Impressions of Buddhism, Neurosis, and Eating Yogurt With a Spoon

The weather’s been perfect lately--cool enough to require a sweater or my perfect new jacket but warm enough to jog in a t-shirt. The past few mornings we woke up to rain, which is something I don’t mind, especially when I know there’s a fine red umbrella hanging on the door that I haven’t lost yet. I drink half a French press of coffee in the morning now. Max became sick just after drinking coffee a few weeks ago so he hasn’t had a stomach for it. He drinks tea for the time being so I grind half as many beans and boil half as much water. The coffee gets me to school and my love for fifteen little people gets me through the morning even if we have to read in unison like robots....Even if Bena, the new girl, is crying again or Erica’s hitting pitches that rattle my brain. The rain clears by the time I venture outside for my afternoon break. On Tuesday the clouds covered the mountains behind Tienmu and on Wednesday they turned purple like cold lips. I went to the Riverside Park near school a few times this week. It is a different park than the one near home, with well-tended gardens and paths lined with trees old enough to co-create canopies. I like their exposed roots, teaming and tangled like piles of worms. The same long white fish fly out of the water in this river and blue herons land where it’s shallow. I saw a man with a sweatshirt that said, “Cornell Dad” on his proud round belly. He was so happy to say hello. Another female runner gave me a look equivalent to a fist-pump. There is something very special about our riverside park but I think I’ll spend time in this one for a while.

So many Taiwanese like to say hello to foreigners. Alyson, Kiah’s good friend, was sweet to let me borrow a bike for the rest of the time I’m here. I get more hellos while riding the bike than I do when I walk places. I guess people become bold knowing we won’t hold eye contact for more than a few seconds. I feel very free riding the bike around. I can’t help but sing children’s songs “Do you know the Chinese Zodiac Signs? Yes! I do! Well what are they?” or the Carol King song that never seems to leave my head, “So far away, doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?” Other people talk to me when I’m trying to read or write at coffee shops or at picnic tables outside of breakfast places. These interactions are usually awkward, “We can be friends?” sometimes, sketchy, “I know very much about both The West and The Orient. I love classical music, do you? Please can I have your email and phone number?”

Once I talked with a woman for an hour and a half about Buddhism. She gave me a little jade rabbit to hang from my cell phone. I couldn’t manage to string it through the little hole so she did for me. That was on Christmas. She drew pictures and wrote English and Chinese words all over a piece of scrap paper while we talked about reincarnation and the Bible, which she loves to read, and why she goes to Catholic services but ducks out before the group meetings. She told me that certain questions preoccupy certain souls and that the experience of embodiment is a way for a soul to come in contact with those questions. When she reads the Bible she finds things to hold on to and sometimes when she goes to a church service a handful of words hit her just right and stir up her sense of purpose. Other words pass in and out of her like smoke, or don’t even enter her at all because her soul rejects them so strongly. She rejects the certainty of the people in the little group meetings, for example, and the “all or nothing” they say that their son of God requires, the impossibility that other God’s or ideas might help relieve suffering. “Me too!” I say. “You read the Bible?” she asks. When I say “no, I don’t," she tells me, “you should.” And she’s right, I probably should. She gave me her phone number and asked me to call her if I would like to sit with her at the edge of her favorite river.

From what I gathered in that conversation as well as talks with Max and Sam, who are studying Buddhism and Daoism, there is no concept of absolute truth in Buddhism. After meditation every Sunday, they sit and listen to their peers ask the teacher questions about anything from poop to burglary to pleasure to karma. He doesn’t claim to give the right answers, he only promises to tell people what he thinks and to share what has helped relief him of some suffering in his own life. He often contradicts himself within a single sentence, gives many different answers to one straight forward question or a simple answer to one that's packed full. He encourages people to listen and take with them what they will, what speaks to their particular preoccupations. There is no moral code in Buddhism, no single way, no fear of contradiction, no demand. There are only suggestions, ideas. Their teacher, in the same vein as the Buddha, encourages his students to practice discipline only in so far as it helps them relieve themselves of unnecessary suffering and helps them recognize what little they actually require to live loving, fulfilling lives. (From all the things I’ve heard, the stuff I share with anyone reading this blog is the stuff that has stuck with me and the stuff I will keep and return to so long as it helps. This is not a comprehensive, or necessarily accurate description of Buddhism, only my impression of other people's impressions.)

I don’t believe that I have ever truly suffered, but I have been pained, saddened, hateful, and a host of other negative things. I set bombs to my insecurities and fears and they blow up in my head, splatter smut on its walls and distort the way I look at the world. I have a wonderful life full of love, security, power, and opportunity, and yet still I set off these bombs. I’m not angry with myself about this. I am not perfect. Everyone falls victim to these mental spirals, and, from what I hear, no one Max and Sam studies with would dismiss me for my superficial and self-induced aches or call them insignificant. No one would judge me for taking pleasure in material things. I think that their teacher would be happy to see me enjoying myself, but he might ask why I take pleasure in a morning glory muffin from Wild Oats Bakery in Brunswick Maine (let’s just say, because I could really go for one right now), and whether or not I felt attached to it or felt that I really needed it to be content. I want to enjoy those kinds of things, not depend on them or live for them.

Max and I have had another flu since the last one I wrote about. I haven’t been able to depend on my body these past few months. I’m trying to appreciate my health now and to keep in mind that I’ve been healthy throughout my life. Max listened to something about how much a false idea of permanence impacts our existence. When we get sick we feel like we’re always sick. It’s hard to remember what it feels like to be healthy and hard to remind ourselves that we will be healthy again. And then if it’s not one thing it’s another. Our bodies are hardly perfect machines, or a machine at all really. They never promise to be. I’m practicing letting my mind take me out of these things. Not to ignore them, but to get along with them and to pay respect to all that’s working. It’s so easy to run around trying to catch the things that are wrong. I trap them in a jar and call people over to come look. I don’t trap them long. I see something else in the corner of my eye and unscrew the lid, free the old thing and race to catch the new one. They’re all so fleeting, these preoccupations. When I can, I just want to watch them fly by.

And so…

Bye-bye guilt for not writing in the damn blog for a while (I haven’t felt like it), bye-bye guilt for eating the muffin, bye-bye timeline, bye-bye mistake, bye-bye headache, jealousy, unproductive judgment, disgust with self, pressure, feigned confidence, so much pressure! Self-inflicted! I can be quite hard on myself. The sad truth is that I’ve been quite devoted, at least in the last year or two, to a shady idea that good comes from self-criticism and self-improvement (Oh New England, you made a Little Wom[a]n out of me!) Think: There are so many things wrong with the way I exist! The privilege I experience! And so I ought to do so much with what I have. I must set goals and accomplish them. I must be responsible. I must not offend. I must think through. Out of fear that I will do the wrong thing, the ignorant thing, offer the wrong interpretation, or offer no interpretation when one is called for… aiyah! This double checking has become part of my identity, and I’m not sure how I feel about it or what to do. It’s certainly a post-grad preoccupation of mine, which this blog is a testament to. I like to remember that I wasn’t always this way. I used to live with less trepidation. I was unprepared to look out at the world, and, of course, I still am in so many ways, but I offered my love to strangers a lot more easily. Feeling, rather painfully, my unpreparedness, I learned to look in more because that seemed like the best, or at least the more possible, way to be a good citizen of the world. But I’m less and less sure. My co-worker called me a “typical writer,” and, to clarify, “rather neurotic.” Immediately following his comment, my interior dialogue went something like this, Shit. What makes him think that? Am I always talking about myself? Am I really so self-involved? Do I make a lot out of a little? Am I negative and awful to be around? Am I just a conditional? A human conditional? A giant “but”? I write a blog! Ah! He’s so right! We’re all pretty self-involved, and I heard a good argument about why I am particularly so. We forget to notice the difference between things that happen and things that happen to us. He apologized later, “I’m sorry, I can be blunt,” which made me feel worse at the time. But all of this brought me to consider that lately I look in more than I look out.

I’ve believed many different things, lived many different ways, harbored many opposing thoughts, and through all of this I’ve been Sophie. I like to remember that.

This poem is for Alex,

Am I the way my hair smells
at the end of this muggy day
(and every muggy day of my life)
or the things I thought
just before that thought,
which I can’t even remember now?
Certainly I am more those things
than what I say I think is beautiful today,
or what I think is good.
One summer I felt very lonely.
I sat down in a diner
with a cousin I don’t often see
in a city we both happened to live in.
“It’s okay,” she said,
“I know the way you eat yogurt with a spoon.”
That is enough, I felt,
to house different versions
of all the good people
I have loved.
To be the idea of me in her memory.

I must tell you that part of me liked being called a “typical writer.” It made me feel authentic, like a “kind of person,” made for some special sort of work.

I believe (today) that what we do becomes a part of who we are and the goals we set for ourselves, whether we accomplish them or not, drop us off at different vantage points that are useful to look in or out from. But we are not what we do; our meaning is not so static as that. We are the composition of all we’ve done and all that we’ll do in our lifetimes (and who knows? perhaps for lifetimes and lifetimes after this…) We are constantly in the making and never made.

He has a point about writers, doesn’t he? Isn’t it true that that's what writer’s do--make a lot out of a little? Find big things behind little things? Or find the small, contradicting parts of big things. Shatter concepts into a million pieces. Shatter love and hate, hunger, pity and power. Pick up a moment, feeling, gesture, and put a human reflection in it? Ask someone else to see his own reflection in the same slice of glass. Do we connect with other people because we see our own face in the same glass someone else saw her face in? Or do we connect because we see her face, and it looks hurt. I have no idea. I’d like to think it’s the latter. But how well do we really see people? How long must we travel through ourselves before we get to something like compassion?

In the introduction to my college writing thesis I wrote about the stretching that happens in fiction-making. It feels good to scrounge around in my life, hold up old costumes, lost and new-found convictions, the stuff that pinned my core, and then take someone else’s measurements, remake these experiences of self on them. Sometimes, even if just for a second, I get behind that person’s eyes and I feel as close to myself, and, simultaneously, as far away from myself as I’ve ever been.

And so it’s for this good reason, and other’s too, that I want to keep up with this writing even as I put to bed most of what I’ve written so far in Taiwan. In fact, I’ve written very little lately and I choose to be okay with that. I choose to be a part of all kinds of good happening all around me.

You might remember that I felt myself leaning back into life when I first got here, “This feeling reminds me of making risotto, and of scenes in Haruki Murikami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle when the protagonist, a pensive man, walked around the empty ally behind his row house in search of his wife's cat. Physically, it feels like the overly anxious parts of me sit back in a rocker with a drink, letting the five senses do all the heavy lifting (living). These old traits are just sort of watching the new world pass by fast and hot and bright and crowded and overwhelmingly kind, helpful. It's a general sense of reserve that appeals to me now (and might make me lonely for home later). I don't feel pressure to "make more" of the minute/I'm not pressuring myself to "make more" of the minute (to clarify: for me, this sense of duty too often derives from negative, artificial things). I'm letting each minute be itself. It's not so much a resigned to fate attitude as a resigned to time one, or a refreshing lack of control. "We have nothing to gain. We have nothing to lose," Max tells me.” The funny thing is, after several months now, that sounds about right again.

I think I’ll write more soon, but before that I'll look out. I'll take a scooter trip around the island of Taiwan, listen to firecrackers and good tidings, get a little smelly and wet, take pictures and live some "it could only happen in Taiwan" stories to share with you all when I return to Xiamen Je.

On a totally unrelated note, I just saw a woman feeding french fries to her pet pig.

Hello Again Taipei

The first time we went up into the mountains and came back to school with weird feelings my friend’s Chinese Co-Teacher, Mandy, lowered her eyes and whispered, “ghosts.” She did not wink or giggle with her hand over her mouth as she often does. Back from our latest excursion, this time south of the city in Woulai up Mount DaTong, my boyfriend Max felt light-headed and woozy. Was it altitude sickness? A flu? I did not mention ghosts but I thought of them. On Monday he felt worse but taught anyway. On Tuesday he could not leave bed so I substituted for him and then rushed home to take him to the hospital. In the NTU Hospital we wandered around the halls following signs with “Emergency” on them. Sick Max walked like a mummy through the suspiciously empty halls while I bolted around like someone being chased by one. Finally a doctor led us to the right place, which was temporarily outside due to construction. A woman behind the emergency desk asked Max if he knew how many centimeters tall he was, how many kilograms he weighed… did he know his temperature was 40 degrees C? (Did you know that’s about 104 degrees F?). He knew none of this. I felt scared and so confused.

In the waiting room I read a Jhumpa Lahiri short story outloud, watched a middle-age man in a fancy suit receive news that made him and his wife cry, watched another white person with eye sockets so dark they looked purple talk to a doctor, wondered if that would be our doctor, wondered when the hell a doctor would come around to talk to us. Max hung his head between his knees.

After an hour a woman called the name Maxevan (they squished his name together like that). She was our doctor and I liked her a lot. She used lots of big medical language but called poop poo-poo. I was so thankful she gave me jobs to do, “Fill with warm water to here and stir in medicine so like mud. Make him drink.”
A nurse gave him a shot that brought the fever down and made him feel better and then she hooked him up to an IV. Eventually they wheeled us out of the main room and into a room off to the side. A large young man with a soiled T-shirt and a mouthful of beetlenut behind his face mask (we all wore one) brought Max another blanket when he saw me trying to prop up my scarf behind his neck. He looked after a skeletal old man, perhaps his father or grandfather, who was throwing up little bits every few minutes and later started pooping feet away from us into a toilet with wheels on it, the bloody tissues passing through our periphery no matter how we shielded our eyes. I read the rest of the story out loud and around one in the morning his fever broke, they unplugged the IV from his arm, and with medicine in hand we were free to go home.

I took the next morning off from work to look after Max and make sure his fever stayed down. I realized that this was sort of a silly thing to do but I was scared. In a way it was more for me than for him that I stuck around to make soup and watch him drink water spoonful by spoonful. It never even occurred to me to stay away from his flu and had it occurred to me I wouldn’t have stayed away anyway, so it was no surprise that into Wednesday I started feeling sick. Thursday we stayed home all day, taking turns in the bathroom, struggling just to rearrange a pillow or press “play.” My head ached so bad it crossed my eyes if I sat up. Friday we made it to work but with warnings bubbling in our stomachs all day and night and into the weekend.

Through all of this it rained. We never woke up to circling dust illuminated by yellow morning light as we do most mornings below the big window. Instead, a daytime version of dark and the tapping of rain on the tin roof next door brought in each new day we were sick. I was grateful for weather that condoned my lethargy. In health I’m able to stop depressive tangents before they start, better able to see and appreciate the good stuff, the possibilities all around, but this past week that rational ability was lost on me and my sadness colored everything about my life here. I wanted to go home, fall into the net of the familiar. Seven months seemed too far away. Max and I started talking a lot about next year and the Nelson family trip around the West, the prospect of working with big kids, the next year in Philadelphia, Portland, New York, Ecuador? I was trying in vain to fast-forward. On the way to work on Saturday Max asked if we could please stop talking about stuff that’s far away, if we could remember that will feel better soon and that this living right now is wonderful. “Yes!” I said, noticing that a little amusement park on the river, seen from the train on my first trip to Shilin, was being taken apart big metal piece by piece.

After getting lunch with friends I walked home from Gonguan looking for streets I’ve never before been down. I passed a school at recess, plants growing between the metal bars of balcony grates and dangling, casting shadows on the smooth gray and green surfaces of apartment buildings. I passed hundreds of petite sweaters kicking around in the wind or hanging still in the narrower alleys, cloth-masks pinned to lines too, and then, near home, the tree that grows out of a doorway at a forty-five degree angle and the random sparkling public bathroom tucked between two buildings. Someone put a big bowl of cat food in a doorway with an umbrella placed next to it for hungry street cats to keep dry in case it starts to rain. I heard the sounds of birds and of a stiff broom on a tile floor, someone practicing piano and then more piano sounds tumbled out of a neighboring window fighting for a different mood.

Today is sharp cold and sunny. The air is drier than usual so the chill doesn’t slip into my marrow. I wear my coat open. My stomach has settled and I sit on a plastic playground in a park near home sipping lemonade with honey and pieces of aloe that break with a splash between my teeth. Old women in wheel chairs and matching maroon hats sit side by side in patches of sun. A woman with a wrapped leg tries to walk in circles around the cement circle. Every sunny morning I pass a dozen or so middle-aged women slowly practicing coordinated dances to Christina Aguilera's "Genie in a Bottle" in that cement circle but this afternoon it’s all hers. Two old men blow snot rockets and play Chinese checkers in the gazebo. A young woman uses one of the metal ellipticals built into most city parks. She smiles at me and I think, This is my park. These are my neighbors. I think about how I am finally starting Chinese class tonight and how afterwards I’m looking forward to stopping by the bar with all of the old records. Or maybe we should go to the bar with the narrow second-floor porch overlooking Shida and just watch people. The man who used to sell bad burritos out of a truck in the night market now sells them there.

Finally I am healthy, sitting in a park, looking, drinking lemonade on a Wednesday afternoon in January for crying out loud. It’s less that things are looking up and more that I am.

Hello again Taipei, you look great.


Too sick to write lately, I painted a picture. I'm sorry I've been so out of touch. I'm back now.

Views From 101

Tearful Taiwan Christmas

We remembered to say "Merry Christmas" at least twenty minutes or so after midnight. Rebecca, our friend and owner of the Bushiban bar on Roosevelt was all about it, elbowing those slouching over the bar and holding her glass in the air. Our new friends all shouted and took a swig for Christmas and not long after that we had ourselves a dance party. At 4:30 in the morning Max and I made a bed of pillows and blankets and sleeping bags on the hardwood floor of Kiah's apartment and, lying flat-backed with our heads reeling, said "Merry Christmas" again, just to each other.

Later in the morning Vivian woke us up to eat a delicious egg strata she'd made. With slippers on feet, hot drinks in hand, and warm food in belly we - we being Max, Kiah, Vivian and me - exchanged sweet little gifts. Alex played some choice Christmas music for us and the floor and blankets were soon littered with wrapping paper (and later cat piss) and everything felt a little more like the Christmas I know. I think that's what did it. I think it would have been a tearless Christmas if I spent the whole day trying to learn the dance to the Korean pop song "Sorry Sorry" (I embarassed myself at the dance party) or running errands or wiping bum-bums, anything, but as soon my Taiwanese Christmas felt a little familiar the thought of my faraway family put a lump in my throat.

Kiah and I had to go to school to teach that afternoon. We let time slip through our fingers and left late for work. Saying goodbye to Max the tears started gathering up behind my eyes and I felt it was only a matter of time before I'd cry. The wind hitting my face on the thirty minute scooter ride to work helped to hold them in but sometime after arriving at school my co-teacher, Teacher Maggie, said something silly about Christmas, something sappy and wishful, that turned the faucet. I spent fifteen minutes or so sitting crying on the toilet watching Auntie's mop twirl around the floor of the bathroom trying to get it together, knowing Auntie was so patiently waiting to clean the tile under my feet. It wasn't snow or food or music or smells or home (perhaps the best Christmas was the year we wandered for hours around Rome in light jackets looking for an open restaurant, making fun of the way my dad laughs the hardest at his own jokes). It was the thought of the five of us together and the puzzle we make. It's never as good when one of us can't come out to dinner with the rest, if one of us won't make the two hour trip to the freaking Walden Galleria Mall then there's no way in hell I'm going because I didn't even want to go there in the first place. But if M and D are up front and the back seat is squishy, filled with three, I'll go anywhere. There are very particular ways we all connect, strings I can't even speak to, and when everyone's there we're locked in for whatever ride it will be and we will piss ourselves laughing.



Christmas 2007

Christmas night I wore a sun dress with a light sweater on top and stood outside HJs for twenty minutes or so talking to both brothers, both parents, practically smelling Christmas breakfast and snow. I told them I missed them and about how I cried at work and about how I thought life is the greatest when the five of us are fitting together in the same space. It made me feel happy and safe to say that out loud and to hear Dusty say, "exactly Soph." I went back inside the restaurant to behold the shining eyes of the family I was a part of just then - a beautiful family of Kiah, Vivian, Max, TC, Sil, Willie, and TC's friend whose name I cannot remember - to drink TC's stinging liquor (Merry Christmas! Cheers! we said in English, Chinese, Spanish, even Italian) and eat his famous chicken salad and beef noodles and talk about our plans for our Taiwan Christmas Night - a sloppy and sweet night of KTV. Before Christmas I had no idea that TC sang such sweet jazz or that Willie was a bad ass rapper, "Don't want to be your circus monkey," Willie shouted and we all hollered and laughed, sang back-up.






Christmas 2009

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

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