A Hundred Fragrant Seeds

Friends,

So far, my job has taught me that desk graffiti, cafeteria lunches, and teenage giggling are a universal language. And, I guess, so is Toto’s “Africa.” I have about ten full days under my belt, and I don’t want to be foolishly optimistic, but I think I’m going to make it.

Ghost month has come to a close here in Taiwan, which means fewer tables in the street with food on them, and fewer dirty looks when I whistle without thinking. At the beginning of ghost month, someone told me I shouldn’t whistle as whistling is known to attract ghosts. Ghosts are more active at night and during ghost month, so you especially don’t whistle at night during ghost month. Of course, as soon as someone told me this, I found myself accidentally beginning to whistle constantly without being conscious of it. So I have a parade of ghosts. I haven’t asked how our nearby neighbors with whistling pet birds deal with the ghosts yet, but I will find out for you, gentle reader.

A question I get from people here in Taipei a lot is how I’ve found the move. This is too big of a question to answer on its own, so I pretend like they’ve asked me about something more specific. Maybe how I have found the food, or how I have found living in an apartment versus spending ten nine years living in a house, or how I’ve enjoyed sweating more in two months than in the previous fifteen years. The boring, unsurprising truth is that Taipei has quickly become my new normal. The food, the apartment, the public transportation, the heat (ok, the humidity), using cash, etc. etc. etc. all feels like something I’ve been doing for longer than the three months we’ve been here.

The part that doesn’t feel normal yet is that I still feel like I’m taking up too much space. This is especially true on public transportation, where I always feel huge and in the way of people trying to get on or off, but it’s also true in a bunch of other spaces. Like a restaurant, where there’s no reason to feel bad, but I still do: sliding my chair out a little further to fit my legs under the table, having to adjust a little more to fold myself onto the low stools some places use. Or, even more irrationally, feeling stupid ashamed when sitting down in a quiet cafe and misjudging the physics of the chair/body/floor situation and making a loud noise. It’s something I’ve done a thousand times in the US without thinking about it for more than a few seconds, but the handful of times I’ve done it in Taiwan it reverberates for hours in my head. The loud foreigner, always being a disturbance. The little bit of uncertainty about a few things calls everything into question.

But it will go away! And I am learning so, so much. On the Mandarin front, the title of this newsletter comes from the word for passionfruit: 百香果, bǎi xiāng guǒ, literally translated as “a hundred fragrant seeds.” Which works well for passionfruit! There is a man who sells bags of four small passionfruit from the back of his van for $100NTD (about $3.30USD) in an alley between the IKEA and the subway. The first time we bought them because I thought they were plums. They were not plums, and I do not recommend biting a passionfruit as if it were a plum. The second time we bought them because they were really good passionfruit. Another Mandarin tidbit: a lot of compound words use 心, which means heart. So 開心 / open heart = happy, 粗心 / coarse heart = reckless, but the best one is a combination you’ll see everywhere, 小心. 小 is a character you learn early as it’s on every menu — 小中大 — small, medium, large. Small heart, small heart, why is there small heart all over Taipei? Well small heart is the word for careful or caution. So, small heart, don’t lean on the subway doors.

But yeah, don’t rely on literal translations.

Further reading:

• I don’t know the answer to the current state of media. No one wants to pay for journalism but ad-supported work doesn’t seem to be realistic. Megan Greenwell’s exit from Deadspin and this accompanying article highlight the problems with media as investment. Someone hurry up and figure it out, please?
• Have you ever wondered what some candy bars that you’ve seen in the grocery store but never tried actually taste like? ME TOO! Thankfully, there’s a calorie-free way of finding out: this excellent Twitter thread .
• I don’t like the headline but this Bretbug bedbug Stephens saga is ridiculous. Good on Karpf for riding it in a way that brings some much needed sunlight to Stephens’ behavior.
• Ever wanted to know where that S made of six straight lines and eight diagonal lines came from? You know the one. You do. Here’s an 18 minute video about the S everyone drew in elementary school that was interesting enough for me to watch all the way through.
• I am finally, slowly catching up on the podcasts I missed over the past few months. The Death, Sex, Money interview series they’ve had in place of their regular content while Anna Sale is on maternity leave has been one of the best runs of radio I’ve ever listened to, period. I feel bad saying that because Anna is also awesome! But, yeah, these are incredible. They ran from the beginning of April until the end of June, check them out here .
• What’s the deal with crab rangoon ?
• I walk past a Falun Dafa building every day (and some Falun Dafa protesters occasionally), so learning about their role in the 2016 election through their “media” company The Epoch Times has been a journey.
• RATS IN ALASKA RATS IN ALASKA

This weekend is the Mid-Autumn / Moon Festival. We get the day off on Friday, but I’ve already started celebrating by consuming a thousand calories worth of mooncakes per day. I think the ones filled with egg yolk are the consistently best ones, while the fruit/nut/red bean ones are much more inconsistent. Apparently it’s a good time to wish for things, so my wish goes to you, dear readers.

I have a bookmark in front of me that instructs me to find the uncommon beauty in common things. Same goes to you.

-g