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.

…

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)

…

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.

…

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.”

The Taipei Public Library

[This is a piece I wrote as a kind of guest contributor to my father’s library-related column in our local newspaper. You can see that Borges really is always on my mind in Taiwan.]

About a year and a half ago I read an essay by George Orwell called “Books vs. Cigarettes,” in which he defends of his habit of buying books by systematically proving that it is not, in fact, as expensive as other hobbies, such as smoking. I don’t smoke, and thank God, because I, like Orwell, already spend the majority of my paycheck on books. Since moving to Taiwan this has become problematic: all English-language books here are imported, and therefore astronomically expensive.

After a month or so in the country — by which time I had finished the books I’d brought with me from home and determined that the books at school, full of sentences like “Biff cannot open the door. She is angry!” would not quite satisfy my intellectual appetite — I began to worry. And then, luckily, blissfully, and with the help of a friend of mine, I discovered the Taipei Public Library.

The library has eleven floors and five or six elevators, none of which actually go anywhere. The foreign language collection is housed on the fourth floor — an ironic fact, since in Chinese culture the number four (and by extension the fourth floor) is unlucky. The collection consists mainly of English books, though occasionally a French, German, or Russian volume will crop up.

Like the libraries in the stories of Borges, the Taipei central branch has its own order of things, which is utterly incomprehensible to mortals. There are mysterious and delightful labels in the non-fiction section such as “Institutions Governing the Relation of the Sexes” (which turns out to contain books on wedding planning and marriage counseling) and “Breakfast Foods and Animal Husbandry.”

The section labeled “American Literature” is the largest, made up of British authors and Danielle Steele. Alphabetical order is nonexistent; the Dewey Decimal System is unheard of; books are classified according to the order in which your eyes find them. For this reason you cannot browse with intention; you can only wander and wait to stumble across an unobtrusive treasure.

The first thing I found was The Complete Poems of Cavafy, which I have since renewed twice and will probably refuse to give back at all; the second was Mrs Dalloway, which both prompted and resolved an existential crisis in me. The library’s collection of translated Chinese, Japanese, and Korean classical literature is impressive, and I have my eye on some Japanese fairy tales, including the very poetically-titled “Story of the Old Man Who Made Withered Trees to Flower.”

In order to avoid the spurious elevators, I take the stairs between the first and fourth floors. One wall of the stairwell is glass, and looks out on to Taipei’s vast central green space, Daan Park. Another wall is decorated with posters, which are in Chinese except for the cheery yellow order, “Have a question? ASK A LIBRARIAN!” In the stairwell I often encounter other foreigners. We rarely speak, but we often exchange little embarrassed nods and guilty smiles. We are here ostensibly for the same reason — to indulge our addiction for books while ensuring that our paychecks remain firmly in our bank accounts.

And that’s what I’d tell everyone, Orwell included, but the truth is: I love the Taipei library for reasons that have nothing to do with money. I love it for its randomness and its good intentions, for its eager offering of calculus textbooks and outdated travel guides, and for its unintentional arrangement of itself into a microcosm of my experience in Taiwan. In the library, familiar things seem slightly foreign and surprising; yet at the same time, that foreignness suddenly reminds me incontestably of home.

The Original London Underground

Why is it that so many British place names sound like parodies of British place names? I imagine that I can put together any combination of roughly old-worldly sounding saxon, old norse, norman french, and middle english words and come up with something inevitably ridiculous but vaguely plausible. south kinswaite. aberswick-upon-casterthorpe.

I suppose they all have long and rich histories which I should not mock (does anyone else encounter disapproving toponymysts in their dreams?), but that is precisely why they are mockable: they are usually composed of various recognizable units that one encounters again and again, each one endowed with specific meaning. They also tend to seem rather obvious once deciphered.

(Not so with American place names, which are too often new or just unimaginative. The practice of assigning numbers to blocks in cities might be effective, but is really rather lackluster. The neighbourhood in which I grew up featured streets named after various native american tribes. Most weren't even indigenous to the area, and the ones who were had been long forced out by my neighbours' ancestors. I suppose these sorts of things happen when you build streets before you have people to live on them.)

But I digress, slightly. Today I journied to the southeast London suburb of Chislehurst (Chisle from the Saxon word Cisel, or gravel, and hurst from the Old English hyrst, or wooded hill), which is indeed a gravelly wooded hill, but perhaps most well known for what is under the hill (beneath the name). It's home to the Chislehurst Caves, which are not caves at all (perhaps the fact that they are misnamed already tells us something about them), but 22 miles of passages created to mine flint and chalk. They're old- the earliest historical evidence for their existence is sometime in the 13th century, though the tour guides at the caves claim that the Druids and Romans had been mining there well beforehand, and that the Saxons were relative latecomers. Indeed, the whole operation is much more about transmitting a kind of creative history of the caves than an actual one. It's not as if the documented history of the caves is dull; on the contrary, they served during WWII as a massive bomb shelter (harboring 15,000 people for 22 months), later as a mushroom farm of epic proportions, and most recently (though sadly no longer) as a music venue hosting the likes of David Bowie. It's just that their version of the history is better, mostly because they've had a hand in making it up, constructing fake Druid altars, ghost stories, bad models of former inhabitants, etc. You can call it cheap and dishonest, or you can see it as their attempt to not simply bow down to what history has given them for raw material. I like that mentality, I think.

What is it with this passionate insistence on fidelity to historical fact, anyway? Yes, yes, I know- it allows us to view Holocaust deniers as terrible people and enemies of truth, which isn't a bad thing. But what happened to this tendency to season history, to spice it up with a few tales here and there that are not expressly factual? This territory has become solely the property of grandparents, and the ocassional tour guide. I want it back.

Until I forget to remember

Getting up late in the morning and having a cup of coffee
dark and strong would not be a lazy distraction.

It is just my least struggle to endure the time
without you, the indelible you, until my heart forgets to
remember you from my past, my old habits.

Let us possess one world: each has one, and is one.


This was written on the cover of a notebook I did not buy, but only photographed, another example of the haunting and inevitably sad dialect of Asian English that seems so ubiquitous and marketable. The photo I took turned out, appropriately, furtive and blurry. I’d taken a lot of photos that day — we went to the Nougat Museum, a peculiar and haphazard little place that sold candies called “milk cake plateaux” and “heart crisp fresh milk volumes” — and on the way there I was thinking about Louis Malle.

Two summers ago I started watching Malle’s film L’Inde fantôme, a six-hour documentary first released in 1969. The problem with Louis Malle in India was that he was incapable of living in the present. Every beach reminded him of an earlier beach; every street in Calcutta was an echo of Paris. Time had ceased to exist for him, and so when he looked through the eye of his camera there was no boundary between what was happening and what had already happened. The camera was the crux of his alienation: he was a westerner with a camera, and so a westerner twice over. When India gave him too much — too many colors, too much noise, too many eyes and voices — he became mute, and deaf, and blind, and set up his camera as a facsimile of a human being, to watch and hear and speak in his absence.

I am very jealous of Louis Malle, because he trusted his camera so much. I have a little video recorder now, a fantastic device that looks like an iPod and has enough memory to hold at least six hours of Taïwan fantôme (if I ever make it). But still I use it suspiciously, blushingly, and it’s even worse with still cameras. Quite simply, I feel it is impossible for me to both live in and photograph Taiwan. What can I photograph here? National Geographic moments; east/west confrontations that would be cliché if they weren’t so everyday; things that are foreign to me.

What can I not photograph? Everydayness and memory; the coexistence and nonchalance of grandeur and kitsch, plastic and puddles and pineapples; the overwhelming sensation of being here, and its counterpart of not being here. I cannot photograph the fact that I am simultaneously here and in Paris, and in Germany, in America, in my books, on the moon. The camera removes me from my always-already uncertain process of integration, suspends my current negotiations with Asia, and makes me again a Westerner twice over.

Hemstede

Those places in the city that remain untamed and uncivilized (though not unsullied) after the passing of years are always the most interesting. We experience them as little rebellions, even though the city sometimes preserves them precisely because of this impression.

Take Hampstead Heath, that wilderness smack dab in the posh residential order that is northwest London. Famed by day for its role in inspiring many a Romantic poem and some excellent studies of trees, as well as providing a lovely backdrop for Marx's Sunday picnics with his family, one's first associations with it are utterly respectable. But eventually one learns that it is no less notorious by night as a cruising ground (this history is equally absorbing, although not nearly as well documented). That it is a pleasure ground in more than one sense is established sometime during the first meander- one is far more likely to tread upon an empty condom packet than some discarded verse.

Those who despair the Heath's duplicitousness seem to do so not for moralistic reasons, but on the grounds that the knowledge of its night life somehow infringes upon the sanctity and peace of the grand trees and the tall grasses during the day. What they neglect to remember is that even before the discovery of that first discarded remnant of passion (only the 20th century allows us to describe it in this fashion) there was something suspicious, something (exhilarating?) in the air that the glory of the landscape did not quite account for.

So perhaps Keats did only wander peacefully around the meadows of the Heath and contemplate Fanny in the shade provided by the great chestnut trees. Then, again, who are we to say that she didn't accompany him?

The order of things

A few weeks ago I dreamt that I had dinner with Michel Foucault at a Chinese restaurant in Paris. As I was talking to him, I was feeling increasingly guilty for not having finished The Order of Things yet, though I’ve been carrying it around for four months.

And for two out of those four, I’ve been in Taiwan, and my Chinese is still execrable. This will all change, I hope, as of next Friday when I start taking bona fide lessons, but until now I’ve been picking my friends’ brains for vocabulary words and grammar rules — and I bring up Foucault because whatever I learn about Chinese grammar reminds me of him, and Borges’ Chinese encyclopedia that prompted so much laughter from him. For example: measurement words. There are certain words in Chinese that don’t have direct counterparts in English, but are necessary to indicate what kind of object is being talked about. Instead of saying “I want a guava,” for instance, you must say “I want [measurement word, meaning roughly ‘of those things there’] a guava.” There are measurement words for: people, books, things you can point to, and things that are small and stick-shaped (including pencils, chop sticks, and I suppose probably syringes and golf tees as well). Such a taxonomy! Straight out of Borges!

Also: two particularly fabulous pieces of Chinese lexis:

1) Astronaut: tài kōng rén, which literally means something like “great space person.” My students taught me this word and find my pronunciation of it hilarious.

2) The characters for “sun” and “moon” put together mean “light”; “light” in combination with the character for “book” means “instruction manual” — literally, sun-moon-book.