The Swing of the Pendulum

Friends,

Well, the ubiquitous coronavirus has finally made its way to the shores of our isolated island. We’ve had three weeks now of about 300 cases per day. Carolina and I are one shot into vaccination and working from home, and the majority of the cases have not been geographically close, so we’re not very concerned at the moment. Hopefully the previous sentence ages well. This weeks marks the end of our second year in Taiwan, which continues to go nothing like we expected. We’re making it just fine, though.

After all, we are getting through these troubling times with mango.

I am teaching from home for the last month of the semester, which is somewhere around a moderately mitigated disaster. I am unwilling to force cameras (I ask nicely every now and then for the sake of my mental health) or penalize students for missing their names being called, meaning a lot of my classes are extended monologues where I sink slowly down into an existential funk, which is similar to normal classes except in person I can actually make students talk a little more. It’s also a rich get richer scenario because the more engaged the students are the more lively I am which feeds itself whereas some classes are an ouroboros of enervation. The best thing I could be doing is getting them to write more, but after spending all day looking at screens, adding more to that in the form of digital homework on their part and grading on my part seems sadistic.

If I were building an online class from the ground up, I have a lot of good ideas now, but as is my students and I will be limping towards the finish line. Which, again, is not really that different from normal.

Although the day-to-day class situation is miserable, I’ve actually had some really great interactions with students outside of class and via email. I’m guessing the experience is mostly not great for them too; I’ve heard stories of music teachers throwing up their hands and PE class involving dressing up in gear and taking silly pictures. I’ve also heard of accidental unmutings and wrong chat windows and I’m sure this is all old hat for a lot of people in the US but it’s still freshly painful here. For fun, I taught a cooking class about how to make granola, and I’ve eaten lunch “with” my students a few times, and there was this one great moment where everyone got a pet or a stuffed animal into the frame with them and I guess here too you can carve out space.

I have only left our apartment twice in the last week, and this morning I had to run an errand at school. First I walked through our lobby where two signs implore us to pick up packages in a timely manner since they are inundated with packages during lockdown. I passed my favorite breakfast spot, where the owners have, like many other small restaurant owners nearby, erected a makeshift barricade of plastic chairs and cardboard boxes to keep people from passing the counter. Then, I decided to take the bus because I love public transportation, it didn’t seem like many people were out, and taking a taxi involves smelling like smoke a majority of the time. On the bus, several other passengers were wearing giant plastic face shields in addition to the mandatory masks, and I scanned a QR code which will allow me to be notified if someone who tests positive was on the same bus — similar QR codes are basically everywhere. Off the bus, a mother and daughter passed me on a bicycle. The daughter was using one hand to hold on, and in the other hand had a bottle of hand sanitizer, her finger on the trigger like she was ready to ward off zombies. The security guard at our school’s gate scanned my temperature before letting me in. Inside, only a handful of people were there working. I passed a few classrooms where teachers had desks arranged around them in an arc and were teaching into the camera while sitting in an otherwise empty classroom. It was a little surreal. Ants have taken up residence in the teachers’ office, to which I say let them have at it. Anything left behind is fair game.

When I got home, I realized I had forgotten to do one of the three things I specifically left the house to do, so I will be going back out on Thursday. Shame on me and wish me luck.

Further reading:

• This May is the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa “Black Wall Street” Massacre . I did not learn about anything connected to this history when I was a student, and in fact didn’t know about it at all until fairly recently. Same for the Wilmington Uprising. I’m very happy to report that my 11th grade students in Taiwan are learning about these events as part of their US history course. Here’s Jamelle Bouie’s thread on how the event has only recently gained mainstream knowledge.
• Does the idea of gorgeously shot videos of people doing everyday things with soothing background music sound appealing to you? Of course it does. Here’s what you need .
• I feel like I link something by Nicole Chung every single month, but there’s good reason for that. Here’s her newest in Time , about how she’s tired of how much oxygen has to go into just convincing people that racism still exists.
• I need to confess something. While in Venezuela I ate some capybara. I regret it. I go through phases where I want to see four hundred videos of a specific animal: dogs, rabbits, donkeys, amano shrimp, etc. etc. Right now it’s capybara. Get your capybara fix .
• Here is our grocery’s store song . Before I saw this YouTube video, I thought the chorus was “Wag Your Booty” and I was very confused why I couldn’t get it to come up in Shazam (it’s a song made just for the store). Our airport also has an official song .
• Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu are a Taiwanese couple who write a newsletter together called “ A Broad and Ample Road .” I heard about them because one of their recent posts went viral on Taiwanese Twitter about the decision to move to Taiwan after growing up in the US and living in France. It’s breathtakingly honest about the difficulties geography introduced in their marriage — she’s a “trailing spouse” (what a shitty term) to his professorship — and also about the negative attitudes she had about moving back to Taiwan.
• I contain Twittitudes .
• The Asian American Writers’ Workshop published this incredibly touching and beautiful interview between the poet and translator Jack Jung and his mother about her experience working in healthcare as an immigrant. It’s the best interview I’ve read in a long time, I think. Here is the final segment, which should convince you to read the rest:

Well, I recently read this: when a person flies a plane to reach their destination, they must first reach their highest altitude. Some can reach that height, but many end up running into a countercurrent of air or a storm. They are not able to fly through the path they plotted.

So, they fly lower and lower until they reach a certain point, and that becomes their life — Despite all the effort to reach the height, many people reach somewhere much lower than that. When I read that, I thought, yes, that’s it — when I was young, I was certain I would reach so high and that I would not stay at the bottom. I believed that I would always jump higher for my goal. But now, when I look at where I am, even though I did not fall completely, I have reached a certain middle point. And I think, if I had not tried to reach that height at all, where would I be now? So, this might all be nonsense, but it is important for me to think about.

I told a student the other day that I was a pretty lazy person. He asked me how I deal with that, and I told him that I think I’ve worked hard to grow into not really caring much about it, which feels pretty good. That’s the altitude where I’m at. How about you?

-g