DeepSeek, “Communism,” and the misconceptions of the average Fox Business commenter.

(Note: this needs fact checking.)

I can see you, RobCartman24730. You’re sitting in a Delta Sky Club near gate T23 as you await early boarding for your monthly flight to Cincinnati on business. On an article about DeepSeek on fox.com, you wrote that LLMs are not to be trusted because Nancy Pelosi, a communist, sold NVIDIA stock before the rise of DeepSeek from China, who are communists, and they’re all in cahoots. You learned about a different and skewed China in grade school, but that hardly matters now, because those preconceptions still exist in your head and in those of your fellow commenters. You think of yourself as a good businessman with your two LLCs that you primarily got for tax deductions, which is why you voted for Trump. It’s obvious which party is worse, which is why you voted for Trump. It’s obvious which party is associated with the communists, which is why you voted for Trump.

Oh, Rob. You could probably school me on setting up a 501(c)(3) or on how to file jointly and then, two kids later, separately. But if only you knew. If only someone showed you the other side of the world that you’ve only heard about. Your head would spin as your worldview realizes it needs an update, and your eyes would glaze over as the subconscious part of you scrambles to explain how this doesn’t make you wrong about the state of the world.

If only you knew that China today is probably more capitalistic authoritarian than it is communist (with the given that communism definitely doesn’t mean what you think it means). That this socialist authoritarianism has improved China on a crap ton of metrics to such a degree that we Americans have only glimpsed in our dreams, at the expense of some others that we’ve (so far!) only experienced in our nightmares.

RobCartman24730 doesn’t actually exist, except in my imagination, but the people I based him off of on that DeepSeek article I read this morning are definitely real, and definitely Un-Woke. However, I grew up around a lot of RobCartman24730s back home in Georgia, so I’d say I have a slightly better imagination about him than I would if I had lived in the city. Rob is not a bad guy, and is certainly not my enemy. Like the rest of us, he simply has no mechanism to tell him about the world as it is, because of all the stories in his head.

I’ve been obsessed with storytelling lately. I’m not sure where I read it from initially, but the concept that humans only process the world through stories has really struck a chord with me. I’ve been really pensive in the new year—about hanging out in social settings, about working in a startup, and about elections. All have these have something in common, which is that you are dealing with people, and if you want to succeed in any of these, you have to be good at telling stories.

If you know me, you’d know that while sometimes I can be funny, a lot of times when I talk about something that happened it’s really hard to follow what I’m saying, which kind of ruins the whole thing. That’s right, I know about this flaw of mine that y’all never tell me. I can see it in the way you start listening and then kind of stop, the way that your eyes quickly dart back to me after I finally look up from the floor. Well, new year, new me—I want to get better at this talking thing. Some of it I’m sure I can learn from a blog post through a quick Google Search, and anything else I can probably grasp from ChatGPT or DeepSeek, whose data inevitably contains numerous blog posts accessible via a quick Google Search. Or, even better, we can call and you can tell me yourself.

As a founding engineer in a startup, I struggle a lot with figuring out how to convince people to buy our product, but I’m starting to think it’s less about the product and more about the vision. According to the book on startups that I’m reading, to successfully sell, you can’t start with a catchy tagline and work your way down. You have to tell a hero’s journey where your customer, not you, is the hero. Your customer is saving the world, and that every purchase they make and every friend they refer is a noble step in a grand cause. Only then will your customers stay customers and do the work of marketing for you. You want the evangelicals. You want, dare I say, the MAGAs.

To help me cope with the changing of the tides these next few years, I’m looking to read some ancient philosophies to remind myself that despite having new technologies, many of today’s problems and themes are as ancient as people are. As I’m Chinese, I find myself gravitating towards Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism as I can probably more easily grok the concepts and appreciate the beauty of the concise and artfulness the Chinese language offers. Take this, for example: Confucius once wrote, “三人行，必有我师焉。择其善者而从之，其不善者而改之”, which means “Among three people walking, there must exist one who can be my teacher. Take that which is good and follow it, and that which is bad and correct it.” 8 years on, I can’t help but really respect Trump. The man famously was handed a silver spoon, but not every man handed a silver spoon became Trump. As a business magnate, as a TV personality, and now as the most authoritarian president of our time, he’s always cared deeply about image, and little else. He and his team understood the importance of image and what drove attention and engagement. And with just a tiny little sprinkle of serious, major lack of empathy, look where it got him. On Inauguration Day, he was more upset about the optics of a lowered flag than the death that the lowered flag represented. I’m not sure how my fellow Georgians feel about that, but I feel sadness and a strange bicolored sense of awe: that he felt this way, but also that the man that would feel this way might have a good reason to do so.

I’m in awe really at the relentless pursuit of the conservative movement in the past few decades on all fronts. Where’s our MAGA? Our Federalist Society? Our Heritage Foundation? Every day in the past four years we woke up thinking our one vote meant that someone else could take care of the country for us, while deifiers of Trump woke up believing that they were part of something real and great. I want to be part of something real, and to write a new American story that includes instead of excludes. Because maybe the popularity of All Lives Matter—while tone-deaf and often racist and in bad faith—was trying to tell us something about our movement: that despite “White America, you’re an oppressor” being as real and as true as it is, maybe if we had said something like “White America, we need your help, nobody is free until all of us are free,” we would’ve gotten more metrics improved than Number of Master Bedrooms Renamed to Primary Bedrooms. Maybe something in the place of “Defund the Police” at a time when Americans (erroneously, that is!) perceived the country as high in crime could have funneled money to better institutions as was desired instead of, well, increasing the budgets of police departments around the country.

Yes, obviously, it’s not like MAGA is the poster child of inclusivity, but it put nationalism front and center and told its followers to be heros and to, well, MAGA. For those not turned off by its misguided platform and premises, it did feel inclusive and feel right or at least tolerable, at the expense of minorities and some imaginary enemies. I just want to know: is there a way we can create liberal movements that gain traction and really last and include all of America, even the Robs and the Worse-Than-Robs?

Maybe not, and maybe all of this was inevitable. But this year, I want to learn and try and know for sure.

Reunions

When I swipe my card from the lanyard around my neck and enter the dorm under the canopy of trees, memories of summer camp flash briefly in my head. It’s different of course. I’m in a new campus, sure, but the urge to fit in merely sits on a fence almost out of my gaze, undulating its legs as it makes an occasional snide comment. As with the memories I’m told about these parallel quads, I hear but don’t really experience them.

I’m grateful for my first reunion to be someone else’s. While she introduces me as her partner, I can emotionally prepare for my own reunion, happening in a few weeks, and also develop some sympathy for when she becomes the outsider. It can be isolating, trying to fit in. But you remind yourself you need not try—your life isn’t here.

Hers was though, and still is. As you walk the grounds together, her grip on your hand tightens as she sees an old face, her body preparing to face a battle. For the past five years of nightmares and daydreams, she’s fought countless enemies with faces of the acquainted. They’ve gnawed at the parts of her who no longer exist but can still hurt, in her memories.

But the demons never appear. Genuine smiles and how-are-you’s fill the space where there ought to have been screams and brawls. A near decade of self-conscious imagination through a freshman’s lenses, shattered by the odd dullness of reality. They’re so happy, they say, to see you’re doing well. In fact, they add, they’ve been thinking for some time that they’re sorry for how they treated you.

Memories are snapshots frozen in time, while the world continues to turn. Reunion participants are a self-selecting group to be sure, but they’ve taught us that we don’t realize and can’t possibly know what’s happened to those photographed in our heads: that they’ve matured and grown, been pained and humbled, just as we have and maybe more so.

This is not to say that college students don’t cause irreparable physical or emotional harm to one another or that everyone should be forgiven. But there’s a tinge of anxiety in all of us I think, about going to reunions for fear of judgment or a repeat of drama from the past. The truth is that the caricatures in our head canon probably don’t exist anymore and perhaps never did. It can be scary to reveal, but your shoulders deserve a chance to no longer carry the weight of monsters under your dorm bed.

Piano Lessons

"Don't cry." It's funny how those words always made me cry harder. Tears started to fall on the keys, and I quickly wiped them away with my wet sleeves, ashamed. His words drilled through me ceaselessly, unaffected by my sobs. Kids weren't supposed to cry doing things they liked, right? I was 6.

Sometimes during class, he would tell my mom and me stories about his training and how he once played so much his fingers bled onto the piano, but he’d wipe the blood off with a rag nearby and keep going. So, in that damp basement under a single, bright incandescent lamp, I learned about self-loathing.

I hadn't felt much joy since I started taking piano lessons, even with other teachers. Before I began them, few things made me as happy as trying to copy my brother in everything, whether his words, thoughts, or actions. One of those actions was playing the piano. The moment he stopped practicing and left the room was the moment I hopped on to attempt to imitate exactly what he played. It was a puzzle, a challenge, a game.

Eventually, I learned to read sheet music. I remember learning Fur Elise. In kindergarden, my school's music teacher found out I could play, and one day asked me to show her after the class had left. Impressed, she asked my parents if I could play at the school's annual PTA meeting. "Just the first section," they all agreed, which was the entirety of what I'd learned in my lessons. But right before I went on stage, I apparently looked my teacher in the eye and said that I was going to play the whole piece, whether they liked it or not.

I sat on stage for a long time, motionless. My teacher eventually came up to me and asked what was wrong. "I need someone to turn the pages," I said meekly, as relieved laughter swept through the crowd. She agreed to stand next to me and do so. I played the whole piece, in kindergarten, in front of a crowd of a couple hundred parents, teachers, and kids, evidently before I learned about stage fright. I'm told I got a standing ovation. Afterwards, my parents were beaming. Surely, they believed, I was destined for some sort of greatness.

Of course, my parents' insistence on taking lessons inevitably migrated from my brother to me. And what was once a vivid and limitless universe of possibility became a formulaic, weekly regimen. Throughout grade school I had at least five piano teachers, at my mother's behest. It was like a doctor's appointment. Something's wrong with your wrists. Let me cut your nails before we get started. They prescribed much practice, which I often did not do. They told me much advice, which I did not like. I nodded yes, but my mind was elsewhere in some other reverie.

I nodded yes, but I never spoke. I played, but I never practiced. And why would I? The magic was gone. There was no game to play, only rules to follow. Worse, there was the occasional nocturnal nightmare: an audition, an opportunity to play in front of judges who wrote essays about you after you finished playing as you wonder what to do with your hands. Scribbling of pens when you expected some applause, or at least silence. We auditioned for some reason. Everyone at the events seemed to know the reason. I never knew the reason, or the cadence, which confused and terrified me. It only recently occurred to me that I may have been auditioning for something. But it didn't matter, because for me, here, I learned about anxiety.

Yet paradoxically, some broken sense of identity had formed. For my middle school's talent show, I auditioned with the Mario theme that I shoddily learned by ear. "That was great," said one teacher judge. "Perhaps you could wear a Mario hat when you perform on stage!" Another judge nodded wholeheartedly. I didn't get selected.

"You should've played some adult pieces," my brother suggested, which failed to cheer me up. I hated those pieces, never knowing why anyone would listen to them. Boring to listen to, boring to play.

The next year, on a week long science field trip, I ignored signs to audition for the trip's talent show. It was beneath me. It was not beneath my classmate, who happily played the third movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, a piece famous for its difficulty. Her playing was flawless, beautiful. And she didn't take it seriously, pausing a few times to comment on pieces of dust left on the keys, which drew laughter from the whole theater. As she finished, everyone immediately stood to clap. I was too proud, and briefly sat with my arms folded before realizing how ridiculous I looked.

Who did she think she was? It can't be that hard. I could do that if I really wanted. This was *my* hobby. When I went home, I printed out sheet music and started learning the movement. I never finished.

There was solace at school, where I participated in after-school jazz band. Here, I can feel good about myself. The other piano guy didn't play since he was 4. The other piano guy didn't take lessons since he was 5. After a while, no one cared much about my classical chops that I always showed off before practice. Oh well, I didn't care about chords, or girls from Ipanema.

At the annual performance, we played our songs, and it came time for my solo. The band teacher motioned to me. But I sat there, as people looked to me. Motionless, solo.

"What happened, man?" he would later ask. I don't know what happened. I don't know what a jazz solo is supposed to be. I don't even know what jazz is.

Later that year, perhaps in an act of pity, band teacher thought it would be great for me to at least use what piano abilities I did have to play at the school French Club's breakfast event.

"Play some Debussy. Americans love that stuff," said my piano teacher at the time. I spent much time pondering her statement. They do? I'm an American, right? Why don't I?

They did in fact love it, at least as much as they enjoyed the croissants from Costco. As I played my Arabesques and Claires de Lune, I realized there was beauty emerging in the midst of the sounds. Somehow, I could be delicate and yet still command some deep, broad tones that felt larger, more profound than me. The pieces weren't known for their difficulty, yet people still clapped in that classroom for an inexperienced middle school nerd slouching on an aged middle school upright. Here, I could say for the first time honestly, "This sounds nice."

When high school came, my parents and I decided that I was too busy to continue lessons. Though we never vocalized it, tacit in our agreement was acknowledgment that I wasn't nearly good enough to pursue it. A good excuse came, as my piano teacher at the time was moving to either Sweden or Switzerland to live with her new fiancé. It was a shame though, because it was while I was her student that I really started treating it as an artform rather than a chore. She helped me feel my playing and truly express emotion. I actually talked to her.

"That's good," she said when I told her I was quitting. "Er, not 'good'," she quickly corrected, "but good to know." If it was a freudian slip, I was okay with it. At some point during these years, I came to terms with who I was, and, more importantly, who I wasn't. I'm not going to be great at piano, and I probably never will be. I had to drop extracurricular pursuits like that, to make room for whatever impromptu fantasies would come next from my parents.

When I got into college, the blurbs I sent to each of my roommate candidates all contained: "I like music, I play piano and guitar and sing." In one reply, a classmate said, "I used to play piano as a kid but I quit once I entered high school." We also shared the same last name.

There's a beautiful thing about going off to a university far from home. Distance from everything you've ever known facilitates reinvention, and exposure to a diverse student body allows for profound reframing of all your thoughts, beliefs, and personalities. Thanks to a tip from a friend, I rented a key to access practice rooms in the music building, each with a grand piano. There I found serenity, in the basement of the music hall at midnight. However cold and unfamiliar the campus after dark, there was some semblance of familiarity on the benches. Blank canvases for exploration or nostalgia, video game or classical.

I reflected on this in muffled silence, sounds of musicians through the walls. Enclosed, warm, I learned about art.