "My Way", "Mack the Knife", "Copacabana (At the Copa)", and the many hits of Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, all paired with childhood memories of my dad in his 1989 Mercedes coupe, steeping the grey leather seats with fresh Cohiba smoke and blaring a repertoire of music that I found too loud and too annoying to appreciate at the time.

3. Something I'm Writing: A Condolence Note

From 2012-2014, I worked at Harvard Business School as a research associate. My job primarily entailed writing case studies and teaching notes for the MBA program. Bittersweetly out of the blue, my boss from HBS reached out to inform me that one of the protagonists of a case study we had written had passed away.

​The case study was about how a French-Canadian father-son duo, the St. Pierres, had founded and scaled a pioneering wine importing company in Mainland China. This was in the 90s, an impressive feat in a time when Chinese alcohol consumption still revolved around beer and baijiu. The success of ASC Fine Wines was in large part due to the battle-tested experience of the father in the father-son duo: Don St. Pierre Sr. had been a primary character in navigating the fraught joint venture to manufacture Jeep Cherokees in China in the 1980s (more on that here in an old school interview with a favorite China scholar, Jim Mann).

I'll never forget my first impressions of Don Sr. in my first interview of him in Shanghai in 2013. He was fresh off the plane from Phuket, where he had happily retired and had at least one girlfriend as a companion. He spent an afternoon camping with me and my boss at the Langham in Xintiandi, smoking through packs of cigarettes even in the Shanghai smog, telling us his life story that felt one part historical drama, one part James Bond movie. To say the least, he was a man who had lived.

The best thing I wrote this week was a short condolence note to the son, Don Jr., sharing a few thoughts on what meeting and working with his dad meant to me. It wasn't until I wrote that note that I realized how fortunate I was to meet a guy like Don Sr. early in my career. Excerpted from the note:

Sometime after the HBS case study came out and before he passed away, the father wrote an autobiography. The cover art and bio speaks volumes. I fully plan to honor Don St. Pierre Sr. this summer by reading Jeeps, Pretty Ladies, and Wine with a good glass of wine in hand.

4. Something I'm Reading: When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi

A haunting memoir about a neurosurgeon who goes from being a high-flying doctor to being a Stage Four cancer patient, When Breath Becomes Air is a book about what it means to live.

I love the book for what it has to say about ambition, potential, the titanic responsibility of doctors, and the unfathomable pain of terminal illness. But keeping spirit of this edition's theme, the quotation that struck me the most is what Kalanithi writes to his then-newborn daughter, to whom the book is dedicated:

For all the ambition and achievements that Kalanithi amasses as a promising surgeon, close to death, he is never so satisfied in his work as he is, briefly, as a father to his baby daughter.

5. Something I'm Watching: This Reel, On Repeat​

This is very much toilet humor, but is something my dad would have found hilarious and closes this newsletter out on a less-solemn note. As someone who works remotely, I'm not sure "just 💩 your pants" is a viable solution to get a day off from work, but I can appreciate the thinking--and the humor it brings--nonetheless.

That's all I've got for this edition.

See you in two weeks,

EZ

PS: For a throwback piece in the theme of Father's Day, here's a post I wrote on Linkedin x Medium from June 2020 on three lessons learned from my dad about life and business.

PPS: Below, a look at fatherhood in my current household.