Located in Bartow, Florida, Hong Kong Chinese Restaurant does the most business during hurricanes. Connie Wu recalls her parents’ restaurant was still taking orders during Hurricane Irma in 2017, even as the lights went out and the army rolled up to their door. “They had to order food,” Wu says. But Christmas was always a close second. “Other than the hurricanes, Christmas would be the busiest.”

Wu, now a junior at New York University, spent much of her childhood under a faded grid of stock photos depicting the dishes offered on the menu. Her parents have owned Hong Kong Chinese Restaurant since 2002; when she didn’t have school, she’d work rigorous 12-hour shifts — from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. — taking orders from behind the restaurant’s green marble countertop or working in the kitchen. On Christmas, once the lunch rush started, business wouldn’t slow down until late into the evening. The restaurant usually stayed open past its normal operating hours to accommodate the extra orders, making about three times the revenue it would normally make on other (non-hurricane) days. Wu recalls not being able to eat lunch until 4 p.m. on Christmas Day, “but we usually never finish. We just don’t have time to eat lunch,” she says.

Once they finally closed, the Wus would return home to a late-night Christmas hot pot, a Fuzhounese seafood spread prepared by one of the siblings sent home earlier in the evening. When they’d sit down, Wu says the overwhelming feeling among the family was relief, tinged with exhaustion. “We’re like, ‘Oh my god, I can eat now,’” she says.

Christmas is one of the busiest, and most profitable, days for Chinese restaurants, to the point of becoming a cliche. They’re often the only lit storefronts on Christmas in otherwise empty neighborhoods, offering a haven to those who don’t celebrate or those simply looking for somewhere to eat: American Jewish diners, in particular, have been dining in Chinese restaurants on Christmas for over a century.

As the setting for others’ Christmas celebrations, these businesses can become points of cultural significance in their communities, or at the very least, personal significance for many of their diners. However, for the owners, the Christmas rush — and the long, hectic hours on Christmas Day — usually means sacrificing traditional holiday celebrations with their own families. (Wu says the only presents she’d receive on Christmas were from a regular customer who would stop by with gift cards and chocolate.) Instead, they form traditions born out of necessity, whether alternative Christmas celebrations at odd hours, or eschewing the holiday altogether. And for the generation of kids who’ve grown up in Chinese restaurant families, they’re now afforded the opportunity to choose how they celebrate: what they keep, what they leave behind, and what they adapt.

Curtis Chin, former Chinese restaurant child at Chung’s Cantonese Cuisine in Detroit and author of Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant, recalls eating Church’s fried chicken and Little Caesars pizza late on Christmas Eve with his mother and five siblings. They’d wait for their father to close the restaurant and return home, just after midnight, before opening presents. “We weren’t the type of family that woke up in the morning to open the presents,” Chin says. “We’d wake up, and then we would go to the restaurant to work.”

Roger Liu’s Catholic family would spend their Christmas mornings at church before returning home for a quick celebration. “We’d do the Christmas tree present thing, and then my parents would go off and start working,” Liu says. On busy days, Liu and his siblings would join their parents at Tony’s Hong Kong Restaurant, which opened in December 1989.

As Liu and his siblings got older, the practice had to change. “It became a little bit of a bummer,” he says. So, while they’d still attend church on Christmas morning, the Lius started celebrating Christmas on the 26th. Over the years, they expanded their celebration, blocking off the entire period from the 26th to New Year’s for family time. Somewhere within those six days, the Lius would drive an hour and a half from Battle Creek, Michigan, to Detroit to spend the day at the mall and buy Christmas presents for each other. 

Liu’s parents retired and sold the business in 2014, but the offset Christmas tradition continues. “From Christmas to New Year’s, it’s pretty much Liu time,” he says. 

Liu happened to marry into another restaurant family. His wife, Joanne Liu, grew up in a small Chinese takeout place in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, alongside her three siblings. New China Garden wasn’t particularly busy on Christmas — the busiest days were the Super Bowl and New Year’s Eve — but the family was at the restaurant on Christmas Day nonetheless. While the parents cooked, the four kids worked the front of the house, manning the takeout window, answering the phone, and preparing the prepackaged duck sauce and soy sauce.

Because Christmas was just another workday, Joanne Liu never really celebrated during her childhood, something she kept to herself throughout middle and high school. Growing up in a predominantly white neighborhood, “I didn’t want to stand out even more than I already did,” Liu says. Rather than celebrating a half-hearted Christmas, her family poured extra effort into Thanksgiving, the one day each year the business wasn’t open. “No one was going to a Chinese restaurant for Thanksgiving.” 

To this day, the Lius gather from across the country to eat a big Thanksgiving dinner, a mixed spread of Chinese and American dishes, including Hong Kong-style lobster, steak, and the traditional turkey, all largely cooked by Joanne’s mom, Siu, who was New China Garden’s primary chef. Siu starts by putting the turkey in the oven at 11 p.m. the night before Thanksgiving and cooks the rest of the feast through the night.

Kenneth Wan, Liu’s younger brother, says, “We felt like it was two holidays in one with all the turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, but then also, all these really classic, almost banquet-style Chinese dishes.” 

Wan and his siblings now make their own contributions on Thanksgiving. As a preamble to their mother’s feast, they’ll get together and fold wontons, either for a soup or for crab cheese wontons (known as crab rangoon on the East Coast). Last year, Wan cooked up steaks he bought from a butcher, and the year before that, he cooked a Cantonese-style lobster. “I’m usually doing a big protein,” he says. “I’m the chef, so everyone expects me to make something a little bit more grand.”

Despite growing up in a restaurant, Wan decided to become a chef after spending two years in an investment banking job in New York City. Liu remembers Wan telling their mother about a six-month culinary program in Lower Manhattan. “I recall my mom saying, ‘If you go into restaurants, you won’t have a holiday,’” Liu says.

Wan graduated in 2010 and worked his way through various New York City kitchens before opening his own restaurant with his wife, Doris Yuen, in 2023, a tradition-inspired Chinese restaurant in Denver called MAKfam. MAKfam serves familiar flavors with a twist, like málà mozzarella sticks or corned beef fried rice. Much like the food he serves, Wan makes another departure from experiences of his childhood: He closes on Christmas. In fact, he closes from Christmas Eve to New Year’s Day.

That period between Christmas and New Year’s, which some might recognize as the Liu Christmas, is Wan’s favorite time of year. “I feel like everyone’s life is kind of on a pause,” he says. After spending years missing his fair share of holidays and celebrations, Wan wants to spend more time with his family. “I definitely appreciate that entrepreneurial spirit of just being open all the time, but if we don’t have to, then let’s try to enjoy our time with each other. That’s something that we’re trying to instill in our family.”

Wan acknowledges that he can afford to close on holidays — including a week in November for Thanksgiving — due to the success of MAKfam, which received a Michelin Bib Gourmand in 2024. “I feel like I owe it to myself, right? I have the opportunity to close, and I’m not in the position where I have to stay open to meet my margins,” Wan says.

“It sucks to think about my parents, they didn’t really have that option,” he says. “But, we did it as a family. We were there too.”

Joanne Liu now runs a nonprofit called Asian Girls Ignite, which creates a space for Asian girls in Denver to connect. She also started Mile High Asian Food Week, which supports Asian-owned restaurants in Denver, as an homage to her parents. Now in its third year, the event gives restaurant owners a chance to gather, talk, and build community. “I find myself creating things I wish I had when I was younger,” she says. “Imagine what it would have been like if [my parents] had people to talk to about owning a restaurant.”

It can be easy to draw a hard line between celebration and work, but that line is blurred in a family-owned restaurant. While many Chinese restaurant families have found their own ways to celebrate and develop traditions around their work hours, the work is its own tradition. When Wan thinks about the years he spent working on Christmas day, he says, “I wasn’t too upset because I spent Christmas with my family. We were all together, working on the family business.”

Working on Christmas is undoubtedly a sacrifice, but a certain community develops in these businesses, be it the staff in the kitchen or the diners at the tables, when it feels like the rest of the world is doing something else. Growing up in a town where the Chinese community was sparse, Roger Liu grew to know the other Chinese families operating restaurants in the area. During the holiday season, he found himself at many of their staff parties. 

The Lius’ Christmas staff party was a potluck dinner. Roger Liu’s father would cook a lobster or some other seafood dish and members of the staff would bring their own dishes along with their families. In its earlier days, many of the kitchen staff either moved to Battle Creek from Chicago or were brought over from China and sponsored by Liu’s father. The parties were one of the few times that Liu would meet the staff’s kids. “You would actually see them and get to know them,” Liu says. 

At Chung’s in Detroit, many locals found community in the restaurant itself — having debuted in 1940, it had already been serving food for decades when Chin was born in 1965. His parents kept the business open even as crime rose in the neighborhood. “What I didn’t realize was that my parents were keeping that restaurant open for the people of Detroit, because so many businesses were closing down,” Chin says. Since publishing his memoir about growing up in Chung’s, he’s talked to people across the country who recalled meals and memories there. “In some ways, our customers were my parents’ family, too, right? They saw them as the Detroit family.”

So come Christmastime, Chin’s mother would decorate the restaurant with a Christmas tree in the lobby, complete with empty presents underneath that kept getting stolen — Chin would slip little nasty notes in these empty boxes for the thieves. It also had a plastic blue-and-white electric menorah, for the Jewish side of this found family.

As Chung’s became a part of its customers’ traditions on the holidays, spending time there became its own tradition for the Chins. He remembers playing with the dreidels that their regular Jewish customers brought them. “That was always nice, this notion that these two non-Christians connected,” Chin says. In those moments, working at a Chinese restaurant during the holidays could still “feel more like a family get-together.”

Grayson Haver Currin’s profile of his friend John Darnielle, founder of the beloved and prolific band the Mountain Goats, plays a bit like a Mountain Goats album. Its ten sections alternate between Darnielle’s nearly 35-year music career and Currin’s 10-day stretch on the road with the band, traveling to Rochester, New York. Each section, like many of Darnielle’s songs, cinches an off-kilter detail, a harrowing backstory, a bit of hard-won heart. (Surely two men holding ten pounds of apples and talking about Geto Boys as they wait for a ride is a scene from some future Darnielle song?) The cast of characters holds big names like Lin-Manuel Miranda and Craig Finn but also makes space for the Pitzer College freshman who, in 1991, turned the PA system back on so Darnielle could sing to six people. “I’d never been so close to something so good,” that student told Currin. It’s hard to imagine getting much closer to Darnielle than this.

He does wonder how long he can write, record, and tour at this pace. In a few months, after all, he’ll turn 59. The list of ailments he’s accrued, whether through life on the road or simply aging, is mounting. This morning, he went to see his doctor again about a retina that’s possibly detaching. (It’s holding steady, thank you.) He is self-conscious about his belly and mentions it often. He laments that, at least at the moment, a string of injuries has kept him from running, a relatively recent enthusiasm. Every time I ran on tour, before I could even catch my breath upon returning to the bus, he would say, “How far did you go? Man, I wish I went with you.”

He tells me more than once he’s looking for an off-ramp, for ways to spend more time at home, hanging out with the kids and writing novels. I remember that in 2006, the first time I interviewed him, he suggested he might stop touring if he had kids. He now gives himself maybe four more years on the road, possibly as many as seven. He loves the work and the people, but he is honest about the indignities of the road, like a 30-hour ride from Maine to North Carolina this summer in a tour bus where the air conditioner died. Wurster remembers that, whenever things would get bad during his early days in the band, Darnielle would joke he was going to jump off the nearest bridge. “Tell them I died taking progressive thrash to new levels,” he would tell his band.

Rose Horowitch, in The Atlantic, says something is deeply wrong with America’s schools:

For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment. Schools across the country have been lowering standards and removing penalties for failure. The results are coming into focus.

Part of the problem, according to Horowitch, is we’re giving away good grades for poor performance in high school classes. But those same signs of academic decay—low standards, reduced penalties—infect all levels of American schooling. The result? Rapidly eroding skills:

The decline started about a decade ago and sharply accelerated during the coronavirus pandemic. The average eighth grader’s math skills, which rose steadily from 1990 to 2013, are now a full school year behind where they were in 2013, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the gold standard for tracking academic achievement.

But there’s a problem with Horowitch’s argument. Her piece is anchored by a fascinating report from UC San Diego about their surging remedial math program. She thinks this surge reflects a decline in basic math skills. But there’s no decline on California’s state tests, which instead show increases up until the pandemic (and slow recovery since).

This isn’t to say that Horowich is wrong—test scores have declined in California on NAEP. But when she points to a drop starting in 2013, that could only be in 8th Grade mathematics; 4th Grade math seems to have only dipped in California with the pandemic.

So—were standards only lowered for 8th Graders? And only for math? Because 8th Graders were looking pretty good at reading on NAEP in California until the pandemic.

My point isn’t to defend or focus on California. I’m also not saying that everything is fine. What I am saying is I find all of this very confusing. Some scores definitely started dropping around 2014, but not all of them. I don’t know how you can decide what’s going on in American schools based on these graphs. Whatever the cause of the decline is, it’s not obvious or simple—maybe it’s not even problematic.

It’s Mostly About the Weakest Students

Play around with NAEP scores and you’ll notice that the declines are concentrated in the weakest students. This seems to be the case also for TIMSS, an international assessment. On both the 4th and 8th grade exams, America’s lowest performing students peaked in 2011, while the strongest students continued improving through 2019.

So are American students “getting dumber,” as Matt Yglesias says?

First, that’s rude. But second—no, they aren’t! I mean, yes, even high fliers were impacted by the pandemic. Everyone was. But strong students were looking fine up until then. That cuts out some possible explanations: this isn’t about detracking, gifted education, grading in AP classes, or anything else that would primarily impact the strongest 10% of students.

So…is it test-based accountability? Economist Joshua Goodman thinks so. He points out that 2015 is when the Obama administration started issuing waivers that defanged No Child Left Behind. Up until then, high-stakes testing pushed schools to focus on lifting weaker students up.

Listen—I don’t know! I’d quibble that since NCLB was introduced in 2001, it can’t explain the decade of improvements leading up to that law. And because NCLB was focused on math and reading it can’t explain declines in civics or US history.1

But there’s another, more significant problem with this explanation…

It’s Not Just Kids

Chad Aldeman has been writing about declining test scores for years, and generally favors an explanation not unlike Goodman or Horowich’s. But it was from him I first learned that American scores on PIAAC, a test of workplace skills for adults of ages 16 to 65, have also been on the decline, arguably also peaking around 2014.

There were declines in every cohort, in both literacy and numeracy, even in the 55-65 group that has been out of school for over forty years.

Isn’t that…deeply weird? So it’s not just kids that have lost progress, but adults. How could schools possibly be responsible for that? And not all countries experienced a decline. So something is going on in America that impacted both students and adults beginning in 2014. What could it be?

It’s Not Just Phones, and it’s Not Just Here

Adults have phones. Teens have phones. Maybe it’s phones?

Goodman thinks this is part of the story. Horowich mentions this too. But as Aldeman points out, phones are everywhere and declines in TIMSS scores aren’t universal:

Smartphones and social media are global phenomena, and yet scores in Australia, England, Italy, Japan and Sweden have all risen over the last decade. A couple of other countries have seen some small declines (like Finland and Denmark), but no one has else seen declines like we’ve had here in the States.

(I’d also point out that 4th Graders typically don’t have phones, so they couldn’t explain declines in 4th Grade NAEP reading.)

But on the subject of international declines, and whether America is an outlier, there is another major international exam besides TIMSS—that’s PISA. And PISA scores have been down across the board since around 2014.

Weirdly, looking at this graph, America looks like it’s beating these trends in reading and science. How do you explain that? Why would countries participating in PISA have overall declines starting midway through the decade when TIMSS did not? Why would the US partly buck the trend on PISA, the test we traditionally do worse at, and then underperform the international trend on TIMSS, the exam we do much better on?

Now, there are differences between TIMSS and PISA. TIMSS is generally more of an achievement test with questions that closely resemble what students learn in school. PISA is designed to go a step further, requiring interpretation and application. Maybe that explains the different international trends…

But at this point, I want to throw my hands up—I just don’t know what’s going on!

So, what is it?

Here’s the situation: Americans are getting dumber...well, mostly not. But our lowest performing students seem to be losing ground. And, simultaneously, our adults. Some international tests show a similar decline happening in other countries. On other exams, America is on its own. What gives?

For a moment I had a theory that I liked—that it’s about the shift from paper to digital assessments. NAEP went digital in 2017. PISA went digital in 2015. TIMSS transitioned in 2019. Kids do a lot of lazy button pushing when they take these digital exams.

Maybe the issue is giving tests with the same devices we use to scroll YouTube?

This is definitely something to worry about (it’s a “mode effect”) but it seems as if the test-makers are on top of this. I guess I trust them not to mess up? Also, you’d figure that if there was a big problematic mode effect it would be more of a one-time hit. It probably wouldn’t cause a steady decline…right?

OK, another theory: is it just a coincidence that this tumult coincides with a huge influx of immigrants to the United States? Wouldn’t that change the adult workforce along with the school population? Demographic shift is the most accurate answer to so many educational questions—could it help us here?

I don’t know! This is all so speculative. I feel like I’m just making things up. And none of the explanations are completely satisfying.

Meanwhile the amount of confidence on display from our political writers is remarkable. They seem quite sure that American schools are in crisis, that students aren’t being taught, that there is some grand trick being played on the American public.

But the facts are confusing. So why the confidence?

“America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment,” Horowitch writes, and would it be crazy to say that she sounds a little bit jealous?

The American school system is stubborn. It evolves slowly and only in complicated ways in response to the demands of outsiders. It’s hard to reach into classrooms. Maybe that’s the point here. Writers, advocates, policymakers—many of them love the idea that schools have been steered in the wrong direction. After all, that means they can be steered, and maybe you can even take back the wheel. Climb aboard, everyone! We’re headed back to the 2000s.

Abstractions are powerful tools. Given enough abstraction everything gets somewhat simple. Somewhat clear. Also somewhat wrong. Abstraction turns everything real, material, consequential into mostly nothing. The abstraction of “a relationship” hides all the love and care and desire it might entail. The abstraction of “the border” hides the violence its defense entails.

Given enough abstraction every monstrosity becomes just a kind of mental gymnastics. This is the domain of devil’s advocates kind of people form whom the real often political meaning of certain statements or movements has become fully replaced by a game of debate. Who cares about the position, let’s win!

I keep thinking about abstractions when looking at the state of the current “AI” bubble and with it the state of a lot of the global economy.

As most people reading this know, I am not a fan of “AI”. If I never have to hear or read or see the term “agentic” ever again that would still be too early. Not only do I despise the political project that is “AI”, the mental damage these systems do to us, the harm to the environment they create, etc. but the way the narrative has turned a narrowly useful technology (stochastic pattern generation and recognition using neural networks) into the hammer to demolish all established codes and practices that ensure some base level of quality: But hey, who wants their software be developed by a team of professionals who can actually understand, model and solve or mitigate security issues when you can also just use a slot machine?

I’ve found myself saying how much I’d love the “AI” bubble to pop if just to shut “AI” influencers up, if just to have some space to talk about real solutions to real problems again. But that only works in abstraction. Only works when nothing means too much, really.

For worse (there’s no better in this sentence) we have made “AI” the foundation of many core parts of our economy. Not “AI” systems – those don’t really work, or meaningfully increase productivity – but the belief in the (future) value of the handful of tech companies building these systems. The US would be in a recession without the data center buildout that tech is throwing all its savings at. A buildout that is not connected to any form of successful business yet. “AI” does not scale the way digital services usually scale but all we see currently is still the old “increase user numbers and hope a business plan will manifest itself” scheme. Maybe ChatGPT can give Sam Altman some form of strategy besides lying.

This has material consequences. When (not if) the bubble pops we will see a few things: The stock market will take a dive which will affect many people living in countries without pension systems who rely on the money they have invested in ETFs or stocks. I am not talking about some VC dude or millionaire losing a few millions or billions, just normal people who wanted to retire at some point. Companies who have bet on “AI” now no longer can claim that one “needs to get onboard” and ride the hype but will have to fix their budgets – quick. This will lead to squeezing employees even more, firing people to make the next quarter’s numbers look better. In the current political landscape the instability that right leaning tech oligarchs and their fans will have created will probably benefit the right. We’ll see a lot of blame going around (remember: “AI” can never fail us, we can only fail “AI”. If this thing crashes, we did not believe enough!) and cuts to social services and anything that gives people the feeling of living in a functioning society. Which only helps right wingers but well that’s Neoliberalism for you.

I love the abstraction of the “AI” bubble popping. But the very probably effects haunt me.

This shouldn’t be read as a “well, ‘AI’ is here to stay so let’s make the best of it” kind of thing. I neither think “AI” will automatically stay (again: see this) nor am I sedated enough to believe that political values and action have no meaning. While I think there are a few narrow use cases for machine learning, whatever is called “AI” today has very few redeeming qualities being built on extraction, violence, domination, colonialism and right wing, anti-labor politics. This is not a moment of capitulation but of reflection.

It’s always easy to cheer for a revolution. Shit is fucked up and bullshit and our institutions and structures don’t seem to be willing, capable or motivated to meaningfully move towards a better world so let’s fuck shit up! Burn down data centers. Get out some guillotines. The thing is: Revolutions mean that people get hurt. That ultimately people die. That doesn’t mean that revolutions are always wrong, but it means that the abstraction is again doing a lot of work hiding harm to people who just want to get through their workday to be home with their family.

My criticism of “AI” is about limiting injustice and suffering. The suffering of the communities who get data centers put in their midst drinking up all the water, taking the electricity while producing metric fucktons of emissions, e-waste and noise. The injustice done to kids who get to chat to an LLM instead of building meaningful relationships to teachers and mentors, who don’t get to figure out what they are good at cause everything they do looks worse than “AI” output so they use that instead of getting to be so much better than slop machines. The way that non-working stochastic parrots undermine labor power and therefore putting the livelihood of thousands of families at risk. My criticism comes from love and care for people, communities and societies. So my actions can’t abstract the effects of those away.

But what can be done? In a better world we’d see governments segmenting the toxic “AI” part of the economy off and insulating the actual economy against it. Slowly moving big public investments out of those companies (not the best word, they seem more like cults these days but we still call them companies). Preparing for that bubble to deflate without taking thousands of lives with it. But we see the opposite: Europe where I live keeps wanting to throw all the money they can find at more “AI”. Just do more “AI”, it will be so good, bro. Trust us, bro. Just 10 more billion. It’ll be super cool, bro. Governments treat hyped tech like a stoner threats hits of their bong.

So what can we do? That is the question. Moving our savings out of the stock market? Maybe – if you have some. Stopping to criticize “AI” systems and the narratives that push them? Never: We mustn’t prop up or protect those dangerous and harmful systems by inaction.

I don’t have all the answers (I rarely have any TBH) but I do think that we should be at least careful wit glorifying the bubble popping a bit. Sure it’s fun to predict when it will go down and how much money Softbank is gonna set on fire but I think that it is also our job as critics to make sure that the public understands that “the AI bubble popping” has material consequences for them. That joining a union might be a good idea right now. That getting smart and knowledgeable people on Works councils is more important than ever. That tech companies are not your friends or benevolent and that they’d sell your kids if it made the stock perform well.

The “AI” bubble will deflate. But as cathartic as a “POP” might feel right now, we need to build the structures that ensure that this event doesn’t put a lot of harm on people who had nothing to do with it. Let Marc Andreessen or Satya Nadella or Sundar Pitchai and all those tech bros lose their money, make sure that after the storm nobody forgets that these people gambled with our lives and societies to make number go up. But we can’t just focus on holding those men accountable – as righteous and good that might feel (and holy cow do I want to see many of those people put on trial). We need to start building lifeboats and barriers protecting our peers, neighbors, families and communities.

We are all we have. Only solidarity will get us through this.