Meet Me at the Pure Love Snack Bar

Friends,

The Mandarin word for Christmas is 聖誕節, shèng dàn jié, literally “holy birth holiday.” I love the word for holy, 聖, originally because I thought it was an ear and a mouth above a king, but instead it’s an ear and a mouth above “a human standing on soil.” Which is also great. Holy moly. Today it hit 82°F/28°C, so it’s not feeling very Christmasy on the streets of Taipei (at least, away from the giant Christmas trees in front of the shopping malls). But here in the apartment, we’ve got our spiced apple cider and our Sufjan Stevens going, so we’re making do. A friend even gave us a wreath! It’s hanging on our office door, and will probably remain there months from now until it starts falling apart.

The above picture comes to you from my most frequented slice of National Taiwan University. There are many masses of parked bicycles on campus (which is ironic because I feel like I see more rent-by-the-minute YouBikes on the university sidewalks than personal bikes), but this one is the best. It’s beside a busy intersection where there’s tents of student organizations selling random stuff (which occasionally involves costumes or musical performances), a tiny tiny Family Mart, and the free bicycle maintenance station where students can air their tires and even get help with minor repairs. Like any job, teaching at a university has its ups and downs, but there is so much value in the energizing effect of simply walking across campus and being awash in the Sea of Happenings.

Next month marks the seventh anniversary of this humble newsletter. Unfortunately, it also marks the end of my tenure on TinyLetter. TinyLetter has been abandonware for a while: it was acquired by MailChimp way back in 2011 — MailChimp also does mailings, but they cost money — and given they probably make nothing off TinyLetter and they’re owned by Intuit, I’m not surprised it’s getting shuttered in February . I’ve been researching alternatives. I’ll take the opportunity to get away from Intuit . Substack is the most popular, but I have ethical issues with it (though I do subscribe to many of their writers) which you can read about in this thread from Anil Dash if you have Bluesky. (God, the internet is a mess.) I’m in an awkward middle ground for the other recommendations. I have too many subscribers for most free accounts, but not enough to justify paying for a service, nor do I want to try to get anyone to pay to receive this. So, I’m leaning towards using WordPress’s newsletter feature, which seems to have a convoluted user experience but has the positive of having been around a long time. If you have any other feedback I’d be happy to get it.

Regardless of where I move, I’ll be able to export/import everything from TinyLetter to the new location, so you shouldn’t need to do anything. I also keep my writing up to date on Medium until they too shutter.

I’ve been thinking about friendship more lately! Last summer, my best friend here in Taipei moved to the US for graduate school, while other friends went through the normal churn of moves or babies or shifting interests. Anne Helen Petersen wrote about “the friendship dip,” : “a prolonged stretch of adulthood that is not conducive to forging or sustaining friendship or community” (and her next book focuses on the subject as well). For me, I’m lucky that the problem is less about being unable to find friends, and more about being a little too picky with friendships. I’m wary of neighbors and coworkers, and that eliminates a huge chunk of people. We have friends who are single or have kids, of course, but it makes things more complicated. Our area of town does not seem to be popular with people our age — I keep making friends who live in the outskirts of Taipei to the north or west, and we live in the southeast corner. Plus, I always think about it from a Taiwanese person’s perspective: would you put energy into a friendship with a foreigner living here, given there’s a good chance at some point they’ll suddenly move across an ocean?

But, of course, Taiwanese people my age have the same problem. Long working hours and high cost of living in the city makes socializing difficult for everyone. I’ve met several people, for example, who play video games together and seek out gaming friendships with a main motivation being the time and money saved by not going out. One way people meet each other is through online-born social groups that plan meetups. I keep tabs on one such source: PTT’s friends board . The advertisements here are fascinating. You have groups organized around topics, like AI, Disney, fitness, or stocks. Some are for singles, some are not, most discuss gender breakdown of the group. They often include poorly lit photos of large groups of exuberant people at restaurants and joining can involve a long Google Form. The advertisements are full of metaphors — many people looking for partners on the road, to join their club of social animals, or to get together and “steal each other’s salaries.” A lot of it I don’t get. An AI club says their age range is from 70–84. There’s an advertisement for a luxury camping and hotpot group that says it’s for 7th and 8th graders. A person posted looking for a group to go watch badminton and comedy shows together. They have silly, wonderful names like “Taichung Lifeline,” “Pure Love Snack Bar,” “My Liver is Very Firm,” and “Lunar Oasis.” (My wife is part of a group that calls themselves “Girls from Everywhere.”) There are 3–4 new posts every day. I’m sure some (a lot?) of them are scams, and I’m sure actually finding a group of people you click with is a pain in the ass, but from the outside looking in, it seems so cool. Maybe I will seek out a Lunar Oasis one day.

Oh, as I type that out, I realize the AI club probably meant their birth years are from 70–84. Mystery solved.

I’m thankful for my long distance friendships. There is a comfort to them: we can still share experiences (including game night), they don’t require the same time or money commitment, and there’s something so lovely about waking up to an ongoing conversation. But, frankly, the technology is not quite good enough to share a meal or karaoke, so there’s still work to be done.

Further reading:

• The Journal of Pediatrics has a new study I wish I could place in the hand of many parents, especially Taiwanese parents: “ Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Well-being: Summary of the Evidence .” From the conclusion: “Parents today are regularly subject to messages about the dangers that might befall unsupervised children and the value of high achievement in school. But they hear little of the countervailing messages that if children are to grow up well-adjusted, they need ever-increasing opportunities for independent activity, including self-directed play and meaningful contributions to family and community life, which are signs that they are trusted, responsible, and capable. They need to feel they can deal effectively with the real world, not just the world of school. Even parents who recognize that their children are capable of and would benefit from more independence, and would not be seriously endangered, are often reluctant to allow it because of realistic fears that they might be accused of negligence by neighbors or, worse, by police and child protective services.” Full PDF here .
• Loved this short Marketplace piece on how graveyard maintenance is usually paid for in the United States , and now I want to know similar things about Taiwan.
• Kiese Laymon interviewed by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an automatic read for me. I can’t get enough of Kiese’s voice, and I’ve listened to him on podcasts enough that I could hear some of this. As Chanda says in the interview, “You have a great voice.” Writing and speaking.
• Rosalina is my favorite Taiwanese cooking YouTuber. I have not cooked any of her recipes — she almost always uses meat, and her prepwork involves way more dishes than I even own — but she speaks slowly and clearly, and her videos are very soothing. Last month she did a video about two ways to roast sweet potatoes . One involves a pressure cooker which I didn’t even own in the US, but the other involves wrapping the sweet potato in a wet paper towel THEN in foil then roasting it, which sounds kind of interesting. I’ll be honest, though, when I roast sweet potatoes I just wash them then throw them in the oven with something to catch any syrup that drips out and I’m pretty happy with my method. Of course, I’m also happy with 7-Eleven and Family Mart’s methods, though I lean Family Mart. For the uninitiated, people regularly debate which chain has better coffee or sweet potatoes. 7-Eleven’s have thinner skin and mushier insides, whereas Family Mart’s has a very chewy skin (many people don’t eat it, and those people are wrong) and a better texture inside.
• The best short-form fiction I’ve read in quite a while is Carmen Maria Machado’s “ Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU ,” which is ten years old at this point, but I wanted to make sure you’ve seen it too.
• Last month’s newsletter already had two Paris Review pieces, but it was supposed to have three. I forgot to include Hanif Abdurraqib’s meditation on heaven and Red Dead Redemption 2 . I didn’t even like RDR2 and he’s got me wanting to retry it.
• A few months ago I linked Anne Helen Petersen’s wonderful piece on colonoscopies . Last month, another colon-related article caught my eye, this time from Asterix , which presented pretty compelling evidence that getting one as a matter of course might not be a good idea. And, it was a really interesting look into medical research beyond that.
• Finally, after last month’s newsletter, I put together a collection of photos of the plants of Taipei to add some visuals to my descriptions. I would be honored if you check it out here .

Ah, the end of the semester. Grading, test-writing, anxious students, grad school applications, and last minute schedule changes: the whole band is here. Soon it’ll be the prodigal children returning home from overseas universities, the rainy season, and hopefully a few days where it’s cold enough to wear my favorite sweaters. I hope you get some quality time with your favorite sweater, too.

See you in 2024, on a new platform.

-g