taiwan travelogue

a review

Everyone I know loves Taiwan. I’d been holding out on visiting for some years until I was on a group walk and encountered a friend of a friend who had interned at Bytedance and grown up in Taiwan and politely informed me that I should visit soon, before China invaded. Well okay. I took her suggestion seriously and a plan was made in the group chat.

I went with my friends C and L and my mom. My therapist was like Are you sure you want to go with your mom? I was like yes my mom is a great hang. She’s met all of my friends, plus she speaks Mandarin, which I assumed would be a bonus even though I was told everyone in speaks English in Taiwan.

The vacation was meaningful for me. People have written about this more comprehensively than I have, but my unconventional work life means that while I have very flexible hours I also don’t really have any distinct starts or stops in my work life. I have coaching calls every week, I try to post on Substack every week (though I’ve been more relaxed about it for the past six months… that’s probably gonna change, I’m in the mood to write more), I’ve been working on the novel continuously for a while. My agent got back from maternity leave in May and I sent her a revision that I’d been working on for the past few months. I’d tried to get the edits done before she left for maternity leave, but she’d gotten back to me and basically informed me that my edits were not good. Which I accepted: I’d done it on a pretty tight schedule and tried to give her exactly what she requested, which essentially meant it came out somewhat lifeless. I knew that I could do a better job if I gave myself some time and just vibed it out, but it felt high stakes to give her the revision when she came back because, well, I really want the book to be sold and published! And I’d put six months of my life into revising it! During these six months I’d luckily made the smart decision to hire this amazing novelist as an editor so I could get a pair of eyes on it. I highly recommend Anna; she is the most professional person in the world, her comments were super helpful, and most importantly having someone else read it and offer feedback kept me tethered to reality. When you’re doing something with a very long feedback loop you can sometimes start to feel totally insane. (I know that’s how my friends feel: they’re all like, is there really a novel? Does it actually exist? I haven’t seen it. Which isn’t helped by my air of extreme secrecy around it. But at this point I can assure you: the novel really exists, and Claude had no part in its creation. Thank God.) Anyway, the week before I left for Asia, which I spent partially in Edge Esmeralda and partially at Interact (more on Californian utopia communities soon at ava.substack.com!), my agent emailed me and said she was mostly through the revision and liked it. Which was an incredible relief. I was so happy. I still have work to do on it, but this feels like a turning point. And going to Asia is the age old way to celebrate turning points… right?

DAY ONE

My mom and I were on the same Sunday flight. C and L had gotten to Taipei the day before us. I ended up sleeping six hours of the 13 hour flight, and my mom was out out the entire time. When we landed I was amused by these signs at the airport… are there really so many people try to smuggle pork floss through security? Evidently yes.

As the weather forecast had anticipated, Taipei was overcast, wet and sticky. I have a love-hate relationship with humidity: I was born in Shenzhen, where it was so hot my parents kept my head shaved (!!) for the first two years of my life and I have pathologically dry skin and hair that thrives in wet environments, so in some ways I'm very well-suited to it. But I choose to live in seasonless San Francisco because I hate the heat.

It was raining when we got to the Airbnb and would continue raining on and off the entire trip. I spent the whole time wearing these white sandals from the Row I got for $50 (I’ll be bragging about that until I die). We donned our rain jackets and umbrellas and wandered outside. We ate at Chapman’s Noodles, which was pretty good. I immediately learned that cash is king in Taipei, especially for restaurants. Taiwan is like Japan in that sense—they have these weird extraneous gadgets like a machine where you place your order but the restaurants won’t take Apple Pay. After dinner I requested we go to this (touristy) speakeasy called Book Ing, that was ostensibly book themed but actually was Studio Ghibli themed? I ordered a Howl’s Moving Castled Bloody Mary. One thing that you may or may not know about me is that I am super fixated on tomatoes and as a result I’ve consumed probably thousands of Bloody Marys in my life. On planes… at bars… at brunch restaurants. I will happily embarrass myself at a fine dining establishment by asking if they can make a Bloody Mary. You have to stand for something in this life.

C and L instantly got on with my mom, which I was happy about. She told us a little bit about her (hilarious) relationship with ChatGPT, who helps her shop. When she’s at Marshall’s or whatever she’ll take pictures of whatever she wants to buy and Chat will be like “That’s not worth the money.” When I heard that, I immediately thought, OpenAI is going to make a trillion dollars.

DAY TWO

In the morning we ate Food Life, which had amazing breakfast sandwiches. My mom really wanted to hike Yangming Shan, but I said we had to wait until she bought sneakers because all she’d packed were Crocs. Instead we walked over to Daan Park, which was peaceful and green. I noticed that there are a lot of old people out and about socializing and doing taichi—Taiwan is definitely an elder-heavy society. There was actual netting on the basketball hoops, which C and L said were a sign of a high-trust society (apparently people in the US steal the netting?). Afterwards we went to the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. Despite repeated applications of sunscreen, it was so sunny at this point I felt like passing out, and insisted that we seek shelter in the air-conditioned inside of the all. There was a Botero exhibition which I was thrilled about—I love Botero’s art! I have a little Botero cat sculpture on my coffee table that Maran gave me. I guess taste in art is genetic, because my mom and I both were obsessed with his paintings. I like his idea that volume is sensuality.

I wondered out loud if he was a feeder but everyone else refused to engage with me. After we finished browsing we decided to go to Eslite Spectrum Songyan. The bookstore is apparently open 24/7. It was really interesting to see the Asian covers of Western novels. I hope that one day my novel will have an Asian translation and cover, too. I found the books on AI very funny—like this one, which seems to be mostly about how to generate anime girls?

We ate lunch at FUJIN TREE Taiwanese Cuisine & Champagne, which was honestly some of the best Asian food I’ve ever had.

The chicken brought me to tears. In the afternoon we mostly browsed stores—I bought a slouchy summerweight jacket made by Ulterior and a pair of emerald green Rototo socks from Groovy, which had a great selection of Japanese brands. Another standout was this great outdoor equipment/gorpcore store called Field Day. I bought a baseball cap with cat ears (never saw a hat with ears I could turn down) and discovered this great running gear brand called Unna. I loved these shorts but didn’t buy them because they were available for cheaper online.

Honestly, I would’ve probably purchased them if I knew how much sweat and rain was ahead of me, but whatever. At night we briefly walked through the LinJiang Night Market and ate at this cute izakaya called Shinjai Shokudo. We finished off the night by getting cocktails at Bar Mood.

DAY THREE

We ate breakfast at Pei Pei Tong Breakfast Restaurant (沛沛彤早餐), which actually has a different sign and name. The guy who served us was definitely an Asian baddie. As readers might know, one of my longtime complaints about San Francisco is there are not enough male Asian baddies here though there are many female Asian baddies. After that we went hiking at YangMing Shan. I was nervous because of the heat (and I did end up completely soaked in sweat), but it was really beautiful. Taiwan has amazing butterflies.

There was a bird that had the most haunting call. For lunch we ate at Halal Chinese Beef Noodles. We spent most of the afternoon in the Chifeng St area, which has a lot of cute vintage shops. I really liked Ede Select Shop—I bought a pale pink Margiela midi skirt there. They also had a great Issey Miyake bag but I’m banned from buying bags. I also liked Par Store, which had vinyls, posters, and magazines. I bought a fringe Moschino top and a BCBG dress from Masako Vintage. We went to a few bookstores: Athena, Kimotsi, and 浮光書店. We were all still full from the beef noodles, so for dinner we just ended up going to this very charming bar called Cafe Society with a lot of Jura wine.