The Interminable Bento
Noon came, and with it the sound of plastic rustling outside my door. I waited for the footsteps to grow faint as they padded down the hallway, followed by the ding of the elevator, then silence. I stuck my head out just beyond the threshold of the doorframe—and no further. We’d all heard the story, by then, of the woman who was fined $3,500 for walking down the hall in her quarantine hotel to retrieve boiling water for instant noodles. At my feet lay the telltale plastic bag, striped pink and white like a candy cane. And inside it, the squat, horizontal box that would be my resilient companion for the next fourteen days. I arrived in Taiwan on a Fulbright research grant in February 2021, after weathering the pandemic, first from Berkeley and then from Seattle, for the better part of a year. Taiwan had been sheltered from much of the pandemic up to that point due to its early intervention and austere quarantine measures for incoming travelers: two weeks confined to a hotel room. In my case, the room was the size of a galley kitchen. My window at the Green World Hotel in Taipei overlooked the backside
