Cuteness Immersion Program

Friends,

I have spent a good deal of the last month watching from the other side of the world as my friends and family have been buried under ice and outages and capitalism. What a year. What a year of preventable tragedy. Jackson is still in it .

Here in Taiwan we are beginning our third week of the spring semester. I am overwhelmed and apparently under the effects of an eye infection-induced headache. On Friday I stood in front of my students’ parents at an open house and told them the thing I was most worried about was that their students didn’t ask enough questions.

On a positive note, my current obsession is drinking roughly a gallon of roasted barley tea a day and it is a choice I am very happy with. On a positive note, people I know are being vaccinated (Taiwan’s vaccinations are a ways off yet). On a positive note, we took a lovely trip down to Tainan for a night and took the beautiful picture featured above. On a positive note, my wife and I have matching Hello Kitty masks .

Speaking of Hello Kitty, have I told you that she’s everywhere here? Walk down the street for more than five minutes and you will see Hello Kitty umbrellas, motorcycle helmets, masks, backpacks, shirts, and more. We have a Hello Kitty Subway card; my students have Hello Kitty pencils and lunchboxes. There’s a Hello Kitty cafe (Which we have, of course, been to. The food is roughly equivalent to a Steak ’n’ Shake.) and tons of Hello Kitty merchandise shops. Taiwan’s airline, EVA Air, not only has Hello Kitty on their planes but even Hello Kitty-themed flights . But Hello Kitty and her entourage are not the only omnipresent cute cartoons. The most popular messaging app, LINE, has an entire cast as well, and their stuff is everywhere. Taiwan regularly uses a cartoon version of the Formosan Black Bear for everything from its sports competitions to its public transportation and its tourism . And then you have the stray Totoros, Winnie the Poohs, Doraemon, Monsters Inc., and more, just around every corner.

Taiwan has a culture of cuteness. Any big chain here will have cartoon mascots for their business — as an example, one of the most common coffee chains here, Cama Coffee, has small human-sized statues of its mascot sitting on benches outside its cafes that you can take pictures with. Other coffee shops almost all have some sort of cartoon figurines (rough estimate: 50% of all cafes here have a Totoro somewhere inside). They’re used even in very official situations. Blood donations are solicited by anthropomorphic cartoon drops of blood . Subway etiquette posters and street safety signs never feature real people. It’s not just cartoons, either. The Minister of Health posts pandemic updates with their spokesdog, ZongChai .

And then, of course, there’s anime. Back to blood donation, imagine my surprise when I go to donate blood and the bus for donating has this image on its side. Taiwan’s CDC has a magazine cover series where they turn diseases (and preventive measures) into anime characters. Even new light rail projects get assigned anime mascots . My students read anime, draw anime, reference anime when discussing literature, etc. If you needed to pick a TV show that the most students have seen, Attack on Titan is probably near the top. But I can’t emphasize enough how this isn’t just young people. Two different restaurants we frequent have an entire row of figurines from an anime I had never heard of Slam Dunk , featured prominently on their counter.

Perhaps the most surprising place to find cuteness is in LINE chats. LINE is ubiquitous — it’s used instead of SMS or WhatsApp. It’s not unusual for there to be work-related chats. However, even the most professional line chat, including ones between me and my boss or Carolina and her boss, are filled with animated stickers and cartoon characters to say hello or goodbye. Anytime you add someone new on LINE, the custom is to immediately send them a sticker. I’m still picking the sticker that is my best foot forward.

It is quite different from the US, which means a lot of people who move here have a strong reaction to it. In fact, one of the very first conversations we had before moving here involved discussing the cuteness. Our friend said she really hated it at first, found it to be infantalizing, especially towards women. She was especially upset because her bank wouldn’t give her an undecorated credit card — they literally only had options that had something cartoon on them. But, she said, she eventually came to love it as creative expression, especially as she realized that in some ways there is less sexism in the workplace than in the US. Because it’s so different, I think it’s easy to look at some of the images above and think how silly they are or how unhealthy the oversexualization of the female characters is, but I’m not sure it’s really worse from what we typically see in the US.

You probably shouldn’t listen to me, given my bias as a longtime cartoon and video game proponent, but I think it’s neat. And I think you shouldn’t listen to me whatsoever about its effect on culture. Give me a few decades then I might have an informed opinion on that. In the meantime, I would love to give you a recommendation to read about the subject from someone local, but I can’t find anything right now. If you find something, share it.

Further reading:

• Only 3% of households in Taiwan have a dishwasher. Bosch wanted to change that, and they documented their research and methods. While two main reasons were that people didn’t think the machines were as efficient and problems with fitting them into small apartments, another reason was that using a machine would be losing face, so instead the company decided to advertise how women could give the time they save washing dishes to their children. Happy International Women’s Day.
• Here’s a better one from our President.
• Or a more actionable one: this one goes out to my grad school friends. On “Imposter Syndrome” as just renaming sexism/racism.
• As a 36-year-old American, it would be impossible for me to have grown up without encountering my fair share of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Novels. I love this quick history of the genre , touching on its predecessors, and it’s the perfect time for me to re-up my own investigation into similar choices made in video games.
• I remember one of the first episodes of Black-ish I watched didn’t just have the main characters laying down beside each other in bed, but also explicitly referenced them having sex. I was surprised by that moment because of how infrequently mainstream American TV directly alludes to characters having sex. This essay about sex’s disappearance from cinema was really thought-provoking.
• Helen Rosner ’s last three have all been fantastic: on indoor dining mid-lockdown , on heart-shaped food , and on the microwave .
• Social media moment of the month: Stop. It’s Hammer Time. (Time to hammer the myth of STEM superiority?)
• Lastly, you need a video of a snail .

Despite having this eye infection headache thing, yesterday the weather was cool and overcast and perfect for a sweater and a walk. Some friends took us on a tour of the largest university in Taiwan, where we saw approximately a million people riding their bikes and taking pictures with the blooming Rhododendrons. There was a koi pond and a little museum filled with farming antiques and this moment where we noticed a bird beside the bike trail seemingly frozen in place, ignoring people taking its picture, when suddenly it plunged its head into the dirt and struggled to pull out the largest earthworm I have seen in my life.

It was a good day, with good weather and good friends and a good walk. We ended it with a good bowl of soup. I hope you’ve had a good day recently, too.

-g