Redistributing the Air in the Room
Friends,
I’m currently in the middle of teaching a small unit on reviews (of the movie, restaurant, music, etc. variety) in my “English Writing for the Media and the Web in the Age of AI” course. It’s my favorite part of the semester: students get to write about things they really care about and there’s lots of room for the ones who want to shine to do so. One of the examples I use is a 2023 review of the TV show Wave Makers from Taiwan Insight, written by Chieh-Ting Yeh. This line stuck out to me when I read it two years ago:
But in another sense, while the world that “Wave Makers” created is inaccurate, it may actually be what the Taiwanese people prefer their politics to look like. In “Wave Makers”, policy towards a foreign country is not an existential issue and does not overshadow all the other important issues from the public square. Rival politicians can debate immigration and environmental policies, fend off student protesters, and even dig up each others’ scandals without worrying about what anyone in Beijing or Washington says.
Link to full review. The reason I use this in my class is to show my students how important providing context is in a review - not just to explain the thing being reviewed, but also the writer’s opinion, the creator’s decisions, or the audience’s reaction. But teaching this quote also made me think about the present moment, how the zeitgeist conversation around stocks and tariffs (or, more broadly, the ongoing What Has Trump or Musk Done Today conversation) sucks so much oxygen from the room. Whether it’s the flooding across my home state of Kentucky and nearby areas, the aftermath of Myanmar’s earthquake and the military junta’s continued crackdown, the possible end of Greenpeace, or the Trump subplots of measles and student deportation and congestion pricing and and and.
So I thought my little response to this moment would be to try to reproduce what Yeh was identifying in Wave Makers: a spotlight on Taiwanese stories that don’t focus on Trump or China. There’s a lot of cool and awful and important stuff happening here lately!
This Japan Times article highlights the great things going on in the Taiwanese manga world, including the government-funded effort to translate more Taiwanese works. I actually helped proofread some of the stories described in association with Michelle Kuo and Locus Publishing - and I highly encourage you to seek out Taiwanese comics. (Note: this article comes back with a paywall if you go directly to it, but seems to not have one if you find it through a search engine.)
Relatedly, UK-based publisher Strangers Press is putting out a series of translated Taiwanese short stories. The cover art is gorgeous! I’m hoping to be able to get a hold of these soon.
One difference in education between the US and Taiwan that I have had a hard time getting used to is that students have much more expectation of knowing averages and class ranks here. Being very public with this information has gotten less popular over time, but still today, for the national test that determines what university students can go to, perfect scores are published where anyone can find them. This makes me uncomfortable for a lot of reasons, and it’s awesome to see a group of students, parents, educators, and politicians working to change that.
Han Cheung at Taipei Times has an in-depth history of Taiwan’s most iconic restaurant, Din Tai Fung. If you haven’t been to one, they have a bunch of locations in the western US along with NYC, but they also had to close their Australian location due to wage theft, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
Also in the Taipei Times, reporting over the McDonald’s sexual assault case that has led to a lot of anger and boycotting here. A supervisor sexually assaulted a 17-year-old employee who later died by suicide. This week’s update is that no charges are being brought against the supervisor. McDonald’s has been given the “maximum fine,” but it’s a paltry amount. Hoping for more news on this.
A Filipino student here in Taiwan wrote a brave op-ed about the specific flavor of racism experienced by southeast Asians here in Taiwan. As someone who gets praised by random people for my extremely basic Mandarin while seeing how my international students’ fluent tri+lingualism is considered no big deal, I am not surprised by her experience and hope people take her letter to heart.
There’s a big effort to recall politicians in every political direction here in Taiwan, and you can read more about that from Frozen Garlic, but what I’ve been interested in seeing is how different groups have come together to make their voices heard, and how they show up in the news. Here’s an article about a group of writers jointly supporting efforts to recall the KMT, with a focus on denouncing the defunding of government culture projects.
Taipei is attempting to remove cars during the weekend from a busy tourist street. I really, really hope it’s successful! It drives me nuts having to dodge scooters in crowded market streets, and anything to make cars Uber/Foodpanda delivery more inconvenient is a win.
Finally, a popular street near our house got featured in a travel YouTube. The video is soothing and highlights a lot of great spots. The opening starts within 100m of our home, right across the street from our grocery store. Check out our corner of the world!
Yesterday was a tough day here in Taiwan: everyone had to head back to work after a four-day weekend. Coffee shops around the country offered special buy one, get one deals in the name of easing the return to the office. It was the combination Children’s Day + Tomb Sweeping Holiday, which means the past few weekends have had extra traffic around our house, near the largest cemetery in Taiwan. The graves are quite a ways uphill, so a road nearby is blocked off to allow buses to shuttle people up on the weekend. Volunteers usher people into lines and divert traffic to alternate routes. But even though the holiday was last weekend, because of convenience, different cultural beliefs, and adjustments due to Covid, they spread the activity across four weekends. The first two had pouring rain all weekend, so the volunteers mostly spent their time under an awning, sipping tea, waiting for the weather to pass. Not a bad way to spend a weekend.
Non-Taiwan further reading:
I’m continuing my litter cleanup efforts in my neighborhood, and part of this involves saying good morning to everyone I pass. We have a few people nearby who talk to us when we walk by, which is new after five years! We’re not quite to the point where we’re drinking tea or having breakfast together, so I’m jealous of the experience of Patty Smith, who describes purposefully building community in her neighborhood, starting with simply drinking coffee on their front stoop. I’ll get there eventually.
I think the last newsletter I sent about my attempt to force my mindset to focus on how I can realistically improve the litter situation in my neighborhood versus getting angry on the larger problems of people littering and government (lack of) intervention could accurately be described as an environmental harm reduction philosophy. I’m still playing with it. For a great look at drug-related harm reduction action in Minneapolis, highly recommend Tim Evans in The Nation.
“Nostalgia for a place that no longer exists” can describe a slice of many adults’ psyche, but I still enjoyed Tracy Thompson’s poetic meandering through her own southern-US-tinged version of it. “Solastalgia” from Salvation South.
One day I will be sick of “look at how shitty generative AI is” articles, but that day is not today. Tom McAllister, a writer I’ve long admired especially through his work with Barrelhouse, describes in the New York Times how soul-crushing it is for a student to turn in a ChatGPT-generated essay when asked to write about their own life in an elective.
My former student and all-around awesome person Natalie Tai put together a great list of "10 Asian Women to Celebrate for International Women’s Day" for Asian Raisins in the Netherlands. So proud of this work!
I finished two TV shows this month, which is unusual for me! Arcane Season 2 was a huge disappointment (I really enjoyed Season 1). The season retread emotional ground from the first season, had way too many plot threads, dipped frequently into melodrama, and obviously got too much feedback that they should do more music video-y scenes. I also finished all 50 episodes of Midnight Diner that are available on Netflix. That show has been my comfort food for months. I’ve parceled the episodes out, consuming them slowly, both because I don’t want the show to end but also because the show is like a repetitive short story collection, where consuming it too quickly diminishes the quality. It’s the kind of cheesy show where there’s always a clear answer to the problem du jour and it rarely ever strays from its patterns, but its just so warm and delightful. I’m looking for a new comfort food show, if you have any recommendations.
Now that I’ve been teaching ten years, I have a lot of students that I maintain correspondence with on and off, but I always have this internal conflict about checking in on students I haven’t heard from in a while. A lot of times I talk myself into the mindset that I don’t want to disturb their current life, don’t want to remind them of what, for many, were the unpleasant memories of high school or of a distant life. This mindset is stupid! In the last month I’ve gotten a small wave of students reaching out, and each one makes me so happy. Isn’t it great for someone to tell you that they were thinking of you, that they want to know what you’re up to? Why wouldn’t I want to share that?
You should share it to. Check on someone you haven’t heard from in a while. Get them to sign up for this newsletter, while you’re at it.
Until then,
-g