About Jason Shew

If you have no idea who Jason Shew is, start with this site: www.jasonshew.com. Here’s a TL;DR version for you:

• He/him
• INTP
• linguistics, TESOL, and coldżone
• music-making and Arikid
• human resources management and corporate identity design
• photography, coding, and design
• wiki-binge addict
• Ontario-based

Yes, that’s all about his public/professional persona.

If you desire to have an intimate knowledge of him, just read on.

Names

In North America, he is referred to as Jason Shew professionally or Jay Shew in day-to-day life, whereas in Asia, he is widely referred to as Jason Shew (among English and Cantonese speakers) or Shao Jingxiang (among Mandarin speakers), with Zhang Jia formerly used at school.

Born in 1986 to a Chinese family swamped with changes, Shew has been given more than one legal name, including a maternal surname 邵 (Cantonese: Shiu⁶, Mandarin Chinese: Shào), whose “neutralized” speech sound, based on a number of Asian languages (Korean, Japanese, etc.), is Shew, and a given name 敬翔 (Cantonese: King-ch’eung, Mandarin: Jingxiang). Another given name is 佳 (Cantonese: Kai, Mandarin: Jia), complete with a paternal surname 張 (Cantonese: Cheung, Mandarin: Zhang). Since both given names start with the same consonant J in Mandarin, he got his English moniker Jason.

The neutralized surname Shew smacks of a sense of denationalization. His indisposition to Hanyu Pinyin signals his keenness to distance himself from the decaying present-day Chinese culture and the contentious Chinese stereotypes (even as a Chinese Canadian).

His middle name is Barry, which was given in remembrance of his late de facto step-father, Mr. Baorui Zheng.

Born under Aries in the Year of the Tiger and often being “reckless,” he’s also dubbed TIGER.

Denationalization

Denationalization is not a denial of someone’s native land but a cautious detachment from certain social, political, and cultural milieu. Shew is not believed to be a stereotypical Chinese because he …

• embraces individualism rather than collectivism.
• doesn’t subscribe to theories like “Blood is thicker than water.”
• is averse to most Chinese conventions.
• is averse to knockoff products and intellectual property theft.
• is averse to nationalism and totalitarianism.
• is averse to censorship imposed on all media.
• is far from prudish.
• is LGBTQIA-friendly.
• always seeks high levels of privacy.
• cares very much about public order.
• doesn’t live on WeChat, TikTok (Douyin), etc.
• is not prone to compulsive buying disorder on November 11 or December 12.
• does not get butthurt easily.

Philosophy

Shew believes that …

• family members do not necessarily outweigh friends.
• too much desire (of whatever kind) is detrimental and even disastrous, and so is any type of addiction.
• Earth is not flat at all.
• one should not work only for money.
• one should know the ins and outs of parenting before having a family.
• nationalists and radicals are toxic.
• good intentions can’t justify bad results.
• good end can’t justify bad means.
• everyone has freedom in line with their liabilities.
• probity matters a lot.
• age, gender, and status are not reasons to glorify or belittle a person.

Aromanticism

Shew is not the average romantic guy seen in your class or workplace: most of the time he keeps himself alone, feeling little to no romantic attraction toward anyone. Usually aromanticism and asexuality accompany one another, but this is not his case at all. He’s aromantic yet allosexual. To someone who wonders if he feels sexually attracted to men or women, he usually makes a bona fide response “Anybody but you,” when he deems this question to be insipid or casual. In the same case, “Nobody but you” could be either ad lib flirtation or a sincere utterance. Gauge his mood if you’re there.

This does not mean that romance and sexuality have no place in a conversation with him. As an INTP, he is willing to discuss these issues only in a serious manner. Technically, he is aromantic 💔, gynephilic ⚤ as well as androphilic ⚣, yet only attracted to cisgender individuals. Humorously, he calls himself a complex number, which is a+bi. ⇢ Read more

Netizenship

Shew became a digital citizen in as early as 1999. The first websites he frequented were Yahoo! and AOL. Apart from the Web, he came into contact with Email, IM, and Telnet in that year.

He started to craft his first homepage in 1999 (using Microsoft FrontPage) and his first website proper (arikid.com) in 2006, hence the time span shown in the footer. Over the past 10+ years he hopped from one blog to another, but these sites came along by the same token: serving as his online personal silo.

Photos