Lessons from Taiwan

I just got back from a two week vacation in Taiwan, and let me tell you — it was a grueling schedule of eating, figuring out where to eat next, getting there, with the occasional massage between meals. Two weeks is a long time to stay in one place (I was mostly in Taipei), but it also felt short as there was no shortage of good food to be had.

The benefit of going during Chinese New Year is being able to celebrate and spend time with family. However, a lot of businesses tend to be closed during that time, and it’s kind of a guessing game when they will open back up. Din Tai Fung, for example, took two days off (Chinese New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day), while other restaurants could be closed for a week or even longer. Everybody’s also traveling during that time, so it’s more expensive and crowded to leave Taipei the first week of the New Year.

There’s so much I can write about, but I’ll start off with an innocent text I got from my mom (who lives in the Bay Area) towards the end of my trip:

“Can you get me a teapot?”

It seemed like a simple request, but I was annoyed. Why, you ask? Let me list the reasons:

1. I had a packed itinerary for my remaining time in Taiwan, and I still had other, more urgent matters to tend to, like getting more massages. Plus, I wasn’t a teapot connoisseur, and didn’t have time to figure out where to get one.
2. She was in Taiwan in December…why didn’t she get one then?
3. She couldn’t give me specifications of what she wanted. How big should it be? What material? What should it look like? Are there specific things this teapot should be able to do, like the ability to travel back in time and correct past mistakes?
4. What’s special about getting a teapot in Taiwan that you can’t get at Ranch 99 or Amazon (see #3)?

She eventually sent me a photo of what she wanted, and despite my misgivings I did my best to look in the limited time I had left. It should have been easy to find as it was “very common,” but unfortunately I was unsuccessful, even after enlisting my cousin’s help on my last day in Taiwan.

According to my mom, “it’s okay” that I couldn’t find it, but that just made me more irritated. “It’s not okay,” I told her, “because I sacrificed what I wanted to do to look for what you wanted.”

When I told my roommate about this whole debacle, he said, “So this isn’t about the teapot.”

He was right, of course, and I’m still working out what it was about, but there are a couple of immediate takeaways I had.

The first is to ask for what you want. Which is ironic, because honestly, I wish my mom didn’t tell me what she wanted. I made the choice to look for a teapot instead of doing what I wanted, even though I knew full well she would have been fine without a teapot from Taiwan. But alas, I wanted to be a dutiful son, and that’s my cross to bear. When I told my cousin about my mom’s request, she said, “You should have told me earlier…I could have gotten you one.” In this situation I didn’t have a lot of time to ask for help, but if I had asked my cousin for advice even 12 hours earlier I might have been able to get my mom what she wanted. It made me think about how self-reliant we’ve become, and how reluctant we can be to ask people around us for help. Even my mom didn’t want to ask her friend in Taiwan for help…in retrospect I could have just asked her friend, but I didn’t want to trouble her after she already helped me get some hot sauce.

The second takeaway is to know what you want. It can be a process to discover what you want, both in teapots and in life, so it’s important to make time to do just that. Taking my Taiwan trip as an example, I didn’t plan what to do beyond the basics: spend time with family, eat a ton, and get massages. Halfway through my trip I started researching hot springs, and I ended up spending a night at a hot spring resort. Ideally I would have liked to spend 2 nights there, but I ran out of time. If I had known what I wanted and told my family earlier, they would have gladly taken me to hot springs earlier on in the trip.

Given how much time I’ve spent in Taiwan and how often I’ve visited, it’s interesting how I still learn so much whenever I go, whether it’s about my relationships, family history, and even what I want. That’s why it will always hold a special place in my heart, and why I’ll spend a bit more time planning my next trip there.

Also — Mom — if there are other things you want from Taiwan…tell your friend so she can get them for you. 😅