Stressful Art in a Stressful World

Friends,

The attached photo is of a tree farm growing Ali Shan Oolong Tea. Shan means mountain, but this farm is not on the mountain, don’t tell anyone. After more than a year of living in the heart of a city and only leaving to visit slightly smaller cities, it was nice to be out in the quiet, with the smell of a farm instead of traffic. I am sorry to say we did not sample the tea (but we did sample from a nearby dragonfruit crop!). I don’t drink as much tea as I would like, because in the mornings I want coffee, and in the evenings when I would drink tea I don’t want the caffeine. Decaf tea doesn’t taste as good and doesn’t seem to be commonly available here in Taipei. That said, a lovely alternative that I am deeply committed to now is to pour boiling water over a handful of fresh ginger slices.

The only cold drinks I partake in these days are bubble tea and iced coffee. Everything else is room temperature or warmer. This is the biggest change Taiwan has wrought in me, I think? Drink more warm drinks, even in the summer. I endorse it.

Lately, though, Taiwan is conspiring against me. September 28 was Teachers’ Day, which is celebrated (by itself an amazing feat — I think the only people who told me happy teachers’ day in the US were fellow teachers) by students’ giving teachers adorable cards and everyone giving teachers sugar-laden goodies (including a drum-sized container of some Starbucks mocha crunch nonsense that is basically my kryptonite). Then, last weekend was the Mid-Autumn / Moon Festival, which is celebrated by everyone in the country being allotted a ridiculous number of mooncakes (a variety of paste-filled pastries) and capped off with hours of barbecue eating. Lots of opportunities for snacking and stress-eating right at that month-into-the-semester marker where students and teachers begin to lag and flounder.

Folks, I am not good with temptation.

The best message I got on my teachers’ day cards this year was a student who was in my 8th grade class last year who wrote that 9th grade literature “has no liberty.” This was balanced by a student in the hall who told me they can’t play games on their computer during 11th grade anymore. I am not known for my strictness.

I’ve been thinking a lot this month about stressful art. I picked up a book from the library, Geek Love , that I regret reading. Not because it wasn’t good — the writing and world-building was incredible. But halfway through the book, it got deeply, disturbingly dark. Similarly, I’m close to finishing a video game — The Last of Us 2 — that makes me feel like I’m holding my breath the whole time I’m playing it, waiting for the next terrible thing to happen. I can’t play it at night or it disrupts my sleep, and with Carolina I refer to it as my anxiety simulation game. But I also can’t deny that the game is an achievement in storytelling — both for a video game and for all storytelling art writ large.

At least two of my friends stopped playing it before finishing it, connecting their dislike of it with the real-world epidemic and stress.

I regret encountering these works for multiple reasons, but I also wonder if those reasons make them more valuable as art. I am not going to forget them anytime soon. The artists have succeeded in creating something that affects me more than the overwhelming majority of art. But does that make them worth it ? Does distressing art need to say something bigger about the world, does it need to be especially artistic? For me, one of the important considerations is that when I’m reading a book like this I’m going to read a lot less per day than normal, so it’s not a matter of substituting this one work for another but instead this one work for several. I’m also thinking here about how it compares to things like haunted houses or roller coasters, or also of things like the graphic novel Uzumaki , which is beloved by many but for me was just a series of visually creative and terrifying but nonsensical images. Or the second half of the show Game of Thrones , which became something I dreaded finishing as opposed to looking forward to, despite the same awful things happening in the show not affecting me in the same way when I read them in the book. So I guess what I’m asking is, if something in art bothers or disturbs or distresses you, what determines if you’ll say “that was difficult, others need to experience this,” versus “that was difficult and I regret spending energy on it”? Echoes of this conversation have come up with regards to TLOU2 , a recent novel called Homeland Elegies , the TV show Lovecraft Country , and more — I think people are more aware of their appetite and capacity for stress in general due to the quarantine, and of course that encompasses the art we consume.

Another thing Geek Love and TLOU2 have in common is that the distress in their stories is caused by an overabundance of selfishness and a corresponding lack of empathy by their characters, which might make them especially hard to deal with against a backdrop of wildfires caused by gender reveals , a wedding infecting a couple hundred people , a University prioritizing football over voting , speakeasies opening to packed crowds illegally skirting NYC’s gathering bans , or *gestures expansively at everything.*

Further (only semi-stressful) reading:

• I read so many good and important pieces this past month.
• The coffeeshop I’m writing this from is currently playing a lot of Nujabes . #blessed.
• Jiayang Fan’s “ How My Mother and I Became Chinese Propaganda ” popped up in my feeds SO MANY TIMES and for good reason. What a heart-wrenching story. Obviously not everyone is a journalist being targeted by the Chinese governmental apparatus, but how many people will have stories about their insane personal struggles due to Covid?
• It’s so hard to even begin to think about how much of a setback this year will be on parents, teachers, and students. Aubrey Hirsch’s comic about “remote learning” is one of those laughing to prevent crying situations. Similarly, here’s a Twitter thread about Zoom chaos .
• The Bitter Southerner has been killing it lately. There are lots of important pieces about the opioid crisis, but I think this one by Chelsey Reid is one of the best written ones I’ve read.
• This comparison between editing Wikipedia and playing an MMORPG was grown in a lab to appeal to me.
• Kiese Laymon is one of the writers who, as soon as I see a new piece with their name attached, I’ll read without reservation regardless of the subject. I think he’s one of the most important nonfiction voices working today, and I’m so glad I got the opportunity to see him at Texas Book Fest a few years back. Here’s one of his latest , for Mississippi Today .

Today is 10/10, which is kind of like Taiwan’s 4th of July but in a really complicated way, since the date has nothing to do with Taiwan the island country and instead is about the end of the Qing Dynasty and beginning of the Republic of China. Like a lot of Taiwan’s past, today’s Taiwanese society and politicians are trying to figure out how to adapt this history to the current reality. Unfortunately the current reality involves a necessitated show of military force. In the past few weeks China has been flying their military jets closer and with more frequency, so when Taiwan moved a bunch of jets around for 10/10 celebrations, it freaked me out . If you haven’t had the sudden feeling that you might be about to die while scrolling through Twitter in an empty classroom, I kind of recommend it? It’s good motivation for getting away from doomscrolling social media.

May your near-death experiences always be additive.

-g