The Frozen Moments in a Typhoon

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An Introduction by H. Steven Moffic, MD

Searching for Kindness and Connection: From COVID to a Typhoon, From a Teenager to a Young Adult

I was looking out the window early in the morning from the 46th floor of the Delta Hotel in Toronto, clearing my mind with coffee as the fog lifted to shimmering sunshine, reacting to a piece my granddaughter had recently written from Taiwan. She was finishing a summer doing chemical engineering research before entering her sophomore year at Rice University, concerned about the environment. All communication there was in Mandarin, harkening back to the time over a decade ago when my wife and I returned from China and suggested she learn Mandarin because China was becoming a superpower. She did. Ironically, she will experience a unique typhoon as an example of our increasing global climate instability.

It also harkened back to when the COVID-19 pandemic had just started and Mira began writing a series of 9 articles for Psychiatric Times over the next year as a cub reporter, starting on March 30, 2020, with “A Teenager’s Reaction to Learning about Covid 19.” She was 15 and in high school then. She is 19 now and, as a friend suggested, making her debut as a kind of international reporter.

What struck me is that she has also been on an internal psychological journey, searching for kindness and connection as examples of what I have called the social psychoexemplaries. What a contrast they are from the social psychopathologies, such as the hate and divisiveness, in our presidential race in the United States that I wrote about on Monday! May the youth lead the way for us, our patients, the public, and politicians to find more of the kindness and connection.

-H. Steven Moffic, MD

I am always hunting for words of kindness. Fortunately, my limited Chinese allows me to perceive love in any sentence, blissfully unaffected by Mandarin’s complex tone system. Although it was frustrating, my lack of fluency helped me focus on the positive and absorb every word around me. During my 3 months in Taiwan, I discovered that language learning is a never-ending journey. I use the term language learning broadly because I view internal dialogue as a different aspect of language compared with what we learn in school. As we grow, our human experience evolves, and so does the language we use to describe it. Living in the land of Chinese idioms, big tales boiled down to a few characters, taught me how to condense a feeling into words. Shared narratives like 万物皆有灵(everything has a spirit) shape Mandarin and uncover the human experience. This specific idiom reflects the concept that everything will interconnect and influence each other.

This idiom demonstrated to me that inspiration can come from all around us and converge at a single point. At the intersection point, culture, belief, fear, and love intersect. I strive to live within this interconnectedness, where I cannot always pinpoint what influences me. Everything contributes equally to my overall experience. It is at this point that we live in the moment, free from longing for distant expectations.

I constantly chase adventure and opportunities to experience new places, meet new people, and try new things. I knew my summer plans needed to be in a completely unfamiliar environment like Taiwan that required quick problem-solving. When I challenge my brain, I feel most alive. But as much as I love exploring, the first 2 weeks of any trip challenge me the most. The slow moments of orientation, not having friends yet and not understanding my new environment flash nostalgic memories of the comforts of home. It always takes 2 weeks—2 weeks to make friends, find my footing, and begin to establish the feeling of a home away from home. This slow time evokes my fear of standing still, wasting time longing for expectations of places I have wanted to visit for so long.

Similar to my slow introduction to Taiwan, I spent my last week abroad sheltering as Typhoon Gaemi devastated the area with horrific flooding and wind damage. The isolation of staying inside rekindled the homesickness I felt at the beginning of my trip. With little time left, I had the strong urge to make the most of my travel experience. The weather was completely out of my control; I had to accept the realities of a typhoon ravaging the beautiful country I was so eager to explore.

Stuck on the third floor of my homestay, I struggled to pass the time. The typhoon amplified the sense that each day in Taiwan feels like a countdown until my next meal. After I ate 蛋餅, a Taiwanese pancake-egg omelet that my host family graciously brought home for me, I then needed 3 hours of activities before I could eat lunch. I started by listening to music, crafting, cleaning my room, and all my other quarantine activities. After a few hours, I sat in bed and contemplated why I could not rest peacefully like I had been able to in 2020. Why was time passing so slowly?

The main difference between quarantine and typhoon sheltering came from the lack of connection. During quarantine, my house buzzed with my whole family ready for spontaneous game nights, baking challenges, and long drives. During the typhoon, I was home alone while my host mother and brother worked. When they returned at night, exhaustion exacerbated their ability to switch from their mother language of Taiwanese to the Mandarin I was learning. My loneliness intensified in our misunderstandings.

On a normal day, I was only at my host family’s house to sleep. I left the house at 5AM for my university’s karate club that I joined, then went directly to the lab. I often returned home at 10-11PM after eating dinner and adventuring with local friends. The added barrier of my host mother’s damaged hearing and preference to speak Taiwanese kept us at a distance. Although I rarely saw them, we maintained our connection through small gift-giving. I left paper flowers around the house, and when I returned home from lab, there were small treats and plastic jewels dispersed across my room like a treasure hunt. My host mom and I met at the intersection point of culture, belief, fear, and love; a relationship founded on genuine empathy.

Instead of paper flowers, to overcome a similar challenge of connecting with my lab mates, I surprised them with Trader Joe’s snacks and helped them complete lab tasks through the night. Working at a lab was a completely immersive Chinese experience, and being in an environmental engineering lab required even more nuanced and technical language. I spent hours after lab translating terms like “activated carbon,” “mass spectroscopy,” “isotope” and other scientific words whose English meanings I did not even fully understand. As much as I tried to keep up, I was always a step behind. I struggled to connect with them because my fear overwhelmed me, preventing me from finding the intersection where my anxieties could blend with love and culture.

In addition to lab work, my lab partners and I ate most meals out together: breakfast after karate club, lunch after group meeting, and dinner when we ended our last experiments. Just like how my friends in the US and I ate lunch, we had very quick back-and-forth conversations that rapidly switched topics. I always struggled to follow their conversations and often felt isolated.

To maintain our friendship, my lab mates and I creatively searched for other ways to spend time together outside of the quick lunch talks and technical lab discussions, such as exploring Taiwan together. They were very excited to take me to their favorite restaurants, night markets, and local shops. We found harmony in the intersection between the fears of language barriers and our growing friendship.

Our adventures halted during the typhoon as the whole city shut down. My support systems for overcoming isolation crumbled against the strength of the typhoon. As I laid hopelessly bored, I realized my problem with sheltering inside is that I could not maintain connection in the same way. I struggled inside because I have been lucky enough to find my footing in Taiwan. The more at home I felt with Taiwanese culture and around the love of my new friends, the harder it became for me to say goodbye. The typhoon in the last week of my summer abroad prepared

me for how to maintain a connection from afar. How could I stay connected to the friends I have made when they are thousands of miles away? I cannot rely on FaceTime as I did with my friends in the US because I built my relationships here on shared adventures and our language barrier makes communication more challenging.

Immersed in a new environment, my fundamental identity transformed rapidly. To answer these questions on human connections and personal growth, I now draw inspiration from everything around me. I formed lifelong friendships with strangers and created a sense of home in unfamiliar places. Recognizing common humanity at the point where love, fear, belief, and culture intersect gave me confidence to push past any loneliness that intensified in language misunderstandings. These experiences are unforgettable because they occurred at the intersection of our shared humanity, where everything shaped my world like a kaleidoscope. Through this new lens, I see that every moment and interaction can contribute to an ongoing journey.

Mira Goldstein is an upcoming sophomore at Rice University.