A Writer and a Graveyard

https://tinyletter.com/grahammoliver/letters/a-writer-and-a-graveyard

Friends,

I’ve recently joined a Taiwan-centric book club (see Wenpei Lin’s newsletter Transcreation if interested) and the second book we read was Pai Hsien-yung/白先勇’s Taipei People /臺北人. I had previously read the book before moving to Taiwan, as it’s probably the most prominent piece of translated Taiwanese literature, and at the time I found it to be a quiet collection of slice-of-life stories about post-war people nostalgic for the past. I didn’t have enough context to understand all the nuance, like the title itself being ironic. The stories are about recent arrivals to Taipei after the KMT/PRC civil war, people who largely saw Taipei as a temporary stop before regaining their place in China. In short, they would never call themselves Taipei people.

Armed with a little more context, Taipei People was still a great book. But since I’d read it already, I also picked up the author’s other book translated into English, Crystal Boys /孽子 (closer to “sons of sin”), which was just absolutely wonderful. The book is about a group of gay men in 1970s Taipei, who hold court in a public park. They’re outcasts and largely poor. Most have been disowned by their families. Some steal, some prostitute themselves. But the focus of the book is on the cyclical nature of their lives: new arrivals, people who drift away or die, the similar versions of the same story they all live. It’s also full of these devastatingly concise and illuminating depictions of each character. There have been a few adaptations since, one of which was recently subtitled into English by Taiwan’s public television and put on YouTube for free .

Light spoilers that I don’t think would affect your enjoyment of the book: One of the most interesting facets of the story, with context, are two fathers in the book. The main character A-Qing’s father is a disgraced military veteran who lives in poverty in military housing, whose wife left him, and who kicks A-Qing out of the house when he discovers A-Qing’s homosexuality. At the end of the book, A-Qing seems to be considering reaching out to his father again. The other father is “Papa Fu,” another military veteran who becomes the characters’ financial benefactor. As the book progresses we learn that Papa Fu’s son was punished for being caught in a homosexual act in the military, that Papa Fu berated his son when he learned about it, and that his son subsequently committed suicide. He blames both his son and himself.

Pai Hsien-yung’s own relationship with his father is similarly complicated, and it’s an easy jump to speculate on the real-life inspiration for the two fathers in Crystal Boys . Bai Chongxi/白崇禧 (same last name but most common Anglicizations are different) was a high-ranking figure in the KMT military who was cast out of the inner circle due after the war due to disagreements with Chiang Kai-Shek and died in 1966. The exact details are unclear, but their relationship was rocky and the last time they saw each other was in 1962, when Pai Hsien-yung left Taiwan for America. He’s lived in Santa Barbara since, and interestingly one of his more recent works is a photobiography of his father.

But for a personal tie-in, Bai Chongxi’s grave is a short walk up the hill by our house. I’ve written before about the large cemetery that we walk past on a regular basis. It’s one of the largest in Taipei, and it shows up several times in Crystal Boys as “Six Plows Cemetery.” The photo I put at the top is the sun setting over the cemetery, which covers a large hillside. Bai Chongxi was a Muslim, and his grave is part of a large Islamic section .

This same cemetery has been in the news lately because many of its residents have been given five years to be relocated. The city is turning part of the cemetery into a cultural heritage area, due to it containing a mass grave of approximately 264 political victims from the White Terror (in addition to other historically significant graves). Taiwan has also been strongly pushing for families to practice cremation, especially around Taipei, due to limited land suitable for cemeteries.

The move has been an odd development to witness. First, every single tomb got a sign posted nearby explaining that they had to move and the deadline. Then, a tent was setup nearby with more information about the plan. Now, families have started to move their family members, but in a very inconsistent manner. They were already a very diverse crowd of burials: some are underground, some are in above ground stone caskets, some are in these little buildings. Some had little patios around them or surrounded by meticulously cared for plants, some were overgrown with weeds. And now, they grow even more diverse, as some families simply removed or sanded off the headstone. A few graves have been completely smashed and even filled with trash after being emptied. The majority, of course, are untouched, though whether they remain occupied or not is hard to tell. A slightly chaotic picture.

Three interesting notes are that a) Taiwanese people are constantly astonished we choose to regularly walk past the cemetery, yet there are a constant stream of fellow walkers/hikers/bicyclists out with us when we do, b) while most families take caring for their family plots seriously and there’s even a dedicated “tomb-sweeping” holiday, the area around the cemetery is one of the only places I’ve been in Taipei that has a lot of litter, and c) my favorite sights around the cemetery are the literally hundreds of snails you see around the walls of it and a small shrine at the top that plays soft music 24/7.

So, Bai Chongxi, buried about a kilometer away from where I sit, fought against Qing rule, then against the Japanese, then against the PRC. Fled to Taiwan where he was kept under surveillance by the military he fought with due to his disagreements with Chiang Kai-Shek. His son grew up to become an internationally acclaimed writer, openly homosexual, and lives in the United States. And now, the cemetery where he is buried is going to become a monument to the political victims of the military dictatorship he helped to bring to power before it exiled him.

What a road.

Sources:
1) Information about the relocation .
2) Historical site registration .
3) Strange stories from the cemetery .

The pre-semester jitters are setting in. One short month until I’ll be teaching new classes at a new university, but that’s an understatement isn’t it? Whole new world, in a way. Let’s hope I hit the ground running. If you’re interested in learning more about the department I’ll be working for, here’s a fun/corny little YouTube video .

Further reading:

• Loved my friend Allison Grace Myers’ beautiful essay about becoming a mother in Mutha Magazine .
• Patrick McGinty’s close reading of “crypto memoirs” is my favorite literary article I read this month.
• Haven’t attempted biscuits in a long time (nor cooked much with cheese or butter), but this kimchi-cheddar biscuits recipe in the NYT from Bryan Washington (and the accompanying article ) is looking very appealing right now.
• I’m looking forward to checking out Isaac Fitzgerald’s memoir Dirtbag, Massachusetts , but until then I’m thinking about his wonderful article “The World Needs Uncles, Too” from Esquire .
• The two biggest events of the past month for English-Asia-Online conversations (which does not reflect other conversations accurately at all) were the assassination of Shinzo Abe and the upcoming (as I write this) visit by Pelosi to Taiwan. If you want to read nuanced commentary on these topics, I recommend Aurora Chang on why Abe was so popular in Taiwan and a roundtable of Taiwanese-American voices about Pelosi’s visit at Hyphen Magazine .
• Renaissance is, unsurprisingly, a masterpiece.
• RIP to John Aielli, a weird one. I knew I was growing up when I started to find his on-air wanderings charming as opposed to exasperating (though charming only in small doses).
• Self-plugs! I wrote two things relevant to teenage Graham this month. One was about how my self-harm twenty years ago changes the way I move in the world today . The second was a completely uncalled for essay about the most important video game of my life, Everquest .
• Related: Three brief entries on Everquest and video game addiction by Ta-Nehisi Coates: 1 , 2 , 3 .

The best book I read this month was Oliver Sacks’ memoir On the Move , which is a phenomenal read, but one of the many things it got me thinking about is the size of our worlds. For Sacks, he very purposefully narrowed his world to his life’s work to an extreme extent, often to the detriment of his friends and family, and he wrote about how he purposefully had very little idea of what was going on in the world outside of his work and related interests.

I think when I was growing up, the goal was always to aim for a bigger world, a broader world. And I think that continued for a long time, but recently, maybe towards the end of my stint in grad school, I find myself wanting to pare back. That might seem like an odd thing to say alongside the fact that I made a choice to live life across two countries. Life in Taiwan has allowed me a path to cutting back on a lot of little inconveniences of life, but there are still moments where I feel overextended. A symptom of a digital world, perhaps, that allows me to keep tabs on far more places and people and events and ideas than I should. But I don’t think the internet is purely to blame.

I hope you are mindful of the size of your world and are turning that knob as you see fit.

-g