A Note from Miles

Last time, when Jack said I had a “nouveau riche mentality,” I blew up on the spot. Thinking back on it now, I owe him an explanation — and I owe myself one too.

Jack’s Chinese isn’t actually that good. He’s the kind of person who grew up in international schools, way more fluent in English than in Chinese. So when he used the term bàofāhù — “nouveau riche” — what I heard was the heaviest layer of that word in a Chinese context: rich but uncultured, flashy, shallow. I thought, at that moment, that he was insulting me.

But after I cooled down, I replayed the whole thing in my head. What Jack was trying to say was never “you’re a vulgar new-money poser.” What he was trying to say was: some things have developed too fast, so fast that they’ve skipped a whole lot of steps. People are like that. Countries are like that.

When a country covers in forty years what took others two hundred, it’s bound to leave a lot of things out along the way. Manners. A sense of boundaries. Knowing when enough is enough. An appreciation for silence. These things don’t sprout overnight. They’re polished slowly, across generations. When speed overrides everything else, these are the first things sacrificed.

It’s nobody’s fault. It’s a developmental problem.

China has this problem. Other Southeast Asian countries do too. Any place that’s gone through compressed growth will have it. Jack wasn’t singling out China, and he wasn’t singling out me. He was pointing at a phenomenon he had observed — he just used a word that lands far too heavily on Chinese ears.

And so I arrived at this realization: Bàofāhù isn’t an insult to a person; it’s a warning about the speed of development. When things move too fast, you have to look back and pick up what got left behind — substance, awareness, a sense of something beyond yourself. This isn’t a remedial class just for China. It’s a required course for every region that grew at high speed.

I learned two things from all this. First: when someone uses an imprecise word, first ask what they meant, then decide whether to get angry. Second: what sounds like criticism in your ears may be nothing but a neutral description in someone else’s. The biggest barrier in cross-cultural communication isn’t not knowing what the other person means — it’s knowing too damn well what you think that word means, and forgetting to ask what they think it means.

Thirty years old, one ring, three meanings

I’m thirty.

I’ve never bought a luxury item before. Not that I couldn’t afford one — I just never felt the need. But turning thirty, I wanted to give myself something. Not a reward. A marker. Like an anchor, telling myself: you’ve made it here.

I chose a Cartier panther ring.

Not the full panther-head one. A more understated design. But the panther — that’s enough.

My father’s name has the character for “tiger” in it. Ever since I was little, I’ve felt a resonance with that character. It’s a part of my dad. A panther and a tiger aren’t the same thing, but to me they’re like distant relatives on a family tree. Wearing that ring feels like my dad is with me, witnessing this milestone. I’ve been away from home for too long, and this is my way of saying to him: I haven’t forgotten.

That’s the first layer. Missing him.

The second layer is for myself. These ten years, from China to Cambodia, from knowing nothing to finally being able to say “I have friends I can argue with fiercely and still never lose” — it hasn’t been easy. Wearing this ring on my hand is a reminder: you don’t have to wait for someone else’s approval. You can give it to yourself.

The third layer is the funniest.

Panther.
Bào fù — panther wealth.
Bào fù — sudden wealth.

It’s a Chinese homophone pun. Every Chinese New Year, nobody actually says “Happy New Year.” They say gōngxǐ fācái — “wishing you great fortune.” Among close friends, it’s even more direct: zhù nǐ bàofù — “hope you get suddenly, stupidly rich.” Two meanings, one sound: a fierce animal, and the promise that money is rushing your way. When I chose this ring, this was running through my head too.

I haven’t told Jack and Ted about the pun yet. Because they’d probably give me that look — not impolite, just genuinely puzzled. To them, Cartier isn’t a “luxury brand.” It’s just something they’ve seen around since they were kids. Jack once told me his mom goes to the boutique every month, tries on the new pieces, keeps what she likes, returns what she doesn’t. In his mouth, a two-thousand-dollar jacket is “pretty ordinary.”

What I was thinking, deep down, was: trying on several two-thousand-dollar jackets a month and calling them ordinary — how many layers are there, exactly, between the world I grew up in and the world he grew up in?

I wasn’t uncomfortable. I just felt a kind of reset. It reset my understanding of “normal.” The “normal” I grew up with and the “normal” he grew up with are two completely different coordinate systems. It’s not about right or wrong. It’s about origins.

So this ring, on my hand, carries four layers of meaning:

One layer is my father.
One layer is myself.
One layer is the culture I grew up in — that culture where no one says “wishing you elegance” at New Year but instead says “hope you get filthy rich,” that culture where wishing wealth upon someone is the most sincere blessing.
And the last layer is this: the me now, sitting across from Jack and Ted, as they look at my ring and think “that looks nice,” while I know in my heart how much this ring actually means to me. That gap — that is exactly what I’m learning.

You don’t have to give up your own meaning.
You only have to know that what other people hear might not be the meaning you hear.
That’s why I’m here. Not to explain China. Just to show you what I see.

We had a version. Multiple versions, stuck between coherency and branding. Ultimately decided on this. Because if it’s coherent to you, then Freakyyy wouldn't be needed.