What’d you bring me?

Friends,

I am currently in the United States, where I find myself frequently playing “am I getting old?” or “have I lived in Taiwan too long?” This game has very simple rules: any time I feel like something about myself has changed from what I remember, I try to figure out which to blame. Can’t focus on a conversation in a loud restaurant? Find HEB’s medium salsa too spicy or a homemade pie too sweet? Unable to finish the generous portion at an Indian restaurant?

The biggest one is temperature. I was cold in the airplane. I was cold in the airport. I’m cold in the car. I’ve been cold in restaurants. I was uncomfortably cold in the grocery store. I froze in a movie theater, even with a jacket. I’m currently cold in the house. Back when I was a full-time resident of this country, cold was not my normal state of being.

My friends, it is July in Texas and I have asked to borrow a hoodie.

This is especially annoying to me because I’m still constantly uncomfortably hot in Taiwan. Obviously there are differences in the heat: Texas is much drier, but air conditioning is also much more omnipresent. In Texas we go from ACed house to shaded garage to ACed car to ACed building, with only brief parking lot crossings of exposure to the relentless sun. In Taiwan, by contrast, many more spaces lack air conditioning: our building’s lobby, the hallways of universities/schools (most are open air hallways and only the classrooms are HVACed), and one of our primary grocery sources (an open-air market). In addition, we walk a lot more, and the air conditioning level of public transportation is typically pretty low. (Caveat: there are still a lot of businesses that PUMP air conditioning, and some that even use AC as advertisement, giving you a frosty gust of air through an open door, enticing you to enter. If I was in charge of Taipei, this is one of the first little things I would crack down on.) But, regardless, if I’m now going to be cold all the time in the US, it would be perfectly acceptable if I was also more comfortable in Taiwan’s gross 5+ month summer.

Before the US, we were in the Philippines for a brief trip with a Filipina friend. Hearing people talk in the Philippines was like a strange dream. I’d hear a lot of English, a smattering of Spanish words I knew, and then a bunch of words I didn’t recognize, all mixed together. It was both really neat and really disorienting! Besides the language, other observations about the Philippines: 1) They love their cover songs. I’m not sure I encountered a single public space playing music that was not cover songs. I heard a slowed down female-voiced version of Bon Jovi’s “Bed of Roses.” I heard a folk-y cover of CCR’s “Proud Mary.” Perhaps oddest of all was a reggae cover of “Stan” by Eminem playing in a mango-centric dessert shop where they’d put edible googly eyes on your ice cream. 2) I’m not sure I’ve been anywhere that Coca-Cola is more ubiquitous. 3) Everyone had cute stretchy sweaters on their suitcases, which I hope are replacing the massive amount of plastic wrap people used to use for extra security.

In both the Philippines and the United States we are visiting people we know and therefore we are bringing gifts. Gift-giving culture in Taiwan is a little more uniform than in the US. When people travel, they buy a large amount of whatever snack is famous from that destination and then hand them out to many people in their lives. Because of this, we’ve had a steady stream of Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and other countries’ snacks presented to us, and I’ve been persuaded into believing that, for nonserious occasions, snacks are truly the best gift you can give someone. So many other gifts are an obligation. For example, we have a wonderful collection of coffee mugs, many of which were gifts from friends. But now, if anyone gives us a coffee mug, we have to decide which of our old ones to throw away, as we already an absurd, impractical number for two people. But snacks? Even when snacks become an obligation due to an abundance of quantity or being something we don’t like, they are a simple one: we just give them to other people. A few other gifts come close, like cute stationery, but snacks are universally used and easy. I’m often frustrated by the way almost every snack is individually wrapped in Taiwan, but it does make them easier to share.

The photo accompanying this newsletter is a grab bag of snacks we packed for the US. It includes some of my favorite things to give people outside of Taiwan. Now, I’m sure you can get all of these on Amazon or somewhere in the US, but I’d never encountered them before, which means most of my recipients haven’t either. Top choices are sea salt lemon candies, spicy (Sichuan peppercorn, 麻辣) peanuts, random flavors of Kit Kats (of which more are available in Taiwan due to Japan ), tea, dried plums, mung bean cookies, and fried garlic fava beans. The spicy peanuts are a particular hit, with one friend offering to pay a luggage fee for a suitcase full. Maybe I should learn to make them myself. This recipe looks pretty good.

I’m going to say something controversial next! I tend to avoid buying pineapple cakes as gifts. They are THE iconic present from Taiwan, and there are so many beautiful gift boxes full of them everywhere you look. But I find other snacks to be more appealing. Shelf-stable cakes can only ever be okay tasting! A jar of the pineapple cake filling would be better.

Please don’t call the Taiwanese police and tell on me.

Further reading:

• In a creative workshop that is fading from my memory, the instructor rightly advised us to avoid writing about dead pets: there’s just not much you can say that will feel new on the subject. That makes this NYTimes animated essay especially impressive. There is so much to say on the subject, but it’s things we’ve all thought about before–how we fall in love with pets, how getting a new pet as an adult is to knowingly invite loss and grief into our lives, how the kind of love pets can give you is unlike any other love–and, yeah, I don’t know how you say something new. But the specific details and the lovely animation makes it work.
• Loved this explainer on the cages that adorn many windows in Taipei . I assumed most people still thought of them as being about anti-theft, but apparently a lot of people have other reasons for them. We don’t have one, but I’ve seen them put to good use when it comes to storage and hanging clothes to dry. I’d probably choose to have one if I could, though would definitely want some way to get out of it in an emergency.
• Still having to have too many conversations about LLMs/”AI.” The only good thing I’ve read on the subject in the last month is this brief musing from Neven Mrgan on what it’s like to get an email you know was written by AI. Or, to put it into a maxim that’s been repeated/reiterated so many times I can’t find the original source, “Why should I bother reading what someone couldn’t bother to write?”
• RIP to Donald Sutherland, one of those faces present throughout my life in so many different roles. I’ll remember him most in two movies: Fallen with Denzel Washington, a movie I loved and seemed to always be on TV, and Kelly’s Heroes , one of the few movies my father and I share a love for. If you haven’t seen Kelly’s Heroes , I highly recommend it. Clint Eastwood, Donald Sutherland, and Don Rickles in a war heist comedy. Sutherland plays Oddball, a guy in charge of a few tanks. See a clip .
• I watched two really great documentaries this week: The Last Repair Shop and Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó (奶奶跟外婆). Both are short, both are on Disney+, but The Last Repair Shop is also on YouTube . The former is about a dwindling office in LA where they repair all the school system’s music instruments, while also telling brief stories of the people who work there and the students who borrow them (I wanted a lot more of this and was disappointed when it ended!). The latter is a brief portrait of the filmmaker’s maternal and paternal grandmothers, who live together. It’s, of course, sad. But it’s also delightful and full of optimism and joy. Really really encourage you to seek them out.

I learned recently that the Chinese equivalent to night owl is 夜貓子, night cat. Why do people who stay awake at night get cool animal nicknames? Where’s my nickname, set up for people who would normally sleep in but have been working hard to be well-hydrated lately and can’t physically sleep longer due to said hydration? I’m an unwilling morning person. I’m not sure what animal that correlates to. I’m going with morning octopus. You can’t stop me.

-g