It’s been said that life is a series of decisions. Most decisions—what am I going to wear today? What will I have for lunch?—are largely inconsequential, but most people do not expect everyday choices to change their lives, even though it’s almost always a combination of such decisions that do.
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I still vividly remember walking out of the theater after watching Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle. I was with a group of friends of various ages, and those of us too scared for the horror movie next door decided to watch two stoners on their quest for hamburgers. I left the theater 88 minutes later with residual pains in my stomach from laughing so hard—and a stark realization that I had just watched the funniest movie I’d see in a long time. I couldn’t remember ever hearing an …
I will never forget the first moment I started to worry about my weight. I was nine years old and visiting my grandparents in Virginia Beach for the summer. While putting on my hand-me-down bathing suit in my grandmother’s bathroom, my aunt came in to collect me. She looked me up and down, slowly extended one long finger and prodded me in the ribs.
“Aiyah,” she said. “You are getting fat.”
I am Whasian: half-Chinese, half-Caucasian. My father, a (now retired) diplomat, met my mother in Hong Kong, and the two of …
Ever since she was young, Ning Chao has been obsessed with makeup. “I always wanted to be a makeup artist,” said Chao, who is currently the beauty director of social-networking site Beautylish.com. “I would do my mom’s makeup, I would do my friends’ makeup. But I never had a really steady hand, and my parents, being Asian, made me go to college. That was the end of the makeup artist dream.”
In college, at Columbia University in New York, Chao was introduced to the magazine industry, though the initial idea was …