I may be mellowing. Here we have a Twine piece with minimal interactivity and text delays and pages that give you just two sentences and a link to go forward. It’s a format that usually gets up my nose, but I found I didn’t mind it here. I’m always more forgiving when the writing is good.<\/p>\n
It’s a sweet, simple story. You’re ill, and you miss the congee you used to eat back home in Hong Kong under similar circumstances, but you just can’t get it in the UK, a land of Chinese restaurants that cater to the non-Chinese. So your best friend makes some and brings it to you, resolving (for the moment, at least) the meditations on social displacement and being a foreigner and losing connections to your birth culture that the predicament inspired.<\/p>\n
That’s it. A bunch of worried feelings followed by a kind gesture. There’s also a phone call with your mom in there, because how could there not be. But mainly, it manages to say a few things about the expat experience, in simple and understated terms that anyone can understand and sympathize with. Perhaps the reassuring ending makes it easier to swallow. There’s a bit of irony there, if you look at it right: the very discomfort of seeing seeing your culture repackaged to be more palatable to outsiders is itself here repackaged for outsiders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I may be mellowing. Here we have a Twine piece with minimal interactivity and text delays and pages that give you just two sentences and a link to go forward. It’s a format that usually gets up my nose, but I found I didn’t mind it here. I’m always more forgiving when the writing is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[84,53,682],"class_list":["post-6441","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-if","tag-ifcomp","tag-ifcomp-2020"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6441"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6441\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6454,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6441\/revisions\/6454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}