On Tigers and Shifting Stripes

Friends,

The friendly stuffed teddy bear in the picture above guards the door to Mianto , a vegetarian restaurant that often shows up with beautiful pictures on my Instagram feed but I’d never visited. I’ve been burned by beautiful pictures before! There’s a whole subset of restaurants where the primary purpose is the Instagram accompaniment, not the taste. Fortunately, Mianto isn’t one of those.

My trip to Mianto was special because it was my first real outing after quarantine. From the end of November when we left for the United States until two months later, our lives were put on hold, first by travel and then by travel plus Covid isolation and then by quarantine. It’s very strange to push pause on almost every aspect of your life for two full months, a mix of liberating and concerning, with a healthy dose of reflective reprioritizing. My least favorite part of life in Taiwan is that everything feels temporary whether I want it to or not, and the last three months have not helped with that feeling, but I think that will correct itself quickly. Today I am writing to you from my neighborhood coffee shop , a place that I used to visit once a week but had not visited for 2.5 months. Don’t worry: it seems unchanged. (Which invites the question, is it more or less unchanged than me?)

I don’t think I would recommend quarantine as a preferred method of spiritual or mental cleansing but I will say that my walks in these last three weeks have felt exceedingly special. How lucky am I to be able to walk to work, to the grocery, to this coffee shop, through the morning market, to the post office? (Ask me again in 3 months when Taiwan’s summer arrives.) How great is that feeling between being a little too cold when you leave the house and a little too warm after you’ve been walking with a coat on for a while, the crisp air scraping into your lungs, the Panda Express scooter that adjusts for your presence with the most efficient minimum of movements, the smiles of the parent-child duos who are milking the fun out of the last couple of days before school resumes? Of course, there are also the miniature tragedies you pass, like the two workers at an empty restaurant at noon mournfully making eye contact as you pass while the stand next door has a line of people waiting. But in the words of Jason Lee in Vanilla Sky , “‘Cause without the bitter, baby, the sweet just ain’t as sweet.”

In digital adventures, Carolina’s company’s 尾牙/end of the (lunar) year banquet was online again this year, despite Taiwan continuing to, against all odds, hold Coronavirus at bay (Omicron made landfall but has been kept to a very low number of cases). These banquets are huge, extravagant events, with lotteries for prizes like Nintendo Switches and weekends at resorts (all the way up to cars at gigantic companies) and professional entertainment and multi-course meals and waterfalls of alcohol, so trying to translate them to an online space is… interesting. This year Carolina’s involved two people dressed as Mario and Luigi dancing their way through Bowser’s castle, a company exec-studded “music video,” a group tug of war game using cellphones, and Carolina not winning any prizes. A word of warning — if you select the vegetarian option for an online event that has an accompanying package sent home, it might mean you miss out on the specially prepared event cocktail and instead be sent British tea.

Speaking of Omicron making landfall, there have been a spate of articles lately pointing to Omicron’s lack of severe symptoms among the vaccinated and Taiwan’s good vaccination numbers (74% of population at two doses) as evidence that Taiwan “has to” open up soon and can’t keep up its current restrictions, which is one of those statements that sounds like it’s probably true, but on second thought, I’m not sure it is. I think if the mask mandates were dropped tomorrow, the vast majority of people would keep wearing them. Quarantine for incoming travelers is inconvenient and the lack of tourism sucks for a ton of people, but it’s been the situation for two years, and everything seems to be continuing to run. The CDC reports that the average daily deaths for the last seven days in the United States is 2,300 people, a number that is in all likelihood underreporting the truth. Taiwan, as far as I can tell, has had a single death from Covid in 2022. How do you look at those numbers and argue that Taiwan is what has to change?

Further reading:

• I love this brief photo essay about the pandemic in Taiwan . The first photo is a set of statues beside Ximending MRT station; I walk past them twice a week on my way to work and they delight me every time.
• Writer and all around role model Helen Rosner celebrated her 40th birthday by gifting the world a Twitter thread of wisdom .
• I’m compelled here to point out, however, that I disagree with her on Accutane. While I struggled with depression on and off from 14–25, my only serious suicidal episode was after six months of Accutane, and (slightly less seriously) I also developed a small bald spot about the same time that has barely changed in the twenty years since (despite no similar early baldness in the family). Of course, no guarantee those two were caused by Accutane, but you can learn more from Wikipedia (which is conspicuously absent from the first page of Google results). SO, maybe it’s not worth it.
• Few artists oscillate in terms of enjoyment for me as much as Mitski does — I love love love a handful of her songs but can’t listen to her full albums (despite her having one of the greatest distillations of emo album titles: Bury Me at Makeout Creek , a title that instantly teleports me back to AIM away messages and WinAmp theme selection), HOWEVER she seems like an incredibly thoughtful and generous person and I loved this profile of her at Vulture . It’s no surprise it’s by E. Alex Jung, who simply does not miss.
• Other music news — I’ve been listening to two albums a lot: Bad Mode by Hikaru Utada and 揮灑烈愛 by Mira Lin/米拉拉. Interestingly, they both have the same problem, which is that most of the individual songs are great but as albums they don’t cohere very well. But you should listen anyways! This interview with Utada is also great. Finally, make sure to catch Tori Amos on Tiny Desk Concerts , which is unsurprisingly jaw-dropping.
• I don’t consume as much literary discussion/criticism as I used to, but some of the thoughts swirling in my head were developed and presented exquisitely in the essay “Have We Forgotten How to Read Critically?” by Kate Harding . I’ve tried to hold out against “the internet has killed nuance” take for a long time but I’m probably slowly giving in, while simultaneously acknowledging that something (the world? the internet? personal happiness?) has been pushing me further and further away from abrasive or uncomfortable art.
• There’s an episode of a new Netflix show called Midnight Asia on Netflix about Taipei’s nightlife. It’s a little bluntly a marketing piece for a handful of establishments, and they didn’t do a great job with editing down the interviews, but if you want to see some beautiful visuals of Taipei, you should check it out.
• Finally, one of my best friends here in Taiwan and a really inspirational teacher/coworker, William Van Luven, was interviewed by one of his students for their podcast. It’s a wide-ranging and thoughtful two-part conversation that you should check out.

We have begun the Year of the Tiger. The firecrackers signifying businesses reopening for the first time in the new year are hopefully dying down. We welcomed the New Year by sitting around our friends’ table, helping stuff filling into a couple hundred dumplings (friends who are good enough to offer not one, but two varieties of vegetarian dumplings at their table due to my presence). Which is to say, we’ve welcomed the Tiger beautifully.

I hope the Tiger is behaving for you, as well.

-g