Friends and I spent all day on that narrow strip of sand – building sand castles, swimming along the shore, and learning to surf. The rocky cove was desolate in the heat of the day, as sunbathing was taboo among the Taiwanese locals. Our small group of recent college graduates had set aside this day for fun and squeezed every …
Exhausted from multiple flights, I arrived at the Taoyuan International Airport with bleary eyes and dragging feet. Although I desperately wanted to stretch out horizontally, I had one more thing to do. Moving toward the currency exchange booth, I was thankful to find it open. The words “foreign exchange” were boldly posted in Mandarin and English above the booth. Thirty …
After a few years of living overseas and studying Chinese, my Canadian friend and I needed a break. A local expat group was hosting a women’s retreat on our island of Taiwan, so we planned to attend. “We can take our car,” I announced bravely. “I’ll drive, and you read the map.” The map was in Mandarin, but as Julia …
Lavishness leapt up at us the minute we signed for delivery. Three oversized boxes awaited us at our Taiwanese gatehouse, and we were glad both of us came to collect. Their bulk and weight would have proved an unmanageable challenge for just one person. A couple we knew in grad school had asked us to send their church our family’s …
The height and depth and breadth of parables happen around us all the time. But sometimes, you must wait a lifetime to realize the significance of the moment. Kernels of truth dropped in mundane soil will bear fruit only when given space in your memory. My parable starts with a sticky preschooler I knew well and was trying to raise …
The bakery started as a small hole-in-the-wall, hidden behind a single glass door along a narrow Taiwanese alley. This mom-and-pop shop smelled of freshly baked bread the moment you opened the door. Joint-owned by a Kiwi chef and his Chinese wife, Chef Dereke named it Finga’s, for everything within was handmade. In time, Dereke and his wife Lily were no …
For the sum total of my twenty-eight years, my mother’s dressing had always been on my holiday table. This time, 7500 miles separated me and that pan of crumbled biscuits and cornbread. Would it truly be Thanksgiving if that stuffing wasn’t on the table? I was an adult by all appearances and had a family of my own. I could make …
The early morning wet market was mostly dry by nightfall. Housed open-air under a corrugated tin roof, the stainless steel display tables and wire shelves stood chained together and ready. Except for a night breeze, an eerie silence was the only sound awaiting the coming day. Sometime before sunrise, generations of market vendors hosed down their stalls in preparation for …
There is an exhaustion so absolute that you find yourself counting minutes before you can crawl between the sheets. In my experience, that overload usually involved an overseas flight and jetlag. No matter how we adjusted our flight schedule, crossing the international date-line always depleted our reserves. I suppose any continual twenty-six-hour trip will do that. Our plane trip had been …
The fatiguing day of verb conjugation at school burned out into an evening of conversational silence at home. Weeks prior, weariness had replaced the nine-month adventure of living abroad. Despite the buzz of traffic, drone of vendors, and hum of shoppers just outside our door, my husband and I habitually collapsed each night once our preschoolers drifted to sleep. As …
