Letter to a Taiwanese Friend

Dear P,

Life is getting on very well, but my days of lazing about at room temperature eating potstickers are over. I am now concentrating on editing Yang in Disguise while the heat in our house seems to drop. I have a cold, although it's getting better. Weekends are hardly breaks, and--well, probably enough complaining. After all you are busy in school with homework and tests. What do you do on weekends? Adrianna has her violin, I do last-minute Chinese homework, we both do Chinese class, and sometimes go biking. (Saturday). Sundays are sleep-in days of boredom. The most exciting thing on Sunday is Sixty Minutes, the TV program. Speaking of TV we watched the Oscars just now. Did you watch the Oscars? The "pre-Oscar" time is extremely boring. They claim the Oscars begin at four, but that's just when everybody's getting seated and obnoxious reporters interview rushing nominees. They drone on and on about spectacular gowns. A typical conversation between the reporters would be--"And the new trend with jewels on so-and-so and bare shoulders, so-and-so's dress is Calvin Klein, so-and-so is taking a note from so-and-so and wearing diamonds, so-and-so's dress is Versace with some great beads, so-and-so is wearing..." And it goes on in that vein for some time. My mom wanted me to watch it anyways. Watching the actual awards was alright, though. Some of the commercials were quite good. Weather has taken a rather nasty turn. It is quite rainy, foggy, and windy. What are you doing in Taiwan? What is your everyday life like? Is school harder, easier, or about the same? What are you studying right now? How did you like the Taiwanese book? Also, forgot to ask you. What did you do for Christmas? Did you celebrate it? What did you do for New Year's? (Chinese or otherwise.) I attatched a photo of our aunts and uncles on Christmas Day. I hope you'll be able to see it. I took the picture with the mini Lumix digital camera I recieved from my mom as a present. I also recieved a Santa hat, a lot of candy canes, a fifty dollar Barnes and Noble gift card, and a porcelain kind of vase shaped-thing for holding pencils, pens, and erasers. It was a pretty great Christmas. We ate a buffet breakfast in Todai, Redmond Town Center. By the way, we made bedding for "The Ontario Club" (also known as the "DAM Club"). My room is covered in soft bedding. So is Adrianna's. I said hi to K for you. Oh, by the way--guess what? We didn't get any homework for the weekend!!!

Please reply soon!

Love,
Dory

Journal

Journal (Handwritten at an earlier date) January 27th, 2006--I mean 2007--obviously, right?

Well, time passes quickly, whether you're having fun or not. It seems only a few moments ago that I was crouching in Benaroya Hall's Safeco Founders tier, and tomorrow we'll be heading to San Diego on an almost red-eye flight. I was in Benaroya Hall listening to Bill Cosby. To be honest, I might have rather gone biking, since it was a nice day outside and all (it was all dark when we came out though)...ah well. Daddy isn't coming with us [to San Diego] which is a shame since I think he definitely would have liked SeaWorld and the [San Diego] zoo. I desperately hope we won't have to write a report about San Diego [in class]. We faithfully sent emails to Beastie throughout our entire Europe trip, and yet!-alas, we had to write an entire report. I usually despise Alaska Aairlines [airlines], since last time when I got on an L.A. flight the hallways were narrow, the plane was pretty stinky, and overall I don't like planes, or airports.

I'm glad everything is packed for San Diego, but I'm still nervous about a lot of things. By the way, I just thought of Bush's call to "support the soldiers". Are we exactly supporting them when we send more of them into harm's way? I thought Bill Cosby's "Is there any way to buy out the president?" joke was pretty funny. Somebody really ought to look into it. However, I bet Cheney would steal the money and either dispose of Bush or keep him as a puppet president. My mom took pictures of it all (the Green Room meeting with Bill Cosby, etc.) and then got into a big fight with my dad since she thought the pictures hadn't been taken, etc. I desperately hope we will have a good time in San Diego.

Sincerely,
Adora

[A note to the reader--all inserts in brackets were observations typed up by the author (me, otherwise known as ADORA SVITAK. Including this one.]