Like a Good Neighbor

Friends,

Happy Taiwan-iversary to us! June marks our fourth year. It doesn’t feel like that, largely due to Covid’s time distortion field, but the calendar tells me it’s so.

After a little more than a year, we finally opened up our batch of homemade plum wine, also known as 梅酒 (Japanese: Umeshu; Mandarin: Méijiǔ). Despite the name, the drink is made not by fermentation but by infusion, mixing together unripe green plums, liquor, and sugar. Traditionally the liquor is shōchū, a rice-based alcohol (differing from sake in that it’s made by distillation instead of fermentation). We thought it would be neat to use a bunch of different types of alcohol and taste test to see the differences. Tito’s Vodka from Texas, Kaoliang from Taiwan, rum because we thought it would taste good, then two kinds of shōchū, sweet potato and rice.

Readers, I am sad to say after 13ish months of the bottles taking up precious real estate in our apartment, the one that tasted best was the traditional rice-based shōchū, and it was not noticeably better than what we can buy cheaply in the store. There was hardly any difference in flavor between the variations, except for the Kaoliang whose strong flavor still punched through, and that some tasted sweeter than others. We will not be making plum wine again any time soon, and we will not be buying it either, as it will probably take us another year to get through what we made. If we foist a bottle of it onto you as a gift, my apologies in advance.

One easy target of an umeshu gift would be our new neighbors. For the first 3.5 years in our apartment, our neighbor was a single businessman who smoked like a chimney and spent about 80% of his time traveling, who never spoke to us beyond saying hi. Besides the smell of his cigarettes, he was the perfect neighbor: quiet and unintrusive.

This is much different than how I felt in Texas. Ten years ago, if I had new neighbors, I’d be baking them a loaf of bread and fretting over how many days I should give them before coming over to introduce myself (I usually went with a week). We knew their kids’ and pets’ names, we invited them over for food, even for Thanksgiving. In the ten years we lived in that house in Round Rock, we had ~6 families as neighbors to our immediate left and right. But, towards the end of our stint there, I had a few really bad experiences, suddenly finding myself being sucked into one neighbor’s messy divorce (including a sobbing spouse at our front door), while two other sets of neighbors who we both liked independently developed an intense feud with each other for reasons that I am still unclear on. So, now, I don’t reach out to neighbors. Even if there is someone obviously super cool in our apartment building who plays Miyazaki movie piano music with the window open at the perfect volume where I catch wisps of it only beside our own open window.

This is despite the fact that the door to our neighbors is literally a step away from ours now, and that they seem like nice people, a couple about our age. It’s also despite the fact that I’ve had way fewer negative social interactions in our four years in Taiwan than in the average year in Texas. I’m guessing if they reached out to us, I’d be amicable, but we’ll see. Our first interaction was an awkward one: I went to talk to our building’s doorman about a guy in the neighborhood who’d been harassing Carolina and I (moving to block our way when we were walking) occasionally to see if anyone else had experienced it, and our new neighbor was looking at paperwork when I got there. The doorman asked them to help translate what I was saying, then we realized we were neighbors, so our first interaction was a very odd one. Given one of Carolina’s best friends in Taiwan is someone she met when she needed help filling out paperwork when donating blood, who knows, maybe we’ll end up barbecuing together in time for Mid-Autumn Festival.

An interesting addendum here: although I am very hesitant to befriend neighbors beyond general pleasantries, I don’t feel the same hesitancy to coworkers. In fact, the best friend I’ve made in Taiwan was a coworker, though now he is sadly moving away from Taiwan. It would seem like the same principles should apply, but I guess I feel like I am forced to interact with coworkers in a way that I am not forced to interact with neighbors, and so it’s more fun to be friendly with them.

Or maybe I just haven’t had a bad enough experience to make me wary in that sphere yet. Who knows! How do you decide where to make friends? Do you just go with everywhere and let the chips fall as they may? Are you more hesitant in some regions of your life versus others? Was there an office happy hour that made you decide to never go out with them again?

Let me know.

Further reading:

• Race-blind admissions . Ha ha ha. Of course, this is just a riff of what Justice Jackson said back last November .
• I’m not sure why I like James Hoffman’s coffee videos so much. 90% of my coffee drinking is cold brew using cheap grounds. It’s probably his voice. Regardless, his recent meta-analysis of all health+coffee-related research is really good and interesting.
• My friend Allison Grace Myers’ piece “Filled to the Rim” was selected as a 2023 Top 50 short fiction piece by Wigleaf , and it is so deserving. Look at this richly dense little explosion of language .
• Allison’s piece was published on the same site as “The Nine-Tailed Fox Explains” by Jane Pek , which was the best short story I read this month.
• Tori Bowie’s is heartbreaking in its commonality. Read her teammate Allyson Felix’s heartwrenching accounting of it at Time . Then scroll down to the graphs on the CDC’s site .
• Anne Carson’s 2017 poem “ Saturday Night as an Adult ” recently got some attention due to a couple of terminally online people discovering it, mocking it for including a popular culture reference (how dare Anne?) and implying a universal experience, then a legion of writers defending it. I am a worse person for having read that conversation, but also a better person for it because I hadn’t come across this wonderful piece of writing before. “We cover our ears inside our souls,” indeed.
• Taiwan has had a much publicized surge in #metoo news lately, connected to the Netflix drama Wave Makers . It’s unclear whether much will actually change, but for a solid breakdown, read Brian Hioe in The Diplomat . Note — I spent a good chunk of time trying to find an English-language article about the news written by a Taiwanese woman and was unable to. If you know of one, please send it to me. I found many articles written by Taiwanese men and many written by non-Taiwanese women.
• I’ve linked before to Chen Shui-bian, the former president of Taiwan arrested for corruption who now posts surreal photoshops of himself on Instagram. Mid #metoo news, he posted this image , which includes the message “Respect Women” in the top left. As far as I know, there is still no insight into if he is making these images himself, if it’s a staffer, friend, young family member, ???.
• One of my students is obsessed with MrBeast, and nothing makes me feel more out of touch with the youths than streamers, so thankfully the NYT published a long profile to give me at least a touch of understanding.
• ProPublica is doing so much amazing work. While they’ve made headlines for their Supreme Court investigations lately, they also dive into so many important stories. Read about the grad student who found the largest recorded slave auction in the US by combing through Charleston’s classified ad archives.
• Very excited to play Final Fantasy 16 , despite the fact that FF15 was a complete mess (I loved the road-trip vibes and the atmosphere+world, but everything else was awful), and despite the fact that I’m sure I’ll agree with Gita Jackson’s incredibly entertaining breakdown of 16’s story/characterization .

We missed celebrating Dragon Boat Festival in Taiwan this year, which is a mixed blessing. On one hand, it’s a four day weekend with beautiful aesthetics (the boats, the food, the hanging herbs to drive away the five poisonous pests ), a cool background story (saving the body of a suicided poet by distracting fish with dumplings and racing boats!), and egg balancing . On the other hand, the main food, 粽子/zongzi, are just not very good. And people give us so many of them every year! They’re rice dumplings folded into beautiful pyramid shapes, that can include a wide variety of fillings, both savory and sweet. My observations: tons of people say there’s a big debate over whether the north or south’s version is better, but almost everyone I’ve talked to prefers the south’s, so I don’t think there’s much of a debate. 2–3 years ago Starbucks did a silly mini-zongzi made of coffee-flavored sticky rice that was the best-tasting one I’ve ever eaten. The vegetarian ones are typically just mediocre 油飯/oily rice with mushrooms. Beyond arguing over where the best ones come from, not many people actually like eating them, and there’s tons of jokes about how long they will sit in people’s freezers. But they look great , so I hope people keep them around. Which is, ironically, the same way I feel about myself.

May you spend a summer free of the five poisonous pests, wait, no, centipedes and spiders eat worse pests so they should be allowed to stay, so until next time,

-g