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.

When you alight

I must admit, my loyalties are conflicted. I came here to teach English (and not just any English, but the Queen’s own English, since our textbooks insist on such civilized phrasings as “If you become ill, you should go to hospital”), yet I adore the fractured and accidentally poetic dialect already in place. Taiwanese English in general inspires great affection in me, but I have an especially soft spot for MRT English.

At each station, a recorded female voice cautions us, “When you alight, please mind the gap between the train and the platform.” It’s grammatically correct, but it transforms us all effortlessly into little birds in someone’s seventeenth-century sonnet.*

[ * or picaresque novel: Don Quixote, part I, book 4: ‘Here comes a fair troop of guests, and if they will here alight we may sing Gaudeamus.’]

Those of us on the platform, moreover, are requested to allow passengers to alight before boarding the train, and this request is invariably honored. Taipei residents, when not driving, must be the most considerate people in the world. Everyone lines up v. properly to board or disembark (alight) from the trains, and then lines up v. properly to ride the escalator. (Beware, Great Britain — you’re about to be usurped as the monarchs of queuing!)

Inside the train are v. few seats, which are intended for “elderly, infirm, or passengers with baby” [N.B.: the baby may be either inside or outside the womb]. The reminder of this fact reads: “Let each and every seat be priority seat.” It struck me as a beautiful phrase, somehow, like the proclamation of peace after a war over blue plastic territory, and I could imagine the author of that sentence proudly recalling the phrase ‘each and every’ from his or her English class several years before.



P.S. Some of my favorite instances of Chinglish ( = Chinese + English) are those which have an unintentional but amusing compounded significance. At Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall yesterday, we saw a little dispenser of hand sanitizer labeled HANDY WASHER. Little handies, v. handy indeed, and in Germany it would mean a place to wash your cell phone. ;-)