At the liquor store on the corner of Corcoran and 17th, Northwest

Guy at the counter when I bring up a bottle of champagne is a middle-aged Ghanaian man. Asks if I need a bag.

"Yes please."

He tells the guy next to him that I must be English, saying yes please and all, or maybe Canadian. This guy next to him seems like a DC local, sounds like a DC local, especially when he looks at me and hmphs back, "He's probably from Southeast."

Ghanaian Man, like he had it in a holster: "Southeast Asia."

I'm just standing there, getting out my wallet and getting my money out of my wallet, sort of stunned (1) that DC Local awesomely just doesn't do stereotypes, going more with common sense, no reason why the Asian kid isn't also DC Local. And sort of stunned (2) that Ghanaian Man, without me saying anything more than yes please has pegged me in close to exactly the right hole: from the Commonwealth and Southeast Asia.

I finally speak up when Ghanaian Man decides to settle it and asks me straight up where I'm from, my favorite question of all time. So in return for him being completely on point for me, I abandon my usual stereotype-dispelling lie (pick 'em NY or CA) and instead dispense with the truth.

"Hong Kong."

And Ghanaian Man smirks and says to DC Local I told you so without telling him so. Then he eyes the Chinese Taipei flag on my cap with the Olympic rings and says, "Yeah you were out there for the Olympics, weren't you?" DC Local rolls his eyes, apologizing to me without words, minority telepathy that says, sorry for my fob friend who thinks all one billion Chinese people went to the Olympics just because they were in China. Again I want to reward DC Local for his awesomeness, but the truth is out there.

"Yeah, I actually was at the Olympics."

Ghanaian Man is beaming. DC Local is quiet. Except, "'Bout time he got something right."

Ghanaian Man asks me where I was born, and when I say Australia he just laps it up like he had me at yes please. But DC Local gets the last word, at least in my book, because when I explain that I lived in Hong Kong most my life, he asks if I was there for the handover.

And I'm like, yeah, I was.

And he's like, yeah 'coz that was pretty cool.

And I'm like, yeah, it was.

And that's like, the most informed conversation about where I'm from that I've ever had through three years in the District of Columbia, capital city of the United States of America.

There was another liquor store across the street. Glad I picked this one.

My dear Mr. President:

When John Paul Stevens took the oath of office as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States on December 17, 1975, my mother was two months older than I am today. Three weeks earlier, some kid at Harvard had written the word "Micro-soft" for the first time.

William Douglas, whom Justice Stevens replaced, took the oath on April 17, 1939, three days after John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath. My grandmother was nine. When she turned ten, the Japanese invaded her hometown.

Justice Douglas had replaced Louis Brandeis, who took office on June 5, 1916, less than three weeks after a couple guys named Sykes and Picot divvied up the Middle East, hopelessly unaware of what they were getting the world into. Later that year, my great-grandfather (from the other side) commanded the Third National Protection Army in Guangdong's fight for independence from Yuan Shikai. It may have been the only good fight he fought.

Justice Brandeis was the sixty-seventh justice of the Supreme Court. The woman who replaces Justice Stevens will be the one hundred and twelfth. Three guys; forty-five justices and ninety-four years on the bench between them. As a third-year in law school, that is a whole lot more opinions than I ever want to have to think about again, and those three wrote some pretty good ones.

But as a history major, as a student of the court and its country's cases and controversies, that is a whole lot more of the world than I can ever hope to live. I don't agree with life terms, but they sure make things interesting.

Better Weather

It was gorgeous in Washington this weekend. It may not have been an especially long winter, but it was intense. Yesterday, I took a look at my boots for the first time since the snow stopped falling. They were brand new in January, and yet they already know what it is to be weathered, creases already in the leather, watermarked for life by the blizzard of 2010. It's raining again today, but the weekend, at least, was gorgeous.

So I took a walk on Saturday because it was perfect out. Perfect to soak up the sun, enjoy the greenery, see the monuments. And perfect to party. Tea party.

It was just funny at first. I'm not sure I'd ever met a real life teabagger before, and it was ticklish to see that they all seemed to live up to the caricature. Outlandish homemade signs. A woman lying on the ground yelling, "Pelosi, go home back to your Soviet Union." Harmless, really, and not too different from the people in Dupont Circle who were throwing their shoes at a giant blow-up doll of George Bush the day before the Inauguration.

But then I walked around to the other side of the Capitol, where several hundred, maybe even a thousand, teabaggers were lining up around the steps of the House. They were trying to form a human wall, they said, around the congresspeople inside, either to confront them when they tried to enter the House or to be close enough that their loud yelling--and there was a lot of yelling and it was very loud--would disrupt proceedings inside the building.

My immediate reaction was one of betrayal. That I was somehow helping their cause by simply being there, adding to the headcount, sitting on the other team's bench. I smiled to hide a smirk. I tried hard not to laugh at the misspelled signs. But then I realized it wasn't so funny.

The louder the yelling got, and the more sing-songy the chants, the more I felt the conspicuous absence of other people of color, and the conspicuous presence of me, not exactly looking like I fit in. I tried to weave in and out looking for good photos, but wherever I went, I was surrounded by a very large group of angry white people yelling whatever they were being told to yell. I think sometimes people call this a mob.

I know I wasn't remotely close to being in any kind of real danger. There were Capitol Police everywhere. And even if it plays to the stereotype, I can always whip out my "I'm not American" card and duck and cover. But it wasn't the idea of being the only minority in the crowd that got to me. It was the idea that, in another age, not really all that long ago, these were the kind of people that gathered in large groups and yelled something awfully similar to "Kill the bill!" And when you overhear them talking about the "illegals" that were also protesting this past weekend for immigration reform, and you see the less than subtle voodoo effigy, it's hard not to think that even today, if there were enough of them in a crowd, if they were angry enough and yelling loud enough, someone could get hurt much more than enough.

Maybe that's taking it too far because I'm not exactly predisposed to giving teabaggers the benefit of the doubt. Maybe that's because they don't deserve it. Or maybe they're just envious, because they saw the kind of crowds and the enthusiasm of the Obama campaign--however cheesy and bandwagony--and want something like that for themselves. So there they were, yelling. "Kill the bill!" "Vote no!"

I went back to the Capitol last night because after all that, I basically wanted to see them shut the hell up. A lot of people seemed to have the same idea--because, you know, liberals respect the process--so I had to wait in line for almost two hours to get into the House galleries. They were shuffling groups in for 15 minutes at a time, and someone must have been looking out for me, because I got shuffled in for the exact 15 minutes of the vote on the Senate bill.

The House chamber is a whole lot smaller and more intimate than it looks during the State of the Union, and when all the Representatives are on the floor yelling their yeas and nays in unison it has the feel of those old basketball gyms that literally rock when the crowd gets going. Much cooler than C-SPAN. When the yeas hit 216, and as they counted down to the end of the vote, the Democrats did their best impersonation of all of us naive young multiethnic immigrant pothead hippies on the campaign trail that the teabaggers hate so much.

"Yes we can," they chanted. Beats "Vote no" every time.

It was gorgeous in Washington this weekend.

HRC

(Alex Wong/Getty)

I didn't get in.  When they closed the doors there was one guy in front of me and that's it.  Echoes of a South Carolina night two (!) years ago, when we were the next batch of people they were going to let in to the Obama victory speech and they shut the gates.  This time, Capitol Policeman said everyone was there just to see her, really, so it was unlikely anyone who got in was going to leave.  But I had gotten up at seven-thirty for this, and someone was depending on me to watch this hearing, and I mean, it was Hillary.  The line before she arrived was so long that I didn't really see her when she walked in, but her voice traveled down the hall when she greeted whoever welcomed her at the door.

"Hey, how are you?"

Just like it sounded (on TV) on the campaign trail.

So I waited.  The intern in front of me did, too.  And 45 minutes later, Capitol Policeman points to us and says, "Two."  He waved us in the direction of an aide or page or whatever you call the congressional staff who mind the doors of committee hearing rooms, and she told us one seat was in the back, the other in the front.  Maybe the intern in front of me was shy, maybe he just understood House decorum better than me, but he walked to the back so I had no choice.  Front.  Very front.  Ten feet from Hillary front.

I sat down next to a State Department staffer who for the first few minutes kept glancing over at me.  I thought he was wondering what some random Asian kid in a sweater was doing sitting in Hillaryland.  After the hearing, he recognized me by the vending machines in the Rayburn cafeteria and told me he was glancing over at me because the Secret Service agent next to him had been glancing over at me.  Apparently it looks suspicious when you sit down ten feet from the Secretary of State with your hand hidden inside a thick winter coat you folded over your arm as you sat down.  Oops.

For the next two hours, and then two more hours at a smaller hearing in the afternoon, I watched Hillary demolish the field.  At first I thought the Democrats who fawned over her in their opening statements were probably just old superdelegates of hers, but when even the Republicans couldn't seem to help but praise her, it was clear she was smarter than all of them and they knew it.

For the Representatives, it was an easy day's work.  They had a couple prepared questions about one or two countries and didn't have to pay attention to anything any of their colleagues were saying (and they didn't: truly awe inspiring to watch congresspeople thumbing away on their Blackberries with the Secretary of State in attendance).  It was like that gameshow from a couple years ago where a hundred former winners take on one new contestant.

She beat them all.

It was incredible.  Like Wikipedia for world affairs was running in her head.  Iran.  Iraq.  Afghanistan.  Pakistan.  The obvious ones, of course.  But then Armenia and Turkey.  Cyprus.  Russia and China.  Yemen.  Yemen.  Yemen.  Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Western Sahara.  Bosnia and Kosovo.  Israel and Gaza and Israel.  Refugees and internally displaced.  Orphans from Haiti.  A USAID worker detained in Cuba, a new embassy in London.  It was like the only problem in the world she didn't mention was what I was there for, but to be fair, she wasn't asked about it.

These weren't even things she was supposed to be talking about.  She was supposed to be talking about the budget, about the money State is requesting for 2011.  Instead, all these politicians who never get any facetime with her wanted to be able to say they asked Hillary Clinton a sexy question about Iran and nuclear weapons or Yemen and the Christmas Day bomber.  Well at least they don't get to say they stumped her.  Because she destroyed them.

One Republican asked her why there was foreign aid going to China, of all places.  She said it was earmarked for American organizations working in China.  He said something like, "So you're saying Congress forced it upon you."

And she said, "Those are your words, Congressman."

Another Republican asked her why a press report he read suggested State was cutting funds for the Millennium Challenge Corporation.  She said, uh, no we're not, I'm the Chair of the Board of Directors of the MCC and if you read the freaking budget we sent you in advance, you would see we want to increase funding for it by 15 per cent.  Then the guy asks, so the press report wasn't accurate?

And she's like, "Congressman, I don't know why I would ever doubt the accuracy of a press report."

Everyone laughs.  Republican gets nailed.

I was pretty down in the summer of 2007, when the Obamachine had lost its startup excitement and Hillary was up 30 or 40 points.  And I was really up that night in South Carolina two years ago, when she and Bill's crazy, finger-jabbing rants got whooped 55-27.  She could have never matched the magic of election night and the Inauguration, and I don't think she'd be doing any better of a job than he's doing right now.

But in January 2017, there isn't anyone else I want to be taking the Oath of Office but Madame President Hillary Rodham Clinton.  I just hope she ages better than McCain has.

Snomfg

After the snow stopped falling on Saturday afternoon, the weekend felt like a theme park, like those winter wonderland sets they put up in malls in Hong Kong that are so over the top with the fake houses and trees and gazebos that are marshmallowing with whiteness. Only this had poofy white toycars, too. And it was, like, real.

My street.

Monday was nice. Sunny, people happy to have the day off, appreciating what little transportation was available.

Today, I'm not so sure. Not sunny, people kind of like, huh? I'm gonna have the whole week off?

Across from the Indian Embassy. I thought he looked a little cold.

Him not so much.

Yeah ok.

The snow is back. Four inches already tonight. Six to eight more on the way. Snoverkill, for sure. This is getting a little psycho.

Snomageddon

Snow.

There was a cop to the left who yelled at these guys to "stop throwing the fucking snowballs."

More snow.

Lots of snow.

豉油雞飯

Snopocalypse. Nothing to do but stay at home. And try something new.

I am no chef. I am the family dishwasher. But step by step, I am sloshing through the snow-covered path along my quest to be able to cook my 10 favorite dishes of all time.

#4: 豉油雞飯. I am awesome.