It makes your nose itchy

What to do? I am no longer in Taiwan; Lauren is no longer in the U.K. So our claim to be an east/west blog is now rather suspect. We apologize for our (now unintentionally) deceptive title; we might change it later, but maybe not. We are both exploring miniature limbos and reading Deleuze at the minute.

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How was Taiwan? We’ll have to start with Henry Miller. He was thinking about firecrackers and the Fourth of July:

One never thinks of China, but it is there all the time on the tips of your fingers and it makes your nose itchy; and long afterward, when you have forgotten almost what a firecracker smells like, you wake up one day with gold leaf choking you and the broken pieces of punk waft back their pungent odor and the bright red wrappers give you a nostalgia for a people and a soil you have never known, but which is in your blood, mysteriously there in your blood, like the sense of time or space, a fugitive, constant value to which you turn more and more as you get old, which you try to seize with your mind, but ineffectually, because in everything Chinese there is wisdom and mystery and you can never grasp it with two hands or with your mind but you must let it rub off, let it stick to your fingers, let it slowly infiltrate your veins.

(from Tropic of Cancer, whose namesake bisects the island of Formosa exactly)

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In fact, I have two Taiwans. One of them is densely populated, like Taipei, with everyone I knew there: my students; my fellow teachers; the street vendors who grew to memorize our faces and our unvarying orders; and my friends, whom I love so much, who are the reason it was wonderful. This Taiwan speaks Chinglish; it is young and energetic and in a constant state of delight. It exists in the hundred tiny and often nameless streets where we spent our nights meandering, eating, getting lost, laughing, and usually eating again. This Taiwan I feel I could fold up and carry with me wherever I go.

At certain times — the Lantern Festival in Pingxi; daybreak in Ali Shan — this Taiwan brushes up against the other one. The other one, my other Taiwan, is Miller’s China, the one that has infiltrated my veins and settled under my skin. This one is quiet, like a Chinese ghost. Its landscape is the Taiwanese mountains, which are insubstantial piles of green, damp and breathing. It is old and vast. It is not sad. It is this Taiwan that makes me, now that I am back in America, look over my shoulder, for a ghost with long feet.

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Dame Margot Fonteyn says, “Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere, for wherever one is some part of oneself remains on another continent.”

For every American tree, there is one in Asia. Whenever I sneeze or sleep, somewhere in Asia you are brushing your teeth or tying your shoes.

How to recognize a Chinese ghost

There is a Ghost Month in Chinese tradition, the time when the doors of the underworld are opened. The spirits who still have attentive families on earth are happy to stay where they are, but the orphan ghosts — those without descendants — are jealous of the living and come to haunt them. So during the Ghost Month, everyone puts offerings on the street outside their home or business (even international banks) — plates of pineapple, flowers, incense, etc. — to soothe the ghosts and persuade them to leave their families in peace.

My roommate had been warned not to swim in the mountain lakes because there were ghosts in them. I was told not to enter a temple during “that time of the month” because the ghosts could follow me inside.

Finally I asked one of my students, “What does a Chinese ghost look like?”

“Hmm. They have very long feet,” she said. “And they are everywhere.”