The Joy of Surprise Peppers

Friends,

The picture I’ve included at the top are 紅豆餅 (hóng dòu bǐng), a Taiwanese version of a Japanese dessert that usually gets translated as “wheel cakes” in English. 餅 is one of those characters that’s difficult to translate because it is used for almost anything that is round and edible. Pancakes, cookies, crackers, flat breads, etc., all use the word, including my favorite casual breakfast item, the 蛋餅 (dàn bǐng), a fluffy crepe-like green onion pancake with an egg cooked on it then folded up. You can get it with ham, cheese, etc., but a few places will put Thai basil on it, and that’s my go-to.

As far as these wheel cakes, you can usually choose between red bean or custard (and more rarely flavors like taro, matcha, or various fruits), but I find the red bean to be a little too plain and the custard to be a little too rich, so the best ones are where they do red bean with a dollop of custard in the middle. Foreigners here have strong feelings about beans for dessert (I remember very vividly a coworker saying “They used red beans in dessert because sugar was hard to come by. Well guys, sugar isn’t rare anymore!”) and locals have strong feelings about savory beans (besides soy). I like them all, but wish it was easier to get more legumes as part of a meal.

October was a strange month. Carolina and I experienced the largest earthquake we’ve ever been in (6.5 about 35 miles away). I began tutoring two elementary school students in addition to my older students, which is a very interesting change of pace. Including tutoring and working in a writing center, I have now worked with students from kindergarten to graduate school which is… something. Elementary school students are fun one-on-one, but I don’t think I’d ever want to try to teach more than about 1.8 of them at a time. Much respect to those who brave their difficult questions like “Why do your veins stick out like my grandma’s?” on a daily basis.

A big part of my focus, though, was on college essays. November 1 was the first big deadline wave, and while there are many more deadlines after, most of the later ones will reuse material from the November 1 deadline, and so it won’t be as heavy. Personal statements are actually one of the least weighted bits of information they send in to colleges, but because it’s one of the last pieces they have control over, they get an outsized amount of attention. Which is fine with me; as I’ve written before, I love the process of working with them on these essays. It’s one of the few times I get to help students a) work on something they care about that’s b) about themselves and c) has a lot of room for creativity and finally d) does not involve me giving them a grade.

(A note: the UC system and a few other places have gone test-optional, which would logically put more weight on the personal statements, but this is a superfluous change; for all intents and purposes there’d be little differences if colleges just asked you to fill in your household income instead of requiring SAT or a personal statement.)

Besides work on their essays, one of the most fascinating parts of this process is how their choice of where to apply compares with US students. For most US students, geography is a huge factor. How far away from home do they want to be, which schools are worth being an out-of-state student for and which aren’t, etc. Of course, that last factor doesn’t matter for international students, and when it comes to geography they congregate around CA and NY because that’s where the schools that rank highest on the rankings they care about are, not because of the states themselves. A caveat here that the students I work with are a wealthy bunch who will be okay with any of their choices and that as I tell them over and over, their lives won’t be drastically different regardless of which school they go to, but man their decisions are TOUGH. While universities all publish their acceptance rate, the acceptance rate for domestic students versus international students can be wildly different. MIT, for example , accepts 4.1% of applicants overall, but 5.2% of domestic applicants and 1.3% of international applicants. But there are many schools that don’t break down their numbers like this (and a whole lot of schools would be flipped with their numbers), AND acceptance rate is reflective of popularity as well as quality of applicant pool, so that’s really hard to judge anyways. The students here have to rely upon questionable info from the internet and a tiny pool of historical data from past applicants from the same high school, which depending on the school can be only a hair better than looking into a crystal ball. And then the all-powerful rankings and their parents’ dislike of a handful of cities makes them not choose great schools (or, in one student’s case, not choosing England because they don’t want to eat beans for breakfast). SLACs are especially hurt, which is disappointing because I think coming from a prestigious high school with only 45 people in their graduating class, they would find (many) SLACs a very welcoming environment.

AGAIN, these kids are going to be fine, but the amount of stress they’re undergoing for their perceived mountains of difference between their first choice and their fifth choice is kind of heartbreaking. They’ll get through it, though.

But I want to end this newsletter with a mini-celebration of these same students. Despite having after school tutoring five nights a week, despite my seventh grader student’s math course being on par with my own tenth grade math class, despite the arms race of the Taiwanese education system and the insane schedules they’re pushed to, they still find time to do really creative, cool work beyond their academics. I would love to share some of these projects with you, and hope you check them out.

• Aiden is an occasional YouTube vlogger , and also has a biology-focused podcast called 20-Minute Bio . I’m jealous of his oratory skills: he’s a really naturally gifted speaker.
• Iris’s podcast is called Sirious Talk and has only recently launched but already contains some really fantastic and fascinating interviews with her classmates that are just so thoughtful.
• Kate creates really catchy and impressive mashups of pop songs on YouTube that are, in my completely unbiased opinion, often more fun to listen to than the originals.
• Quinn is a writer with a website and a recently released book, just another teenage daydream . I highly recommend their short story “The Midway Station.”
• Natalie is one of the hardest-working young writers I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing, and her website The Societeas is a treasure trove of strong writing about the most important topics surrounding young people today. Give her a follow on IG !
• Nora and Emma do really fun reviews of restaurants on both Instagram and YouTube as “FoodieOnRoad.” The two have been split up by university, but I’m looking forward to see what they do next.
• Rachel is not only an awe-inspiring violinist and erhu player , she also takes enticing food photos on IG .
• Richard is finishing up his first semester at UNC and vlogs about it on YouTube . If you want to know what the transition from small private high school in Taipei to gigantic university in the US is like, check it out.
• Serena is an insanely talented drummer who also creates song mashups on her YouTube channel .

And this is just a small sample. Makes you proud, hopeful, and maybe a little envious.

Further reading:

• The most fun thing I read this month was Ben Jenkins at (the relaunched) Gawker pondering the question that has been on the front of everyone’s minds: Which old famous people could identify Mario?
• There were several excellent essays this month about Dave Chappelle’s disappointing descent into the wildly profitable fame of being “cancelled.” I recommend Saeed Jones’s at GQ and Roxane Gay’s at NYT .
• The Atlantic announced nine new newsletters , which means we now know where Nicole Chung is landing after finishing up her stint at Slate . I’m really excited about her and Charlie Warzel’s larger platform especially, though all these writers are ones I check out on a regular basis.
• The “ Removing Statues of Terrible People Erected at a Time when Other Terrible People Wanted to Intimidate African Americans Daring to Ask for Equality ” culture war topic has faded in America, having now been replaced with the “ CRT Is When You Teach Things I Don’t Like ” culture war topic, but here in Taiwan a very similar conversation has been playing out over decades over what to do with the many KMT leader / brutal dictator Chiang Kai-shek statues. While more than 150 were moved to a single park ( which you should definitely look at pictures of ), Taipei still features a giant, centrally-located memorial to the dictator that has come up as a target for a transitional justice committee , making it reappear in the national conversation.
• This summer I hit an unusually long reading slump, where I wasn’t a fan of a whole bunch of a books in a row. Between July and now I read just over thirty books (trying to make up ground lost from the last two years), and the only two I gave five stars to were Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend (which I really only recommend to MFA-adjacent people) and a book I finished this week, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. Her two Greek mythology-inspired books, this one and Circe , are two of the best books I’ve ever read. You should check them out.

Carolina and I have been visiting the morning market by our house a lot more lately. We get slightly different things every time, and I’m always on the lookout for something I haven’t tried cooking before, but there’s one vendor we go to almost every time. She has our favorite tofu, soy bean sprouts (which we love for salad and sandwiches), fresh soy beans (I’m realizing as I write this sentence that maybe too much of my diet is soy-based, I say having just finished a soy latte ,and I’m about to heat up miso soup for dinner), great pickles, fresh noodles, fake meat, and a variety of seaweeds/kelps. One of my favorite things about her is no matter what we buy, she throws a few tiny spicy peppers into our bag as a freebie, which surprises and delights me every single time.

I am trying to be more and more easily delighted, especially by surprise peppers. I recommend this same course of action to you as well.

-g