During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was erroneously believed that there were “canals” on the planet Mars. These were a network of long straight lines… observed by astronomers using early low-resolution telescopes without photography… Around the turn of the century there was even speculation that they were engineering works, irrigation canals constructed by a civilization of intelligent aliens indigenous to Mars.

• Martian canal, Wikipedia

I’ve known Troy Parfitt for several years. I edited two of his books, and I’ve read the others. Our tastes in literature and music are similar. We’ve only met in person a handful of times, but I consider him a friend. 

Nearly two years ago, Troy began telling me about disturbing similarities between the words of Jordan B. Peterson, the Canadian superstar-professor/bestselling author, and those of Adolf Hitler. In a series of emails, and later in Facebook posts, he shared examples of what he described as Peterson’s plagiarism of the Nazi leader’s writings. 

I could see that the language was somewhat similar, but I wasn’t convinced that Peterson lifted so many phrases and ideas from Hitler. I wondered if the wordings Troy highlighted weren’t somewhat common constructions — like “a topsy-turvy world” or “something for everyone” — and I told him so. But what to one person is nothing more than blurry lines on the surface of a dead planet is to another proof of the Martians’ engineering genius.

Back in September 2019, I spent most of one day with Troy. We discussed Peterson and some other topics. He was (and remains, if our regular correspondence is anything to go by) reasonable and reasoning. His eyes did not swivel. I saw no foam on his lips. 

While we were driving through rural Taiwan, roughly equidistant between where he lives and where I’m based, he asked me to take a look at the foreword of his just-published book about Peterson, The Devil and His Due. It was the part that was giving him the most trouble, and he realized if it wasn’t any good, a lot of readers wouldn’t get into the chapters where he compares Peterson’s lectures and writing with those of Hitler, Jung, and others. 

He didn’t say so, but I think he approached me because he knew I’m skeptical about his thesis. Also, I hadn’t (and still haven’t) read the main body of the book, so there was no risk I’d unconsciously depend on something that appears later in the book in order to get his drift. He asked for no-holds-barred feedback. I gave it, inasmuch as it was necessary, and wished him the best of luck. 

This is a longer version of my article in the November 2020 issue of Taiwan Business Topics:

“In Taiwan, we use something like 16 billion plastic bags every year, and fewer than 10 percent of them are recycled,” says Jason Huang (黃之揚), co-founder of Re-Think, a not-for-profit organization that aims to protect Taiwan’s coastal and marine environments.

This dismal recycling rate is not entirely the fault of consumers, Huang points out. In the case of bags, the quantity of retrievable plastic is often so small that those who collect or process recyclables for a living do not accept them.

Advice posted on the website of Taipei City Government’s Environmental Protection Bureau in May 2018 reminds householders that only clean, single-material bags can be recycled. Bags contaminated by oil or solids should be thrown out with general waste; plastic packaging for snacks is often laminated with aluminum foil and so cannot be reclaimed, the website explains.

As part of its plan to get rid of all single-use plastic bags, straws, and beverage cups by 2030, Taiwan’s government has already banned supermarkets and convenience stores from giving out free plastic bags. Despite that restriction, each day millions of bags are used just once, to hold a bento box or some soup. Few individuals bring their own containers when buying cooked food. Others say they would, but tiffin carriers and Tupperware-type boxes are neither light nor compact.

“People understand that reducing plastics consumption is an important goal, but this is ‘a society of convenience,’” says Huang.

Lynn Kao (高海琪) and Will Chien (簡仲威), co-founders of Agooday, hold a similar view. But rather than organize educational and community activities like beach cleanups, they are trying to change people’s behavior by offering a novel product.

The duo launched the Pockeat reusable food-bag (pictured above) after a wildly successful 2017 crowdfunding effort. Seeking NT$1 million via zeczec.com, they raised NT$24.04 million. So far, they have sold more than 90,000 of the bags.

The two-liter Pockeat, which retails for NT$640, weighs 40 grams. The three-liter version (price NT$690) weighs 47 grams. Both can be folded flat to fit inside a pocket or a handbag.

The bag’s lining is waterproof, oil resistant, and heatproof up to 120 degrees Celsius. This inner bag is made from food-grade TPU (thermoplastic polyurethane). In Taiwan, Kao says, unused TPU can be recyclable, but after exposure to oil or food, it cannot be recycled.

Asked why Agooday does not use recycled PET bottle fabric for the Pockeat’s inner bag, Kao explains that current regulations do not allow recycled material to be used in the manufacturing of food containers.

By adjusting a velcro strip, the user can shrink the capacity so small portions do not bounce around. The bag’s handle is designed for easy carrying or hanging on bicycle handlebars.

“Compared to free plastic bags, people think the Pockeat is quite expensive, so we try to educate them about both the environmental cost of single-use bags and the health issues. For instance, it’s not safe to use disposable bags for hot soup,” says Kao.

The company commissioned SGS to test the Pockeat and certify it as safe for storing hot and cold foods. To help the public get to know the Pockeat, Agooday has published videos showing how the bags should be used, cleaned, and dried.

Asked about the product’s overall carbon footprint, Kao replies: “We don’t know, and it would cost a lot to get a recognized team to calculate it. The key point of our products is to replace disposable plastic and reduce the amount of garbage in the ocean, so it’s important to use them as many times as possible.”

Kao claims the Pockeat, “can be used for forever,” and Agooday offers a repair service to extend the product’s life. There is a small charge to cover material, labor and shipping. In an average month, the company does three or four repair jobs.

In addition to asking the public to do right by the environment, Agooday tries to attract customers with Taiwan-centric designs (Mount Jade features on one edition) and by collaborating with digital-sticker entrepreneur Kanahei and the creators of Bac Bac and Taiwan Bar.

One reason why the Pockeat is not cheap is that Kao and Chien decided early on to source all materials and have all manufacturing done in Taiwan. “If we moved our production to China, we’d cut our costs in half, but we want the Pockeat to be made here, to reduce the carbon footprint from factory to consumer, and to better control the quality” says Kao.

Finding a willing and capable manufacturer was far from easy, she explains. Most factory owners are used to working with big buyers, so it took some time to convince them to work with Agooday.

“We also faced some quality issues. The inner bags are manufactured by high frequency welding, and the factory didn’t QC every piece. We found some with defects, so we had to change manufacturer and delay deliveries. It’s very important to us that we have good quality products for our customers.”

The Pockeat was not Agooday’s first product. In 2014, Kao and Chien devised a biodegradable alternative to the plastic toothbrush.

According to the company’s website, 100 million toothbrushes are thrown away in Taiwan each year, polluting ecosystems and eventually degrading into microplastics which enter the food chain. To trim this tide of waste, Agooday sells a toothbrush with a bamboo handle (coated with beeswax and flaxseed oil to prevent mold) and nylon bristles.

Agooday toothbrushes — like their plastic counterparts — have to be replaced every few months. Kao advises customers to dispose of them by plucking off and throwing the bristles in a trash can, then burying the handle in soil it can decompose. The nylon is not biodegradable, but unlike conventional petroleum-based nylon, it is made from castor oil, which is a renewable resource.

For a period, the company was selling a 100-percent biodegradable (but vegan-unfriendly) toothbrush with hog’s hair bristles instead of nylon bristles. “Due to quality control issues, we discontinued that version,” Kao says.

The toothbrushes are made in China. “We’d like to keep our dental-products manufacturing in Taiwan, but honestly it’s very hard to find suitable factories in Taiwan, as most of them have moved to China or Southeast Asia,” laments Kao.

Agooday’s plastic-free dental floss is made of silk. It is sold in a reusable bottle, while refills are packed in paper. “For vegans, we’ve tried to get cruelty-free silk, but as the quantity we need isn’t great, it’s hard to obtain,” says Kao.

Like the founders of Agooday, James Chuang (莊麒勳) has examined Taiwanese lifestyles, and seen ways to scale down plastics consumption.

“I started Helashuo Co., Ltd. in 2017 because I wanted to reduce plastic use through innovative products. Here in Taiwan, many people ride scooters, and raincoats are in great demand, but they’re made from petrochemicals. That why we started with raincoats,” he says.

Both Agooday and Helashuo have benefitted from government help. The former received advice and financial support through the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ Service Industry Innovation Research and Development Program (SIIR), while the latter qualified for a Taipei City Startup subsidy of NT$700,000 in 2018.

Helashuo’s products are sold under the LIve For Eco brand name through several websites, including its own.

The outer layer of Helashuo’s raincoat, which accounts for more than 70 percent of its total weight, is pure cotton — “a natural material that naturally decomposes,” Chuang stresses. Cotton is a hydrophilic fabric, meaning it absorbs water, and Chuang admits the raincoat may get slightly heavier when it gets wet.

The waterproof inner layer is made of polyurethane (PU), which he describes as an “eco-friendly plastic.” Proponents of PU argue that it is preferable to most other plastics. It does not contain chemicals that interfere with the endocrine and hormone systems of humans and other creatures, nor does it influence PH levels in soil or water. There are also various ways in which PU items can be recycled back into its prepolymer constituents.

Biobased and biodegradable types of PU are available, but Helashuo uses petrobased PU. “Nobody wants to recycle and reuse this material, so our job is to reduce environmental impact by using cotton to cut petrochemicals consumption,” Chuang says.

Helashuo is currently perfecting flip-flops made of cotton, cork, and natural raw rubber. “These natural materials aren’t water-resistant, but they’re suitable for use indoors, or outside in dry weather. Most important, they can all decompose naturally,” says Chuang. “We’re still doing market testing, and we’ll adjust this product. We hope our new flip-flop can go on sale in 2021.”

Earlier this year, when Helashuo launched a range of child-sized raincoats. Chuang used zeczec.com to attract money and publicity. He admits that he purposely set a low target of NT$100,000 to ensure it would be met early on in the 60-day fundraising period. The campaign concluded on September 23 with pledges totalling just over NT$1.6 million. “Including marketing costs, we’ll need much more money to run this project. The money [raised through zeczec.com] will go toward manufacturing the first batch,” he says.

All LIve For Eco products are made in Taiwan, and pricing is a major challenge, Chuang admits. He explains: “Natural materials are more expensive than petrochemicals, and manufacturing in Taiwan is more expensive than in China or Vietnam.”

A LIve For Eco raincoat last just as long as ones made of conventional materials, says Chuang. They are, however, significantly more expensive. LIve For Eco’s prices may be more acceptable to consumers in countries where the standard is living is higher, Chuang says. For this reason, he expects to focus on developing overseas markets and children products. “We’re very interested in partnering with big companies, and we have the ability to customize our products, or even develop new ones, for them,” he adds.

Unlike the entrepreneurs behind Agooday and Helashuo, the founders of Uanuan (源源鋼藝) can draw on decades of industrial experience. The brand’s name derives from the first part of the names of two factories established in the 1960s by James Wang’s (王冠翔) grandfather. Wang is Uanuan’s creative director; his father is in charge of production.

Uanuan’s first product — a set of salt and pepper shakers called One Shake — was not specifically designed to replace single-use plastics. It did, however, win both a Red Dot Design Award and Golden Pin Design Award.

Its best-selling item, however, is explicitly pitched as a solution to one of the Taiwanese public’s most polluting habits. The description of the Hiding Tumbler (pictured below) on Uanuan’s website highlights a statistic as shocking as Jason Huang’s plastic-bag tally: Roadside kiosks sell an estimated 1.5 billion cups of tea and other beverages per year. Because only a small minority of customers bring their own containers, it is likely that the thirst for freshly-squeezed juices and pearl milk tea generates four million pieces of trash per day.

According to James Wang, one unique selling point of the Hiding Tumbler is that users can switch between a thick straw and a thin straw; made of Eastman Tritan copolyester, these are supplied with the tumbler. Between sips, the 750ml cup can be sealed with a click, the straw on the inside, away from gritty city air.

The cup is double-layer stainless steel, in which iced drinks stay cold for up to 12 hours. On the hottest days of summer, the website assets, there is no need to add so many ice cubes the drink’s taste ends up diluted. When carrying cold liquid on a sweltering day, no condensation forms on the exterior. Hot beverages keep their warmth for up to 8 hours.

“We do all our own manufacturing, but despite over fifty years’ experience, we still faced many ordeals during the manufacturing process. Improving and sustaining the quality of our products has been the most important thing,” says Wang.

Uanuan’s website claims that, if you use a Hiding Tumbler three or more times a week, in around half a year, the environmental cost of manufacturing it will be canceled out by the quantity of plastic you will have avoided using. The tumbler comes with a carrying bag made of recycled PET bottle fiber.

Many people complain about having to discard an appliance or a utensil that is otherwise in perfect condition, simply because one part of it is broken. To avoid this situation, Uanuan offers replacement straws, lids, and other components through its website.

The website also sells spares for Uanuan’s Bendong compartmentalized meal-boxes. Like the Hiding Tumbler, the boxes are made of stainless steel. If users want their food to stay hot even longer, they can order a silicone inner insulation layer.

About 75 percent of Uanuan’s sales are through online stores. The brand is now sold in Hong Kong, Macao, and South Korea, and is in the process of entering the Japanese market. Yet Wang says: “We’re not in a hurry to expand very fast into international markets. We hope first we can be on a firm footing in Taiwan, and more Taiwanese can know us, love what we do and what we make, and share our beliefs,” he says.

“If we don’t cut down our plastics consumption or increase our recycling, the landfills where incinerator ash is dumped will soon fill up,” says Re-Think’s Huang. Finding new landfill sites is exceptionally difficult, he adds, because as soon as a location is proposed, those living nearby protest.

In Huang’s opinion, more people now understand the importance of curtailing the use of plastic, but “behavior hasn’t changed much, and total plastics production isn’t falling.” The popularity of online shopping and food-delivery apps have pushed up the amount of plastic discarded by households, he says.

The Environmental Protection Administration is working with vendors and trying to figure how to reduce single-use packaging, yet Huang complains that government policies are sometimes watered down when they run into opposition. Asked if the 2030 target can be met, he says: “I’m not sure how it’ll go.”

…is the name of my bimonthly sustainability/ecology column for Taipei Times, which formally debuted in today’s newspaper.

The column soft-launched on September 23 with an article about Buy Directly From Farmers, a social enterprise that helps consumers order organic/pesticide-free produce from Taiwanese agriculturalists. Two weeks after that, I profiled Taiwanese-German zero-waste advocate Shia Su. For the October 28 issue, I looked at the state of local avifauna with the help of the Taiwan Wild Bird Federation.

The first piece to appear under the Environmental Impact Assessment banner focused on the ragged yet crucial woodlands that struggle to survive a stone’s throw from the ocean. Two entities are working hard to protect and extend these windbreak forests: The Buddhist-oriented Tse-Xin Organic Agriculture Foundation (which provided the photo here) and the central government’s Forestry Bureau (in particular, the bureau’s Taiwan Forestry Research Institute).

Pretty much everything I’ve written in the past five months has been shaped by the pandemic.

I was eager to return to the subject of multi-level marketing (MLM), because in my previous article I’d not been able to cover certain aspects of this much-loathed industry. But rather than develop ideas I’d been sitting on since late last year, the editor and I thought it best to look at how MLM companies are struggling to control unscrupulous or misinformed direct sellers who see COVID-19 as a golden opportunity to promote air-filtering machines and nutritional supplements.

To research the piece, I resumed contact with the MLM managers who helped me in 2019. After the second article appeared on May 28, the spectrum of responses I got from them surprised and amused me. A manager at one told me: “The article is really incisive, I learned from you a lot. I will share it with all our members by our official FB.” Another company made no comment, while the third protested: “I must tell you that we are quite disappointed with the tone of your article, which makes [us] and the industry as a whole look bad.”

It’s been many years since I’ve received feedback like that. Perhaps I’m too kind to the people and businesses I write about…

I then covered the issue of working from home (WFH) / working remotely, which I first wrote about in late 2006. In all that time, the needle has barely moved, even though WFH could help Taiwan with its low birth-rate and serious traffic congestion.

Recalling an article I did last year on two-tier pricing in Taiwanese tourism, my editor at Taipei Times asked me to try to find out why Taiwan’s government decided that most foreign residents shouldn’t qualify for the stimulus coupons it began to issue just a few days ago. I approached several officials and various ministries, but the authorities wouldn’t tell me their reasons. We have to assume the thinking behind the exclusion would bring shame on the government, or that officials were too lazy to revise rules set way back in 2009 for a similar program. You can see what I did find out here.

The photo here is one I took in the main seafood market in Donggang, Pingtung County. It appears in A Culinary History of Taipei: Beyond Pork and Ponlai.

 

 

 

Coronavirus aka COVID-19 aka “Wuhan flu”: If there’s a bigger news story in 2020, I dread to think what it might be. Earth attacked by extraterrestrials, perhaps?

The intersection of travel and business has always interested me as much as actual destinations, so no one who knows me can have been surprised that I decided to write about the current epidemic’s disastrous impact on tourism-related businesses. This is the original (and somewhat longer) draft of my article “A lost season for the tourism industry” in today’s Taipei Times.

On February 9, licensed tour-guide George Lu realized things were likely to get worse before they’d get better. The official death toll from COVID-19 in China had topped 800, and the virus had spread to several other countries.

The previous day, Taiwan’s Central Epidemic Command Center had announced that travelers entering the country after transiting through Hong Kong or Macau would have to stay in home quarantine for 14 days. As people throughout the world reviewed their travel plans, Lu received a slew of coronavirus-related cancellations. He decided he’d have to develop another source of income.

That afternoon, he put a notice on the bulletin board in his apartment building in New Taipei City’s Tucheng District, advertising his services as an English tutor. The following day, he visited the language center in neighboring Banqiao District where he taught between 2007 and 2012.

The language center’s boss didn’t offer him any work, yet Lu left feeling somewhat reassured: “He told me that several of his students had quit because their parents didn’t want them to risk catching ‘Wuhan flu’ in the buxiban [cram school], and that they were now being tutored at home.”

Lu has found some students, but his current income is less than a quarter of what he can earn by leading tours for 20 to 25 days each month. “Unlike tourists, students never tip,” he rues.

In Taiwan, few industries are feeling the pinch from COVID-19 more than tourism. The epidemic was likely one reason behind the abrupt closure earlier this month of the Landis Taichung, a five-star hotel.

Taipei’s National Palace Museum, a must-see for both Taiwanese and foreign tourists, was visited by a mere 62,144 people in February 2020, compared to 207,677 people in January, and 407,593 in February 2019. According to a volunteer answering the telephone at the visitor center in Checheng, the number of people visiting this spot in Nantou County on weekends is “down by more than half.”

“Our first coronavirus cancellation was an Israeli couple who’d signed up for a 14-day tour. They arrived in Hong Kong on January 27, and immediately decided to head home,” says Mark Pemberton, founder and managing director of Life of Taiwan. (This reporter writes and consults for Life of Taiwan on an ad hoc basis.)

According to Pemberton, about 80% of his company’s tours between mid-January and the end of April have been scrapped, and he’s bracing for further cancellations or postponements.

Life of Taiwan has been offering full refunds or credit for those who plan to rebook at a later date. The former cost the company a significant amount of money, even if all deposits paid to secure accommodation are retrieved. “If a client pays by credit card, the card company takes at least 2% before passing the money onto us. If we give a refund through the card, the client has to receive the full amount, so we need to pay another 2% on top of the amount we send. We end up out of pocket,” Pemberton explains.

Twenty passengers on the cruise ship Celebrity Millennium booked a one-day excursion to the Pingxi Sky Lantern Festival through Life of Taiwan. However, as the vessel approached Keelung in early February, the authorities denied it permission to dock, because of virus fears. “That tour was sold on non-refundable terms, but we decided to give a full refund as it was an unavoidable situation,” says Pemberton.

He praises his core employees for their willingness to shift to a part-time schedule in order to cut costs, saying: “I certainly sympathize with agencies which have heavier overheads. We’re going to use this quiet period to optimize our products and refine our systems. We want to bounce back as an even better company — but this year is going to be a wipe-out. We have the resources to ride out the storm until 2021. While we’re not counting on government assistance, we do hope there’s some help for the industry as a whole.”

“We’re hoping to be back on track by September or October,” says Simon Foster, co-destinations manager (with his wife, Tot) at the Taiwan office of cycling-tour specialists Grasshopper Adventures.

“The effective job Taiwan has done so far at minimizing the impact of the virus has been noted by the international press, and may be the reason we continue to get bookings for later in the year, while operators we know in other countries are not. But we’ve written off the first half of the year, and June to September is our quiet season,” he goes on to explain. “There’s little we can do about [the situation]. We’re trying to turn this crisis into an opportunity, and use the time to get our new bikes road-ready, improve business practices, train staff, and get on with the other jobs we don’t normally have time for.”

None of the luxury or high-end hotels contacted by this reporter were willing to discuss the pandemic’s impact on occupancy rates or food-and-beverage sales. Some smaller businesses, however, are candid about the struggles they’re facing.

“Most homestays in Yilan have suffered a lot of cancellations for this month and next month,” says Chris Kuo, former chairman of the Yilan County Lodging Association. “Some were due to fights being cancelled,” he adds.

“The Tourism Bureau is offering several different loan schemes, and I’m suggesting to our members they use these tools to reduce short-term financial pressures. They can also adjust staff working-hours,” advises Kuo. Unlicensed accommodation providers — which, he estimates, account for 35% to 45% of Yilan’s B&Bs — aren’t eligible for government help.

“So far, I’ve not heard of an unusual number of homestays closing down, or their owners trying to sell them. However, if the coronavirus crisis isn’t easing by the end of April, I think we could see several going out of business,” says Kuo, who with his family owns and manages three B&Bs in the Luodong area.

“Actually, during situations like COVID-19, many travelers prefer small homestays to big hotels,” Kuo points out. He foresees that, if the epidemic gets worse, some urbanites are likely to temporarily relocate away from crowded cities: “We’re designing a long-stay program. We don’t know if it’ll work, but it’s a way to try to increase the occupancy rate. We’ll give it a shot.”

A Touch of Zen Guest House in Kaohsiung’s Zuoying District saw revenues drop by nearly 40% in February compared to the previous month. “Things dried up pretty abruptly [in February], with a bunch of cancellations and far fewer new bookings. We were fully booked the weekend of February 8 by runners joining the Kaohsiung marathon, but the event was cancelled due to COVID-19. All of our reservations that weekend were understandably canceled,” says co-owner Yueh Shu-wen.

A Touch of Zen had its soft opening last April and its grand opening in September. “In October, when we were fully booked for 12 nights and partially booked for another 11 nights… December and January were even better,” Yueh says.

At a different location, Yueh and her husband used to run Bark, a hot-dog restaurant that they permanently closed on March 15.

Because of coronavirus fears, “dine-in business has been down for everyone, but we think recently we did better than other restaurants, as we had two open-air dining areas,” she explains. “A lot of people prefer that kind of environment than in a closed place with an air-conditioner recycling air. Families with kids told us just that: They felt safe, because they could eat in our courtyard.”

“Even though business was solid for most of the four and a half years we were open, we’d been planning to close this spring due to other factors,” says Yueh. “We probably would’ve stayed open through April or May, but COVID-19 made us shrug and say, ‘why bother?’”

Some travel bloggers are having to tighten their belts. “My website’s traffic and earnings, with which I currently support my family of two adults and two infants, are down about 70%,” says Nick Kembel, owner of Spiritual Travels.

“Pre-coronavirus, I was seeing well over 200,000 page-views monthly on my site. Now it’s down to around 80,000,” says Kembel, who lived in New Taipei for more than a decade until October 2019.

The Edmonton, Canada-based writer/photographer spells out why he’s taking an especially big hit: “Normally, about 80% of my traffic is to my Taiwan content. After Taiwan, the places I mainly cover are Japan, South Korea, and Italy, some of the countries worst hit by the virus.”

“I’m a member of various blogging and travel forums, and it seems that travel bloggers covering Asia and Europe are being massively affected,” says Kembel. “Through a Facebook group I run, called ‘Taiwan Travel Planning,’ I’ve noticed that a trickle of people are still planning trips to Taiwan, but they’re all concerned about the situation on the ground — what will happen when they arrive, whether things will be open, and if unexpected travel bans or flight cancellations could wreck their trip.”

More than 20 years ago, I kicked off my writing career by doing travel pieces for an English-language newspaper here in Taiwan. A few books and hundreds (possibly more than a thousand, I long ago stopped counting) of articles later, things seem to have come full circle. Since summer 2018, I’ve been taking care of the weekly travel column at Taipei Times. 

In 2018, I wrote 22 Highways & Byways articles. The 2019 total will be 48. I also wrote five non-travel features for the newspaper this year, one of which will appear on New Year’s Eve. Each article appears twice on the newspaper’s website — once as a conventional webpage with photos, then again in a text-only format labeled “Print Edition.” Google searches favor the former, while the latter pages don’t show how many times they’ve been viewed. Earlier this week, I decided to tally the visible viewing statistics in case I could learn something useful about readers’ preferences.

My writing doesn’t set the Internet alight. I’ve long known that. Page-view numbers are mostly four digits. In terms of online eyeballs, the most successful article I wrote for Taipei Times this year was the non-column feature “Expats play key role in boosting Taiwan’s tourism” (September 10). So far, it’s accumulated just over 12,000 views. The Highways & Byways winner, “A modest achievement in Nantou” (April 19), looks set to top 7,000 views any day now. Oddly, it’s a fair way ahead of the next five most-read travel pieces, all of which were viewed between 5,000 and 5,500 times.

So what common denominators are shared by the most popular articles? It’s very hard to say. People searching for cycling travelogs might stumble across “A modest achievement.” But of the next five? A couple are about museums (and very different museums: one focuses on insects, the other is archaelogical); one describes a hike near Alishan; the other two cover stretches of coastline seldom visited by international travelers. Is there a “slow burn” effect, with articles gradually picking up page views months after publication? I’ve no idea. Perhaps in six months’ time I’ll go back and check the numbers again, to see if certain types of article are more likely to become evergreens.

East Taiwan is many Westerners’ favorite region, yet the articles I wrote about Taitung and Hualien didn’t get much attention, typically fewer than 3,000 views. Is this because I steered cleared of famous destinations like Taroko Gorge? Perhaps. So… will I change the way I choose places to write about? No, I won’t. I’ve learned no clear lessons from this little bit of web-data analysis, and I’m very fortunate to have an editor who gives me a great deal of freedom. I’ll continue to visit and write up destinations that I think deserve coverage, be they religious sites, museums, or nuclear research reactors.

UPDATE: A few weeks after I wrote this piece, page-view counts disappeared from all Taipei Times articles! I’m told the website will be revamped in the near future.

When my first book came out, back at the start of this millennium, I was fortunate to receive a very favorable review in Taipei Times. After that, I thought it unlikely I’d ever again have my name on a book winning such plaudits.

However, some weeks back Eugene N. Anderson, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Riverside, posted on Amazon.com a 5-star review of A Culinary History of Taipei: Beyond Pork and Ponlai, the food book I co-wrote with Katy Hui-wen Hung:

This is one of the best food books I have ever read–authoritative and densely packed with facts, but extremely readable and delightful. It is more of a food ethnography of Taiwan than a food history of Taipei, but all the better for that. One very good detail is that the linguistic transcriptions are excellent and sophisticated, not only from Mandarin (in standard Pinyin) but also from Hokkien, the usual spoken language of Taiwan. Hokkien is a most unappreciated language–beautiful, flexible, adaptable, creative, with an incredible oral literature, and I am glad to see it get some love for once (it is slowly dying out as China pushes Mandarin on everybody). There are also some words from Hakka and Cantonese, and from Austronesian languages. This book is a linguists’ and ethnobiologists’ delight.

Particularly unique and interesting is the material on the Austronesian-speaking Aboriginal peoples of Taiwan, a diverse and fascinating group almost unknown in the English-language literature. They have a range of unique crops, including a species of quinoa, independently domesticated from the South American one–a striking case of parallelism … this is an exceptionally carefully done book, in marked contrast to too many books on Chinese food. If you are at all interested in Asian food, you need this book.

Professor Anderson is himself the author of landmark books about food, such as Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture and The Food of China. Thanks to his immense experience in Taiwan and Greater China, he was able to point out two minor mis-translations in our book which no one else seems to have noticed! If we’re able to revise the book for a second edition, correcting those errors will be among the changes.

Thank you, Professor Anderson, for your kindness and support!

 

 

 

 

Diving deep into my email account the other week, I stumbled across some 2012 correspondence with Jay Wexler. Introducing himself as a law professor at Boston University who was working on a book about examples of religious practices harming the environment, Wexler told me: “One of the examples I’m interested in investigating is the practice of burning paper and incense in China and countries with significant Chinese populations… I came across a terrific article that you wrote about joss paper in Taiwan Today, and I was wondering if I could ask you a couple of questions about the issue that might help me in my research.”

The commentary he referred to, published in November 2010 and now back online after a few years in the vaults, urged Taiwan’s government to act against the burning of joss paper with the decisiveness they had showed when trying to curb smoking in public places. Burning such paper (also called “ghost money”) is, I wrote, “a major cause of air pollution in urban areas, especially during the seventh month of the lunar calendar, so-called ‘ghost month.'”

A couple of emails later, I mentioned the issue of mercy release. “It’s exactly the kind of thing I want to talk about in the book. Thanks very much for pointing me to it,” he told me.

We exchanged a few more messages, then all went quiet… but he did complete his book. When God Isn’t Green came out in 2016, and in it he says he first heard about mercy release from me: “Crook explained the practice to me, and although I could hardly believe it, a quick web search confirmed its reality.”

It’s nice to think I gave a fellow writer a useful lead, and it’s satisfying that credit was given where credit was due.

 

 

Building on research we did for our book, A Culinary History of Taipei: Beyond Pork and Ponlai, Katy Hui-wen Hung and I produced two feature articles for the wine & dine special issue of Taiwan Business Topics published in January. One examined the role sweet potatoes have played in local foodways since the 1600s (“The Sweet Potato’s Rise and Fall – And Rise Again”). The other was a history of bento boxes (“The Biandang from Japanese Days to the Present”) which touched on the issue of recycling used lunchboxes. We actually had three items in the magazine, as the editor invited us to describe how we came to write our Taiwan food book (“Why and How We Wrote a Culinary History of Taipei”).

The day after I returned to Taiwan from a month-long visit to the UK, I traveled to a town about an hour from my home to report on a bando. What is a bando? An outdoor banquet of traditional delicacies prepared on-site, usually to celebrate a wedding, a temple anniversary, or a company’s end-of-year bash.  The online version of that article (“The Art of Managing Tables”) has just appeared; it’ll also be in the print version of Travel in Taiwan. Over the years, that magazine has sent me on several railway journeys, to explore Taiwan’s oldest neighborhoods, and in pursuit of migrating butterflies.

Compiling a roundup of Tainan’s best street food (“A Culinary Walking Tour Through Taiwan’s Street Food Capital”) for Eater.com took a good amount of time, but led to me discovering several excellent little eateries, to which I’ll surely return in the future. After living in Tainan for 24 of the past 28 years, I feel I’ve no excuses for not already knowing about these places. To make partial amends, I’ve added a couple of them to my Taiwan guidebook; Bradt will publish the third edition this June. My article for Eater is just one component of their very comprehensive and beautifully structured guide for Taiwan-bound gourmets. It begins here.

 

 

Between now and the end of the year, Katy Hui-wen Hung and I will be sharing some excerpts from our new book, which is available direct from the publisher and also via Amazon.

This extract from Chapter 5: The Farms That Feed Taipei describes the poor economic situation many farmers find themselves in, and some of the cultural, social, and regulatory factors that undermine agriculture across the island.

Without them, meals in Taiwan would be dull and less healthy, and the country’s food security situation much worse. Yet Taiwanese farmers are poorly rewarded. Since the early 1970s, agriculture has never accounted for more than 40% of the total income of the average farming household. In the same period, the total disposable income of farming households (one in eleven of all households in 2015) has fluctuated between 62 and 78% of that in non-farming households. When the economy boomed between the 1960s and 1990s, many farmers – male and female alike – spent as much time laboring on construction sites as cultivating their fields.

A lingering sense of gratitude to the land that fed them and their ancestors motivates members of the older generation, but rarely inspires their children to pursue a career in agriculture. At the same time, this emotional attachment means landowners are reluctant to sell or lease plots they no longer cultivate. Around half of Taiwan’s farmers are over 65, and three quarters of them think no one will take over their fields when they are gone. But agriculture is clinging on, and cultivated land still accounts for more than 6% of Greater Taipei’s surface area.

Over the past half century, an expanding population and changing eating habits have left the island dependent on foodstuff imports. Wheat, corn and soy are grown in miniscule quantities, and less than 5% of the beef eaten is local. Few countries have experienced such a rapid collapse in their ability to feed themselves. Before 1968, food production in caloric terms was roughly equal to domestic requirements, but within two decades, self-sufficiency was below 50%. Even before Taiwan joined the WTO in 2002, farmers faced foreign competition due to rampant smuggling from China of mushrooms, tea and offal. In 2014, the self-sufficiency rate recovered slightly to 34.1%, and the authorities hope to lift it to 40% by 2020.

While the cultivation of genetically modified crops is not permitted, the country imports dozens of GM food products, Taiwan Business Topics pointed out in its May 2015 issue. Because inheritance customs give the oldest son half of his father’s land, with other sons (and sometimes daughters) sharing the remainder, farms have been getting smaller and smaller. By the end of 2010, average cultivated land per enterprise was down to 1.9 acres (0.77 hectares), with just one farmer in five having more than 2.5 acres. One expert who praises Taiwan as “the world’s best exemplar of high-tech, mechanized small-plot agriculture” believes government-sponsored efforts to achieve economies of scale are crucial to the future of farming. An initiative called “Small Landlord, Big Tenant” was launched in 2008 by the Council of Agriculture, the central government agency which oversees farming, fisheries and food affairs. Despite its flaws, the policy has succeeded in making thousands of acres of land available to younger professional farmers, some of whom are applying technological skills they learned in other industries. Taiwan is unlikely to meet the majority of its food needs anytime soon, but the future which faces the island’s farmers is slightly brighter now than it has been for some years.