I'm going to Taipei in four days and I'm not calling it a vacation

Four days. That’s when I leave for Taipei.

I’ve been to Asia before — enough to know the particular exhaustion of a long-haul flight, the way jet lag hits differently depending on which direction you’re crossing. I’m not a nervous traveler. But this trip has felt different from the moment I started packing, and I’ve been sitting with that.

I’m not going as a tourist. I’m going as someone trying to make a case to herself.

Tuna has opinions about the suitcase situation. She has not shared them.

The part I don’t talk about enough: I can’t fully read Mandarin

Here is a thing that’s embarrassing to admit when you’re Chinese and you tell people you want to live in Asia: my Cantonese is strong. My Mandarin is not.

I grew up in a Cantonese-speaking household. My parents spoke Cantonese at home, I spoke Cantonese back, and English handled everything else. Pretty common for Chinese Americans of a certain generation. Fluent in one dialect, conversational in another when speaking it, genuinely limited when it comes to reading and writing. That’s me.

Taiwan uses Traditional Chinese characters. A menu in Taipei requires a reading ability I have to work for in a way I don’t have to work for in English. I’ve been quietly embarrassed about this for most of my adult life — being Chinese and still feeling like something of an outsider in a Chinese-speaking country.

I’m going to Taipei anyway, embarrassment and all. Because I suspect I’m not the only second-generation Chinese American carrying this specific kind of gap, and I think it’s worth saying out loud.

What you bring when you go home but home isn’t exactly yours yet.

Why I’m framing this as a chapter, not a trip

This trip is the first one I’m going into with a clear intention beyond enjoying myself. I want to know what daily life in Taipei actually feels like — not the tourist version, but an ordinary day. The transit system, the markets, the pace of a city that wasn’t built around cars.

What would it take to live there? Not someday in the abstract. Concretely: what neighborhood, what cost of living, what it means to be an American in Taiwan rather than a Taiwanese American in America. I want to document it honestly enough that I can look back in two years and understand what I was building toward.

That’s a lot to ask of sixteen days. But the things you want most tend to get clearer the closer you get to them, and I’ve been getting closer to this for a while now.

What I’m planning to film

I’ll be shooting on the Insta360 GO Ultra. Small, unobtrusive, easy to forget you’re wearing it — which is exactly the point. Markets, transit, food, the quiet moments that make a place feel like somewhere you could actually stay.

The footage ends up on YouTube. The written version of it — what I noticed, what surprised me, what hit differently — goes here.

What I’m bringing for my relatives

When you travel back to a place that’s culturally yours, you show up carrying things. In my case: Mauna Loa macadamias, Royal Kona Coffee, Hawaiian Host chocolates — things my father brought back from Hawaii that have been sitting in a bag for months, waiting for this trip. You don’t show up empty-handed. I would never show up empty-handed. But working out what to bring, how much, what it signals — that’s its own thing. Familiar and a little fraught, the way family always is.

I have the bag. The bag is ready. I leave in four days.

Follow along on YouTube → youtube.com/@softpawsedlife