A Tree Grows in Taipei

https://tinyletter.com/grahammoliver/letters/a-tree-grows-in-taipei

Friends,

This has been a month of celebrations.

First there was graduation, which was a little more awkward than usual given the lack of an audience (only students and a handful of teachers/staff attended), but the kids still had a good spirit and we snapped some good pictures. Don’t worry, there was a healthy amount of subversiveness in the student speeches and a few accessories for their photos or hats. I also have an important update following last month’s letter: they did not play Pomp and Circumstance . I know. I was beside myself with grief.

Then a banquet to celebrate the students and as a kind of goodbye that didn’t happen at school due to Covid restrictions. I met a bunch of parents, some of whom were older mirrors of their kids, some of whom I was glad to have a mask on because my jaw was dropping due to the gap between them and their kid. There is a current trend among people to take pictures from a low angle and as a tall person I do not approve, but it also leads to an amusing variety of head tilt maneuvers during photoshoots. The students’ apparel ranged from prom-y to baseball hat and t-shirt to “just returned from a modeling shoot for a watch or shoe company.” There was a dance floor but little dancing, mostly just swaying while in awe of the karaoke, which was divine. Two of my coworkers did a brilliant rendition of “Barbie Girl.” At one point a family of four got up and all sang amazingly together and the teachers just looked at the amount of talent on stage and then at each other and collectively said, “This is unfair.” There was an open bar and the drinking age is 18 in Taiwan and those two things did not lead to the disaster I was mostly expecting. Graduation robes were on loan from the school for students to take more photos in them, but then the parents started putting them on too and, to borrow from the internet zeitgeist’s vocabulary, I almost overdosed on wholesomeness. Then I actually did overdose on wholesomeness over the following days as I got those closure, heading off, next chapter, farewell emails. And now the students have already started to scatter, some going early to their international destinations. I am wishing the occasional pang of nostalgia on them that induces an email back to yours truly.

Then a wedding! Only our second Taiwanese wedding, and quite different from the first. It was small: the groom was from Europe so his family couldn’t travel, and Covid is still pretty bad and, more importantly, still taken seriously here so a lot of people stay away from group events. Weddings in Taiwan are generally lunch affairs, but still are imbued with alcohol. No YMCA-ing or Electric Sliding — there’s usually music and MAYBE singing but definitely no dancing (though in many other respects weddings here are becoming more and more similar to their American counterparts, so I think it’s only a matter of time before the midnight conga line started by some cousin wearing a tie like a bandana makes its malevolent appearance). The brides here wear 2–3 dresses, switching partway through the meal, and the dress is almost always rented, which seems a lot more practical than the US. The coolest part about this wedding, though, was the groom video conferencing in two friends from Europe who proceeded to quiz the newlyweds over whether or not they were following very traditional Taiwanese customs using the five from this website . Apparently both Germany and Taiwan have old customs involving breaking porcelain (dishes and a tile, respectively) for weddings, who knew? Unfortunately our couple was very modern, so the only tradition they were loosely following was to serve sweet dumplings at the wedding, not specifically in the “bridal chamber.” However, the Germans’ presentation led me to discover that the bride dropping a fan out of a car window to signify leaving her anger behind has joined the postmodern age by having brides drop comically large fans , guns attached to fans , or even entire air conditioners instead .

Then there was my first department meeting with my new job. In the fall, I’ll be working for the Academic Writing Education Center at National Taiwan University , where I will be teaching a couple of classes aimed at upper-level science students who want to write in English, as well as helping the tutoring side of the writing center run through consultations and training student workers. The department meeting was online, which was a small bummer because I’ve only met two coworkers and my boss, but is probably a good sign overall. The meeting was their end-of-year meeting, which is usually when teachers already have one foot out the door and zombie-esque energy levels. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find a very energetic meeting. I was also surprised to learn I’m the only employee not Mandarin fluent, so I had a second Zoom call on my phone to translate the first Zoom call on my laptop, which was a little overwhelming but mostly guilt-inducing. Maybe by next year-end meeting?

And, finally, the picture at the top of today’s letter is the newest addition to our family: a Japanese crepe myrtle bonsai tree. It was Carolina’s gift to me for our anniversary. I’d been talking about wanting to try out bonsai for a while, but this was mostly whimsy; I’d never thought about it seriously and the bulk of my knowledge came from Jet’s interactions with them . The first month we had this tree, I thought it might’ve been an expensive mistake. It started losing leaves rapidly, and I thought in less than a month we were going to kill a twenty-year old tree. Was it too much water/sun? Not enough? Did we need to keep it away from air conditioning or dehumidifier? Should we try giving it plant food? I was wishing I’d just gotten a hardy bamboo plant instead. But once we figured out watering it (a lot more than you’d think, and with a spray bottle) and got a good rotation between outdoors and indoors, it regained its health and even started growing a few new leaves (which appear to be a little too large, a sign it’s not getting quite enough sun). Japanese crepe myrtle bonsais have a wide range of looks depending on what the owner does with the trimming and potting, but you can Google to see some others. I hope to report back to you with pictures of flowers eventually! I have no idea what color they’ll be.

Be patient with anticipation.

Further reading:

• Fury . Small action .
• I have been to the mountaintop and returned with the Peanut Cilantro Sundae from Burger King . Which, honestly, a great concept, but poor execution — it just had peanut powder and a little peanut syrup which was not peanut-y enough, and the cilantro was mostly stems. Taiwan has a street food dish that’s similar but much better (the ice cream is typically taro), although I haven’t found where to buy it anywhere close to my house. I fixed the Burger King Sundae by adding some Lao Gan Ma, and if you haven’t tried chili crisp oil on ice cream , it’s surprisingly divine.
• Here’s a really wonderful poem for the end of the academic year: “Statement of Teaching Philosophy” by Keith Leonard.
• And then there’s “How to Make a Body” by my friend Jason Myers, which is both exquisite and written in a perfect way for me to imagine his sonorous voice reading it. “Hunger is the body’s syllabus,” indeed.
• And I guess this is a month for poetry, because I also came across “Dust” by Dorianne Laux and was spellbound by it, especially the last three lines.
• Also really enjoyed this personal essay by a drag queen who did a library reading that was protested. Vogue and Teen Vogue are doing the work other publications are neglecting.
• Lisa Lucas is a gift to my social media feed. I love her enthusiasm for everything — lately it’s been gardening in the face of an awful world as a sort of protest against forces that seem bent on misery. This profile of her in the NYTimes doesn’t say anything really new or surprising about the publishing industry, but is still a really good summation of both the forces holding it back and Lucas’s + others’ efforts to push it forward.
• For the first time in a while, I wrote an article ! It’s my first for The News Lens International , a website based here in Taiwan and in Hong Kong. I reviewed/gave context for last year’s Taiwan-developed video game, The Legend of Tianding . Liao Tianding is kind of like Taiwan’s Robin Hood. Hope you enjoy the article.

Right now, there are two containers of mangoes cut up in our refrigerator. There are two containers because we’ve been regularly buying mangoes, then in a single week two of our friends gave us mangoes (both from Taiwan’s mango capital, Pingtung/​屏東 ), so we have to not only keep cut up pieces in the refrigerator, we also have to know which ones have been in the refrigerator longer so we can try to eat fast enough to stay ahead of them spoiling. It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it. My preferred way to eat them is to take a cube of very ripe mango, place it on my tongue, then press my tongue against the roof of my mouth, causing the fruit to basically dissolve. You have to close your eyes for this because you want all of your perception focused just on that divine flavor.

Mangoes, man. They almost make Taiwan’s summer weather worth it.

-g