Modern Chinese-American Woman: I'm Back and Better than Ever

Hi Friends,

Many of you may know I've been frustrated that Feedburner, the service that automatically emailed you posts was discontinued. I looked up and down, asked everyone I know, even asked if I could pay a college student or "under 30" to help me figure this out. But alas-no helpers.

Then I realized AI could help. A friend has encouraged me to use Perplexity and ChatGPT and Claude for writing. My gut reaction was NO, I'm trying to learn the craft of writing-not to use tools to write for you. The truth is AI has been very helpful in historical facts about ships coming from Hong Kong to San Francisco in the early 1900s or conditions in immigration detention centers upon arrival. I've used AI to understand what clothes people wore on Mott Street in the 1930s and how long it took to get from SF to NYC by train back then.

I asked both ChatGPT and CoPilot to suggest alternatives to Feedburner as an automatic email post distribution service and the suggestions were obvious: Mailchimp, Constant Contact, all companies you've heard of. I settled on follow.it because it is free. Perplexity had step by step instructions which I followed and started feeling great. Could it be this easy? Gee I could have done this months ago if not last year. Then I got stuck--couldn't import my followers (for the record there are 70 of you 😉). After an hour of frustration and anger (I get that from my Dad), I submitted a ticket to their help desk and they told me what I did wrong and fixed it for me. How nice.

Then the funny part came. You had to verify that these were real email addresses who really wanted to receive this blog, and provide screenshots of traffic to the blog. Since I haven't written in awhile, there were only 3 viewers month-to-date. After sending them various screenshots I realized I should have sent Google analytics screenshots of a month with popular posts and lots of traffic. What if they denied me for too few viewers and I went through all that for nothing. Nevertheless they imported all confirmed email addresses and here I am.

I'm writing more in my third Adult writing class-Memoir 2 so expect to hear more from me. So far the name of my book is "Grandmothers and Granddaughters: May Quan Tsang My Grandmother's Journey". I'm sure I'll change the title many times before you see the book.

I've been busy writing and helping a Swiss colleague whose baby has a rare disease asparagine synthetase deficiency (ASNSD). Please attend and donate, share if you can. Links below.