Busan and on and on

Friends,

Happy New Year! The world is on fire. In her wonderful book, Reading with Patrick , Michelle Kuo introduced the new year haiku by Kobayashi Issa (tr. Robert Hass) to me:

New Year’s Day —
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average

I feel this haiku in my soul, but this year I found a second poem that also captures the moment well for me, this time by Ryōkan Taigu (tr. K. Tanahashi):

Today’s begging is finished; at the crossroads
I wander by the side of Hachiman shrine
talking with some children.
last year, a foolish monk;
this year, no change!

This month marks the eighth anniversary of me sending out this newsletter! I think it also marks the latest I’ve ever sent it out. We spent the first week of the year traveling to Busan, and at the tail end of the trip I came down with some shapeshifting illness that has seemed like it’s on the verge of dissipating for four days but lingers on like a mysterious odor. Each day I think if I feel a little worse I will go to the doctor and if I feel a little better I will write this newsletter and then I coasted along in a haze instead.

Busan, South Korea’s second largest city, is a short 2hr20min flight from Taipei. The above photo is from Gamcheon Village, a district of the city that was revitalized to become an artistic tourist destination (controversially, of course: some alleys were strewn with no entry signs and apparently no one wants to buy the homes there ). Busan is on the coast, with a lot of nearby hills, so it’s stretched out in this odd way, making it seem like an assortment of slices of cities instead of the gigantic metropolis it is (almost 3.5 million people, only a little smaller than LA). The beaches among dense urban buildings particularly reminded me of Sydney’s Bondi Beach, but with the skyscrapers overlooking it instead.

We loved (pre-Graham illness) Busan! As travelers, our perspective on a city as big as this is of course very, very limited, but compared to Seoul we found more friendliness and more variety of food and attractions (the seed-filled hotteok and seed-covered kkulppang were our favorites, both are loaded with honey; we also enjoyed gonggal-ppang and will try Maangchi’s recipe soon). However, Seoul definitely won the fashion wars: I still remember the impeccable dress among the older men on the subway of Seoul, and aspire to such greatness. Busan’s subway stations are massive, and the arrival of trains is heralded by the sounds of seagulls or foghorns (as opposed to the classical piano of Taipei ). We visited “Texas Street” and found it full of Cyrillic and shady-looking nightclubs and weird meats, which tracks. Out of the three museums we visited, the most gripping exhibit was “Styx Symphony” by Yuri An, which was a two-channel video pairing with four female poets’ work (Sadako Kurihara, Wislawa Szymborska, Maya Angelou and Goh Jung Hee). It was really incredible and I wish there was some way for me to share it with you, but I can’t find it online.

Korea is coffee-obsessed. At one point, we sat in a coffee shop and looked across the street and could see three other coffee shops. Our favorite was the City Farm House Cafe in Seomyeon, which had incredible coffee and homemade yogurt, but was such an odd space. It had a first floor with about 10 tables, we never saw more than 2 occupied, a large unoccupied courtyard, and an empty hydroponics and cold brew display, but then it had a gigantic, gorgeous second floor with a second unused coffee bar, a room for roasting coffee, and a space for cooking classes. But again, even though we visited four times, we never saw more than a handful of people there.

This emptiness was emblematic of January Busan. It’s a city setup to welcome summer crowds, so all the restaurants and cafes and beaches were lightly occupied, which was sometimes eerie but more often nice (though I did shudder to think of the heating pumped into a lot of the big empty spaces). So many skyscrapers, but the crowds on the streets didn’t seem to line up with how many people the buildings should have contained. Maybe they were hiding inside, or in other places. It was cold, for us, having gotten accustomed to Taipei, but not really that cold overall. So. Busan. I recommend it heartily, but probably not in the summer.

The only sign of the political… instability in South Korea was a fiery speech in front of a relatively small but very intense crowd we caught the edges of on our way home one night, and the televisions in the airport.

Now our trip is over and I’m only working a little as a tutor/editor until the semester resumes mid-February. I have big plans! Walks, trash pickup, writing, reading, video games, exercise, lesson plan adjustments, shoe repair, and more. But first, recovery.

Finally, some annoying news. This month marks one year of being on WordPress, and honestly it’s been a disappointing experience — the interface has tons of stuff I don’t need and makes it difficult to easily do what I want, they added AI crap, and their CEO has been terrible lately . The next newsletter is going to come from a new service — probably ButtonDown as they seem like the least bad option. Just like last time, you won’t need to do anything — next month’s email will just look a little different. Again.

A Little Best of 2024:

These lists ring weird for me because I rarely read or watch or play anything new, but I like sharing them anyways.

• Books: My favorite books published in 2024 were both memoir-ish. Hanif Abdurraqib’s There’s Always This Year , which is about basketball and growing up and community and cycles and is devastatingly brilliant, and Crystal Wilkinson’s Praisesong for Kitchen Ghosts , which is about cooking and family and history and finding the presence of something larger than yourself in your home. Beyond those two, I also loved The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa (a quiet short novel about memory and care), Study Gods by Yi-Lin Chiang (a nonfiction academic text studying the top high schoolers in China), and Stay True (a Gen-X Taiwanese-American coming-of-age memoir that was profoundly beautiful).
• Three games I loved: Astro Bot , Paradise Killer , and Nine Sols . The first was pure distilled video game-y fun in a way that casts doubt on the rest of the industry. The second is just a vehicle for a gripping story and top-tier world building — it’s vaguely a whodunnit but you just see it play out and have little agency. The last one is an incredibly difficult Metroidvania developed in Taiwan and inspired by Tao-futurism that I wrote about a couple of years ago when it was still being funded — it was worth the wait.
• I didn’t see a single movie that I loved in 2024, and the only TV shows I have to recommend are Frieren and Spy Family . They’re both anime, but even if you’re not an anime person, I would recommend them without reservation. Frieren takes a common idea from fantasy stories — that elves and humans live/work together, but elves live millenia-long lives — and explores what that would actually look like for the relationships and psychology in this touching philosophical way. It has magic, and some fights, and a lot of great humor, but those are in service of this bigger ponderous exploration that’s SO GOOD. Spy Family is much smaller and sillier. A spy needs a cover family, accidentally chooses to marry an assassin who needs a cover family as well and adopts a child who has an imperfect ability to read other people’s thoughts. Hijinks ensue. It’s warm and fun and silly and yes.
• Spy Family takes place in a fictionalized cold war Germany, and Frieren uses tons of German names and is set in a clearly European setting. I desperately want to read something smart about modern anime’s unrelenting obsession with Germany. Attack on Titan , Fullmetal Alchemist , Monster, Neon Genesis Evangelion ‘s Asuka, etc. etc. etc. If you look online every discussion of this boils down to “history duh!” which is such a handwavey bullshit answer. Someone send me, or write me, that article.

Further reading:

• There were several great articles connected to Taiwanese culture last month:
• For the Texas Observer , Josephine Lee writes about a community of politically active Taiwanese in Houston , which I was completely unaware of. The article uses the word “nationalists,” which is complicated, but read on and you’ll see.
• In Atlas Obscura , Clarissa Wei covered the iterative weirdness of Pizza Hut’s meme Taiwanese offerings . I’ve mentioned this before — they’re smart little marketing stunts that I refuse to try, mostly because I haven’t eaten Pizza Hut on purpose in a long, long time.
• At NPR , read Emily Feng on southern Taiwan opera , with its connections to Taoism and Taiwan’s history. The photos are so good!
• And on CNN , Wayne Chang describes a NYE tradition I wasn’t familiar with: people get together in Da’an Park (Taipei’s version of Central Park) and cry . Catharsis in honor of a scene from the film Vive L’amour . I did not partake — I dutifully trudged up a hill to watch Taipei 101 explode in a haze of light and pollution then ate my grapes, made my wishes, and went to bed.
• Nikki Giovanni’s loss this year leaves a massive hole in the American poetic landscape. Here’s my personal favorite from her, “Resignation.”
• Watching Kenji’s transformation over the past year has been remarkable. I am lucky in that I haven’t been gripped by alcohol the way a lot of people I know have, but even so I’ve cut back in the last year to the point where I’ve gone a month without drinking at all. Highly recommend you watch this video and think about who needs to hear it.
• Patrick Fealey’s Esquire first-person essay on being homeless is written as well as any memoir, but also is a clear-eyed look at how the system is setup to fail everyone. Medical, police, shelters — all of them bouncing off of each other in ways that make them incapable of actual help.
• I loved this exploration/prototype of how subtitles for music could be improved .
• Still wrestling with how I’m going to continue to both “teach” the use of LLMs and pushback against that usage at the same time. Here are two recent articles I plan to include in my next semester curriculum: The first is on its dismissal of process by a psychologist, the second is a peer-reviewed article that links its use (unsurprisingly) with lower critical thinking ability . (EDIT: the last link here turns out to be from a predatory journal, so probably shouldn’t really take it as evidence.)
• Reading Ed Zitron is probably bad for me, because I agree with him so vehemently and get angry and each time I read him I spend a lot of time changing my habits in tiny tiny inconsequential ways. But, damnit, he’s right. You should be mad, too.
• In Korea, I read two really good, really really different Korean novels. Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-Reum (tr. Shanna Tan) is a slightly cheesy warm hug of a novel with a wonderful anti-capitalist heart. We Do Not Part by Nobel Prizewinner Han Kang (trs. E. Yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris) is a brutal, difficult book about friendship and sacrifice, that ties together a modern female friendship with the anti-socialist massacres in post-WW2 South Korea. It’s a really masterful technical novel too, using the theme of “uncertainty” in a lot of different ways, all of which are crucial to the form and the content. There’s an excerpt at The New Yorker in the guise of a short story, but I’m not going to link it because I think you should just read the book. Not that anyone asked, but I’ve now read all of Han’s English translations, and would rank them thus: Human Acts > The Vegetarian > We Do Not Part > Greek Lessons > The White Book .

I have found that one of my favorite parts of traveling are the “walls of wishes,” whatever you may call them. They could be the ema at Japanese temples or the locks at a tourist location or the wall of graffiti at a tourist-centric cafe. I can read these messages endlessly. I can’t get enough of seeing what people desire, what they think is appropriate to wish for, who they’re in love with, what slice of themselves they want to leave behind in this moment. In the past few years I have seen prayer talismans hoping for Nvidia to hit a certain stock price, for a baby brother, for a child to get into business school, and for the happiness of a Korean boy band. I have a picture from Seoul of a lock that wishes for a long life, owning a house, and having a daughter, in that order. In Sapporo a child’s handwriting asks for a “puppy sheepadoodle” and then for his dad to stop smoking. In Busan, we found a wish that read, “I want my mom to always be this pretty and healthy. I will become a billionaire and live happily with her every single day for the rest of our lives. -Bobby.” Another wants to find a man who will be with her in a “power couple” and lists her Instagram handle at the bottom.

It’s the beginning of a new year, a good time to think about what you would condense down to a wish. What’s on your ema?

-g