The Hulk Represents My Heart

Friends,

Well, here we are. It’s 2024, it’s the seventh year of me sending this newsletter out each month, and it was supposed to come to you from a platform other than TinyLetter. I got WordPress all set up, typed up this newsletter, then when I went to migrate subscribers from TinyLetter it errored out. Turns out their free accounts have a 100 subscriber limit as well that was not very well advertised. I’m probably going to end up paying for WordPress — it’s half the price of Buttondown or Ghost — but that will wait until the next month’s missive. I hope it works out! In the test runs I did, WordPress’s email went through, but it went into the “Social” category of gmail which might cause some people to miss it.

Again, if you have any advice about newsletter services, get in touch.

We rang in the new year from Chiang Rai, Thailand. It’s in the north half of the country, which is a little more elevated and a little less tropical than the rest. It was a nice trip: amazing food (though the best meal we had might have been at a Burmese restaurant), good walking, a nice post-grade submission decompression. But by far the highlight of the trip was Wat Rong Khun, aka The White Temple . An artist named Chalermchai Kositpipat took over a dilapidated temple and renovated it, turning it into something that’s more like a temple-shaped art exhibit. There’s statues of Buddhist figures alongside Ninja Turtles, skeletal representations of Covid, and a frog giving a surf’s up hand signal (visitors have placed coins on the frog’s tongue, ostensibly for luck). It was impressive and I wish I could find more on how its evolved over the years.

The above, very memorable Hulk is not part of the official temple, but was located in front of a very nearby shop.

We also spent time in the larger city of Chiang Mai, which is an odd city because they kind of quarantine most of the tourist elements into a single central square, while the rest of it is much more big city-ish. Convenient, but a little disconcerting. Another Buddhist temple there featured an unexplained statue of Donald Duck — we asked a guide, who shrugged and said he thought a movie had been filmed there.

Chiang Mai’s most notable Taiwan connection is as the death place of pop star Teresa Teng/鄧麗君. Like a lot of people in Taiwan, I’m in love with Teng’s music, but her death is kind of a weird story. Get this: hugely popular star across all of Asia, only 42 years old, on vacation to Thailand with her French fiancé. She’s taking it easy, not doing intense concert circuits anymore but has performed live less than a year earlier. Complains about throat troubles, then a week later dies of a reported asthma attack. Neither her family nor her fiancé allow for an autopsy, and her fiancé is reported as being mysteriously unemotional after the death. If this were a modern America story, there would be multi-part podcasts investigating her death, calling up the staff of the hotel where she stayed and trying to recreate the scene of the crime! There’s even the makings of an earlier drama involving a fake Indonesian passport to get into Japan. Unfortunately my Mandarin isn’t good enough to search for conspiracy theories, but in English there’s a only a shady looking old website alluding to domestic violence — not even a good drug overdose hypothesis. But I bet it’s out there. Yet another good motivation for language learning.

I am sad to say that we did not make it to Chiang Mai’s cafe/shrine homage to Teng, but maybe we’ll go to her museum in Kaohsiung or her memorial park near Keelung soon. If you want to read more about her, I recommend Hua Hsu’s New Yorker piece from 2015, which is China-centric but full of good stuff, or Ku Lin-hsiu’s very thorough career-spanning article (with great photos) from Taiwan Panorama . If you just want to listen, though, you can go no wrong with 月亮代表我的心 — “The Moon Represents My Heart.”

January wouldn’t be complete without a few lists. Here are a few favorite things I encountered in 2023.

• Books: I reread a lot of books this year (though not as many as I had hoped) — from my new reads, the five best ones were The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides, Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, News of the World by Paulette Jiles, The Broken Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin, and The Columbia Sourcebook of Literary Taiwan , and, wow, that’s quite an assortment. You can find my full reviews at Goodreads , but each of them was a delight for wildly different reasons.
• Film/TV: I got really into earnest-to-the-point-of-corny TV this year. Izakya Bottakuri and A Nation of Kimchi are both so saccharine it hurts your teeth some (pretty sure I have a cavity just from the endless post-bite euphoria shots). Weird: The Al Yankovic Story and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent are both good, absurd fun, but the latter is one of the few movies that have ever perfectly overlapped my wife’s and my tastes. Finally, Klaus was a wonderful Christmas movie.
• Video Games: Shovel Knight , Super Mario Wonder , God of War: Ragnarok , and Persona 5: Royal . I’d love to talk your ear off about any of these. The newest game I played, Tears of the Kingdom , didn’t quite live up to what I wanted from it.

Further reading:

• Sarah Jeong is an excellent writer whose voice was suppressed by one of many targeted harassment campaigns on Twitter — on top of the terribleness she experienced, the rest of the world is worse for the work she could not do. Now that the furor is mostly over, she’s gone longform on her experience at The Verge . It’s part of a series of essays they published entitled “The Year Twitter Died”. I take some solace that by the time the next phase of the internet unfolds, I will probably not understand it.
• Relatedly, Bluesky is now publicly viewable by default, so you can see links there! Here’s a good one . If you want an invite code, let me know.
• Speaking of harassment campaigns, I’m sad to note that the plagiarism obsession is now taking root in both my adopted and home countries. All I have to say is that I have caught many of my students plagiarizing, and that it’s usually on accident, and that they face minimal penalties upon rewriting it. Tressie McMillan Cottom has the words, of course .
• Like, I assume, a lot of you, I’m devastated by the loss of Andre Braugher. We’re rewatching Brooklyn Nine-Nine (a close second behind Scrubs as our favorite sitcom), and it’s incredible how much that show depended on Braugher, especially in light of the distance between Holt and his Homicide character. Maureen Ryan at Vanity Fair wrote my favorite tribute to the actor .
• Paul Musgrave wrote a lovely musing about the difficulty teaching Vietnam War-era poetry to today’s students , despite the overwhelming resonance it should have. I should spend more time with Ginsberg.
• 2023 seems to have been one of the best years for video games in a while, but it’s built on top of a shaky foundation. Adam Morgan did a nice broad look at the industry’s woes for Esquire . (And, for the record, Baldur’s Gate 3 features heavily in my winter break plans.)
• America’s Test Kitchen did a video about my favorite hotel breakfast buffet food: congee ! My favorite toppings are similar to theirs, but drop the oil-heavy fried onions for a ton of pickled vegetables (especially burdock root!).
• I’m sharing this a bit late, but a really cool thing that happened last month was the Pee-ee Herman estate uploading the full Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special in HD. Can’t get much more classic than that.
• On the Christmas note, Christina Morales did a loving piece on hallacas , Venezuela’s tamale-adjacent Christmas food, for The New York Times . Carolina and I made our own hallacas one year… labor-intensive is an understatement. We bought them from someone’s garage in south Austin the following Christmases. We still make our own variations on ensalada de gallina and pan de jamón (including weird vegetarian adjustments), though.
• For my 會說中文 crowd, I typed up my recipe for chicken salad minus chicken , using tofu skin as the protein. I don’t think the words I learned in the process are going to help me in many conversations, but at least I finally know how to say smoked paprika.

In our neighborhood, there are a half-dozen motorcycle/scooter repair shops, each with a steady stream of anxious customer faces entering and exiting, their rides deposited in an alluvial fan outside the garage door. Often when I walk past, the mechanic and customer are standing beside an elevated scooter in the manner of a bedside doctor with a patient and a loved one, anxiety written all over the customer’s face while the mechanic maintains a professional patience.

My favorite mechanic to pass is a one-man shop between us and the MRT station. What I love about him is that behind his single repair bay is a big table, and at this big table you can usually see his wife and elementary-aged son, with their endearingly plump corgi lounging nearby. This isn’t one of those family businesses where the parents have the kid nearby because they’re too busy with work to have them anywhere else; instead the wife is often reading, the son is doing his homework. Or they’re eating together, or a neighbor has come by to chat. In short, it looks like they’re there not out of an economic necessity but because it’s the most convenient way to spend time together, turning the necessity of work into something a little warmer.

Reader, I have recently befriended the shop’s dog, and it was a highlight of 2023.

I hope in 2024 you find warmth alongside necessity, carve out a comfortable space where there wasn’t previously one, and befriend a friendly animal.

Happy New Year,

-g