amw

Taiwan is a country of many superstitions.

I won't forget the time at work when i mentioned one of those superstitions as a piece of harmless smalltalk with a new migrant, and then one of my university-educated, highly-paid, well-traveled Taiwanese colleagues looked at me like i'd just said the moon was made of cheese, shocked that i would challenge such a well-known fact. The fact? That if your child plays basketball, they will grow tall. Kids who grow up short, it's because their parents didn't make them play basketball. Everyone knows that! I was suitably embarrassed that i had been such an insensitive clod, and quietly slunk back to my desk with a red face, having proven myself to be exactly the kind of arrogant, judgmental outsider that i generally try my best to avoid being.

It's still a ridiculous belief, but that's beside the point i suppose. Every culture comes up with their own irrational superstitions. I know i've copped flak from people who grew up in the US or Asia from one belief i was brought up with - that air conditioning is bad for your health and will make you sick. I think most people who grew up in Europe still believe that, and will stubbornly open the windows year-round to get some "fresh" air, even - or especially - in office blocks where there is no option to turn off the built-in HVAC.

Anyway, there are superstitions, and there are urban legends, and there are open secrets, and it can be hard to disentangle them when you are a migrant to a new culture. One of the most persistent myths (or truths?) of Taiwan is that street market vendors are secretly extremely wealthy.

Yes, you heard me right. The aunties who unroll their blankets first thing in the morning and squat on the ground till noon peddling assorted greens, they're actually millionaires who own multiple apartments and make all their real income from rent. They probably have a Mercedes at home, they just ride that battered old scooter to the market as part of their gimmick.

The story goes that all the foreigners and tourists who buy from market vendors are suckers - they've been taken in by the old timey mom'n'pop schtick, they've been bamboozled into giving away their money to swindlers who don't pay any taxes (because market vendors only take cash and don't issue receipts) while civilized members of society prefer to shop in clean, safe shopping malls and get their food from internationally-trusted supermarket chains.

Of course if you challenge it, they will point to a guy they know, a friend of theirs on the inside, or some article on the news about the notorious grifter who spends all day cosplaying as a peasant, hawking steamed buns to the gullible masses.

The thing is, it might very well be true. If you try to calculate out the income that most of these street vendors could plausibly be making from their wares, the profit margin is so slim that it'd be virtually impossible to live off. Unless, perhaps, you outright owned your home and did not have to pay rent. Or unless you had a passive income on the side, wealthy children sending you a stipend, connections to organized crime... and then the market vending is just a hobby, that thing you do to pass the time while your real money is being made elsewhere.

But the thing is... even if it is true that every market vendor is a sham, an undercover aristocrat just faking a connection to the common people... THAT'S STILL BETTER THAN THE FUCKING MEGACORP.

It's like when people say "you can't be a real leftist because you buy nice things" or "you can't be anti-capitalist and use a smartphone" or whatever gotcha claim they think will win an argument that nobody was even having.

Like, what would you rather have? A well-to-do neighbor who opens up a market stall and sits there every day, engaging in banter with and selling vegetables to the local people... or a well-to-do neighbor who doesn't give a fuck about the community and spends all day playing golf and sharing racist memes on social media? Which city would you rather live in, the one with hundreds of hyper-local mom'n'pop outfits where the shopkeepers know their customers and sell the human connection as much as the products on their shelves, or the one with hundreds of identical chain stores selling ultra-processed foods and imported tat?

One of the things i like best about Taiwan is that there is still a cash culture. Tap-to-pay and mobile payments are not ubiquitous, which means you can actually exist in society without tech companies and banks spying on literally everything you purchase, everywhere, all the time. Despite rivaling Japan in density of convenience stores, it's still perfectly viable to choose not to pick up a microwaved dinner from 7-Eleven every night. There's enough little food stalls and holes in the wall that you don't need to. Of course, the majority of Taiwanese people do mostly eat at convenience stores, they do mostly shop at supermarkets, they do mostly buy brand name products... but the point is that the option is there. The same cannot be said for a lot of other places i lived.

And the thing that is so insidious about this narrative of the millionaire market vendor, is that it's basically teaching Taiwanese people to turn their country into a giant shopping mall, owned and run either by foreign billionaires, or by local billionaires who would gladly sell out to China because money is more important to them than culture. I mean, obviously it is, because otherwise they wouldn't be running massive conglomerates that push out all the local mom'n'pop stores.

I'm sure some well-heeled, middle-class Taiwanese person would tut-tut and tell me that i am just falling for the trick. By depriving the Taiwanese government of the taxes they were due from these dastardly street vendors, i am actually undermining civil society, and if only i had the great historical knowledge of how corrupt Taiwanese society used to be before the KMT military dictatorship straightened it all out, i wouldn't be so easily duped. Because, you see, many years ago they introduced a system where every receipt issued by a business doubled as a free ticket to the Uniform Invoice Lottery, a scheme to motivate consumers to put pressure on vendors to issue receipts and thus accurately report their income for taxation and bla bla bla. You know what? Maybe that did make sense in 1951, but in 2026 let's be real. The bulk of the taxes are not coming from ama and aba selling bok choy and kim chi to the handful of people who still cook their own meals, they're coming from TSMC and MediaTek and Foxconn and fucking Uni-President (Starbucks, 7-Eleven, Carrefour etc).

No, wait, but you're still being misled! By giving money to street vendors you're supporting organized crime, and if you believe in Taiwan independence then you're shooting yourself in the foot, because everybody knows most of the organized crime syndicates in Taiwan are directly linked to CCP influence campaigns via the United Front Work Department. (This, by the way, is why you can never trust a temple in Taiwan - they're all money-laundering fronts for local gangsters who in turn are owned by the CCP. The Communists are not just under the bed, they're in your ancestral shrines! Clearly converting to Christianity is the only truly patriotic choice...)

So you are cheating the government out of money and not doing your civic duty, or you are tearing at the very fabric of decent, law-abiding society, or you are contributing to a takeover by the CCP... Anything but connecting with another human being, handing over some coins in exchange for some greens, having them smile and give you a bunch of scallions on the house, or knock off a few bucks for being a regular. If these are the bad guys, then why is it so hard for the good guys - those upstanding members of society with vastly more billions of capital behind them - to offer an equivalent service, eh?

When i started thinking about writing this entry i wanted to call it "the mythical millionaire market vendor" because of the alliteration, but i chose not to, because i do actually believe that it's not a myth. It's an urban legend, insofar as it's a story people tell to promote certain lifestyle choices, but i suspect it's grounded in some degree of truth. I don't doubt that market vendors have more access to "old money" than the kids clerking at FamilyMart, and clearly they are doing better than the folks who unfold their sheets of cardboard to sleep on. And yet, when the moral of the story is "why you should distrust your neighbor in favor of a megacorp", bro, i don't like that story. That's not the society i want to live in. I think if most people were honest with themselves, they might agree.

Anyway, i wanted to get it off my chest. This post was brought to you by my local tycoons and triads, making money hand-over-fist, one head of lettuce at a time.

Yes, it's thefridayfive on Sunday, because i wanted to give my last post a day to sit, but i also couldn't skip a meme about one of my favorite things - food!

1. In an average week, how many nights do you eat home-cooked dinners?

Every night. I usually only eat out when i am traveling.

2. Do you plan your meals out in advance, or just wing it?

I'm not sure what this is asking... If the question is do i just randomly buy food and then figure out what to make later, no - that seems like a recipe for creating food waste. I buy exactly the right amount of food that i need to get the calories i want for the number of meals between this shop and the next. I shop at least twice a week so i just get enough fruits and veges and carbs to last exactly until the next one, but i do buy whatever looks good, i don't go to the shops specifically looking for anything other than my preferred brands of tofu, peanut butter, coffee and oats.

3. How many nights per week do you eat out or order food delivered?

This question seems like a repeat of question 1, but aha! It's not! Because one thing i do do about once a week is try to pick up a meat snack. I call it "cheat day", but basically it's just a vague attempt to get some B12 and whatever other nutrients i might miss from eating vegan. (I did start taking a D+Ca supplement after the docs said my bones were decrepit, but that's more due to not having any male or female hormones any more.) Usually i will get a 刮包 pork belly bao on Friday night as a pre-dinner snack, and then i balance the Friday night dinner to have less tofu in it, or one less pancake or something.

4. Do you keep a stock of nonperishable foods from which you could whip up a meal or two if you needed to?

Definitely not. I keep only exactly much as i need and nothing more. I hate wasting food and i hate feeling like my house is full of junk so i always try to keep my shelves bare. In an emergency it would be much more important to get access to clean water than food, imo. I worry about that a lot more, because usually i only have about 2L of water in my bottles plus whatever is in the jug which is enough to survive a day in a pinch, but it'd be cutting it fine if i needed to be active as well. But if i needed to be active then presumably there would be other survivors/refugees/etc too so we could figure out the food and drink situation together. There is a bomb shelter in the next building over, though i'm not sure how much water the local authorities store in there.

5. Have you ever tried preparing meals for the week all at once, say, on the weekend?

No. I know some people do that, but it seems really weird to me, because seems like it'd take longer to cook something from frozen than it would from fresh, and then the freezing process destroy the texture. I suppose it'd make sense for curry or stew or something, but i don't have a pan to cook that kind of stuff in, i only have a single frypan and a single burner so it's not going to happen anyway.

Okay, let's try to get started. I expect we might get a couple of little, bite-sized entries given these thoughts i was having that seemed i wouldn't be able to exorcise without writing down have already started to dissipate. Maybe i should dot-point all my thoughts? But surely that would not be as fun to write or read.

So, how we feel things in our body. The topic came up because i was having an exchange online with someone about religion and how it's experienced differently by different people. It was in response to a recent Religion For Breakfast video about atheists vs agnostics and how, when prompted by researchers with a weird question about the emotions they expected to feel if a divine power turned out to exist after all, atheists tended more toward anger or fear whereas agnostics felt comforted or reassured.


Agnostics Spiritually Struggle More Than Atheists—But Feel Better About God

The research that was cited annoyed me, because how is this even a sensible question to ask an atheist? It's like asking how someone might feel if matter or energy didn't exist. The whole universe would work differently! Belief in a divine power is inherently a belief in impossibility, that's the whole point. If divinity were measurable or observable, then there would be no need to have faith, because it would be just as unremarkable as seeing an apple fall from a tree. In a fantasy world where the laws of physics operated differently and miraculous stuff happened all the time, gods wouldn't be gods, they'd just be the guys who did the magic, so, like, whatever. Maybe better give them a sacrifice to stay on their good side. In that world, people looking for the kind of thing we call a religious experience today would invent a different kind of belief system, and atheists would remain unbothered.

But, it seems, there is some cohort of self-proclaimed atheists who perhaps do retain some kind of belief in the supernatural, since they can imagine this kind of divine being that breaks the laws of physics existing in our universe after all, and that its presence would upset them. Which makes me think about the fact that perhaps some atheists are the way they are more as a reaction to organized religion than as a result of looking at the world around them and concluding that there is no God because of course there isn't.

Fortunately, the video was followed by a second one comparing "nones" to "dones" - that is, people who have no particular religion or belief system ("nones") versus people who were raised with some kind of religion or belief system but don't practice any more ("dones").


Religious Residue: What Sticks After You Leave Religion

It seems that some who start out as "dones" may eventually end up as "nones", but others just persist in varying degrees of "doneness", where the belief system they were brought up in continues to influence aspects of their thinking, and - i presume - their emotional reaction to an absurd question like "but what if God was real tho?"

The video probably also builds on context introduced in previous videos about religiosity where the concept of "CREDs" - Credibility-Enhancing Displays - was discussed. This is an academic theory used to examine how religion gets passed on from generation to generation, or how it spreads in a community. The idea is that witnessing people who demonstrate some kind of sacrifice or ritualistic performance in pursuit of divine blessings or grace is a powerful and influential force. When you grow up seeing your elders or others in your community give something up for a belief, it makes that belief seem rational.

And, of course, it is rational! Not the part where people believe in the supernatural, but the part where people intuitively understand the benefit of being part of a community, of have a system of values that can provide a life direction, a psychological comfort when times are tough, all that stuff. Religion makes sense as a form of social organization - it might not be the most efficient in theory, or the most just in practice, but it's a key part of human history and still a major influence in many people's lives.

So, this is all the preamble to the point of how perhaps the deepest connection to religion is not intellectual - a rational decision made on the merits - it's something that's simply felt deep inside. Some religious people say that they can "feel" God inside them, or in nature, or at some holy site. They experience it viscerally! I try to think back to my own experiences being brought up in a Christian context but with no particular religion, before spending several years more seriously engaged with New Age belief and ritual, to eventually becoming an unapologetic atheist and... yeah i don't remember feeling much of anything outside of manic episodes, psychosis and assorted drug-fueled delusions.

Which means i need to get my understanding of religion from somewhere else, and the one place i really saw it was my mother. Which is funny, because my mother was stridently anti-religion. On reflection, she was perhaps exactly the kind of non-believer who would have been particularly miffed if Jesus popped up one morning saying "lol, here i am, i do exist after all". She was raised Catholic, but had lapsed at least by the time she started dating my father. (There is a whole side quest about her parents offering my father money to not marry her, which i am not sure how much was due to him being ostensibly Protestant and how much was him just being some kind of long-haired layabout who didn't meet their standards.) My earliest religious memories are of my father telling us we ought to say the Lord's Prayer each night before bed, and my mother saying that she wanted to protect us from ever getting screwed up by that nonsense. (She once recounted a story of having to share her favorite band in school - all the other children came up with Elvis or The Beatles or whoever, but her upbringing had been so sheltered she didn't even know any popular music, she only knew Mozart.)

Well, the divorce screwed my mom up, and she went spinning into a search for meaning, which did eventually lead her to one church or another, but she rapidly noped back out of all that and adopted 1980s/1990s New Age - creative visualization, crystal healing, essential oils, tarot cards, Enya, the whole bit. And that's how i grew up, and it overlapped with my budding identity as a raver, so that whole woo/hippie thing is my culture. But my mom never forgot the church, apparently. I didn't realize until one day when i was playing some ambient electronic music that i thought she might not hate, and it had some bells in it and she physically recoiled "ugh! it sounds like church!"

This is weird, because we lived in the Netherlands at the time, and in Europe it's not uncommon to hear church bells on Sunday morning same way you might hear the adhan if you live near a mosque. But i guess the Sunday morning church bells are something that can be psychologically prepared for - you know you're about to be faced with some traumatic trigger, so you steel yourself by making fruit salad and a café au lait and chatting with the kids. A Christian jump-scare in a techno track one of your kids is playing for you, though? The horror!

I wish i could share the song, but it has vanished off the internet - it's Bionaut - Astral Unraveler, from the 1996 album Au Naturel. It's completely inoffensive ambient synth music, not much different to Enya, except for those ding dong bells that for me not even once evoked the slightest religious movement.

And that's the fascinating thing, right? I don't FEEL it. I don't feel the power of the call to prayer, i don't feel the weight of the shame or the guilt or whatever it is that left my mom so deeply connected to her Catholic upbringing, even decades after leaving it all behind, becoming a New Age crunchy/granola mom, a university professor, a strong and independent woman - all that stuff. She still FELT it.

So i was talking to a religious studies expert and they said that's how it works, that's the power of belief. For people who are devout, it's not just something they think about, it's something they experience viscerally, in their bodies. What's important to scholars is not whether their belief is in something "real", because obviously the emotions it creates are real, the impact it has is measurable. That's super interesting!

This led me to thinking about my own visceral reactions. It's not religion for me. I like Maria chapels, i always go in and light a candle - if they have real ones. I'll give a little bow and a prayer to Maria in Christian parts of the world and i'll do the same to Mazu over here. I like the peacefulness and the ritualistic aspects of it, but i don't really care very much, i don't think anything is going to come of it. Church bells are just bells, gospel house is just house, 北管 temple music is just gongs and trumpets.

But then i do find some things just get the hackles standing up on the back of my neck, i feel so uncomfortable, sick to the stomach, i start panicking and feeling like i need to escape... and it's kinda class-based spaces. Or not even class-based, exactly, but just certain monuments to consumerist lifestyles that terrify me. You know what it is, right? Upscale department stores, shopping malls, suburban cul-de-sacs... it's a physical reaction for me. I feel like an impostor, like a stranger, like i am surrounded by aliens... which is absurd because it's exactly people in my own income layer, it's my colleagues, my family, my friends, it's where they shop, where they eat, where they live, but somehow a part of me associates it with trauma that i can't find a root for. Was there something that happened to me as a child? Was it just a symbol of a sort of "normal" life that i never felt i was allowed access to as a migrant? Did it develop later, along with my transness?

I mean, that's another interesting thing, right? Why do trans people want to get surgery? It's a deeply physical emotion, like right inside your core, you feel something is wrong with the bits you were assigned at birth. Something about how the hormones affect your brain or the plumbing affects your movements, it's just uncomfortable and awkward and nothing seems to make it better... until you get the treatment and then there's new or different problems for sure, but at least that crushing pressure of bodily discomfort is lifted.

Of course these are negative emotions, but there are positive emotions too, like how certain music doesn't cause you to recoil, but to spread and bloom and twirl with the joy you can feel from the tips of your fingers to your toes. And when someone asks "what just happened, where did you just go?" The answer is into the music. Into that blissful space where the best words we have to describe the emotion come from religious terminology - it set my spirit free, it was a glimpse of the divine, like being touched by an angel... Because you felt it, right? Like people feel God! It doesn't matter that the emotion is just a trick of your own mind, it only matters that you felt it.

What i think is cool is that we can change it. We can change our bodies to be how we like. We can train ourselves to get over our triggers, or at least manage them better. People who are "dones" can become "nones", but people who are "nones" can discover religion too, sometimes. So even for these experiences that are wired so deep into our bodies, they're not immutable. That's what gives me some kind of faith (ha!) in humanity, that even people who have worked themselves up into the deepest spite and most violent hatred might some day come to understand their very real emotions stem from reactions to stimuli that can be changed - the reactions, that is, not necessarily the stimuli.

I dunno, this kind of turned off in a more psychological/self-help direction than i started out as. I don't have a conclusion. I think this entry is something i want to build on when i go back to the topic of utopic post-humanism and these science fictional ideas about transcending the limitations of the body... but how there is a way to think about that which doesn't have to introduce superstitious notions of dualism or go down some colonialist imagination of erasing people's connection to aspects of their physical identity.

Hmm. Anyway. I wonder what kind of visceral reactions to things the other folks on LJ have seen in their own lives or in people around them? I wonder how many of our bodily reactions encode intuitions that can't always easily be recalled or explained, and how that influences the way we exist in the world...

I have some posts i want to write but i am so exhausted from work i haven't had the time to do it.

- America continuing to waive sanctions on Russian oil so they don't have to face the global economic consequences for their stupid war in Iran makes it even more infuriating that ordinary people like you and me still aren't allowed to pay for our fucking LiveJournal accounts. Which in itself is because of Russia's stupid war in Ukraine. Meanwhile geopolitics nerds are practically chomping at the bit for something to kick off in Cuba, or Taiwan, like our whole-ass countries are just levels to clear in a computer game. Something something war is stupid.

- I recently had an email exchange getting into the visceral nature of religion and how it imprints on people, with the example of my mother's reaction to bells in ambient music. I want to navel-gaze about what might have constructed my own visceral reactions to things like suburban life, and ponder about the way other people respond to elements of society deep in their bodies, e.g. revulsion toward homosexuality. Also bonus China/Taiwan content: why do i feel so cozy among the run-down tenements that cause some local folk such embarrassment or shame?

- An important book for me as a teenager was John Varley's Steel Beach. It comes from the low-brow school of corny, optimistic, male gaze-y, oorah science fiction for boys, but i sense it shaped a lot of how i think about gender. I went back to read the first book in that series which i never read before - The Ophiuchi Hotline - and it's kinda what i wanted the Culture series to be. I want to write something about these ultra-futurist utopias where culture and ethnicity and gender and beauty standards all disappeared because they didn't matter any more, and why perhaps that specifically appeals to me as a third culture kid, but why it can perhaps seem dystopic to people whose identities are more deeply rooted in a specific place or physical condition. This is a big topic. I feel it also relates to the question of whether we are "souls" driving around a bit of meat or whether this biological organism tapping on the keyboard is the thing itself, and how that can shape our place in society and resulting worldview.

- Oh yeah, fucking the UK now making it official that trans people are no longer supposed to be allowed into toilets of the gender they live and present as, despite most of us having done so without incident for decades. But also at the same time acknowledging that it's impractical to ask for proof of "biological sex" at every toilet door. It is one of the most bafflingly heinous things that has happened in the west recently. Engineering the system in such a way that it's not technically illegal for an individual to simply live their life, but service providers can be punished for not enforcing segregation of trans people is a weird, indirect form of lawfare that systematizes discrimination against a group that was already marginalized. The fact politicians and the media continue to waffle around it being a complicated issue is astonishing.

Thank you, LJ friends, for commenting on my sadpost and making me feel a bit less despairing.

The last week at work wasn't much better than the one before, still so much pointless battling with a colleague who just will not step back and let other people do the work they have been tasked to do, but i vented at a couple other colleagues and they had my back too, which made me feel like i wasn't crazy for feeling the way i was about the whole nontroversy. It's so fucking exhausting to have to walk on eggshells around some fragile male ego every time we want to do something that touches "his" precious corner of the system. Of course he's the same guy who will cheerfully use AI to shit all over every other part of the system without a care in the world. Sigh.

I'm just spent, i don't want to have to do any more fighting. Next week we are getting a new starter, but she's in Europe so it's going to mean trying to mentor someone across a timezone gap, which sucks. I really do not buy cross-timezone teams any more than i buy work-from-home as a productive concept. The only way it succeeds is if everyone is a highly-motivated and independent learner who is responsible for discrete, well-specced tasks with no overlap or interplay with other people's shit. In most tech companies that describes very little of the work, especially for new starters.

I've spent most of my career dealing with these problems and it's never gotten any easier. When i started my career we had IRC and conference calls, now we have Slack and Zoom - the only difference is that now the whole process is redirected through servers controlled by American tech companies. It's absurd how pretty much the whole world collectively shrugged their shoulders and let American rentiers slide in as middle-men for every process we previously were quite capable of doing ourselves. And they're doing it again with all this AI nonsense too. Ugh! I fucking hate everything about this industry.

But i'm going to try not to think about it. Today i took a bike ride up to the Danjiang (aka Tamkang) Bridge which opened earlier this week. I was a bit unsure about it because most of the YouTubers who crossed only showed the inland side, which like... why would you cross a bridge over a river mouth and not want to go on the sea side? I was worried that perhaps they had only built the bike and pedestrian way along the inland side and i'd never get to enjoy looking out across the sea, but i was very happy to get up there and find that there are broad cycle and walkways on both sides.

It was really cool to look back over my secret "behind the overpass" beach in Bali, which is now absolutely not a secret any more. The day was perfect - bright sun, not a cloud in the sky, 30 degrees, and a very stiff wind that had everyone gripping extra tight to their hats and selfie sticks. There was a whole army of sightseers up there getting their snaps of the new pride of Taiwan. It's the longest single-pylon cable stay in the world, although no doubt China will build a longer one just as a fuck you at some point. It's only about a kilometer across, but the pylon is something like 200m high and the deck is quite low so it looks pretty dramatic. Probably be cool to cycle over at night time, but who all going to be up in Bali or Tamsui at night other than the people who live there?

Well, probably everyone. I think cycle touring kinda turned me off night-time cycling - the routine was to be up as soon as the tent dried off and then book it to the next campsite before sunset. Now the idea of cycling at night seems odd to me, which is funny because in Europe people cycle at "night" all the time due to winter days being so short you practically don't get any light at all. Although, come to think of it, i cycle home in the dark every day over here thanks to the early sunsets, and it is quite peaceful, but that's only 20 minutes through the well-lit urban core - not a multi-hour 60km circuit to the seaside like i do on the weekends.

Eh, i dunno. I think i just like to be home in the evenings because then i can cook dinner and settle into bed to do my evening ritual of watching shows to avoid thinking about work. In reality, if i added up all those hours of staring blankly at my computer screen at night, i could probably have a more productive hobby, but every time i imagine going out to do something after dinner i fear becoming even more tired than i already am.

Last week i did go out for a banquet, because our CEO was in town and so we had an "AMA" (from Reddit slang meaning "Ask Me Anything" - this is how it is when your executive team are millennials) and a dinner. Normally they hold these dinners at some godawful western restaurant but this time it was a "Cantonese" restaurant, so i jumped at the opportunity to actually have the chance of eating something that wasn't a weak, insipid, Taiwanified version of the actual thing. But, as you can probably tell from the scare quotes, this Cantonese food was indeed a weak, insipid, Taiwanified version of the actual thing. We got a bit of dim sum and it was alright, but mostly it was the usual Chinese banquet dishes, and not really the best version of them imo.

One of my colleagues was sad we didn't get 腸粉 chángfěn, which is one of the most classic breakfasts of Guangdong province... God i miss those steaming boxes on the side of the road where you knew you could always get a juicy, saucy, slippery noodle roll with some lettuce and chili and maybe an egg cracked inside if you really wanted to spoil yourself. She ordered a couple for our table, and of course the Taiwanese banquet version of chángfěn isn't a plain noodle, it's so stuffed full of tempura shrimp you might as well have just served shrimp in the first place. It was like 炸兩 zháliǎng with meat inside instead of 油條 yóutiáo (donut), and did nothing to feed the part of my soul i left behind in Guangdong.

This is the worst part about banquet style dining in Asia - it's all meat-first. Not because the dishes themselves necessarily need to be meat-first, but because the whole culture of banquet dining is showing off the opulence, and meat means you are rich, rice means you are poor. So you don't get any rice unless you ask for it, like a peasant. After a zillion plates of pork and beef and chicken and fish and squid and prawns, they finally brought out some greens, but by that point everyone was stuffed.

The best thing was something they called 宮保雞球 kung pao chicken balls, but - although the chicken was boneless - it felt more like 辣子雞 spicy chicken to me because it didn't have any nuts. It wasn't mainland spicy, but it was a bit more than Taiwan spicy, which made it feel more like something i would cook at home.

Inexplicably we did not get any char siu, but there was one thing where as soon as i tasted it i was right back in every Chinatown dim sum restaurant the world over - 珍珠丸子 "pearl meatball" dumplings, which is i think a steamed pork rib inside a sticky rice ball. That very blank and empty flavor of steamed pork is one of those nostalgic flavors for me that you only get in Chinese restaurants because who the fuck else is going to steam their meat?

It was so weird that the stuff i loved was the stuff nobody else on the table liked, including the pleasantly sweet deep-fried 鹹水角 "salt water horn" dumpling, those 珍珠丸子 "pearl meatball" dumplings... Meanwhile the 燒賣 shumai and 蝦餃 har gow vanished instantly, despite to me being the boringest dim sum that exists - you can find them in the freezer section in every supermarket around the world! Might as well just get a potsticker from 八方 (local chain restaurant) at that point...

Anyway, it was a perfectly cromulent meal, and notable because it kept me out late one night and i didn't spontaneously self-destruct from exhaustion. Also, bro, my table polished off a whole fucking bottle of whiskey. In middle-class Taiwan there is basically only one alcohol that exists and it's whiskey. Beer is for plebs (unless it's craft beer) and kaoliang (the local baijiu) is for toothless, betel-munching hicks. Have you ever been to a Chinese banquet where everyone is necking whiskey like it's coke? Come to Taipei, i guess. Not my vibe, but here we are. (If i didn't have to work here i'd be choking back kaoliang with the hicks, completely failing to understand their 臺語 Taiwanese Hokkien but kan-pue anyway.)

Oh, and speaking of Chinese languages, please, God, can someone teach the fucking Americans how to say Xi Jinping? Every news presenter and podcaster and China-watcher-who-can't-speak-Chinese is failing the pronunciation SO FUCKING BADLY. The worst part is that it's so simple.

You guys. In pinyin romanization, "x" is essentially pronounced like "s". If you want to add a bit of panache you can put a slight lisp onto it, but just pronouncing it like "s" is going to get you SO MUCH CLOSER than the utter cringe fest of all these guys trying to do a Queer Eye zhoosh sound or going full "sh". Chinese already has "sh" and it's spelled "sh"! It's in Shanghai, for fuck's sake! So how to pronounce Xi? Like this: see? Yes, with the question mark. The tone goes up at the end. See? That's how you pronounce Xi.

And how do you pronounce Jinping? Dear Lord. It's just gin ping, guys. Gin like the booze, ping like pong. See? Gin ping? That's it. I cannot for the life of me understand why everyone is doing so much. I almost feel like there is some kind of running joke going on where all the Chinese pretend like the name is much more complicated to pronounce than it actually is so they can laugh at the ignorant barbarians doing it wrong.

While we're at it, what's with the faux-French pronunciation of Beijing? The "j" isn't pronounced like bonjour, it's pronounced like jack. Was there some passive-aggressive CIA psy-op to get everyone in the Anglosphere to pronounce it wrong after switching from the 17th century pronunciation of Peking? Beijing is just bay jing. See gin ping in bay jing. Last week he met with tuh lung poo (also known as chwan poo in Taiwan). Yes, pronouncing Trump's name with "poo" on the end will never not make me giggle.

Anyhoo, here is a video about the history of Israel invading Lebanon, because the war is still on, a million people are still displaced, and hundreds have been killed since the so-called ceasefire.


Israel's Long War on Lebanon

You can watch it as a companion piece to the Guardian's recent man-on-the-ground video showing an assortment of Lebanese people annoyed at either Israel or Hezbollah but somehow not too bothered by their own feckless government. This helps to explain why. Hearing a Lebanese person talk seriously - and with frustration - about being pushed around like a pawn, bullied by their neighbor and stuck with a weird colonial-era political system seems to rhyme somewhat with the Taiwanese experience. Us colonizers sure did leave a mess. You'd think that'd make us less inclined to support contemporary colonial projects, but alas.

I guess i should cook me some dinner. Work tomorrow. Fuck my life.

I am depressed.

Last week fucking sucked and i don't want to write about it or i will just get mad again.

Topic one, i hate Amazon, and online shopping in general, and the fact that it's now impossible to NOT shop online for certain items.

Topic two, i hate my job, i hate the tech industry, i hate that every single fucking thing i do has to be an argument. I hate working with dudes who constantly think they're the smartest guy in the room, people who always have to have the last word, who give their opinion on everything, who "and just one more thing" at the end of a meeting and then proceed to keep everyone around for another 45 minutes. I hate working with people in different timezones - every decision is always delayed, or it's taken by the wrong people, and every morning there is an endless stream of shit to fix. It's so inefficient. I hate working with work-from-home folks who are completely out-of-touch with the struggles shared by those of us who have to show up to the site every day. I fucking hate LLMs, i hate so-called "AI", i hate vibe coding, i hate that every fucking website on the internet is trash now. I hate that you can't trust anything you read any more, i hate everyone who says "look at this thing i made" and then it turns out they didn't actually make anything - they just asked a bot to do it - but they still expect everyone to praise them and take time to review the work that they didn't even do. I hate that i am always, always tired.

I don't have time for anything because i am so fucking tired.

My Canadian passport is expiring and i can't get a new one because i don't even have two friends on the entire planet who can vouch for me. Apparently spending 4 years working side-by-side with people in Taiwan still doesn't net you enough of a relationship that they will say "sure, just put my name and address on the form", you just get these weird, evasive non-answers or they politely ignore the question. Like, my entire life is work, that's the only thing i have any energy for, but i can't even get anyone at work to vouch for me, what the fuck? I give these people everything, all of my spoons, and for what? A paycheck i don't have the energy to enjoy and a bit more paperwork to prove my worth to the immigration department.

You might ask why i don't have any other friends. Because... like... i just like to be alone. Why do people need friends to count in society? I have internet friends, including - i hope - the regulars here on LiveJournal. But i don't know anybody's real names, much less phone numbers or addresses or birthdays, because none of that stuff matters. Until it does. I feel like when i was younger you just had to get a doctor or a judge to attest to your identity, which was a slightly better system because at least it was part of their job to be a pillar of the community - make an appointment, they sign a thing, the end. I mean, because apparently showing up in person to the actual fucking government office to apply isn't enough to prove you are who you say you are!? It's so weird that citizens are made to rope in other random people to vouch for them, basically volunteering to have the government build up a social network like it's an investigation into a criminal network or terror cell. (Ironically exactly the kind of work i do at my job.)

Oh no, now i'm back to thinking about how fucking awful the tech industry is. It's disgusting that a bunch of barely-regulated American ad companies know more about me - and everyone else on the planet - than the government supposed to be looking out for my health and wellbeing. It makes me sick that a bunch of greedy, reckless shitheads have spent the last couple decades hoovering up everything there is to know about everybody just in order to maximally bilk them for cash. I know we all like to imagine that it's sinister spy agencies tracking everything we do and trying to manipulate us into caping for warmongers and ideological extremists, but it's actually even worse than that because in reality it's just unaccountable grifters who will do anything to make a buck. At least the government has to answer to the people.

I mentioned on the last post that i have been reading the Culture series by Iain M Banks because it's set in a futuristic communist utopia. After reading the first three novels, i have come to realize that i'm probably never going to get the book i wanted to read - the escapist one about the actual utopia - because each book thus far is about the worst fucking person in paradise. Vague spoilers ahead - basically all of the stories are not set in the utopia, they're set in worlds outside the utopia, and the main characters are all arrogant, self-absorbed, abusive psychopaths who never really get any comeuppance other than the knowledge that the universe is much bigger than they are and so all the chaos they unleash will not count for anything over the long arc of time. There is something reassuring about that, but also it's not very fun to read. But i realized when i looked up reviews of these books that i am reading them wrong. Because apparently other people spend 500 pages thinking they are reading about a swashbuckling hero, and then when the twist happens on the last page that exposes the main character to be an asshole, it's a big kick in the nuts for all the obviously-male readers who didn't cotton on to the fact that THIS GUY WAS ALREADY A SUPREME ASSHOLE ON PAGE ONE. A real twist would be if these thoroughly 80s edgelord characters turned out to be nice, actually.

I mean, it's fine. I grew up in peak cyberpunk era, i read and watched and listened to all sorts of gruesome, gratuitous, outrageous stuff as a teenager, but it's kind of a bummer that i was hoping for Kim Stanley Robinson and i basically got William Gibson meets Irvine Welsh.

Is it too much to ask to read a book about nice, competent people who live in a kind, caring society and dedicate their lives to making things better for everyone? The funny thing is that there is a whole ass category of "cozy" literature that is supposed to be about such pleasantry - and there is even a sci-fi offshoot of it now - yet it still invariably revolves around murder, like. What the fuck? I enjoy formulaic mysteries as much as the next chick - i mean, who doesn't love a bit of Death in Paradise? - but can't we just have a cozy thing without a bodycount for once? Where are the books about awe and wonder and discovery and learning? I feel like there used to be at least some sci-fi about that.

I keep thinking about this TV show that came out last year called Pluribus. It was made by the same guy who did Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, so it was already going to be highly-acclaimed straight out of the gate. But - just like the Culture novels - it's a story about the worst person in paradise. Utopia comes knocking and the "hero" is the incurious, violent, self-absorbed drunk who wants nothing to do with it. Halfway through the season a second "hero" comes along who is somehow even more unhinged than the first one. As viewers we are supposed to empathize with these two flawed protagonists because lol everyone is secretly an asshole on the inside, am i right? Apparently i'm watching it wrong, because God forbid i wanted a show about a real alien intelligence, a wildly different form of life, a culture that organizes in a way that produces a wholly unfamiliar social contract, an exploration of a way of being that could have all kinds of interesting consequences... But, no, the story is about a grumpy woman and a grumpy man being grumpy about their predicament. Apparently it's a character study. Oh yay, like we didn't have a zillion other shows about awful people dealing poorly with their trauma. For fuck's sake!

And it's not that i don't care about the human condition. It's that I DEAL WITH THE HUMAN CONDITION EVERY DAY. I have enough fucking human condition to deal with in my own mental health. I have to put up with more than enough second-hand manpain and utter douchebaggery at work. Why the fuck would i want to see more of that in my downtime? Why do i want to read about it? People are awful. I FUCKING KNOW. Let me read about people being better. Let me dream about a place that's better, because WE BUILT IT THAT WAY. Because we can, if we just fucking tried, if we didn't resign ourselves to lol oh well, humans are doomed, we all suck, let me immerse myself in this literary deep dive into the psyche of the worst fucking person in the universe.

Fuck everything i want to cry.

I want to be free.

I love the sea. I don't much love swimming in it, but i do love the vastness of it. It's like an opposite desert. Instead of being largely dead it's teeming with life, but it's still violent and dangerous and a cold reminder that humans are delicate bags of mostly water that remain stable for barely the blink of an eye and can collapse at the slightest perturbance.

I love feeling tiny and insignificant, thus i love the sea.

Space is also like the sea, or the desert, except with even more nothing.

I have been reading Iain M Banks' Culture series recently, and one of the gimmicks he has in his space opera is giant space stations called orbitals, which are ring-shaped structures similar to Halos in the eponymous video game. I was trying to figure out how big an orbital was, and was surprised to see that the size of the ring was larger than the diameter of the sun, which felt unintuitive, because orbitals are set up to orbit stars just like planets do. But then i looked at how far the moon is from Earth and it's like one sun-radius away. So the sun seems really big, but there's actually a shit-ton of nothing in between it and us. You could string a hundred more suns end-to-end and it still wouldn't close the gap. So of course you could fit a bigger-than-the-sun orbital into an Earth-like orbit, and the far side of it would show up as a shining band across the sky, just like the moon hangs silver above us every night.

I think that's so fucking cool.

Going to space is a dream of mine, mainly because i imagine it to be like being stuck in the middle of a desert with nothing and nobody around - or like being on a boat in the middle of the ocean. Lots of writers have imagined it the same way, which is why we have space "ships" and sci-fi military organizations that look a whole lot like terrestrial navies. Space marines are a thing because you can't get humans onto the alien base without first moving them through lots and lots and lots of nothing.

I've been thinking more about the navy recently because the US has switched its war in Iran away from a bombing campaign to a naval blockade. Make no mistake - it's still a war even if high explosives aren't raining from the sky, demolishing buildings and killing civilians. Instead, civilians are being prevented from doing their jobs, either under direct threat of "kinetic action", or indirectly due to supplies not arriving and their companies going under.

The blockade already started on day one, of course, as thousands of civilian ships got stuck inside the Persian Gulf, unable to leave through the Strait of Hormuz for fear of copping a stray or even getting targeted directly - by the Iranians, to be clear. Most of those ships are still stuck there today, over two months later. This is like COVID all over again, when merchant sailors were left stranded at sea, unable to dock anywhere. There is a fantastic American YouTuber called What's Going On With Shipping who has been grumbling for weeks about how the US Navy evacuated all their own ships from the Gulf but left American civilians stranded, which is a double slap in the face because at least a few of those ships were Navy-contracted tankers supplying fuel to the same damn destroyers and carrier groups that are now fanned out across the Indian Ocean trying to chase down vessels moving freight in and out of Iran.

From a narrow geopolitical point of view, the Americans blockading Iran is probably a more effective strategy than bombing a bunch of factories while the IRGC hide all their missile launchers in hardened underground bases. Blocking the ships will shut down all the factories anyway, and as a bonus it will also shut down pretty much any other business connected to or dependent on the import/export economy, which is pretty much all that's left, given the Iranian government already shut down their own internet leaving white collar workers cut off too. Sooner or later something will crack.

From a broader geopolitical point of view, fuck America for forcing the entire world to suffer economically because their leader is a fragile-egoed nitwit who tore up the already-existing agreement negotiated by his predecessor and the international community. Maybe Americans don't care that oil prices are going up a bit, but other countries are far more dependent on trade with the Middle East, and other countries have far more people living on the poverty line where business costs going up even just a little can crash their entire livelihood. Hundreds of millions of people around the world - billions - are being affected by Trump's hubris.

But the war will play out as it will. There isn't much people in small nations can do to resist the will of the hegemon, and while the effects of the war are out of sight out of mind, there doesn't appear to be much domestic pressure to stop it in the US either.

So let's talk about pirates instead.

In history there is somewhat of a fuzzy demarcation between merchant mariners, pirates and navy personnel. Some of the world's most famous figures engaged in all manner of questionable interactions with other folks on the seven seas, and the sea in and of itself has been known for its lawlessness since antiquity. When sci-fi brings us tales of smugglers and bounty hunters and privateers in space, it's all based on millennia of humans doing the exact same shit on the ocean. It's only pretty recently that we stopped looting and pillaging and plundering as a matter of course.

You remember about 20 years ago when "Somalian pirates" were kind of a light distraction from the Global War on Terror? They were a punchline compared to Al Qaeda, but they still successfully hijacked dozens of ships each year, terrorizing (and occasionally killing) the crews and extorting millions from the owners. The fact that it's trivial for shipping companies to pay off pirates who manage to stop just a fraction of a percent of marine traffic in the region seems to say something about how imbalanced the global economy is. To be fair, Somalia's economy has grown 2x since the world's navies cracked down on illegal actions in the Gulf of Aden, so maybe all those former pirates are now doing honest work as content taggers for American AI companies?

No, of course they aren't, because now that the US Navy is busy trying to chase down traffic in and out of Iran, Somalian pirates have been at it again, just yesterday nabbing their fourth ship in two weeks.

An interesting thing about the US blockade of Iran is that it's a global blockade. After blowing up a bunch of random boats floating around the Caribbean and chasing suspiciously-flagged vessels out of Venezuela all the way up to fucking Iceland, the US Navy are now stopping vessels around India. The Americans are careful to only board tankers that appear to have discrepancies in their registration, i.e. there is some kind of legal framework for pulling them over to check their papers, detain the crew and confiscate the cargo. This is also why the US Coast Guard is sailing around the Strait of Malacca and a bunch of other places very fucking far away from US coastal waters - so the administration can claim these obvious wartime operations as "police actions". The US now has barely a peg leg left to stand on if the China Coast Guard ramps up harassment of civilian ships in my neck of the woods.

So are the shadow fleet the pirates, or is it the US Navy? Only one of the two is sailing around with guns pointed at the other one. It all comes down to who has filed the right paperwork, which to me sounds a whole hell of a lot like the good/bad old days when law-abiding sea captains could get a letter of marque and just take whatever foreign ship they pleased.

Again, putting the geopolitics aside, if you think about the human aspect of all of these sailors being stuck at sea for months - either on the run or on the hunt - with dwindling food stocks and inclement conditions, it's hard not to feel for them. They're all just out there trying to make a living, a million miles from home.

Do you remember this song?


Dune - Million Miles From Home (Official Video)

i was sent to outer space
to find another happy place
now i'm left here all alone
million miles away from home
floating through the galaxy
all the stars in front of me
now i'm left here all alone
million miles away from home

Yes, it's corny, what did you expect? Rave music makes no pretensions of poetry, it just gets right to the point. I guess someone older than me would post Space Oddity or Rocket Man.

Actually, let's do that - this video features the animation of Iranian artist and former Calais Jungle refugee Majid Adin.


Elton John - Rocket Man (Official Music Video)

I started out wanting to write about spaceships and pirates and now i am back to migration and refugees.

You know, i did have some kind of high concept angle going on where i was going to somehow talk about space-based megastructures and awesome factories and oil tankers, and why the Culture is a communist utopia but also how it's not perfect, but maybe it's as good as it gets, and also GIANT RINGS IN SPACE AND TALKING SPACESHIPS, but that will have to wait for another day.

I liked this week's thefridayfive and i am too tired to do a proper update so let's go.

1. What decade did you attend/are you attending high school or college?

The right answer here is probably the 90s. I started university in the late 90s and finished in 2006 i think, but i was never on-campus and only did it part-time remote after work, so highschool is my last real organized education experience.

2. What clothing fashion from that time are you glad/do you wish went out of style?

The main fashion i remember from the mid 90s was colorful oversize shirts for men and skimpy tops for women, paired with baggy low-slung pants and sneakers for all.

To be honest i still love that look.

I hate tight pants and i really hate pants that go up any higher than the hip - pants covering the belly button are just weird. I'd rather see butt crack and/or pubic hair peeking out the top than a person's midriff all bound up like they're stuck inside a toilet roll. High waist pants suck.

I wore large, multi-colored tees as a teen because i presented masc and that was the style, but now i am trans and supposed to pass as femme so i almost exclusively wear ribbed tank tops to try emphasize my meager curves, which is not dissimilar to the skater girl look of the 90s. I'm too old and fat to get away with crop tops nowadays, but i still would rather have something that gives a bit of a hint that people are supposed to read me as a woman. When i wear oversize tops or even a hoodie these days i just get read as male.

On other people i am attracted to the same thing. Big pants, sneakers, sleeveless top or oversize shirt - that's what i consider to be sexy. Backward cap, bucket hat, sunnies, candy bracelets, tracksuit pants, sports bra, flip-flops, all that cheerful, practical, comfy stuff, that's my jam, and that's what we wore.

There was much worse fashion in the 90s that i didn't pay any attention to. There are so many better things to do with life than fuss over other people's clothing choices.

3. Do you still listen to the music from your high school/college years on a regular basis?

Yes and no. I hardly ever listen to specific tracks that i listened to as a teenager, not because i don't like them any more but because they carry a certain baggage that takes away from me being able to enjoy them on their own merits, it just becomes an exercise in navel-gazing nostalgia. However almost all the new music i buy is very much in the style of 90s-era electronica. I just love the way the instruments were used back then, the kind of unabashed joyous synthiness that never felt too concerned about making sure there was a poppy hook, nor were they trying to be undergrounder-than-thou. It was just a really solid time for house/techno/trance/whatever-you-want-to-call-it.

4. What hairstyle/hair color did/do you wear during high school/college?

In high school i was mostly au naturel or varying degrees of bleach blonde. I had a mullet in the early 90s and was forced to cut it off when i moved to Europe because according to my Dutch family i looked like a football hooligan, so then i had a very typical and 90s middle-part/curtains boy's haircut. My hair is flat and straight so there isn't really much i can do with it anyway.

5. What was/is "the cool thing to do" while in high school/college?

The cool thing in highschool was smoking and drinking, which i did less of in the early years and more of in the later years, but i still never really made it into the cool crowd. In the Netherlands i feel like the coolest kids had scooters and did hard drugs and zoomed around the polders to go to the big gabber parties. I went out clubbing with my friends pretty regularly but it was to alternative/rock clubs because that's what they liked and we rode old bicycles around like losers. Occasionally i took a train out to some other city to go to raves where i met up with weirdos i knew from early internet or BBS communities, which in retrospect was pretty cool actually, but i didn't feel like it at the time because i also read comics and played computer games and listened to less popular techno.

I dunno, "coolness" is a strange thing to think about because it didn't manifest in the Dutch highschool system the way it definitely did when i still lived in New Zealand or the way it's portrayed in American high school dramas. Thinking back to New Zealand, the coolest kids were the biggest rebels who had their own cars or access to an elder sibling's, and they listened to hip-hop music or heavy metal with lots of swears and sexy lyrics... which - again - in retrospect seems juvenile and in reality much less cool than me hanging out with my friend who lived on a farm and shot bow-and-arrow and painted fantasy art, or my other friend who lived in a trailer and made epic mash-ups by meticulously dubbing snippets of tracks off the radio onto cassette tape.

I wonder if all the cool kids i remember from school secretly thought everyone else was cooler than they were, and maybe that's just the rite-of-passage, everyone in highschool thinks they're less cool than they actually turn out to be?

Yesterday i got a new tattoo. Actually i got half of it - i'd like it to start "creeping" from my inner left bicep up onto my shoulder, so i am booked in to continue that cyberpunkish transformation in a few weeks.

The cyberpunk aesthetic is due to a stylized circuit board trace pattern acting as a backdrop for the main part of the tattoo. My starting point was Faith from the computer game Mirror's Edge, who has a stylized circuit tattooed on her upper arm, but rather than the straight lines of that game, i gave the artist reference photos of the back side of two classic synthesizers used in electronic music - the Roland TB-303 and SH-101, both released in the early 1980s. That was just before synthesizers switched from consisting of mostly discrete components to mostly integrated components, so the circuit traces curved and swooped around the physical size restrictions of resistors and capacitors and knobs and sliders - they weren't just connecting a bunch of silicon chips to push buttons arranged in neat little rows. So it's giving a sort of whimsical retrofuturistic vibe, which continues my theme of badass/serious-looking black ink that's also a bit cute and fun.

I would post a photo but i can't pay LiveJournal due to sanctions so i don't have any space to upload anything. Sigh.

Anyway, the circuit trace concept is just the backdrop for the main message i wanted to get tattooed on me: "kein mensch ist illegal". If you google that phrase you will find the logo, which is fairly well-known in Germany and occasionally pops up on signs and banners around the rest of the world. It means "no human is illegal" and it came out of advocacy for the rights of refugees and undocumented migrants. My most anarchist inner self feels like "NO BORDERS" better captures my personal view on the absurdity and inherent violence of political borders, but it also carries a bit of libertarian baggage that i don't really need after getting "不自由毋寧死" ("give me liberty or give me death") on my other arm. "kein mensch ist illegal" is a way of saying a similar thing that's unashamedly inclusive. Nobody should ever be a non-person. The whole point of universal human rights is that everyone has them, no exceptions.

The concept of citizenship is another topic that fascinates me, given it's one of those privileges i theoretically enjoy but in practice am rarely able to exercise. I am especially interested in how affording citizens special rights creates a hierarchical system that is implicitly biased, but it's a topic that few people - including liberals and leftists - seem to want to grapple with.

People who don't think about citizenship very deeply might assume that everyone is a citizen of somewhere, but that's not actually true. There are millions of people around the world who have no citizenship at all, mostly due to strange political maneuverings that left them with no country of their own, but also no right to gain citizenship of the country now governing the land on which they live.

One well-known example of statelessness is Palestinians - not all Palestinians, but a specific subset of Palestinians who were born of refugees in countries that did not afford them citizenship, plus many still living in the Israel-occupied West Bank or Gaza, who might be able to obtain travel documents but not citizenship in any meaningful sense. But there are other groups too, for instance the Rohingya, Bedoon, Sahrawi and so on.

In some instances, citizenship is wielded as tool of power over occupied peoples. Israel famously did this after annexing the Golan Heights, which is still internationally recognized as a part of Syria. They graciously offered Israeli citizenship to the few original inhabitants who remained after decades of violence, but it's citizenship with a gun to the head. By accepting broader rights for yourself in your invader's country, you are tacitly giving up the right to your own sovereignty. The people of East Jerusalem got a similar deal where the choice was capitulation/citizenship or "permanent" residence that Israel could revoke at will. It's the same shady shit Morocco did in Western Sahara, Russia is doing in the occupied regions of Ukraine and what China hopes to pull off in Taiwan - imperialism, pure and simple.

I think most would agree that it would fucking suck for a foreign military to roll into the town where you live, claim ownership over the region, tell you that you're actually better off with them in charge, and oh by the way just sign this contract to make it official. Even if materially you are better off, it's at the cost of your dignity. Of course, if people are particularly desperate - which they often are, thanks to a preceding campaign of economic strangulation and/or full-blown violence - it's understandable that they would acquiesce.

So if this Faustian bargain is how citizenship is weaponized after annexation, what makes inherited citizenship or birthright citizenship any less problematic? In a state that truly believed in universal human rights, all humans would be afforded the same rights, so citizenship would be irrelevant. But a state that recognizes citizens as having more rights than non-citizens has encoded systematic inequality at its core, so it should be no surprise when it implements a carceral system that disproportionately affects people of certain ethnicities, or withholds medical care from certain categories of people, or disenfranchises segments of the population, or unleashes campaigns of violence resulting in the deaths of thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of civilians.

My favorite underrated political commentator is a guy called Mark Charles. He is a former pastor and current Native activist who lives in DC and mostly does speaking engagements and consulting, as far as i can tell. He has a podcast/stream that gets just a couple hundred views each month, which is a real shame because he's a captivating speaker and always comes to current events with something thoughtful to say.


My Second Cup of Coffee: A Native perspective on the Birthright Citizenship debate

His most recent topic was the birthright citizenship hearing that went through SCOTUS a couple weeks back, against the context of Israel's re-invasion of Lebanon and the US/Israeli bombing of Iran. He briefly reflects on America's legacy of bombing civilians, including the unbridled barbarism of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which he did a powerful piece on last year for the 80th anniversary. But mostly he talks about the strange position the indigenous nations of Turtle Island find themselves in, where on one hand they are theoretically sovereign peoples, but on the other hand they exist entirely subordinate to their occupiers.

He points out that the US was never a nation open to all. The citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment was explicitly written to deal with the problem of stateless children of former slaves while ensuring that children born on the rez would not be eligible. Maybe that would make sense if tribal nations had actually been allowed to exist as equal states on the Americas, but obviously that never happened as evidenced by the trail of broken treaties. Native peoples were eventually offered US citizenship through an act of congress 56 years later (4 years after women were first allowed the vote), but the constitution still stands and is now being used by the Trump administation to argue for the denial of citizenship to American-born children of undocumented migrants and temporary residents alike. Charles rightfully critiques the popular imagination that the constitution is some kind of sacred text written by great and wise scholars - reminding us that in fact it is a political document constructed by and for a ruling class of rich, patriarchal white men who even after the emancipation proclamation still understood native peoples as nothing more than savages.

Of course the complexity is that multiple things can be true at the same time. This is why it's interesting to me to consider autonomous resistance movements among occupied peoples like American Natives, or Palestinians, or Kurds, or Uyghurs, or Hong Kongers. It's intuitive as an outsider to want to take the side of the oppressed, because obviously it would suck to have a foreign force come in and claim ownership over your land, place you under an authority that isn't representative of your culture and apply unto you a "citizenship" or other caste that you never asked for... But as the occupation continues, the way people experience it changes.

Indigenous peoples of the US show that it is possible to survive a genocide, albeit at great cost. Even the hardest core Land Back activist today is hardly expecting the Europeans to pack up and go home. Perhaps this speaks to the urgency of resistance? But even conceiving of resistance as a zero-sum game is its own sort of imperialist mindset. The counter to colonialism doesn't have to be ethnonationalism, but it might take some work to find one that isn't.

I guess this is why it's much easier to be an elitist than an egalitarian, because the elite can just sit back and go "oh well, it's survival of the fittest". It's easy to become an apologist for genocide when you figure that it's just a natural sorting. If you do want to stand up for equality, then you hit these messy discussions around who gets to own what? Why should one person have more right to a resource than another person? How do we distribute aid fairly? How do we respect everyone's cultural practices? What do we do when climate change makes certain areas less viable? There is no simple answer, not like with fascism where every conversation gets reduced to "lol, our guys are top of the heap, fuck you, sucks to be a loser".

And this is why it's important to me to unequivocally state that no human is illegal. For me, that should be at the root of everything we try to build in human society, because otherwise we're no better than animals.

This weekend was a surprise 4-day weekend. Normally we get Tomb Sweeping Day off work, but this time around it coincided with Children's Day, so i am enjoying a lazy Monday in bed.

I really think that 3-day or even 4-day weekends should be the norm. It is so much better for my mental health to have more than just a couple days to unwind before having to head back to the coal face. It makes me feel less guilty when i "waste" time watching YouTube or some other dumb, unproductive relaxation thing. And - in the rainy season - it increases the chance of getting at least one day when it's pleasant to go out.

This is the rainy season and Sunday it was humid, overcast and not pissing down. So i went on a bike ride. I was thinking of going up to Bali or Tamsui to look at the progress of the bridge (apparently it's opening next month) but instead i headed opposite direction toward the Zhuwei fishing harbor out back of Taoyuan airport. That's a pretty long ride at the best of times (about 100km round trip) and because i got a late start i decided to permit myself an early turnaround in Taoyuan City.

I was kinda hoping to at least make it to the oil refinery, just to get a first-hand feeling for the kinds of places currently getting bombed in the Middle East and Ukraine/Russia, but my body wasn't feeling it. I should probably mention that the last couple weeks i got hit with a UTI, which the first round of antibiotics didn't clear up, so i went to the doctor and got some industrial strength antibiotics that have left me feeling wiped out and nauseous. Work has been exhausting too. I can't sleep because of the war and my peculiar anxiety to check on its latest developments. It's just been a shit few weeks. Anyway, i didn't make it to the fishing harbor, or the oil refinery. I did make it to the market, though.

There is a flower market in Taoyuan that's located near the start of a rail trail/greenway heading out to the coast, under a highway overpass and over a bridge crossing a creek. They also have fruit, veg and snack food stalls there, and several times on my trips up to Taoyuan i've popped in to buy fresh-cut pineapple, some red guavas or those stubby 芭蕉 bananas that are my favorite. This time i felt a bit bad that i couldn't make it out to the fish harbor where i normally pick up a 蘿蔔糕 turnip cake and 地瓜籤 sweet potato fritter as my vegan fish'n'chip replacement, but i saw a guy in the market frying up the shredded sweet potato treat so immediately stopped and got a serve to give me that seaside vibe. It was delicious.

Before heading back i did a little roll through the market (it's one of those ungentrified markets where motorcycles and pedestrians filter through the same stalls) and found a lady selling jars of 豆腐乳 fermented tofu. I probably mentioned it here before, but fermented tofu is something like blue cheese - they let the tofu ferment, then steep it in some kind of pickling brine with alcohol and spices. Eventually it turns into a cream cheese consistency with a Roquefort pungency. It's incredibly salty, somewhat stinky, but it tastes really great spread on a hunk of bread (if you can find it) or spooned into a stir-fry for richness. The store-bought ones are usually kinda bland compared to the DIY versions i've found about the place, so it was cool to pick up a jar. I cooked up a cube of it last night with some fried potatoes, green beans, silky tofu and basil/chili/garlic/ginger. Om nom nom.

Just because i didn't make it to the oil refinery (or the massive LNG power plant along the coast) doesn't mean i didn't pass any factories. I cycled past a couple of chip factories and chemical plants, then took a detour past some medical device manufacturers, some more electronics places... Some of those factories are right next door to tenements that undoubtedly house the workers. And in Taiwan those workers are often the blue collar migrant class - Filipino, Vietnamese or Indonesian. You can tell by how many nearby canteens are serving sisig, bánh mì or ayam bakar. Annoyingly i never get there around the right time to find an excuse to sit down, but it's on my bucket list to at least check out some of these places for lunch and see if i can find a gado-gado or my beloved ketoprak. They're usually very "rice and meat"-heavy, though, echoing the meals you'll find at blue collar canteens all over the world.

Anyway, yeah, it's interesting to look at the kinds of people who live close to factories. Obviously there's the factory workers themselves, who often happen to be migrants, but there are also poor people. The old folks who perhaps lived in the area before the factories arrived and couldn't afford to retire in a fancier district, plus all the pink collar support people who run the local canteens, the folks selling SIM cards and phone cases, people who fix motorcycles, people who cut hair... young families with small children who don't have the money to live in the next suburb over where middle class condos start to sprout.

So who do the bombs hit when war breaks out? Well if it's a precision munition delivered overnight, hopefully only the night watchman on-site. In the early morning you might start to hit other workers too. Drivers. The lady with the food cart prepping snacks for first shift. The migrant kids training pencak silat under the bridge. Collateral damage. Or deliberate - for instance during the recent combat search-and-rescue operation when all "military-aged males" within the operational area became potential targets. And with less accurate and/or larger munitions, the chance of hitting non-combatants only goes up.

I guess this is how it happens that white collar people can live relatively unscathed in cities under fire for years. They still have to face the trauma of bombs falling each night, rolling powercuts etc, but odds are the primary targets aren't going to be in their neighborhood. Unless they live near a police station or local government building, like i do. Or, you know, there's a high-value target hiding upstairs.

Le sigh.

Anyway, i like to bike around these places because it keeps me grounded. I think a lot of white collar people invisibilize the working class because they never really have to see them other than as clerks in the convenience store or delivery riders bringing dinner.

About a year ago our office switched around the cleaning times so now the janitorial staff comes through during work hours. It's mildly inconvenient to step away from your desk as someone vacuums underneath it, but it also serves to remind that while we sit on our asses all day, some people are out there pushing brooms and lifting bags and unclogging toilets. It also made me think of how many other offices i worked at where i never saw them - they must have come through overnight. Who gets hit by the bombs? Night shift workers.

So this wasn't supposed to be a "war and..." post, but here we are. I don't really know why i am consumed by it. I am an army brat and international relations hobbyist so i kept up with the Ukraine war probably a lot more than the average person, but to be honest i never felt particularly invested because Eastern Europe is not a place i have any connection to or interest in visiting. But i've always wanted to visit the Middle East. It hurts me to see it in flames because there is so much history there, plus all those arid landscapes i adore. Since transitioning i mostly gave up on the idea, because being a solo femme-presenting traveler in that part of the world is not ideal, even aside from any problems or misunderstandings around being trans. I experience it all vicariously, through wiki and maps and books and games, hoping that one day at least one place won't be torn apart by war or oppressed by dictators and zealots. In reality it'll probably always be a never-never land for me, but one that continues to capture my attention. At least i wish for people there to have peace, even if freedom in the way i understand it remains out of reach.

Although i think freedom matters too.

Malcolm X said no one can be at peace unless he has his freedom, and i tend to agree. But he also pointed out that the prerequisite for that struggle is people becoming able to define freedom for themselves. I haven't been to the Middle East so i can't speak for the people who live there, but after living in China i do tend to feel that it's hard for someone to conceptualize of what freedom could mean without first becoming able to question the structure of their society, and surely they can't do that if their home or workplace is being bombed? So, at the risk of stating the obvious, if we really care about liberating oppressed peoples, it seems not bombing them should be step one. Then at least it makes space for them to develop a critical consciousness, and only then can they define their freedom and pursue it to find peace.

I am blessed to have quite some freedom, although perhaps not quite enough to find peace. Four days off is not nothing, though. Everyone should get to have a holiday and time to think.