Friends,

As mentioned last month, Feng Chia University/逢甲大學 in Taichung invited me to give a lecture based on my courses at NTU, so we used it as an excuse to spend a long weekend there. It was the first time somewhere outside of Taipei has invited me!

The lecture went fine. I always follow the same pattern: readily agree, then panic when the time approaches and swear I’ll never agree to do something like this again, then enjoy the actual event. Repeat. And no matter where it is, Taiwan or the US, the majority of the audience are students who are compelled to be there due to extra credit or some other responsibility, which never bothers me since I remember being in the same situation as a student. It’s still fine, you just focus on the people who are engaged. Each time I meet nice people and get an interesting peek into how other places work.

Feng Chia is one of the older and larger universities in Taiwan (1961/20,000 students), but every time I told someone Taipei I was headed there, every single person’s reaction was to tell me to go to the nearby night market. Apparently it’s famous, though for what I still don’t know. We visited and found it to have the same food, and even some of the exact same signs, as most other night markets. Maybe it’s the narrow winding alleys, which are a little more inviting, or maybe it’s the energy from the university, or maybe it’s just older and thus its popularity is rooted in history. I don’t know! We ended up eating Mexican food, largely because said Mexican food had an added bonus of being allowed to pet a dog.

If you’re ever in Taichung, my #1 recommendation is the Comics Museum, which is oddly contained within a Japanese colonial era prison. While we were there they had a display from a high school comic creation competition, and it was so lovely and full of creativity. The Literature Museum is also great, but more difficult to appreciate for a non-fluent audience. The tree at the top of this email, though, is in the middle of the lit museum and worth the trip by itself.

We love the atmosphere in Taichung. It’s much more relaxed than Taipei for a variety of reasons that are all connected. It’s less dense, has a lower cost of living, and most people who want a hustle lifestyle have moved to Taipei, but it still has all the restaurants and culture that we could want. I know, though, that I would never want to live there because of one weird reason: their sidewalks. The sidewalks are infuriating.

Sidewalks are private property in Taiwan, but owners are supposed to keep them open for access. This is not enforced, and thus does not happen. This also means that the height and material of adjacent sidewalks is wildly inconsistent. Taipei apparently passed a law in 2024 saying there’s no motorcycle parking in the sidewalk arcades, but in my neighborhood owners have to fight to prevent people from parking in front of their storefronts, and most don’t. Taipei’s sidewalks are mostly still usable (for me, not for people with mobility issues - people in wheelchairs regularly have to go into the road alongside motor vehicles), but Taichung’s are completely unusable, with vehicles and stalls and furniture and appliances regularly fully blocking the path. A few hours of walking there and I was contemplating vandalism.

Inconsistent law enforcement is a facet of every country, and the sidewalk situation is part of the reason I’m not more excited for recent announcements that the Taipei government wants to make the city smoke-free. They’ve just recently begun the campaign by opening some designated smoking areas and making one tourist-heavy district smoke-free. It’s too soon to tell how successful they’ll be, but I would love so much if it makes a big impact. I don’t have high hopes though. Smoking is already illegal outside of hospitals, schools, and convenience stores, but every day I pass by people smoking directly in front of the signs announcing those laws. In fact, you can see two such smokers in front of Taiwan University Hospital in the Google Streetview.

The most optimistic of my friends are uncertain as to how realistic the smoke-free city proposals are, while the majority immediately say they think even if the law is passed, it won’t be enforced. No one I’ve spoken to is expecting a big change. They place a lot of their blame on democracy: no one wants to piss off voters by telling them where to smoke, or park, or drive, even (I will campaign vigorously for the politician that gets motorcycles/scooters out of my morning market). I want to be optimistic, I want to stop testing my breath-holding capacity while walking the city, but it’s hard. Here’s the one sliver of hope: a total ban is a lot easier to enforce than limited bans. A common complaint among foreigners is that public transportation in Taipei doesn’t allow any food or drink, not even water. “What if I need to take medicine?!” they opine. But the thing is, if water was allowed, then the ban on drinks would be meaningless. Opaque thermoses would lead to people drinking whatever they want. Similarly, if you put a ban on people smoking 50 meters from a hospital entrance, and someone is around meter 40, enforcement is a more blurry, debatable matter.

So, here’s hoping that the people who want to avoid smoke are louder than the people who want to smoke, and here’s hoping that sometime in the near future the only time I need to hold my breath is to avoid breathing in the money being sent to gods and ancestors.

(Don’t worry, if the smoking ban goes through, I’ve already lined up my next big complaint: the betel nut plastic bags that litter the ground all over Taipei.)

Further reading:

• Thank you to Saeed Jones for sharing Tyrese L. Colman’s 2017 essay on grief and trauma and writing through both, “How to Mourn”. It’s an incredible read I’m sad to have missed at the time and glad to have found now.

• There is a sad dearth of non-competitive food shows being made today. Thankfully, Korea’s soft-power-export machine has provided us with a few wonderful hours of them in the form of K Food Show, which shows up on Netflix as A Nation of Broth/Kimchi/Tteok. They’re beautifully shot and hunger-inducing, and the performative hyperbole that infects all these shows is a small price to pay.

• While TV/film food programming is lacking, food writing is never lacking. The best essay I’ve read this year is Caity Weaver on the best free restaurant bread in the United States. No other enticement necessary. (Buried deep in this exquisite article is a link to what might be the first American restaurant review from 1859, which is also well worth a read.) Please note that I had already decided it was the best essay I’ve read this year before I got to the part that biases me towards it, which is that it features a landmark from the background of my childhood: Lambert’s, Home of Throwed Rolls.

• Craig Fehrman on being mauled by a dog, the Lewis and Clark expedition, and PTSD.

• Kiese Laymon’s writing is always hard to read because he is so painfully, unflinchingly honest about himself. His latest, on gambling addiction, is extra difficult because of how much more unavoidable gambling is today than it was even five years ago.

• For some reason, there was a few weeks last month where the soy milk in Taiwan was off. It was slightly thicker and slightly acidic, like yogurt, and the problem spanned multiple brands. Of course my immediate thought was that the problem was me, but it was leaving a new residue in my latte glasses. Evidence! Then I scoured the internet to see if anyone else was noticing this phenomenon and found nothing. So I bought some coconut milk. And it was off! The batch I bought had a sulfuric, eggy smell when the can opened, which, again, was definitely not present before. (And, again, my wife was able to confirm that my senses weren’t betraying me. Yet.) So, spendthrift that I am and unwilling to pay the steep cost of oat milk from the fancy grocery store, I started making my own oat milk. The recipe I use is simple: oats, vanilla, a little honey or maple syrup, a little salt, and a lot of cold water. The result is tasty but very thin, a perfect milk for a very refreshing iced latte. The soy milk has since returned to normal, so now I have options, but maybe next time things go sideways I’ll try a rice milk recipe.

Soon, I’ll have new and exciting adventures in Taiwanese healthcare to share with you: I’m getting my first colonoscopy next month! How exciting. It’ll only be the second time in my life I’ve been experienced general anesthesia, and the last time was when I took my acne medicine without water in high school and it burned a hole in my esophagus. The colonoscopy prep medicine is called Bowklean, which is hilarious by itself, but even more hilarious is that it came with a branded flimsy disposable plastic cup for measuring, complete with its wonderful logo, that they think I’ll hold onto for a month until the procedure. Apparently it’s a third generation bowel cleanser, which obviously eases my mind.

I’m really grateful to Anne Helen Petersen for her article about her colonoscopy - of course I’m still nervous, but it feels a lot better to read a long testimonial from a voice I trust rather than a bunch of short internet comments from randos and unhelpful summaries from healthcare websites. Petersen’s article starts from a foundation of how many topics are made worse by our avoiding talking about them, and man I could not agree more. Taiwanese people are generally more blunt about the wonders of the human body than I am used to, but we have to live in these things for quite a while, so we shouldn’t be shy about talking about them.

Right?

-g