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--------------Excerpted
chapters from my stray dog tale THE TAIPEI ZOO
may be found below on this page.--------------
--------------LETTERS
FROM THE TAIPEI ZOO is not exactly proud
to be sponsored by
Idyllic Oriental Brain Fuck Airlines--------------
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Education
is linked to eros by a golden thread. --Plato.
These are Letters from the Taipei
Zoo. The meaning
of this title will become apparent as you read. My letters cover the first
eighteen months after my arrival here in Taipei, the capital city of Taiwan.
What should anyone read this book?
Isn't a collection of letters likely to be too much bound to the daily lives of
the correspondents to make worthwhile reading for people not connected to those
lives? This might be so. I post
these letters well aware they may be of little interest.
My correspondent H. still lives in the
States. He’s a friend of mine from graduate school still working in the French
Department where I was a student before coming to Taiwan. H. is a serious
student of literature, and I've often sent him my writing in hopes of some
critical response. As he’s now struggling to finish a doctorate, this has
usually been in vain.
I'll begin the collection with a
fragment from my comic novella, which I sent to H. in a mood of provocation.
H., whose research focuses on poetry, had written me about his general
indifference to novels and narrative. I'd been questioning him about his
reading of Dostoyevsky, whose work I suspected he hadn't quite read. His
response:
Did H. take the trouble to read these
chapters? I believe he didn't. He was writing a dissertation on Ponge and Bonnefoy
and another poet whose name begins with "G"--I forget the name just
now. That he didn’t read my draft chapters didn’t much irk me however: probably
I won’t be reading his dissertation either, so how could I complain?
But will you take the trouble to read
the things collected here? If they seize your interest, you’ll read them. If
they don’t, then there’s nothing can be done. That's how it always is.
Eric Mader-Lin
Taipei
1998
Dear H.:
I have nothing in me of your dislike of
narrative. In this as well we are on opposite sides of the world. In fact, I
myself am now writing a novel, or novella to be precise. It’s entitled The
Taipei Zoo. I've
enclosed the first few chapters in the current draft. Let me know what you
think.
Warmly,
E.
But things here aren't quite what they
used to be. Just look at what's happened. Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo--they've all
fallen to their knees. Faces everywhere have the stunned look of someone who's
been slapped good and hard by a hand out of nowhere. Given all that's gone
down, I shouldn't be so hard on myself. Maybe I should give myself a break.
But really, global economic factors
don't matter much in my case. They don't matter in any direct way at least. I can't mention the
declining opportunities in Asia as an excuse for what's happened to me. Declining opportunities--that's just
a constant of the world economy. If Taipei isn't the gold mine it used to be,
what does that have to do with my doggy fate? My failure, I'm saying, should be
chalked up to my own account.
It all goes back to my leaving a red
paper folder on a chair at the airport. I'm talking about the Chiang Kai-Shek
International Airport just outside of Taipei. I left a red paper folder there.
That was a pretty simple mistake, wasn't it? Any of you may have done it, and
you've probably made even worse mistakes in your lives. Yes, I'm even willing
to bet you've made worse mistakes than any of mine, if you want the truth.
But really--how can I say things like
this, right in the first chapter? Here I was just admitting my guilt, so how
can I hint at your failures too?
I do it because I know what you readers
of contemporary novels are like. I'm getting older as a writer now, and I've
had many of you readers as friends. I know you've pulled some pretty pathetic
stunts in your day. I've heard about most of those stunts from your own lips,
in fact. So you can't deny it, at least not to my face. You're a gabby bunch,
always running at the mouth. I'm tired of listening to you.
There's something I don't understand, though.
Even with all the irresponsible, crackpot things you've done, even with all
that, you've always managed to get by in life without much trouble. You've
always managed to slip through things unscathed. I still don't quite understand
it--how you do it, I mean. But that's how it usually is with you
readers--you're a lucky bunch. And you know very well, you've known it all
along, that we writers, writers like myself, we're never as lucky as you. But
you just take that for granted, don't you? "It's the way the world is set
up," you say. "Anyone who spends so much time scribbling in notebooks
deserves what
they get." This attitude makes you more than willing to get your laughs at
our expense too, doesn't it? You watch us stumble, and you laugh. That's how I
see it now; that's how I understand it. You laugh at me or at anyone else who's
foolish enough to work so many months at something and make not a dime off of
it in the end. You take us writers for idiots, obsessives. Your every remark
proves it.
Maybe it's true what you're saying
about us though. Some of us go about the world as if fate were out to teach us
one hard lesson after another. Who is it put the curse on us here? I wonder
sometimes. Isn't writing an honest job like any other? I know from experience
that it's harder than most jobs. I've had most jobs, you know, and writing is
harder than any of them.
But I have to return to my story, even
in the state I'm in. Even now I have this job to do. And why? I don't know why
myself.
My mistake, I was saying, was initially
a pretty innocent one. If I hadn't left that red folder behind at the Chiang
Kai-Shek International Airport, everything could have been different for me. I
wouldn't now be telling you such a sad story, for one thing. And the story I'm
telling you here--it's one of the saddest stories I've ever heard. That you can
bet on. It's certainly the saddest story I'll ever manage to tell. After
telling it my heart will be too broken ever to tell such a sad story again.
I remember my first day in Taiwan very
clearly because in a certain sense it was my last day. I was on the north side
of Taipei, while the night school that had hired me to teach English was in the
downtown. I was supposed to be at the school announcing my arrival. As it
turned out, I knew neither that I was on the north side of Taipei nor that the
place I was looking for was in the downtown. I didn't know Taipei at all, my
Chinese was minimal, and I was already completely lost.
Yes, I'd been hired to teach English.
It's the way many of us Americans first arrive in Taipei. In the folder at the
airport was the number and address of the institute that had hired me.
Stupidly, that was the only place I'd written it down. I'd decided to come to
Taipei almost on the spur of the moment, and I hadn't prepared my arrival very
well. In the cab from the airport, I realized I didn't have the folder, but I
didn't ask the cabby to turn back, because I thought I could easily find the
school through the phonebook once I got into the city. But of course I learned
upon arriving in the city that I couldn't figure out the first thing about the
phonebook as it was all in Chinese. That I knew a little spoken Chinese didn't
mean I could use something as complicated as a Chinese phonebook. A Chinese
phonebook isn't even in alphabetical order, you know. In Chinese, there isn't
even an alphabet to speak of. I hadn't thought of this problem in the cab. How
do these people organize their phonebooks? It's a mystery to anyone who isn't
fluent in Chinese, and I was nowhere near fluent. Though I knew the English
name of the school, I had no way of finding the Chinese name. I was hoping to
run into someone who could help me. It was around noon, I think.
Near where the cab dropped me off was a
cheap hotel. The desk person had no English phonebook, neither could she quite
figure out what I wanted. I decided to check in if only to park my bags
somewhere while I tried to get oriented. It was obvious the one thing I could
do was walk around until I found a foreigner who looked like they knew the
place or a local whose English was good enough to help me.
Leaving the hotel, I decided to get
something to drink. And here I should tell you a bit about my character,
something that needs to be explained before I get any further. It's only when
you know something about me that you'll understand how I got into the scrape I
got into, and how I got into it so quickly.
I am easygoing by nature. As I'd
already traveled more than most people in my thirty years of life, I was even feeling
rather cavalier about being lost in a big Asian city. I knew that statistically
speaking Taipei was a much safer place than New York or Chicago, so I wasn't
really in a rush to find out where I was. I actually had no reason to report to
work that morning, and I thought I might as well revel a bit in the fact of
being lost. Strange as it may sound, I even found something pleasurable in my
situation. I took pleasure in the fact that I could be at ease while lost in a
foreign capital. Although I was certainly tired out on that first day--the
flight from New York was nearly twenty hours--the fact is that I was in a good
mood.
Forty minutes after leaving my bags at
the cheap hotel, I was sitting in a little street-side cafe drinking an odd
sort of sweet milk tea. I picked the cafe randomly, walked in, and sat down.
When the waitress came up, I ordered the tea by pointing at the drink sitting
in front of another customer and gesturing to indicate that I wanted one too.
What had I ordered? I had no idea. At the bottom of the drink there were little
round chewy things that reminded me of something I had eaten long ago. But I
couldn't quite remember what it was, or where I'd eaten it. There was something
strange about those chewy things, something unsettling about the memory they
were prodding to the foreground of my mind. What was it? Taking another one of
the chewy things into my mouth, I pressed it between my tongue and lower lip,
trying to remember. Then, in the dim light of the cafe, it all came back to me.
*Combray*... I was at a birthday party in a large hall. There was a fat man in
the corner playing an organ. A clown was going from table to table doing
tricks. I didn't like that clown. Everyone wanted to avoid the clown because if
the clown came to your table you might have to sing. There were many birthday
parties happening at once in the large hall. It was a kind of special
restaurant for birthday parties, a kind of birthday parlor. The round chewy
things were at the bottom of the bowl in front of me; they were floating in a
kind of watery syrup which had been poured around a scoop of violet ice cream.
They were mixed in with the ice cream and syrup.
That was it! I had remembered!
But was it my birthday there, or was it
someone else's? I thought it wasn't mine. No, I knew it wasn't my birthday
party. But whose party was it? Somehow I remembered that I didn't like the
person, whoever he was. No, I never liked that Birthday Boy.
Or maybe it was my birthday after all.
It's possible I was just afraid of the clown, and this accounted for the
negative feeling of the memory. I couldn't really be sure.
Here, in short, is the sort of thick
nonsense that was going through my head that day because of the strange chewy
things at the bottom of my tea drink, and probably also because of the long
flight I'd just completed. My brain had started to swim, as brains will often
do after a transoceanic flight.
I remember then using my spoon to fish
two more of the chewy things out of my drink. They were round, partially translucent.
They looked like frog eggs. I started to imagine a customer complaining because
the frog eggs in his drink had started to hatch. Then another customer: her
eggs were hatching too! Here and there around the cafe an uproar was beginning,
one customer at a time. People holding up glasses to the light, watching the
tails of tadpoles beginning to twitch. I imagined a man slamming his fist down
on the bar counter: "Your product is not fresh here, Monsieur! From now
on, we will go elsewhere for our frog tea!"
I was tired, mouthing the words to
myself: *We will go elsewhere for our frog tea! We will go elsewhere...* It was
just then that I noticed a small Chinese boy looking at me, watching me
nervously. He was maybe three years old. He was with his mother at a table
nearby, and his mother was busy talking with another woman. He seemed to be
afraid of me, but he couldn't stop looking: his curiosity was too much for him.
I remember thinking that maybe the boy had never seen a foreign man up close.
He had brought four of his fingers up into his mouth for security, and his brow
was knit in confusion and fear. It was an expression defined by tension: rapt
curiosity struggling against an obvious urge to flee the sight of the strange
monster before him. The boy's other hand, the one that wasn't stuck in his
mouth, had meanwhile reached up behind him and wrapped itself in his mother's
skirt. Apparently he'd keep on staring at the strange animal as long as his
hand could assure him, by clinging to the skirt, that his mother hadn't left
him.
I smiled at the boy and began to lean
slowly forward, reaching out with the spoon to offer him the two frog eggs.
Instantly, and with a loud whimper of terror, he leapt round to the other side
of his mother and began to wail raucously, gaining the attention of the few
other people in the cafe. The mother turned quickly and looked questioningly at
me as I sat there holding out the spoon. The other woman too turned and looked
at me with a mild frown. But the man behind the counter, the man who mixed the
frog eggs with the cold, creamy liquid, at least he began to laugh aloud.
I got up from my seat and went to the
man behind the counter. I handed him one of the big blue bills with Chiang
Kai-Shek's smiling face on it. I got my change, a lot of smaller red bills, and
left the cafe.
II.-- All of this seems ridiculous so
far, granted. What is interesting about this character--*me*? Why should you
follow him any further into what is, after all, not an exotic fantasy land, but
instead just another sweltering Asian capital, one you can read about any day
in *The Economist* or *Time*? I hope you will bear with me. My protagonist is
just suffering from a nascent jetlag. He is not normally so flippant. And
perhaps it will help you overcome the weight of this crankish beginning if you
put yourself in my shoes. I know this isn't easy for readers. But still just do
it. Just try to imagine you were me that first day in Taiwan. What is your
situation? What do you expect from the place? What are you doing there anyhow?
You have a PhD. in Classics from a good American university. You are 29 now.
You wrote your dissertation on Lucian and the Russian critic Bakhtin.
Regardless of your academic credentials, you couldn't land a university job in
the States, and you didn't want to be a taxi driver, bartender, hotel desk
flunky, drug dealer, or waiter. Going abroad to teach English for a while
seemed like a good idea. And you'd heard good things about Taiwan. Everything
would have been fine that first day in Taipei, but you left your contact
numbers in a folder on a chair in the airport. You felt stupid about that, but
you knew it was a simple enough mistake, and probably within an hour or two
you'd solve the problem of finding your school.
But then the drink with the frog eggs
had reminded you of a scene from your early childhood--a period you'd prefer
never to be reminded of--and your fatigue from the long flight, your easygoing
nature, and the involuntary memory from childhood had all combined to provoke
you into a harmless but ridiculous act: offering some of your drink, two bits
of candy as it were, to a child who was terrified of you.
Then you were on the street. There was
sweat running off your head, down your neck, and down your back. It was around
1:30 p.m., and your good mood was giving way slowly to confusion and giddy
fatigue. You had, after all, just crossed the planet, you were in the wrong
time zone, and you were lost. All the signs around you were a blur of Chinese
characters, and the people seemed completely taken up by the bustle of their
day, paying you no attention at all.
Imagine you were me that first day. The
situation wasn't very serious, but it would be soon enough.
III.--The traffic was three times that
of New York and the air was stifling. There was sweat running off my head, down
my neck, and down my back. Noticing a bank across the street, I decided to
change some more money. At least there'd be air conditioning in the bank, and
maybe even a city map with romanized names.
In the bank there were two lines. The
teller for the long line was an older lady who looked very relaxed: she was
wearing a wig, and her makeup was poorly done. The teller for the other line
was a nervous-looking little man with grey hair. I decided the nervous man's
line would be faster. That was in fact a mistake.
As I was waiting, I noticed a woman in
the line next to mine. She kept looking at me. Very attractive and rather tall.
About 35. She would look at me, and then smile. She was probably Japanese, I
thought. She had a Japanese nose. My spoken Chinese was good enough to say to
her: "Your nose is very Japanese, isn't it?" The woman laughed at me.
So this Japanese could understand Chinese too, or at least a little.
We got our money from the tellers at
the same time. How I wish now that we hadn't! As we left the bank, we both
paused a moment at the door, as if deciding which way to go. I asked the
Japanese woman, first through my very faulty Chinese and then through hand
gestures, where she was going. She laughed again and smiled and pointed down
the sidewalk. I decided to walk along next to her.
I couldn't say much to her, so I
didn't.
Her car was a very nice silver-green
Mercedes. She played a CD of Spanish flamenco music. During the ride--and
thanks to the flimsy seashell-pink summer dress she was wearing--I was able to
consider her more carefully: her fine, milk-white Asian skin; her long black
hair that draped over her bare ivory shoulders. Her legs under the steering
wheel looked as smooth as polished jade. Given the glint of promise in her
playful smile, I had a hard time refraining from touching her as we waited at
our first stoplight. She looked delicious.
What is it about some Asian eyes that
is so impossibly desirable? I've often wondered about this. I think most Western
men look at an Asian woman's eyes and feel they are somehow defective in
relation to his own tribe's eyes. He feels they are somehow *aberrant*. But why
does that make them so sexy? There is something that seems weaker about Asian
eyes, as if the skin of the eyelids enfolding them were a bit too taut, a bit
too delicate. As if the eyelids were not as they should be, and thus could be
easily torn. And there behind the narrow slits of the Asian woman's eyes, one
glimpses two jet-black pools of ink. The eyes are often so dark that the pupil
is indistinguishable from the iris. The impression given is one of impassive
solidity; such dark eyes have a kind of strong inscrutability that contrasts
with the weakness of the delicate skin enclosing and hiding them.
Certainly these different elements--the
feeling that the eyes are somehow defective; the impression that they are also
somehow weaker; the unreadability of eyes so perfectly black--certainly all
these elements have something to do with the erotic charge an Asian woman's
eyes have in the Westerner's mind. Or at least in my mind. I suppose I can't
speak for others. But I have to admit I was looking forward to exchanging
glances with just such eyes when I accepted the job in Taipei. And already on
Day One I'd caught a beautiful woman's glance in a bank, and here already she
was driving me somewhere where we could be alone. I may have been tired out
from the flight across a dozen time zones, I may have been literally lost, but
such an event nonetheless boded well for the coming year in Taipei. Or so I
thought as her car wove its way through the maddening Taipei traffic.
She parked the Benz in her garage. We
got out, and she opened a side door onto a large courtyard. The sight that
greeted me there made my eyes widen in astonishment and my mouth drop open in
surprise. There were about two-hundred dogs there in the courtyard, and they
all started crowding around us, greeting her. What a bizarre sight in the
middle of a big city! Why in the hell would a woman who drives a Mercedes have
so many dogs? I stood there unsure what to make of it, the dogs nervously
pawing at my calves and licking my hands. They certainly were a friendly bunch.
They all looked like mutts and street dogs saved from the gutter. There was an orange
plastic kiddy pool in the shade with a hose running into it. That was for their
water. When she led me back into the garage, I noticed three tall stacks of
huge bags of dog food. She was smiling as she led me up the stairs to her flat.
I was surprised by all the dogs, but I figured it was a good sign that the
woman I was picking up was a serious dog lover. I too loved dogs.
IV.-- There were dogs in her apartment
too. Two of them were lap dogs, and the third was very big and friendly.
Motioning me to sit down, she went into
another room herself. I played with the dogs while I waited. When she returned,
she was wearing a blue silk robe. Then she was with me on the couch and our
mouths were pressed together, our tongues playing against each other. It was
all very casual, like in a French movie. Even more casual than that. I was kind
of thirsty, but she didn't offer me anything to drink. I remember I felt it was
kind of bad manners.
Soon I'm on top of her on the floor.
Me, who'd only been in the city two hours. There is a large, fine bamboo mat
under us. She is very hot. But her dogs are right there next to us, wagging
their tails and smiling in that doggy way. They seem to know this game. I don't
bother to try to complain about it.
But as we are making love, and as she
is getting more and more aroused, the dogs are getting more and more excited
too. The little ones are running around her head and feet, and one has even
tried licking her face. How can I concentrate on this with these dogs around?
But now she is groaning and writhing against me, and there is no question of
stopping to go to another room.
She has her hands down around my ass.
She is pulling me into her according to a slow and precise rhythm, masturbating
herself with my body. As she gets hotter and hotter, her voice breaks into a
kind of breathless whimpering, then retreats again into the more relaxed
groaning. And then whimpering again.
I would be enjoying this myself, but the
big dog has meanwhile started barking. He is barking rather loudly too, right
next to us. It is making me uneasy. I am wearing nothing, moving in and out of
this big dog's mistress, and he is right there, standing behind me and over me
as it were, barking in a manner more and more worrisome as his mistress gets
more and more excited. This is really too much! Does he think I'm hurting her?
What if he decides to take my balls off with those teeth I've glimpsed now a
few times over my shoulder? He sounds almost angry, that dog, and it has
started making me uneasy.
I'm moving faster now, but I'm not
enjoying it one bit. The big dog is barking at the ceiling, and has even
growled a few times. This woman beneath me has been close to coming for quite a
while now: why can't I get her over the edge? I never should have come to this
place.
She has wound the fingers of her right
hand into the long golden hair that drapes down from the belly of one of the
two lap dogs. I think this dog is called a Llasa. She is finally about to come,
the big dog is still barking at us, and now she has her fingers wound into this
little dog's belly hair. The little dog is right there next to my face, and it
keeps trying to walk away. But her eyes are closed and she's holding onto its fur
for dear life. I can't help thinking of brave Ulysses and how he wound his
hands into the belly hair of that big sheep so that he could escape the cave of
the Cyclops.
Damn this! The little dog is licking
her face, then mine, and then trying to get away again. She is on the very edge
of ecstasy and I am still holding up even though I'm afraid her big dog will
lose it and attack me just as she starts coming. I'm hoping she doesn't cry out
too much.
As she comes, she winds her fingers
furiously in the Llasa's belly hair and he is yelping and screaming along with
her. The big dog is barking at us vengefully, just as a dog barks before it's
going to attack an intruder. Damn this!
But the big dog never attacks. Then she
releases the Llasa, which retreats immediately over to the sofa.
As she begins to wind down, before
she's even gotten her breathing back, I realize what a boil my blood is in,
just how annoying all of this is. My cock starts to come back to full power.
She may have a cute nose, this bitch, but this was really too much! I'm taking
her into the other room and fucking her properly. This is no way to treat a
guest.
I get her up from the floor and begin
to pull her by the arm to the bedroom. She goes along, smiling and almost
playful. I close the door behind us before the dogs get in. I pull her down
onto the bed. She is smiling seductively now. But then she holds up her index
finger as if to say "Just one second!" and she hops up from the bed
toward what looks like a large and elaborate dark wood dresser. The light in
the room is dim and bluish. What does she want to get on the dresser? Then I
see it is not a dresser actually, but a kind of shrine or altar. I can make out
a golden disk and above it two wolves' heads carved in relief and facing each other.
She is praying before it! What nonsense is this now! I feel like pouncing on
her. She comes back to the bed as I'm getting up and leads me by the cock to
the altar. I really shouldn't put up with this. Taking a little black canister
from the altar, she rubs a kind of ointment on my cock and then begins kissing
me passionately on the neck and on my chest. The ointment stings a bit. She is
working her way slowly down me with her tongue. The ointment is potent stuff.
It is making me so hot I almost can't stand still. Her lips are finally down
around it, sucking softly. There is a kind of spinning and whispering and then
suddenly an awful noise of howling. Then I am in a bolt of lightning that
doesn't stop striking. I begin to scream as I feel myself getting smaller, my
shoulderblades drawing tightly up around the back of my head as if my sinews
were the strings on a mandolin being tightened to breaking point. Then my arms
are shortening palpably and my legs are shortening and hunching out behind me.
I feel my jaw and face tightening and pushing out forward, and I am still
shrinking. Then I am below her standing on my hands and feet, looking up, and
she is laughing. What is this? My nose is way out before me, and my hands.... I
look at my hands.... They are paws! They are dog's paws! I am a dog's body! I
am a dog! I start running round the room, I'm yelling, or barking, I have to
get out of here, I have to escape! She has done something to me! I run and jump
up against the doorknob, I run on the bed, I growl at her. I am a *dog*. I
plead with her, barking. But she is huge, above me, she is laughing all the
while. The crazy bitch! I am a dog! Everywhere I run the dog's body goes with
me. I don't have a body to shake it off. Where is my real body? I am a dog! What
kind of drug is this? I have to escape!
"Stop running!" she cried in
English, laughing. "Stop running! Listen!"
So she could speak English. So the
bitch even cheated me on that. She hadn't said a word from the bank until now,
and now she starts speaking to me in English!
She pointed to where I should sit. I
tried to sit still. I wanted to bite her. Why I didn't bite her I'm not sure.
Perhaps I couldn't believe it was all for real. Perhaps, being a dog, I felt
naturally obedient. I was so confused. Me--who'd only been in the city two
hours!
"If you are a good boy," she
said with a Chinese accent, "I will make you a man again. But if you are
bad--if you bite or pee-pee on my floor--I will drive you in my car and put you
in a village far away from here. Then I'll never make you into a man. You'll
never find either me or the zoo. Will you be good then?"
I was shaking all over. I wanted to
escape. What was going on? How could this be happening?
She motioned me to come to her, and I
did. She started petting me. I was growling at her--I couldn't help it I really
wanted to be good, but I also felt like biting her. So I couldn't stop growling
while she petted me. She had experience with this, it seems. She tried to calm
me down.
"To be a dog is not very
bad," she said. "Quiet, you. You will soon be a man again."
V.-- I was a kind of Scotch terrier
mutt, grey and black and brown. I saw myself in a full-length mirror on one of
her closet doors.
I was in the living room with the other
dogs. They were all muttering to me in Chinese. So they were men too! It was
strange, their Chinese. I could hear it as if it came from the back of their
throats or from their minds: almost as if by telepathy. I responded in the same
way with my own very bad Chinese.
"Are you American?" they
asked.
"Yes, I am American," I said.
"Too bad for you to come to this
place," said the big dog.
"We are not happy here," said
one of the lap dogs.
"I also am not happy," I
said.
Being that my Chinese was so bad, this
was about all I could manage to communicate. I didn't understand a lot of what
they were asking me.
The apartment had very strong smells
everywhere around it, and the Mistress' body itself smelled like Heaven. I
wanted to crawl into her skin with her and die in her smell. I almost pee-peed
on the floor when she was sitting next to me. She smelled so good! But I'm
lucky I didn't.
And the bamboo mat we made love
on--what an ecstatic smell that had! Delightful! I immediately made plans to
sleep on it that night. I rubbed my muzzle on it and rolled around on it
awhile.
There were roaches in her kitchen
cabinets. Roaches are terrible creatures. They stink like chemicals or
corroding metal. It made the kitchen very unpleasant even though there was the
smell of meat in there too.
Finally a man came home in a suit: a
businessman. He was about ten years older than the Mistress. When he saw me, he
pursed his lips. He wasn't happy there was another dog, I guess. I believe he
didn't know where his wife or girlfriend got all the dogs from in the first place.
But there was a kind of resigned look about him: even if he knew, he probably
wouldn't have done anything about it. He would only be scared she would one day
turn him into a dog too.
The man smells like a locker room. His
feet especially are awful. But he is, in a way, handsome, and he is probably
the one who bought the Mercedes and the flat. I understand why the Mistress is
with him.
The Mistress made two bowls of shrimp
noodle soup and he and she ate them while the Mistress watched *Those Amazing Animals*
on the Discovery Channel. Loretta Switt hosted the show, and I sat at the foot
of the couch trying to remember what show she was in when I was a kid. I kept
coming up with *Police Woman*, but I knew that was Angie Dickinson. *What was
Loretta Switt in?* I never watched TV after I got to university, and I now
remember very little about all the shows other Americans my age remember
episode by episode. Was she in *Beretta*? No, it wasn't *Beretta*.
I probably only thought of *Beretta*
because it rhymes with Loretta, and because Loretta Switt was holding a white
cockatoo in the opening section of *Those Amazing Animals*, and there is a
white bird in the show *Beretta* too. There is a white bird and some illiterate
cop. Does the bird help him solve crimes? I don't remember. *Starsky and
Hutch*. *The Bionic Man*. *Hawaii Five-O*. "Book 'em, Dano."
"Yabba Dabba Doo!" "Gee, Wally, that Eddie sure is a wise
guy." "And *my* name is Charlie." So many stupid names and phrases
started coming back to me as soon as I tried to remember what Loretta Switt was
in. It made me kind of angry. Why didn't she just dry up along with all the
rest of it? Why did she have to go stirring all that crud around and bringing
it to the surface anyway?
All the animals in *Those Amazing
Animals* were very interesting to me. I wanted to smell some of them or bite
others. That I could only see pictures of them seemed really dull. There was no
sound and no smell. I immediately thought of something like speakers that would
emit the scent of what one was watching. When I saw the rhino, I wanted to
smell the compacted hair I knew made up his horn. I didn't much care about
seeing him from twenty feet away, which is all I could do with the TV screen.
And same with the giraffes. When I saw the giraffes, I wanted to smell their
hooves after they had tromped around in the dust for a day. Giraffes made up of
little flecks of light are nothing but a kind of tease. Do giraffes urinate on
trees or do they just urinate where they're standing like elephants do? You
don't mess with those elephants. I knew that as if by instinct. They are faster
and smarter than they look.
All those animals had dung and genitals
and sweat, a whole library of sweat and skin oils, with matted hair that
gathered the best of it. I knew they all stunk, and I couldn't wait to get at
them. And they all had their own way of making noise when you came near them. I
knew they did. I yearned to hear those noises, to provoke those noises. But you
could sense none of the real thing on a flat screen. It made me feel like a
cretin to sit there watching those animal images, however interesting the
thought of the real animals may be.
Do you think I could I catch those
gazelles? It would be a blast to chase them and then chew on a leg for a while.
I wouldn't want to hurt the gazelle, just nibble on its leg. It wouldn't let
me, but I would nibble and gnaw until I was done, and then I'd let him go. I'm
a humane dog. I'm not some hyena.
Those hyena's look like shit. I want
nothing to do with them. They look like they're all a little mad. And worst of
all: they're bigger than me. I know as soon as they saw me they wouldn't leave
me alone until I was harried into the ground. They'd chew off my hair and eat
my intestines; they'd suck the marrow out of my bones. They'd bite each other
and shed their own blood fighting over my carcass. They look hyper, those
hyenas, like they always get the worst of everything. They look like
revolutionaries destined to fail.
Already after fifteen minutes I was
getting seriously bored. Television is no good for dogs. It is only one
frustration after another. You can smell nothing, and you can only hear what
they want you to hear. Television is entirely disconnected from what matters. I
realized that afternoon why dogs never watch it. It's not because dogs are too
stupid to recognize and interpret the images. It's because images alone are the
worst kind of boredom. I was watching *Those Amazing Animals*, but the other
dogs in the living room scarcely glanced at the screen. The very knowledge that
the television was on made them listless and indifferent. They had been dogs
for a while now, and they already knew what a hoax television was.
VI.-- So the Mistress put me outside in
the courtyard with the two-hundred other dogs. The bitch! And I didn't even pee
on her floor. Why did she do it then? Wasn't I as playful and obedient as those
other lucky dogs up there in the apartment? What did they have that I didn't
have?
Next time that bitch comes in here I'm
going right for her calf. I'm not wasting any more time on this nonsense.
But maybe it's true that she changes us
back eventually. Prudence is the safer course.
VII.-- How long was I stuck in that
pen? I was too heartbroken to count the days. No carving of notches like in *Robinson
Crusoe*. A dog's days follow no calendar. There was the long hot period of
sunlight, during which I moped in the shade by the orange plastic pool, and
there was the cooler night with its mosquitoes. Wasn't I special in some way?
Wasn't she soon going to take me back up to her flat and change me back?
I was in fact special. I was the only
American dog in the kennel. The rest were all Chinese, and one was a German.
The bitch changed him into a German shepherd. Was that her sense of humor? How
do you say German shepherd in Chinese? *Duh guo go*...
The German shepherd and I soon became
friends. His name was Jurgen. He was from Hannover, which is in the north. He
worked for a trade company, and he met the bitch when he was in a copy shop
making photocopies of refrigerators. He had been in Taipei about eight months
when she nabbed him. She seduced him in pretty much the same way she seduced
me. And she had run him through the same rigmarole too, the same fuck in the
living room, followed by the black altar and the cream, followed by the
promises she would change him back. Jurgen figured he'd been there about two
months, and though he had never been back up into her apartment, he said she
had taken one dog back up there and he hadn't been seen again. Maybe she
changed him back to a man? We were hopeful.
My German was pretty rusty, and though
it started to come back with practice, Jurgen and I ended up speaking mostly in
English.
As it turned out, I was lucky Jurgen
was a shepherd, and I was lucky he was my friend. Some of the other dogs, and
some of the bigger ones especially, would pass the time by humping on each
other. I guess men in prison are the same everywhere, even when they're not men
any more. Being that I wasn't at all interested in their games, and being that
I was a smaller dog than average in the kennel, I would have been in pretty bad
shape if it hadn't been for Jurgen defending me. Those bad boys were already
onto me during my first day, and I really almost did get it good. But Jurgen
barked twice and rushed at them, and they scattered. So my friend Jurgen was
top dog, and I was grateful for it.
But really I wasn't at all happy in
that fenced-in little yard. I could work on my German, and I could learn a lot
of dirty words in Chinese, but I was in despair at the thought I'd never be a
man again. But also: I never in my life had much liked being in all-male
company, and the fact that all these men were dogs scarcely made things better.
Even Jurgen was a typical man in one respect: all he did was talk shop. He
talked about what companies he had worked for, different pain-in-the-ass bosses
he'd had, and how he thought Asia was where the future was. All of this was
tedious as usual, even if it had the novelty of coming from the mouth of a
handsome German shepherd more than twice as tall as I. Oh, yes: he also talked
about American movies, which was another subject that interested me hardly at
all. He told me he had once wanted to be a special effects man and try to get
into Hollywood, but how it was almost impossible for Europeans.
"It was just a youthful
dream," he said. "Everyone dreams of some nonsense when they're
young."
And then: "What did you dream when
you were young? What did you dream of doing?"
I really should have told him. It was
an honest question, after all. But of course he wouldn't have understood, so I
lied.
"I wanted to be an
astronaut," I said.
"An astronaut?" he exclaimed,
his shepherd ears pointing up more sharply than usual. "An astronaut?
Really?"
"Yes. Why not? I wanted to work on
space stations."
"Hah! That's even more ridiculous
than my dream. That's really a winner!"
If he'd had hands and if I'd had a
proper shoulder, he'd probably have reached over at that instant and patted me
on it with warmth and comradeship. As it was, he just stood there next to me
with his doggy jaws widened in a kind of smile, looking as if he were taking a
pause in a happy game of fetch. We'd had our ridiculous dreams, both of us.
Somehow that touched his heart, so that I was glad I didn't tell him about my
real dreams, which would only have confused him. He was a warmhearted guy,
Jurgen. I wonder where he is today.
VIII.-- The food she gave us was in
small, dry, brownish pebbles. It wasn't too bad, though, and there was enough
of it. It kind of tasted like ground-up bones mixed with cardboard mixed with
gravy. But she did feed us well, the bitch.
IX.-- What is that awful hemming and
hawing? What is it? It's like the music of Headache itself. It comes and
retreats, and then comes on again, up there in the darkness. It's starting to
get on my nerves. It sounds like a hundred sci-fi ladies running metallic
fingernails on chalkboards. What in hell is it? I've never heard anything like
it, and it's up there, up in the sky.
Am I sick? Someone put their hand on my
forehead. Their paw. Oh, it's no use. If I'm sick here, I'll die for sure. It
must be two in the morning. Why aren't the others awake? The noise is driving
me nuts!
I remember lying there for nearly an
hour, suffering a cranial annoyance like nothing I'd ever known before. It
seemed like sound, but it seemed also like a kind of electrical wavelength. It
tickled the nerves at the root of my teeth.
In exasperation, I decided finally to
wake Jurgen and ask him if he heard it.
"*Es gibt hier zuviele Menschen*,"
he said. "*Es gibt auch zuviele Pfledermausen*."
But what did *Pfledermausen* mean? What
was that? I couldn't remember that word. *Pfledermausen*. *Pfleder* is flying.
I knew that part. And *Mausen* is mice. Flying mice. Bats. So they were *bats!*
What Jurgen had said was: "There are too many people here in Taiwan. There
are also too many bats."
So there were bats careening around in
the darkness above us. I could hear their squeaking because as a dog I had
high-frequency hearing. And really it was an awful noise they made.
Dogs in the tropics have a rough time
of it if they have to put up with such a racket every night. Crickets are
endearing, nightingales are the stuff of secret trysts, but those bats sounded
like nails on chalkboards and nothing more. I felt I'd go mad if I had to
listen to it much longer. But there was something I didn't get.
"Why weren't there bats here last
night?" I asked Jurgen in English. "I mean, I've been here a few
weeks now, and I've never heard these bats before."
"The people who live on the roof
must be having a party on their patio," he said. "That's what I
thought last time the bats came. I've heard the bats once before. The people up
there probably turn on a lot of lights for the party, and the bats come for the
insects. Can you see it's a little lighter over on that side?"
Jurgen gestured with his muzzle.
Looking up to the tops of the buildings
hemming us in, I could see it was in fact a little bit brighter on one side.
"You are one smart dog," I
said to him. "I think you figured it out."
"I am German," he replied.
"We can figure out anything."
"Yeah!" I laughed. "A
German shepherd! Hah!"
But Jurgen wasn't laughing.
"Are you an East German shepherd
or a West German shepherd?" I continued, hoping to get a smile from him.
"Germany is united," he said.
"All German shepherds and all German people are one."
I looked to the ground. Was he serious?
He still wasn't laughing. And now I wonder: Could Jurgen have been serious
about that? I'm still not sure. I decided then not to pursue it any further.
After all, he was my only real friend in the kennel, and I didn't want to make
him angry. But that idea: "All German shepherds are one"--that was
really a bit balmy, wasn't it? I mean, you wouldn't hear me railing against the
English just because I was a Scotch terrier. But it was true that Jurgen really
was German, and that he really ended up being a *German* shepherd. But that was
only ironic, I thought. That was probably just a joke on the Mistress' part.
But still, maybe Jurgen saw more in it. Maybe he saw it as a sign of the
strength of German blood. Who knows? Maybe he believed a witch could change his
species, but could never efface his essential Germanness. Maybe Jurgen thought
if he were changed into food he would end up being a knockwurst or Wiener
schnitzel and certainly not pasta or wonton soup.
I could have joked with him about all
of this--sometimes we joked about different things--but I never did. I felt
there was something rather literal and straightforward in Jurgen, and I didn't
want to let my humor cause a row between us.
I never got to sleep that night. The
bats never went away. Those people on the roof probably partied all night. But
there were no bats the following night.
X.-- I must have been in the kennel about
three weeks when the bulldozer came. It started in the morning with men putting
up big fluorescent stickers on the high fence that bordered....
[The following excerpt is a chapter
from much later in the novel.]
XXX.--My name is Louis Kemp. I don't
know why I haven't told you that already. Louis Kemp. Try to remember it. Names
are important for men. I suppose I am lucky I can still remember it at all,
given what I'm going through.
I should be a classicist by now. I know
Latin and Greek, the latter quite well, and my German and French are quite
strong too. This is something I keep harping on, I know, but I can't help it.
The fact of my education contrasts so painfully with what has become of me.
Even among the graduate students I knew with an education similar to mine, my
learning usually managed to distinguish itself, particularly my linguistic
learning. At the time of my dissertation defense, my Greek was much better than
that of any of the classicists I knew who'd recently been hired out of grad
school. My scholarship showed nothing amiss either. I'd already published four
papers before finishing my dissertation. So why wasn't there a position out
there for me? I was considered the strongest recent candidate from the
department where I did my PhD., and that department was ranked third best in
the U.S. So rightfully I should have found something. And I should now be a new
faculty member in one of the betters Classics departments, writing papers on
speech genres in Aristophanes and organizing conferences. But what am I
instead? I'm a street dog in Taipei. I am down and out. I have gone to the
dogs. This isn't just a metaphor in my case either. *Metaphor* is a Greek word,
you know, from the verb *metaphorein*. I could go on and on about Greek words.
I could talk about Greek until you were ready to pay me to shut up. The verb
*metaphorein* means: to move something from one place to another; to transport
something. I have been literally transported to the dogs here, carried over to
the dogs. And dogginess has started to reveal itself in me. I have begun to
suffer. I am suffering worse every day.
Is it the summer heat? What is
happening to me? Though it still rains often enough, on many days the hot wind
blows the dust around in little whirling storms. The grit and dust from all the
traffic blows in my eyes, it gets compacted in my fur. The pavement is hot
under my paws, and even the cement in the shade seems laced with an intractable
heat. All of it has begun to boil my blood. Everywhere I find nothing but the
maddening pain of my lust.
Is it the summer heat? It is too
fucking hot in this city! It's intolerable! And I am all covered with this
damned fur. My tears themselves seem to sting in my eyes as if they were semen.
My blood simmers. I find myself chewing on everything that comes along.
No amount of Milkbones could assuage
the burning lust that has taken hold of me. What's happening? There is no
rawhide chew that could take the edge off of the curse I've fallen under. My
long, lipstick-shaped shlong swells out of its foreskin a thousand times a day.
It is getting me down. I need a woman. Finally. I *need* a woman. Or do I?
The dirt of this city has infected my
dreams. This terrible heat, this dirt! I know that the sooty surfaces only make
me randier with their filth. The filth has gotten under my skin, and I want to
dash myself into it, to tear myself in two so that my very heart is pumping
with filth. I want to see my blood mixed with the black grime of the alleys.
I crave an apotheosis of soot and
semen, my doggy teeth digging into the back of some bitch's neck, my canines
(as it were) clenched around her loose leather collar, holding her in place
under me as I thump and thump my doggy dick against the knob of her cervix.
What I really desire is to mount the stewardess.
I've seen her pass the cafe four times now: always walking swiftly, always
dragging her little flight bag on wheels. But how can I go about it? If I jump
as high as I can, I could just manage to bite her ass. My teeth would pierce
right through the purple fabric of her Air China skirt, right into the unseen
white flesh of her lovely thigh. But how would that be enough? It wouldn't be
nearly enough for this cursed wave of lust I'm under.
I've had it with this! Something must be
done, and it must be done soon. I'm about ready to go to a vet and get myself
neutered. This is no life!
What is the species I need? My dreams
are rent by the confusion of my being. I dream of sleek wolf-ladies bent over
on curb-sides, everything done doggy style, their chins scraping against the
cement as I do them from behind, their fangs flashing forth from their lips
with every thrust. I dream of girls with five-inch red leather leashes fixing
them firmly to fire hydrants, the ground but a puddle of reeking urine. I bang
furiously against their little haunches, that quick, no-nonsense thrust of
dogs, and they snarl at me in pleasure mingled with pain. They have women's
bodies, but dog's souls: they are inarticulate.
This can't go on! My dreams have recycled
everything of my human past: it all comes forward in line--my high school
teachers, old loves, neighbors--it all comes forward and I lift my leg on it. I
mark it with the dog's world. My memory is being caninized!
Everything is awash in urine and lust,
the urine a kind of propaganda, the signifying thrust of a politics, the lust
being the heart of the matter, the real agenda of this quest to mark the
territory that is my past.
I dreamt I was at my high school prom
again, dancing with my date. The urine began to run down my leg and onto the
floor, slowly making a puddle. The boys began to notice my puddle; they fled
the room in fear. That's just how I wanted it. Then all the girls, abandoned by
their dates, fixed me with their eyes. They began to strip off their clothes,
piece by piece, in admiration of the great puddle I had made.
What kind of a doggy dream is that!
Through the medium of my dreams, my new physiology is beginning to recast my
memories, so that I fear I will no longer have anything left of them. They will
finally become just so many scenes of kennel love, the girls who were my
obsessions in high school taking on ever more canine qualities: Karen K.
becoming a sleek, blond poodle trimmed in all the right places; Amy T. becoming
a gaunt little miniature greyhound with a hungry look in her eyes; Julie
R.--her Angora sweater!--a chubby lapdog that can't stop licking your ears,
down your neck, your hands and wrists, and on and on.
If this continues, I will certainly
forget that I was ever human. My human identity will be washed away by these
waves of canine lust as thoroughly as poodle piss is washed away by a
hurricane.
....
----[The Taipei Zoo was finished and retitled A Taipei
Mutt. It was published in 2002 by Cheng Shang
Publishing. Some links to reviews
can be found at: DRAFT.]----
There are street dogs everywhere in
Taipei. One sees them always and everywhere, and they are a dirty, hunkering
bunch.
I feel for the street dogs. Many of
them limp from having been hit by cars. Others have little hair left on their
bodies: it’s been eaten off by the skin rashes they develop from splashing
through puddles laced with oil, from sleeping on soot-covered pavement, from
the humidity and heat of this sub-tropical city. Some look as if they were
nothing but one big itch, their skin appearing almost to boil with scabs and
open sores.
Street dogs here live off garbage and
the detritus of night markets. There are occasional dear souls--women usually--who
make a point of feeding the dogs of their neighborhood. My neighborhood has one
such woman: she lives across the street from me. The dogs, however, far
outnumber the people trying to help them.
Street dogs are necessarily street
smart. I notice them waiting for walk lights to turn before they cross the
street. I'm not sure if they’re responding to the changing light itself, or if
they are just watching the traffic. It’s interesting, though, that some dogs
make a point of walking to a crosswalk before they’ll venture off the sidewalk.
For their own safety, they know to avoid jaywalking. Once at the crosswalk,
they stand waiting for the light to turn. And they do this whether or not there
are human pedestrians standing there with them. The point is that these dogs
are not simply taking their cue from crowds of humans: they themselves know the
best way to cross the street. When the walk light turns, they’ll glance at the
traffic to be sure it's safe, then they’ll cross. Some dogs, it is true, aren’t
so smart as this, but I’ve watched this doggy crosswalk routine more than once,
and know it is something many street dogs have mastered.
I feel for these Taipei dogs. I’ve seen
too many of them broken down with injury and disease, on their last leg.
Sometimes I buy dog food for the dogs in my neighborhood. I’ve done this only
rarely though. I admit I’m not as faithful as the woman across the street.
The biggest of our neighborhood's
dogs--he is like a large, greying black bear--has taken to following me from my
bus stop to the door of my apartment building.
[The rest of Letters from the Taipei Zoo deals
with my own arrival in Taipei, rather than with the fictional arrival of Louis Kemp.
The letters are in chronological order, beginning with one of my first letters
to H.]
8/8/96,
Taipei
Dear H.:
The sentence came to me the other day,
and I thought I would perhaps write that
I love to ride the bus and watch the
crowded shop signs, banners, and marquees pass by. I’m at the point where I can
identify a character here and there, but still the general effect is opacity. I
pass slowly through a sea of incomprehensible signs. I don’t even have a
phoneme to cling to, for what can you do with this:
I somehow love the opacity of this
city. But I also love this city because I want so badly to be able to read all
of it, and perhaps because I'm confident that I have time before me and that I
thus can go about my deciphering one character at a time. And the character
system means that it is deciphering, for the complexity of any one word means I must
write it at least a dozen times before I have a good chance of recognizing it
when I see it here or there. And given that my idea of writing and my love for
writing are both founded essentially in the fact of writing as the act of
making marks--writing as an act of inscription that every step of the way
involves the decision not to inscribe something else--the Chinese character is
bound to become dear to me if it doesn't become maddening. Probably my only
saving virtue here is that I am patient.
But if the sentence "I have died
and gone to Paradise" came to me, it was certainly not only a matter of
graphology. I also love being surrounded by Asian people--by all the trappings
of Asian people--by all the trappings of Asian culture--but mostly by Asian
people themselves. If there is a pack of kids on the sidewalk, I want them to
be Asian kids in powder green school uniforms. If there is a handful of old men
in stained tee-shirts playing cards in the park, I want them to be old Chinese
men. And more important than these others, of course, are the Asian women bound
to be everywhere in a major Asian capital. Paris and New York don't hold a
candle to this place.
Why I am so struck by Asian women I’m
not quite sure. Maybe it’s a matter of reading, in a way. The fact remains that
woman is to me
first of all an Asian woman. This is to say that a woman has black hair, ivory
skin, and eyes black like two pools of ink.
But you are probably smirking by this
point, and saying to yourself: "Here's the heart of the matter, what is
meant by Paradise." And you are probably more or less correct.
Nevertheless, it is not only the presence of Chinese women, but the whole
constellation of things hinted at above that makes this polluted city something
of a terrestrial paradise.
Here in a place whose words I don't understand
I feel I am at home. How can this be so?
It takes a little daring to come out
with this letter, because, you know, one doesn't like to talk about "dying
and going to Paradise" just after one has arrived in a foreign place, if
only for the fact that things might always turn around and one may even be
prodding them to do so by such open enthusiasm. Knock on wood. When I
contemplate living here indefinitely, I immediately feel that I am a foreigner
and wonder how welcome Westerners will be here in the future. It's an unknown,
of course. Things could change. It will depend on how all the geo-political
cards fall as the world becomes more and more cramped. Different groups predict
that the 21st century will be "the Chinese century." As of right now,
that could mean a lot of different things for a sinophile like myself. And it
could mean a lot of different things for an American in Taipei. On verra.
How would Sartrian existentialism
interpret this latter remark?
I don't know if you will get this
before your exam. If you do, best of luck.
Warmly,
Eric
9/7/96,
Taipei
Dear H.:
The strip that runs along the edge of
our counter had come loose. I'm riding the bus to work when out from under the
awnings on the sidewalk runs a lovely woman in a very classy little black
dress. She is running to get on the bus, and suddenly she nearly falls, but
then catches herself. The heel on her right shoe is broken, and she looks down
in desperation because she is obviously in a hurry to get somewhere. The bus
has stopped, and she gets on and sits three seats ahead of me.
I had remembered to buy the fast-drying
epoxy to fix the loose strip on our kitchen counter. It was in my bag. The
woman's long, ivory legs are crossed neatly on top of one another, and she is
looking down considering the shoe. There are a number of men on the bus, among
them two helots sitting together, and one of these two makes a rough remark
directed at the woman. The other men break into grins, and the woman's
annoyance increases to the point that she turns toward the front of the bus and
swings her legs under the seat.
Standing next to her seat, I begin to
open the epoxy. I point down to her foot, and she flushes and laughs. She turns
toward the window in defiance, but soon I'm kneeling in the aisle next to her,
holding out my hand submissively, waiting for her to extend her foot to me.
Will she do so?
She could have punished me by staying
just as she was, for then I’d have been stuck there kneeling next to her with
nothing to be done. In that case I’d have become either a fool or a clown, and
the difference between the two, in my life at least, is slight. As it turned
out, she didn't punish me. I will tell you just how it happened.
She first moved as if to take the shoe
off, but then--with a slight smile!--she thought better of it and extended her
leg to me. There was a smile of playful triumph in her eyes as she did so, and
I can only understand it as triumph over the remark made by the helot four
seats back as well as triumph over the modesty that would have insisted she
remain gazing out the window. It was a triumph in which we could share.
When it was obvious to all that the
foreigner had her foot in his hand and was kneeling on a moving city bus fixing
her broken heel with epoxy, a whooping went up. The woman was laughing, and
even the older woman in a seat across the aisle was grinning at the unexpected
entertainment.
Meanwhile I was in transport in my own Roman
de la rose.
Everything could go wrong in such a scene, but nothing did. The woman crossed
her one leg over the other so as to hold the glued shoe above the floor of the
bus.
Did the glue stick? I don't know. I had
to get off before she did. In fact, my stop was upon us almost as soon as the
work was done.
She did have time to thank me in
Chinese (a nice touch, for most people are eager to show they can thank you in
English) and to offer me her hand to squeeze.
I could have kissed the hand, sure, but
that would have been clowning. I could have asked her phone number--why
not?--but that would have ruined the scene forever (whether I got the number or
not). I really was to do nothing but step off the bus, don't you think?
I had a student named Peter, about age
12. He was more shy than the others, and was at first afraid of me. At our
institute all the students begin the class with a brief recitation to the
teacher. You call them up one by one, and those not reciting are writing the
quiz. When Peter first gave his recitation, sweat would begin to run down from
his sideburns and his voice would pile words randomly one atop another. Of
course I saw right away that he was one of the smartest students in the class.
After his second class with me, he realized I was on his side, and now he is
much more at ease. He even tries telling me things in English outside class,
which is quite a rarity for students at his level.
One day as I was calling out role, I
noticed that Peter's name was crossed out and the name "Richard" was
written next to it. But Peter was in class. Peter had changed his name to
Richard. I was told the reason for this later on by a Chinese teacher. It seems
Peter's father learned somewhere that Peter meant rock. Chinese are very sensitive to this
kind of thing. The father decided that rock was too lowly a thing for a name, and
insisted his son become Richard instead.
This event bothered me, strange as it
may seem. Perhaps I too am sensitive to this kind of thing. I was thrown right
up against my inability to communicate. I wanted to explain to them that Peter
was rock in the
sense of
It’s true that an explanation may have
had no positive effect on them in any case. It may even have had a negative
effect. Though Christianity means that a certain spectrum of names will take
hold wherever English does, these names in themselves do not mean that the
Christian keys to their meaning will be accepted. There is another text:
A book is a wonderful thing. I've been
thinking about why it is that I love the book so much. It has always seemed to
me wondrous that such things actually exist, and I have to admit--even though this
is so much out of keeping with what deconstruction has supposedly done--I have
to admit that placed next to the world the book is quite a substantial thing.
Probably the book weighs even more than the world--but if this is true, it
weighs only a bit more. That books are there at hand is thus almost unheard of:
it is an incredible privilege.
There is an economic element to my
fascination with the book, or at least one can talk about it in terms of
economics. How is it that merely with the money in one's wallet one can walk
into a store and get hold of the life's work of some major human spirit? The
monetary value is so small, yet what one has, in terms of potential, is
entirely other. So much of that mind, of what made that mind, is there to be
grasped, and what has one had to pay to have things thus laid before one?
$12.00?
One could answer this fascination of
mine by saying that I’m simply "enthusiastic about literature." If I
were enthusiastic about music, wouldn't I say the same thing about CDs? I don't
think I would, or that I could. The main reason for this is that reading and
writing are closer to each other than are composing and listening. This too is
arguable, of course. I won't try to defend it here. I will say only that the
closeness of reading to writing becomes of supreme importance when one
recognizes the fact that language is both the most fundamental and the most
intimate human faculty. Though just as universal, it is more fundamental than
either the faculty that creates and appreciates music or the faculty that
creates and appreciates pictorial art.
The book is somehow the crux of the matter in a way that a CD or an
image cannot be.
The book has a virtue another virtue
that none of the other arts can equal. It is small. The smallness of the book adds
tremendously to its power, for nowhere else can the life's labor of a major
human spirit be laid out in such compact confines. If one has a book, one needs
nothing else but light to begin reading it. This smallness and self-identity (a
CD needs a very elaborate machinery, after all, to be heard) is part of the
wonder of the book.
It is a traditional part of Muslim
piety to copy the Koran in minuscule letters on minuscule leaves of paper. And
everyone has heard of the Chinese who copied Confucian analects on a grain of
rice. Both of these practices demonstrate an understanding of the importance of
the book's smallness as well as an attempt to heighten that smallness in an act
of knowing piety.
If you are in the library, and you
think of it, would you photocopy a few pages of English tongue-twisters for me?
I’m going to trade training in English tongue-twisters for training in Chinese
tongue-twisters with some of the Chinese teachers at my branch. I'd appreciate
it.
Also-- You shouldn't believe all the
stories I tell you. What I wonder is at what point you think the above story
begins to be a story. Is it untrue because I was not daring enough to come
forward with the epoxy? Or is it merely untrue because the epoxy didn't work?
Or was I made a fool of? Or is it even untrue because our counter is all of a
piece and there aren't any strips to come loose? Is it the case that no woman
in a black dress ran out that day and broke her heel? Give me your best
surmise.
All my best.
Warmly,
Eric
10/10/96,
Taipei
Dear H.:
If you remember correctly--I am sure
you do--Lily Briscoe's love for Mrs. Ramsay extended itself--(we are in
Virginia Woolf)--even to the point of admiring Mr. Ramsay for his rather
tyrannical sense of self-importance. They were before the house, and Lily was
liking Ramsay all the better for the fact that if his little finger hurt the
whole world would be at an end. Mr. Bankes parried by wondering aloud if Ramsay
were not "a bit of a hypocrite."
Now I am not like Mr. Ramsay at all--I
must come out and say it--for I had kept quiet about the whole thing. Not a
whimper from me, much less the world coming to an end.
But now I can speak, for I have good
news. It is even with a feeling of great dexterity that I write this letter.
The swelling of my right index finger
has finally gone down, and I can grasp my pen and maneuver it over the page
without pain. Almost three months ago a pink cockatoo in Florida latched onto
the end of my finger with its beak and wouldn’t let it go, but instead slowly
ground its way down to the bone. That cockatoo, though smart, didn't know how
close it was then to the end of its life, but because I didn't throttle it on
the spot, the bird now has a good chance of outliving both you and me. My
finger has been swelled up ever since, and I was convinced it was permanently
damaged. Now I see that might not be so.
But I’m not like Mr. Ramsay at all--for
I’ve kept quiet about the whole thing. And it wasn't even my little finger that
ached, but my very pointer!
My finger is back, and I feel I could
pen a novel.
[The following few paragraphs will
only make sense to those who have read Gospels from the Last Man, being volume II of THE
CLAY TESTAMENT.]
I have found a place here that actually
reminds me of Steep 'n Brew. It’s in a crowded and older part of town that I
like very much. I’m not sure why it reminds me of Steep 'n Brew, and it may be
in part just the colors of the interior and the style of the tables and chairs.
The coffee there is cheap, and not very good, and the place is full of old men
yelling at each other. I would say that the old men gabbing, boasting, and
waving their arms about somehow hold the place in this caf(c) that the
derelicts and maniacs held in the old Steep 'n Brew.
But there’s even more evidence that
Caf(c) D. is a Taipei Steep 'n Brew--more evidence than just an unleashed mania
in the atmosphere. One day I sat there reading for an hour and a half, and
different people started talking to me. Out of the blue. This doesn't happen
often at Taipei’s more chic caf(c)s. I was glad to have some sociability, of
course, but I was a little apprehensive as well. I was afraid I might be
picking up new chumps. Nevertheless, it’s a good sign to find a place where people
will talk to each other.
I should mention what I think is the final
proof of Caf(c)
D's affinity to Steep 'n Brew. While reading my novel I noticed someone
twitching and moving about across the room. I looked up and saw that it was a
thin man of about 30. He was writing on little scraps of paper, and reading
other little scraps of paper, and he was talking to himself and laughing. His
face twisted here and there. He was obviously excited about something.
Was it Cosmo di Madison, or was it me?
I am afraid that in Caf(c) D. we have combined into one person.
Taipei is a very crowded city, H., and
the Chinese are known to be a practical and frugal people. Not having space
enough for both Cosmo and his scribe, they’ve decided to combine us into one. I
can’t really complain. At least we have a foothold.
You will say I am boasting and gabbing
myself even to suggest that Taipei has a need for its own version of us. You
will say I am waving my arms. But I did see him. I don't know, however, what
his scraps of paper said, being that I didn't see them. What's more, had I seen
them, they would have grinned back at me in Chinese.
This week I taught extra classes to
cover for a foreign teacher off on a two-week vacation. I ended up with an
exhausting schedule, and I'm still behind on correcting homework.
I like the children very much, and they
have drawn pictures and cartoons for me for Teacher's Day, which is celebrated
on Confucius' birthday. The Chinese have a far greater respect for teachers
than Westerners do, though their attitudes are probably being steadily
westernized in this regard too. Some of the children's cartoons are quite
funny, and if I figure out a way to photocopy them, I may send you copies. Some
of the older girls (13-14) seem to have a crush on me. It is very sweet.
I’ve enclosed a "translation"
of a poem by the Taiwanese poet Lo-Ch'ing, as well as a copy of the letter to
him concerning my translation. I may write you about this man some time, as he
is certainly the best host I've had over here. I know him because he used to be
Hui-Ling's professor. His personality and position in things is somehow
classic, or at least represents what I have picked up about Chinese literati
here and there. He and his wife are great collectors of Chinese art, and their
possessions lean toward the eccentric, which of course makes visiting them
particularly attractive to me.
As for the reason the story was untrue,
it’s not because she didn't pick up the heel. The heel didn’t break off
completely, but hung from the shoe. The reason it was untrue was simply that
she got on the bus in front of mine. I was riding 18, and she got on 292. My
epoxy could do nothing for us.
The story becomes existential then--in
the sense that a French film of it would be existential. The space between 18
and 292 becomes the very stuff of drama, and the rest of the film continues as
a dwelling on the missed bus.
You've got the glue, but Catherine Deneuve
got on 292.
You may want to translate this in
another direction--also French--and say that these paragraphs--from the last
letter and this one--are preludes to an American Exercises de style à la Queneau. I still do want to read
that book.
Warmly,
Eric
Still I can't help myself:
I must create
one tiny little car
one tiny little man
one tiny little animal
On the sly
I take up these tiny things
and set them loose in the big city;
I set them loose in Taipei
The car's lights turn on, but it never
starts.
The man has one hand and tries to clap.
And there's the tiny animal that has no shadow:
a kind of armadillo that can imitate bird songs.
So if you are out and about in Taipei,
and if you see my little car,
or meet my little man,
or hear the singing of my animal,
there is one thing I'd ask you to do:
Please close one eye immediately, and
smile.
September 15, 1996
Lo-Ch'ing:
I translated this poem about a month
ago. Hui-Ling taught me each of the characters one at a time. The delay in
getting it to you is explained by the fact that we’ve only just recently gotten
our computer desk and equipment set up.
Why Demiurge? I mentioned this in your office. The
word demiurge
comes from Western religious history, specifically from Gnosticism. The
essential point is that the Demiurge is a kind of upstart creator god who can't
hold himself back. In this case, I used it to refer to a creator who engages in
a kind of unauthorized creation, or extraneous creative activity.
The terms Demiurge or demiurgic creation often come up in discussions of modern
Western poetics. For example, Rimbaud is often considered "the poet as
Demiurge": the poet who seeks to rival God in his creative autonomy.
Rimbaud struggled to breathe fire into his creations so that they could stand
on their own; he would have his poems march forth and overturn the world. Pious
Western thinking is always out to demonstrate that such overweening faith in
one's own creation is bound to lead to aberrations and monsters, for in the
tradition it is only God that truly creates. We have the Hebrew legend of the
Golem, we have the Frankenstein story, and recently in the same mode the common
assertion that Rimbaud's own poetic career was a "stunning disaster."
All of this ties in with the mythos of the Demiurge and demiurgic creation.
Your poem seemed to me, as you translated it in your office, to be calling out
for a comparison with this particular Western tradition of understanding
creation and the creator. That your poem is in a more playful mode doesn't in
my mind change the essential facts that 1) you evoke your creation as
unauthorized or surreptitious, and 2) the beings your creation brings forth
are, in a very light vein, monsters.
You notice I've changed one of your
lines. Don't complain about this. Monsters, after all, are bound to beget
further aberrations.
A one-handed man trying in vain to
applaud. Is he
trying to applaud his own creator?
Also: Why "Please close one eye immediately, and
smile"? I understand it as follows--
Taipei is so crammed with beings that
there isn't room for any more. Nonetheless, the poet in Taipei can't help but
create. He creates tiny beings, half-complete beings as it were. One must close
one eye upon seeing these half-beings, for it is only with one eye closed that
they appear full. Close one eye--"Please close one eye"--is an indulgence
to the poet, who is not after all a god and whose creations only trace out
parts of the fullness of phenomena. Parts though they be, one should take time
to see them. Thus closing one eye is also a metaphor for being able to
appreciate the particularities of what the poet brings forth: not full beings,
but creations nevertheless, whose tininess is a virtue in a city so crammed
full.
But why do you write "smile"?
For several reasons, yes? First, one should smile because there is still at
least some room
left for such creations to move about. Second, one should smile because these
tiny things have a kind of sad humor about them. And finally, one smiles in
indulgence at the vice of the poet, who can't hold himself back from creating,
regardless of the crammed fullness of the city around him.
Eric
11/11/96,
Taipei
An American humorist I'd previously
only read snatches of--but, to tell the truth, he is all made up of
snatches--is Donald Barthelme. I've picked up a collection called 60 Stories, and I can't resist telling you to
find it in Memorial Library and read, say, "Miss Mandible and Me" and
"Daumier." These are brief tales, H. You certainly would have time to
read a few.
Probably Barthelme is to high modernism
what comic books are to the quattrocento--there is some truth in this--yet I
think you will laugh aloud. He writes down only the sap of American English.
"Possibly you will laugh, no? One
will see, yes?"
There would be nothing notable in this except
for the fact that the scrambling used to block these channels doesn't quite
block them, but just drapes the image with grey fuzz. You can see more or less
what you will be able to see clearly if you pay.
Channels 5 and 6 have a very special
effect when you’re first getting used to watching cable TV here. For instance,
if one is surfing up the band ("1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - ...") trying to find
something to watch, one will click over 5--getting a quick glimpse of a sumo
match--followed by 6--getting a quick glimpse of two or three people
fucking--followed by 7 and then 8. Coasting over 5 and 6 has a particular
aftershock to it. One has the impression of having seen a "Before"
and "After" commercial for a weight-loss clinic: 5 being what it's
like before you
attend, 6 being what it's like after you attend. I had clicked through these channels a
couple of times before I finally laughed out loud at the absurdity of their
being right next to each other.
If, on the other hand, you are surfing down
the band, and you click
7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3, the effect is very different. What you see first is the
heady seriousness of the erotic. What you see next, as if hidden just behind
it, is an absurd parody of the erotic. To click down the band is to get a kind
of subliminal Morality Play. One feels a bit annoyed at this. For someone, it seems, is out to expose our
desires in all their ridiculous absurdity. Who could they be? Someone, it
seems, is trying to point out how ugly the whole game of love really is. The
bastards.
(Note: I write these remarks with no
ill will to the Japanese, for whom sumo wrestling is sacred. In fact, I even
respect the Japanese particularly in that they probably wouldn't be much
bothered by the porno station being so near the sumo wrestling station, lovemaking
itself being charged with so much of the sacred in Japanese life.)
There’s a series of stages the
Westerner goes through learning Chinese, and they can all be classified under
the heading wonder.
The Westerner wonders that; he also wonders how.
At the very beginning, when the
Westerner considers the Chinese and their language, he is struck that such a
thing can exist as a modern civilization based on a logographic writing system.
The logographic writing system, for the Westerner, is somehow most closely
associated with the Egyptians or the Maya. That such a system is currently
holding together more than a billion people--and a nuclear power at that--is
something that seems somehow incongruous. This first stage provides an instance
of wondering that.
Coming second is the initial stage of study, when one begins learning the first
few hundred characters. At this stage, one suspects that each character is
unique, that all of them are separate pictures, and one wonders how any human being
can hold several thousands of these little pictures in their head. Here one
begins to feel physiologically incapacitated, as if one had gotten off the boat
in a country where everyone could walk either on the ceiling or the floor,
depending on their will. You yourself, the Westerner, are stuck with the usual
laws of gravity, and cannot even get your feet to stick on the walls: witness
the scuff marks all over the plaster.
The shock of this second stage is
mitigated when one realizes just how important radicals are in the composition of characters.
Radicals mean that the Chinese written vocabulary is not so much thousands of
utterly different pictures as it is thousands of different combinations of a
few hundred simpler pictures.
The third stage of wonder--where I am
suffering mostly now--has to do with the spoken language. I have mentioned the
difficulty of the tones before. This difficulty takes particular forms, one of
which is hallucination. One has the recurring impression--extremely annoying it is--that
Chinese use the same seven words for everything. Everything is either shou, jie, shi, chu, or wan. Some other things are shui, ma, or xiao. The Westerner is tenaciously,
doggedly, deaf to the tones. I am confident this applies to everyone, though
there may be some prodigies.
We Westerners have places prepared in
our brains to register phonetic differences. Learning a new set of phonemes is
no big deal for us. We also, of course, have places prepared to register tonal
differences. But tonal differences for us typically define the emotional
intention of the utterance, or, say, whether it is a question or statement.
Tonal differences in Chinese define the very word one is using, and so the
Chinese speaker's mental registers for tone are of an entirely different order.
One is quickly tired by the mental effort of trying to hear the tones in one's
own and others' speech, and one is never long into a conversation before one
feels like a bird in a straightjacket trying to sing along with other birds who
have grown long used to their straightjackets and even, it seems, mistake their
straightjackets for feathers.
Such, of course, is the nature of all
languages. We mistake our own for feathers.
I don't imagine the annoyance of tone
will go away soon--only that my experience of the troubles of a tonal language
will refocus somewhere else. I’ve already mostly overcome that most confusing
Western mistake: changing a statement to a question by using rising intonation.
We have the sentence: You want some coffee. We change it to a question through
rising intonation: You want some coffee? You can't do this in Chinese, but you
do do it, all the time. The foreigner asks: "You want to dance with
me?" The woman hears: "You want to dance with me."
* * *
There is a new teacher at our branch, a
New Zealander. Because all the women teachers are rather traditional, they
immediately begin pestering him.
"Michael, do you have a girlfriend
back in New Zealand?"
"Michael, what kind of women do
you like?"
"Michael, when are you going to
get married?"
Now I ask you: what sort of man is it
whose presence provokes such questions--questions that repeat because they are
never answered?
Michael says: "I decided long ago
that I would never get married." He says with bluster--very
unconvincing--: "Nope. Women are trouble."
The questions continue: "Michael,
what do you do on the weekend?"
"Michael, tell us about your
girlfriends."
And on and on. The persecution
increases by the week. I think some of the women have figured out the obvious.
I know that at least one has. They say things to me calculated to provoke me
into acknowledging that I too think Michael is gay. They seem to want it
confirmed aloud by another Westerner. But I am evasive. They can ask him
themselves, if they choose.
One day I was teaching in one room and
I could hear Michael's class going on in the next. It seemed to me they were
repeating something ridiculous, but I wasn't sure I was hearing it right. About
a week later I thought I heard the same thing from a different class of his, so
I decided to listen outside the room. Choral repetition is an important element
in teaching language to children, even more important than it is in teaching
language to adults. Michael was saying:
"Okay. Michael has a beautiful
bottom. Repeat."
The class: "Michael has a
beautiful bottom."
Michael: "Michael has a beautiful
bottom."
Class: "Michael has a beautiful
bottom."
Michael: "Who has a beautiful
bottom?"
Class: "Michael has a beautiful
bottom."
Michael: "What does Michael
have?"
Class: "He has a beautiful
bottom."
Michael: "Very good. Does Tom have
a beautiful bottom?"
Class: "No, he doesn't have a
beautiful bottom."
Michael: "Who has a beautiful bottom?"
And so on. It seems this a standard
sentence he teaches to each class.
All across Asia the Western businessmen
are dragging about their huge, bloated corpses. At any moment of daylight they
are on the move, slowly on the move, conducting their massive bellies here and
there over an endless maze of sunbaked streets and sidewalks. How many hands per
minute reach up with tissues or handkerchief to blot the sweat from flabby
necks or reddish foreheads? These men are huge compared to the tight, crowded
little sidewalks they must negotiate. Waiting on a corner for a walk light to
change, they look like oil tankers run aground in some faulty lock of the
Panama Canal, their Asian hosts no bigger than tugboats trying to drag them
free. The tugboats smile and try to be hammy--hammy the way the weaker-witted
Western men like it--but as they tug their guest through factory and bar and
restaurant, as they drag their sweating charge over all the little stretches of
heated pavement, their Asian eyes glance to each other on the sly, they mutter
words I can only guess at--words in languages the Westerners will never take
the trouble to learn--:
"Finally, tomorrow, we'll be rid
of this flabby fuck!"
Frequently the Asian businessmen will
take the Western businessmen to hostess clubs or brothels. Then the physical
incongruity between the Asian men and the western men must give way to the more
striking, yet more comic incongruity between the western men and the usually
petite Asian women. It is true that Chinese women, on the average, are not
really all that small, and in other Asian countries the incongruity must be
greater. But even here the girls have an idiom for taking on one of these tubby
western businessmen. They refer to it as "doing the circus ride." I
can think of different ways in which this idiom may be apt, but the one I
prefer to think of, the one that most touches my imagination, is that the
"circus ride" meant is an elephant ride. I suppose it is not actually
at circuses proper but rather at carnivals where a father can pay to have his
children walked round a dirt track on the neck of an elephant. I've seen these
rides at carnivals. But even so, this is what I think of as the bar girls'
"circus ride."
"Uh, oh!" says one to
another. "It looks like he wants you, Coco! You'll have to do the circus
ride tonight."
And when svelte little Coco is riding
the huge businessman's waist, Herr Kaiser from Siemans AG, what does it look
like if not an eleven-year-old girl astride the back of an elephant?
A dream this morning. I’m on the third
or fourth floor of a large Taipei hotel, looking down onto the pavilion below
me. More than a hundred fold-out chairs are arranged for journalists, and there
are TV stations there too. On the platform before the journalists, the Spice
Girls are giving a press conference. All the Taipei press is there as the Spice
Girls proclaim their philosophy in English. The Spice Girls don't bother to
stand. Rather they are slouched on the fold-out chairs placed on the platform.
The blond Spice Girl, as I can see, is wearing skin-tight lime green leotards,
and she slouches back with her legs spread indifferently, her snatch thrust in
the most provocative manner at the audience.
One of the Spice Girls has a book open
and is reading a vitriolic essay by an American feminist theorist. While she
reads on in the usual righteous tone, the journalists make jokes to each other
about the theatrically bored blond Spice Girl with her legs spread. She herself
is too transcendent to meet their eyes.
I begin to urinate on the Spice Girls
from three floors above. According to some kind of dream logic, neither the
journalists nor the Spice Girls realize what is happening.
A man is standing next to me at the
balustrade. He’s in his fifties, and his face is covered with a kind of thick
yellowish make-up. The make-up is almost pasty in consistency, like I've always
imagined the make-up to look on Queen Elizabeth's face when she died. I
remember in high school being told that Elizabeth I wore a quarter inch of
pale-colored make-up on her face during her last years. I've always thought
that one could have made a death mask of her simply by spraying her face with
gloss, letting it dry, and lifting it off. The man next to me wears a similar
make-up, and his hair is pommaded back. He is wearing a heavy, maroon velvet
suit in Renaissance cut. The suit looks like it’s been mended in places. I know
the man is Michel de Montaigne, but I am not to say anything about it.
"A fine place you've chosen to
leak," says Montaigne with the soft old voice of one who has seen the
world. And he unbuttons his cumbersome coat and trousers and begins to leak
with me.
So Montaigne and I are pissing on the
Spice Girls while they do their news conference. Both the conference and our
urine go on and on. I must have drunk a lot of something.
Finally some of the Spice Girls are
getting bothered by whatever it is that's falling on them from above. One of
them starts shaking her hair like dogs do when they get out of the water.
They’re getting frustrated, and their faces express their annoyance, as if to
say, "What is that, damnit?" A journalist stands up and
apologetically informs them that there is a lot of rain in Taiwan.
"We must celebrate the rain
too!" cries the blond Spice Girl, gesturing dogmatically to the
journalists. "We must celebrate the rain as the creative female force of
otherness that it is!" she insists.
"The rain is our Mother,"
chimes in the cafe au lait Spice Girl, standing up and adopting a theatrical
pose. "The rain is the otherness from which we all come. It is our Mother!
We must celebrate the rain!"
Montaigne is snickering at this.
"What a lot of rubbish," he
says.
I remember that Montaigne winces
occasionally from the pain of urinating.
"It's the stone," he says.
"It's terrible."
Even so, he continues heroically,
draining himself steadily as the press conference goes on.
The dream ends here, or rather this is
all of it that I remembered.
Warmly,
Eric
2/12/97,
Taipei
Dear H.:
I have seen the Chinese albino. He is
not as ugly as people say. He is, I am told, a gangster, and is rather high up
in the Bamboo Tong Triad.
He was leaving a restaurant with two
other men when I saw him. I dared to stare at him long enough to develop a
complete impression of his appearance.
An aura of calm power and the slightest
bit of a swagger in his movement struggle with the pale weakness and delicacy
he emanates as an albino. His eyes are not red, but seem more a dull amber shot
through with grey. His appearance is more singular than any other.
The thing about the Chinese albino is
that you cannot on any account picture him in your mind before you’ve seen him,
for the hair of the average Chinese is so very black and the complexion so
ivory-yellow that replacing them respectively with white and pale rose is
impossible in the mind. Others who’d seen him before had tried to describe him
to me, but to no avail.
Try to picture the Chinese albino in
your mind, and you will get glimpses of parts of a man who never comes into
focus. If you pin down the snow-white eyebrows, the rest of the Chinese face
disappears. When you see the white hair, you cannot see the white complexion,
which in any case is unimaginable on the full, rounded face of a Chinese man.
Had he become a gangster in protest
against his fated weakness? Had his potential in the Triad been tripled by his
almost frightful difference from the others? For who is less suited to be a
thug than the anemic, hot-house plant that is the albino? One can imagine him
protected by his very myth. It would not be surprising if the crime world had
developed the notion that the man who killed him would bring a terrible curse
down upon his head. The Chinese are far more superstitious than Westerners. And
who is more superstitious than gangsters?
I saw him for only a moment, but it was
long enough to make up the whole of an image that can't be imagined. Is he as
high up in the Triad as people say? If so, he is already a character in
fantastic literature.
My wife and I married in the U.S. some
seven years ago. She is from Taiwan, and I am American. Soon before our
engagement, she showed me the photo-album she had brought with her to the
States from Taiwan. Among the photographs were a handful from her childhood,
and among these there was a small black-and-white photo that had been torn into
several pieces and then taped back together.
In this reconstituted picture, my
wife's family stood before their home. Her parents were obviously very young,
and I could see my wife in her mother's arms as an infant. At the very center
of the photograph, where all of the tears intersected, was the hardly
recognizable face of a Western man. The tears were obviously intended to
destroy precisely his image.
My wife told me of this picture that
she herself tore it into pieces when she was five. She had no memories of the
earlier visit of the Western man--she was only one at the time--but she clearly
remembered tearing the picture into pieces because, she said, she couldn't
stand the image of this strange intruder standing in the midst of her family.
Apparently her parents discovered the ripped-up photo and taped it back
together. Thus it still survives.
All of this was particularly amusing to
me because of the many implications I could take from it. This was my future
wife's first recorded reaction to the sight of a Western man. Of course there
was a very intentional irony in her manner of telling me the story of the
destroyed photo.
Some months ago we moved here to
Taipei. For the first time I am experiencing life in a city where I am not
merely a foreigner, but a foreigner racially marked as such.
I look very different from the Chinese,
and everywhere I go I am aware of myself as visibly foreign. I know that when I
step on the bus the people who see me have a voice that whispers faintly in
their minds, "The foreigner is stepping on the bus." If I am walking
through a food court in a mall, I am visible as "the foreigner is walking
through the food court." Not that I suppose I am the center of attention,
but rather simply the following: merely to glimpse me is to glimpse me as a
foreigner.
In a big city like Taipei, there is no
reason for my passing to cause heads to turn. They don't turn, and I am only
slightly more noticeable than anyone else. There is an exception to this,
however. The exception is children.
I have realized since I've been here
that most small children, when they come in close proximity to me, are amazed
and shocked by my appearance. Let me note, for the record, that my appearance
is not out of the ordinary for a western man. I have learned, however, that my
appearance is enough out of the ordinary in the daily life of the average child
here in Taiwan to cause a kind of rapt amazement. The reactions show a striking
consistency from one child to the next, and have set me thinking about the
question of just how children may perceive the foreigner. What do Chinese
children perceive when they encounter a foreigner close up?
After considering the different age
groups, and taking notes on what I've noticed, I've come to certain conclusions
which, if they are not really the stuff of anthropology, are nonetheless rather
amusing.
Let me begin with the two-year-olds. I
run across them all the time. If they notice me, they almost always have the
same reaction. Their eyes widen in fright, their brows knit in dismay, and they
stare at me as if dumbfounded. The two-year-old who has noticed me cannot stop
looking at me; neither can he or she figure out what sort of being I am
supposed to be. Soon after they begin staring they will often lift one of their
hands up to their face and insert four fingers in their mouth for security. For
already, by then, their mouth has dropped open in astonishment.
It is obvious by the reactions of these
children that they notice before them a creature quite different from the
humans they recognize as fully human (i.e., the Chinese adults that fill up their daily
lives). The creature before them is strange enough to provoke dismay, but
similar enough to provoke intense curiosity. They are apparently so shocked by
my presence that they can't bring themselves to stop looking at me.
This scenario has happened to me numerous
times: in malls, at street-side food stands, on buses, in the park. What is
striking is seeing the same exact expression take over the faces of so many
different children in different corners of the city.
What is it they see in me?
I will say with confidence that
children of this age do not have the concept foreigner at their disposal. That seems obvious
enough. Thus they do not think foreigner when they are looking at me. I would
guess that what they see is fundamentally deformity, for this is what their faces express.
As they stare at me with their worried little eyes, something like the
following is running through their heads:
I am writing here of the two-year-olds,
those who have just learned to walk and are still learning to speak. The
reaction of these children is of course a far more primal one than the reaction
of children a bit older, who when they see me can immediately conjure up the
category foreigner.
Children ages four to seven can thus put me into a category the instant they
see me. And by recognizing me as a foreigner, they make me in some respects less
strange. For the foreigner is not a monster like the two-headed calf, but is
merely an exotic species. When one sees a foreigner, one knows that there are other
foreigners of the same type in the world: one does not imagine that the
creature before one is a singularity of nature.
The reaction of four- to
seven-year-olds to me is thus completely different from that of younger
children. They will spot me, look at me for an instant, and then they will retreat.
If they catch me
getting on the same elevator as them, they will try to stand behind the Chinese
adult they are with. Their reaction indicates that I am to a certain extent a
known quantity: they do not stare at me in amazement like the two-year-olds;
they know me well enough to know that I am one of those; and they sense instinctively that those
are pariah.
These older children perceive me as a
being about whom everything is problematic and thus dangerous. My presence is
the presence of a renegade. They know ahead of time that I am likely to break
all the codes of behavior, and particularly the most basic code of behavior,
which is the language. These children are painfully aware that the sounds coming
out of my mouth are inappropriate: even if the adults may understand me, my
Chinese is impossibly incorrect from a child's point of view. Thus they do not
want to be trapped into any kind of verbal exchange with me, for such an
exchange is impossible. I sound far too strange. It is better for them to step away
before our eye contact leads to an attempt at speech on my part.
Maybe these children wonder, at some
level, why the adults themselves tolerate such renegades in their city. Maybe
these children are aware, at some level, that the adults themselves have
difficulty tolerating them.
It is obvious that they do not want to
hear me say things to them in Chinese, because they will then be compelled to
respond, and they will not be able to respond, because their mind will be fully
occupied by my foreignness, to which there is after all no iterable response.
And what if it should happen that I take the opportunity offered by their
frozen silence to snatch them up and carry them away to some foreign world?
What if I kidnapped them to the incomprehensible foreign world they know from
western video images? The world of foreign films is after all quite close to
them in a certain way--in the sense that it gets inside their living rooms--and
thus it is not really unreasonable for them to fear that mere verbal contact
with me could lead to their being implicated in that video world.
The four- to seven-year-olds are
clearly not as interested in my appearance as are younger children. They are
interested only in avoiding contact with me. When they see me in their
proximity, they generally give themselves just enough time to glimpse and look
away. Their reactions indicate that they are to have nothing to do with me, and
it is not uncommon for them to skip around corners or shuffle quickly out of
sight so as not to be in my immediate field of vision. Here is the paradox:
whereas the two-year-olds, who know nothing about foreigners, cannot stop
looking at me, the seven-year-olds, who recognize me as a foreigner, cannot bear
to look at me. For to look at me is to risk that I will look back, and then
anything could happen.
In the States, I worked for a short
time as a French teacher. For this reason and also because I love teaching
language, I have taken up work here as an English teacher. The students of the
institute where I teach English are from nine to fourteen; thus they represent
an age group just senior to the four- to seven-year-olds. Most of them who
enter my classroom are coming in sustained contact with a foreigner for the
first time in their lives. What is interesting to me here is not so much how
they behave in the classroom--classroom behavior is after all dictated by
rather strict norms and expectations--but rather how they behave just before
and after the first few classes. How do they behave during that period of ten
minutes or so when everyone is mulling around the entrance to the classroom
waiting to go in?
I should point out that before a class
ever has me as a teacher they have already been together as a class for around
eight months. During that eight months, they learn the rudiments of English
from a Taiwanese-born English teacher. One fine day, however, they notice that
it is me standing outside their classroom door and not their Taiwanese teacher.
Their glances shift around nervously. They see what looks like their class
folder in my hands. For one reason or another, their Taiwanese teacher
neglected to tell them that the rough times would begin today. When they
finally confirm that it is indeed their class folder in my hands, there is a
general uproar of fear and excitement.
Once all the students have seen me and
verified just where I will stand while I wait for the previous class to finish
with the classroom, they will usually form up into groups and begin squealing
and pushing each other. On several occasions the game has been to push your
classmate over by the foreign teacher. This game is best played against a
classmate who has just arrived and hasn't yet noticed me standing there. This
in itself is not so amusing, and is rather predictable. What is more amusing is
a different game, a game I've seen played only once since I've been a foreign
teacher, but one that through its very uniqueness defines all the other
reactions of all the other Chinese children who've met up with me.
The game was played by a girl named
Cindy. I believe she is around 9. It was just before the first day I was to
teach her English class, thus the first day she would have a foreign teacher. I
was standing and reading through my lesson outline while waiting for the
classroom to open up. Suddenly Cindy's face was right next to me, jostling the
notebook I was holding. Her lips were pressed firmly together and her fists
were clenched against her sides. She stood stiffly to her full height and
glared defiantly right into my face, refusing to turn away. She was even
blocking me from seeing my notes.
Cindy was obviously trying to
"stare me down." It was an outrageously daring move, and it appeared
to me even more daring when I compared it to the fearful behavior of other
students in front of their first foreign teacher.
Because my mere presence as a foreigner
was in itself a kind of provocation, Cindy had to demonstrate that she was not
afraid. Far from afraid, she was in the attack mode.
Cindy managed to keep up this game for
about twenty seconds, after which she could hold out no longer. She burst out
laughing. She stood there a few seconds more, trying to regain her composure and
return to her serious stare. But this second time the stare was even more
strained, and she couldn't hold it as long, but burst into laughter again and
ran back to join the other students.
Cindy was in part laughing at me, at
the strangeness of my presence up close, at just how foreign indeed I must look
at such close quarters. But even more than this I would guess that she was
laughing at herself, at her own unique situation. She was laughing as it were
in celebration of her daring. Cindy's laughter was the burst of pleasure she
got in payment for holding her ground so firmly--for a full twenty seconds--in
the face of a being as foreign as myself.
While demonstrating to her whole class
that she was by far the most daring, Cindy demonstrated to herself that the
boundary between her and the foreigner could be played as a game, and that in
fact the struggle to get close to the foreigner was the very stuff of giddy
hilarity.
I must admit that Cindy's little game
made me think of her as a sister, and that the look on her face as she broke
into laughter was immediately familiar to me as something of my own. I myself
am attracted to foreignness as a challenge to my sense of balance. What's more,
I am likely to break into laughter and joking when the seriousness of the
other's presence begins to seem dull and heavy. As an expatriate here, I see
Taipei as a provocation to be played out as a game. The fact that I am still a
beginner at Chinese means that I have a long way to go in this game, and this
in itself is enough to cheer me on.
The foreigner new to a city is often
shuffled between a nagging desire to retreat and a firm intention to hold his
ground. These two rub most harshly against each other in those everyday
situations where communication doesn't work, where it is obvious that one has
made a mess of what one is trying to get across. But these situations in
themselves are attractive to a certain kind of person. This person, given the
chance, is likely to become a traveler. Where many would see endless hassles or
even danger, the traveler is likely to see the most attractive kind of
engagement.
Cindy's daring in staring me down was
in some respect the antitype of all the reactions I had gotten from children so
far. That it ended in hilarity had an irresistible effect on me. I am not
ashamed to admit that the actions of a child can be important to my
happiness--in this case, my happiness as an expatriate in a foreign city.
Cindy's laughter in some way redeemed the fifty or so farcical encounters I had
had with children since my arrival: all those ridiculous little dramas that
occurred between myself as image and the Chinese children of Taipei. It was
after Cindy stared me down that I first thought consciously about what
children's reactions to a foreigner might mean. How may these reactions, so
consistent and predictable from child to child, relate to the general problem
of foreignness as we think of it in the adult world?
Whether there is more wisdom in
engaging the foreigner or more wisdom in hiding around the corner is up to
everyone to decide for themselves. I am of the race that opts for engagement
and play, but I can also see good reasons for maintaining one's balance.
Nevertheless, it seems obvious that learning is more likely to result from
engagement than from balance. In my own case, it was my student Cindy's
courageous little game that illuminated for me the importance of the other
children's behavior in my understanding of the world. By walking boldly up to
me, she reminded me that fear of the foreigner also has as its secret
concomitant a desire to overcome that fear. This recognition returned me to
thinking about that tension experienced by the expatriate between the nagging
desire to retreat back to one's own country and the dogged intention to stay where
one is. And it suggested some common ground between the fear and fascination I
see written on the face of the two-year-old who comes upon me in the mall and
my own fascination with the specter, every day repeated, of sidewalks all
around me filled with foreign Asian faces.
[This article was finally published,
with a Chinese translation, in the March, 1998 issue of Sinorama magazine.]
I've been reading now and then an
anthology of Paul Bowles' writing. Here is a writer still living who has some
of the grace and power of traditional literature. I had been misled in the past
by finding his name mentioned along with William Burroughs and clan. This is a
disservice to Bowles.
Almost all readable living American
writers find their power in being funny. Paul Bowles generally isn't. That
other noteworthy living American writer, Thomas Pynchon, is very American in
this regard. Bowles has managed to write in the twentieth century without being
terminally ironic. Or rather, when Bowles is ironic, it is usually in the sense
of tragic irony.
There is a story of his, "A Distant Episode," that I believe to be a
rewriting of Camus' story in L'Exil et le royaume about the missionary who goes to
convert the City of Salt. (I don't remember Camus' title.) If you set the two
tales side by side, Bowles' superiority becomes obvious. Bowles' sense of
tragic irony is classical in its hardness; Camus' is plodding and unconvincing.
Another sign of the great writer is the
following: what I've read of Bowles is etched in my memory. There is a power
and inevitability in his tales that impresses them immediately upon the mind.
Now it is six months since I've been
here. Nothing like homesickness has made itself felt. Not even a trace. I am
even surprised by the extent to which I do not miss anything of life in
America. Not a single taste or atmosphere. Only very few people.
I'm also reading Claude Pichois'
biography of Charles Baudelaire. And I'm rereading Northrop Frye's book on the
Bible: The Great Code. I'm always reading the Bible itself in various translations.
I'm reading a book on the history of writing by Henri-Jean Martin. I'm reading Les
Fleurs du Mal.
How do I have time for all this
reading? I've had a week off from work for the Chinese New Year. I was going to
go to the beaches at the south of the island, but my friends decided they
didn't have enough money, so the trip fell through. Hui-Ling is busy writing,
and I didn't really want to go alone. I have stayed here, going out
occasionally, and reading every day.
I'm also enclosing some materials from
my classes. The most interesting of these is Vlad in Taipei, a vampire tale being written by my
most advanced class. Each chapter is the result of about four class periods,
which is to say that each chapter took about a month to complete. I begin by
teaching and working on the grammatical structures necessary for the envisioned
chapter. Then, after giving them a few introductory paragraphs and some
vocabulary I imagine they might need, I ask them to write what happens next in
the vampire story. Reading the homework they hand in, I select the best things
I find in different students' writing and edit them into a coherent chapter,
which is printed up and photocopied for the whole class. We read it together as
a class, and they thus can encounter their own writing corrected and woven into
the story. I'm sending you the four chapters I have so far. [Vlad in Taipei was completed some six months after
this letter was sent. The complete text is on a separate file: VLAD IN
TAIPEI.]
Warmly,
Eric
4/4/97,
Taipei
Dear H.:
I haven't read Lolita since I was twenty. That's quite a
long time now.
My job often leads me to think about the
erotic status, or stature, of children. Children may not be the right word.
Actually most of my students are on the borderline of adolescence; thus they
are not really children. They are of the most interesting age. What are they? I
don't know. When I ask them to create, and I always do, they produce things at
once childlike and perversely adult. I have several times thought how I am
lucky to have ended up teaching this particular age group.
But the erotic stature of children.
Since Freud we have acknowledged that children are erotic beings. They have an
erotic life and erotic fantasies. Freud may have been wrong in what he posited
their erotic life to be, but of course he was right in what Adorno called an
allegorical manner. Children have an erotic life, and the no-longer-children I
teach most certainly have an erotic life.
What does it mean for me to be always
working with these erotic beings? I have always to touch their imaginations, to
keep them alive by playing off their relations with each other and with myself.
This has had an effect on the seriousness with which I take their imaginations.
Because I love the game of language teaching, the relations between the class
and me are real: they are not mechanical and professional. I am interested in
the outcome and in what will come up.
I realized a couple months ago to what
extent my relations with these adolescents were gendered: the boys and I and
the girls and I do not relate in the same ways. Though I'm not unfair to the
boys, though I don't ignore them, there is a spark between the girls and I that
cannot be there between the boys and I. This relationship is something I
determine myself, but it is also something they determine.
After class last night some of the
girls came up to my desk with a ruler. They were giggling and trying to explain
that they wanted to pull some hairs from my chest and measure them. This is a
class of almost all girls, and so girls set the tone of the class. They are
lively and chattering; they gossip in Chinese about things they hear I did in
other classes; they are concerned with my hair and clothes: they always have
suggestions about both; they want to know about my wife. They draw me on the
board as a giant goldfish and draw around me a school of smaller goldfish with
thick red lips. The fish of the school are labeled Wife 1, Wife 2, Wife 3,
Diana, Candy (some of the girls in the class). Two weeks ago, after class, they
asked for one of my markers so they could put something on the board. They
wrote the following:
Amy said: "Read the sentence to
me." I did. They all burst out laughing. "Read it to Candy!"
Candy: "No! No! No!" I read it to Candy. Hysterical laughter and
applause. Of course the sentence means something in Chinese. Finally I started
listening in Chinese to what I was saying in English words: "Morning nine
nine how how one." After a few repetitions, I figured it out:
"Caressing your breasts is a lot of fun." Then I realized I shouldn't
be in the classroom after class repeating this sentence since, after all, there
are always parents mulling about around the school and the walls are thin.
After I got to my desk, I decided they
had done a good job with their very brief erotic poem. I think OULIPO would
have been pleased. They used the English words they knew. I tried to improve
upon it, though. I wrote the following:
Morning nigh nigh
how how wan
(Or: Look, the pale morn approaches!
We must part.)
The erotic relations between teachers
and their pupils. What a dangerous subject on the American scene! Taiwan hasn't
become so progressively paranoid yet. It is odd how our office is more open
recently about the idea of pupils having an erotic importance. The women in the
office, all Chinese, have taken a fancy to a twelve-year-old boy named Jason.
Jason is tall and dark for his age: he is a hot number. I haven't seen him yet.
The women are bantering in Chinese about how they will "molest" him.
Natasha suggests a come-on technique, and narrates it with actions. The very
idea of Natasha's come-on repulses Grace, who squints and exclaims, "Ahh!
How vile!" in Chinese. But then Grace suggests an approach to which
Natasha and the others burst out with the same words: "How vile! How
vile!" They are laughing and twisting about in pleasure mingled with
revulsion. They don't know I'm listening. Finally, when I know they've gotten
graphic enough in their narratives, I ask Grace to explain their plans to me,
because I missed some of it in Chinese. She refuses. Grace: "It's too
much. It's like a porno film." Natasha: "Ask Vicky when she comes
back. Vicky will tell you." But Vicky wasn't there while this little
discussion was unwinding. That means they've gone through these Jason plans
before! Later on, Vicky tells me that Grace imagined walking Jason into the
corner and practicing the phoneme [l] with him. By this detail I figure out
that Jason is in the beginning stages as a student: he is still learning the alphabet
and the phonemes. Grace had her approach worked out in stages. After the boy
had been sufficiently moved by the repetition of these [l]'s--about which more
presently--Grace would reach down and begin caressing him with the following
words: "C'mon, Jason. Let's see if you can use a woman like me."
What about this [l]? Grace was going to
articulate it in a manner which would slowly bring her tongue out of her mouth.
The boy was to imitate her. Soon both of their tongues would be sliding out of
their mouths. This is nothing if not perverted. We know the phoneme [l] is a
voiced apico-palatal. What Grace wanted to do was to model [l] for the boy in a
manner that would convince him that [l] was in fact a voiced apico-palatal that
slid slowly and luxuriously into the position of a voiced lamino-dental. Now
[l] cannot on any account be construed as a voiced lamino-dental. In the close
proximity envisioned by Grace--she has the boy pushed up against the
wall--practicing the consonant in this way would result in the teacher's and
the student's tongues coming together and mingling. What would be the result?
It is not easy to grasp in phonetic terms. In fact, the [l] would become a
phoneme wholly new, something we could only call a haltingly voiced bi-glottal--something
like: "[l] l ...[ll] lll lllll..." Now bi-glottals are not part of
our phonetic spectrum--But please, God, take me to the country where they
are--and so Grace would be perverting this young boy's phonetic development. Perversion is the
only proper word for it. One can see him struggling with the [l], dwelling on
it overlong, in every English class for the rest of his life. Thus in level 2
Jason answers a question: "Yes, I l-llike baseball-l mole than
basketballll." Notice how he's even substituted an [l] for the [r] in the
word more. Lamentable perversion. In level 4: "I wall-lked home alfter I
lll lll-left the store." It's sad to see this happening. The twisted
fruits of premature sexual experience. In level 6: "I woul-ll-lldn't move
to New Zeal-ll-land even if I coull--llld." The teacher can't get him to
stop pronouncing the silent l's: bad scores, extra homework, calls to his
parents--nothing works. And why? It's all Grace's fault. Finally, in level 8,
when the boy is in the full swing of puberty, he takes up the [l] as a banner
of revolt! No matter what the teacher asks him, his response is always the
same: "lll-lll... ll...llll...ll-lll-l...lll." He's even affected a
little drool to accompany his phoneme because he thinks it looks cool. It
doesn't. His parents are wringing their hands; they don't know what to do. Then
follows the adolescent counselors, the adolescent psychiatrists, the tuning in
to talk shows, and finally psychoanalysis. It is a credit to Rand's discourse
that it is only the latter that finally reveals the cause of the boy's problem:
her name was Grace; she was his teacher in level 1. Then follows the scandal:
the hysterical parents on TV; newspaper articles; the Institutes'
self-distancing from the culprit--"We had no idea. We only knew Grace as a
dedicated teacher. There was never anything that would lead us to
suspect...."--the drop in enrollments; the tense, humorless classrooms;
even I lose my job because my branch of the Institute becomes tainted: "Sure,
send your kids to Ho-Ping Rd. and they'll learn how to llll-llll-lllllll--if
you know what I mean." But all of this is as nothing compared to the
damaged psyche of poor Jason. For his parents wanted him to be lawyer, to
defend the company's interests in Seattle and Los Angeles, and now all he can
say in English is:
Warmly,
E.
4/13/97,
Taipei
Dear H.:
Hui-Ling works late. She does her best writing
between midnight and 3:00 a.m. I can usually hear her in the other room typing
at the computer as I fall asleep. This sound is something I've gotten used to
in our small apartment. And as I know it's the sound of her best work, it gives
me a feeling of contentment as I drift off. Last night I woke from my
half-sleep to write two lines:
In the morning, as I prepare my coffee
and oats, I often hear the periodic muttering of a mina bird that's kept by one
of our neighbors. For a while I was convinced it was the babbling of a
toddler--it sounded so human--but then I realized it was a bird. The voice of a
mina bird is closer to a human voice than a parrot's voice is, so I was fooled.
In fact I've now learned I was wrong on
both counts. The muttering in my neighbor’s apartment is neither a toddler nor
a mina bird, but is actually a toddler, then a mina bird, then a toddler again.
The toddler and the mina bird are muttering interchangeably; they are
exchanging influences.
Their voices of the two are very close,
but now I think I can tell which is which. What do they say? There are a few
patterns I recognize, but I'm not sure if it's language yet or if it's mostly
just mutual imitation. If it's language, it’s most certainly Taiwanese, for
Taiwanese is a language made for mina birds. And if it's language, I am certain
I don't understand it, and am confident besides that the mina bird doesn't
understand it, but as for the toddler--who can tell? The bird's repertoire may
have been picked up from adults, and the toddler may not really understand some
of what the bird says. But the toddler knows how to imitate too. With this
interesting result: by mere dint of the mina bird's repetition, the toddler
will learn some of its first phrases--and will learn them well. The toddler
will learn some of its first language from a source that doesn't understand
language. There’s beauty in this, don't you think? This is also how I think of
the Western literary tradition and the universities that currently teach it.
E.
4/17/97,
Taipei
Dear H.:
Since I have been here there has been a
shift in my understanding of youth. Youth to me is ages seventeen to
twenty-four. In America, at least since 1986 or 1987, I felt little solidarity
with young people and their dreams or desires: their fantasies were repugnant;
their righteousness ridiculous; their erotic lives increasing suffocated by the
resentocracy of the politically correct. This American youth movement--or lack
of movement--didn't show any signs of turning down another path even up until
last year when I left. And so I’ll always think of the American culture of my
generation as the MTV culture. There are individual exceptions, of course, but
if one considers their collective gestures, the meaning of their styles, their
music, their films (Slacker is the epitome of these films), then one can only say
something like the following: American youth culture of the 80's and early 90's
represents one of the most noteworthy cultural garbage heaps yet piled up by
Liberal society.
Whereas in America I felt only
alienation and disgust, here I am feeling something I haven't felt since I was
seventeen. I feel solidarity with the young generation and their dreams. I feel
I stand on their side against the self-righteous stodginess of their elders. I
haven't yet figured out why this shift has taken place in me, but I have some
ideas. For one thing, the stodginess of the Chinese elders is a particularly
craven and money-centered stodginess. To the conservatives among the older
generation in Taiwan, if it isn't good for the cash register, it doesn't exist.
Youth standing up against this kind of stodginess is quintessentially youth: it
is the youth of Shakespearean comedy. It is the youth that stands for love and
passion.
Youth here is heavily influenced by
American culture, of course, but there’s a level of intelligence and a lust for
life that’s lacking on the American side. I find in high school students here a
basic sophistication and reasonableness about the world that is rare in
American university students. Young people in Taiwan aren't (yet) mouthing
self-righteous soundbites like their American counterparts. They’re neither
politically correct nor apocalyptically nihilistic.
Jefferson and Voltaire, Paine and
Rousseau--when I was in America I thought of American youth as so much vomit
I’d have liked to dump before these founders as something arisen from their own
guts, something they were called upon to clean up. But now I'm not so certain
of this critique of Enlightenment. Now I wonder: to what extent is American
youth predicted in the Enlightenment project, and to what extent is it
something merely American--something resulting from historical bad luck, from a coming
together of the Vietnam disaster and traditional American anti-intellectualism?
Add to these two elements a third, namely American technophilia, and you maybe
have all the cultural bases you need for our “MTV culture.” The Liberal project
then perhaps does not necessarily culminate in the American present.
The status and meaning of the Liberal
project in Asia is something as yet hard to trace out.
E.
4/22/97,
Taipei
Dear H.:
It is rare that I understand all of a
conversation I overhear. The following, in fact, may be the first time that I
understood every single word of a conversation of some duration. I was on bus
285. After getting off, in a mood of triumph, I decided to translate it as best
I could. It was a father, a three-year-old boy and his two-year-old sister.
BOY: Is this 285?
FATHER: Yes.
SISTER: 285. 285. 285.
BOY: 285.
SISTER: Bus. Bus.
BOY (singing): 285. 285. 285. 285.
SISTER: Your head is a child's head.
BOY: 285. 285....
SISTER: Your head. Ha ha ha! Your head is
a child's head!
BOY: It isn't! YOUR head is a child's
head!
SISTER: Carrot head!
BOY: Banana.
SISTER: Banana head! Your head is a
banana head! Ha ha ha!
BOY: Grape head!
SISTER: Your head is a child grape
head!
FATHER: Quiet now.
SISTER: Fruit! Ha ha ha ha!
BOY: Your head is a banana head!
SISTER: Melon head. Melon melon head!
Ha ha ha!
BOY: Butt head!
SISTER: Ha ha! Butt! Butt! Ha ha ha!
Your head is a butt head!
BOY: Shit!
FATHER: Quiet now.
SISTER: Shit Shit Shit. Ha ha ha ha!
FATHER: C'mon, quiet. Sit here.
[There’s about thirty seconds of
silence. The boy begins humming to himself, then:]
SISTER: Lychee! Your head is a lychee
head!
BOY: Shit!
[Sister laughs loudly.]
FATHER: Sit here. C'mon. We're almost
getting off.
SISTER: Shit shit shit! Shit! Ha ha ha
ha!
[And here I had to get off the bus.]
Language really is a wonderful thing,
don’t you think?
Warmly,
E.
4/26/97,
Taipei
Dear H.:
One can usually understand the relations
between a man and a woman simply by looking to their table. I assume most
people have this ability, though they might remain unconscious of it.
I’m in a restaurant and look across the
room to a table where a man and a woman are eating lunch. That they aren’t
married is evident to me even as I see them: it’s an evidence as instantaneous
as sight. The man's posture of cordial attentiveness--he leans forward in his
seat; his face is slightly taught in expectation of her every next word--makes
it clear they are not a couple. No, they aren’t married, and they aren’t lovers
either--though this latter is something the man wants, and it’s something the
woman (I can see this by her obvious delight in her own speech) would certainly
consider. The woman is taking pleasure in her own words and gestures.
The man is courting the woman in the
wisest possible way: he is directing his own part in the meeting so as to make
the meeting more than anything a stage upon which the woman can delight in
herself. After this delight reaches a certain pitch--perhaps after another
meeting, and then after yet another meeting in the evening--the man will reach
out to touch the woman and so "take possession" of the whole
spectacle. The woman in turn will allow him onto the stage with her, and the
two of them together will tear down in an act of expenditure all the delightful
talk and all the delicate gestures and eye movements and poises that have made
up the spectacle so far. This is one kind of seduction only, but it is the most
classic seduction both East and West. It is the one the table I’m watching is
engaged in now.
They are having their first meeting:
this is evident by the man's posture of cordial attentiveness. He leans
slightly forward, his facial muscles taught with attention. His aura is a
silver color shot through with flashes of dark green: the color of expectant
desire.
E.
5/5/97,
Taipei
Dear H.:
The old Chinese men here. Many of them
spent their childhood and youth in war-torn China. They came over in 1949 with
Chiang Kai-Shek. Their speech is rough, indescribably guttural. They speak to
each other in a kind of barking or yelling. When two of them are on a bus
together, the whole bus can hear their every syllable. In a restaurant, whether
for lunch or dinner, one often sees next to them, either on the table or the
floor, a clear glass bottle of some infernal liquor or other: sorghum liquor or
sake or western whisky. They almost always speak Mandarin, but often I can hear
their strong regional accents: Mandarin wasn't their first language. Soon they
will all be gone, and there won't be a trace of them left.
Many of these old men came over as
soldiers in the Nationalist army. There is a confidence in their speech, a
dogmatic confidence, for even when they are being jovial they sound as if they
were lecturing one another. Their sons, the boys in their forties and fifties,
sound nothing like these old men: their sons are smooth talkers rather:
businessmen.
E.
5/17/97,
Taipei
Dear H.:
For a Westerner to land here is rather
something of a historical displacement. It is as if one were put down suddenly
in the world of pagan Rome. This is an analogy, and I can get at it by a more
precise analogy. Imagine a Baroque humanist suddenly picked up out of his own century
and moved back to Republican Rome. He wakes up in the household where he will
stay, with Roman garb, servants, and a Latin speech that is very rusty. He is
given a cover of sorts in that he is given a name, the means to live, and a
place to stay. What would his life be like? As a humanist, he is delighted to
be there: to have Rome within his grasp. As a Christian, however, he would soon
discover himself to be in a world of a different temporal and spatial shape. He
wouldn't be able to bring himself to approve of this shape. Though delighted to
be in Rome, he everywhere feels that he is not quite of Rome. He knows also that he will not
become a Roman by staying there, for the world from which he comes is not
something that can be effaced. That world will always have for him more reality
than the one he has landed in.
I am living in a Chinese capital in the
1990s. Regardless of Buddhism--which has not in any case been compelling enough
to change Chinese experience the way Christianity has changed the West--this
city is somehow part of the old pagan world. The world here is a world that had
died in the West by the 5th century.
How strange it is to be living again in
the pagan world! For the world here--not even a century after the demise of the
Ching Dynasty--is one that has grown out of a China that had much more in
common with pagan antiquity than with anything from the Christian West. And
regardless of the recent "westernization" that has come with Western
political and economic institutions, Taipei remains a fundamentally Chinese
capital.
Some would say: "Look at Los
Angeles if you want to see paganism! Go to a chic club in New York. Look at
London and Berlin: aren't these also now pagan again?"
Such people of course don't understand the
basic differences between the modern West and ancient paganism. They don't
understand how deep these differences lie, and where. Of course these Western
capitals aren't "pagan again." The West is now more under the aegis
of the Apocalypse of St. John than it is under the aegis of any kind of
renascent paganism. The chic club in New York is a place where history is
fundamentally understood in the Biblical typological mode: the revelers
understand themselves to be in "Decadence" or "Babylon" or
the "End Time"; some of them perhaps feel themselves to be in the
throws of the Marxist movement of history--for some still believe in this. And
this Marxist understanding of history: how very Christian and Western it is!
For it is Hegelianism and thus one of the great traditions of Romanticism.
These different historical visions put our New York revelers solidly in the
West. Such visions are not at all paganism: they are rather the visions of a
wandering Judeo-Christian historical thinking.
The people here in Taipei, on the other
hand, are not living in the End Times. They don't suspect they are living in
the terminal stages of the world, and don't comprehend what the "End
Times" could possibly mean. The coming year 1999 means very little to
them. Their cultural background, in the conservative register, has more in
common with Roman Stoicism than with anything Christian. Their thought arises
from a mixture of Taoism and Confucianism. For them historical time is the
unfolding phenomenality of a continuum: they are not heading to some historical
Elsewhere or Telos.
The phenomenality of the world
here--the very touch of objects; the way people encounter each other; the
ethical imperatives felt--is palpable to the Westerner as paganism. I recognize
it as something the West once knew, but as something the West rejected. I do
not, however, recognize it as "primitive" in the Hegelian sense.
The Baroque humanist in pagan Rome--he
feels his foreignness, yes, but perhaps this foreignness does not cause a
feeling of exile or despair, but rather a kind of delight.
E.
5/20/97,
Taipei
Dear H.:
Returning home late from work, a man in
his fatigue enters his building's elevator and presses the button for the fifth
floor rather than the button for the third floor where his apartment is. The
building is tall and narrow, so each floor has only two apartments on it, the
doors being to one's left after one steps out of the elevator. Two floors above
his real apartment, then, the man steps out of the elevator with his key
already in hand and turns to the door. He is standing in front of 5A with his
key, but as there are no numbers on the doors in his building he has no idea it
is 5A. He thinks it is 3A. But something is different. He notices that the
neighbors in the apartment next to his are making more noise than usual, for he
had never before heard more than a peep from them. And look: for some reason or
other his wife has tossed the mat that used to be in front of his door. He
inserts his key, which works, and steps into the dim foyer where a woman who
looks exactly like his wife steps forward with a smile and kisses him. He puts
his keys down on the foyer table and steps into the living room. The green
leather couch seems of a darker hue this evening--though not, it is true, dark enough
to make him start wondering--and the apartment has been cleaned up a bit, so
that everything has a slightly new feeling about it. This is good to see,
because in fact the disorder in the apartment was starting to get out of hand.
After showering, he takes up the
Dostoyevsky novel on the table before the couch and intends to continue reading
where he left off that morning. But the bookmark is missing, and he must find
the page. His wife must have been reading the novel, and didn't put the
bookmark back.
I won't continue with the events of
that night or the following morning. Suffice it to say that the next night the
man returns to his apartment on the third floor, that his wife seems put out
but doesn’t insist on finding out where he’d been, that because she doesn’t
insist he of course never learns that he didn't actually come home the previous
night. Meanwhile the woman upstairs, who’d had her eye on him for some time, is
angry that he never returns. She had recognized him here and there in the neighborhood,
but knew neither that he actually lived in her building nor that he was already
married. When he showed up in her apartment that night, she assumed that he’d
followed her home, that he was adept at picking locks and very daring, and that
he was beginning their love affair with a gesture both coolly offhand and
outrageously aggressive. He broke into her apartment, said not a word, and
began to kiss her as if there was nothing out of the ordinary in doing so. Then
he took a shower and even read the novel on her coffee table before paying any
further attention to her. There was something exciting about such strained
indifference, but now he did not bother to come back. With such a promising
beginning--wasn't it like something from a European film--how could he not come
back? What had she done wrong? Had she somehow misunderstood the game he was
playing that night? Had she too much betrayed her anxiety at his visit and so
made any further relations uninteresting to him?
What is this story about? Because my
own apartment is 3F-1, the reader may guess that this story is partly
autobiographical and disapprove of it as a fantasy. Or rather: the feminist reader may disapprove. For aren't I
projecting a submissive lover and then abandoning her in the coldest possible
way, without even, in fact, acknowledging the abandonment? And aren't I
abandoning my wife as well? As for the "guilt" of projecting lovers,
I would never acknowledge it as such. Oh, well. And as for
"abandoning" my wife, I’d never think of it. The inadvertence of this
story is humorous, of course. It is written not so much in the realm of fantasy
as in the realm of comic somnabulism. But no matter.
The story is autobiographical. For one
night I came home late from work. In my fatigue, I entered my building's
elevator and pressed the button for the fifth floor rather than the button for
the third floor. My building is tall and narrow, so each floor has only two
apartments on it, the doors being to one's left after one steps out of the
elevator. Two floors above my real apartment, then, I stepped out of the
elevator with my key already in hand and turned to the door. I was standing in
front of 5F-1 with my key, but as there are no numbers on the doors in my
building I had no idea it was 5F-1. I thought it was 3F-1. But something was
different. I noticed that the neighbors in the apartment next to mine were
making more noise than usual, for I’d never before heard more than a peep from
them. And look: for some reason or other my wife had tossed the mat that used
to be in front of our door. I put the key in the lock but the lock didn't open.
That was when I realized I was on a different floor. I smiled and then realized
I was lucky no one was home in the apartment I was trying to break into. For
the chances are they wouldn't recognize me as their neighbor--I’ve yet to so
much as see the faces of most of the residents in this building--and at my own
surprise at seeing a strange man open my apartment's door to me and start
questioning me, blocking me, in fact, from entering, I may begin to push my way
in and fight back, supposing that this man, whoever he was, was up to something
in my apartment. Perhaps I’d make it into the living room. Then finally seeing
that it was not in fact my apartment and realizing I was on the wrong floor it
really wouldn't be easy to explain myself in Chinese. And if the guy were
playing poker with his friends I may even end up getting a good thrashing
before the escapade was finished.
The American feminist reader: I
mentioned her above. She would probably call this latter paragraph a fantasy of
"male bonding."
E.
6/1/97,
Taipei
Dear H.:
All that simply means that something
is there, something which Barnabas has the chance of using, something or other
at the very least; and that it is Barnabas' own fault if he can't get any
farther than doubt and anxiety and despair. --Kafka's The Castle, K. to Olga
The way you and I think about things is
fundamentally different. In this letter, in a summary fashion, I will take this
up. You must know these differences yourself. I think it is curious that we
haven't fallen out by now, that we have managed to continue communicating. Of
course I will take up only my side of the bargain, because your side I can only
get at secondhand.
For one thing, I am a Christian. This
is something you must have already recognized, though at what level you
recognized it I am not sure. But in fact I have been a Christian since before
the time I met you.
I ought to make clear at least
something about how I believe, since the fact of this belief is something
you--I know this much--find hard to accept.
First of all, you should know that I am
not a Christian merely out of some kind of "conservative" cultural
solidarity. These kind of non-believing Christians exist by the churchful, but
I am not one of them. They have been taken in by the Enlightenment; I have not.
I actually do believe in God and in the soul and in revelation.
I am not of the fundamentalist mindset
either. My understanding of things is quite different from the fundamentalists.
The revelation, as given in Scripture and elsewhere, is not a kind of literal
transcription of the truths of the Divine, but is rather oblique: it points to
an Otherness that couldn't be represented in language in any case. This is not
to say, however, that I think there is nothing fundamentally true about the
specificity of the Scriptures. The opposite is the case. I am not a believer in
cultural relativism when it comes to such things. Rather, there is a
specificity in revelation. The texts of Buddhism, for example, are not part of
it, or are only so in a very weak manner. The poems of the Mayans, whatever
they may have been, were not part of it, or only in some weak and tentative
manner. The revelation given in the Bible is not that of a particular culture,
but is rather the revelation as given to man as such. This is to say it
concerns the destiny of man as such, the meaning of man as such.
These few remarks begin to define what I
believe, what I mean by saying I am a Christian.
The reason you and I know each other is
to be found in our mutual concern with literature. But of course here again our
thinking is fundamentally different. I have some idea of your thinking of literature
from being in classes with you and from reading your dissertation proposal. My
own understanding of literature has little in common with yours. I may get at
my understanding of literature by beginning with what I could call the literary
absolute.
For me, the texts of the Bible are
literature's highest meaning. Literature's ultimate meaning is to be the
textual medium of revelation. It is a matter of text, and revelation.
Literature is that which descends from the meeting of these two things. Even the
manner in which many of the most important Biblical texts came to be
written--as a choosing, an editing, a kind of layering one could indicate by
the metaphor of a heavily beleaguered palimpsest--even this for me makes the
texts of revelation more compelling as the examples of Literature. They define
from then on what the word literature is to mean.
Literature for me is a question of
canons even more than it is a question of rhetorical tropes. The Biblical texts
are the Primary Canon and the great texts of Western literature are what I
would call the Secondary Canon. They are a secondary canon because they are
written after the fact of and under the dispensation of the Revelation.
Following this understanding, the literature of classical antiquity must then
constitute a Third Canon, being neither the Primary Canon nor the literature of
the culture of the Revelation, but being important to the formation (mainly the
generic formation) of that latter literature. These remarks indicate how
literature is arranged according to my understanding, and if I continue reading
and studying literature it is partly in the hope of an ever-greater
understanding of the relationships holding between the major canons. This is
not to say, however, that literature is a scholar's game. If I read Shakespeare
or Dostoyevsky with a particular delight, it is because these canonical writers
articulate parts of a world whose general structure and meaning is founded in
the revelation given in the Bible. And this is to say, for one who believes,
that they articulate parts of the world as such. Thus it is that those who are
not interested in the world are not interested in literature.
This is not an apology for the West. Of
course I am writing of the world as such in a manner that would make cultural
anthropologists and the politically correct cringe. That doesn't concern me.
There is in fact much offered by the West (such as the cultural anthropologists
themselves) that doesn't concern the world as such. I mention the current
academic intellectual culture, but I could choose the West's
"literary" culture as well. I could take up the American Thomas
Pynchon as an example.
As for the world represented in a
Western writer like Pynchon, it is amusing, to be sure. It is full of
interesting gags and twists; it is a very colorful and subtly modulated world;
the reader enjoys moving about in this world as one enjoys being taken into a
film. I have once or twice suggested you read Pynchon because there is
something unique in his writing, something entrancing. He is, or at least for a
time was, a major American writer. Ultimately, however, I do not find Pynchon's
writing to be serious literature. It is not Literature. His is a flimsy world
that does not recognize the bases of its being. It is one that is becoming
quickly a world of mere surfaces, a dumb show of empirical data: nothingness.
This is why many who seriously take up Pynchon as a subject of study will read
his books five or six times, read much of the criticism, and then suddenly feel
a total lack of interest fall upon them. Diversion is not the stuff of life: it
is rather something to keep one from taking up the stuff of life. One's need
for reality will make one tire of such writing. But the readers around us, what
do they do when they tire of a writer like Pynchon? Since so many of them are
only willing to read contemporary writers, they put down Pynchon only to pick
up another contemporary with similar strengths. Such writing as Pynchon's--and
the West offers much of it now--shows a soul impoverished, a soul that has been
seduced into believing that the dumb shows of science and technology are all
there is. Intuition shut down, the soul's hearing shut down, language's
revelatory power curtailed, the data of the senses organized by a logical machinery
much smaller than language itself. Of course the literature that arises from
this general program is comic. It is merely comic. This is to say that it is not
even humorous
in that stronger manner in which much of the great European literature is humorous.
Don Quixote, the story of Jacob and Laban, Prince Myshkin. This latter strong
humor, the
possibility of this humor in man, is one of the mainstays of my understanding
of man's place in the world. The critics of literature that most interest me
have all understood this humor to some degree: Bakhtin, for instance, or
Benjamin.
I am a Catholic in most things, but I
am not certain if I am a Catholic, or if I am accepted as a Catholic. At least
many Catholics would probably not recognize me as one of them. There are things
about which I know the Catholic Church is wrong. In any case, I am more a
Christian than I am a Catholic. My solidarity is with the Christian Church as a
whole.
The Catholic Church is most crucially
right in its understanding of the Mass. The Mass is the ritual that defines the
destiny of man: it is the central sacrament. The Mass is the gathering around
which men can eventually gather. Perhaps they will eventually gather around it.
This is something the Catholic Church knows better than the other branches of
the Christian Church.
I know you must disagree with these
things, and I can live with such disagreement. I am not of the school that
dreams of compelling agreement in belief. I am not enthusiastic about those
horrid scenes from the Catholic hierarchy's past, for example. Who would be? Is
there anything Christian about them?
We are both concerned with the question
of how language reveals presence, but the register of the presence that
language most essentially reveals--that is one basis of our difference.
That you are a secularized Jew makes
you even further from me than if you were a believer in Judaism. For regardless
of the gripes Jews may have with Christians, I don't have as much gripe with
Jews as I do with the secular. The fact that you are a secularized Jew means to
me that I have no reason to consider you other than, say, the secularized
Christians all over America. This is to say, in part, that I don't know in what
you consider your Jewishness resides. I know this is an infinitely discussed
question, one that receives much of its immediate importance from the
nightmares of the twentieth century.
The Jews as a religion are very close
to the truth that I follow, and their understanding of the truth of revelation
is of concern to me, more, say, than the Zen Buddhist understanding of the
truth. I would never step on a Menorah, though I would certainly step on
Diderot's Encyclopedia, or even Voltaire's hand. So you should know where I stand.
* * *
That you and I have managed to
communicate. Perhaps it will continue. It is like Origen maintaining a
correspondence with Lucretius.
* * *
ON THE EPIGRAPH--
I had read most of Kafka before, but it
was only recently that I've read The Castle.
Some readers find in Kafka an apparent
restatement of the universe projected by the Jewish Kabbalists. Benjamin is the
great exponent of this reading. Benjamin's Kafka wrote allegories of a kind of
Kabbalist faith or hope. Other critics disagree with this by leaning on the fact
that Kafka was not a "religious writer," that he was an atheist, that
he was not a scholar of Kabbalism, etc. I am one of those who think that Kafka
needn't have been a "religious writer" or a Kabbalist to write the
kind of allegories he writes. These allegories are Kabbalist allegories, if you
will. Kafka was a Prague Jew, after all.
The dichotomy set up between a
"religious writer" and a "secular writer": what does it
amount to unless we are considering precisely weak writers or journalists or, again,
cultural anthropologists?
The Castle seems to me, after this first reading,
a kind of allegorical romance. K.'s quest is nearly fruitless--that is
apparently the case--and yet K.'s life in the shadow of the Castle seems more a
life than that, say, of Kafka's father in the shadow of a cash register.
Kafka's K. shows a certain daring in
his quest. He is not struck with the same kind of unreasonable awe that strikes
the people of the village. Threatening or not, he would be there where the Castle's
power is manifested. He would know its workings and sees such knowledge as the
only thing worth struggling for. Any other activity--cobbling, tanning, running
an inn--is a species of biding time that concerns him not.
Does Kafka, despite his atheism, make
it into what I have called the Secondary Canon? Evidently so.
Was Chretien de Troyes a
"religious writer"?
E.
6/9/97,
Taipei
Dear H.:
One has to boil the water here before
drinking it, or at least one should. They've specially designed water boilers
for the purpose, something like a large thermos. I'm used to boiling the water,
but there’s an annoying catch: a species of tiny red ant that loves to get into
the boiler, right in there with the water. What can the attraction be? I’ve no
idea. They die immediately, of course, and there’s nothing sweet in the boiler
so far as I know, and the boiler is used daily. So why do they keep trying to
occupy it? I often end up drinking
a kind of ant tea, or soup.
I'm going to call the Discovery Channel
and have them send a team here to observe and do a report. I know just how
they'll do it. There will be lots of scenes of my kitchen, mysterious music,
close-ups of the boiler, interviews with different scientists at Berkeley and
elsewhere (some of them short-haired, greying and chubby, some of them
post-hippy scientists with that kind of "I'm a primate and I know it"
expression so many of them now wear). There will be one scientist who figures
it out, and the last scene will either have me sipping a cup of ant
tea--resigned to the fact or even delighted that I’m being thusly integrated
into the biosphere--or sipping a cup of clean water--delighted that the man
from the U. of Minnesota figured out I need only put a certain colored
night-light near my boiler to keep the ants away.
The discovery about the ants will,
moreover, be linked to more important questions of our place in the universe.
It will be presented in a very upbeat way. And why shouldn't it? For after all,
we really are getting a grip on things here, we’ll have everything under
control any day now. The ants in my boiler, the mystery of the ants
solved--these are only a metaphor for our general conquering of the universe,
which is really coming along very well, H.
E.
9/9/97,
Taipei
Dear H.:
My sister Kristin, a beautician in
Florida, suggested that I let her remove all the hair from my back.
"You really ought to get rid of
that," she said.
What do you think? Should I?
*
I don't know if you know it, but for
some time now there’s been a left ear tattooed in black on the left side of my
back.
"Let me get rid of all that
hair. You'll be able to hear better," said my sister.
In fact I do have a lot of hair on my
arms, chest, shoulders, and back. I am a brute. I am one of those hairy Northerners
who eventually gave such trouble to the Romans.
*
According to Orthodox Judaism, a man
with a tattoo cannot be buried in a Jewish cemetery. This caused some
consternation to the young Israeli soldiers who, proud of their creed and their
people, had Stars of David tattooed on their right shoulderblades.
*
I am like those Israeli soldiers, like
a Maccabee, in that I have faith in signs seen in the sky, in words heard.
In hoc signo vinces. Is my Latin correct? In hoc signo
vinces--"In this
sign be victorious": the words the Emperor Constantine saw written in the
sky next to a cross before the Battle of... But my history is weak. The Battle of the Milvian Bridge?
*
The Emperor Constantine won the battle
and converted to Christianity.
E.
9/23/97,
Taipei
Dear H.:
September 28th is Confucius' birthday.
Being that Confucius is the most honored teacher of Chinese civilization, this
day has been set aside in modern times as Teacher's Day, a national holiday
under the government of the Republic of China. Since it falls on a Sunday this
year, the country will get a day off work on Monday just to be fair. Confucius
was the very spirit of fairness.
And my students too: they are eminently
fair. There is balance in their judgments. For the approaching Teacher's Day,
my school has an essay contest in which students are invited to write about
their teachers. The students who write these essays give them to their Chinese
English teachers, so when they choose to write about their foreign English
teacher they can be confident the teacher will never see what they write. This
means they’re likely to be more honest. But when an essay stands out here and
there, the Chinese teachers will usually come to us foreign teachers to show
us.
I’ve decided to send you two examples.
Only the grammar mistakes have been corrected. The first is from a girl in
class 510 named Annie. I think she is 11 or 12.
My teacher is Eric. He looks like a
vampire because his teeth are long. He drinks blood every night. His home is in
a castle in Germany. A lot of snakes, germs and ghosts are in his home. He
greets the people by biting the people's necks. His home is very dirty and
little. He likes to do CPR to all the girls.
Oh, he is sick.
This is my teacher.
I have studied English for two years at
the Golden Thread Language Institute. I recognize three English teachers. They
are Ed, David and Eric. Eric is the best teacher in my heart.
He is a handsome, humorous, smart,
young, thin and conscientious teacher. He is from America, so he usually goes
to America. He likes to joke in the classroom. For instance: if he sees a
police patrol car outside, he always says, "Paul, here comes your bus! Go
out! Go out!" Then, everybody was laughing. Everybody likes him very much
because he is the funniest teacher.
His homework is little and easy and his
scores are high. He can draw a beautiful picture. For example: the shark,
virtual pet and a lot of things. His writings are beautiful. Maybe he will be
the best English teacher at Golden Thread school.
I like him very much. I hope he is my
teacher forever. I hope he will be healthy and happy.
I noted that there was balance in the
students' judgments. And so it is. The truth about me is somewhere between
these two essays. My canines are rather long, and I am humorous and
conscientious. My house is in fact small. I do harass Paul all the time in class
517, and I did draw sharks on the board several times during my lessons.
Also: I do sometimes greet people by
biting their necks, but not, it is true, when I’m at work.
E.
9/27/97,
Taipei
Dear H.:
Since Hui-Ling took the job in
Taichung, and since I still have my contract to fulfill in Taipei, we are
compelled to rent two apartments. This is quite a financial strain, as rents
are high, especially here in Taipei. Anyhow, the situation is that we are now
renting two smaller apartments rather than one larger one.
I myself could have cut our expenses by
moving out of the downtown and commuting by bus every day. I thought about it
for a time. But as I hate the idea of commuting, I decided instead to choose a
little neighborhood right down here on the edge of the center of town. I
initially thought it was the right decision, but now I'm starting to wonder.
The new place is small, very small. It
is, however, the most I can afford if I insist on living down here. And for now
I insist. So what can I do? But you really can't imagine how small the place
is. Especially given the number of books I have, and my computer. The place is
really far too small.
"How small is it?" you’re
probably wondering.
Let me tell you. This new apartment is
so small that when I brush my teeth in the bathroom my elbow bangs against the
bookcase in the study. It isn't really so much a study as a sort of partially
separated section of the living room. The bookcase doesn't quite fit in it, and
my elbow bangs on it when I brush my teeth.
Perhaps I didn't make the right
decision in choosing this place. Perhaps it really is too small.
"How small is it?" you
wonder.
This apartment is so small, H., that I
don't have enough room for all the channels on my TV. So far I can only watch
three of them. There’s not enough space for the full band of channels to
function. How else explain it?
This thing with the TV sounds
ridiculous, I know, but I was actually starting to get used to it. I almost
never watch TV anyhow. Three channels I could accept. Three channels is better
than four, two is better yet--know what I mean? But then I learned that I can
only watch certain programs. I can't watch just anything I want, not even on my
measly three channels. I figured this out the hard way when Hui-Ling was here
last weekend. We were watching a Chinese-subtitled French documentary on
Chartres cathedral. Suddenly there was a horrible scraping and crashing noise.
We quick switched off the TV, but it was too late. Plaster flakes all over the
floor, a big gouge right down the center of the ceiling. I think it was
Chartres' western spire, the taller one, that did it.
I really don't know how to explain this
scratch to the landlord. But maybe this kind of thing has happened before in
the other shoe-box apartments he rents. And when I think of what I'm going to
be paying him for rent, it really kind of pisses me off, having to live like
this.
Then, as if I hadn't learned my lesson
with the Chartres cathedral, the very next day I went and left a Japanese news
program on long enough to allow them to run a few clips from a recent sumo
championship. So now there's a huge crack down the wall facing the TV set, and
my refrigerator was pushed up and through the kitchen window and fell crashing
down onto the sidewalk below. There's glass all over the place, and now I have
to buy a new refrigerator. I'm just lucky there was no one on the sidewalk.
This place is too small, H. I'm telling
you. Perhaps it really wasn't the right decision. You can't imagine how small
it is.
"How small is it?" you ask.
It is so small that I have to sleep
with my legs hanging out the bedroom window. I was too embarrassed to admit
this at first, but now that you know about the TV situation, I feel I can tell
you. My legs hang out the window as I sleep. Can you imagine it? Meanwhile my
pillow is resting against the door, the main entrance door to the apartment.
That's how small the place is.
There are perhaps some advantages
though. At least when I go to bed at night, I can just reach up if I want to
check if I remembered to lock the door.
But to have your torso cover basically the whole apartment--that's
really too small.
"How small is it?" you
wonder.
It is so small that I had to saw one of
the blades off the electric fan I bought. There wasn't enough room for all
three of them to spin. Having to do this made me really feel that this place is
perhaps too small, that I really shouldn't have signed for it. The two
remaining blades of the fan can spin about 160 degrees, and then I have to
switch the fan off, turn the blades back manually, and then switch the fan back
on so the blades can spin again. I have to do this over and over: it’s an
arduous and tiresome process, and frankly I'm not sure it is really worth it in
terms of the wind it generates. Maybe the place is just too small.
But it's true running the fan gives me
some exercise. And there’s really no question of doing aerobics here, or even
sit-ups. I’d keep banging into the walls and ceilings, and my neighbors would
hate me.
The neighbors--feel for them, H.--live
in similarly small apartments. I just learned yesterday of an accident that
happened here a few months before I moved in. A guy on the fifth floor (the
fifth floor, you know, is about a meter above street level) spilled half a
glass of iced tea in his kitchen, and four people were drowned on the floors
below him, seven others suffering from varying degrees of hypothermia.
I'm telling you, H., this place is
small, and I mean small.
"How small is it?" you ask
me.
Let me give you some idea. One of the
guys on my floor has decided to recarpet his living room. I saw them bringing
in the new carpet the other day: three inch-long pieces of orange yarn with a
tiny stub of frayed canvas glued to the end.
I wonder if this landlord can track me
down should I decide to break the lease. I never should have given him my real
work address. The place is just too small.
"But how small is it?"
Let me tell you. We used to have one of those mail slots
in our door so the mailman could slide letters in. We had to bolt it up. Every
time he slid a letter in he'd knock down all the furniture.
Pitiful, H. It’s really pitiful what
people go through. And it isn't just our building either. Let me tell you. Our
whole neighborhood is small. Very small.
"Really?" you ask. "How
small is your neighborhood?"
I've always known you to be an
inquisitive correspondent. Our neighborhood is so small that our building
shares a welcome mat with the two adjacent buildings. The first building gets
the "WE-," the second one usually gets the "-LCO-," and we
usually get the "-ME." I say usually because there have been scuffles over
the mat, both buildings situated on the outside envying the relative luxury of
the three letters enjoyed by the middle building. So the residents of the first
building once pulled the mat further in their direction, thus getting
"WEL-" to themselves, giving "-COM-" to the middle
building, and leaving just "-E" for us. This wasn't fair to us, of
course, but I'm told there has been shifting of the mat in our direction in the
past, and in fact the mat is shifted back and forth periodically. Apparently,
if I understand correctly, there have even been at least two street brawls
resulting from this ongoing neighborhood crisis. I suggested Hui-Ling tell the
landlords to just toss the English-language WELCOME mat and buy something
different: something, say, with a large Chinese dragon pattern on it. Since
there are all kinds of welcome mats available, why stick with something that
causes trouble? But she told me that, being as I'm a newcomer in this
neighborhood, and what's more a foreigner, I shouldn't just yet offer my
opinions regarding a situation that has obviously become a sore spot in the
local consciousness. Same thing with the One China policy.
But the WELCOME mat is not the only
community problem we have here. The small scale of our neighborhood has now
made us the center of a local scandal that just hit the papers last week. This
scandal has especially been a shock to me, for reasons you will soon
understand.
When I leave my building for work every
day, I must walk past the fire station to get to my bus stop. And every day as
I walk past, rain or shine, I can see the shiny fire trucks parked in the
station and the cheerful firemen standing next to them. I was always impressed
by those firemen, always smiling as they were, looking ready for action; and I
was always impressed by their trucks as well, which they obviously kept in
tip-top condition, the cleanest, shiniest fire trucks I'd ever seen. Well, as
it turns out, the local fire station is a sham, a betrayal of public trust.
It’s recently been discovered that city administrators on the Public Safety
Commission have been diverting funds from their proper use and using them,
instead, to back gangster-run hostess clubs and pachinko arcades. Some of the
details of the scam are still unclear, but what is clear is that in relation to
these corrupt politicians our neighborhood has played the biggest chumps in the
whole of Taipei city. For in our neighborhood, rather than set up an actual
fire station with real trucks and firemen, it has been revealed that the Public
Safety Commission has done nothing other than buy three shiny new Mattel toy
fire trucks, parking these three toys not it an actual garage--which would, of
course, have revealed the miniature size of the trucks through contrast with
the high ceiling and the large chromed handles on the doors--but rather parking
them in a slightly modified lizard terrarium acquired at a pet shop in one of the
larger Taipei neighborhoods, one of those neighborhoods, it is to be presumed,
where people have room enough to own pets. So this, H., it is the sad truth
about the fire station I had so admired, the fire station that was the only
endearing thing so far about my miniature neighborhood.
And those smiling firemen? you ask.
What about the smiling firemen who seemed so ready for action, always appearing
to shift slightly from one leg to another as if they were just itching to jump
into their trucks and go to fight fires? Let me tell you, H. The firemen were
really Weebles.
E.
10/12/97,
Taipei
Dear H.:
Lines to teach a parrot--
Change me back.
My name is Louis Kemp.
I'm a lawyer.
You bastards. Change me back.
These people are witches.
Can't you see what's happened?
My name is Louis Kemp.
I'm not a bird.
I graduated from the University of
Chicago.
Change me back.
1/25/98,
Taipei
Dear H.:
I've always been annoyed by the new
James Bonds. None of them, I think, could so much as make breakfast for Sean
Connery. The last two in particular were weak fellows, and this Pierce Bronson
is but a scrawny mannequin of a weakling. He looks like he should be doing
commercials for some British sock manufacturer rather than playing Ian
Fleming's Bond.
A few days ago I read in the paper that
Bronson was staying in a Taipei hotel just down the street from me. He and his
Asian costar were in town to promote Tomorrow Never Dies. I put down the paper and my fancy
started to roam.
I toyed with the idea of sneaking into
the hotel, somehow sneaking onto the floor they’d reserved, and once there
(Bond theme music starts up in the background) getting myself into
"Bond's" room and murdering him.
"Your champagne, Mr.
Bronson." Then I’d murder
"Bond" in his Taipei hotel.
Killing this flimsy new Bond would be a
fine way to become famous, don't you think, H.?
That day I told my colleague Wade of my
plan. I pointed out that I'd try get off on an insanity plea.
"You'll take the obvious tack,
won't you, mate?" said Wade. (Wade is Australian, so he often calls me
"mate.")
"What's that?" I wondered.
"When they ask you who you are on
the stand, you just say: Bond. James Bond. You claim you're the real Bond, and
you had to kill Bronson as an enemy agent and impostor."
"That's an excellent idea!" I
agreed.
"It's the only way to go."
"And if I get off on an insanity
plea,” I said, “my next step would be to take some acting classes, go to
Hollywood with Michelle Yeoh, and try to get myself in the next Bond movie. I’d
be the new Bond."
"Well," Wade said, "if
you really think you’d get into Hollywood after killing Pierce Bronson, well
then you probably really are insane, mate. You're probably actually nuts. So why
not just go and do it? Get over there before he leaves town."
Wade is probably right about not being
able to get into Hollywood after killing Bond. It's a pity, though. Really this
kind of thing would add a little spice to Hollywood, don't you think? All the
controversy of casting a murderer and possible schizophrenic as the new Bond.
It would liven things up. And more than that. It would set in motion a certain
cultic machinery, the kind of thing Hollywood needs, as follows: I myself would
make two movies as the new Bond and then be murdered in turn. My murderer would
claim to be "the real Bond," and so would become my replacement. Then a couple years later he himself
would be murdered by "the real Bond," and on and on.
This succession of Bonds, each murdered
in turn by his successor, would do two things. First, it would add a ritual element to the cult of this
particular genre of Hollywood film, thus bringing at least one branch of the
modern Silver Screen "religion" in line with certain more heroic ancient
religion. Second, it would add an
element of manliness to the hopelessly sterile and wimpy character(s) of Bond:
since each new Bond would have to kill the Bond he was replacing, he’d at least
gain some authenticity as a killer.
Playing Bond would be the most
dangerous game around. Bond movies would become worth seeing again. And sooner
or later the following would most certainly occur: Bond would be murdered by
his successor while on set; and the successor, "the real Bond," would
have to finish the movie. The film in which this occurred would of course then
become the
classic Bond flick, the very peak of the genre.
It would be left to the lawyers to work
out the legal precedent of establishing a kind of permanent "insanity
rap" for anyone interested in playing Bond.
E.
[The following letter is the one
that brought about H's remarks concerning his growing indifference to
narrative, which in turn provoked me into sending him the draft of The Taipei Zoo that is printed at
the beginning of this collection.]
2/8/98,
Taipei
Dear H.:
Over my break I managed to finish
rereading Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov. Have you ever read him to any extent?
Of all writers, he is the one, I realize it again, who is closest to my heart.
When I don't read him for a year or so, I begin to forget to just what extent
his understanding of things seems to be a well-orchestrated echo of my own
soul. This is not to put myself on a level with this great European spirit, but
merely to say that I feel the world and the meaning of the world in the same
registers. And Dostoyevsky's humor, that humor which many current readers would
not recognize as such, it is my humor in a more profound cast.
I read Dostoyevsky in David
Magarshack's translations. I know there’s another, more recent English
translation, but I cannot trust it. I cannot trust it simply because it is more
recent. The further we get in time from the vibrant European tradition in which
Dostoyevsky wrote, the less likely it is that our language will be able to do
justice to the original.
The question of languages. I tell
myself that if I ever master Chinese (twenty or so years from now) I may want
to take up another language. (It’s a kind of disorder, isn't it, this grasping
after foreign tongues?) I tell myself that it should be Hebrew I take up next:
I would take up Hebrew both for the sake of the Bible and for the sake of an
ancient language that I can also practice with living speakers. That is an
interesting phenomenon: the question of the relations between biblical Hebrew
and modern Israeli Hebrew. But then I think of Russian, the language which,
with Japanese, I find the most beautiful to listen to. And if I learned
Russian, it would be in order to read Dostoyevsky.
Crime and Punishment is one of the less interesting of
Dostoyevsky's major novels. And yet if students read one novel, that is the one
they are assigned. I believe that is because it is on the shorter side, and its
plot runs the most like clockwork.
E.
Since beginning work for the Golden
Thread Language Institute, I have been carefully recording the more interesting
mistakes found in my students' homework. The mistakes I've collected are of all
kinds: grammatical mistakes, mistakes in usage, suggestive spelling mistakes.
As any second-language teacher knows, students, and especially young students,
are liable to bend grammar and usage in ways that couldn't so much as be
imagined by the native speaker. Thus it is that some of the mistake I quote
here are not only humorous, but they go so far as to be brain teasers: they
warp reality in ways that remind one of classical paradoxes. All of the
following mistakes are quoted word for word, letter for letter.
NOTE: Homework assignments are usually
in the form of "Write 7 questions and 7 answers using the new
vocabulary." Thus the "Q and A" form of most of these examples.
--E.M.-L.
Certain problematic words seem to be
misspelled over and over, by both good students and bad, often suggesting
either 1) a perpetual invasion from neighboring words or 2) a kind of neurotic
inability to deal with the reality conjured by the word. In the former
category, I would place the word mother, which, week after week, month after
month, in upper levels and lower, is frequently misspelled monther. I wondered about this for a while--Where
are they getting it?--when
I realized that the word was being invaded by the word month. In the second category, I would place
the words boyfriend
and girlfriend.
My students, young adolescents, are just on the crux of finding their own first
boyfriends and girlfriends. Their uneasiness about this prospect seems to be
reflected in their inability to pin down the spellings of the English words. I
often correct a student's homework to find that everything is correct except
the single dangerous word boyfriend. That will be misspelled as any of the following:
Consider the following:
In this category, I will include
assorted perversities, nastiness, conundrums, blatant misunderstandings, and
examples of plain laziness.
When you are angry, what do you do?
--When I am angry, I hit my pens.
Who is he who salts his ice cream?
--Eric is he who salts his ice cream.
Does she butter her brother and laugh?
--Yes, she butters her brother and laughs.
Before he swallows the sandwich, what
does he do? --Before he swallows the sandwich, I chew it.
Does she eat her dinner one after
another? --Yes, she eats her dinner one after another.
Email: inthemargins03@hotmail.com
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