Grow Less Air

Friends,

Earlier this month Carolina and I set off for a walk in the neighborhood. There’s a street past our apartment that we’d never really been down, and on the map it showed there was a little shrine there, so we set off. The shrine was on top of a hill, and it was tiny and there was not much to see, but just past it the path continued to a hilly overlook where we came across the view in the picture above. Taipei 101 never ceases to catch me off guard. The building is actually a good bit shorter than One World Trade Center, but its lack of skyline competition makes it so much more… abrupt? dramatic? They light the top part up a different color every night and it’s right in my field of vision as I’m walking home from most places and I always have to give it some of my attention.

I wonder if we can stand on that hill to see the NYE fireworks.

It’s midterm season here in Taipei. Midterms are a big deal. The grades are uploaded to the government, though no one can tell me exactly why. Not only that, but midterms could play a big role in which students I have next semester. Here, middle school students can move at the halfway point of the year from regular to honors classes. That means that next semester I’ll lose my top students and I’ll have a few new faces.

One of my classes had a midterm project involving interviewing a friend who is not a student. A few of them interviewed friends who went to schools outside of Taiwan and I used it as an opportunity to talk about some of the differences. A big one is what one girl described as “freedom,” that she felt like Taiwan students don’t have a lot of it. And I agree, and I think when I first started teaching I felt a lot of pity for the students, that they seemed so busy and they all aspired to go to US colleges where they’d have to work harder to get in than their US counterparts and I just wasn’t sure that was the best path for happiness for them, but obviously I don’t know enough to make any kind of pronouncement on that. However, I have to say that a little more than three months in I definitely feel less pity. Even though my students here are insanely busy, like at school until 9pm a night or two a week and going to after school tutoring and weekend test prep and so involved in everything, they overall seem happier than any group of young people I ever interacted with in the US. And I think some of that might have to do with the school requiring them to give a lot of their time but still giving them the space to both work hard and play hard (the playground sounds like a prison riot sometimes).

Caveats, of course. My point of view is very, very limited, both in scope and in time. My school is wealthier, high status students. I am in no position to draw any conclusions, and I still think they’re too busy (especially when some of my best students struggle to stay awake in class every now and then), but, yeah, less pity.

Five months in and I’m at that plateau of language learning where my vocabulary grows by a few words every week, but I still can’t have more than a very, very basic sentence. I got so frustrated this week because I was trying to read a children’s comic that had the phrase “來喝喝看” in it. I knew all four of those characters, and they literally mean “Come, drink, drink, look/see/read.” And I was so mad because even though I knew the four characters, I still had no idea what the sentence as a whole meant. Of course, it’s simple, it means basically “Come try a taste of this drink,” but yeah. I know I’ll get past this soon, but it’s definitely more of a struggle now.

I do continue to find joy in what characters come together to form words. A 車 is a vehicle and by itself it means a car, but add fire 火車 and it becomes a train, or make it public 公車 and it becomes a bus, or make it self-traveling 自行車 and it’s a bicycle. I told you last month that popcorn is 爆米花, explosion rice flower, so now I’ll add other food flowers: broccoli is 青花菜, green-blue flower vegetable, and cauliflower is 花椰菜, flower coconut vegetable. Finally, my favorite new word I’ve recently learned is angry, 生气, which literally translates as growing air.

Grow less air, my friends.

Further reading:

• I haven’t fully decided if I like boba tea or not. I think right now I’m of the opinion that most boba tea is good, but most boba tea would be better without the actual boba/tapioca pearls. Regardless of if it’s good or not, this article about boba culture in the US and the Asian diaspora at large is fantastic.
• November 3 was the 62nd anniversary of the death of Laika , a dog I wish I had never learned about. Now you get to share the pain. I made my students learn about her through this haunting poem .
• I’m a huge sucker for adaptations of widely known stories, like Angela Carter’s fairytales or Steven Millhauser’s take on Alice in Wonderland or the Jesus story found in The Master and Margarita (or, for that matter, Jesus Christ Superstar ). Thus it is absolutely no surprise that I adored Circe . Maybe one of my favorite novels in a few years. So rich and complex and such a satisfying ending, all the while staying “true” to the spirit of the mythology as I’ve been taught it.
• Have you seen “Get Me Bodied” interpreted into Sign Language in real time? I highly recommend it , courtesy Atlanta’s Pride Festival.
• There’s been a spate of pieces recently about how hard it is to keep friendships alive as adults. There’s not a whole lot to say on the topic beyond the pressures of work, cost of living, geography, and the effect of having good friends available at any time via the internet so there’s less motivation to keep other friendships alive, then feeling like you’re missing out by not having face-to-face contact, etc. This article is one of the few with specifics though, and it’s well-written, even if it leans a little too heavily on the self-pity/self-flagellation scale.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, so I’m a little sad I’ll be missing my usual gatherings in Austin this year. Regardless of where I’m thankful, I am thankful for many things, including you, dear reader.

-g