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skin issues

Skin so dry it starts flaking off visibly. Chapped lips. Having to buy eye drops because your eyes get uncomfortable wearing contact lenses. The occasional nosebleed. A drinking ban for six months because your liver doesn’t need any more stress.

Those are all side effects associated with isotretinoin (Accutane), which is the strongest standard treatment for acne in pill form. Of course it can be safe enough, and worth it if it makes your skin clear, but when my dermatologist here suggested it, I winced inside. I told him I’d stick with the antibiotics for now, thank you, because I’d rather suffer stomachaches and the good bacteria in my gut potentially getting murdered over a medicine that’s so taxing on the body it needs a blood test for prescription, considering that my acne isn’t even severe.

I’ve had acne since I was nine, and I guess it’s a lot more manageable now that I’m an adult–I’m just more self-conscious of how I look, dabbing at my face with oil control film every twenty minutes and habitually squinting at my pores in the mirror before I go out of my apartment. I also had a brief few years of respite during the pandemic when my skin miraculously cleared up (thanks to a very competent dermatologist and a lot of chemical peels).

It’s already a normal part of life for me to go regularly for facials--before, every two weeks, and now just every month because my skin can handle it–and I have a facialist here in Taiwan as well. She’s very kind–trims my eyebrows for free, serves calming tea afterwards, and does head and shoulder massages too. Just today, I saw her again, and apologized at having to check a dictionary for the nth time because I still don’t know that many anatomy-related terms in Chinese. She laughed and told me that my listening had improved a lot because we could actually hold a conversation now, plus my skin was getting better.

I’m already fairly resigned to having acne, or at best imperfect skin, but sometimes it gets tiring, having to sit inside clinics and wondering on dates if the huge bump on my chin is too distracting and not being able to wear halter tops and bikinis because my back is scarred and haphazardly testing out skin products then ditching them after a week of no effect.  

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Cool project that aims to make insulin much more affordable. I was surprised to know that one vial of insulin is pretty expensive (considering how common diabetes is):

I also didn't know that for one type of diabetes, they literally need insulin to survive–because they'll die within weeks or even days without it.

Hope the project does well! Medicine is probably the area that we need the most innovations in just to make it more accessible to everyone.

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feeling introverted and cozy

I’ve finally accepted this about myself: I like being alone.

I used to think it was a character defect, or rather a byproduct of being shy or socially awkward or just not knowing how to reach out to people or having only a few close friends. But in my one year here in Taipei, I’ve… gotten fairly used to socializing. I still find parties and group events bothersome, but I can comfortably sit in front of a stranger (from any country, even) and carry on a long conversation with them. Talking to people is easy. Getting to know people is easy. And it's easy to find them too–not just surface acquaintances but very likeable friends who share some of your interests and who delight you with their quirks and ideas and who accept you. If I wanted to, I could fill up my calendar with meetups and events.

Which I did try doing, for whatever free time I could squeeze out, but then… I started hating it and feeling run down. Because in a selfish way, the more time I spent with people was less time to spend on my hobbies, which are fairly solitary. I like reading and journaling and doing yoga and lounging in cafes on my own, and also exploring and trying out new restaurants (which, misanthropically enough, I prefer doing alone). I’ve had a lot of experiences where I went traveling with other people, and I always had to compromise (for the worse) in terms of where to eat, where to sleep, how long to keep walking…  

Of course I still reserve time on my schedule for people, because I do enjoy hanging out and actually maintaining relationships, but I noticed that I’m protective of my alone time since… it keeps me from getting lost in others? Or it helps me maintain my individuality? Because if I give away all of my time to others (and to my usual mundane responsibilities), I don’t have time to read (and formulate my own ideas). Or think about what’s going on in my life. Or try out things that I’m really interested in but other people don’t necessarily like. I feel like I’ll start just echoing the thoughts of people around me, or just going along with the cultural norm, not only with small things but also with my aspirations and my hobbies.

This is definitely highly personal–I can imagine some people would cringe at this–but I guess what changed is I used to think I was forced to be alone, but now I’m choosing to be alone. It helps that Taiwan is a fairly introverted country (thanks to all that cultural influence from Japan), and I just feel accepted? Unlike in the Philippines before where people actually got miffed at me for not wanting to attend specific events. And it’s... great.  

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every abstraction needs a human face

I heard some sad news today (note to self: write more when you’re actually feeling quite happy, which is more often than not). There’s a delivery guy that my grandparents like because he’s always the one who delivers the packages to our house. According to them, he was pretty bubbly and cheerful, and his dad was even one of the tenants on their farm–the dad would come over to our house sometimes to give the rice harvests.

So it was a cute little ritual where my grandparents would make small talk with the delivery guy when he dropped by and even gave him cookies sometimes.

It turns out he died two weeks ago. He was riding a motorcycle home from work at night, and he got into a road accident. He’s… around my age, which is late 20’s. He had a wife and two kids. My grandma–still alive, my grandpa’s dead already–was very sad about it, especially considering she’s almost three times his age and he died so young.

I don’t even understand why road accidents happen so often in the countryside, where we live. The roads are wide. Traffic is hardly as congested as in Manila. There are none of the big-name delivery apps too, so it’s not like there are motorcycles constantly zooming past. But I always hear about a truck ramming into a car, a motorcycle with a drunk driver hitting a pedestrian, and someone always ends up badly injured in the hospital or even dead. If you work in the emergency room at the main hospital there, you’d probably have become quite cynical already because of the sheer number of traffic accidents (here we go again).

I think a huge part of it is because of drinking–but then why does it seem to happen more often there than in Manila? Another factor would be the boggling lack of street lights–I get creeped out going home sometimes, even sitting inside the car, if it’s past eight o’clock because the road is so damn dark. I suppose the easiest solution to this would be for the government to make regulations to prevent it, but the accidents keep on happening and nobody’s investigating how to lessen them–it’s just a small town, after all.

This reminds me of a philosopher that we briefly talked about in one of my university classes before. I can barely remember him–Levinas–but I do remember how he said that for us to understand suffering, we need to gaze into the face of the other and to look at their eyes. We can read so many news articles, perform impersonal analysis, see headlines about whatever ills plague this world, but we’re fairly desensitized to them or quite detached until, well, they take on a face. Another human being, telling us their story, the details so specific that we can’t substitute them with anyone else having the same problem. You can’t be racist if you’ve loved someone with that particular ethnicity. You can’t judge someone who has a different life circumstance from you if you’ve drank together, shared secrets, and for a moment, you see the world from their eyes. You care a little bit more once you’ve heard someone explain their situation, and they’re crying, and it’s not a media op or a choreographed moment where they’re being a poster boy or girl but only sheer human honesty.   

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i repeat myself too much in my head

Most of the thoughts in our head are repetitive. That makes us like cows, then (no offense to cows, there are positive and negative sides to it)–if we could listen to a recording of what goes on in our heads, we wouldn’t be able to stand it for more than half an hour because it’s incredibly neurotic, the same old anxieties and worries looping back and forth, another childhood memory rehashed as we absent-mindedly note whatever actually is happening in front of us.

And there’s an exasperating quality to this. I think the times that I’ve felt very bored were the times when my thoughts were constantly the same. Isn’t this a waste of mental energy? What if we could stop being repetitive about it and forge our thinking so that we actually get new ideas and insights?

Today, I got asked: “How do you make sure your life is always improving?” It’s a question I can answer quite easily, automatically in English, but my Chinese is probably at a six-year-old level right now, so I stumbled over what I was going to say. But it did make me wonder because I hadn’t really given that much thought recently.

There are… a lot of things that I haven’t thought about.

For example, I’m slogging through this widely recommended novel that was interesting at first, if gritty–people in slums, belonging to some of the lowest castes in India–but then everything bad seems to happen. Amputation, murder, getting burned alive, getting widowed… There’s no hope for a happy ending for any of them, and I want to put the book down because it just seems like the author wants to torture the characters. It’s imbalanced storytelling–if you were the god of a fictional universe, wouldn’t you try to sneak in at least some breadcrumbs of happiness? But then what if that is reality? What if in real life, people do run into all sorts of unhappy endings all the time, especially when everything’s set against them?

There’s a very old debate about art: should art disturb, or should art entertain? I think both forms are equally valid, and of course, the best forms of art manage to do both. “Disturb” isn’t really the word I’d use–I’d rather say good art leaves a mark on you, makes you think thoughts you’ve never thought before, leaves you with questions that you have to grapple with yourself because there’s no absolute right or wrong here. And so maybe it’s a depressing book (that I am honestly just finishing because I’m already at 400 out of 700 pages), but it does do its job of breaking me out of the monotony of my usual thinking. Because I’ve thought millions of times about my job, someone I like, the tediousness of having to be proactive about a social life, my Chinese classes, the constant haunt of what my next step should be. But I haven’t thought as much about–let’s say, beggars who were born without limbs so they take advantage of that, or why “neediness” is seen as so horrible today (but its opposite, being cold or distant, doesn’t get vilified as much), or those strange characters in a bubble tea menu that I order from every day but have never bothered exploring all the drinks yet.

Maybe instead of neurotically ruminating about my life yet again (or doomscrolling on IG, or looping the same music because it gets me lost in fantasies), those are more worthwhile things to think about because they’re fresh.

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Source: @dayforrecord on IG (video not mine)

Saw this cafe in Korea mentioned in IG–they let you borrow a vintage film camera, then they’ll edit the footage for you. Someone asked in the comments section: why would you bother getting blurry, muted footage when you can get much better quality with modern cameras (and without the hefty price of paying for the video-editing)? 

Film–like vinyl, I suppose–has a unique, nostalgic quality that somehow gives it more character than sleek, modern photos. Of course, if we’re talking about efficiency, modern photos win, but I’ve always had a soft spot for film because of how imperfect it can be. It also reminds me of how these photos are of the past, as if we’re seeing stories rewind through a foggy, grainy lens.

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Was playing this on repeat while working, and of course it turns out to be a Grey’s Anatomy song. 

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Some interesting parts of this essay by @startingfromnix:

It’s startlingly obvious the longer I spend in the corporate world that most smart, high achieving people are in love with a specific form of difficulty: the ever-escaping measure of competence. It’s an obsessive, all consuming desire. Resulting in late hours, large volumes of caffeine, little sleep. Competence is more fulfilling than love, more delicious than rest — it’s so tangible, measurable. The euphoria of feeling useful, valued.

In isolation, this desire for competence is a good thing. Wanting to push to the edge of your ability, seeing effort translate to outcome. Seeking competence is why I was so obsessed with tennis in high school. A precise forehand across the court, a sinewy thwack. It’s why I’m always typing in my notion app by a blinking San Francisco crosswalk, the relentless ache to capture something, to make it good. It’s engrained in me — to keep stubbornly bashing away at something, again and again until I become proficient at it.

Then another tweet of hers:

I think that more often than not, people value selective competence. Most people have specific things that they cannot bear to be incompetent at (what is emotionally resonant with them), while for other things they couldn’t care less. 

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I have this habit of checking Hacker News almost every day to find articles that are worth reading. Hacker News is a community that was started by Y Combinator (a prestigious incubator for tech startups), so most of the people who share and upvote articles are developers, investors, designers, or pretty much working in the tech scene.

I was pretty surprised to find that one trending link is St. John’s Great Books list, with a lot of people saying that if they could go back in time, they would study that in school instead (since a traditional computer science degree barely teaches computer engineering). St. John’s is this unconventional, liberal arts school in the US where the classes are heavily structured around seminars where you discuss the so-called great books, which cover classic literary, philosophical, and even scientific works. These include Archimedes, Virginia Woolf, the Hebrew Bible, and Mozart. Granted the criticism that it’s definitely Western-biased (they do have a graduate program about the Eastern classics with its own reading list), the program also gets a lot of praise because it trains students to think critically and debate well–it’s essentially a classic liberal-arts program that has managed to survive in the present.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I would want to have taken it as a formal undergraduate program, but I do think the reading list is worth going through. Just accepting recommendations from Amazon’s algorithm can get so myopic. Anyway, what amazed me was that these were mostly technical and high-earning people on Y Combinator, with many working for Silicon Valley companies, and they were thinking so highly about a humanities program. One person even said that he made it a project to read through all of the books (and another chimed in that he watched the top 500 movies recommended on IMDB).

It got me thinking that cultural literacy–or the humanities–matter, and they are incredibly undervalued. I’d say that the best combination is to develop cultural literacy and work on technical or business skills–the humanities teach you creativity and non-linear thinking, while technical or business skills give you the chops to get things done in a very concrete way.

I was just surprised because I came from a very heavy STEM environment in high school, to the point where the humanities were almost completely excluded, and I’d assumed that STEM was like that, all around the world. But apparently it’s not–maybe that was just a very specific perspective. One of my grievances with high school was that everything was about hard science (well, to be fair, it’s not like they mislead me… you could tell just from the name of the school). What about ethics, philosophy, communication, even business or entrepreneurship? I think I ended up developing a counterreaction to STEM afterwards because the focus was so extreme, and it’s only now that I’m realizing that both can be combined–it doesn’t have to be one or the other.

It's also why I was very sure about choosing Ateneo. I wanted liberal arts. I wanted debate and discussion and exposure to different perspectives and introspection. I wanted my view of the world to be challenged, to be asked to formulate what I personally think–and until now, I still think that’s the best thing that I picked up from college.

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writing is therapeutic

I feel like I have so many thoughts and feelings that are constantly rumbling under my mind, to the point that I overwhelm people sometimes on chat because there are so many threads of thought I could pursue. Then there’s a distinct sense of dissatisfaction since I always have to condense myself, give myself brevity–until it hit me that maybe it because I’m repressing the writing urge, that I should be writing essays and blog posts and stories rather than trying to express it all through text messages.

I haven’t written properly (AKA not work-related) in a while. It’s not high on the list of my priorities, given my severely time-squeezed schedule–working out, chores, exploring, and considering grad school applications all somehow end up higher than it–but then maybe it really is a need for me. I feel good right now, writing, like there’s a flow of words I’m just tapping into and it feels so fucking good to let it all out.

Some things that flit through my mind: Feeling uncomfortable with what a friend says, or maybe her chronic sadness, and the wedge that gets driven between us because I’ve become too… optimistic? Crying the other day at the train station because people have been so nice and I wasn’t used to it in that specific context. How adults stereotypically feel flat, bland, as life gets too routine, but then that doesn’t have to be the norm. A book about a man who doesn’t feel very human and who spends his whole life faking it, to the point that he tries to kill himself. A sweeping 81-episode Chinese drama about a bullied kid turned eventual Dowager Empress, and the viciousness of an imperial harem where women constantly compete based on rank and attractiveness. How I still miss my grandpa so much, and I am a little sad his watch that I used to wear isn’t working anymore, so it’s just on my table rather than on my wrist. The discordance of loving someone I’ve never met properly, in a way that goes beyond romance. Feeling happy about how my hair looks nice for once–I’ve figured out the art of mixing hair products and using hair masks–and no need to chemically alter it anymore.

I suppose it’s because when I write, life feels cinematic. It’s not a detached, third-party retelling of events, but probably more similar to video-editing, pasting clips together and weaving them into a story, setting up the mood and frame–and letting my heart crack open and bleed, sing, do whatever it wants to do, with a tenderness that is too honest to do anywhere else.

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Article: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-64373950

Japan now has the world's second-highest proportion of people aged 65 and over - about 28% - after the tiny state of Monaco, according to World Bank data."

Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society," Mr Kishida told lawmakers.

Damn, I know the birth rate is dropping in so many countries, but I never realized it’d gotten so extreme that 1 in 3 Japanese are senior citizens. Those are just the current figures, so that number will probably increase, and the economic fallout will worsen in the future as the workforce reduces in proportion to the seniors in the country. 

All of the East Asian countries have low birth rates (Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and China), which makes me wonder how it’ll play out economically–all of these are fairly well-off countries, but how will this affect their productivity in the future? It makes sense, then, why Taiwan’s constantly trying to attract foreigners across all spectrums, from entrepreneurs to migrant workers. Japan is especially vulnerable–its tourism is great, but it’s a very insular country in the sense that it’s not as culturally accepting of foreigners staying there long-term. 

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I ended up walking into a Japanese-ish grocery store today (mostly Japanese products, and a smattering too from other countries). There was an entire shelf of Japanese alcoholic drinks (just guessing, based on the characters on the shelf label). A lot of the bottles looked ornate, with trademark Japanese calligraphy, but one type in particular caught my eye:

It was the award-winning label that stood out for me at first, but I got curious because I didn’t really know what umeshu was. A quick Google search later, I found out it’s an almost unbearably sweet plum liquor–ume means salted plum. The alcohol percentage is usually at 35%, so given my pitifully low alcohol tolerance, it would have knocked me out after a few swigs.

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This post doesn’t really have much of a theme except Japanese things. On the train going home–speaking of Japan having a mostly aging population–I discovered a really cool website called Sail:

It’s almost your usual language exchange by subscription website–you pay a fixed amount every month, then get to video call with native speakers–but what makes Sail different is it connects you with retirees and senior citizens. They usually have a lot of stories to tell and a lot of free time, making them great for language exchange. The unspoken additional reasons: they’re also more likely to be patient, and it’s easier to get lonely when you’re old and to want company.

I have a soft spot for old people–I get sad when I think about how the generation that lived through World War II is close to gone now, that so many stories and memories of a different, simpler, pre-internet world would be lost–and if I could, I would want to sit next to them and ask them questions and spend hours listening to their stories.

Most people who post online are younger than sixty, so I think it’s so easy to miss out on the perspective of older people, to dismiss it as antiquated and traditional, to forget that there are other worldviews and they might be just as valid as our own–a generation that actually wrote letters to each other, where women still wore skirts most of the time, who still had the ability to wait in line and just stare into space without fidgeting for a phone, who knew original recipes that seem so quaint and difficult to make now.

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I like this new, technologically enabled world

Found out that Spain is about to launch a digital nomad visa and it counts towards permanent residence / citizenship! If you have the visa, you can work remotely in Spain (and the rest of the Schengen area) for up to three or five years.

A lot of other countries have digital nomad visas, but here’s the clincher: Filipinos only need two years of legal residence in Spain to apply for citizenship. Non-colonized countries would have to go through ten years of residence total. 

I’m likely going to stay in Taiwan for a while, but afterwards, I want to try staying on the other side of the world. Nothing set in stone yet–I’m just juggling possible plans in my head at this point–but it’s exhilarating to think that I can actually aim for Spanish citizenship afterwards (then throw in a Taiwan gold card for the ultimate badassery). 

My main reason for wanting citizenship in another country isn’t even for immigration purposes or ease of travel (no more pesky visa document-checking). I want to get universal health insurance. Medical bills are crazy expensive, and in case I’ll beon my own financially for the rest of my life, universal health insurance is a top priority for me. I also don’t want to stress too much about when my mom gets sick–if I obtain permanent residence / citizenship in, say, Taiwan or Spain, the healthcare benefits would extend over to her, so even with diseases like cancer or Alzheimer’s, costs would get driven down way more.

This is probably the most motivated I’ve ever been my whole life. I want to get it on my own terms too. The traditional route involves working in the country you want to get citizenship, but remote work is a non-negotiable for me, so that’s not an option. Enter these new, 21st century-visas that are actually remote work-friendly–and they give me a worthy goal to work towards.

Speaking of visas, I got my resident visa here in Taiwan! What I find amazing about today’s world is as long as you have the right skills, you can move to almost anywhere you want in the world–and countries will welcome you with open arms. And these skills aren’t static–the technology landscape is changing so fast that new types of jobs keep coming up, so it’s exciting how you have to keep up with that and work on your skills. What’s funny is I ended up in marketing and content creation, which aren’t the classic tech areas like data science or web development, but they’re a good fit for me and I actually like my job.   

So maybe I had a lot of disadvantages based on birth–a weak passport in a country with little benefits, an upbringing that wasn’t emotionally supportive, years at school spent studying the wrong thing and hating it–but I can work my way out of them.   

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Christmas 2022

Six hours before Christmas, I was walking up to a friend’s apartment, nervous in the cold because I barely knew anyone there but him. It turned out that everyone else was Taiwanese¬–speaking in English for our convenience–and pretty much everyone had graduate degrees except for me. They were neuroscientists, protein engineers, urban planners. Somewhere in between talks about applying to Berkeley or memories from their time studying in the UK, I should have felt terribly out of place about how unrelatable it all was for me, but I felt… cozy just being present, soaking it up, letting the time slip by.

Dinner was mostly homemade–pieces of steak dipped in some sort of improvised onion sauce, pizza, half-roasted bell pepper with melted cheese. Then we watched a Christmas-y romantic comedy while eating either dou hua or grass jelly instead of popcorn–how Chinese, I was thinking. And strange that I was so used to it already as comfort food.

On the way home, I ended up sharing a 30-minute train ride with one of the people from the party. He was a cancer researcher, about to visit one of the biggest research centers in the US next month. We talked about cancer, Elizabeth Theranos, politics, and it was soothing, how he cut so quick to the chase, to the point that I almost wanted the train ride to stretch on just to keep talking. He said he wanted to become a cancer researcher to help people. It fascinated him too–there was a glint in his eyes as he said that, which made me realize that I miss passion in people.

Then it hit midnight, Christmas already. While walking home from the train station, I felt a familiar warmth in my heart, the kind that makes people say tadaima and then okaeri. 

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Goals for 2023

• Get a resident visa in Taiwan – My plans could change anytime–I can always move back to PH and do other fun things from there–but if I do end up staying here, I’m applying for a resident visa by January. It’s not as cool as it sounds. The visa just makes me a legal resident here, with a potential work permit eventually and (most importantly!) the capacity to be able to go in and out of the country.

• Keep taking Chinese classes – This goes along with the resident visa. I’m pretty much at a rather depressing A2 level with Chinese right now (probably intermediate with reading, but speaking and listening are so hard), but my Chinese should improve as the classes get harder.

• Apply for graduate school – Partly to get my mom to quit nagging, partly because it’s one of those bucket list items that I want to get out of the way. I’m not sure if I want to do graduate school because I have the nagging suspicion that I can do just as well by continuing to work (it’s marketing, hardly a traditional field), but I suppose I’ll make the decision once I actually get acceptance letters. I’m planning to apply for language technology programs–a combination of computer science and linguistics–and I can get recommendation letters from my Chinese teachers here.

• Earn more money, gain more skills – What I’m realizing is as long as you have the right skills, companies–and even countries–will trip over themselves trying to get you. We live in a world where borders are breaking down, and if you gain the right skills–which are constantly changing, so you need to keep adjusting–you can have the freedom to move almost anywhere, and the money to go along with it.

• Travel to Japan – This is mostly because it’s so much easier to get a visa for Japan as a student in Taiwan rather than as a freelancer / remote worker from PH. In PH, I’d have to submit tax documents, but in Taiwan, you just need a bank statement (and low risk of you trying to run anyway if you’re enrolled in classes).

• Meet more people – It’s almost funny to admit considering my general personality, but I’m realizing that social capital is important. Each new friend you make gives you more opportunities, more chances to be invited to interesting events, and overall potentially increased happiness. It’s also very cool to get to know people who are doing something that you like or aspire to do because it gives you an idea of how to get closer to your goal.

• Do yoga regularly, even if just for ten minutes – When I don’t do yoga, my posture gets bad, I start to get aches in my neck and back and legs, and I’m also less conscious of what I eat. I’m in my late 20’s anyway, which is a bit of a “danger zone” in terms of fitness.

This isn’t exactly a goal, but I’m also committing to doing emotional work constantly. There are a lot of things that I want, but I suppose the biggest and most ambitious of them would be to do my best to resolve all of my emotional issues as they come up (I actually found an effective method for this, after years and years of searching and therapy). I want to be at peace (even with the most negative emotions), and confident, while constantly improving as a person so that the future version of me will always be better than how I am now.

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Almost Four Months in Taipei

I’ve been here in Taipei for four months and it’s almost the end of the year, so I guess some reflection is warranted. Normally, I reflect a lot–excessively, to the point of getting too hung up and being counterproductive–but I’ve had so little free time that it feels like I’m jumping from one activity to the next, from work to classes then chores and meeting people. In fact, I’m only able to write this now because I’m sacrificing some of my work hours (which is making me sound like a workaholic).

To put things into perspective, the pandemic felt like the worst two years of my life, and my time in Taipei so far has been the best few months. The pandemic was horrible because I got stuck with my family for two years with very little independence–I had to depend on my mom to drive me, couldn’t see anyone else, and frequently struggled with the nagging sense that I was wasting my mid-20’s away. My mid-20’s just seem like a blank period to me now–I went into the pandemic at around 24, then went out of it at the end of being 26. But as shitty as it felt, I don’t have any regrets about it because it forced me to grow up (learn how to be disciplined with work, how to save money, how to cope without external distractions). It also allowed me to spend time with my grandfather, who’d asked me then if I couldn’t stay with them forever so they would have company. Without the pandemic, I don’t think I would have been able to say goodbye to him properly, and just for that reason alone–being with my grandfather during his final years–I can say that all of it was worthwhile.

Taipei has been the best few months because–I feel accepted here? It’s not even about moving to a more developed country–I’d stayed in Singapore and US before for a while, and I didn’t really feel strongly about them. I suppose in Taipei, so many of the things that I like and am deeply interested in are validated, versus back home where I felt so out-of-place with them.

One is learning Chinese. My family was constantly griping at me about putting so much effort into it (“why not learn a European language? who cares about Chinese?”), and most people saw it as a quaint curiosity. But here, I sit for two hours every day with a teacher and other students who care about the language. I went for a hospital checkup the other day, and the doctor sacrificed a few minutes of his time to share a website with ancient Chinese texts, telling me to read them someday. My language exchange partner slash friend teaches classical Chinese. People regularly tell me, 加油, which in English can be translated as a variation of “Good luck!” or “Work hard, keep trying!” As someone whose interests were constantly being invalidated, it feels so nice to be connected to what I’m learning.

Second would be the remote work / digital nomad lifestyle. When I talk to my peers back home, their lives always seem to revolve around their nine-to-five job, and often in unfavorable ways. This might be more of a PH thing¬–my online friends from other countries don’t really seem to be like this. But here, I’ve met plenty of people who have less traditional careers or paths in life. For example: a guy who used to work as a product manager for a US tech company, but then he got a special visa in Taiwan for high-income earners, so he quit his job, relocated here, and travels around freely now. A girl who works as a clinical trial manager for J&J but squeezes in enough time to solo travel. A friend from Spain who does part-time marketing for a finance startup while taking Chinese classes. When I talk to them, what I do feels normal, and they’re also showing me what I want to be in the future. I don’t… feel so different.

That’s not to say I’m idealizing Taiwan–I can barely speak the language well enough, my friends here are all English-speaking–because there are a lot of things that I miss about PH. The unbeatable convenience of Grab (you can pretty much order anything from the app). Apartments with elevators and security guards¬–I have to walk up five floors to my apartment here every time. Mostly cashless payments rather than having to give cash to my landlord every time. European food that tastes decent and isn’t overpriced. Being able to cook (I’m dreading the consequences of all of the vegetable oil that my food is soaked in here). Having free time because I was mostly focused on work back then. Wearing dresses and tank tops (for some reason, people don’t wear sundresses as much here, even in summer). Maybe so many more things that will only hit me the longer I stay here.

I guess I can also count it as a turning point in my life because it’s the first… authentic achievement I’ve had in a very, very long time? I started out as an overachiever kid who didn’t really care about what she was studying, then lost my motivation after that because I was so confused about which direction I wanted to go in–I think I always knew, but my mother kept forcing me into programs and environments that really didn’t fit me as a person. Staying in Taiwan was an actual dream of mine. I’m still not sure how I made it work, but everything aligned. I got a scholarship for a few months which gave me an entry point, my remote job took off and it’s with a language learning app so this is helping my career, and once I got here, it was feasible–although a bit exhausting–to keep staying and working. But the fatigue is worthwhile because I’m following a dream.

So for the first time in a long time, I can say that I’m proud of myself.