Unplanned Growth

Friends,

The above picture comes to you from an alley near our apartment. Two apartment buildings share a small square lot, and instead of sacrificing it to the never-ending hunger of scooter parking, they filled it with potted plants. It fascinates me — how do they make decisions about who got what space? Is it an advertised feature if you consider renting an apartment, or do the older tenants swoop in and annex any space people move out from? Do they have arguments over whether people choosing to plant taller plants are blocking the sun from the shorter plants?

It’s funny, my first thought about seeing this plot is how beautiful and amazing and heartwarming it is, but then my mind goes to the conflicts above. Why? Maybe it’s a simple small slice of utopic living carved out by the residents as it first appeared.

Though I am not a contributor like I should be (other than letting plants freely grow a meter high from cracks in our patio), I am such a huge fan of the ubiquitous plant life in Taipei. We don’t get the changing fall leaves here — and I got a little wistful and jealous when I saw my former classmate Bobby Bolt share the wonderful poem “The Way the Leaves Keep Falling” by Linda Pastan on IG — but we get a city that has plants everywhere . There are planned plants adorning many outdoor walls, like the green walls put around construction sites or what appear to be staghorn ferns mounted on a piece of wood and half a coconut shell. The area around doors are often thickly crowded with potted plants like my above photo. But the coolest part are the unplanned plants. There are plants growing out of fence posts, abandoned trash cans, any available crevice in brick or tile or wood or metal or anything else. There’s a dragon fruit plant growing on a telephone pole near our house that bore fruit last year. For a while, I wanted to make an album of plants I found growing from unlikely places, but I quickly discovered there are simply too many examples to document. Exhibit A: the photo of potted plants at the top of this newsletter: did you notice the ones sticking out of the gutter at the top? There are tiny alleys lined by ferns and trees that make the urban jungle literal. So many of our friends cede significant portions of tiny apartments over to plants. Our patio has a sturdy tree growing in between it and the landscaping nook, pushing the bricks up, and hopefully no one will be angry at us for permitting this to happen. A maybe-abandoned house on our block has a tree growing out of it that appears to start on the second floor. Even at my university and previous high school, thanks to the hallways connecting offices being open to the outdoors, tiny potted plants are the most common decoration! And young students here learn early on about the health benefits of breathing in phytoncides . Personally? I’m happy because all the plants keep the city cooler , not to mention their role in getting carbon out of the air. But perhaps what I like best are the constant reminders that if the people of Taipei disappeared tomorrow, the plants would take over almost instantly. Taipei would be a far cry from the apocalyptic abandoned cities of The Walking Dead ’s Atlanta or Blade Runner 2049’s Las Vegas or I Am Legend ’s New York — instead, it would quickly become a very bumpy jungle with a handful of vine-wrapped skyscrapers sticking out.

Despite the verdancy here, I am sad to let you know that our bonsai tree, Mr. Benjamin Shoe, has moved on to the great botanical garden in the sky. He did not survive our nerves nor our travel. He will be missed, but not yet, because we are still using his dead body as a coffee table decoration. It feels wrong to put him in the trash.

October was a slightly frustrating month for me! My university teaching job has hit some bumps, but the more annoying thing was my attempt to join a new Mandarin class. Carolina and I have been with the same amazing tutor for four years now. However, tutoring is her side gig, which means there’s limited availability, and between the three of us we often have to cancel classes. Right now, because I have more free time during the weekdays, I thought I’d join a group class — it’d be good motivation and maybe I’d make some friends! I assumed this would be very simple: after all, shouldn’t there be lots of people in Taipei who are also a few years into studying Mandarin?

Gentle reader, it was not very simple.

Read a bit online and you’ll find that in Taipei, three universities have the best reputation for teaching people Mandarin: National Taiwan University (where I teach), National Taiwan Normal University, and Chinese Culture University. Unfortunately, all three are aimed primarily at international students and new learners, so people in my situation are kind of an afterthought. NTU had the most restrictive schedule and no employee discount, so I moved onto NTNU. NTNU has the best reputation, and in fact, we use their textbooks in our private class. I took their placement test, went to find out what class I was in, but was then told I had to pay a deposit before I could find out the schedule, the level, who the teacher was, or anything else. So on to CCU! Another placement test, then a series of facts, of which you can guess the outcome: 1) Placement test is based on a different textbook than what I’ve previously studied. 2) To change levels once you begin a class, you must take a new test. 3) You are only allowed to change classes once.

I’m in the process of joining a private language center’s classes now, as word on the street is they’re a little less structured but a lot less restrictive. If it doesn’t work, I’ll just do more one-on-one. Silver lining? I’m turning my indignant emails / reviews into translation homework assignments.

Further reading:

• Free direct file is coming ! May Intuit’s family be cursed for a thousand generations !
• Thanks to Michelle Kuo’s deep dive in The Paris Review , I need to seek out A City of Sadness soon. I love this kind of review, where the writer uses the object under review as a jumping point to weave together all the surrounding context.
• Jamelle Bouie on pedestrian deaths. As long as we judge a car’s safety only by how it protects the people inside it, we’re fighting a losing battle.
• Found myself nodding along to Anne Helen Petersen’s description of millennial aging (I’m so thankful to have her as a contemporary, expressing many of the ideas that had previously just skipped along the surface of my subconscious). Sad that she needed to put the disclaimer at the beginning of the article.
• Speaking of aging, Taiwan Data Stories’ visualization of Taiwan’s aging population (with the lede graphic showing that in 2021 pets [cats+dogs only] officially outnumbered children for the first time, which means it’s probably been true for years before that) is incredibly done.
• Marlon Brando was such a fascinating person — it’s only recently I’ve learned much about him. This revelation is brought to you by my stumbling across an article describing how Brando spent some of his latter years anonymously arguing with people in AOL chatrooms . I wonder if middle school me crossed paths with him.
• Taiwan band 徐噴以煙Slow Smoke just released their self-titled debut album, and it is dreamy and ethereal and you should listen to it wherever you listen to music. Here’s the album opener, “Lost in Wonder.”
• Linda Holmes convinced me I should give GBBO another shot with her newsletter opening .
• I guess it’s unsurprising self-check out is probably a failure for anyone who has tried to use them, but rather than the schadenfreude I expected, Amanda Mull’s post-mortem just made me sad. All that wasted money going to a handful of people at tech companies instead of store employees, and as even CNN has noted, instead of talking about that or l , we are endlessly focused on an exaggerated crime problem .
• Finally, your fun Chinese lesson for today. Due to a sandwich menu at a cafe, I learned Elvis’s name in Mandarin is 貓王: literally “cat king.” Perfection.

Jeanette Winterson had a gripping essay in The Paris Review that is a kind of thought experiment about AI LLMs like ChatGPT. Less tech, more philosophy. If you’ve talked to a person via text enough, you have, in theory, enough material to seed an LLM with to be able to recreate that person’s writing. Winterson imagines the implications of this: your best friend dies, but you’re able to keep chatting with “them” indefinitely. Will we choose to do that? Will it change our relationship with death? And, of course, like any conversation around this subject matter goes, it ends with asking what is real, what is reality?

Here’s my reality — there’s a typo in the middle of her essay, and it makes me feel so human to notice it, and so sad to think that an LLM could easily mirror our typos.

Yours until the LLMs replace me,

-g