August and Everything After

Friends,

I feel like a complete jerk to be taunting you like this, but part of the writing contract is that I must face the confront the truth along with my reader, so here goes: even though we have near-complete freedom to gather and move about, the struggle of summer break thus far has been convincing myself to go outside. The heat. Good Lord, the heat. All of my decisions are made in terms how long they involve being outside. Example: Market A is closer, but Market B has a coffee shop halfway between there and the apartment, so I can punctuate the stifling journey with an ice coffee’d, air conditioned pit stop. I finally understand why so many people sit drinking easily portable drinks in 7-Eleven.

I actually don’t really mind the feeling of heat, but I have grown vain in my old age and hate looking like the big sweaty American (especially when I am, definitely, the big sweaty American). And so there are outer limits to my journeys. The library represents one such outer limit. Well, two, actually: our house is almost exactly halfway between two branches. The Da’an district’s branch (not to be confused with the Central branch which is also in Da’an district) and Sanxing’s branch. I use both, depending on what I want to pass on the way there. Sanxing’s is my more frequented and the more practical. It’s beside the better market, grocery, and coffee shop, and has two lovely parks nearby as well (photos here and here ). But the walk to the Da’an branch is the more scenic one. There’s the temple where it’s not unusual to see a live pig tied up outside, laying on the sidewalk in the shade of a tiny pickup truck (as opposed to the temple closest to our apartment where the common animal are turtles in buckets). There’s this tiny store that is packed to the absolute brim with gorgeous, dark-stained wooden furniture that looks so lovingly polished and high quality but is exposed to the outside air and the owner’s smoking constantly. I have never seen a customer there. And, finally, the last block before the library consists entirely of funeral-related businesses, so it’s endless scenes of families dressed in black exiting vehicles and exquisitely dressed people holding doors open for them. The library itself is in a dilapidated five-story building with a grocery on the first floor, a senior citizens center on the second floor, and the library on the third and fourth floors. I don’t know what’s on the fifth floor. In the grocery, people are not wearing masks, but in the library they are and a smiling little old lady checks everyone’s temperature as they come in. This might seem illogical — what’s the point of precautions in one but not the other? — but to me it’s also a good sign that if conditions in Taiwan were to change that we would go back to being super cautious very easily. As I’ve said before, masks were a part of everyday life before Covid, and I think that’s a good thing.

So I sweat for my books now, as one should. Most recently I sweat to get There, There by Tommy Orange and All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders. On the way to the library, there were people wearing long sleeves while riding a motorbike, which makes sense, and then other people wearing long sleeves for no discernible reason. Almost no one else is sweating. There are three high-rise apartments being constructed along the way, and the sign says the project completion date is 2025, and I don’t know if that’s an estimate or a worst-case scenario or when a permit runs out. A woman was being interviewed in front of the grocery store by a television crew and I have no idea why. She looked confused about it as well.

I make the decision about what to read by going down my “To-Read” list on Goodreads and seeing what the Taipei library has. I want to interview the person in charge of deciding what English language books to buy and how they distribute them among branches, because I cannot find any rhyme or reason to it. For example, they do not have an English translation of The Tale of Genji , which was my big ambitious summer plan (that probably wouldn’t have happened anyways), but they do have eleven copies spread across two translations of Don Quixote . Thankfully, ebooks can fill their gaps. And thankfully friends still pass along books in the mail every now and then, the most recent of which was Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout. If you haven’t read Olive Kitteridge , a series of connected short stories that won the 2008 Pulitzer, you most definitely should. There have been three follow-up books, the first two of which were just okay but the most recent one ( Olive, Again ) was fantastic. They all fit into one of my favorite genres of stories, which are ones where people look back on their lives and are surprised by what they find. The absolute top of this genre is Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (and its follow-ups), but Minae Mizumura, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Virginia Woolf all operate in a similar space.

I do have a question for you, gentle reader. How do you make decisions about how to stay connected to the outside world, especially when it’s especially outside of your daily life during quarantine-ish behavior? For me, I don’t want my conversations with friends to be loaded down with the triviality? negativity? frustrations? of current events. I find my preferred way to learn about the world outside of my immediate purview is through the filter of public voices I trust, sympathize with, respect, etc., and while I can get a little of this through newsletters and articles (and I should make more space for it to come from podcasts), a majority of it has to come from social media. And, my friends, I am bad at social media. I can be glad to learn something from, say, William Yang, giggle at some clever observation of Tressie Cottom McMillan, but then, for some reason, I can’t help myself. I can’t stop myself from clicking on the comments of, say, a Sarah Jeong or Nikole Hannah-Jones tweet even though I know exactly what’s going to be there and exactly how it’s going to make my mood worse. I guess that’s the quandary of the information age — how much information do we need and what’s the best way to get that information, both in terms of morality, efficiency, and our own self-health?

Further reading:

• A person I always want to filter the outside world for me is Anne Helen Petersen. One of her recent newsletter deals with one of the many, many downsides of the current information age: the death of local news . You should read her take on it, subscribe to her newsletter, then read this as a companion piece: Nathan Robinson’s “ The Truth is Paywalled but the Lies are Free .”
• John Lewis was a founding father. His words . His eulogy .
• I’ve had Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns on my to-read list for a while, but I definitely need to get to it quicker, because this essay makes me want to get to her latest book, Caste , ASAP.
• Do you want to learn more about school segregation in the US. It’s the highest it’s been in decades . Chana Joffe-Walt, one of the brains behind Serial and This American Life , has a new podcast about the role white parents play in continuing segregation, even (or maybe especially) ones who vocally oppose it, called Nice White Parents . Here’s an article with a reading list that includes Eve Ewing, who in turn pointed out the horrible reaction happening in the podcast’s reviews.
• Lighter: Susan Orlean had a moment . Explanation .
• You know what you should make for dinner this week? Gazpacho. I used this recipe recently and it was faaaaaaaaaaantastic. We went with mint instead of oregano or basil and it was a good decision.
• Look, Taiwan is great, but it’s not all roses here. Instead of filibustering, there are apparently scuffles during our legislative session that recently involved bite marks and water balloons. The news , from William Yang.

One reason to be okay with Taiwan summers is the fruit it brings along with it. The mangoes here melt in your mouth and are akin to a religious experience. I didn’t consider myself a fruit person before moving here, but now I most definitely am, though mostly for the plums, winter melons, and mangoes. Taiwan has not converted me to its guava love yet, but I suspect it’s only a matter of time. This conversion into being a fruit person must be a common trope in Taiwan — it’s the subject of an entire conversation section of our Mandarin textbook, where two people are telling each other to try all these fruits and describing them and saying how amazing the fruit is in Taiwan. It’s a good example conversation because it’s a conversation that happens often.

So now I am a fruit person. Before I was a pickling person, but now I live my life in a way that there is no space for pickling. What kind of person will be I be next? What kind of person will you be next? Let me know.

-g