Bumper to Bumper Inspection

Friends,

The above photo is from the Taipei International Baking Show , which Carolina and I attended last month. Carolina is an award-winning baker and volunteered annually at a big cake event in Austin, but since moving to Taiwan, home-baking is less common and more inconvenient. We’re limited to a countertop oven, often unfamiliar ingredients, fewer occasions that call for sweet treats, and less motivation to cook at home. But we’re still interested, so we jumped at the opportunity to go to this event, but it was quite different than the Austin-equivalent. First of all, it was gigantic! Of course the name says “international,” but that can mean very little. In this case, there were many vendors and competitors from other countries, taking up multiple halls in an exhibition center. The place was packed, and even included field trip groups from high schools (and a youth baking competition). However, we were surprised to find vendors to be the star of the show. At most baking-related events in the US, the main attraction are the cakes, but here the artistic baking goods were sparse, with equipment manufacturers and food importers taking up the best-placed stands.

I left the event with a newfound desire for a refrigerator-sized oven and baking contraptions that involve conveyor belts and produce dumplings.

February was a medical month for me, but, unusually, not in a bad way! I’m teaching the same class as last semester plus one new class this semester. My new class is part of the “College of Clinical Medicine,” so while I was planning, I looked it up and discovered it only has a PhD associated with it. Basically, students who want to do medical research but aren’t working on becoming MDs. This plus its 5xxx course number made me assume my students would be PhD students.

Reader, I walked into the classroom the first week of class and my students are entirely, pardon my French, grown-ass doctors.

This made some of my icebreaker questions a little… off the mark. (Why did you decide to go down the research path instead of practicing medicine? How long do you expect to spend on your PhD? What do you know about the differences in a research PhD in Taiwan versus the US? etc. etc.) But, other than the imposter syndrome dial being cranked up a little more than usual (these doctors are listening to me ?), it’s going pretty great. The course also overlaps with my other course a lot, so this is the first time since moving to Taiwan that I’ve gotten to really reuse course material. I’ve forgotten how much time that frees up (however, giving writing feedback is a gaseous form of matter: it expands to fill up all available space).

So I can now say I’ve taught in a medical school, a bucket list sounding item I didn’t even know I had.

My second medical experience was our annual health exam. Taiwan requires health exams for foreigners when starting a new job (maybe for locals too, I’m actually not sure), and my wife’s company requires one annually. You can get a cheap one at a hospital and it’s still very thorough. My first one revealed to me (unsurprisingly) that I had scoliosis. But for the last two years, Carolina and I have done half-day exams at a private clinic that only does health exams, and let me tell you, it is quite the experience.

First you have to choose between a rotating buffet of additional tests on top of the base exam based on your age/history/previous exams (much like when visiting a new restaurant that asks me which side I want, I say, “Please choose for me”). Then, a month before your appointment, they mail you five pages of instructions for fasting, arrival, information needed, along with a fecal sample kit with extensive diagrams. How exciting. When you get there, they go over your information, give you a wristband with your identifying number on it, then escort you to a locker room. Everyone changes into the same plain grey light sweatsuit and rubber sandals, and puts their stuff into a locker unlocked by your fancy new wristband. First is peeing in a cup, then from that point forward, you are escorted test to test by a myriad of faces who find you thanks to your wristband: hearing, eyesight, abdominal ultrasound (your liver is a little fatty, but so is everyone else’s), x-ray, something, arterial stiffness? At some point they’re just making stuff up. If there’s congestion at one test there’s a little lounge with plastic dividers and water to sit down and comfortably stare at your phone in. After your blood test, you’re led to a small cafe where you can eat breakfast (sweet potato, sticky rice, dried fruit) and have a cup of soy milk before resuming. It culminates with a consultation with a doctor who goes over everything they’ve found (based on stuff with immediate results) and answers any questions you have. I have a cyst on my kidney. It has not grown since last year. It is not a concern. I should exercise more. Duh.

I’ve got to say, I love the whole experience! I mean, at first it feels very “extra in a dystopian sci-fi,” maybe something Gattaca adjacent. All the patients are dressed the same, all the workers are dressed the same. No one says your name, just looks at your number. But it also feels so… positively efficient? I mean, even the food they give you to break your fast. Fuel for the machine that is our bodies. And I’ve never had this level of scrutiny on my health, but I should have. It should’ve been normal and as painless as this was.

A couple of weeks later you get a large glossy paper packet enumerating and explaining all the results. I paid $50USD extra to get my Vitamin B and Iron checked (could’ve been cheaper if I’d presented symptoms at a doctor’s visit but this was easier since they were drawing blood anyways) because I’ve been having some skin issues and those are a) possible causes and b) common deficiencies amongst vegetarians. Turns out my Vitamin B is great but I’m a little low on Iron and a good bit low on Vitamin D, so if you see me, tell me to go eat some broccoli while standing outside.

(In case I ever have to get back on American insurance, the above medical information is 100% fictional.)

Further reading:

• Taiwan’s former president who was jailed on corruption charges ( read more from A Broad and Ample Road ) has been posting meme images of himself on Instagram . I don’t know what else to say.
• I’m not sure who runs the account LEAP: Voices of Youth (though I should probably find out), but their occasional articles are really great: in-depth explorations of gender-related topics in Taiwan. Really admired this article on Taiwan’s glass ceiling , but all their articles are consistently good. Follow them! They deserve more readers.
• I don’t engage with comics as much as I used to or want to, but I still make sure to read everything Glen Weldon has to say about them. This review of the latest Ant-Man movie echoes a lot of my feelings about this “phase” of MCU movies and is just so fun to read.
• I’m kind of surprised I haven’t seen much about gas stoves here in Taiwan, but I hope I can switch to induction in our next home. You should too.
• I’ve started finding more and more good uses for ChatGPT as a teacher (fill-in-the-blank vocabulary questions are #1!), but the way people talk about it still blows its potential out of proportion. Ted Chiang’s take in The New Yorker is a really good explanation of why . I really appreciated the tone and content of my own university’s statement about ChatGPT’s use . Speaking of, did you catch that Vanderbilt used ChatGPT to write an email to students about a school shooting ? I actually think that’s a good use case for it — but as a first draft, not a final one, and don’t leave the footnote at the bottom!
• A refrain I’ve repeated a hundred times since moving to Taiwan is that having children would be the one difference that would make me less likely to want to live here. Taiwan’s education system is so, so stressful and still too rooted in memorization and exams. But, I don’t know if I can honestly keep telling people that. There’s all the mess in Florida with… everything, but the drum beats are the same across America. Here’s Texas . Those who want to weaken public schools have a much easier job than those who want to strengthen them, and they are winning, overwhelmingly.
• A tweet that addresses my happiness with daily life in Taiwan , and a feeling I’m going to try to hold on for as long as possible.
• My first attempt at misozuke (Japanese pickles, mentioned last month ) did not turn out well. This is one of those recipes where I wish I had watched a video before attempting it, as the written description and photos did not fully convey what I should’ve known (also I probably used too weak miso).

I recently finished a book that took me two months to read, The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan . I picked this book up because it was next to something else I wanted from the library. My library has the option for me to get them to set aside the books I want at the front desk, but I never do it, I prefer combing, for just this reason. Who knows what you’ll find?

I expected to skim it and ultimately find it boring, but it turned out to be maybe the best academic collection I’ve ever read? It’s a translated chronological tour through Taiwan’s literary conversations. It was really great because of how closely the conversations people were having about books mirrored the culture at large, e.g. one writer saying Taiwan’s literature needed to be more like Japan’s, another saying it should be more like China’s, another saying it should be more like the west’s, and another saying it should not look anywhere else for inspiration but instead develop its own, independent literature. It had grandiose statements from new literary journals that would fit in perfectly on Literary Twitter. It had nitpicky pedantic acerbic takes. In short, it surprised me and is going to lead me to a lot of writers to check out in the future.

I hope you pick up the book next to the book you were aiming for and find something surprising and delightful as well.

-g