Lines of Communication
Friends,
Hello! Welcome to a new version of my newsletter, this time hosted through ButtonDown. They’ve been really great - very personalized touch - and I’m hopeful for a long and stable relationship.
I should take the opportunity for a new look and a new host to self-promote a little. I’ve got my online presence summed up here in a nice little Linktree card. You’ll notice IG isn’t there - I’ve migrated off it, and wrote some about why (as well as how I’m aligning my digital existence with my values a little better step by step). The article is over on Medium, which I’m currently using for writing that don’t fit the newsletter but also don’t feel like a good fit for trying to find a publication venue.
Given the new platform and presence, I’d really appreciate it if you share the signup link for this newsletter with someone who might appreciate it.
So welcome to a different newsletter look, and also welcome to the Year of the Snake! I always love spending Lunar New Year in Taiwan. Everyone is in a good mood, there’s so many decorations, people give me too many desserts and fruit (I am very curious if there are any sociological studies on the regifting of Lunar New Year + Mid-Autumn Festival treats), and the weather is usually pretty good. I am even happy to report that this year there seemed to be fewer midnight-5am firecrackers! I do wish there was less burning of stuff as part of the celebrations, but, hey, I’ll take what I can get. Our Taiwanese friends make us feel so welcome even during this very family-based holiday - we had spring rolls with friends we’ve visited almost every Lunar New Year (picture below), and added on new experiences through trips to Miaoli (see the picture at the top of the newsletter) and miso hotpot in the suburbs. We even wrote out our own 春聯 - Lunar New Year’s blessings put on doors - this year. Usually we buy them from the market, but this time we went to a little friendly classroom in the back of a tailoring shop and spent an hour to produce a handful of characters. In the photo below, Carolina’s are the two prettier ones on the left.
These interactions, and others, have got me thinking about the differences between my experiences communicating in Mandarin here in Taiwan versus what I’m used to. There’s a commonly held belief that Asian communication writ large is more “indirect” than North American and European communication. I hope readers of this newsletter already know that this is, of course, a flattened generalization. To unflatten it a tiny bit, my experience in Taiwan has shown me more indirect communication in the workplace and much more direct communication in personal life. At the high school I worked at when we first moved, this sucked, because the more direct foreign teachers dominated meetings and even casual conversations, which not only silenced our Taiwanese coworkers, but often made it difficult to understand what our coworkers or administration were trying to communicate in the meeting. But, of course a similar story happened in the American workplaces I’ve been a part of - there are always people who are disruptively loud and inconsiderate of the people around them. In the US it just tended to be more on a gender line than an ethnic background one. Here’s an example: I don’t have a set office at the university due to being part time, so I usually eat at my department’s conference table. One day I walked in with my lunch, and three of my coworkers were setting up a laptop on one half of the table. I sat down at the other end, but then one of my coworkers looked at me and said, “Hey Graham, just so you know we’re about to have an online meeting here. It’s going to be kind of loud, and I don’t want to disturb your lunch.” I think in the US, I would’ve understood this to mean what she literally said, but here in Taiwan, I understood the message: “Please go eat somewhere else.” Indirect!
In personal life, though, woo boy it took some getting used to. People we just met ask us how much we pay in rent. Many people directly ask us why we don’t have kids. Two times now, we’ve taken our Nintendo Switch to social gatherings and someone present immediately starts trying to tally up how much the total cost of the games we have. I have also heard way more about my acquaintances digestive habits and issues than I ever wanted to. Finally, a cool one, my university students will very directly tell me they’re staying home due to period pain.
Another adjustment has been sarcasm. I’ve grown less sarcastic as I’ve gotten older, reserving it primarily for when I’m really annoyed or trying to make a joke, but it often just doesn’t work here. And the thing is, I’m not sure why. At first I thought it was my teacher being proper for class, making sure I’m writing very clearly. I’d write a sentence like “more and more of my neighbors are plants” referring to the abandoned buildings being taken over by overgrowth, and she’ll change it to “more and more of my neighbors have plants.” Or she’ll soften other things I say, like when I wrote a recipe for vegetarian chicken salad and said, “Some people put grapes in their chicken salad. Those people are weird,” and she wants me to change it to, “I think those people are weird.” But eventually I realized that it wasn’t just my teacher. There’s been a recurring joke in Taiwan that our former president, Tsai Ing-wen, had a device that blocked typhoons from hitting Taiwan, due to many typhoons during her term being predicted to hit the island then diverting at the last moment. This year, when a typhoon actually hit Taiwan, I made a joke to my coworker that our new president, Lai, hadn’t learned how to use the machine from Tsai. She laughed, wanted to know how I knew about this, then paused a moment, and asked me if I knew that the machine wasn’t real. And there have definitely been a lot of moments where I immediately regretted trying to make a sarcastic joke with my students. I’m so curious, once I get a little more fluent, how much or little sarcasm I’ll notice in Mandarin conversations.
Finally, a really interesting thing has been to observe differences in social media. I follow more and more Mandarin-language social media accounts both to be connected with Taiwanese society and to practice my language skills. Obviously there are limitations on comparison - my exposure to both American and Taiwanese social media is very, very narrow! And some of it has nothing to do with culture. For example, I was surprised at just how many Taiwanese Discord servers (basically chatrooms mainly for video games) have a dedicated section for sharing porn and how much casual racism there was, but honestly I would probably find the same on American Discord servers, I just haven’t looked. But when it comes to the average social media post, a few things I’ve noticed: 1) I constantly see people share dreams they had, which I’d never really noticed before, 2) There are SO MANY posts about not wanting to take a shower, and I have a lot of questions about this, and 3) Both English and Mandarin social media is full of complaints about work, but they come in very different flavors. In English, complaints are often very summarized, “My work expects us to do this, it’s so stupid, can you believe it?” kind of statements. But Mandarin complaints use a lot of dialogue. A very common post is something like this:
Boss/Coworker/Customer: Something slightly stupid.
Writer: An answer seeking clarification.
Boss/Coworker/Customer: An addition that’s more stupid.Then a line about what was going through the Writer’s head when the boss said that.
I haven’t decided which version I prefer yet, but I will say, I’m very thankful to the dialogue format for being better language practice. Online Mandarin is basically a separate language from spoken, but it’s also more interesting/motivating to work on than a textbook. Or so I tell myself. It’s definitely not just that I’m lazy and want to browse the internet instead of doing the structured work of learning. Definitely not.
Further reading:
First, great news. Bookshop.org now carries ebooks. Read an interview with their CEO. Divest from Amazon. Using Bookshop supports local bookstores (you can even choose which one!), and they’re a B Corp. In other, slightly optimistic news, B&N is making a comeback.
Cal Newport on trying out TikTok as an offline person is a little predictable, but I especially liked this line: “In a 2013 blog post called ‘Why I’m (Still) Not Going to Join Facebook,’ I described a common argument in favor of legacy social media: that it ‘makes it possible to maintain lightweight, high-frequency contact with a large number of people.’“ I’ve been trying to assess social media’s worth in my own life, and this sterile summary was helpful for thinking about it.
David Lynch is one of those artists I admired from a distance, in clips of scenes and short videos of him talking with a ubiquitous cigarette in hand. Trying to digest whole works by him overwhelmed me, but I know how much art I’ve loved has been directly influenced by his work. There were lots of great essays after his death, but I found Max Nelson on the violence against women in Lynch’s work to be the most thoughtful.
I bristled a little at the explanatory comma for kudzu and at the headline mismatching the content (there are many vending machines but they’re all connected to one org, it seems), but Leah Nelson on the Narcan vending machines in Walker County, Alabama is an important portrayal of what it means to prioritize harm reduction.
UCLA Health’s post about research showing relying on GPS can reduce spatial memory is not surprising, but you can bet I’m going to work it into my classes to demonstrate what relying on LLMs might do. Here’s the actual research, since they didn’t link it (why, UCLA Health???).
America’s Test Kitchen did a review of veggie burgers! I haven’t tried most of them but I want to. However, I miss Boca chicken patties the most. I also miss good vegetarian sandwiches in general - outside of a handful of banh mi places with veg options, they’re hard to find in Taipei.
s.e. smith for The Verge writes about link rot, the disappearance of old websites from the internet, and the lost information they represent. Archival work evolves but remains necessary.
I’ve been listening to the album MEmento·MORI by the Taiwanese band 珂拉琪/Collage a lot lately (thanks Tiffany for the rec). It has the ethereal wispiness that I love, but it also cuts in with anger - helpful for both motivation and fitting in with the past month.
Lately in some of my tutoring classes I’ve been talking with Taiwanese high schoolers about a collection of art the New York Times published four years ago by teenagers about Covid. We discuss the editors’ choices, which pieces they were most moved by, and the different emphases of each artist.
I always ask them about their own experience - most of them were in 5th-7th grade at the time - and just like the artists in the NYT, some of them have very positive memories of lockdown and some very negative. But then I ask them how they think this collection would be different if it was Taiwanese student artists instead, and invariably they say it would be a lot more boring since everyone spent time on lessons and not doing the kinds of things the students in America were doing (masked cross-country running, Lego art, protests, socially distanced parking lot hangouts, and more).
That’s a little sad! I also disagree a little (my students were doing plenty of extracurricular activities even while they were sitting in my digital classroom - Patrick, for example, accidentally talked in our chat when he was trying to talk in Discord with whoever he was gaming with). But it got me thinking about how I would handle lockdown differently if I was a little better prepared. Buy more bread flour. Go for more walks. Stretch more.
Which is the exact same thing I’m trying to do now. What are you trying to do?
-g