"Belong to your place"
Friends,
It’s September, which means the beginning of another school year. This is the first semester I’ve had a class begin with more students than chairs, which I’m going to choose to believe is due to my incredible teaching prowess and not due to a reputation for being an easy grader.
This month I came across Ralph Fiennes reading a Wendell Berry poem, “A Poem on Hope”. Berry, lifelong activist and fellow Kentuckian, wrote about the strength place can give you, but he always emphasized the reciprocal relationship: “No place at last is better than the world. The world / Is no better than its places. Its places at last / Are no better than their people while their people / Continue in them. When the people make / Dark the light within them, the world darkens.” Here’s the author reading the full version, instead (the Fiennes reading is abridged). I can’t find a legitimate text copy to link to you - I can’t even find what collection it’s from after a lot of table of contents browsing. Help me out, if you can.
If I were to summarize a lot of the writing I’ve done in this newsletter over the last six years, I would say that a central theme is basically, “I like this place. Can I build a full life here?” And I think the conclusion that I’ve come to and that Berry would encourage is that it doesn’t matter, I should act as if I’m doing so anyways. That is often difficult! Our apartment often feels temporary, life is incomplete without a dog, on average we’re gone from here for two full months each year. America’s current trajectory pushes me away from wanting to live there, but that same trajectory seems to be disruptive to Taiwan’s longterm status. (Speaking of which, don’t expect any packages from me anytime soon. Due to the US’s changes in tariffs and customs, Taiwan’s postal service has stopped sending parcels to the US. We can still use DHL/UPS/FedEx, but it’s often 3x the price.) I hope I’m wrong! Even if I’m not, obligation pulls us to other places, as well.
But every place can feel temporary and unstable if I let it, right?
Berry was absolutely not thinking of an urban neighborhood that looks like ours when he wrote, “Hope then to belong to your place by your own knowledge of what it is that no other place is, and by your caring for it as you care for no other place”, but it seems like a good goal regardless. And so I try to learn, mostly by paying attention more.
There are little things that make me happy, like a new sign for a NTD$10,000 (~USD$330) reward for a missing parrot by the temple. A new caretaker for an elderly neighbor loudly says hi to everyone and most people answer her and as a result I’ve gotten to hear some people speak who have otherwise been silent roadside fixtures for the last six years. On the way to the bus stop is a loose tile in front of a motorcycle repair garage. If it’s been raining, water pools under that tile, and if you step on it too hard then the water is forced out, splashing your leg. It is satisfying to remember this, to avoid it. Every time I look up and see Taipei 101, I can’t help but hear Ani DiFranco lyrics:
They say goldfish have no memory
I guess their lives are much like mine
And the little plastic castle
Is a surprise every time“Little Plastic Castle”
Oh yeah, there’s a giant iconic building just over there. A little jolt of pleasant surprise. I feel the same jolt sometimes on the train: oh yeah, I’m on this amazing public transportation I wouldn’t have access to in most other places. Or sometimes I get the jolt anywhere, just a general: oh yeah, I’m living in Taiwan. I try to turn that jolt to appreciation. It’s not hard. And then, later, I try to turn that appreciation into motivation and contribution.
A good friend lives in the best retirement community I’ve had exposure to, and recently she talked about how one of their jobs as members of the community is to persuade and teach new arrivals to treat the place as a community as opposed to something akin to a cruise ship. This struck me because of how applicable it is not just to retirement communities, but to every place, and how all of us, myself included, would be better served by thinking about how to contribute to an active community instead of existing passively in the same physical space with those around us. More work, but worth it.
Further reading:
Buttondown was kind of enough to profile my newsletter as part of their customer testimonials! Using their service has been great, and I hope it remains so.
We’re mid Ghost Month (Broad and Ample Road for a primer), and every year PXMart, a supermarket chain here, has great occasion-specific commercials. Last year and the year before focused on ghosts punishing the wicked living, this year is a music video focused on the rituals of the living during this time. They’re all incredibly well-produced and fun.
Focus Taiwan had a great pair of local culture pieces this month. The first is about a “Broom Grandpa” who still makes and sells homemade brooms in Taitung. The second is about the cats of Dihua Street, a popular traditional shopping area of Taipei. Cats are, unfortunately for me (bad allergies), very popular assistant shopkeepers here. Both articles feature really great photos.
At Asian Raisins, friend of the newsletter and former student Natalie Tai interviewed the people behind The Emerald’s Touch, a documentary profiling the queer community in Indonesia’s fight for equal rights and political representation. Check out their trailer for more info.
Jordyn Haime has a long deep dive into a Japanese church that’s dedicated to Anne Frank, using that specific situation to discuss relationships between east Asia and Judaism, Israel, and the Holocaust writ large. It’s a strange and fascinating article, highly recommend.
I do not know what it will take to get the US to invest more in public transportation, but it is my continuing joy to live in a country that connects its cities by rail, so it makes me very happy to see a small amount show up in the US. Last month was the first time since Katrina that Amtrak went from Mobile to New Orleans.
During our first day of class I’m still having to evolve what I want to say about LLMs. I’m thankful for having a lot of smart voices to guide me on that, since I’m exhausted just considering it. Especially true for Tressie McMillan Cottom’s words on this NYT panel: “Most of the promotion of A.I. in schools boils down to: Well, it’s happening, and so students need to know.
But there’s nothing attaching it to learning outcomes. There’s nothing assessing its risk to privacy, to data, to the mental and emotional and cognitive development of students. That’s actually what education is supposed to do.” I just hope the endless hype and conversation around it ends soon, and I’m betting it’s going to (which will be fun for the stock market). Charlie Warzel agrees, and writes very intelligent analysis on why.Loved Benji Hart’s story in Hammer & Hope about a Black church in Chicago that worked to welcome and assist Venezuelan refugees. The photos are so good.
I finally got my act together with regards to reading manga digitally! I really enjoyed The Guy She Was Interested in Wasn't a Guy at All which was so warm and full of energy. I’ve also reread my all-time favorite, Solanin. I’m looking for more recommendations of slice-of-life manga if you have them. (But I didn’t like the oft recommended I Want to Eat Your Pancreas.)
Our amazing Mandarin teacher had a baby this summer, so I took a couple of months with only the bare minimum to maintain learning. I’ve been feeling kind of plateaued. Simple conversations are easy and offer little practice, but I’m still not at a level where I can have complex conversations about much besides food.
There’s also a bunch of words I have to spend time thinking about before I use. 葡萄 (pútáo) and 蘿蔔 (luóbo) don’t sound anything alike, but if I don’t consider carefully when looking at a menu, I might get them mixed up. Which is a problem, because one is a grape and the other is a daikon radish. 驚訝 (jīngyà)、驚喜 (jīngxǐ) and 驚嚇 (jīngxià) all mean surprise, but the first is neutral, the second is positive, and the third is negative. 嚴重 (yánzhòng)、嚴肅 (yánsù) and 嚴格 (yángé) can all mean serious, but they’re used in different situations, like for a strict teacher or a major accident, and I can never remember which. 滿意 (mǎnyì) and 滿足 (mǎnzú) are both translated as satisfied, but one is used more like a mood/feeling and one is more like meeting a need. I think.
Here, let’s make this easy. I hope your upcoming week involves both 滿意 and 滿足. Boom.
-g