🌁 Empty Mall Reflections

What do you mean by “empty mall”?

Ash Wednesday was on February 18th, and that day marked the beginning of the Lenten Season.

The day right after, I went to the nearby shopping mall just a few minutes from work to eat lunch. It was a pretty stormy day, and it was quite cold. It felt like a perfect day for something warm and comforting, so I decided on a cozy combo of ramen, gyoza, and Oolong Milk Tea. Work wasn’t that busy that morning, so I had a long lunch break to enjoy it. Honestly, it was the perfect moment to warm up, decompress, and reset before the second half of the day.

The ramen restaurant I went to was just outside the mall. Since the entrance was only a few feet away, I decided to take a short walk for some after-lunch movement. At that point, I was really shocked– the mall was almost completely empty. A kids’ indoor playground, a few clothing and accessory shops, a boba booth… and that was basically it. This was one of those moments that reminded me of my current age and how I’m inching toward the middle-age chapter of life.

The mall used to be the central heart of my youth. ¹ Back in high school, groups of friends would go to the mall just to wander, talk, and be seen. We’d always look for someone with a driver’s license who was willing to take the rest of us– because the bus? Absolutely not. We’d save quarters just to hop from one bus line to another to reach the “good” malls. Since Union City doesn’t have an indoor mall of its own, the go-to spots, within our small area anyway, were always in Hayward or Fremont.

Seeing the mall so empty made me think about how everything eventually fades. The places that used to feel loud, alive, and central to our lives slowly grow quiet. And maybe that’s why the timing hit harder — it was right at the start of Lent, a season about letting go, stripping away distractions, and looking at what actually matters. In a weird way, the empty mall felt like a reminder that life moves on, and sometimes you’re meant to release the old so you can grow into whatever comes next.

Lent 2026

For Lent this year, I’m keeping this simple. I’m not doing anything dramatic or extreme– just focusing on pulling back from the noise a little. Less scrolling, less mindless snacking, less rushing from one thing to the next. I want to use these forty days to make room for quiet, for small habits that felt nourishing, and for reconnecting with parts of myself I tend to ignore when life gets too loud.

Recently, I learned that those with chronic medical conditions, such as diabetes, are exempt from Meatless Fridays. We need all the protein that we could get that won’t starve us to death. However, in exchange for being exempt, here are the things I decided to temporarily sacrifice and do the following activities instead:

• Giving up playing video games (Switch, mobile, PC)
• Giving up engaging in social media²
• Participating in Hallow’s Lent Pray40 Challenge³
• I’ll be reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov because of the Lent Pray40 Challenge. I’ve been wanting to read this classic novel for ages, but never had the time and was also intimidated. Maybe with the help of this challenge, I can finally read this book step-by-step
• In relation to that, I vowed myself to read more books. I haven’t read any books for months now because of studies, but to keep myself distracted from video games and social media, reading is a must
• I’ll also be learning and doing more art, especially pixel art and character art
• Going back to studying more courses on Coursera… and occassionally look for potential job openings
• Work on more web projects and more data analysis capstone projects… the portfolio stuff
• Sometime in March, which is still Lent, I’ll also have to file my taxes too

After Lent, I’ll probably continue doing everything I mentioned above that list, except I’ll also be playing video games again and reading social media.

Anyway, enough about Lent and life cleanup — let me switch gears real quick because The Bay just WON today and my East Bay heart is screaming.😱

Shout Out: The Bay is Golden Again

Congrats to our East Bay homegirl, who brought not one, but two golds back home to The Bay~

The U.S. has been in drought of a gold medal in figure skating since Sarah Hughes. We haven’t had a figure skating medal from anyone from the Bay since Kristi Yamaguchi ⁴. And on February 19th, Gold has returned to us.

There was a time some years ago when I used to frequent the local sports center and getting in the U-JAM ⁵ groove when one of my friends mentioned she would be enrolling her two daughters at St. Moritz in Oakland for figure skating, and that was around in the late 2010s. It was then that I realized that my friend just enrolled her daughters to one of the country’s most respective ice skating clubs. Both Kristi Yamaguchi and Alysa Liu trained under St. Moritz ISC.

The Bay has raised figure skating champions in history. Here are some of the familiar names I could remember:

The Olympic Winners

• James Grogan (Oakland): 1952 Olympic Bronze
• Peggy Fleming (San Jose): 1968 Olympic Gold
• Charlie Tickner (Lafayette): 1980 Olympic Bronze
• Brian Boitano (Sunnyvale): 1988 Olympic Gold
• Debi Thomas (San Jose): 1988 Olympic Bronze
• Kristi Yamaguchi (Fremont): 1992 Olympic Gold
• Alysa Liu (Oakland): 2026 Olympic Gold

Bonus Skating Legends

• Rudy Galindo (San Jose) – 1996 U.S. Champion, World Bronze
• Polina Edmunds (San Jose) – 2014 Olympian, 2015 U.S. Nationals Silver
• Karen Chen (Fremont) – 2017 U.S. Champion, Olympian
• Vincent Zhou (San Jose/Palo Alto) – 2019 World Bronze, 2x Olympian

Here’s the thing: The Bay Area isn’t exactly known for snowy winters. But we’ve always had Tahoe, Yosemite, and the rest of the Sierra Nevada up in NorCal — the perfect training ground for learning skiing, snowboarding, and other winter sports. So even if we don’t get snow at home, we’ve always had world-class access just a few hours away.

Going back to Alysa Liu — this young lady is genuinely amazing and such a breath of fresh air. I remember watching her a few years ago when she was this skinny 16-year-old phenom, then suddenly she disappeared from the sport and later announced her retirement. Reflecting on everything she went through, her journey reminds me a lot of what many of us (active) Catholics feel during the Lent season: stepping back, reassessing life, choosing peace over pressure.

For her, it wasn’t quitting — it was a very long sabbatical she genuinely needed so she could go outside, breathe again, and actually live her life. And because of that sabbatical, she found her love for figure skating once again and decided to return on her own terms.

And when she returned on the ice and on the public eyes, she became an inspiration for everyone out there– future skaters and non-skaters. Not only did she earned the gold, but she reminds us why we’re doing the things we’re best at. It was because it’s for the love of the sport, the love of the field, not because of the results that we hope we would get. She said it herself that she came to the Olympics to show her love, passion, and art of figure skating. She didn’t need the medal, but she ended the night with one.

One of my newest lifelong goals is to get a job in the AI field. But Alysa’s amazing accomplishment also reminded me that to get to that goal, I must first love the field I’m currently entering. There are always tough challenges on the road, but when I find that particular love of the field, I feel that I can overcome each of these obstacles one step at a time.

Back to the empty mall

Standing in that near-silent mall, I realized something: chapters end, but people don’t. We keep choosing what to fight for. Alysa chose the ice again. I’m choosing AI.

I don’t know where this journey will take me yet — but I know I’m walking into it with love, purpose, and the same Bay Area grit that raised Olympic champions. And honestly? That’s more than enough to keep going.

And that’s where I ended my quiet little mall walk — with a reminder that even in empty places, growth still happens.