Friends,

I have returned from those United States. I ate copious amounts of tacos and petted an abundance of dogs (Gracie, Hattie, Pax, Luna, Katie: I already miss you all). I spent more time in a car than the rest of the year combined and was annoyed by every minute of it. The best restaurant I ate at was the vegetarian Indian restaurant Suprabhat in Round Rock, which I also visited 10+ years ago but has definitely gotten better since then; the second best culinary experience was eating Furioso tacos multiple times at Veracruz All Natural (Veracruz, if you’re reading this, you gotta make your horchata a lot less sweet though). This year’s clear sign of climate change was seeing dozens of armadillos in Kentucky, an animal I did not see a single time growing up there. I was off social media an unexpected amount due to Bluesky disappointingly prematurely complying with legislation requiring age verification in the state of Texas, which was surprisingly more isolating than I would’ve guessed. (Note: no other website was affected, and I could’ve very easily just verified my identity by sending ID in to some third party company, but no thank you.) Google Calendar briefly stopped sending email reminders for recurring events and my life almost fell apart as a result (and definitely would’ve fallen apart if the same thing had happened mid-semester). There is a wave of Mahjong popularity crashing over the social circles of western Kentucky that I would love someone to write an article about. Everyone is playing the definitely-legally-not-Pokemon game PALWORLD and the kids are all playing a digital hide and seek game called MECCHA CHAMELEON or the card game TACO CAT GOAT CHEESE PIZZA which is a toned down version of my beloved EGYPTIAN RATSCREW that occupied hours at summer camps. (I was happy to see that the game has a Wikipedia page, and kind of shocked to see that it also has a page over at Bicycle. For me, it didn’t exist outside the confines of my WKU Summer Camp Meccas.) When my niece and nephew went to buy TACO CAT ETC., they were out of the normal-sized one and so they had to buy the “Ridiculously Large Edition” which was, in fact, ridiculously large and added even more comedy to the experience.

Taiwan has a reputation for being overly bureaucratic, but this summer in the US I faced the most annoying bureaucracy of my life. Here is the most important, probably illegal advice I can offer you today: if you decide to move away from the United States, do not tell any financial institutions. Not only is everything more complicated because some things are allowed and some things are not, not only is everything slower because of additional regulation (we have a new debit card that’s going to be here in maybe a month), not only are you limited in who will do business with you, BUT ALSO customer service is even worse than usual because no one knows exactly how it works outside of specific questions, so when, for example, you find out you need to open a new type of account and call to talk to the bank about it and they say “oh sure no problem” and then afterwards you find out that it automatically closed a different account you had and the “oh sure no problem” actually meant there were some problems. This was the first year we had to make some actual changes to our retirement accounts since we’ve moved and the process involved printing scanning signing dozens of documents, about 25 hours on the phone with support, and after a month of wrestling ending with problems we were told wouldn’t be problems at the beginning.

I will not be sending Charles Schwab a Christmas card this year, I can tell you that. BUT if you want advice on managing an IRA while living outside of the US and can listen through a lot of complaints to get it, I’m your guy.

Jet lag is in full force still. I laid down for a nap yesterday at 3:30pm and accidentally slept until 11. Two travel tips: 1) order vegetarian meals when you buy your ticket, they’re better 9/10 times even if you aren’t vegetarian, and 2) the inside of airplanes are very dry, so artificial tears help with eye ache. I still haven’t figured out the caffeine situation when traveling, which is to say I think the best solution would be to taper off a few days before traveling, but I don’t have the willpower for that, so I just don’t drink coffee the day of in hopes of sleeping more and having to pee on the plane less and end up with a wicked headache. I’ve also heard from several people that fasting can help with jet lag, but searching doesn’t reveal any real evidence for that, and, again, the aforementioned dearth of willpower makes me testing it unlikely.

We returned home to a new luxury apartment building starting construction a block away, my favorite neighborhood sesame noodle shop having closed, and a freezer that smelled absolutely horrific. The power was turned off for construction while we were gone, and our refrigerator sometimes doesn’t power back on after an outage without flipping the circuit breaker. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem because we leave a key with a friend, but she had to go out of town unexpectedly and, yeah. I don’t even know why, but the refrigerator itself didn’t have much problem, only the freezer. I blame the frozen lion’s mane mushrooms in sesame oil. Or the ice cubes that turned into puddles then back into ice. Sometimes I imagine renting out the apartment while we’re gone, but obviously that would be more trouble than it’s worth unless it was a very close friend, so instead I dream of buying the apartment next to ours and renting it out to a recurring cast of guests that could involve zany antics. Or just more people from the US visiting and someone to handle circuit breaker flipping.

Taiwan is also greeting us with the edge of a typhoon (playfully named “Typhoon Dolphin” which is probably going to result in some incredible memes) this first weekend back. I’ve already bought too many groceries in case we don’t want to leave the house, but it doesn’t look like it’s going to do much more than drop a lot of rain on Taipei. It works out, though, because even without a typhoon it’s too hot to want to leave the house much anyway.

Further reading:

• I read a lot of books while traveling, but the one that stood out the most was May Sarton’s A Reckoning. It’s about a woman who receives a terminal cancer diagnosis and tries to decide how to fully live the end of her life, while also reflecting on what’s been important to her. It touches heavily on the regret over repressing homosexual love, as well as on the weight of family. Big thanks to my friend Megan for recommending this book after seeing I was interested in literature that deals with end of life.

• Panthea Lee/李佩珊’s longform essay on moving back to Taiwan with the complications of its geopolitical uncertainty, the complications of cultural and linguistic fit, and the complications of finding new ways to be involved in activism/art is so thoughtful and wonderful.

• I loved reading Molly Young’s meandering essay on malls and mall brands and growing up alongside them in a way that’s only implicitly an elegy.

• Any reason is a good reason to read more of fellow Kentuckian bell hooks.

• Do you want some quantitative analysis of punctuation in the western literary canon? Of course you do. Though, I wish the sampling had been a little more diverse.

• I have two bits of peer-reviewed research to share with you: 1) People behave more prosocially (offering their seat to a pregnant woman on the metro) when Batman is present. 2) Connected to last month’s topic, doing exercise before undergoing surgery is associated with better outcomes (this is unsurprising, but even people who regularly exercise might think to dial it back because of stress or worry of bad effects).

It’s been really wonderful to talk to a wide range of people over the last few months who have read Taiwan Travelogue, people from the US, Taiwan, and elsewhere. Mostly positive, but not everyone has appreciated the extensive food cataloging!

Talking to everyone has made me feel a little more optimistic about the problem of cultural hegemony that expresses itself differently in the US and Taiwan. In the US, it’s hard to get people to check out literature that’s not from the US - famously, only about three percent of books published in the US are translations. In Taiwan, though, it’s the opposite; my students who are readers almost never have read Taiwanese literature. They don’t even get Taiwanese books in school, because most of the texts taught in high schools here are classical Chinese literature (and, like the US, fewer and fewer full books are read for class). The same applies to other media too: students often listen to, read, and watch Korean/Japanese/American TV/movies/anime/manga while often not even checking out what Taiwan has to offer. I’ve tried to encourage my students to do so, but awards like Taiwan Travelogue winning the Booker will generate a lot of buzz that propels a conversation that can build momentum for more (like checking out the author or translator’s other work - I’m going to pick up The Boy from Clearwater soon because of this).

Hopefully one day Taiwan’s government decides to fund culture with the resources and expertise similar to how South Korea’s has - all those Korean food shows on Netflix are not there by random! I’m looking forward to sharing more exported Taiwanese culture with you soon. Until then,

-g