Six years ago, I walked over a bed of hot coals. While I didn’t burn myself that night, I’ve been raking myself over the coals since.
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All articles filed in Guest Column
Sushi Express: A meditation on love and dating in Taiwan
Eric Lin was not merely my first Taiwanese friend – we’d actually met on the flight that brought me to Taiwan. He was trying to start a business with his friend based on a design idea they’d come up with in their spare time for better packaging of fragile items, which would enable him to quit his monotonous engineering job. He was great fun to talk to, and I was drawn to his complicated shyness: just awkward enough for it to be apparent, but not enough to stop him from ringing me up to have coffee.
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Give Me Back My Name
Before coming to Taiwan to study Chinese, my language school required me to give them a Chinese name. I didn’t put much thought into coming up with a new name.
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From the Island of Women to #MeToo
Not long ago, when news of rich and powerful men finally being called to account – dethroned as a comeuppance for sexually predatory behavior – was still rolling in, my friend Darice Dan Chang wrote about how the movement had barely touched Taiwan. Although I’m usually upbeat about life in Taiwan as a woman compared to the rest of Asia, she had a point.
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Traveling in Taiwan as a woman (but not only)
Too often, a female traveler cannot experience a place in the same way as a male counterpart. There are always added dangers, prohibitions, assumptions, expectations and just those extra things women notice because experience and necessity have trained us to do so. If an exception exists, it might well be Taiwan.
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