— If you want to support indie bookstores, you can also buy books from Bookshop.org, an online bookstore with a mission to financially support independent bookstores and give back to the book community.
—- An excerpt from the book ran in The Cut / New York Magazine – read it here.
The UK book version is available in paperback and e-book: order at Amazon, Waterstones, Hive, or the audio book at Audible UK (the cover with the speech bubble).
My second book, SORRY I’M LATE, I DIDN’T WANT TO COME is out in May 2019 in the US, the UK and the Netherlands (and soon in Russia, Germany, Korea and China). It’s about the year I spent: talking to strangers, performing stand-up comedy, travelling solo, trying out improv, going on friend dates and doing a bunch of extrovert-y things. It’s about being an introvert and trying to extrovert for a full year.
I interview brilliant people throughout the book who guide me through these nightmares.
Reviews for Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come
‘Funny, emotional and deeply inspiring, this is perfect for anyone wanting to break out of their comfort zone’ Heat
‘I loved it! It’s such a wonderful title, and the book lives up to it’ Nigella Lawson
‘Beautifully written and so funny! I related to it A LOT’ – EmmaJaneUnsworth
‘Relatable, moving and fantastically funny’ – Rhik Samadder
‘In a world of self-care and nights in, this book will inspire and remind you to do some things that scare you every so often.’ Emma Gannon
‘Hilarious, unexpected and ultimately life-affirming.’ Will Storr
‘Tender, courageous and extremely funny, this book will make us all braver.’ Daisy Buchanan
‘A chronicle of Pan’s hilarious and painful year of being an extrovert.’ Stylist
‘Excellent, warm, hilarious.’ Nikesh Shukla
‘You WILL laugh and laugh while reading this.’ Sun
“Very funny, very smart” (Liberty Hardy on the Book Riot’s For Real podcast)
Embrace the unknown, like I did this year. It led to a lot of unexpected places…insane things happened and I’m excited for you to read about them…
And if you want to read my first book, a memoir about living in Paris, Beijing, New York and Melbourne, GRADUATES IN WONDERLAND (Penguin 2014) is out now.
Shintrovert: a socially awkward introvert, a shy introvert, a SHINtrovert – (OR a pervert who is very into lower legs). This is the official definition, coined in my book.
I walk with purpose through the halls and see a tall man in his 60s, alone. I jump out of the corner at him like a nightmare. “Hi, I’m Jess,” I say. “Where do you live?”
“There are things an American in the U.K. will probably never get used to, like how there is seemingly only one flavor of Pop-Tart here, and that flavor is S’mores. Or how British people don’t know what strep throat is. Or how there are seven ways to say “bacon sandwich” and 141 ways to describe being “drunk” and not one sincere way of saying you are “super-excited.” People are also more skittish when you casually try to pet their dogs. (Please just let me pet your dogs, people of Britain!)”
Print piece about why it’s okay to be scared in light of recent events in London and the UK. My editor needed a quick turnaround for this piece, so I powered through the night and until 5am to get it done before press day – and am so grateful for fast-responding sources.
Not my funnest piece but possibly my most important so far. Read it in Stylist this week.
Jessica and Jessica – I’m the one on the right with bangs/ fringe. Jessica J Lee is the one with her hair in a half bun
Then, this past week, I finally managed to swim in a loch. I was only able to do this by frantically texting my doppelgänger. Thank god she was awake – Jessica J Lee coached me via Whatsapp messages from Taipei. She is a very kind doppelgänger.
Her advice: go slowly, exhale out as you submerge, it takes 30 seconds for it to stop being painful and swim for 45 strokes.
I managed to get in the water and not panic by saying to myself over and over, “you can do this” and”you can’t feel your legs but that’s totally fine” and “there are no sharks in Scotland” while blocking out the sentence “BUT THERE IS AT LEAST ONE MONSTER WHO LIVES IN A LOCH.”
But I survived! Swimming in cold water feels like daggers, but in a good way. You should try it! But also, don’t do it alone.
Not pictured: my struggle to pull my body out of the lake and onto the pier. Also not pictured: the person who helped drag me out of the water
Want to read the memoir that I co-wrote with my friend Rachel about living in Beijing and Paris? It’s called Graduates in Wonderland. We sporadically blog about random things here.
About ten years ago, I got a letter in the mail when I was living in Australia (the first time). I opened it and all it said was, “I’m so sorry I missed you. – David.”
That was it. No other evidence of who it was, except that the return address on the envelope was from Paris.
So a man, named David, was in Paris pining for me and he had tracked me down in Australia to tell me. But he was locked in a tower with no wi-fi or electricity, so he could only scratch out this letter to me, just to make sure that I knew.
Later I told this story to Rachel and she informed me that it was she who had sent the letter and that the letter was from David Sedaris, whom she had met at one of his book readings. I actually think I like the real version better than the imagined. I’m so sorry I missed you, too, David.
I finally met David Sedaris the other night in London…
I loved it when footballers cried when overcome with emotion. Maybe it was because of the persistent myth of the Englishman’s ‘stiff upper lip’; his refusal to convey his emotions in public. Seeing a player moved to tears, to me, showed that he cared more than the rest. It wasn’t like watching an actor pretend to tear up. This shit was real.
My latest piece for the Guardian Weekend magazine is about my love of English football and my take on UK culture.
I loved any sort of drama on and off the pitch. Family tensions, love problems, scandals. Brother pitched against brother on opposing sides. Managers shoving each other on the touchline. Basically, anything that your typical football fan views as a distraction from the real bread and butter, was my bread and butter. And so before too long, I became a resource of useless, soap-opera-esque facts about players.
“Every time I see a local ripping off a tourist for some ‘authentic’ experience, I think, ‘Who the hell is going to fall for that?’” Dylan, my ex-roommate, remarked a few months ago over breakfast. “And then I think, ‘Oh wait. There’s you.’”
“Why?” I asked.
“You paid money to shear a sheep in New Zealand,” he replied.
“So what? That was a great experience,” I said. (It was disgusting.)
“You’re the kind of person who would pay money to see the ‘fairies’ on Ireland’s marshes,” he insisted.
“No, I’m not,” I said. “Wait, are they real fairies? Tell me more.”
“Exactly,” Dylan said.
***
I couldn’t resist the pull of elf school.
Elf school in Iceland costs $48. This would be a steal if you walked out of the classroom transformed into a full-fledged elf; however, nearly $50 to listen to a non-elf tell you about Iceland’s so-called “hidden people” does not seem like a great tradeoff.
Infamously, 54 percent of Icelanders are said to believe in elves. (Icelanders protest that this ‘fact’ originates from a very carefully phrased question which asked, “Can you be 100 percent sure that elves do not exist?” Logically, 54 percent of them concluded that just because they have never seen an elf, that doesn’t mean that elves do not exist).
Before I attended elf school, I spent two weeks driving around Iceland looking for elves with my husband Sam, reveling in the 24-hour daylight that occurs during the height of summer. This meant approximately 12 extra hours during which I could be on the lookout for elves. Finding none, however, I turned to the locals for some insider knowledge.
Somewhere off The Ring Road, we stayed at an Airbnb house that belonged to a blond, burly Icelander named Börkur. In his early 20s, Börkur liked to drink and chew tobacco. His English, like most Icelanders’, was excellent. After he let us into his apartment, he crossed his arms and leaned back against a wall, eyeing me up warily. When I asked about the tattoo of a ram on his arm, he explained that he’s an Aries.
“Me too,” I said.
“Really?” he asked, his icy demeanor breaking. “That’s cool. That’s really cool.” He looked at me with approval, until I blurted out:
“Do you believe in elves?”
The look on his face showed that I’d lost all the points I had gained by being born in March. “No,” he said, sighing.
“Not at all?”
“No, but the woman next door thinks they live in a rock on the hill.”
Over the course of our 14-day road trip, I found that elves and “hidden people” (or huldufólk) are always spoken of together and the terms seem to be interchangeable, representing supernatural Icelandic beings (apparently they exist elsewhere, too, but the rest of the world is too jaded to see them). According to lore, they’re people just like us—we just can’t see them. To them, we are the hidden people.
That’s a little too convenient, even for me. I have two older brothers. I know how these things work.
“I shall eat Ice and drink French wine, and be above Vulgar Economy.”– Jane Austen, in a letter to her sister, Cassandra, 1808
Let’s live today as though it were 1808 and we are Jane Austen vacationing at our rich brother’s house in Kent. Our days are long and filled with entertaining guests and writing letters to our sisters and eating Georgian ices, as well as ice cream, in such varied flavors as burnt filbert ice cream, royal ice cream and the most unusual of all, parmesan ice cream.
When you’re little, you think that any combination of your favorite foods would be great (think Friends: “Custard, good. Jam, good. Meat, good!”) Just a little something to keep in mind as we journey through Jane Austen’s culinary landscape.
So Parmesan ice cream was brought over to the UK from the Italians. Are you intrigued? I was. Cheese, good. Ice cream, good!
According to 16th century confectioner Frederick Nutt, this is how you make parmesan ice cream:
Take six eggs, half a pint of syrup and a pint of cream, put them into stewpan and boil them until it begins to thicken; then rasp three ounces of parmesan cheese, mix and pass them through a sieve, and freeze it.
As the ingredients begin to boil in your stewpan (or whatever your twenty-first century equivalent is), the wet mixture will begin to stick to the sides, like a very wet omelet. You’ll find that, by the sieving point, this mixture will actually resist sieving (try to imagine straining on omelet), but repeated banging will produce a full ramekin of the warm creamy egg-y sweet cheese liquid.
Then, freeze it. Let’s hope that you had the good foresight to save chunks of ice from a nearby river or pond during the winter and store them underground in a forest of tall trees, like they did in Austen’s day, so that you will be able to enjoy this cold dessert.
I recommend halving this recipe, for I could not even give this “delicacy” away. I offered it to friend after friend after friend and pretty soon, I had no friends at all.
Therefore, I had to sample it myself. I approached the cold mess with trepidation. Let me put this in perspective for you: it was the first time I’ve truly been afraid of what I was eating. And I lived in Beijing for three years with a peanut allergy, so please consider the significance of the statement.
VERDICT: It looked like crème brûlée, but I knew better. In short, I spat it out. At length, the cheese ice cream, while creamy and frozen, was too disgusting for me, mostly because it tasted and smelled like frozen Parmesan cheese. Mostly because it was like frozen Parmesan cheese with syrup. I do not know what the hell Regency Era people were thinking. Reader, do not make this recipe. Cheese, good. Ice cream, good. Cheese ice cream? BAD.
We’ll just say that I took one for the team here, okay?
Luckily, I found another Regency Era ice cream that was delightful.
The best thing about this 1807 recipe is that you probably have all of the ingredients in your house right now. This means that, even if you are not Jane Austen vacationing on a large English estate, but instead, say, a hungry lady whose cupboards are bare save for stale bread, a couple of eggs, and some sugar, you can actually have ice cream!
Granted, the flavor of the ice cream will be “brown bread” but beggars can’t be choosers (even Jane knew that± — that proverb was written in 1562). Besides, we like bread, right?
As the recipe is from the 19th century, you do not need an ice cream maker (and if you do have one, what are you doing reading this? You have everything a woman could ever want).
For the toasted bread crumbs
100g demerara sugar
150g wholemeal breadcrumbs (don’t bother to make your own bread — this is the 1800s, after all — we can buy bread).
For the meringue “ice cream”
2 egg whites (like in the old days, hold them up to candle light to check if the yolks are solid or not)
pinch of salt
a few drops lemon juice
90g caster sugar
For the cream Double cream (Jane’s family had a few cows in Steventon, in Hampshire, if you happen to be close. Though they are probably dead now.)
Vanilla extract
1. Preheat the oven to 390 F. Mix the bread crumbs and sugar together and spread onto a lined baking sheet for 10 minutes. Remove, stir and bake for another five minutes. Stir again and set aside to cool.
2. Whisk egg whites, salt and lemon juice in a bowl until frothy. Then, beat until they form stiff peaks. Gradually add 2 tablespoons of the caster sugar and whip until stiff, glossy peaks. Set aside.
3. Heat the remaining 60g of sugar and add 60 milliliters of water to a pan, until the sugar is dissolved and the syrup bubbles up to form a sticky mass (to test the consistency, drop a ball into cold water — if it remains solid, it’s ready).
4. Very slowly, pour the hot syrup into the egg white mixture with beaters running, until the mixture is cool to the touch (10–15 minutes).
5. Add vanilla extract to the double cream and whip to soft peaks.
6. Stir the caramelized breadcrumbs into the whipped cream. Then, fold in the
meringue mixture.
7. Divide into ramekins and freeze. Serve with caramelized breadcrumbs on the side.
VERDICT: Crispy sweet frozen soufflé all made with the ingredients found in your household. The crunchy chunks and creamy meringue complement each other well. Very tasty. Super impressive. No gags. For extra fanciness, keep them cool in this French porcelain ice cream pail.
Like Jane, we too, “shall eat (brown bread) Ice (cream), drink French wine (coolers) and be above Vulgar Economy” (whatever that means — at the very least, we will not squabble about who has more Twitter followers).
And, no matter how religious you are or aren’t, let’s all say a word of grace before our next meal that Parmesan ice cream is not a thing anymore.
Jess Pan 