Cut Fruit & Unspoken Care
On peeled apples, Silicon Valley's obsession with verbalizing everything, and the bandwidth of noticing before someone has to ask.
If you grew up in a Taiwanese or East Asian household, you already know the exact acoustic signature of a plate of cut fruit being set down on the corner of your desk.
There is no knock, usually, or if there is, the door is already opening while the knuckle is still on the wood. Growing up, my mom would always peel apples and those huge, crunchy, almost impossibly juicy Korean pears and mix the wedges together on the same plate. It was her all-purpose medium. Sometimes the plate arrived twenty minutes after an argument, when nobody was going to say I’m sorry I was harsh earlier out loud. Sometimes it arrived while I was hunched over homework. And sometimes, honestly, the plate was partly a Trojan horse—an excuse to open the door, catch me mid-match, and yell at me about why I was playing video games instead of studying, while simultaneously setting a freshly peeled, cored, geometrically perfect plate of apples and Korean pears right next to my mousepad.
Even when she was scolding me with her sentences, her hands were still feeding me. And if you tried to make a big verbal deal out of the fruit after a fight—if you tried to initiate an earnest, eye-contact-heavy debrief about what the plate of pears meant—you would actually be breaking the protocol. The whole point is that the fruit says the thing so neither of you has to suffer the indignity of making a speech about it.
I live and work in Mountain View now, as a software engineer, which means I spend forty-plus hours a week inside an ecosystem that treats explicit verbal articulation as the highest—and sometimes the only—form of human intelligence. In tech, if a thing isn’t written down in a design doc, a ticket, or a neatly bulleted post-mortem, it effectively doesn’t exist. And over the last decade or so, that same engineering mindset has sort of colonized our emotional lives too. We have scripts for setting boundaries, frameworks for conflict resolution, three-prompt optimization strategies for dating apps, and a whole vocabulary of clinical therapy-speak designed to package every messy, subterranean human impulse into clean, unambiguous sentences.1.There is, obviously, a pretty glaring recursive irony in sitting at a mechanical keyboard and writing an 850-word essay in English sentences to argue that English sentences are overrated as a medium for human connection. I don’t really have a clean defense for this except to say that sometimes you need a map to point at the territory where the map stops working.
Don’t get me wrong: words are great. Clear communication saves projects and marriages and keeps bridges from falling down.
The Tax of Explanation
The weird thing is how exhausting it gets when we pretend that language is the only legitimate channel we have—or that an emotion doesn’t count unless it has been dragged out into the fluorescent light and turned into a paragraph. Because there is a very specific kind of loneliness that happens when you have to verbally specify every single thing you need from the people around you. If you are exhausted after a brutal week and you have to hand someone a Jira ticket explaining, step by step, how to comfort you, the comfort is already half-dead by the time it arrives. What you actually wanted wasn’t just the tea or the dinner or the quiet room; what you wanted was the proof that someone was paying enough attention to your existence that you didn’t have to ask.
A while ago, I was filling out one of those four-circle Ikigai diagrams—the Japanese framework where you map out what you love, what the world needs, what you can get paid for, and what you’re actually good at—and under What I’m Good At, right between lifting advice and being in my body during sports, I wrote down: “knowing what needs to be done without it being said.”
Looking at it on the page, it sounded almost suspiciously like a trauma response—or at least the classic hyper-vigilance where you walk into a room and instantly read the barometric pressure of everyone’s mood.2.Or the powerlifting spotter’s reflex, which is basically the same neurological circuit in gym shorts: watching the bar speed slow down by two centimeters per second at the sticking point and knowing within a tenth of a second whether your friend is about to grind through the rep on their own (in which case touching the bar is a mortal sin) or whether their central nervous system just hit a wall (in which case your hands need to be under the steel before they even have to say take it). And maybe it starts there for a lot of us. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that when you strip the anxiety out of it, that kind of quiet, physical anticipation is actually one of the purest mediums we have for love.
It’s the reason I love setting up hotpot or Korean BBQ for people so much.
When friends come over to my place after a long week, half the time we’re all a little bit fried from staring at screens and talking in meetings and trying to be articulate, high-functioning adults. If I ask someone “How are you really doing?” the moment they walk through the door, they’re going to give me the standard two-sentence status update because their brain is still wearing its work armor.
So instead, the table is already laid out before anyone has to think: the portable burner centered, the pot of broth rolling or the grill pan heating up, the plates of thinly sliced meat, mushrooms, tofu, and greens arranged within arm’s reach, the little bowls of sesame oil, chopped garlic, scallions, and shacha sauce ready to go. While everyone is talking, you’re just quietly running the table—adjusting the flame before the broth boils over, dropping another round of meat or vegetables into the pot, swapping out a charred grill plate, refilling someone’s water glass mid-story without interrupting their sentence.
Something physical happens to a person’s shoulders about ten minutes into a hotpot or KBBQ table that they didn’t have to set up or ask for, with the steam rising into their face. The jaw unclenches. The voice drops half an octave. Nobody has said anything profound yet—maybe we’re just talking about a lift that felt heavy on Tuesday or a weird bug at work—but the real message has already been transmitted at a bandwidth that English (and honestly Mandarin, too) is just too narrow to carry.
We spend so much of our lives trying to find the exact right words to bridge the gap between our own skull and somebody else’s. And we should keep trying, obviously—which is why I’m building this studio and writing these notes. But almost everything I care about most right now—cooking a meal for people I love, pulling a heavy barbell off the floor when my brain is too loud, drawing a bow across a violin string, or pointing a microphone at a quiet canyon just to hear what the wind is doing—lives right on the other side of that border.
Words take us to the edge of the room. Mediums are how we actually cross it.