Happy New Year, 红包拿来

Friends,

You get bonus pictures because it’s the new year and my birthday. A gift. Three images covering some of the extremes of Taipei — from the pig laying on the sidewalk, to a Friends cafe facsimile, to Carolina’s ode to 臭豆腐 . I woke up way too early and we walked down the street, past a long line of people voting at 7am on a Saturday (they’re having an election in Taiwan in honor of my birthday), and had 蛋餅 for breakfast before retreating to the apartment for coffee and music and writing this newsletter.

Last Sunday night Carolina and I had dinner in Tonghua Night Market. It’s a solid walk, there are a bunch of options (even though we generally end up eating the same thing), and it’s great sensory overload so we end up there about once every other week. As we approached the night market, there was a line down the street, leading to a stall at the market. It was moving slow, and the line formed a gap so that people could pass by and enter the market or the nearby fried chicken restaurant. All in all, there were about 200 people in line, and it was an immensely isolating experience for me. I had no idea what they were in line for, even after we walked past the stall they were waiting to get food from. I couldn’t read the sign. I couldn’t tell what the food was even after seeing it. I had no idea where people would learn about a stall in the night market. YouTube? Instagram? Facebook? Had someone made a video about how good this place was? Could I have enough of a conversation with someone to find out? Even having lived here almost seven months, I felt completely cut off from this aspect of life here that all these people were participating in, with no idea how to access it.

Before we moved to Taipei, we talked to a lot of people who had moved abroad. Several of them said that there’s a honeymoon period but then after that, the first year is the hardest. If that’s the case, then I am not too worried. That moment in Tonghua Night Market was pretty out of the ordinary. Every week I have a few more words, a few more characters, another person to say hi to as I pass on the street, another place that has an excellent snack for our meal rotation. I think I finally settled on a tea shop near school, too. Charcoal roasted Guanyin tea with a cheese milk cap, iced. We fancy.

So hello 2020, hello 35 years old, hello to you and you and you.

Would this even be a newsletter without a rundown of my favorite things from 2019?

Books : Gotta break it out, of course. Novels: Circe by Madeline Miller (Greek mythology rendered both faithfully and with modernity), The Stolen Bicycle by Wu Ming-Yi (a slow-burn tale of obsession), Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman (the ache and fire of young love). Short stories: Come Along with Me by Shirley Jackson (not creepy like her most famous work but so good). Essays: Thick by Tressie McMillan Cottom (a brain I love). I can’t say I read a memoir that blew me away this year. Three friends had books come out this year and they are all dynamite: Tokyo Ueno Station by Yū Miri translated by Morgan Giles is the book you should read while the Olympics are on this summer. Like Water and Other Stories by Olga Zilberbourg is one of those collections of very short stories I recommend spreading out, reading one every week or two as a meditative little morsel. Finally, The Spectators by Jennifer duBois mixes politics, Jerry Springer, mass shootings, and the AIDS crisis and does one of those things I love in books where there’s a character who we can only see in the periphery, through the eyes of others, and the book pulls it all off so well.

Movies : Knives Out was the only good movie I saw this year. If you haven’t seen it, you really should. If you saw it and enjoyed it, may I also recommend Logan Lucky ? Similar tone and similar Daniel Craig.

Video Games : Had some good moments still in WoW but this expansion has been pretty boring overall. Picked up FFXIV again and really enjoying it, but it’s basically a really long single player game that you have to complete before getting to the MMO part. Subnautica had an amazing, amazing first half, but then the ending got really tedious. Spider-Man blew my mind just with the travel through New York, web slinging, etc., so much so that the story being very mediocre didn’t matter. Sekiro was probably the best gameplay: a little faster paced Dark Souls but with a little less variety. Best all around game though was God of War , 100%. Just amazing on all fronts, and I still think about its storytelling on a regular basis. Also, I’m stupid excited for the new, expanded version of Persona 5 coming next year.

What was good in 2019 for you?

Finally some further reading:

• Want a round-up of thoughts on the Taiwanese election? Here .
• How about a few amazing political “ advertisements ”?
• The best article about online dating I’ve read: CJ Hauser in The Guardian .
• For Christmas, KFC+Japan+holidays: Luke Fater in Atlas Obscura .
• Also for Christmas, a dissection of Kevin McAllister’s dad in the Home Alone series, asking the big question of how in the world the family could afford all those plane tickets: Alex Siquig in The Complex .
• In honor of the Golden Globes, reupping this gem from 2018, “What in God’s Name Happened to Ricky Gervais?”: Brendan James in The Baffler .
• Kate Beaton is usually known for literary comic strips, but I think her recent one on parenthood is a success.

I didn’t take many pictures of my favorite pages of books this year, but I will end with one of my favorites, an exchange from The Spectators :

“Cynical is easy, you know,” he said. “It’s everything else that’s hard.”
“Oh yeah?” I brushed his hand away. “I hadn’t heard that one before.”
“Don’t be petulant,” he said after a moment.
Petulantly, I said: “I’m not.”

Encouragingly, I say to you: Make 2020 what you need it to be.

-g