I’m Still Young, I’m Still Young

https://tinyletter.com/grahammoliver/letters/i-m-still-young-i-m-still-young

Friends,

The above photograph is from the beach at Kenting, Taiwan. It’s on the very southern tip of Taiwan, far away from the nearest train station (we had to take a 2.5 hr shuttle from the Kaohsiung station! the horror!). We spent a relaxing long weekend there celebrating my spouse’s birthday. We chose a perfect time — the beginning of May — when the weather was hot but not too hot and the crowds hadn’t yet arrived. In our hotel’s restaurant, a Filipino band sang covers of Teresa Teng and then Frank Sinatra. The poolside bar would cook you a hamburger on a hotplate pan or swap the pan for a small pot and fix you a packet of instant noodles. I read three books beside the beach, including Michael Pollan’s wonderful foray into the therapeutic (and not-so therapeutic) uses of psychedelics, Changing my Mind .

Fun fact: the word psychedelic caused me a heartbreaking defeat in an elementary-wide spelling bee. I still want to spell it psychAdelic.

Kenting was an unusual place to visit compared to the rest of Taiwan: it was maybe the most “American” experience I’ve had here so far. The place we were staying had golf carts everywhere and a pool table and a putting green and a lot of people sunbathing (which is otherwise really uncommon here) and a prime rib slicing station at the dinner buffet. The place is a small town, but at night the main street is one long market, the specialty being either Buy 2 Get 1 Free Shots, oysters, or fried milk (milk+corn starch+sugar thickened then deep-fried). There were roving groups of people of all ages. It felt positively spring break-ish. Carolina tried and failed to win a large stuffed animal by playing a Mahjong matching game neither of us understood. We bought coconut water from the back of a pickup truck and had dinner in the empty second floor of a restaurant with a packed first floor. I tried to catch a crab and failed.

Since that trip, life has been a little bit of a whirlwind in typical end-of-the-school-year fashion. I’m under a mountain of grading, have a calendar full of coffees with students fresh from university or who will soon be off to university, and am headed to a goodbye party for someone moving away from Taiwan about once a week. But it’s a good busy. Plus, there’s the occasional wonderful distraction. Two weeks ago on my way to the laundromat I noticed that there were 8 fire trucks and multiple other emergency vehicles assembled around my neighborhood. I looked and looked, but could not find any smoke. Then, I turned a corner and found a large crowd of people gathered behind some police tape, necks craning and phones in recording position. A sinkhole had opened in an alley behind a construction site. It was funny to watch — no one was hurt, and news crew people were running around trying to figure out how to get a good angle, old people were emerging from apartments and trying to see what was causing the commotion, and in general people were getting closer to a potential source of danger rather than moving away. For the following week, street crossing guards were posted, looking very bored while keeping the curious from getting too close. I was hoping it might lead to a discount on apartments in that building, but I think it’s early enough in construction that this will be long forgotten by the time they go on sale.

One of our very sad goodbye parties was singing karaoke last weekend. While my singing voice is still offensively awful, I am getting better at finding songs among the very slim English-language pickings where singing quality matters less, and this trip I sang most of a couple of Mandarin songs for the first time. I am almost being blasphemous by singing along to Teresa Teng/鄧麗君 with my voice, but her songs have a pretty simple vocabulary and are slow enough for me to keep up, especially 月亮代表我的心 and 甜蜜蜜 . Then 我還年輕 我還年輕 by 老王樂隊 , “I’m Still Young I’m Still Young” by the band Your Woman Sleeps With Others, written in 2017 by bandmembers born in the mid-90s (so the title is very literal?). That band name is their chosen English translation — there’s not a good literal translation since 老王 (old king) is slang for an older man that a woman has an affair with and 樂隊 just means band (the fact that English doesn’t have a solid male equivalent for mistress is… completely unsurprising). “Adulterer’s Band” sounds kind of dumb. “Band of Adulterers” would be a little better, but if they’d asked me I would’ve suggested “Band of Affairs” or “The Side Pieces”. The chorus of the song goes “Give me another bottle, give me another cigarette, just go, I have time, I don’t want to cry alone in the days ahead, I won’t move forward.” Which, you know, is how I roll. It’s one of those half-screamy songs where your voice can be awful and it’s okay, plus I love the sound in general. The music video has a lot of nice shots of Taiwan’s cities, too.

Tomorrow is my last day on campus for this school year. It’s been a really great year as a teacher at NTU, and I’m signed up for another year. Way back in September I wrote my initial thoughts , and rereading it now I see that nothing is really wrong with what I wrote, but it was a very shallow analysis. Small things I’ve learned since then:

Taiwanese medical school is 7 years long, but you start it during undergrad, so it’s much shorter going from high school to practicing doctor than the US.

Unlike the US, where several students will race to finish the exam and turn it in early, no matter how much time I give students for an exam they will always work on it until the last minute.

We had a discussion about public discussion of sexual harassment at university; I shared with students measures I’d seen in the US, like alarm buttons on sidewalks, self-defense courses, awareness presentations, etc. My students were unaware of any public efforts by the university to combat harassment, and most could only think of posters in the subway as being an example. They said there’s an attitude that such a problem wouldn’t exist at NTU, since it’s the best university in the country. But that’s pretty clearly not true .

And, finally, the bureaucracy is worse than I thought. But, hey, the students, and the classroom itself? Can’t say enough about how great that part is.

Further reading:

• My university was in the news a little more than usual lately, for not great reasons. Here’s Brian Hioe rounding up the Econ department student council members who included ignorant sexist and racist memes in their campaign material, as well as a banner claiming efforts to help indigenous Taiwanese be admitted to NTU are unfair to “city dwellers”.
• Relatedly, I just recently learned that nearly 40% of NTU students come from just two high schools full of “city dwellers” in Taipei. Chinese source , h/t @shu_wang_gong .
• I loved this what-if, AI, regret story by Kylie Lee Baker: “The Infinite Endings of Elsie Chen” .
• The written analysis in this article isn’t great — I’d just check out the graphs — but I was really interested in the partisan divide among TV programs. Especially because all of my understanding of modern TV is filtered through Twitter and friends. “Which TV Shows Transcend America’s Red-Blue State Divide?”
• You’ve probably heard about trees communicating and assisting each other via fungal networks in the ground — it turns out a lot of details about that idea is based on very blurry science. While I hadn’t heard many of the specific claims debunked in this article, I still found it interesting to read a few researchers try to piece together how their field’s topic got so overblown .
• Kimberly Mata-Rubio’s story, shared in Texas Monthly by Skip Hollandsworth, is devastating to read but something necessary to confront: “When 19 children and 2 teachers are killed in a town of more than 15,000, the math works like this: You either loved one of the victims or you know someone who loved one of the victims.” “Amor Eterno.” It’s a good companion piece to McMillan Cottom on “Caring” , which I’ve linked here before.
• There is a refrain in personal essay circles/classes that writing about a dead family member is overwhelming and intensely difficult, because it’s hard to say anything about it in a new way and it’s hard to get critical feedback on it. “My Daughter’s Future Was Taken From Her, and From Us” by Sarah Wildman in last month’s NYT is one that did feel gratifying to read and such a well-balanced mix of shock and thoughtfulness.
• Is there any regular column more depressing than NPR’s Bill of the Month? I’m not sure. I’m so thankful that someone is doing the work they do and so depressed that it’s necessary. Last month’s, a story about an American living abroad who visited the US with uncertain health coverage , was a little painfully close to home.

I’m not sure what the equivalent of “OK, Boomer” is in Taiwan, but its opposite is probably 草莓族, strawberry generation , a label given to young people by the older to indicate that they’re too sensitive and bruise easily. Not to be too sappy, but this is one of the things that I like best about working with young people. They are still open enough for the world to affect them, for better and for worse. I know I myself am slowly calcifying and/or crystallizing, and while I work hard to make sure that the patterns and forms I end up stuck in are okay, I also look for those places that I can still bruise.

I hope you are crystallizing or bruising to your own standards as well.

-g