At Home, Online, Overgrown

https://tinyletter.com/grahammoliver/letters/at-home-online-overgrown

Friends,

I love the word “overgrown,” and of course love the situation itself. What situation led to my above pictures of a door and a backhoe being abandoned on the side of the road and slowly being reclaimed by nature? Failed construction project? Or ambitious successful garden decoration project? I’m not sure, but passing by them makes me happy, especially now when the weather is getting nicer and nicer.

September has been a month of new routines. I ought to write in the mornings right after walking, but I don’t as often as I should (either the writing or the walking). Instead I think about writing when I’m trying to fall asleep and then get up and type a flurry of 500 words and mess up my sleep. I read and nap in the afternoons. Work is entirely in the evenings or weekends now since I’m working with students who go to school during the normal workday. Mornings and afternoons are also dedicated to interrupting Carolina’s work with “LOOK AT THIS PICTURE OF A DOG.” It’s very important.

On work: I’m officially a private tutor. More specifically, I’m unofficially a private tutor, since it is currently illegal for me to work. It’s one of those laws that many people break (either because of a lack of work permit like me, or because their work contract or student visa prohibits the extra work), but fortunately for me it’ll only be illegal for a little longer. Once we hit three years here, I’ll be eligible for permanent residency status. Permanent residency only has two real benefits: 1) If Carolina got fired or quit her job, we wouldn’t be required to leave, and 2) I would no longer need an employer to sponsor my work permit, and instead could work any job. Taiwan actually has ways to achieve this quicker for educators, but I don’t quite meet the requirements (amusingly, if I had gotten a job at UT instead of TxSt or ACC I would meet them, as one of the requirements is to have worked at a top 100 university).

Currently I tutor two students on a weekly basis, plus a bunch of one/two/five-off appointments for college essays. In a month or two the college-related appointments will fall off and I’ll need to find additional ways to fill my time, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. This work is mostly fantastic — it pares away several parts of teaching I disliked or wasn’t good at, like classroom management, speedy assessment, and constant lesson-planning. Instead, the focus is on parts I love: focusing on very specific skills and improving them, tailoring instruction for one student. The college essays are even better; it’s one of the few times students are both writing about themselves and very invested in the outcome. There are a few downsides too, of course. Small stuff about schedule and commute. Biggest thing is being a cog in Taiwan’s cultural “more is better” approach to education. As a teacher, I could help reduce the massive amount of homework students are expected to be given, but as a tutor, my job is based on adding to that load. I am one of three tutors for one of my students, a student who is in middle school and is above average in all of their classes. I guess the best I can hope for is to do more good than harm, but if you compared my work with 1.5 hours more sleep or time to just process life in general, I’m not sure I’d come out on top.

Consolation: I can’t be compared to empty time, because that’s not what I would be replaced with. Like the proverbial situation where you’re running from a bear, I only have to be faster than (less boring than) the tutor who would be my replacement.

Last newsletter I was thinking about the longterm geography of housing, but housing is linked to career, and so of course I also have to be thinking about next steps there. When I first came to Taiwan, I was hoping to get a job at a university teaching part-time like I did in the US. Part-time university teaching appeals to me greatly, because it gives you a meaningful anchor both in terms of schedule and direction, it gives you access to a lot of resources like library databases and a great social circle, and it still allows plenty of time for writing or whatever else you want to do. I was unable to get a job at universities in Taiwan due to a combination of reasons: I only have a Master’s instead of a PhD, I was only looking at a couple of universities in Taipei to limit the commute, and I only have two academic publications. This meant I was only eligible for the lowest of teaching positions, and the few that were open did not seem open to the work permit thing. Now that I’m approaching no longer needing a work permit, I will try again next year, but honestly my two years away from academia probably hurt me more than the additional two years of teaching experience helps. So I think if I stay in Taiwan, I’d mix together teaching at a language center or a university with a little writing, a little tutoring, and a little substituting. The dream would also be able to mix in a little translation eventually, but wow does that seem like an insurmountable mountain away. This mixing together several different jobs has always fit my personality really well, and I think it’s one of the many reasons being a full-time high school teacher was so completely exhausting for me. Based on what I’ve seen in my time here, I think the only way to accomplish this legally while you’d need a work permit is to work for one of the for-profit after-school programs (aka buxibans), and I don’t think I would be good at that. I actually had a conversation with the government office that said getting a part-time work permit is no big deal since I don’t need a visa sponsorship (because of Carolina), but multiple workplaces have disagreed with that statement.

If I moved back to the US… I have no idea what I would do. Academia in the US is even further out of reach than in Taiwan at this point unless I publish a book in the near future. Maybe a job related to college admissions would be good based on my experience. Or maybe I should dedicate my life to making kombu more popular in the US. The possibilities are endless.

The Chinese word for tutor is 家教, which just means house teacher, but amusingly if I do it online it becomes上網家教, a kind of oxymoronic phrase of teaching at home on the web. Fortunately, here in Taiwan we’ve had almost no local cases, so even McDonald’s is fully opening back up and there hopefully won’t be much 上網家教 in my future.

Further reading:

• Taiwan’s public television station, PTS, has launched a new English YouTube channel where they are uploading movies and shows with English subtitles at a breakneck pace. I don’t have any specific recommendations yet, but I plan on making good use of it! If you find something good please let me know.
• Besides overgrown things, my regular walking path involves passing a gigantic, gorgeous mountainside cemetery. Part of that cemetery is clearly Islamic — I’d read a little bit about it and learned it started with connection to a group of Islamic soldiers but has grown since. Well, last month 馬映卿 at TWReporter wrote an article about the Islamic cemetery situation in Taiwan , which taught me just how special and unusual our nearby cemetery is. While current generations in Taiwan primarily use cremation now, cremation is against the Islamic faith, and there are only two major Islamic cemeteries in the whole country which are both running out of room. The article is in Chinese but autotranslate works pretty well!
• It’s Nobel season! Which means the same thing it always means! We should read Alex Shephard’s annual article breaking down the possible winners, which is good as it always is. Plus, I’ll repeat my perennial opinion, which is that I had no problem with Dylan specifically winning the award, but the award’s gender imbalance is ridiculous at this point. My top choice pre-Dylan was Didion, but now it probably shouldn’t go to an American again so soon, so now I think my top choice is Can Xue.
• It’s also MacArthur season! 2021’s winners , as always, encompass just so so much thought. I’ve been a big fan of Daniel Alarcón for a long time, and met him in Aspen right as he was beginning Radio Ambulante. Two other winners that I’m happy to see there are Don Mee Choi and Hanif Abdurraqib. I mostly know Don Mee Choi as a translator, but her own poetry is fraught and stares into you. Here’s “Woe Are You?” If you’re a fan of modern music, sneakers, or Columbus Ohio, you should definitely be following Hanif’s Instagram .
• Two Covid articles, one about hope and one about rage. Nicole Chung is moving on from her previous gigs at Slate’s advice column “Care and Feeding” and from editing Catapult , but I’m excited to see what she does next. Here she writes thoughtfully as ever about how to offer kids hope in the face of a seemingly unending pandemic. On the flip side, Charlie Warzel wrote about the building anger over the pandemic , using Reddit’s HermanCainAwards as a touching off point. I especially liked his opening describing the layers of emotions being built as the pandemic progresses.
• My friend Jayne Moore Waldrop’s novel Drowned Town is releasing this month and I’m so excited to read it. Jayne’s writing is always so observant, respectful, and keeps a close connection to the big picture. Here she is in Kentucky Monthly writing about the historical inspiration for her novel at the Land Between the Lakes , a little slice of Kentucky that takes up a wide berth in my memory.
• President Tsai Ing-Wen wrote an op-ed for Foreign Affairs basically laying out a broad case for the world to support Taiwan. If you’re familiar with Taiwan at all, I don’t think you’ll find anything surprising in it, but I do think the act of a world leader writing so circumspectly and directly through a variety of lens is just comforting, even if the reason (potential military action) is not.

Before Ang Lee directed films you know like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain , he directed a handful classic Taiwanese films. We recently watched Eat Drink Man Woman , which unfortunately does not seem to be on any streaming services, but you should find a way to watch anyways. It’s got some of my favorite cooking scenes I’ve ever seen, including this opening which you should definitely consume. It also, moreso than the recent, more serious Taiwanese films we’ve watched ( Little Big Women , A Sun ) does a great job with puncturing pockets of sadness with little darts of humor. I’m a big fan.

I hope that if you hit any sad pockets that the darts of humor quickly come your way.

-g