You Gotta Keep ’em Separated

https://tinyletter.com/grahammoliver/letters/you-gotta-keep-em-separated

Friends,

I write to you today from The Orange Hotel, which is in the heart of Taipei, near Ximen station. It being in the heart of Taipei is of not much use to me, as I am not allowed to leave my very small room for any reason, not even to get an extra charging cable from Carolina in the next room. Pictured above is the welcome package that was waiting upon arrival. Carolina and I were not allowed to be in the same hotel room, then the rules changed and we were, but we’d already booked tiny rooms and finding those had been a pain so we kept it (which maybe have been a mistake logistically thanks to the tightening rules, but oh well). We overlook a tree-lined arterial street. The food is boring but mostly healthy, which is probably a good thing after a month of eating abundantly in the US. Despite being small, the room is very comfortable if you want to lay down, and has enough room to exercise. The room is not very comfortable if you are 6'2" and want to be in a good position to work on a laptop, which is nice for me because it gives me a very convenient excuse for why I didn’t use this opportunity to write a novel. Our first week of quarantine ends Sunday and we’re allowed to transfer to our apartment, where we are still not allowed to set foot out the door. I am thinking longingly of my desk, stove, and coffee at home.

I write to you today having survived the end of 2021. And, more than maybe any other time in my life, survive is the correct verb. Shortly after I wrote my last TinyLetter to you, a tornado destroyed downtown Mayfield, Kentucky, 25 miles from where we were asleep at that time. Similar to probably everyone reading this from the US, 10+ close acquaintances got Covid last month, including people I’d been in the same room with, sat across a table from. At one point I was sure I had it, and I guess it’s possible I did, but fortunately when it came time to get a PCR test for our flight, it came back negative.

But more than that, the trip gave me a real taste of the conditions of living in the United States for the pandemic. I knew on paper, heard from friends, read about the kinds of decisions you have to make, the fact that in almost every case there are no good decisions (see Eve Ewing on school closures , and it’s awful but I really hope we get a couple of good black humor/satirical novels set in schools/universities out of this, see NYC ). Despite that, I didn’t fully understand the stress, the abrasion of that mountain of decisions. Every single encounter with another human being is a risk to be calculated. Do I trust this person to keep their mask on? Do I trust this person to have been vaccinated? Do we have similar definitions of acceptable risk? Do I even trust this person to have not gone to a large indoor gathering recently? Have I been safe enough to not risk infecting this person? What is the safest situation for us to interact? Can I run to the grocery or do I need to wait to do curbside? Can I trust an HEB pharmacist who literally interacts with possibly sick people all day to wear a mask? (No, no we could not.) Do I need to see this person now, or can I wait? If it’s been five days since I sat in a cafe with no nearby occupied tables with one friend who I mostly trust, is it safe for me to go visit another? A horrible, grinding, unsolvable math word problem. Beyond the physical health costs, what has been lost mentally? Emotionally? No path back from that.

And we were only there for six weeks. At the end of the trip, when everyone around us seemed to be getting it, we were lucky enough to have friends out of state who lent us their empty home. We spent the end of our first trip back to the US in 2.5 years sleeping in separate rooms on a couch and the floor, eating in separate rooms, masking with windows open (during a disturbingly mild December, thankfully), only interacting with two other people in outdoor, distanced, masked conditions. And I know that we are lucky that we had it that good.

My Chinese teacher asked me last night if the trip had been worth it. I told her to ask me in six months. Speaking of which, in the US I tried to put into use my very rusty Spanish, and I just could not do it without throwing in Chinese words on accident, so I kept saying sentences like, “Tengo muchooooo hambre, 你 quieres 吃什麼?”

The three best books I read in 2021 were The Secret History by Donna Tartt, Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, and Know My Name by Chanel Miller. I made a choice to only read books by non-men in 2021, a decision that was only complicated when deciding whether to read Elena Ferrante . I’m remembering a conversation with a classmate at the beginning of graduate school who was upset that a local theater was going to have one year where they only had performances directed by women, thought it was a slippery slope, but the truth is that the opposite is in effect even today, especially in directing spaces, but also in book spaces. For evidence, browse a handful of /r/booksuggestions threads and you’ll quickly find entire comment threads where maybe 10% of the authors recommended are women.

I write to you today from 2022. Happy New Year. My resolutions remain the same as last year. Be a better friend. Walk more. Learn more Chinese. I figure this year we should also get a dog, primarily to boost my social media numbers. And you?

Further reading:

• Kiese Laymon and Tressie McMillan Cottom are two of the greatest writers working today, so her interviewing him when she was guest hosting the Ezra Klein show is a no-brainer must-listen.
• Cottom also put out a masterpiece essay about black women in country music, Jason Isbell, and the price of maintaining the fiction of nostalgia. It comes with an exquisite playlist . (Maybe the next iteration of this newsletter should just be a Tressie fan club publication.)
• The latest thing I throw on YouTube when I want to cool off my brain for a while is the voice of Joe Pera. His content is a little hit-or-miss for me, but here’s my favorite .
• I knew something was wrong with grapefruits .
• Brandon Taylor on what the Wordle craze represents , and how the internet has encouraged us to all try to optimize our existence as much as possible through mirroring people we think are doing it right. It’s funny, because in this essay he says he doesn’t understand why people ask what books pages he posts pictures of are from because most won’t read it, and I got defensive and wanted to exclaim “I want to know if I read it already, so I can look back on what I thought of it! And that’s justified and a good thing!” but then I remembered that I don’t need him to agree with me, and that instinct to want his opinion to line up with mine lines up with his thesis.
• Do you want to learn all about the situation here in Taiwan with regards to sea turtles? Of course you do. Luckily, Aiden Lo has you covered, with a really well-designed article brimming with great visuals.
• If you’re going to change your eating habits on the occasion of the new year, please think carefully about it. Kate Manne on dieting .
• A literary drama in two parts: 1) Inexplicable socially engineered thefts of unpublished manuscripts, unsolved for years . 2) An arrest .
• Two giants died last month. If you haven’t read bell hooks or Joan Didion lately, I recommend you start with “ Love as the Practice of Freedom ” and “ The White Album .”

As always, gentle reader, thanks for gently reading. This month marks five years of this newsletter. Haven’t missed a month as far as I can recall, so sixty letters. On the front page of my Google Drive I keep a simple text file called “GMO Timeline” where I put where I was living and the overall status of my life at the beginning of each year going back to childhood, interspersed with a limited number of entries for other important life events. A quick reference sheet to my personal history, if you will. Five years ago I was in the final semester of my second master’s degree, a little worried about the next step but not at all thinking of the step after that, and definitely not thinking the step after that would land in a nice life on the other side of the ocean.

So good job five-years-ago Graham. And happy birthday little newsletter. And thanks again to the generous person reading this sentence.

-g