One Foot in the Door

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Friends,

OK, help me out here: let’s say you decided to live in one place ten months of the year, and a different place two months of the year. What do you do to make that work? What things do you need in both places? What do you shuttle back and forth? How do you carve out spaces in that two month stretch so it doesn’t just feel temporary? How do you minimize the drain that the travel and switch brings?

This is what I’ve been thinking about a lot in the past few weeks, as we approach our departure back to Taiwan after six weeks in the US. The good news is that at the end of the visit I continue to be 100% sure I prefer living in Taiwan to the United States. I am also sure that to keep making it work, we’re going to spend a big chunk of our summers here in the States. That’s possible right now due to both of our jobs allowing it, and due to an abundance of friends who are overly generous with sharing their living space. Although, in the future, that might not be the case (well, hopefully we keep having friends and family who like us enough to let us have the guest bedroom, but career-wise who knows), we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

It’s easy to get into the weeds of upsides and downsides. The travel time, the monetary and environmental cost (dealing with the need for a car and insurance in the US is a big pain point), the benefits to in-person connections versus video chat, missing time from Mandarin lessons, maintaining connections in both countries, etc. etc. etc. We want to avoid our trip having the tenor of college students visiting home for the summer, seeking a little more productivity. Probably the biggest downside, which I’ve written about quite a few times before, is that it continues to make our Taiwan lives feel a little temporary, which is annoying for so many reasons — foremost, hesitancy to invest in improving our day-to-day lives and inability to be pet owners. But let’s move past that, forget the pros and cons. Let’s say we decide to just go all in on this choice. What needs to happen for it to be the best situation it can possibly be?

This is my third trip back so far, with each trip getting a little easier as we understand the assignment better. I have a few takeaways at this point, but I’m still working through more. In no particular order:

A schedule helps immensely. There are a lot of people we want to see. There are things we have to do (usually involving licenses, passports, banks, and shopping). There are restaurants we want to eat at, and more. Trying to schedule that out over multiple weeks feels a little overwhelming and also impractical. We want some spontaneity! And our friends and family are busy. But without a schedule, making decisions about what to do each day leads to a lot of stress. The schedule prevents conflicting pulls in two directions. And, it helps minimize the number of days of sitting around waiting on other people. Which leads me too…

Have some “normal” days. This one is important for several reasons. The first is that constantly visiting people and doing “special” stuff is very draining, so you have to plan for rest. It’s also expensive, and usually unhealthy. But beyond that, on a long trip, you need some days to have space for routine. For getting work done without rushing to make sure you finish before you need to go do something else. For taking stock of what else you want to do. Plus, for me, I don’t want to pause my reading, writing, Mandarin learning, etc. — a difficult task at home in summer, Herculean while away. A helpful thing here is to have a third space to retreat to these days, like the coffee shop guarded by frogs in my above photo (Sunflower Coffee in Cadiz, KY), but that gets expensive quickly!

You are going to miss out on seeing someone or doing something. Sometimes scheduling doesn’t work out, and we have to be in two places at once or stretch ourselves to the verge of snapping to make things happen. It can feel like we are obliged to see everyone we possibly can since we won’t return until next year, but I have to remind myself that even when we lived here, there were people I considered friends who lived in Austin who we only saw in-person maybe twice a year. And so it’s okay to say no, or for things to not work out.

You are going to get sick. Extensive traveling, being in close contact with a huge number of people, and expending more energy than usual is a recipe for illness. Like the previous point, it works best to accept this early! This also makes the schedule important–we need to hit the ground running so we don’t spend part of the last week deciding if we are symptomatic enough to put off meeting someone in-person until next year.

Be a little selfish. The first year we visited, we said yes to a lot of things we shouldn’t have. People wanted us to see their house way outside the city, or wanted us to come to a special restaurant on the other side of town, or do really involved activities. This year we got a lot better about being more practical and convenient with our visits, being a little more willing to tell people they have to come to us. Car rental/borrowing was still a pain point, but I have some ideas for that too. One to work on is that because it’s an “occasion,” everyone wants to pay for us, which I have to push back on more.

But now that I have these points laid out, I’m not sure exactly what I concrete things I can do differently next year besides continuing the small adjustments that got me to the list in the first place.

One final benefit of these trips is that inevitably we get 17,000 questions about continuing to live in Taiwan–when we plan to move back, why we don’t want to move back, etc. I often give short, rote answers (don’t have to own a car, don’t have to deal with insurance), but the repetitive nature of these conversations does get me to actually think about what else I want to say, which crystallizes my thoughts in general. And that connects to the answer that I developed, which is that living in Taiwan allowed me to reset and recalibrate my life in a way that might not have happened in the US, and in the process I found the lifestyle that Taiwan allows suits me much better, and that I’m stretching my brain in ways I don’t think I would have otherwise. Which is still simplified, but coming to that conclusion is still satisfying.

Further reading:

• I’ll admit I’m not much of an Olympics person beyond scrolling through the memes and color commentary (especially Saeed Jones’s ), but it has been great experiencing two Olympics from Taiwan’s point of view. Last go round badminton popularity exploded and it was impossible to escape Tai Tzu-ying’s face on billboards, buses, and TVs everywhere. Will there be a surge again this year? I’m not sure, but you should read Min Chao’s excellent breakdown of the team name, “Chinese Taipei.” PS, if you want to get me that shot glass set, please do.
• Speaking of the Olympics, that AI ad was so gross for reasons Linda Holmes articulates perfectly . I’m glad they pulled it , but it’s yet another sign that they have no idea what the value of writing is, and how their tool might actually be useful in the long term.
• Moby Dick x DEI is the crossover satire you didn’t know you needed.
• Food rec! I’ve been making this West African Peanut Soup recipe for maybe a decade? And it’s a joy every time, and so simple to do.
• I really loved this profile of photographer Paul Kwilecki’s work from The Bitter Southerner . His photos from Decatur County, Georgia are at once familiar but also vivid explosions of moments and personalities.
• One of my career goals is to teach a literature course focused on death. I already have a reading list prepared, and this week I added a new article to it: Meg Bernhard on death doulas at N+1 .
• I’d always heard that diet matters way more than exercise for being slim, but I had misconceptions as to why. I found Kurzgesagt’s video “The Workout Paradox” really enlightening, and good motivation for exercising more despite it not being the shortest path to losing weight.
• It’s rare for me to play brand new games, so this list is not very useful to me (yet), but I love seeing coverage like NPR ‘s “Best Games of 2024 so far” pop up more and more.
• Finally, you should read about pooping . It’s interesting, I promise.

There is one unexpected silver lining to showing up here once a year: it’s a little easier to delight in the mundane. There’s a great meme of a blurry upset dog captioned with “He mad because day by day nothing changes but when you look back everything is different,” but we get to skip that existential nonsense by seeing the children in our social circles grow in annual leaps, astounding us each time. And it’s not just the kids. There’s also a little more magic to seeing what new buildings have sprouted as we’re stuck in Austin traffic, or how our friends’ home decor has evolved in the space of the year, or what menus have changed and what have not. I mean, good god, the way some of the trees shot up after a milder winter and summer and a good chunk more rain…

Enough to make you gasp, if you let it. I hope you find a way to delight in the mundane as well.

-g