American Dream

i.

My mom and I shared a bunk bed until I was seventeen.

Top and bottom, tiny room, Henry Street. She worked so much I'd sometimes go days only seeing the shape of her sleeping above me when I came home late from school. Or I'd wake up at 2am and she'd just be getting back, moving quietly so she wouldn't wake me with lingering smells from the restaurant.

That's the thing I remember most. The smell of cooking oil in her hair. Everyday. All the time.

ii.

I was maybe eight or nine when I got scared watching a movie alone in the apartment. The light shifted, the room got too quiet, and something in me just broke. I ran out the door, down the street, didn't stop until I got to her restaurant.

I didn't tell her I was scared. I just sat in the corner by the kitchen and watched her work. The cooks yelling in Fuzhounese, the exhaust fan humming, my mom moving between tables. I stayed there until closing.

We walked home together that night. She held my hand and didn't ask any questions.

iii.

I started washing dishes at my mom's restaurant when I was eight. Standing on a crate to reach the sink, hands red from the hot water, scrubbing woks bigger than my torso. I didn't think of it as work. It was just what you did.

By eleven, I understood that money was a problem. No one told me. No one needed to—you just feel it. The math starts making sense in a way you wish it didn't. So I started selling candy and snacks at school. Bought in bulk from Costco, sold at markup during lunch. Little plastic bags of gummies, chips, whatever kids wanted. I kept the cash in a red pocket.

High school was sneaker reselling. I'd wake up early for drops: flip them online, make a few hundred here and there. Anything to keep the math "mathing".

I didn't have many friends. Most days I'd come home and play League of Legends or Minecraft until I fell asleep. The screen was easier than everything else.

iv.

We were poor. Not the kind of poor people say when they mean things were tight—actually poor, the kind where your mom works twenty years without a day off, the kind where the aunties on Mott Street help raise you because someone has to.

I think about those aunties a lot. They'd slip me 叉烧包 (Chā shāo bāo) when I walked by, watch me grow up without ever making a big deal about it. Columbus Park grandpas who knew my name. A whole neighborhood holding me loosely in place while my mom kept the lights on.

She gave up everything in Fuzhou for this. Not because America would be easy. It wasn't. She came because she believed it was the only place I'd be allowed to try.

v.

Ten years ago I was sitting on the bottom bunk, waiting for a League game to load. I had a stream running on the second monitor: the Falcon 9 launch.

Then a rocket landed itself.

I didn't understand how it worked. Didn't matter. What I understood was: someone decided the limit everyone else accepted wasn't real. Someone bet against the obvious and won.

My mom had come home between shifts to switch the laundry. Maybe twenty minutes if she rushed. I turned to her and said I wanted to do something like that someday.

She laughed. Read more books. Stop playing so many games.

Then she left, back to the restaurant, and I sat there with the game loading and a new kind of hunger I didn't have words for yet.

vi.

When it came time for college, she had one wish: good school, good grades, good job. Stability. Safety.

I listened. Out of respect, out of love, I listened.

I quit League. That was the hardest part, honestly. I'd been playing for years—it was the one thing that was mine, the one place I was good at something that didn't feel like survival. But I thought about my mom, two decades of twelve-hour days, and I couldn't justify grinding ranked while she was still grinding for real.

So I gave it up. Put my head down. Did what I was supposed to do.

vii.

At Northeastern I was locked in. Investment banking was the goal—that's what success looked like, right? Good school, good grades, good job. The path my mom wanted for me.

I recruited hard. Networked. Did the coffee chats, the case prep, all of it.

And slowly I realized it wasn't for me. Not because I couldn't do it. Because I didn't want to. I was chasing someone else's definition of making it.

viii.

First semester of college. One week before Thanksgiving break.

I was eating breakfast in the dining hall when a friend sent me a news article. Hit and run. A kid from our school. I read the name and my stomach dropped—I had just talked to him the night before. He was right there, talking to me, and then he left, and now he was gone.

I sat there and cried. Right there in the dining hall, I just cried.

Another friend of mine was in the same accident. He walked away fine physically, but not mentally. He was in our marketing group project. He had to take a break from school. We could've asked for an extension, could've skipped the whole thing. But the rest of us looked at each other and knew we had to finish it. For him.

That week broke something open in me. Life is real. Anything can happen. You think you have time and then someone's just gone. There's no dress rehearsal.

ix.

When spring semester ended, I bought a one-way ticket to San Francisco.

No plan. No job. No place to stay.

I crashed on my friend Tomas's couch. Shoutout to Tomas for that couch—I owe him more than he knows.

I didn't know what I was doing. I just knew I couldn't go back to optimizing for someone else's version of success. I needed to figure out what I actually wanted.

x.

I got lucky. I got very, very lucky.

I started meeting founders. Building a community. Showing up to everything, saying yes to everything. Slowly, somehow, I broke into venture.

It wasn't easy. Nothing about it was easy. But I loved every second of it. For the first time, I was working on something that felt like mine.

Delphi took a chance on me. Intern, then full-time within a month. I learned so much about being a startup operator—how to move fast, how to think in bets, how to build something from nothing. Forever grateful to Dara for taking a bet on me.

Six months. That's all it was. SF, venture, Delphi, and now—

xi.

Here's the thing nobody talks about: not everyone gets to chase.

The American Dream is sold like it's open to anyone willing to work hard enough. But I know kids from Henry Street who worked just as hard as me and didn't get the same breaks. Kids who washed dishes too, sold candy too, stayed up late grinding too. Some of them are still there. Some of them never left.

I got lucky. I got a couch to crash on. I got people who took bets on me. I got doors that opened at the right time.

Not everyone gets that. Most people don't.

I don't know why I got the chances I got. But I know it means I can't waste them.

xii.

Today I'm joining xAI.

It still doesn't feel real. Ten years ago I was a kid washing dishes in Chinatown, selling candy at school, playing League alone in a tiny apartment. Now I get to work on something that might actually matter.

I don't know what comes next. I don't think you're supposed to. But I know why I'm doing this.

I'm doing this to retire my mom.

That's the goal. That's always been the goal. Everything else is just the path to get there.

xiii.

Sometimes I zoom out and see it all at once. The bunk bed on Henry Street. Standing on a crate to wash dishes. The candy in my locker. The couch in SF. The kid who watched a rocket land and said he wanted to do something like that.

All of it leading here, somehow.

My mom always says: 记得吃饭、睡觉、多喝点水、多交朋友。

Eat, sleep, drink water, make friends.

One day I'm going to tell her she doesn't have to work anymore. One day I'm going to watch her rest.

She's given me everything. Now it’s my turn to grind my ass off.