Inculcating Inoculation

Friends,

Your picture this month comes from the patio of Taipei’s Cloud Gate Theater , the home of a modern dance company where we recently saw the performance “13 Tongues.” It was incredible. I highly recommend you check out the following links in order to both see pieces of the production as well as information about Taiwan’s night market culture: 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 . Finally, here’s a good clip of the actual dancing . The “people” sitting at the table above are part of a temporary set of statues outside of the theater that are made from recycled material, and are selfie magnets.

As of Friday afternoon, I am one dose into the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine. This is unusual for two reasons: 1) AZ has not been approved for usage in the US. 2) Relatively no one in Taiwan is vaccinated.

AZ hasn’t been approved in the US because it had some problems with its US trials and productions, but it’s pretty widely used in the rest of the world. Many Taiwanese people are waiting either for Moderna (which is supposedly arriving in July) or a Taiwanese developed vaccine (which is supposedly close), but the general attitude is that they can afford to just wait and see both about how the vaccines play out in terms of side effects and efficacy as well as how Covid itself plays out since there are hardly any cases on the island. AZ does have slightly lower efficacy than other vaccines, but there’s also some disinfo going round about the side effects, which is disappointing but not surprising. When Taiwan got a big batch of AZ vaccines, they started distributing them to high risk groups, but the signup rate was so low that they were going to risk expiration and instead just opened it up to anyone who was planning on travelling internationally for reasons other than tourism in the near future. And so I took it.

Due to the possibility of side effects, I signed up for a Friday afternoon, and the closest place that had appointments for that time slot was a hospital connected to the university. While I was standing in line, two women with suitcases got into the line behind me, and I was suddenly concerned I hadn’t understood the instructions fully.

It took five minutes of paperwork, fifteen minutes of waiting, the shot, then thirty more minutes to make sure nothing bad happened, and I was on my way. While several of my coworkers had a few days of fever/aches/chills, I had a small amount of muscle soreness and a little lightheadedness and that’s been about it. Maybe that means I’ll be due for a rough weekend when I get the second shot, but that’ll be after the school year ends, meaning not an issue.

So, a weird confluence of circumstances that might mean we are able to visit the US in the not so distant future. Depending on a million things. Next month we will have been here for two years. When we decided to move here, my expectation was to visit the US twice a year. My first visit will be 27 months in, at a minimum. And as soon as I have that thought, I shy away from it, because I am lucky for my life to have been so relatively unaffected.

This week we also had a guest speaker in my class! My friend Karissa Chen came to visit four of our classes. My students read three of her articles: the 11th graders read about her grandfather and her experience deciding whether to stay or go in the US at the beginning of Covid . The 10th graders also read the latter, but instead of the former read her on the subject of gua bao . When it came time to ask her questions, though, they were mostly interested in the nuts and bolts of existing as a Taiwanese person in America. In a way, she is their mirror. Her family is from Taiwan but she grew up in the US, then moved to Taiwan as an adult after grad school. The move was supposed to be temporary, but now she’s been here for four years with no definite end in sight. On the other hand, most of my students have grown up in Taiwan and are on the verge of moving to the US or similar countries. They asked her about catcalling, US 7-Elevens, making friends, racist encounters, and if it was easy to find rice in the US. It feels so difficult to make something meaningful happen in 45 minutes, but I think it went well. I learned something, anyways.

It’s always hard to say what moments will stick in a student’s mind. One of the first serious guest speakers I got to listen to was Tobias Wolff in my undergrad English class, and I’ll never forget his little spiel about how one of the important reasons to be in writing groups or workshops was to learn how to not listen to people. Which was good, bad, and formative advice for me at the time. I don’t know which is scarier, the possibility of giving bad advice or the possibility of giving formative advice.

Further reading:

• Will there be longterm changes, or won’t there? Here’s an interesting analysis of the workforce shifts due to Covid.
• One of the more interesting writing-related interviews I’ve read in a while: Simpsons ’ writer John Swartzwelder .
• Need more food-related videos? Goldthread is a really cool series focused on China that does some great work. One of their main people, Clarissa Wei, is based on Taipei and does updates on Twitter on her effort to start a small farm near the city . It’s kind of awe-inspiring.
• Want a quick peek into random restaurants around the world? This nifty Twitter bot uses Google Maps photos to provide just that.
• If you aren’t following Moira Donegan’s work, you absolutely should be. Here she wrote about a viral TikTok video where a man approaches a young woman who is livestreaming with devastating clarity. It ends with the line: “This, too, is one of the surest signs that a girl is becoming a woman: suddenly, she finds herself being held responsible for men’s actions.
• Kiese Laymon is one of the greatest writers working right now, so congratulations to Rice on being lucky enough to have him.
• I don’t know what’s wrong with me but Brian David Gilbert is this guy on YouTube whose every video just feels personalized to the weird corners of my brain. A comment on one of his recent videos said, “I love how every time Brian uploads now it’s just roulette between stupid silly comedy and insanely unsettling emotional horror. Whenever something gets weird it’s just a question of, is this getting silly weird or am I about to have a breakdown” and honestly that’s the aesthetic I aspire to. So, silly weird or about to have a breakdown ?

This Friday will be Carolina and I’s ten-year anniversary, which is fun and fairly crazy. The high school is mid-AP exams. Everyone is falling apart and rebuilding themselves on a daily basis. I am proud to be a part of the process; I am exhausted and stressed by the process. I bought two giant bags of roasted barley and have a constant stream of roasted barley tea when coffee is not an option and I would recommend you do the same. I even made a loaf of bread using roasted barley tea instead of water and the flavor was subtle but nifty and I’m going to do it again, but stronger next time, real soon.

What are you rebuilding this month?

-g