Image caption appears here

Blog

I found a long, pointy knit hat in the living room.

Mom perked up, sidled over and plucked a library book from her knitting-sewing-ironing-magazines-library books-knickknacks-all-purpose Danish dining table.  She opened to a page titled “Winter Hats for Gnomes.”  

“I knit these for the grandkids,” she said, and produced two more long, pointy gnome hats.  She’d used thick, gorgeously-saturated Malabrigo yarns from Uruguay, dyed in alizarin crimson, viridian and cobalt.  

“Cute,” I said.

Petra had already told Mom to quit knitting for her kids (ages four, four and two), since they were refusing to wear Grandma's slightly itchy creations.

In between Twister, Temple Run, and Jenga With Sudden New Rules Made by Cheating Children, I noticed a Hal Leonard’s Guitar Method Book 1 and a kid's guitar sitting on the floor next to me.  

I picked it up and played some songs - Greensleeves, Shenandoah, Red River Valley, etc.  I thought I was doing pretty well, and mentally patted myself on the back.

“You’re horrible,” Italo said.

On the internet, Positano looks gorgeous and saturated with color. 

When we showed up in May of 2018, it looked like this:  


Positano mountain fog

Haha!  I still liked it, though.

Eventually, it looked more like this:

Positano cloudy day

I'm not a photographer, so this view was way nicer in person.  

And now, please enjoy this inviting chair that we found outside of our Airbnb.


Positano red chair

I was on Facebook the other day (five years ago), and saw a comment on my cousin’s Facebook page.  

Kai-Hsiang uses Chinese characters for his Facebook name, so every time Mom asks me to show her photos of Kai-Hsiang's kids, I go to my cousin Yi-Ta’s page (he uses his English name, Benny, in his profile), and look for Kai-Hsiang in the “Mutual Friends” section.  Kai-Hsiang’s photo features him posing with the hideous-pink starfish guy from SpongeBob SquarePants, so he’s easy to find.

The comment on Kai-Hsiang’s page came from someone named Shampoo Hsu.  I’ve always thought that Shampoo Hsu was an underused name, and I wanted this person as a friend, or alternatively, I wanted to rename myself Shampoo Hsu.

A year later, I noticed another comment from Shampoo Hsu, and clicked on his profile.  

Shampoo Hsu is my cousin!!!  As it turns out, Shampoo is the English name of Kai-Hsiang’s younger brother, Kai-Jin.  Six-year-old Kai-Jin used to lock me in his family’s laundry room at 5 a.m. while everyone else was sleeping and I was gazing, jet-lagged, out of the laundry room window.  He would smirk and mutter, “You monkee,” “You doge” and “You peeg” through the glass door.  

Apparently, shampoo - “xifajing” in Mandarin - sounds similar to “Hsu Kai-Jin” (“Xi” is the same as “Hsu” as long as the tones and character match; it’s just a different Romanization).  This was why Kai-Jin picked his name.

A scan of Shampoo Hsu’s Facebook page reveals more glorious bounty.  Shampoo has collected friends named Liquefy Chang, Achilles Hsieh, Macro Chen, Conductor Wang, Mejust Chuang, Agroup Tsai and NewWay Hsiao.

In Taiwan, kids pick (or their teacher picks) their English name while in school.  As far as I know, they can change their name later, but I hear they often stick to their first choice (I’ll ask Kai-Hsiang about this later, since I’m not sure).  This is why you can befriend adults named Pizza, Glitter, Maximus, Policeman and iPhone in various parts of Asia.

from a Japanese decor magazine.  Ah, so peaceful and calm.

Chupa and his friend Jonic spent the evening singing and jamming along to Daniel Caesar’s “Get You,” which requires a lot of falsetto and features the lyric, “everything I need's . . . between . . . those thighs.”

I didn't know what lavender smelled like until I moved to California.  In Kansas, stores sold sachets of lavender that smelled like diseased wax.
Thought I'd share some work by this artist.  Who is this artist?  I have no idea.  I found his paintings in a book in my parents' house (written in Chinese; I can't read any of it) while doing a massive 5-day-and-night spring cleaning of the disaster that is their home.  But isn't he amazing?

Chupa told me that he’d made reservations at a special place for my birthday, but I told him that I’d already picked out the venue.  I wanted PASTA PASTA PASTA.  Specifically, I wanted a $60 plate of Chitarra alla Norcina that turned out to cost $70 when we showed up at the restaurant.  

In my defense, I’ve never demanded a pricey meal from anyone before, but I’ve been craving good pasta for twenty years.  

Plus, TRUFFLES (a.k.a. 1/80th of a truffle)!

I wasn’t sure that I’d say this, but it was worth the $70 (granted, it wasn't my $70)(but I can speak for Chupa and say that it was worth HIS $70, plus tax & tip, so $92.  Right?  Even though he only got 2 noodles).  Delicious!!!

For a half-assed dinner, I cooked buckwheat noodles to pair with spinach and broth.  Chupa found the noodles in the sink and began eating them out of the colander.

“Mmmm,” he said.

“Do you like them?”

“Mmmm, warm rubber bands,” he replied. 

“Want to play a game?” Mom would ask.

The game turned out to be us pinching and pulling the skin on the tops of our hands in a perpetual dog pile of claw hands.  She’d pull/pinch the skin on the top of my right hand with her right hand.  While she held the pinch, I put my left hand over her right hand to pinch her skin and hold it while she put her left hand over my left hand and pinched hard.  I’d take my right hand from the bottom, and put it over her left hand to pinch, and so on.  This game never lasted long, as Mom, smiling, would speed up the process until we ended with a big collapsed hand pile.

This game was not fun.  It was painful.  Mom pinched hard and enthusiastically.  Maybe it was invented for bored Taiwanese schoolchildren trapped on public transit.

Chupa buys Bartlett pears that sit in the fridge until they rot. 

Tom and Petra had a night nanny who held the twins tucked under her arms, like footballs.

My college floormate, who looked like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo, always shared his MJ stash with me (in exchange, he would come by looking for snacks).  His stuff never had any effect on me.  One Saturday night, a group of us attended a midnight reading of Dante's Inferno at The Cathedral of Saint John the Divine (because that's what freshmen do) and luxuriated in a row of ornate Gothic wooden thrones onstage while the pipe organ thundered around us.  I still didn't feel anything.
. . . in my dream turned out to be a flood in our house.  A flood in your house doubles as a pain in your butt.

"What are you doing?"  Mom asked.

"Invading your space." 

"Oh gee," she said.  "I don't mind."

Mom loves beverages.  For fun, she adds orange juice to oolong tea, along with leftover coffee (ground, bagged and ancient, from Marshalls) and week-old wine.  Part of me thinks she makes this drink because it disturbs me.

 

Mom opened my door and threw several socks at my head.  

"I found some orphan.  Nobody want," she announced.  

She closed the door on her way out.

For Christmas, I gave Mom several presents, including a set of artisan felted wool coasters The set consisted of two yellow coasters and two blue coasters, with an artsy silkscreened design on the top of each coaster.  

After a few months, I noticed that Mom consistently used the blue coasters on the correct side and the yellow coasters turned over to wrong side.

"You don’t like the yellow coasters?" I asked her one day.

"It’s fine."

"Then why do you turn it over to this side?"

"What’s the difference?"

I flipped the coaster over.  "This side is the design side."

"Either one.  No difference."

"There’s a difference:  This is the design side . . . this is not the design side."

"It’s you who buys it, not me."

"That’s true, but I intended for you to use the design side."

"And I intend to use the non-design side as the design side," she said.

I feel especially Asian when I drink jasmine tea and dine on heroin-sprinkled, crispy lotus slices.

On Sunday (her only day off), I tried to cajole Mom into organizing the guest bedroom closet, which houses her collection of cheapo pastel cotton clothing that she buys from one of Dad's medical patients out of their home store/garage.  You can’t walk into the closet without feeling irritated by the plastic bags housing giant, billowy comforters that take up most of the floor and tangle with your feet like leeches.

Mom grumbled about not wanting to clean, but followed me into the guest room anyway.

In addition to the usual jumble, there were several other bags crowding the floor.  Mom brings five bags to and from work, and tosses them in random places when she gets home.

I watched as she rummaged through everything, unearthing Tupperware, smashed newspaper clippings, various-SPF tinted moisturizer tubes, Sudoku fun time, crumb-filled magazines, piles of scratch paper cut into random sizes, bobby pins, medical billing papers, crunchy Japanese broad beans, hairbrushes, and library books featuring knitting tutorials, British writers and Taiwanese schoolteachers.

She paused when she reached a mysterious plastic bag.

“What’s this?  Oh!”

It was salami and a trio of Trader Joe's cheeses.

“How long has this been here?” I asked.

She couldn’t remember.  “Four days?” she mused.  She opened the salami and commenced a smörgåsbord. 

“Ever been to Jiufen?” I asked Mom.  

“No.”

“You should go!  It has a nice view of the sea.  It’s rumored to be the city that inspired Spirited Away.  And they have the best gweh I’ve ever tasted - your favorite, with taro, and the green one with radish or whatever that chewy stuff is.”

She looked skeptical.  “How did you get there?  You don’t speak the language.”

I know thirty words in Mandarin, and speak Taiwanese at a four-year-old level.  Also, Mom is not really aware of the internet. 

“How did you buy a ticket?  What did you say?”

“Wo beh ki Jiufen.  Wo beh beh i-ge pyoh.”  

Mom chortled.  

 

Before the hour-long bus ride to Jiufen, I wandered around the street looking for breakfast.  I’d left the hostel without eating, and thought I’d find a Family Mart or 7-11 and grab a 7NT tea egg or a 30NT freshly-roasted yam.  

The only to-go snack I found was a cart selling pan-fried baozi.  I bought two bao, each under two inches in diameter, and walked back to the bus stop, eating.  It was super delicious.

Several cabs lined the curb.  Each driver offered to take me to Jiufen for a good price.

“Wo ooh pyoh,” I told them.

One of them wanted to know where I was from, why I spoke Taiwanese instead of Mandarin, since most people my age spoke Mandarin, why was I in Taiwan by myself, and why didn’t I just use his taxi, it would be so much faster and easier for a clueless tourist like me to get to Jiufen.  Why wait forever for a slow bus?  I explained and politely declined, and he continued to pester me.  We eventually had an argument, during which I dropped my second bao.

I ran back to the bao stand, but the vegetable bao were sold out.  

“Mayo (none),” the guy said unsympathetically.  He had thought it was weird that I only wanted two bao.

I thought about the bao during the bus ride.

When we arrived in Jiufen, everyone clambered off the bus and booked it towards an alley.  I followed the masses and bought something from the first popular stall - a bowl of pretty pastel taro and sweet potato balls in a clear purple-gray soup.

I sat next to a gold-and-black stray cat on a concrete ledge overlooking the sea and ate the lightly sweet chewy balls (called yuyuan and diguayuan, or tang yuanand soup, feeling lucky that I hadn’t purchased fifty dumplings and arrived in Jiufen stuffed.

I get full quickly, so I had to pass up most of Jiufen's scrumptious snacks in favor of not exploding.  After leaving the Old Street, I took a bus up to the Gold Mine Museum and explored the peaceful surrounding mountainside.  The day was drizzling and gray, and clouds drifted into the mountain range.  I explored enticing vine-covered paths and stairs that made me feel like I was in a Miyazaki film. 

Two orange tabby brothers followed us home in December.  They lived with us for five weeks, snuggling, wrestling, running around like madmen and punching each other in the face, until their owners saw our “found” signs (which had been posted in front of their house for weeks).  

Chupa misses them a ton.  They shredded furniture, ate my expensive paintbrushes, pawed wet paintings and shoved my brush around whenever I painted, but they were cute and soft fuzzballs.

Rummaging Region