filters
on masks, lenses, and what accumulates between them
2020
In November 2020, nine months into the pandemic, I wrote an essay about masks — literal ones, the kind we looped around our ears before leaving the house, and figurative ones, the identities we put on and took off depending on who the situation needed us to be. It was published in my university’s literary magazine in June 2022. I am including it above this one, unchanged, because the person who wrote it is the first data point.
Filters (2020) - page 65 of the PDF
2026
Earlier this month, I was on the Caltrain to work at 8:30 a.m. on a Monday, not wearing a mask, revising my novel manuscript on my laptop, when I started crying.
I ripped out two stray napkins from my backpack and pressed two fingers under each eye, hoping the person across from me wouldn’t notice.
Mid-cry, while blowing my nose, I became aware that it was the week of March 13th. Six years, almost to the day, since my university shut down and moved everything online — the week that, without my knowing it at the time, changed the entire downstream of my life.
The manuscript was still open on my laptop. The train sped past freeways and office complexes, stopping at each station and departing to the next with equal attention. With their earbuds in, the commuters around me boarded and alighted, muscle memory.
By the time the train got to Santa Clara, I was still sitting there, sitting with it. Six years ago, I was in my sophomore year dorm room in Santa Clara watching the world close. Now, I was hauling my bag off a train in Santa Clara on my way to work, finishing a novel I had been working on for three-and-a-half years, finishing a master’s degree, not wearing a mask, crying because enough had accumulated — enough living, enough writing, enough revision, enough time — to register where I actually was.
I am, by training and by temperament, a frequentist (bear with me for a moment, because this is the part where I use statistics to talk about my feelings). In statistics, this means understanding probability as the long-run behavior of repeated events: you run the experiment, and again, and again, and eventually what accumulates tells you something no single trial could. It took me longer than I’d like to admit to notice that this is also the framework I use to understand my own life. I did not intentionally choose it; it was already there, quietly operating below the level of conscious decision, building something I couldn’t see yet.
Here is what I mean: evidence accumulates into a lens. The lens is how you see the next piece of evidence. This means the lens is not neutral: it was built by everything that came before it, and it selects for more of the same, and it keeps building until it can’t.
Because sometimes a sufficient quantity of sufficiently strange evidence forces the lens to break wide open. This is not an update or adjustment. This is a revision so thorough that the world you were previously looking at appears completely different, and you understand, in hindsight, that it always was.
In November 2020, I was living in Singapore with my grandma. Some mornings, I would take the red MRT line to Dhoby Ghaut and walk to my favorite cafe across the street from SOTA, on the first floor of the Rendezvous Hotel (the cafe has since shut down and been replaced by a chain malatang restaurant).
I would get in line and scan the QR code on the door, order an iced americano, find a table for one, and take my mask off. I was writing my first novel draft (a different story entirely), the first one I had ever fully committed to drafting to 50,000 words. Between writing sprints, I vividly remember looking around the cafe at the other masked patrons, then out the window at the masked pedestrians on Prinsep Street, wondering what any of them were thinking, and wondering what my friends and family in California were doing, and wondering what my life would look like in six years, whether the pandemic would be over by then, whether any of this would come to anything.
I had a plan at the time: graduate from college a year early, PhD in clinical psychology, the research career I had been orienting toward since my second quarter of college, when I took Intro to Psych. The pandemic had already made that plan untenable, but not because of logistics. COVID had broken the lens through which the plan had made sense. I spent the early months of the pandemic finishing up online classes for spring quarter while living in my parents’ house in the US, then went to stay with my grandma in Singapore for nine months. In that time, I watched two governments, two cultures, two entirely different assumptions about what a person owes other people, respond to the same virus. I had grown up inside one of those bubbles and been reshaped by the other, and suddenly I could see both at once, and I couldn’t unsee it. I added a minor in public health, then a minor in international business. I started writing a novel and going to the gym seriously. All this not because I had a plan, but because the evidence was accumulating and I was following it.
What I didn’t understand then, with my mask off in the cafe, was that the lens I was looking through was warped in ways I couldn’t detect from inside it. This is the Bayesian critique of frequentism, and it’s a fair one: if the prior you started with was built from a particular kind of evidence, everything you see afterward gets filtered through that warp, and you won’t know it. From inside a warped lens, the distortion looks like seeing the world with the contact lenses prescription you’ve always worn. I don’t know if the lens I have now is warped in ways I can’t yet detect. I won’t know until enough strange evidence accumulates to force the next revision. This is not a flaw in the framework; it’s the framework.
What breaks it open, eventually, is accumulation.
The international business minor led to my first job out of college, in management consulting in New York. The Upper East Side is where I started writing a second novel draft — the one on my laptop on the train, the one I am currently revising. Less than a week after I hit 50,000 words, I got laid off. A few months later, I found my current job in institutional research at my alma mater, moved back to the Bay Area, and kept writing. A year later, I started a master’s in business analytics. And a year after that, I finished the novel draft while getting one quarter closer to finishing the degree.
None of that was in the cafe in Singapore. All of it was the accumulation.
Every time I return to the manuscript after time away — months, weeks, sometimes days — I have the same thought: Who wrote this?! I could do so much better than that.
So I revise it. And then I come back, and I have the same thought, and I revise it again. For a long time, I thought this meant the novel just wasn’t good enough. Now, I think it means the writer keeps outpacing the draft. The time away is evidence accumulating into a new lens. The revision is also evidence accumulating into a new lens. Every return to the manuscript is a new experiment run by a slightly different version of the experimenter: one with more data, a more refined instrument, a different pair of eyes.
Of course, there is a version of this that becomes its own trap. You could revise forever; the lens will keep updating and the draft will never be done. This is the frequentist’s practical problem: at some point, you have to stop running the experiment and report your results, even though you know more data would change them. Significance is declared not because certainty is achieved, but because enough evidence has accumulated to act.
Last month, I finished the novel for the third time. The first two times I thought I’d finished it, I was wrong — I didn’t know that at those times, which is the warped-lens problem again. This third time, the ending arrived as a recognition: this is what it was always going to be.
I cried when I wrote the last major section, and then I cried every day the week after, sometimes two or three times a day. What I was feeling was less a sense of relief, and more like the knowledge that I had been testing something for a long time, and now there was finally a result.
I moved from Singapore to the United States when I was seven years old. The novel I finished is the novel I would have needed to read that year.
When I started writing it, I didn’t know that. I found it out the frequentist way, in the accumulation of each piece of evidence until the pattern became undeniable. In some scenes, the protagonist’s identity gets overwritten by her environment without her permission, without her knowing why. Writing those scenes, I slowly and retroactively understood that I was trying to tell my seven-year-old self something she needed to hear: that what happened to her was not her fault, and that it would also make her into the person she was going to become, the person who would be able to write the book she needed to read.
In other scenes, characters pursue impossible dreams across years of delayed gratification, pushing forward without knowing if anything would come of it. I was writing those for myself, too. At some point, I wrote a line for one of them that I meant equally for myself: “If they dreamt, so would I.” And the act of sitting down to write them, day after day, revision after revision, was its own form of perseverance. Every time I returned to those scenes, I was also returning to my dream. My writing was evidence. It all accumulated into the lens that made my dream more legible to myself, and more real.
The scene that made me cry on the train was a transmission, in which something passes between two people and neither of them is quite the same afterward. I was revising it, and I realized — consciously, and then the crying came after — that the novel was a transmission from my past self to my current self, and from my current self back again. It felt like an entity I did not fully know was giving me something fuller than I knew I needed, and lifting a burden I had been carrying for a long time without knowing what exactly it was.
The burden had two related parts. The first was the feeling of not being understood — not just by others, but especially by myself, the sense of carrying a mind whose workings I couldn’t fully account for and had learned to treat as a liability (one that could walk into a room and simultaneously map the social architecture of everyone in it, and then feel alienated by its own map). The second was a flavor of homesickness: for a place to call home, and for a sense of home inside my mind, the knowledge that I am doing what I am meant to do. I had carried both of these since I was seven years old in a new country, wondering if I would ever find where I belonged, and I had carried them again as a twenty-five-year-old writing a novel with seemingly no end, as if I had committed to something whose shape I wouldn’t be able to see until I was almost through it.
In 2020, I wrote about masks as identities — the different ones we put on depending on who the situation needed us to be, the question of who we are when we take them off. Now, I think the question was wrong, or at least incomplete. You can’t take the mask off, not because it’s false, but because it’s the most accurate available rendering of something that keeps accumulating. The mask I wore at seven — the one that looked like a child searching for home — wasn’t hiding something more accurate underneath. It was the highest resolution at which she was legible, to herself and to the world, given the evidence she had so far.
The mask I wore in 2020 in that cafe was still lower resolution. And the one I wear now — the analyst-novelist, the institutional researcher finishing a manuscript on the train, crying in public because the accumulation finally registered — is not the final version. It is simply the current one. The lens I currently have is the most refined instrument I have ever had for reading my own signal, and I know it will be superseded, and I have made my peace with that for now.
On the Caltrain, after I had stopped crying, I looked back at the manuscript on my laptop. I had been revising a scene in Part 2 that I had revised so many times before that I’ve lost count. With the lens I have now, I could see exactly what it needed. With the same lens, I could also see that the instrument had become precise enough to know what it was measuring.
When I write now, or when I build connections across the different domains of my work, I have a sense that this is exactly what I am here to do, for now. I feel more at home in my mind than I ever have, and I have come to understand the way I think as an asset rather than a liability, though it can still feel like the latter sometimes.
This is not a resolution; it is only the current reading. The evidence is still accumulating, and the lens is still being built, and whatever it resolves into next will look back at this version of me the way I look back at the version of me in that cafe in Singapore — with affection, and some distance, and the knowledge that she could be revised.
The seven-year-old wanted to know if she would ever feel at home. I think she does, for now.
The accumulation continues.