Friends,

We’re at the beginning of October, and the semester has gotten into its familiar rhythm. I’m teaching classes I’ve taught several times already, meaning I’m often having feelings of déjà vu and telling students to interrupt me if I’m repeating myself, though I know they won’t so I stay paranoid. Course planning is reduced to small adjustments, which gives me just enough freedom to start getting in trouble.

I start thinking, hey, the weather is about to not be miserable and I’m probably indoors too much and playing video games too much so I should find something more productive to do with my time. I catalog the usual possibilities: additional Chinese classes, volunteering, picking up more work hours via tutoring or substituting or something, or trying to find more social connections (or maybe just find new people to play video games with). But this urge happens every year and so far the success rate has been pretty low. One of the discouraging parts is that each year my language skills feel like they’ve improved, but being fluent enough to do a lot of ordinary things still feels so far off.

However, there’s also the encouragement! Last week was Moon Festival, and for five of our seven years in Taiwan we’ve gone to visit a friend’s extended family in the countryside and partake in the traditional outdoor grilling and KTV. As a vegetarian, I’ve learned that the typical grilled veggies here are plain corn, peppers, mushrooms, or bamboo, so I’ve tried to expand the repertoire some by rolling up peppers in tofu skin and brushing on sauce, or throwing on some pineapple slices. Next year I’m going to have to come up with something new, though. Gotta keep them guessing.

Since we only see them once a year, just like our trips to the US, these visits let us see families grow in fast forward: a child who was a middle schooler our first trip is now in university, the university students are now married, and there’s new babies. Each year there’s a new focus - the karaoke songs change, the amount of alcohol ebbs and flows, and for the first time this year the choreographed dances were at a minimum. They also see us in fast forward, so they get to tell us our Mandarin is improving so much! The compliments made the trip worth it, even when the trip involved staying at a B&B with shared bathrooms and roulette hot water and adjacent children with Miyazaki music white noise. The other family members sent to the B&B were the college-aged cohort and their boyfriends, so we felt young, but also in my discomfort I thought about all the horribly uncomfortable places I had slept without complaint when I was their age. It made a rural Taiwanese B&B a lot easier to appreciate.

So being able to talk to them in Mandarin made me feel good! And yet! Day to day I feel so insufficient. I find it very difficult to get practice that’s at the right level - short chats with the neighbors or the people at the market are easy, but anything complex is still a little out of reach. I still have to get out my phone and look up words I feel should be basic, or I learn two new grammar structures and forget one in the process. This month my poor language skills prevented us from seeing a movie due to the website being impenetrable and frustrating us into submission, turned a one-day air conditioning maintenance job into two days because I miscommunicated what I wanted done, and has stopped me from figuring out how to pay my electricity bill online so that I can worry about mail a little less while traveling.

We’ll get there. Eventually.

Two big pieces of news out of Taipei:

The first is that one of my favorite temples to visit had a large fire. Zhinan Temple is up on Maokong, and it has a beautiful view of the city. I take any visitors we have up there and it’s always so peaceful and lovely. Hopefully the rebuilding is fast - it’d actually just undergone remodeling shortly before the fire.

The second is that a large tree on my walk was chopped down by the city government, and I was lucky enough to catch it before the stump was removed. The government, knowing people would be upset the tree was cut down, had taped a sign onto the stump explaining that when they trimmed the tree’s branches, they found significant termite damage that required removing the whole tree. Expecting that people would not believe this reason by itself, they even included multiple pictures. This seemed reasonable, I thought. Taipei people, especially retirees, love their public parks and nature. I am thinking here of one woman in our neighborhood whose daily exercise appears to be roughly caressing a tree beside a bench.

I didn’t realize how big of a deal this particular cut tree represented, but apparently the city government being gung ho (wait, TIL the history of American usage of “gung ho” - I had no idea!) on tree removal has become a mayoral election issue. The mayor of Taipei is considered one possible stepping stone to the presidency of Taiwan - Taiwan is a young democracy, so it’s only had five elected presidents, but three have served as mayor of Taipei, and the current previously served as mayor of Tainan. However, in recent years, the city has leaned firmly toward the KMT. This year there’s been a surprising closeness to the race, with the incumbent having a recent dip in popularity due to trees, nepotism, and a little overly hands-offedness. I’m not a KMT fan due to thinking the party of the authoritarian dictator shouldn’t have continued to exist once the transition to democracy happened, but I’m especially not a fan of electing someone whose claim to fame is that he might be the illegitimate great-grandchild of said Taiwan’s authoritarian dictator, so I’m hopeful that the challenger Puma Shen can pull off an upset. For a solid English-language breakdown of the race, I recommend Nathan Batto’s blog “Frozen Garlic”.

It’s going to be a stressful November with the US elections at the beginning of the month and Taiwanese elections at the end, despite neither of them electing presidents this year.

Further reading:

• The heat has been overwhelming lately, though it’s finally cooling off at night some. So far, I haven’t resorted to hugging a winter melon to provide coolness yet, and thus have avoided melon explosions in bed. Thanks to Chenchen Zhang for the link.

• Are you a native Mandarin speaker who has been desperately wanting to learn how to sing “Despacito”? YOU ARE IN LUCK. Our KTV venue introduced me to this incredibly silly phonetic karaoke video that lets you sing along.

• Mamdani’s tones are much smoother than mine :(

• I don’t get to talk gaming with many of my students because if they game, they typically stick to the player versus player endless game of the year that does little for me but raise my blood pressure. However, for the few students who venture into single-player games, they often asked me whether or not I had played Black Myth: Wukong. I had a hard time explaining to them in a short period of time why I hadn’t, and why I wouldn’t be, but thankfully this article (Made in China journal, Dino Ge Zhang and Nathanel Amar) does a much better job than I ever could. Now I can just give them the link!

• Texas Monthly gave us a useful guide on “How to Kill a Cockroach in 34 Easy Steps”. Thank you, Lauren Larson, this will come in handy.

• Are “death doulas” a symptom of an increasingly disconnected and impersonal world, or a realistic and humane way to face the end? (or is it just a titillating rebranding of the word hospice?) I don’t know! But I found the New Yorker’s profile of them by Alexandra Schwartz to be fascinating.

• Weird Al and Death Cab both played Tiny Desk last month, which made me very happy.

• If you haven’t tried making Chinese-style scrambled eggs, I highly recommend giving it a go. Two Youtube links to guide you: Made With Lau, who does an overview, and Kenji, who does a specific fast walkthrough using tomatoes. I find Kenji’s more useful! I’m also a convert - this is my favorite way to eat eggs now.

The beginning of the semester is also at that point of the end of summer where the the daytime is still miserable, but the nights are finally cooling off enough to be considered pleasant. However, there was about a month period after we returned from the US where it was raining nearly every day. Everything was damp, everything smelled bad. Nice to fall asleep to, though.

I have to fight my impulse to try to optimize the humidity in our house. I feel like I need a degree in Physics: Should we leave the window open while showering? Probably. But after showering when the room is warm? If so, how long? Should we run the vent or is that sucking in wetter air in the process? How do all of our neighbors stand leaving a window cracked all the time?

I might get a little obsessive (“a little????” I can hear my wife asking with exaggeration) about this kind of thing, so I try not to think about it. Sometimes it even works.

May you be able to occasionally not think about the things you don’t need to think about, as well.

-g