simple pleasures

My utterly silent Taiwanese housemate and I seem to have silently worked out a land-use arrangement regarding the public space in this apartment (this as opposed to my rather talkative Brazilian housemate, who is out of town for a week and is mostly up on the second floor, which is his, or out partying—once more I have had pretty good luck with housemates, by which I mean I rarely have to interact with them). He spends a couple of hours in the evenings sprawled out in positively gymnastic positions on the couch watching Japanese soap operas (which sound like soft porn to me, the girls are always breathing and sighing in the oddest ways), and I am there in the mornings, setting up my computer on the very Ikea table across from the windows as I write my (unbelievably boring to anyone who is not me) summary of the history of land control relations in Taiwan and other random efforts.

Through the windows on the far side of the room, I can see, peeking out from behind the building opposite us, one little triangular edge of the sloping yellow roof that tops Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, which is right across the street. A block-sized park surrounds the memorial, which is built in the style I think of as Cement Traditional, an unfortunate combination of old Chinese forms with not-new-enough materials, which was popular for way too long. The other biggie, the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial, built presumably after his death in 1975, is in this same style. Given that Taipei is one of the cities with the least per capita green space in the world, I am currently sitting probably five capitas taller than most everyone else in the city; although like most parks here, this one is also made up to a significant degree of cement.

In the mornings I sit around out there, looking out at the space (it’s always great to be able to see anything out of a window that is not the building directly next to you, especially sky and space), and eating some fruit that I buy from the man with the van out in the parking lot next to my house (a parking lot that is literally a block long), with whom I have conversations like this:

你祖國在那裡? Where do you come from? [Where is your ancestral country?]
美國. America.
來這邊學習中國語言? Come here to study Chinese?
eh, 對. Um, yeah.
講的不錯. You speak it not-bad.
那裡. 我來這裡做研究. Not at all. I’m here doing research.
做研究honh. 結婚了沒. Oh, doing research. Are you married?
還沒. Not yet [this is the only acceptable way to say “no” to this question].
那你長得還可以. 還不錯. Well, you are [using a resultative combination that technically means “you have grown up with the result that”] okay-looking. Not bad.

And the other day I saw a café by the name of Fag. The Chinese name was 非果, fei guo, clearly a name chosen not for what its characters mean but because it sounds not-Chinese. There’s something very cool, I’ve been told, about having a name with characters that are clearly not in line with everyday Chinese usage, very cosmopolitan. Be that as it may, what these characters, 非果, actually do mean is: “not a fruit.”



can you spot sun yat-sen memorial hall?