Speaking People Words

Friends,

The above picture comes to you from Dihua Street. The boss lady here is selling whole or freshly ground peppercorns: white, black, red Sichuan, or green Sichuan. $50NTD a bag, ~$1.60USD. A friend recently gifted me a stem full of fresh green Sichuan peppercorns for the first time, and they’re incredibly convenient because you can just lay the full stem on top of your cooking liquid, let it get that flavor for a while, then take them out. A lot easier than just using the individual pods, since removing those is more annoying.

Today we just needed some black pepper. How old do you think her pepper grinder is?

Dihua Street is one of the oldest parts of the city, a narrow street along the river lined with old buildings, the ground floors of which are mostly markets selling dry goods. Lots of tea, dried fruit, spices, dried meat, dried mushrooms, Chinese medicine, etc. The first time I went there, I found it baffling: half the stores seemed to be selling the exact same goods, in bags that looked like they were all sourced from the same place. But each little store has its own specialty, even if there’s overlap, and over the years we’ve found our own favorite vendors, making the trip for dried passion fruit and flower tea, or in-shell Macadamia nuts, or pottery. Last trip’s haul included cinnamon sticks, deep-fried fava beans, and dried peaches.

This week was quite eventful! Taiwan had its largest earthquake in 25 years, since 1999. That year, the earthquake was 7.7 magnitude and centered in the middle of the island. 2,400 people died, and it led to massive shifts in the country’s earthquake preparation (and is even said to have changed the outcome of the 2000 election). Last week’s earthquake was 7.4, and the epicenter was off the east coast, so it’s unsurprising the damage was less. How much less, though, is remarkable. At this moment, only 13 deaths have been reported (though there are still several missing persons). The number of collapsed buildings is relatively small, even in the city closest to the epicenter. To read more about it, and see some really impressive photos of the power of steel braces added to old buildings, read The New York Times’ coverage. The best photos, in my opinion, are from photographer Annabelle Chih’s Instagram account .

I had just woken up when the earthquake hit. I tend to freeze in tense situations, so I stood with Carolina in the doorway to our bathroom, trying to decide the best reaction. By the time we thought to get away from the glass shower door, it was already over. Other than acquiring some new cracks in the paint, our apartment was undamaged; even the crowd of picture frames on our too cluttered cabinet stayed standing.

I know now that our plan should be to get under our kitchen island table. Given our building’s newness, the biggest danger is from broken glass, which means we definitely shouldn’t go outside. I remember when I was growing up, we were taught to get under something and cover our heads, but we were also taught that a doorway was a safe spot, something that is apparently not true. Professor Kerim Friedman has a nice little list of the basics with links to more resources.

After the earthquake, I taught a class on the 5th floor at the university hospital, where I avoided the elevator though a lot of people didn’t. An aftershock hit just as class started, and a handful of my students immediately looked up at the ceiling, saw where the projectors were hanging, and moved out from under them. I am envious of their spatial awareness.

I’ve been having a bit of an existential crisis in the classroom lately. This semester I’m teaching my first “professional writing” class, aimed for students to have a solid foundation for things like business emails, blog posts, cover letters, etc. I find myself torn in half a lot of times. I disclaim so much of my advice with, “most people won’t care about this, but just in case….” I go back and forth about even bothering with tiny grammar things, like the fact that a comma is supposed to go inside the quotations if it’s American grammar, but it might go outside the quotations if it’s British grammar. Should this matter? No. Might it matter to some hiring manager who has based some of their self-worth on knowing grammar rules? Yes.

On the flip side, when I worked at Texas State University, the Nursing Department there had the most exacting standards for their essays of any classrooms or departments I’d ever encountered. After helping dozens of frustrated students, I finally went to meet a professor and ask why, and they told me that paying attention to grammar showed whether the students would pay attention to prescription specifics. I’m not sure I agree! I can spot a grammatical error a mile away but there are mountains of details I mess up in my life on a weekly basis.

This conflict is actually one of the things that’s holding me back from being entirely negative about ChatGPT and other LLM’s usage as a writing tool. For all the things it does terribly, one thing it does well is to take a basic outline for something like a cover letter and turn it into a legible, professional-sounding document. Is writing a cover letter in English a skill my students should have to learn? For my classes in the US, sure, the skills they learn in that process will help them with tons of other things. But here? Many of them are on their third language and can converse in English without an issue, but a majority will make tense and punctuation errors on a regular basis. If they’re going into non-writing careers, what does it hurt to have an LLM write it for them versus paying some career coach or begging a friend?

Of course, I want them to learn to love writing, but they might already in their first language!

One of my students taught me a lovely Mandarin phrase: 見人說人話 見鬼說鬼話, or roughly, “with people, speak people words, with ghosts, speak ghost words.” It’s a saying that is used for people who say what their audience wants to hear, who changes their opinion to get the most advantage in a situation. And, for better or for worse, this is part of my job, to help my students figure out the mask they need to put on for various written situations, even when those masks are unimportant and the rules are arbitrary.

Further reading:

• I’ve written before about how much 7-Eleven is a cornerstone of life here in Taiwan. Frank Shyong in the LA Times gives a more thorough rundown of its history and status.
• I’m looking forward to checking out Grace Loh Pasad’s debut memoir The Translator’s Daughter , but until then, here’s a brief essay with wonderful accompanying photos of Taipei: “Things that Can’t Be Translated.”
• This week I learned that the Kentucky Inter-Prison Press is open access on JSTOR, due to a lovely little article showing a poem and other features of one issue. You should glance through the archives: it’s quite intense.
• A bright spot in my social media feeds, Hanif Abdurraqib, has a new book out ( There’s Always This Year ), which means an onslaught of interviews/profiles with him that I’m so excited to wade through (I haven’t even gotten to any of the many podcast episodes, but I will soon, his voice is such a luxurious treat). A particularly great one was with Katherine Rowland in The Guardian : “And so I really wanted to have a body of work that was also considering what it is to say I am here, and I’m really thrilled to be here, and I can’t and don’t want to imagine a world outside of here.”
• I really enjoyed writer Min Chao’s history of Taipei Zoo . It opens with an excerpt from my favorite Taiwanese novel, Wu Ming-Yi’s The Stolen Bicycle .
• RIP to Akira Toriyama, creator of Dragonball and source of inspiration to an unending number of other creations. There were a bunch of good articles, summarizing his work, but I especially enjoyed Gene Park’s article putting the artist into the broader context he deserves.
• Dana Stevens’ review of Judith Butler’s new book , which mixes both context and Stevens’ own experience being a student of Butler’s, is such a great piece of writing: “It is, without question, a demanding read, but not because the author is obfuscating or showing off. Rather, the difficulty derives from the rigor of the thought itself, and the work of accompanying the movement of that thought brings its own kind of pleasure.”
• Doom and gloom sells, but I have to agree with Ed Zitron’s article “Are We Watching the Internet Die?” that a line seems to be in the process of being crossed, that AI-generated drivel is making what was previously a barely functional internet even less functional. I’m sure the internet will continue to exist, but I’m less sure I’ll want to use it for anything other than keeping tabs on acquaintances. I already can’t remember I got useful information from a pure Google search (as opposed to making it search only specific sites).
• In the same vein, I had a wonderful little burst of nostalgia browsing through nekoweb and Neocities , two web platforms that seek to bring back the early internet, with its clashing inconsistent aesthetic and more personal touch. I didn’t find any content that would take me back, but, you know, that’s why I’m telling you. Go make something.
• I’ve been watching Brandon Taylor post about Zola on social media for a couple of years now, and while his essay does not make me want to read Zola, it does make me want more books full of Brandon Taylor. “Is It Even Good?”
• No one needs me to tell them Babel is a fantastic book. It’s sold a bajillion copies and topped book of the year lists. But, yeah, alternate history fantasy book that’s language-centric. I loved it.
• Finally, this has been a Cowboy Carter household for the last week. The album is so, so good. Right now, I’d put “16 Carriages” as my favorite, but that could change in a few minutes. Read Tressie on it , of course (even if I disagree with some of her adjective choices for the songs) — just don’t open the comments.

Every few minutes I’ll feel a slight dizziness and think, “is that another earthquake?” It might be; there’s been hundreds of small aftershocks since , but it’s much more likely I just need to stop looking at my screen so much. Let this be your sign that you, too, should stop looking at a screen for a few moments. Like me, you should go fix a cup of tea instead.

-g