Your Honor, My Lord

Friends,

A quick technical note: when you get these newsletters in your email, it will tell you that if you reply to the email, it will post your email as a comment. That is not true. What will instead happen is that I will see your reply and respond to it, but it won’t show up publicly. I haven’t figured out how to get WordPress to say that, yet.

Hello from the Year of the Dragon! The above picture comes from our neighbors across the street, who appear to sell bulk-sized containers of cooking products like rice, cooking oil, vinegar, etc. Outside their mini-warehouse they also sell eggs! For a long time we were unsure about buying them — it’s very hard to tell when anyone is actually working there and there’s a constant flow of large trucks loading and unloading, but this year we steeled ourselves and tried it. The eggs are much more irregular than supermarket eggs, so I’m going to tell myself the sourcing is better, though who knows. The smaller bucket on the right is full of century eggs. Their common name here sounds much less interesting — 皮蛋, “skin eggs” from their preservation method involving covering them in a skin of rice husks . I’m a big fan of stir fried century eggs ( 宮保皮蛋 !), but not really a fan of the most common way you see them here: cold, halved next to a cube of cold tofu drizzled with a slightly sweet, thick soy sauce.

This picture, specifically the price difference, makes me think about Eater ‘s recent post about egg yolk colors . Like most food-related sources I trust, Eater had the audacity to suggest that egg yolk color doesn’t correlate with taste, which upset a lot of people . Yolk correlates with diet, and there are good diets that make for lighter yellow yolks and bad diets that make for darker orange yolks and vice versa. The same is true for egg shells — some breeds lay brown, some lay white, but it’s not about quality. But don’t listen to me! Kenji and ATK are much more reliable. Anyways, it’s possible that the brown shell egg production across the street is 50% higher quality than the white shell ones. Unlikely. But possible.

When we buy something from a place like the above, we always call the salesperson 老闆, a word that has no good single translation. It could be salesperson, it could be shopkeeper, it could be the cook, but it’s a catch-all label for anyone who is running the store/restaurant, and you can use it to describe your own manager at a job as well. It often gets translated as “boss,” but this isn’t great because in the US, it’s more common for the cook to cal l the customer boss than the other way around.

I’ve been thinking about this more than usual because for my Mandarin class homework recently, my teacher asked me to give a short presentation about a difference in culture between Taiwan and the US. Now, obviously entire books could be written about this subject, but for some reason the first thing that came to my mind was titles and honorifics like 老闆. When I first started teaching here, my students would raise their hand and say, “Teacher, teacher!” to get my attention. My reaction to this was that the students had either forgotten my name, were embarrassed to pronounce it, or were being a little bit rude. But I’ve slowly (very slowly) realized that names are much less commonly used here in conversation, whereas titles and honorifics are much more commonly used.

This applies in all parts of your life! You’ll call your friend’s mom 阿姨, ~auntie (note: the same term is not usually used on your actual aunt), and it wouldn’t be unusual to never use or maybe not even know her actual name. Even parents rarely use their children’s names, instead using 妹妹、弟弟、姐姐、哥哥: little/big sister, little/big brother, even in cases of an only child (and I’m told that in families with more than two brothers or sisters that nicknames are much more common than using actual first names). When I was discussing it with my teacher, she was surprised when I said that basically everyone gets called Mister or Miss, but that if I know someone’s name and just called them their title that it would be a little unusual or possibly rude.

Except for a few cases, I realized. Doctor?

I wish I could say this takes some of the stress away from me about learning student names (especially as the university has started giving me larger classes), but it hasn’t. I especially worry about it in my medical college classes where my students are actual doctors! Should I call them by their name? Can I call them student? Should I call them doctor? Are they judging me right now?

The emphasis on titles shows up in the scariest sight for a new Mandarin student: the family tree . Mandarin has different titles for your uncles on your mother’s side versus father’s side, your cousins based on side but also based on age, and then “in-laws” has its own complete vocabulary set. I have given up on learning these and will not be taking questions at this time.

So, here’s a list of my titles: To my younger students I’m 老師 (teacher) but to my older students I’m 教授 (professor). I’m Carolina’s 先生 (mister) in informal situations but her 老公 or 夫 (both husband) in more formal places. To my siblings I’m 哥哥, but to Carolina’s siblings I’m both a 姐夫 and a 妹夫. To one set of kids I’m a 伯父 uncle, while to the other I’m the 姑父 uncle. I’m thankful no one has called me 叔叔 (male version of auntie, generic term used for older person you’re informal with) yet, but I’m sure I’m not too many gray hairs away. To a stranger I might be 先生 too, but if it’s a stranger who wants to sell me something, I get the best honorific, which is 帥哥, or handsome brother.

Further reading:

• NPR has a great profile of three Taiwanese Americans who chose to move back to Taiwan , including friend of the show Michelle Kuo! I love how the interview shows that the America the parents moved to, and the Taiwan they moved away from, have changed so much in a short period for these individual families.
• My links about the internet are almost always negative, but here’s a sliver of joy: Anil Dash on how “Wherever you get your podcasts” endures as one part of the internet where the promise of open communication remains free and not limited by a single company.
• Now for the negative article. You might have noticed the gross amount of spam sites that show up when you Google someone’s obituary. Mia Sato at The Verge has a new article about how LLM-generated text is now making them even worse by incorrectly identifying who has died.
• The Verge has been killing it, lately, in my opinion. Here’s a second link: Kevin Nguyen’s loving remembrance of TinyLetter and what it stood for .
• One of my favorite writers of all time, James Baldwin, would’ve celebrated his 100th birthday this year. Robert Jones Jr., who went by the handle “Son of Baldwin,” commemorated the occasion with a nice guide to approaching Baldwin . I especially liked this article, though, because although I’ve read almost all of Baldwin’s work, I hadn’t come across the essay “Nothing Personal.” It’s the text for a collection of photos about American identity, and it’s so full of momentum and jabs and take a look at this one sentence: “the relevant truth is that the country was settled by a desperate, divided, and rapacious horde of people who were determined to forget their pasts and determined to make money. We certainly have not changed in this respect and this is proved by our faces, by our children, by our absolutely unspeakable loneliness, and the spectacular ugliness and hostility of our cities.”
• I am a huge sucker for journalism and art that takes the voices of children seriously. The Cut ‘s fashion interview series with 13-and-unders is a delight . A choice quote: “I’m over coats and the drama of zipping them up.”
• Speaking of taking children seriously, I’ve recommended Japanese TV show Old Enough in the newsletter before. It features 3–6 year olds being sent out on errands with hidden cameras watching them along the way, and is a great show. However, I’d somehow missed SNL’s parody of the show last year, “Old Enough! Longterm Boyfriends!” and, yeah, very good.
• Our big national news flashpoint here in Taiwan this month was an after school program’s Facebook post praising the work ethic of a 4th and 6th grade pair of siblings. The post showed the students’ schedule, which included dinner in the car and 11:30 bed times. Tons of people call for change, but when it comes down to the frontlines, parents simply do not believe that free time has benefits, and they’re not willing to push a little less and then having that to blame when their child misses some opportunity (whereas the opposite, pushing too hard then missing an opportunity due to exhaustion and being spread too thin, is blamed on the student instead).
• I finished up Spider-man 2 on the PS5, and the story was so, so bad. But swinging through New York City is fun enough that I still wholeheartedly recommend it. Plus, the voice acting is pretty great.
• Finally! I’ve been listening to the Japanese musician Motohiro Nakashima lately, who I stumbled upon through the algorithms and highly recommend, and he made me realize that I so rarely listen to music for the first time these days, so please send me a recommendation of your own.

We just finished the third week of the semester here, so it should feel like I’m about to hit a groove after the initial startup, but !things! !keep! !happening!. Good and bad. And, hey, it’s a little annoying that some of these things couldn’t have spread themselves out in a way where I could’ve tackled some of them over winter break, but we’ll make it through. What’s really nice is that I’ve been able to say “No” to a few things lately and not have a big internal crisis about whether I should’ve tried to make it work even if I didn’t want to. Which is growth. And evidence of security/privilege.

Hope you have things you’ve wanted to say “yes” to lately. And hope you can say “no” when you need to. Good luck out there.

-g