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misslinguistic

You're speaking my language.

Language learning has long been my form of self-ca

Language learning has long been my form of self-care: there is something so meditative about learning new alphabets, something so zen about immersing yourself in the mental exercise of expressing thought through a completely novel system. When you’re speaking a foreign language, you can’t overthink. You have to focus on pronunciation, you have to recall vocabulary. You’re focused only on the message. Unless you’re very advanced, all other implications are secondary.

But I’ve been head down on a couple big writing projects this last year, and I took a step back from studying. It was a very different kind of zen, a different kind of absorption: immersing myself in longform writing projects, in reading and learning from dozens of good books, and in getting to know more of Beijing flora and fauna, especially the fauna that dwell on hutong rooftops and in hidden coffee shops. This city is a never-ending thrill.

If you have read to the end of this, you might be interested to know that I’m coming to Europe and Central Asia soon! Let me know if I might catch you in:

Paris
Prague
Baku
Tbilisi
Batumi
Istanbul
Tirana
Tashkent

If I let you know what I enjoyed reading this year

If I let you know what I enjoyed reading this year, could you let me know your favorites as well?

This was the year that I got back into poetry, back into fiction with a vengeance. I read a lot of fiction I didn't like this year, I'm sparing you those titles. I'm good with the fact that I didn't like a lot of what I read: that came from trying out new genres, trying out unexpected recommendations...by keeping more of an open mind this year I also stumbled upon so many unexpected winners.

Hmmm...looking through my lists I realize I didn't successfully read any fiction in Mandarin this year, had several false starts. If you have any favorites please send them along! In 2024 I will read more Mandarin!

Fiction

The Quiet American, Graham Greene
The End of the Affair, Graham Greene
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin
Soumission, Michel Houellebecque (French)
Exciting Times, @naoisedolan
Fleishman is in Trouble, Taffy Brodesser-Anner
The Happy Couple, Naoise Dolan
The Peacock and the Sparrow, I.S. Berry
Un amor, Sara Mesa (Spanish)

Non-Fiction

Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino
Range, David Epstein
The Bilingual Brain, Albert Costa
The Peking Express, @thepekingexpress
France-Chine, les liaisons dangereuses, Antoine Izambard (French)
The Beijing Bureau, by 25 Australian foreign correspondents
Babel No More, Michael Erard
Hidden Potential, @adamgrant
Genghis Khan, Jack Weatherford
The Creative Act, Rick Rubin
Moonwalking with Einstein, Joshua Foer
China's New Youth, @ialecash
Peak, K. Anders Ericsson
Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson
The Power of Language, Viorica Marian
Flawless, @elisewho
Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda (F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Fitzgerald)

Poetry
Turn Up the Ocean, Tony Hoagland
50 Poems to Open Your World, Padraig O'Tuama
And lots of very powerful English, Spanish, and Mandarin poetry from Beijing writers at @spittooncollective ❤️

What a treat to wrap up the year in California. An

What a treat to wrap up the year in California. And what a year! A year making up for lost time, in a lot of ways.

Long-delayed trips, long-delayed hugs. Revenge everything: revenge travel, revenge joy. 報復性熬夜 (revenge all-nighters). Then of course, 特种兵式午休 (special-forces naps, or power naps). I took 55 special-forces naps in 2023, according to my fitness tracker.

Do you need to have an enemy in order to properly exact revenge? Let’s say that we do not. It is more fun this way. If there is no enemy, then the enemy can never be vanquished, and we’ll have no choice but to keep on in this way.

I’ve been asking around, is it possible to love

I’ve been asking around, is it possible to love a place the way you do a person? Possible, said one friend. But not preferable.

And what are places but collections of people? said another friend. I thought about that a lot this week, as I sat with my collections of people.

How convenient of you all to collect in New York. How wise and prescient of me to have collected you all along the way.

New country who dis! Lao is just close enough to

New country who dis!

Lao is just close enough to Thai to be a particular delight: I can speak my baby Thai and then sprinkle in a Lao word here and there, and all is well. ບໍ່ເປັນຫຍັງ , as they say in Lao, no worries.

English is also spoken annoyingly well in Luang Prabang (how is a linguist supposed to practice) and when those languages fail, there is always French.

After nearly 60 years as part of French Indochina, the language has been preserved here far better than in Cambodia or Vietnam. Nearly 35% of all students in Laos receive their education in French, with the language being a required course in many schools.

Lao coffee, languages, sunshine, kop jai lailai Laos ❤️

I feel like Vietnamese is the Portuguese of Asia -

I feel like Vietnamese is the Portuguese of Asia - all those beautiful nasal vowels!

And what luxury: a Romanized writing system with the tones written right in. Unfortunately in my experience, learning one (or even two) tonal systems doesn’t make it that much easier to learn a new one. In fact...does it maybe even hinder you to have that prior knowledge? I find myself trying to assimilate Vietnamese tones to Cantonese ones, and making a big mess of everything. Good thing everyone is so friendly here.

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