Friends,

Tragedy has struck here in my part of Taipei. For the last year, a majority of the newsletters you’ve received have been written in large part at 日好商行, my most frequented neighborhood coffee/tea shop. However, the manager told me today it’s closing after spending months understaffed. Even though the coffee itself was mediocre, it was one of the few coffee shops in an easy walking distance that a) opened before noon and b) carried non-dairy milk. And, bonus: it usually had good music, good vibes, and snacks if needed. I’m going to miss it!

Right now the weather is good, which means my walking range for coffee is a bit further, but the closure is going to be especially painful in a couple of months. This is the third or fourth coffee shop I’ve frequented that I’ve had to give up: one other closed, one pivoted to a brunch restaurant, and one got a cat. If you want to open a coffee shop by my house, I promise my undying loyalty and small coffee fund.

The Year of the Horse approaches! February 17 marks the transition away from the Snake. The Horse is associated with energy and action, which makes me concerned about 2026, since as a rule I am against being coerced into either energy or action. The word for horse (馬) is also used in the word for immediately (馬上), and Lunar New Year is all about puns, so there’ll be a million signs that say things like 馬上健康, 馬上幸福, 馬上加薪. Immediately get healthy, happy, salary. There’s so many more. The puns are easy this year because the syllable for horse, ma, is used a lot. One of my favorites is “金馬舞銀”, which in Mandarin means “golden horse dances silver” but sounds very similar to Taiwanese for “now have free time”.

One of the main Lunar New Year traditions is to do a big house cleaning before the holiday starts, getting rid of the old, bad luck and making room for new, good luck. There’s advertisements for maid services to do this for you, people travel back to their parents’ house to help them, and this weekend will see a dearth of social events as people stay home to convert chaos into order. This year we’re throwing ourselves into this tradition with more gusto than usual. We’ve bought an array of containers from Ikea, donated unused clothes, started actually using the years worth of gift candles instead of just stacking them endlessly. A couple of years ago, I upgraded from PS4 to a PS5, and since then the PS4 had been just sitting in a cabinet, taking up some of our very limited cabinet space while waiting for an opportunity to pass it on to someone else. This year we finally decided to go trade it in and maybe get enough credit for a game. The store needed thirty minutes to test the system before they’d offer money, so we went next door to a very nice coffee shop to kill the time, and got to pet a dog named Leo in the process. It was great. Then we went back to get our money.

If you subtract the cost of coffee and transportation to the store and back, we lost money in this transaction. And that’s not counting the unreasonable amount of time it took - they don’t pay cash, only bank transfer, and due to language barrier and who knows what else it took forever, and Carolina and I were both about to explode with frustration. The low price was because our PS4 was an American version, they said, hard to sell it here. I don’t know if I believe them, but in sum the experience was probably still worth it, because a) got to pet dog and b) next time we need to get rid of something, this experience will be ringing in our ears and we might remember that trying to resell things is almost never worth it and we should just donate/recycle instead.

The big cleanse this year was documentary. We’ve been living here for 6.5 years, and so I figured we’re finally allowed to get rid of the mountain of paperwork associated with moving here and starting our first jobs. There was so much! And some of it we want to save for our memories, and some of it might actually be useful in the future, but most of it is trash. Do I need the proof that I got my substitute teaching license from Arizona (because I’d read online that would help bypass some bureaucracy here but was never actually useful)? I mean, it might have some comedic value to me in a few decades. But probably not. I took a picture instead. I threw away the contract for my high school teaching position, but kept my school ID and a book of detention slips. Memories.

And so our apartment has a marginal bit more space for good luck.

On the topic of horses and action and energy, in grad school, I had a teacher who told us we should probably avoid trying to write essays about pets or parents dying, that those experiences are simultaneously universal and personal in a way that makes them hard to step outside of yourself and say something both new and interesting to a stranger. This, in my opinion, was good advice, and applies to a lot of topics. Which is why it is with some apprehension I find myself wanting to write about starting to regularly go to the gym for the first time in my life at 40 years old, about rotating which parts of my body are sore and about how trying to get enough protein as a vegetarian means I feel constantly feel uncomfortably full. This is definitely something everyone wants to read about from my brave new perspective and not something better resigned to a journal.

Further reading:

• I am in awe and full of thanks and admiration for Minneapolis. The best portrayal I’ve read for why comes from Adam Serwer.

• If you find yourself reading an academic article and suddenly there’s the scientific name of a completely unrelated fish dropped into the text, it might be due to LLM-based translation, and it’s definitely due to publisher negligence.

• My friend, the excellent translator Morgan Giles, has put two essays about translating The End of August onto her website, and they’re both excellent. On trying to capture Japan’s superior onomatopeoias and and on finding a healthy way to deal with translating trauma.

• I end a lot of my sentences with lol :(

• The Believer did a wonderful feature on four writers and their relationship to athletics. Feeling some Baader–Meinhof phenomenon right now, but you should read it. RO Kwon: “On the one hand, I’m lucky that everything else I like to do for fun generally involves thinking about the writing. Like reading, watching movies, talking with writer and artist friends. The work is always entangled. And then sometimes it’s just so nice to go to a place of pure being and of trying not to get hurt while doing a thing that’s good for your body.”

• A parody of Isaac Chotiner interviewing a character from Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” has a very small, very specific audience, and I’m smack dab in the middle of it. (This is the first time this newsletter has linked an AO3 story, ha.)

• It was a month for good parodies! Comic artist Joe Chouinard has a disturbingly faithful mashup of Frasier and Columbo that was so fun to read.

• Finally, an academic article popped up relevant to my interests. I love sociology! For Social Problems, a pair of researchers analyzed a large number of private college counselors, the kind that start working with students in Kindergarten and have price tags in the five digits. The researchers wanted to know how the counselors could make moral sense of a clearly unequal situation. As someone who gets paid to help provide suggestions to college essays, I recognized myself in some of the answers.

Learned a nice new phrase in Mandarin this month: 可遇不可求 (kě yù bù kě qiú), which is used to describe things you can’t do on purpose, that only happen through fate/luck/accident. Finding love, a good teacher, or a good boss. It’s cool that Mandarin has such a short phrase to describe these things - I struggled to figure out if English has anything similar.

Acknowledging these kinds of things in life is walking a tightrope, right? On the one hand, it’s healthy to recognize that some things are out of your hands, to push that locus of control outside of yourself a little bit. On the other hand, it can also make us too complacent, too subject to inertia, staying in bad situations because we assume a better situation will only pop up by magic and not through actually doing something. So I’ll end with a wish for you to have the cliche dose of wisdom needed to discern the difference, and a little Horse energy to shake up your fate when you need to shake it.

-g