Should I move to Taiwan? (Ricky Weekly #42)
This is where I share 3 things every week with my friends and anyone else interested.
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A picture from my life:
It seems like the only IRL social thing we know how to do is go hiking together. This is probably my 4th time hiking in the last 2 months. I’m not an outdoorsy person so normally it would’ve taken me 2-3 years to go on 4 hikes... Still, it was a great time celebrating my friend Yosh’s birthday.
Thing on my mind:
Some of my friends have moved back home or out of SF because they have the privilege of WFH. I remember thinking about whether or not I should move out of SF (to NYC) last year and decided that I still place a very high premium on being close to the people I admire and in the center of the startup ecosystem. Now Covid-19 has driven people away and even the people who are still here are not looking to hang out anyway. I did a lot of Zooms for the first two months of quarantine, then everyone stopped Zooming because it’s just not the same. My Co-Founder and I used to have a persistent Zoom open all day and we even prototyped something like what Phil Libin launched last week to enhance our persistent Zoom experience, but now we just call each other up real quick when we need to talk and only Zoom if we plan on talking longer.
Biking around SF these days, especially on my normal path going from Bayview through the south side of Potrero Hill through the Mission or the Tenderloin, the scene is pretty apocalyptic. Over the years I’ve complained about the city because of the crime, homelessness, bad roads, ineffective government, high cost of living and doing business, etc and I’ve tried to find out why the political culture is the way it is. I like the history of SF being a place that welcomes people who are different, but how did that culture translate to a useless government? Talking to friends who grew up in the city, they didn’t see this much homelessness or feel this unsafe growing up. One friend even told me that all the best ethnic restaurants have left! I dunno. I guess it’s a complex question to answer and a bit of a Rorschach test depending on your politics.
I learned about the Taiwan Gold Card program recently, and I’m starting to consider moving to Taiwan with my Co-Founder. It’s just the two of us right now so we have the flexibility and it would improve our lifestyle since life is 95% normal there (here’s a video of a local baseball game, with fans!). I’m trying to separate my fondness for Taiwan from what’s actually important. I’ve never considered living in Taiwan for any extended period of time before, and it doesn’t seem like it would help much with our startup, which is the only thing we care about. David and I have had a relatively easy quarantine because all of our available cycles are spent on the startup anyway. But it seems like the US is unlikely to get to anything resembling normal this year and probably the first half of next year, so…maybe I should consider it more seriously?
Piece of content I recommend:
The Model Minority Trap by Viet Thanh Nguyen (h/t to Sita for sharing)
Longread, but a strong recommend from me. It’s very woke, but weaves in a lot of Asian American history, photographs, his personal story, and just brilliant writing to articulate an idea that’s very hard to pin down.
“Asian Americans are caught between the perception that we are inevitably foreign and the temptation that we can be allied with white people in a country built on white supremacy. As a result, anti-Black (and anti-brown and anti-Native) racism runs deep in Asian-American communities. Immigrants and refugees, including Asian ones, know that we usually have to start low on the ladder of American success. But no matter how low down we are, we know that America allows us to stand on the shoulders of Black, brown and Native people. Throughout Asian-American history, Asian immigrants and their descendants have been offered the opportunity by both Black people and white people to choose sides in the Black-white racial divide, and we have far too often chosen the white side. Asian Americans, while actively critical of anti-Asian racism, have not always stood up against anti-Black racism. Frequently, we have gone along with the status quo and affiliated with white people.”
Yi Yi: A One and a Two by Edward Yang
Also wanted to recommend a movie. I discovered Yi Yi on BBC’s list of the 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century and it was everything I wanted. It reminded me of Boyhood (#5 on that list and my favorite movie of all time) and it’s just as long of a commitment (~3 hours). Both movies are capable of transporting me to an alternate reality close enough to my real life that they bring up all kinds of very nuanced and complex feelings. I moved to the US in ‘99 and there was a very real chance that I could’ve stayed in Taiwan and had a very different life. Yi Yi was shot in ‘99 so I got to see what life was like back then.
🤗
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As always, you can find out what I’m thinking in more real-time on Twitter and my essays are on my website. My latest essay is called “From Socialcam to TikTok: How we figured out video social in a decade”