Trip to the Tea House

This past Sunday was one of the best days ever.

It's taken me awhile to get around to writing about it. I don't know why it is that I put off important things to clean the kitchen floor or look at the real estate section of the New York Times (as long as I'm on the subject, check this out -- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/greathomesanddestinations/28gh-househunting.html?_r=1) when all the while I have love for special someones on my mind, people I ought to let know. To those of you I love, I love you so much. And yes, I realize this is a cop-out. But boy is my floor clean... (And if you read my last post, you'll remember my efforts aren't in vain).

It began with an orange omelet (the yokes of eggs are so orange here!), toast, hash-browns, orange juice, and coffee at an American-style Diner called "The Diner." I also ate some of Sam's pancakes... classic dilemma, right? What to choose what to choose... salty or sweet? Aha! Wait for your friend to order first and count on mooching. Best of both worlds. It ended with a couple hours spent on the computer rearranging everything I've written so far in my story of Helen and Moses. A filling day right? Both physically and mentally. But the middle part was the most wonderful.

After breakfast Max, Kiah, Sam and I took a scooter trip to the eastern edge of the city to a small mountain dotted with tea houses. Even more delicious than the omelet was the air. What a tease to escape the smoggy valley! Almost immediately I tasted the difference. My head cleared. I shivered! The greenery on the mountain was thick and tangly and sort of bluish. It smelled like home. Like dirt I guess, and I learned I can't be away from the stuff for so long. We passed ram-shackle cottages, tawny wild dogs with red eyes, modest gardens sweetly framed with wire fences, thick, compact, temples like hot red and golden caves tucked into walls of overgrowth. Everything was on the edge with stairs connecting houses to sheds to gardens to temples like a board game. And all the while a view of the city, or at least 101, remained in the distance and started glowing at dusk.

We kept our eyes out for a teahouse. That was the original destination, and we'd come prepared with books, notebooks, Chinese homework (that would be Kiah). On our first attempt we went up the wrong side of the mountain (or the wrong mountain? I'm not sure. I was a passenger content hugging Max and thinking about Helen and Moses). On our way down we stopped by a temple that caught our eyes. We thought it might be a tea house but when we took our helmets off in the parking lot we heard chanting. We walked cautiously up a pathway to a kind of courtyard and rooftop. In a covered portion of the courtyard monks in dark yellow robes chanted and men and women faced statues of gods with burning incense in their hands. The smell was so thick and spicy I forgot how cold I was. In the courtyard little boys kicked a ball around and a few young women milled about. Everyone was welcoming; somber, but friendly. Kiah helped the three of us to pray properly. We grabbed a fistful of incense and prayed to the god in the open part of the courtyard before making our way inside and bowing and praying at each statue. Afterwards we hung over the banister. We pointed out the barren pond below, surrounded by sticks and small flowers. Inside the dark water we caught flashes of orange goldfish. Snake-like dragons made of metal framed our view down the mountain. Above that layers upon layers of soft blue distant mountains. A rope cut through the sky and from it hung faded Chinese lanterns. They were off-kilter, collapsing into themselves, their tassles blowing around tiredly. Kiah wanted to stay for awhile. When I realized I felt eager to leave I felt bad. In a way it was just too much I guess. I didn't know what to do with such an unbelievable reality.

We waved goodbye to the little boys playing. We acknowledged the mysterious little stone staircases leading up into the mountain and the perfectly careless arrangements of rocks and pots of pouring flowers on their steps. On our second attempt up the mountain we found a teahouse. And so we watched the sun fade sitting together against a wall of windows. Overlooking Taipei we brewed and drank fresh green tea right from the property, following a series of steps in the Taiwanese tradition. For the most part we sat in silence with our heads in books but every once in a while we talked. The four of us are so good together. I felt so at ease. When we got hungry we ordered some fried rice to share and when it was time to go we went.

I feel funny ending with fried rice. I also feel funny about using so many adjectives, but I forgot my camera. And this good day was about looking, not so much about thinking and doing. It was also about how easy love can be.

The Hog and Other Developments

Well, Max and I have been in Taipei over two months now.

Some of the initial discomforts morph into expectations as we become more familiar with the way things work here. And things work pretty well here.

Our list of delicious and cheap restaurants expands every week. I’ve taken to bowing my head slightly in thanks… in greeting… pretty much all the time... I’m learning to read red lights as suggestions rather than commands (Max caught on right away). I’m careful not to chew gum obviously on the subway or cough, even when it’s just to relief a tickle. My ability to dance to anything but a heartbeat (and who’s dancing to techno anyway?) declines every weekend that passes without some hip-hop, reggaeton, or Julie Wagner. I’m becoming a better teacher. I’m beginning to catch familiar words in the sound of Chinese though very little stays between my ears. I now know the cultural significance of the kinky gray hairs spurting out of old men’s facial moles (cutting such a hair is to cut your wealth), and I’ve witnessed the usefulness of extra long pinky nails (be it removing a sticker or separating a rope of snake muscle from blood vessel). I can speak to the particular regulations of gender in Taiwan and I’m beginning to recognize class markers. I’ve tasted stinky tofu (yes, it was unknowingly…) and found congealed pig blood at the bottom of my soup. I take for granted the cleanliness and efficiency of public transportation and restrooms; these days I have no preference – porcelain hole or toilet – either way I’m squatting. I’ve chewed beetle nut, spit its red juice on the sidewalk and felt my legs turn a little noodley. I’ve started considering McDonalds an expensive place to eat and the people who eat there fairly well off. I know you shouldn’t eat bread, cool liquids, and cold fruits (such as oranges) when you have a cold and that the woman punching herself on the subway is relieving bad qi.

I’m still blown away by the view of sloping mountains relieving the skyline of cold and calculated right angles, the amount of green sprinkled around the city, the curly architecture of temples tucked discreetly in alleyways or situated bold and lonely upon guarded grass lawns and the earthy smell of incense trickling out of them, the loose and clean fashions and the fake eyelashes on so many of the beautiful women I pass, the taste of fresh passion fruit tea, a crack of clear blue in the gray shell encasing the city after days of rain, and the fact that I’m living here for a time.

Some specific experiences with bugs, motorized vehicles, thirteen year-olds, and flying fish made this past week memorable for me.

Last week I decided to forego black and white movie night to write. Max went over to Kiah’s leaving me alone in the apartment with the promise I’d made to write for a good three hours. Not even a whole hour into it I saw something big and dark scuttle into the bathroom out of the corner of my eye. I thought it was a mouse (yeah, it was that big) but then I found the cockroach in the bathroom hugging the plunger. Unsure of my next move I googled the hell out of it, completely freaked myself out (“they can lay eggs even after they’re dead,” “if you have one you have many more,” etc.), called Max, and set about making a trap out of a Vaseline coated jar full of beer. Max arrived twenty minutes later with chemicals and didn’t even take off his bike helmet before spraying the thing to death and flushing it away. I threw the beer away and cleaned the bowls Max used to carry the roach corpse to the toilet about five times in case it had laid invisible eggs in them. Now, all of this sounds pretty pathetic, I’m sure, but it felt like roaches and the idea of roaches had invaded the safe space we made. It actually made me angry and defensive. We’ve had two more cockroach citings since then, though none were as big as that first one, and for days I had nightmares about them dropping out of the air-conditioner over my head onto my face or marching like an army out of the garbage can when I lifted the lid. Cockroaches are all over this city – dried up and flat on the sidewalk, very much alive and large on the sidewalk - and I’ve heard a handful of horror stories from other freaked foreigners; it is good to know I’m not alone. Reminding myself over and over again that they are just bugs I’m a big girl with a very powerful and changeable mind, I’m back to dreaming roach-free dreams.

The Hog is Max’s lame nickname for our new moped. He’s actually a pretty classy fellow; plain and simple, a good size for two. We each spent about 220 USD. A full tank of gas costs, in total, about 4 USD… we might even save money driving to school sometimes instead of taking the MRT. We bought it, though, for the chance to see the city and the island. Already I’ve seen parts of Taipei I might have missed otherwise. Riding on the scooter, hugging Max for a solid 10 or 20 or 30 minutes, I feel happy and alive and glad we bit the bullet.

I’ve picked up a class on Saturday mornings, which I’m not thrilled about. I’m glad for a couple extra hours, though, and Max works Saturdays so I’m usually up north writing anyway. Standing in front of a classroom of smelly and bored teenagers on a Saturday morning is terrifying no matter where you are in the world. I’ve fitted my sense of humor to a four-year-old audience (which still relies too heavily on pee-pee and poo-poo to be appropriate for any age) so very little of my burgeoning teaching personality bridges the gap between the weekday babes and the weekend teens even though their speaking levels are about even. The first Saturday was pretty horrible. The second Saturday was exponentially better, but my relationship with Sarah soured. She is the moodiest, flirtiest girl in class. On the bright side I made friends with someone else in class, a chubbier girl who forgets to close her mouth, and I made a group of boys laugh trying to imitate the dance moves from a song by a Korean pop band the “kids go crazy for.” I’m confident that one by one I’ll win them.

These little snafoos, challenges, and additions like a scooter and the company of a pair of Scotsmen for a week,



disrupted the calmness and quietness of the weeks that passed by earlier. I’ve felt a little frazzled and clausterphobic beneath the eggshell sky lately. Stuck in my story, I’ve been writing less than I would like to. All I need is to take a deep breath, try not to indulge in self-pity or general asshole-ness, and tweak some things in this little life of mine.

Milan Kundera Takes Me to the Roof (an old thing I never posted)

I just finished reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being. For Milan Kundera, the “lightness” of “being” (experiencing humanness) is the great tragedy we must all contend with. At first I read that “lightness” as a kind of smallness, the trite but important sense of smallness that overcomes a person standing alone beside an ocean, but now I understand that reading of the word is wrong. A small thing can be a significant thing but the “lightness” he speaks of is the complete insignificance of the totality of our human lives.

I had a bad day at work yesterday and you won’t be surprised to hear that my mood sunk lower while reading this book on the train ride home. Much has been said of the experience of riding on a subway. Sometimes it gives me that ocean feeling of smallness, which humbles and excites me. Yesterday it made me feel lonely. So there I was feeling lonely in a train car of silent strangers, with my mom on the other side of the world, with a sadness exasperated by the “unbearabl[y]” sad idea that my sadness, though it marks my “being,” is of no significance. Sadness marks our “being” - so at least Kundera throws us that bone (not that I take for granted what he’s saying… I just have a habit of seeking my own way out of these heady tangles). But you know what? I’m somewhat comforted by that affirmation, afterall.

I still felt sad on that train ride though, and I haven’t felt so sad in Taiwan yet. I’ve experienced some dips in my mood, but none that gave me that fearful tearful feeling. At 77 degrees Farenheit, yesterday was the coldest it’s been here since my arrival. I made a plan to go home, turn down the air-conditioning and make vegetable noodle soup like my grandma and mom make. Once out of the subway I decided to walk to a grocery store I remembered seeing once on HuPing with a slogan like, “get your fresh fruits and vegetables here!” I walked there, past the hoards of people getting out of work, past two separate trash collection cites, to find a grocery store full of everything but fruits and vegetables.

In this instance my sadness made no room for frustration, a feeling I often host as a new foreigner. I just turned around back in the direction of our apartment and stopped by the grocery store close to home, which lacks in the produce area, and picked up some carrots, celery, onion, and chicken broth. Back home, I got to cooking straight away. Soon the apartment smelled like home and Max and I had hot bowls of home to eat. I started to feel grateful for the feeling of sadness and the particular sense of self affirmation it sometimes brings with it, not to mention soup.

This evening, sadness caused me to write. It also brought me up to the roof of our apartment to watch the sunset. It embarrasses me to say that I’ve only been up there a couple of times. Most days I don’t get home until after dark and it’s so nice to be in a safe and private place I find nothing enticing about a big dark sky or lights flickering in windows to remind me, for the umpteenth time that day, that I am a stranger among millions of strangers. Sitting on the couch, finishing up the book, I noticed the sun setting pinkly over the river and the buildings that break up the slice of horizon we look at every day. I carelessly finished the book (I was more than ready to finish with it) but setting it down I felt unsure of what to do with myself. Like usual, I felt sort of scared to go up to the roof and risk feeling smallness or vertigo, but then I thought about how I already had a fearful tearful feeling anyway and I made myself go.

It was a purely pink sunset, without a trace of yellow or orange or blue. Swells of clouds or smog took on strange rectangular shapes like the buildings all around them. On the roof of the building next door a man hung laundry. The rooftops of most buildings are inexplicably dilapidated, with random boards poking out and plants pouring off the edges. They look like shacks from tropical islands dropped off on modern buildings. To be honest, while up on the roof I thought of little other than these roof shacks.

My point in writing about this experience is not to share the content of my thought, for there is not much to it. The point is that I went up there at all. Feeling stable for most of this past month, I haven’t gone up to the roof for fear of disrupting that stability. When you’re already off balance, when you’re sad and you already feel a flash more alive, sometimes you live a little more.

Kundera says that our lives are flimsy because the events are random and linear. In response to that I like to think about how feelings appear and disappear in more or less the same colors over and over again throughout our lives. They differently affirm our senses of self, even if the events that inspire those feelings baffle us. It was not the soup itself that I craved, but rather the recurring feelings I associate with it, feelings I hoped to summon up within me.

In conclusion I’ll just say that all of it – the sadness and the all stuff it brings out of me – feels significant to me. Soups, ideas, sunsets, over and over again.

Out of Our Ways

"The fair, strange face of the child looked over the shoulder of the mother, all asleep but the eyes, and these, wide and dark, kept up the resistance and the fight with something unseen." -- D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow

It is interesting to think of the things you never grow used to. Perhaps a more anthropological statement would be – it is interesting to think of the things you have the most difficulty growing used to. I thought of this while in the Taipei 101 mall the other day, standing in the middle of a hall of shining marble with twelve-foot photoshopped models slung in the windows of Gucci and a corner chunk of the second tallest building in the world a stone's throw away. Malls (especially such a fancy mall) never fail to make me feel irredeemably dirty. Young women my age grew up to adopt a "screw you!" kind of attitude... a "I'm beautiful because I'm real" attitude. I like to think these things sometimes, just as I like to feel elegant sometimes, but the problem I see with thinking this way is that it uses the same language as the one the mall uses - the language of beauty. And beyond that it doesn't really frame "beauty" in anything but reactionary terms. As far as I can tell those terms are simply too boring to care much about, except for the ways they infiltrate more interesting, complicated parts of us. More comforting to me, while I stood face to face with such cleanliness, was the thought that I would never grow used to malls. I looked around at the people, dressed differently, looking more or less "beautiful" or clean, and I figured that most of them probably felt the same way. And that made me feel even better.

I think it’s probably most difficult to recognize what you are completely used to. Without consciously unraveling our habits of mind, we tend to recognize them only if and when the unfamiliar disrupts or replaces them.

For instance, after twenty or so years of throwing used toilet paper into the toilet I physically memorized the gesture. I’m sure a neurologist could tell a cute anthropomorphic tale of how different chemicals and parts of my brain talk to one another in the tiny portion of a second before I throw the toilet paper in the toilet, but for all intents and purposes I throw the paper in there without thinking about it. I’m used to it. So used to it, in fact, upon arrival to Taiwan I threw used toilet paper into the toilet at least a dozen times even after learning that people throw it away in the garbage here. Over and over again I let my body think without me. Each time I messed up I flushed guiltily, made certain no incriminating evidence of the tissue (as it’s called here) resurfaced, and promised myself not to do it again. Well, I’m happy to say that after six weeks of living in Taipei I consistently get it right now. I am more than less used to this cultural phenomenon. So used to it, in fact, if I returned to the States tomorrow I might act all Taiwanese up in the bathroom.

I was just getting used to the sticky heat when the remnants of typhoons sweeping through much of South East Asia dumped some raucous weather on Taipei. For days it rained and Max and Sam and I holed up with Max's Gibson and Milan Kundera (who turned out to be a depressing companion…). Excited for a dreary change, we gratefully listened to the drumming of rain on the windows and stopped watering the orange tree. The rain finally stopped yesterday evening. Today the air felt cool and fresh. I walked all around the neighborhood seeking streets and lanes I’ve never ventured down before. I made a special stop to say “ni hao” to the beautiful young woman who sells watermelon drink on the corner of Ting Zhou. I want to be her friend. Back in the apartment I went up on the roof with a fold out table and chair, the french press, a pen, and a notebook. I started writing but soon stopped. I felt cold! I thought four winters in Maine had instilled in me a certain hardiness. I went back down to the fifth floor for a sweater, marveling at how changeable we all are.

I have no doubt that I am able to get used to living here – wet and hot and all. I’m also sure that out the window of my future home, the leaves on the trees are brown and red and so dry they scratch against each other when the wind moves through them. It is October, after all. I miss the autumn of Western New York, of Maine. I miss it because I choose to. In an email to Rachel I tried to articulate my memory of fall (or maybe it’s the memory of a general feeling?]… I’m at my old house playing outside with my brothers. It’s getting dark out and I feel cold and warm at once because we’re running around. The ground is cold and wet and everything smells like dirt and smoke. My mom calls us inside and without washing our hands we sit down to eat disgusting amounts of spaghetti. The house smells like sautéed onions, dust, and warmth, but I can still catch that dirt smell in my hair. Through the window panes it looks completely black outside and I can’t believe I was just out there playing. I’m happy to be inside though, and I feel safe and at peace knowing I can expect homework and bickering and a shower and a morning. I’ve loved fall always, but I haven’t had that exact feeling in a while. So I miss two things I guess – fall and being a kid. October is very different in Taipei at twenty-two, though the thought of morning still pacifies me. That is another habit of mind that I'd like to keep.

I’m getting used to the chicken feet and organs on display beneath a heat lamp at a corner vendor down the street. Even the smell I find less shocking lately.

I’m getting used to the daily crotch shot I get every time I step out of the apartment. The woman who owns the store next to the apartment building sits open-legged all day every day cackling and fanning herself. She’s very friendly (No, I’m not insinuating anything... ). She smiles and waves her fan at me sometimes. In fact, everything about our neighborhood becomes more and more familiar and more of a comfort to me. Every day I walk past the same stubby street dogs and dodge the same couches and chairs and bookshelves spilling over the sidewalk into the street. My neighbors nod hello and the children offer shy, twinkling smiles even with their mouths full of noodles. I’m happy to feel a little homecoming at the end of a day.

I’m getting used to the cluttered air I breath and the way it collects in my lungs and has me coughing every morning, but I know I don’t want to get used to that.

I’m getting used to separating paper from soft plastic from cans from bottles from compost from trash, which is something I’m happy to get used to. Living in Taiwan, we’re forced to deal with our waste. Walking around Taipei in the evening time you often hear an eerie whistling to the tune of fur elise. Then you smell it. Garbage. The garbage trucks play the eerie melody to announce their arrival in a neighborhood. On nearly every street they appear at a specific time every day but Wednesday and Sunday. On Xiamen, just steps away from our apartment, fur elise fills the air at 5:30. If we miss it, we can catch a pick-up up the street near the park at 8:30. If we miss that one, we can wander around like fools with stinky bags thrown over our shoulders and our ears pricked. It’s quite a thing to watch a whole neighborhood of people pouring out of their homes with blue bags in their hands. Once I unknowingly mixed Styrofoam with “soft plastics” and a woman near me put her hands right into my bag and helped me sort the Styrofoam out.

I’m getting used to kindness, which is probably both good and bad. I told my Co-Teacher I liked a ring she wore and she bought me one. She gave me a cracker to try and I liked it so she brings those crackers in to school often to share them with me. Writing these things down I’m reminded of what exceptional gestures of friendship they are and how sad it would be to start taking such things for granted, even as I experience such generosity in abundance as a foreigner in Taiwan.

Every day I tweak the repertoire of what I’m “used to.” Though old habits die hard (toilet paper) new ones are possibly born every day (toilet paper). And then there are some things your soul choses to refuse (malls in every time zone). Living in a place so significantly different from the places I’ve lived before, I’m forced to alter my habits of mind to function on a day to day basis. I think it’s important for me to think about this process of alteration as I am always a part of it here in Taiwan and wherever I go next. Beyond that, I must make decisions about how and why I do or don’t want to change my ever-changing habits of mind. Everything in Taiwan is a little too sweet until I get used to the sugar. My next question is -- how sweet do I want to be?

I think it’s probably most important to think of the things we’ve been used to for a long time, maybe our entire lives, and reach to determine how those habits of mind put us in touch with the world around us (or the part on the other side). Moments that disrupt and therefore bring attention to our habits of mind happen too infrequently, especially when we’re too comfortable, to be the sole inspiration for self-reflection. I think we have to go out of our ways sometimes.