A Clean, Quiet Place

Friends,

Taipei is the first city I’ve lived in the middle of. I’ve lived on the edges of Austin and Washington DC, far enough away from everything to where I needed to get into a car to do anything at all. As I’ve said before, I love the convenience of urban life so so much. I love being able to read a news article or chat with friends during my bus commute (or just rest my eyes). I love being able to walk to anything I could possibly want to do, including being able to take the longer walk to and from work on nice weather days. I love having so many places easily accessible by the subway, or train, or bus. I would be happy if I never drove a car again.

All of that said, living in a city and a tall apartment building for a year and a half has definitely made me appreciate moments outside of the city in a different way. Even though Taipei has a relatively high amount of green space for a large city, being in a space surrounded by trees and silence feels so unusual and noticeable in a way that I definitely think it wasn’t before this year. The above picture was one such moment. It’s a lovely vegetarian restaurant in Taoyuan , which is kind of like Austin’s Round Rock to Taipei. Even though the restaurant had a crowd of people, outside it was so quiet and serene and I had to pause for a long moment to just think about how nice it was for me to be in a completely silent place. At home we fight for silence, with white noise and futile adjustments of our overly loud dehumidifier. When we decided to move here, I knew less space would be an issue, but it’s been small, really. The lack of quiet is something else — we can’t even get away from the noise of our own lives. You can hear the washing machine or the oven or the keyboard from almost anywhere in the apartment. Of course, my rose-tinted glasses often eliminate all the annoyances we had with our house in Texas. I’m sure I could go back into my email and find what I was annoyed with then and feel better, but I don’t really need to, I’m pretty sure the pros outweigh the cons. Especially when we’re a short train ride away from some silence. (Or an even shorter bus ride to Da’an Park , which can feel like a semi-secluded pocket and you can almost but not quite escape the noise of traffic.)

Besides silence, living in a city has changed our relationship to cleanliness too. I am baffled at the amount of dust that accumulates in our tiny apartment. I have become convinced that living our lives produces a set amount of dust, and so the amount of dust produced in our Texas home is the same amount crammed into our 1/3-the-size Taipei apartment. When we first moved here, we knew from the start that our apartment would be a shoe-free zone, which is the norm for a lot of places — the libraries and computer labs at school are socks-only, the dentist gives you sandals to change into before the waiting room, shoe shelves are common pieces of furniture everywhere — but we’ve grown past that into people who change clothes as soon as we get home, keep outside clothes isolated. Part of it is that it’s part of Taiwan’s culture, but it’s also been emphasized repeatedly in the last year as a way to limit possible viral/bacterial transmission. Which, who knows, but there’s something really pleasant about shedding the version of yourself who was outside when you enter your own space. Sometimes I try to think about what’s best when it comes to a healthy microbiome and the number of hands that touch the same rail I touched on the bus and get a little overwhelmed. But there are worse things to worry about.

Of course, Taiwan’s relationship to cleanliness is not without humorous contradictions and quirks. My students take off their shoes to go into the library, wear masks to prevent the spread of germs, have plastic wrap on the elevator buttons that’s replaced on a daily basis, use UV lights to occasionally disinfect their classrooms, and have looked at me in disgust when I picked up a chair and put it on top of a desk to fix a broken piece of it (having something that touched the floor then touching a space others will touch is something I don’t really think about but people here definitely do). I will never forget the look of horror on a student’s face when she described to me how a substitute teacher licked his finger in order to better turn the pages in a book, a practice the student had never heard of, never wanted to hear of, and couldn’t believe was common in the US. But at the same school, students eat maskless a foot away from each other and serve their own lunches out of bins of food the whole class uses, aren’t shy about reaching into each others’ bags of chips or whatever snacks, their post-bathroom handwashing is only a little better than my memory of American students’ (which is to say, not great), etc. But the bigger conundrum is that the school puts children in charge of most janitorial duties: sweeping, window washing, etc., which is great, instills a work value into them, levels their social class with the people who work there some, etc. Except the school doesn’t back up much of the students’ cleaning with adult-backed cleaning, so, as an example, I don’t think the floor of the communal teacher office has been mopped since before I started working there, only half-heartedly swept by middle schoolers. I spilled some water once and wiped it up with a napkin and the napkin came back black. I’m also starting to become a little bit paranoid about what might lie inside of our air conditioning units.

But it’s probably making me stronger, right?

I am getting into some really confusing grammar learning with my Chinese classes. Right now I’m working on the difference usage between three prepositions: 跟, 對, and 給. The first can be translated as with, the second as towards, and the third as give (but use grammatically as a preposition for another verb, similar to how we say “give someone a call” in English). But they overlap a lot, so, for example, you can explain with/toward/give someone, but you can’t give someone a smile or smile with them, you can only smile towards them. It’s difficult!

Further reading:

• Speaking of city living and wonderful public transportation, a reminder that it will never be possible in America if the primary motivator is profit (wow the writer had fun with this one).
• Sometimes I find myself telling someone that my friends and family in Austin are not getting hit that hard by the pandemic. But immediately there’s a little ping in my head that people in Austin are still affected more than they should be, even if it’s less than other places. Here’s a depressing, unsurprising in-depth look at how unprepared Texas was for… anything.
• And, of course, it’s much bigger than Texas. Up the road from where I grew up in western Kentucky is St. Francois County in southeast Missouri. The county health director wrote an infuriating breakdown of the responses she got to trying to do her job to help her county get through this pandemic. It’s… something.
• Going to hit your heart again, but in a slightly different direction. Nicole Chung is one of those writers who is always full of thoughtfulness and compassion and reading her essay about not being able to be with her mother as her mother passed away was so raw and touching. She even apologizes during it because she knows her story isn’t as bad as so many others. (If you haven’t read her book about interracial adoption or seen her advice column Care and Feeding , you will be better for either/both.)
• Here’s something lighter: my favorite read of the last month was a brief history of the Muppets , a history I definitely did not know enough about. This skit , maybe the earliest featuring Kermit, is so deliciously absurd.
• Remember that time a phantom drone shut down Gatwick airport? I don’t know why this story is interesting to me — I think it’s the in-your-face proof that our eyes are so unreliable.
• Three favorites from Twitter: 1) Someone knows my father , 2) Shel Silverstein (and I listened for you and yes this album sounds exactly like how this photo looks), 3) Celeste Ng trying to comprehend the tiny desk .

I finally found a Taiwanese band I like, thanks to the Twitter account “ Taiwan Song a Day ”! 鐵擊 means Iron Punch which sounds very metal but their music doesn’t sound very metal. Here is a song . Enjoy!

I hope wherever you are is as clean and quiet as you want it to be.

-g