Make Something New

Friends,

My picture this month is the view of Taipei 101 from a park near our apartment. The park is new, but soon it will be less new than the apartment building rising behind it, and then it will lose some of its fantastic background scenery. The park will still be okay because it’s always filled with insanely cute dogs and toddlers, but everyone’s Instagram accounts will suffer. My winter vacation has been full of walking, and this park is between our apartment and one of my favorite neighborhoods: Wuxing Street .

Tomorrow marks the official beginning of the Lunar New Year holiday. 新年快樂！If there’s one thing that living in Taiwan has taught me, it’s that I don’t own enough red clothing. Last year we tried to give fruit to people we would see during the holiday, because fruit is commonly recommended as a gift. Fruit is inconvenient though — sometimes it’s hard to know the quality, and people have a ton of food already so it might go to waste. This year we learned that candy is also acceptable, and that seems much more on brand for us. So Carolina bought a giant bag of strange candy from an old man at the nearby morning market. One was quite unexpectedly filled with alcohol. Perfect for kicking off a new year. The closest church to us has New Year couplets with blessings from Jesus up beside a still-standing Christmas tree. It’s fantastic. (Taipei 101 also still has Christmas decorations at its base as of last weekend. For several pictures of the Christmas spirit I’ve run into around town, click here .)

This week is pretty much the only time each year that a majority of businesses will be closed in Taipei. 7–11 will still be open, but that’s about all you can count on. We have gone completely overboard in making sure we can provide for ourselves and our refrigerator is bursting at the seams. Please think of us during this trying time as we try to eat a liter of yogurt before it goes bad.

One of the first people to wish me a fortuitous Year of the Ox was a person who I have never met. Ever since I got LINE, a woman I do not know has sent me a constant stream of captioned pictures of the night sky or a cherry blossom tree, videos of birds singing, or news about Coronavirus. LINE is the most-used messenger app in Taiwan, and it’s tied to your phone number. I assume this woman sends these messages to a ton of people indiscriminately, but I like to imagine that she was friends with whoever had this phone number before me, noticed the changed profile picture, and just decided I look like the kind of person who needs these messages in my life. I’ve never friended her or responded, but the messages still show up like clockwork. It’s kind of endearing and comforting.

Our Mandarin teacher asked us to write a short essay about Lunar New Year, to talk about our experiences or what we know about the traditions. I wrote about how this Lunar New Year was a happy one because to compare it to last year is to see the progress we’ve made in this chapter of our lives: in our language abilities, in our comfort with our environs, in our connections with friends here. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by so many things (purchasing a new dehumidifier this week was an ordeal let me tell you), but if I pause to reflect back on last year, when we had no plans over the holiday and were barely learning the words for colors to this year when we’re having a little candy bag assembly line for several get togethers and are writing short essays for homework, it’s hard to be pessimistic.

(Yet another reason why learning something new is great beyond just learning that new thing.)

Further reading:

• Before our break, I asked my students to recommend one song that represented the good parts of 2020 and one that represented the bad. Here is what they came up with (Lorde and Su Lee were my contributions).
• Author Wendy Wang Yuen created a thread comparing presidential inauguration outfits with boba .
• It really sucks that Sesame Street lacking funding led to Big Bird and Daveed Diggs advertising for DoorDash during the Super Bowl, but I guess you can’t blame him for getting paid. People talk about celebrity magnetism a lot, but Diggs is one of the few celebrities that just completely oozes an uncanny amount of charisma to me. This brilliant profile of him adds to that.
• My friend Karissa Chen wrote a piece on behalf of an iconic Taiwanese food that doesn’t get linked back to the island as well as it should when it’s served overseas: gua bao . I’m lucky that our nearest night market has a vegetarian option!
• Ever wondered why NBA player photos on Wikipedia are so very strange? Don’t worry, I never have either, but this article was still fascinating.
• The cream of the pandemic writing crop: “I Recommend Eating Chips.”
• Seriously the writing here is so good. “the bramble of tabs,” “Lean in, inhale that unmistakable bouquet: toasted corn, dopamine, America, grief!,” “That is the great virtue of chips: They are here for us to eat them,” “The chips come like ocean waves, like human breaths, serial but unique, each part of a huge eternal rhythm but also its own precious discovery.” (PS, look at how dumb the “always put a comma inside of quotation marks” rule is in the previous list. The Brits are right on this one.)
• This MLK, Jr. Day was the first one in which I read his speech commemorating WEB DuBois . It further showed me what an incredible rhetorician MLK was. “Let us be dissatisfied,” indeed.
• My favorite find of this year so far: someone took James Baldwin’s record collection and turned it into a ~500 song playlist on Spotify . It is fan-freaking-tastic.

I didn’t read much at all in 2020, but I’ve used a lot of my break time so far to make up some ground. I read several books that I’d meant to get to a while ago. Sally Rooney’s two novels are amazingly written, but I was disappointed with the plots and characterization that the amazing writing was in service of. Between the Acts was my least favorite of Virginia Woolf’s books I’ve read so far, but it felt like a book that I probably needed to study, not just read. The Memory Police was the best novel I’ve read in a long time: a dystopia with heavy-handed metaphors but centered on my favorite kind of narrator, one that is unnaturally calm and thoughtful and this calmness and thoughtfulness slowly evolves into an indictment of something out of sorts, something broken. Finally, Know My Name is one of a handful of books that I wish everyone would read.

My favorite Lunar New Year phrase is 一元復始，萬象更新, which roughly means all things are made new. I love the wide possibility of interpretations of that phrase, of the implications. I hope something is made new for you this week, this month, this Year of the Ox.

-g