A Day in the Life of Teacher Sophie

(Jerry)

Auntie cooked some ambiguous, chewy chicken parts for lunch and covered them with thick curry, making it impossible to spot and gnaw off the stuff I grew up considering edible, which means I’m at the McDonalds next to school filling my belly with french fries, and, escaping (to McDonalds?) the madness that is preschool for an hour while the kiddies sleep, or, more likely, pinch each other in the dark. I spent this morning asking Richard what he’s looking for up his nose, explaining how “it’s cold out so mama T needs a hat and baby t needs some mittens,” crawling on the ground like a cat, (not) smelling soap on kids’ hands, trying to respectfully dissuade my co-teacher from asking the kids, “Do you want to kill yourself?” when they hold scissors incorrectly, asking over and over again for Allen to wait until he’s inside the bathroom to pull down his pants, and all the time wondering, is this seriously my life? Not that it’s bad - as you can imagine I laugh a lot. I’m under no great stress, I’m happy, and yet still I wonder how I came to this part of the world, teaching preschool, living this bright, smelly life.

Most of the time I’m inspired to write when something out of the ordinary happens or when I experience some shock to my sensibilities but after four months of sloppy kisses and phonics a crazy day like this one is nothing out of the ordinary and certainly not inspirational. And so, in the name of honesty rather than inspiration I present you with, “A Day in the (Silly, Smelly) Life of Teacher Sophie,” and in doing so, dispel the fiction that my life is all sunsets, islands, momentous feelings.

Most days I wake up to Max’s phone alarm at 7:15 and accidentally drop the phone on his head while trying to turn it off, apologize, but secretly hope he will wake up and drink coffee with me. Most days he rolls over and falls back to sleep. I shower and get a little sweaty afterwards grinding coffee beans in our little manual grinder. If Max boiled water the day before I put it through the filter and then boil it again to make coffee in the french press and if he did not I pour tap water in the kettle and hope the purported metals will not cause permanent bodily damage (The Buddhist Master Max meditates with says American water will kill you and that Taiwanese water is good for you, so I find it useful to think about that.). I sit around drinking coffee and watching the Daily Show or listening to NPR, dress too carelessly, and rush out the door. Walking down Xiamen I nod hello to neighbors and hold my breath past those rubbing polish into their wooden and leather furniture.



(Xiamen Je)

Once I get to Tongan Road I join a stream of suited people on their ways to work. In the Guting MRT station the trains come fast and full and I throw myself into the almost entirely Asian crowd like someone drunk at a punk concert. If I’m lucky I can read a little bit on the train ride up North, but it’s more likely I’ll be pinned against strangers for those seventeen minutes, or at least until we get to Taipei Main Station.

For the first half hour at work I catch up with Kiah and Sebastian and Sean, the foreign teachers with whom I share desk space. We prep lessons for that day and at 9:40 we walk with trepidation upstairs to our classrooms. When the kids rush, smiling, to the classroom door in the morning and scream “Teacher Sophie! Everybody, Teacher Sophie’s here!” I regret my trepidation and count myself lucky for hugs, big personalities in little people, soft, squishy faces.



(Sophia's soft face, which I sometimes squish)

We play and talk and read and write and yell and eat and hush and make and cry and laugh from 9:40 to 12:30. I like to think I’ve become a better teacher since August but a more accurate description of my development is that I’ve become better at predicting when shit will hit the fan and learned techniques to avoid trouble when possible. I’m also better at plowing through the madness of a day with a good sense of humor. For example: if I give a lesson in glue application before passing the glue out only two kids will get stuck to each other and/or their art projects rather than five or six. If I ask kids not to draw on their writing books before I pass them out only half of them will draw on their writing books, etc… From 12:30 until 1:40 they nap and I escape to read or write or eat french fries somewhere before heading back to school at 1:50. It’s more playing, talking, reading, writing, yelling, eating, hushing, making, crying, laughing until 4 at which point I stumble out of school, sometimes passing Max on the way in to teach evening classes to older kids.

After work I usually go to a coffee shop down the street from school called Ikari to write, or read when I can’t bring myself to write. On the way I pass a new bakery and hope the woman standing outside of it doesn't recognize me and offers me a fortieth sample of the same nutty muffin I've been "trying" for weeks now. From Ikari a whole wall of windows looks out over the busy street. I enjoy the lattes and the people watching and hate the awful “musac” they play. It’s a posh place (our school is in a posh neighborhood) and frequented by an odd assortment of people: old men with pocket-watches drinking tea while reading newspapers, old women lounging on the couches and rubbing their bare feet while they chat, brightly clad high school kids eating chicken wings from a bucket or taking “selfies” on their phone cameras before starting their homework. I’ve become quite comfortable here. I like to think of myself as a sort of fixture in this place - that girl who moves to “her” table as soon as someone vacates it and camps there for a few hours until the bearded guy comes and hands her a helmet at which point she packs up and hops on a scooter for home.

Max and I usually eat dinner together but sometimes we pick up food in his sister’s neighborhood and eat it together with her in her apartment. We get some delicious beef noodles for 90NT (less than three USD!) in the Shida night market or Japanese teppanyaki around the corner from her place. Sometimes we go to Gonguan market for Vietnamese or falafel or rice burgers at the Australian fast food chain “Mos Burger.” At home we like to make pizza and omelets while we watch Ugly Betty, three seasons of which we’ve devoured shamelessly in the past few months. Sometimes we read, sometimes I write while Max plays guitar. Less often we go out to see some music at a reggae bar near 101 or drink two for one beer at dark bars on Roosevelt or Shida. Some of the best nights are the nights we go to HJ’s, a restaurant owned by Kiah’s adopted godfather here, and sit at the bar talking with him and the cooks Willie and Sil while we eat his famous chicken salad and chicken hearts and drink his stinging Chinese alcohol.

Most weekday nights we go to bed around midnight tired and happy.
Of course, life interrupts this schedule, and sometimes I must adventure East for random provisions or to the Riverside Park for a run. For better or for worse (and usually for better) this is “A Day in the Life of Teacher Sophie,” and proof of my good fortune here in Taiwan.



(There's Sam and Willie!)

Most weekday nights we go to bed around midnight tired and happy.

Of course, life interrupts this schedule, and sometimes I must adventure East for random provisions or to the Riverside Park for a run. For better or for worse (and usually for better) this is “A Day in the Life of Teacher Sophie,” and proof of my good fortune here in Taiwan.

It seems I have nothing very tidy to conclude with. This not-story just kinda ends with the anticipation of another day and then unconsciousness.

For now it's lights out. The boy is already asleep.

For your enjoyment, a message to my dad from Jerry:

Hi Dusty,

I love you. I have cookie give to you. My name is Jerry. I like a transformers and spiderman and ironman and batman. I home I will play with Justin. My brother's name is Eric. I go to school I see my little brother (that's a lie). My class have Daniel Stone. Because I like some Richard. I like a Erica.

Bye bye

p.s. I give to you a fire engine.
p.p.s. Teacher Justin eats a pizza.
p.p.p.s. My favorite story is a transformers. I have a transformers underwear.
p.p.p.p.s. I like a monster give to you.



(Because you can't get too many Jerry pictures)

Green Island Vacation con Vivian

The writer of the Lonely Plant guide to Taiwan has only puked aboard a ship twice in his life - going to Green Island (1) and returning to Taitung from Green Island (2). With this knowledge we woke up two hours before departure and munched on some dramamine. A taxi driver arrived promptly at 8:30 to take us to the dock (we got an amazing package deal with all this stuff included). He had a sign with Max's name on it, and a crusty red smile full of betle nut (and in case you're curious what it looks like -
).

I'd heard that betle nut was much more popular down south but it's pretty shocking to see so many men and women with rusty lips and teeth. Taitung is a much smaller city with cleaner air. It reminds me a bit of Linkou, the Taipei suburb where Sam lives, but the buildings aren't so tall and everything is a little messier, smellier, more compact. While unpacking in our dim hotel room we heard firecrackers and announcements, or advertisements, broadcast from vans. Looking out the windows we suffocated on stinky tofu smell and caught sight of a parade snaking around the corner of the street. Walking around the city that evening looking for food, we heard this strange parade over and over again, and later, from bed, we still heard it. There's something eerie and futuristic about the chirpy voices sounding from the vans. Sometimes in Taiwan I feel as though I'm on the set of the movie "2050" with no sight of green, or perhaps a few scraggly sights of green, nothing but efficient rectangular buildings and advertisements as far as the eye can see. Max and I also get that futuristic feeling riding along the Riverside Park with long views of Taipei like a pastel-colored leggo creation beneath a sky that looks as likely to host UFO's as birds.

As the Taiwanese say, "Ay-yuh." What a tangent, teacher.

Where were we, Taitung? OK.

To our delight the sickening boat from Taitung to Green Island is called, "Uranus." (As you can imagine, a series of dirty jokes followed this realization.) While waiting at the pier a woman offered us a banana and later an orange. A man looked at my hair and called me beautiful. The boat was wide and the seats spacious but so full of barf bags we approached them nervously. Twenty minutes later Uranus hiked up and down waves like shark's teeth while we knocked around in our spacious seats and watched water fall over the windows. Only a few minutes into the trip the puking began. Vivian Max and I tried to block out the sounds with our ipods but with ten minutes of boat ride left Max finally hit the bag. We walked off the boat with weak legs and collapsed on our beds at "Jack's Boutique Hotel." Right away the woman in charge of the empty hotel, Angel, set us up with a map and two scooters and off we went for lunch and then adventure. We went to the restaurant she recommended, "The Fisherman" (where Angel also happens to work). We ate beside the water, which chilled our fried rice and kept the sashimi cold. Later we'd acknowledge that we all felt a little disappointed just then. We'd only seen the least beautiful stretch of island and there is a gloomy mood to the people here - a content but sedated and dark, wintry mood - so unlike the cutesie, friendly mood of Taipei. Of course that makes sense though. These people brace against cold winds, care-free foreigners and wealthier Taiwanese. There are two or three communities comprised of a few dozen ram-shackled cottages, restaurants, some bigger but abandoned-looking homes or perhaps motels, lost roosters, stiff-eared muts without homes to lose, deer with ropes around their necks and goats attached to gates. Below is a picture of such a deer.



People sit around in living rooms with gold and red shrines, bathed in florescent lights, spitting betle nut and enjoying each other's company. Some people run errands or work in the restaurants, some fish, some find work in the tourist industry. Teenagers hang around the 7-11 slurping hot noodle soup from paper bowls or hang over the rails looking out at the ocean with cigarettes between their lips.

After lunch at The Fisherman we took a nap and woke up around dusk, scurried out the door to the hot springs, one of two natural salt water hot springs in the whole world. We took a left instead of a right out of Jack's, and, though it was dark, saw the outlines of mammoth mountains and chunks of rock like black pieces of torn paper stuck in seething water. The hot springs by the water blew us away and initiated the theme of the vacation - surprise and wonder. Max and I boiled our bodies in salt water while the wind off the water twirled our hair and burned our eyes. Eventually we joined Vivian in a warm and sheltered pool and stayed there for awhile just sitting and breathing.

We woke up the next day to the sound of a tearful Chinese voice wailing. Between two boarded up shops a crowd gathered to listen to the person in the gold robe standing before a shrine. A funeral. After breakfast we watched a somber but musical parade pass by and saw a large picture of the man who had died.



That day was one of suprise and wonder. Surprise and wonder, over and over again. I relished the free feeling of my own scooter and the cliffs hovering over the empty road, the sound of The Pacific roaring, the site of it crashing in teal and bubbling over in white, cloudy skies, palm trees and also dune grass - an implosion of vistas. We stopped and got off the scooters now and then to hop along rocks and search beaches for shells. We spent the whole morning this way and barely made it back by two for our snorkeling adventure.






In no time a man we were instructed to call "Coach" had us outfitted in wet suits and snorkeling gear. We were the only foreigners in our group but luckily one of the Taiwanese men spoke English well enough to translate for us. Unfortunately, he was a very literal man who took Coach for his word when he recommended stuffing leaves in our ears as ear-plugs... The water is a colder blue color, not aqua like Puerto Rico where the three of us (+ rum) snorkeled before, but very clear. We walked carefully out on the coral before reaching the drop-off. All the Asians in life jackets followed coach around on a chain of intertubes but we were given permission to swim around on our own. Surpise and wonder. Below the lake-blue water were thousands of the most beautiful fish imaginable, swimming inches from our faces or puttering around and sucking off mansions of coral reef below. Every once in a while Max and Vivian and I would explode through the surface to exclaim something but for the most part we just wandered around in the sea world by ourselves watching the

yellow wrasse,



moorish idol,



blackbelt hogfish,



and bullethead parrotfish.



The next morning we breakfasted by the water and took the scooters to the entrance of a trail we'd caught sight of the day before. This day was cooler and cloudier than the last, a good day for moving. The "ancient" trail was well established with stone steps and signs to help hikers identify different native plants, but no words of warning regarding the yellow and black spiders with bodies the size of our palms and legs so thick we could see the joints. We walked carefully, keeping an eye out for those spiders, which we've since learned are golden orb spiders.



(there it is eating a bird!)

We smelled the dead baby deer before we saw it. It's head had caught on a metal-wire fence and it's face had been eaten away by bugs and maybe birds. Later we saw a baby goat caught the same way and two women bent over it, helping the little one out of the trap while its mother looked on.

It was a beautiful walk. We sat and nibbled dry fruit from a look-out before hopping on the scooters again and discovering the "The Little Great Wall of China."



We confused our tired bodies in the hot springs for hours later that afternoon, moving back and forth from hot to cold springs. It was nice to see clearly what we had only seen in shadow before and Max went hopping along the rock trails by the water and eventually scaled a mountain to find Ireland. Vivian and I soaked and talked in an outdoor pool before a bearded and flanneled man talked us out of the water and into climbing up the hunk of land to see what he had seen. Surprise and wonder.




That night we ate the most delicious meal at a small restaurant owned by Green Island's most bohemian couple. She wore a long skirt and played latin music, which thrilled Vivian who's been missing reggaeton.

The next day, our last full day on the island, we set out with lose plans and found a temple inside a cave, a graveyard, an old abandoned prison, a rocky path to a beachy inlet walled in with cliffs and crags, a treasure chest of beautiful shells. I looked through shells for hours thinking about nothing memorable. Vivian searched for shells in the watery places and found tiny purple jelly fish. Max risked his life scaling yet another mountain and at the top found himself face to face with a huge black billy-goat. He sidled his way along the grassy plateau, avoiding the wrath of the horned goats, and ran back down through the Gonguan Community, through the graveyard and down the path to find me at the beach with a furrowed brow and a lap full of shells. We stayed down there for hours, mostly in our own worlds, wondering at this Green Island. Afterwards Max took us up to meet the goats in China (for some reason that particular chunk of land belongs to China). We ran around in the grass and climbed a mound of rock to look out over the grass and beach and ocean.




This morning we woke up to see the sun rise from "The Great Little Wall of China." We nibbled on bread with sweet beans and watched the clouds turn a little pink but the sun did not show itself. It was still nice to see a new day glow open.

Now we're back at Jack's, assembling our stories and clothes and things, preparing for another sickening boat ride. It feels as though I've been away quite awhile. I read over my post from the train and I'm happy to say that I fell asleep red-faced and wind-whipped after every day spent with The Pacific. I've been red-faced most mornings too, for though the sun hid it burned. I like the full circle of a trip like this... home - train- boat - island - boat - train - home... and I'll be so happy to see our little apartment on Xiamen je. Going away makes coming back so sweet.

On the Train to Taitung

A man in a sharp blue suit sleeps not a foot away from me. Vivian Max and I sit on a train to Taitung, a city in the southeast corner of Taiwan, from which we’ll depart tomorrow morning for the beautiful Green Island, a rocky pebble tossed and stuck in the massive Pacific somehow (there is something so frightening and impossible to me about little islands in big oceans). The man’s snoring is not as loud as some I’ve heard but it rattles so deep within him I feel it in my own bones. The man in front of us shoots his phlegm around from the back to the front of his throat, his neighbor sneezes, and the man two seats in front of Max hacks and coughs as though he will die before we get there. These morbid coughs are interrupted by lighthearted burps, the kind a person pops out for fun, or snot-rockets, so at least he’s enjoying his untimely death. Either I’ve been in masked Taipei too long or these exceptionally fluid-filled people go out of their way to maneuver the stuff around. Besides these sounds I hear the hums of the train and feel the rumble of train on track. A little girl with wild hair squeals and leaps around the floor of the train car like a frog while her grandpa chews on the beetle nut that puts a smell like celery or radishes in the air. As for the sights – not even phlegmy sounds or bitter smells could take away from such beauty.

We decided to take a slow train to Taitung because we are in no rush to get there and because it’s significantly cheaper (30 USD to go from the North of the island all the way down South and back again). The windows are tall and wide and through them we’ve seen mountains so tall we have to dip our heads to see the tops, the Pacific lapping sandy or garbagey shores, and mini-mountains growing out of the shore like the brown drippy castles I used to make on the beach with my mom. We’ve seen rickety towns and bigger towns like Hualien. It’s only 4:21 now but the sun’s already fading, blurring the faint distinction between blue sky and blue mountain, and the foggy air lends a hand in the merge. I saw the Pacific as a baby and from the edge of an expensive hill in San Fransisco a few months ago, but babiness or fascination with a pretty city prevented my being fascinated with something as big and cold-blue and far away from “home” as The Pacific! And there it is looking like a quilt of blue with ominous grayish patches, patches as aqua as my mom’s eyes, some a little more seaweed-green, and the rim the chilly color of sun fading behind clouds. I look so forward to the week we have to spend without even a slice of glass between us, getting to know each other’s blue moods. I want to be exhausted by it at the end of every day I spend on Green Island, red-faced and strung-out with wind and spray.

I’m already exhausted, but it’s a medication/four-year-old-children-induced kind of exhaustion. My legs are stiff with want to run faster and longer than it takes to catch up a baby in my arms. I will miss them though. I’ve spent some of every day in the past few months basking in their love. I’m sure this time away will remind me how lucky I am to have this job.

Vivian came just in time for Thanksgiving (the Wednesday before!) and spent the day with us at school before settling in at Kiah’s home for delicious turkey, potatoes, stuffing, green bean casserole (apparently it’s a Midwest staple?) and pumpkin pie. It is so good to have her here. It makes me feel a swirl of things - a little startled, mostly safe, and the world seems at once smaller and bigger. Smaller because here she is just like that (snap) and bigger because it doesn’t change to fact that the rest of my family is still so far away. She’ll stay through December and then we’ll find ourselves in another month. The thought makes me feel like I’ve been on a train this whole time with experiences flashing past so fast I can’t possibly catch sight of them all. For whatever reasons (I have some ideas) some things catch my eye and others don’t. I’ll never go on this ride again, though, so this is my only shot. I’m glad to have caught sight of the things I have and grateful for the time to send them through this portal to you. dddddddddddddd


Ghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Sssssssssssssssmmmmmmmmmmmvvmvvvmvmvvmvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvrvrvrrrrrrrrrrrrrrzzszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzppppppppppppppppppppphphhphhhhhhhyhhhhhhhhttthtthththffffftttytttttbbbbbbbhbbbbbbbbhbbbddddddddddddddddddddddddddddd1dd22222222222222233233233333333333333333333333333xx3x3xx3x3x3xxxdxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx……………..>>ddfhrdddddddddddjjjjjjjjjmmmmmmmmmbbgggggggggggggkkkkkkkgjfjygfkjyflkfglinhyxxxxxjjjjjjliiiiii,gffjhgljghng5ekjfkjyfkjhrooomjhhhhhghmnbvbgcawGGGGGGGggggggGGGgggggggggggggGGhgggGgGHgIGgggghgddddtssaaaaaassdfffffghjkl;;;;;;;;;;;;;’’

That’s a message from the girl with wild hair.

Damn You Swine

Can't you see in his eyes what he's thinking?



In case you couldn't tell before it's something like, "You've got to be kidding me."

Person I Appreciate With Cat

People I Appreciate

Every time I catch a glimpse of a thought or idea worth following I start looking too hard for other bits of life to package together with it. I know this is what essayists and people who write letters do--assemble the random just so, but sometimes I’m more or less willing to go through with it. Sometimes it just feels dishonest, I guess. And then other times, connecting the dots, those random bits of life, is an act that sends my thoughts in new directions and I couldn't image moving through my life in any other way.

My dad sent me a book of essays by E.B. White that he found in his father’s bookshelves, The Points of My Compass. I’ve thumbed through a couple of the essays on the metro and as I fall asleep. White puts together such nice packages, with bits from his day to day life that artfully converge on a single point. That is what I’ve tried to do in this blog with much less success. White grew up in New York State and split his time between Maine and New York City as an adult. Like me, he’s attached to the idea of Maine.

My favorite lines are the ones in which he recalls drives down the lonely state highway in an essay called, “Home-Coming.” Reading it reminded me of the long drive I took a dozen times in college, bright days ending alone in the car with strung out thoughts, a dozen or so tired songs, garbage bags full of clothes, the dirty taste of another cup of coffee. In “Home-Coming,” White considers how we perceive the familiar. “A farmer pauses in the doorway of his barn and he is wearing the right boots. A sheep stands under an apple tree and it wears the right look, and the tree is hung with puckered frozen fruit of the right color.” As we grow up we adopt (and later amend) ideas about what looks “right” and take comfort in those ideas. White suggests that we defend the things that comfort us against negative criticism, but I don’t wholly agree with this assertion.

Sometimes I feel pressure to point negative criticism at the things I am most familiar with. I resented my hometown growing up and complained about campus life when I couldn’t escape it. After years away I realize what was good about growing up and returning home to Bemus Point and now pine a little for that special combination of freedom and paternalism that defines the college experience. I suppose dissatisfaction and restlessness are symptoms of youth White is no longer afflicted with. As for me, I’m currently in Taiwan and giving this place a hard time.

I’ve met many foreigners in Taipei who have lived here for years and plan to continue living here and yet still go on and on about all the things that aren’t “right” with it, and about the oddities of “these” people. Though I’ve eradicated words like “right” and phrases like “these people” from my speech, I find myself criticizing more and more. Perhaps I speak less offensively than some of the foreigners I’ve met, but sometimes I cleave to negativity in the same way.

I’ve had such a tumultuous relationship with criticism over the past five years. Sometimes criticism is enlightening. Other times it hols me in check. I’ve heard people say that life is more fulfilling when you go out of your way to ponder its complications, and most of me defends that thesis. It's the judging something as good or bad so as to act well, speak well, live “correctly” that I don't like. We all judge--it is undoubtedly part of the human experience. But so often it feels bad when I’m doing it.

I’m thinking about graduate school. Critical approaches to language help me express specific ideas. But too often my feelings get so tangled up in the careful formation of words that they no longer resemble my actual feelings. Instead, I communicate the feelings I think I should have. In the end, my words might communicate something specific and safe (which helps me feel good about myself and somehow justified in giving weight to other people’s words), but they don’t communicate me honestly. Take the word “honest,” for example. Some might encourage me to avoid this word because of all the semantic baggage it carries. But I say it’s a good word because anyone reading this knows what I mean when I use it, loaded as it is.

Lately I’ve been so appreciative of people who speak and (more importantly) live as honestly as they can, who personalize the angles of critique they use and respect other people enough to step far away from words to hear meanings. I think we’re probably all confused and maybe a little scared about our complicity in hurt. We seek exoneration from that hurt but actually we’re too stuck in the web of it to ever completely escape it. I think that I want to believe I am better because I use “better” language and access “better” angles of critique (there--I said it). But that’s such bullshit, isn't it? Skipping straight to a conversation about what’s wrong with the way other people think/feel/act and avoiding honest conversations about the way I think/feel/act? All it does is add another layer of deceit. Everyone hurts people with the things they say and do and think--no one is better than that. I'm certainly not better off trying to fight my complicity with negative criticism. We all think and feel and do bad things. We all evolve out of and into different habits of mind. We’re all human. Pondering life’s complications is not a fulfilling exercise because it allows us to feel better or worse, but because it rides on hope and puts us in touch with people.

Shared contemplation puts Max and I in touch with each other. In conversation we each respect the words the other chooses but we’re always listening for the greater meaning or feeling our partner expresses. That’s the beauty of really knowing someone I guess. We have trust in the goodness of the other person. There’s no fear.

Outside the fearless space of our little world is the larger world in which I respond to fear, with stipulations and expectations, on my tip-toes, without faith that people will forgive me my offenses, with some messed up idea that I am above offending. And Max watches me exist in that world and loves me despite the ridiculous dance I do. He knows my heart and my mind and he puts what I say and do in the context of Sophie.

When I speak about people I appreciate I’m mostly speak about Max, who lives as honestly as he can. Every day he plays music and writes these fearless/fragile/strong poem-songs not to establish that he is better or worse than anyone, but because he hopes and loves and thinks.

I’ve been searching through the events of the past few weeks for some Taiwanese anecdotes to include here. This is S(w/ Max)ie in Taipei, afterall; it’s expected. I climbed a steep mountain near Linkou last weekend but that doesn’t fit in nicely anywhere. Because H1N1 took out most of my class last week I have to wear a face mask in school until December, which is a hot and sweaty annoyance but little else. I spent four hours looking for a pie pan and baking soda on Wednesday with no luck. Bah-hum-bug, no homemade pumpkin pie on turkey day. When Mr. E.B. White needs help connecting a big picture to some little ones he falls back on the quirky personalities of his dead dauschunds. Then the father of Stuart Little and Charlotte, in all his element and style, proceeds to connect his dogs to the U.S. election process.

The truth is that I have nothing very foreign to share with you. I might have had these thoughts anywhere. Wandering around a bookstore, getting a kick out of the Taiwanese-English spoken by little cartoon animals on cutesy Asian notebooks, I came across this saying: Strive to be what you want to appear. This is probably just a mistranslation, but it’s more fun to think there’s a Taiwanese writer of inspirational phrases who philosophizes from the mouths of little cartoon animals about the gap language puts between what we think and what we say, between who we are and who we think we should be.

I think I will accompany this post with very Taiwanese pictures to fool you into traveling through my thoughts for a while. I probably miss talking to you about these things anyway. Thanks for listening.


pictures! -- http://www.flickr.com/photos/42182903@N02/

Birthday Poems

small world poem

write down where you live
and after school my dad will
take me to see snow

-- allen





just to clarify (a love poem)

I am harrison
happy birthday I love you
my teacher sophie

-- harrison


suspiciously charming poem

teacher, do you look
more beautiful because
today's your birthday?

-- allen



far away birthday poem

look at us facing the mirror in the half light chopping away at my hair and cracking cold m&ms between our teeth wondering at how the other is the only person in the world we can't see quite clearly though we see every pore, every hope, pass no judgment, one smells like home to the other

-- teacher sophie


craigslist, philadelphia, apartments/housing

chocolate, balm, leaves
a package arrives from anna
and I go online



most recently on ugly betty

we made good cookies
in the oven he bought me
and ate quietly



kiah gives

a card that says what
I would like to say to her
what a friend we found

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.

Rainy Sunday Morning Oatmeal Eating, Even in Taipei...

You'll notice Samuel Read of Linkou is eating out of a dog bowl. Yes, we did purchase dog bowls at IKEA... they were cheaper aight?

Water Parks, Respect, That Kind of Thing

I spent the last two weekends at a water park. The first time I tagged along with some of Kiah’s Taiwanese friends and on this past Sunday I went with Kiah’s best foreigner friends and Max to celebrate her 24th Birthday. The second time we met Samuel Read of Linkou and his teacher friends at the park. I enjoyed myself both days and don’t regret spending time reverting back to childhood rather than fumbling through museum brochures of awkward English in translation or oo-ing and ah-ing one of the famous temples in Taipei. I plan to do these things, of course, but the beauty of actually living somewhere (rather than vacationing) is that you have the liberty of listening to yourself and finding out what it is you truly want to do with a given day rather than obliging the tourist books. I’d like to add, however, that I would happily adopt such a sense of obligation if anyone were to visit me (let’s be honest – sometimes that’s the only way to bite the bullet).

The park is quite far from the center of the city. Both times we took the MRT up north to one of the final stops on the red line and hopped on a bus for another thirty minutes to the park. While this trip isn’t the most comfortable (particularly if you’ve had a few too many drinks the night before) it only costs about $1.50 USD and the park itself costs around 550NT (about $15) so all in all it’s a pretty cheap day. We brought beer from outside the park without a problem and even the food inside is pretty affordable (albeit as nauseating as any American park food). Crazy, right? No one was frisked, scammed, scolded… nada.

In fact, since being here I’ve both knowingly and unknowingly broken laws and social codes, but only once have I been yelled at or spoken to in anything but a level speaking voice. This occurred outside my house at a busy intersection. I safely crossed one street, with the help of the person directing traffic, but I had more difficulty crossing the next street. Without a traffic light or cross-walk, I was that crazy squirrel crossing the road – you know the one that rushes out into the street and decides against it, for it, against it, for it – while the driver reacts with a foot to the pedal. His neck snaps around while he curses the small-brained animal’s stupidity and wonders why the hell he cares about the damn thing anyway. To recap – Sophie = small-brained animal, Taiwanese drivers = cursors of small-brained animals. Except that they don’t curse. This is no New York or Rome - Taiwanese people don’t even roll their eyes. Foreigners tell me that Taiwanese people are emotional (of course), but that “shame” culture (as opposed to “guilt” culture) so effectively commands their public “face” this emotion surfaces in passive aggression and other harnessed kinds of behavior. I’m wary of such behavior, but I’m also pretty sure that my unfamiliarity with Taiwanese culture and language makes it pretty near impossible for me to pick up on these subtle expressions of anger or dislike. In fact, from my position in this particular cultural context ignorance is a kind of convenience. (But I suppose people find ignorance a convenience in other cultural contexts too, when it upholds their own comfortable positionality.) The director of traffic, however (most likely out of concern for my safety), started screaming at me in Chinese, waving his hand in the air and grabbing at his hair as though something horrible were happening. In other words, he behaved like someone from home who has had it with crazy squirrels.


An angry director of traffic is nothing out of the ordinary, right? In a city of millions of people, you’re bound to get yelled at, called after, or cursed… right? Nope. I’m beginning to wonder how I will cope differently with these situations when I return to the States. Some call New York City de-sensitizing. If that’s true, Taipei is most definitely sensitizing. I will add here that the director of traffic usually working at that intersection in the morning always gives me a big smile and hello. She stops traffic that inconveniences me as soon as she catches sight of me, and sometimes I don’t even have to stop at the cross-walk. I feel a little like a rockstar (having just left my air-conditioned apartment I’m always least smelly and disheveled at this time of the day) and a lot like a jerk witnessing Xiamen’s daily halt for the foreign white girl and being that foreign white girl. The question is --what can/should I do about it? I know that guilt, the option I seem to milk in this blog, doesn’t get me anywhere. At the same time, I have so little understanding of all the implications of this particular scene I don’t know where else to begin and I desperately want to begin somewhere…

It is interesting to think about how someone moving to the States with equally little knowledge of American culture or the English language as I have of Taiwanese culture and the Chinese language might be differently received by most American people… Everyday in Taipei people treat me kindly and fairly. I feel safe and respected here. Some people I meet ask my forgiveness for not speaking my language… How is my experience coming to Taiwan to work different from the experience of so many people who move to the U.S. to fulfill some “need” (I’m told I fulfill a “need” for Native English speakers in the job market in Taiwan) in the U.S. job market? As someone with an economically profitable skill to share (proficiency in English) I get a well-paying job and I’m able to live quite comfortably in Taipei working as a teacher for roughly 30 hours a week. When people with less economically profitable skills move to the U.S to fulfill some “need” in the job market, they’re probably working a shit job for twice (if not three times) as many hours a week, for shit pay. I understand that this is “the way the world works” and I’m familiar with (and critical of) the nuances of the arguments that support neoclassical economics. I’ve certainly benefited from the “way the world works” and I’m riding out the wave sitting here “blogging” and trying to write a book in all the spare time I have, so I understand that this voice rings with hypocrisy. Still though... let’s recap: a person without work comes to the U.S. out of necessity, takes a shit job (many of which U.S. citizens themselves won’t do) for shit hours for shit pay. And then, on top of all that, a person gets treated like shit. Whatever a person’s complicated relationship to capitalism is, nothing justifies the disrespect so many people experience for speaking the language they grew up speaking, practicing their cultural traditions, remaining wary of assimilation and those who champion nationalism over humanism (not to mention SO much more). This is a comparison riddled with all kinds of unexplored complexities, but still, it infuriates and saddens me. And one more thing – Taiwan provides me (a non-citizen) health care, not to mention the rest of the people living, loving, working, staying healthy and getting sick on this island.

I grew up thinking the world was my oyster. I listened to Joni Mitchel songs about “bought me a ticket, hopped on a plane to Spain, went to a party down a red dirt road.” Just across 86 in New York, NY “there was milk and toast and honey and a bowl of oranges too. And the sun poured in like butterscotch and stuck to all my senses. Oh, won’t you stay, we’ll put on the day and talk in present tenses…” Growing up I hoped I would turn into a well-rounded and well-traveled pearl. A present tense kind of girl. So here I am living in Taipei, and I like to think it means I internalized a little bit of Joni’s bravery mixed with those endearing flashes of vulnerability (I certainly adopted the aesthetic of her Chelsea morning). I’ve picked up other things too, though, that deprive a pearl’s life of some Joni Mitchel romance -- the world’s small if you can afford a plane ticket and boarders are more or less easy to cross depending on where your passport’s from. And when it’s all said and done the truth is that Joni and I are a couple of lucky women. And if you’ve got a beer or two in your belly and one in your hand and you’re floating down a lazy river with new friends on an inner-tube looking up through palm trees at a sky full of cotton and a temple with a red roof tucked into a blue mountain, say it out loud again and again – “I am one lucky young woman.”