names and renames
Last Friday was a day of disparate temporal chunks. I got up to a bout of translation—the city government had once again sprung something on me at the last minute. They are starting to get worried about how much I am doing for them and there is some talk going on of finding some way to pay me. Of course I don’t have a work permit so they can’t legally pay me for the work I’m doing for them; I know people who have worked for public institutions in the past and been paid illegally but apparently they are not considering this option. The option they are considering, much to my consternation, is to invite me to give a lecture or two in my capacity as foreign expert; there are apparently funds for this, and obviously a visiting guest speaker does not need to hold a work permit from the Republic of China. I am consternated because, first of all, as I think I’ve mentioned, I don’t like giving talks very much—and although it is very progressive to do so as an anthropologist, the idea of giving a talk that would potentially be about the people I was talking to is still a little bit daunting. And second of all, even though I do feel like they’ve been giving me a little more to do than I am really happy with (although mostly what I am unhappy about is the timing—almost every single thing I’ve been asked to do, I’ve been asked to do by tomorrow), still getting money for doing your fieldwork, however unproductively you may be doing it, smells a little funny. When I voice this concern to my boss—using my advisor’s ostensible disapproval to give the claim some weight—he says, “That’s fine, if you don’t feel like you can take the money, you can treat all of us to a night of karaoke with it.” So it looks like there will be no getting around it. Although I am kind of looking forward to the karaoke. (It grows on you, like the fatty meats.)
As soon as the translation was finished I rushed off to be at peace. My friend Ten, a dancer and actress,[1] had invited me for a bit of improvisation work. She picked me up at a party a while ago—I mean, she squatted down a bit and lifted me onto her back, where I flapped my arms in what must have been a rather flightless fowl sort of way. Whatever it was, she liked my reaction, and invited me to come practice with her and her boyfriend. She just moved in to a very big by Taipei standards apartment and turned the living room into a little dance studio. The studio is floored with some springy, cushiony material. At her last party, every woman who walked in started stretching out as soon she stepped on it, it just has that effect on you. We did some relaxation exercises first, with two people at a time manipulating the third person’s arm and leg joints. It turns out I am incapable of relaxing my right arm. I probably could have guessed this myself, but the boyfriend, who was in charge of that part of me, seemed very disheartened by it. He’s not a dancer and has only just started this kind of work, and he spent half the relaxation exercise time whining about how I wouldn’t give my right arm over to him. In case you’re wondering, having someone complaining about your failure to relax does not, actually, make it any easier to relax.
Then we started the dancing. I have no dancing skills at all beyond just the ability to move, and all my intuitions come either from yoga—which is more about reaching a pose and holding it—or from the midnight dance floor—which, in my case, is all about flailing about in whatever direction the ground seems to move me. Neither of these approaches is very interactive: yoga is a relatively solitary practice, and dance club dancing, well, I realize that one can be quite interactive about it, but in fact if you try to dance with me, you are likely to end up being thwacked. Accidentally, of course. Because I really am flailing. So, just like my favorite theater exercises in college, this was an exercise in Dealing with Others. I had much more success in dealing with Ten than with her boyfriend, which may have had something to do, aside from the obvious reasons of relative comfort, with her size and her experience. She’s a tiny skinny body of total muscle, around the same size as me, but so well-packed that I tend to feel a bit clumsily fleshy around her. And she’s a dancer to begin with, so when she’s improvising she has a huge range of moves to choose from and impulses to act on; all I was doing was trying to react in time. Whereas the boyfriend is almost as much at a loss as I am. There are some pictures somewhere that I will put up when I get them. It was incredibly fun and kind of inspiring—I’ve been feeling a little closed in on myself and on much too much of an even keel lately, and the way this exercise made me focus on things outside me and my own interaction with them was exactly what I needed.
The boyfriend left, Ten and I had a bite to eat, and then it was time for the next stage of the day, which was the going away party for the group of Australian students who have been here doing an urban design project along with some students from a local university, and their two professors who I’ve been translating for. We milled about, me mostly chatting with city government coworkers and the one sweet Taiwanese student in the Australian group, and occasionally being accosted by someone from the university who hadn’t met me yet and needed to express the fact that I spoke Chinese. (When someone tells you that your Chinese is very good, you can say, “Nali nali [where where],” meaning “not at all.”[2] But often people will just come up to you, after having observed you talking to someone else, and say, “Hey! You can speak Chinese!” I have gathered that “Yes!” is not the appropriate response, but I still don’t know what is.)
The highlight of this party for me was when the students made two three- or four-foot tall paper lanterns that they sent off into the sky. Sending off paper lanterns is a traditional ritual that happens at least on the middle day of ghost month, and I think on some other day as well, but I’ve managed never to see it happen. The lanterns express our hopes and dreams. The students wrote their wishes on the yellow lantern papers before hooking them up to several round wires connected at the bottom by a circle of flammable something. Then they lit the something, held up the lanterns until they straightened out on their own, and released them from the eighth floor veranda where we were gathered. The lanterns bobbed off into the night sky with a sunny glow. They made it all the way out of sight without burning, but it’s okay that they eventually will burn, because burning things is, of course, the most efficient way to deliver a message to the spirit world—once burned, a request goes directly into the bloodstream of the universe. Somebody is sure to hear it.
Then the party was over, the Australian professors left to pack up and get ready for the next leg of their trip, the students stayed, presumably to decide on where the afterparty should be, and us lower-level city government folks shuffled out with a bit of Friday-night expectancy that no one really knew what to do with. “Let’s go out for dinner!” the section head said. “Don’t tell me you can eat again,” I, the wet blanket, commented. “Then let’s go drinking!” My Former Object said. I turned to the other two guys left from our office. Section Head and My Former Object are nice guys, but they are both just around ten years too old to have caught the sarcasm and self-mockery that make Che and JZ so much fun to be around. (Personality types in this country change very quickly.) Unfortunately Che and JZ are not only young enough to have a sense of humor about themselves, they are also young enough to have a sense of obligation to their wives, who were waiting at home with their children. “I’m due home at nine,” Che said, pointedly looking at his watch, which said nine. “Let’s make a plan to go out next week.”
So we all got in to My Former Object’s car, and drove to somewhere completely different. A few other people from the department were having spicy hot pot in a restaurant neither near nor far from where we were, so My Former Object skinnied his way through the alleys to drop us off right at the front door, and then drove off in search of a parking space. We found the group inside and greeted them, chatted for a while, and then went back outside to be picked up by My Former Object, who had, predictably, failed to find a parking space in this, one of the busiest and most alley-ful of all Taipei districts at dinnertime on a Friday night. Che and JZ did not look unrelieved, but the weekend moods of Section Head and My Former Object were unsated. My Former Object’s children are a little older than the younger guys’, and, I suspect, his wife a little more obedient; Section Head’s children are cared for by a nanny, a cousin of some sort, during the week. (Although the one time I met her, his wife, very pretty and quite young looking, did not seem obedient at all. She had studied in America for a while, for six months. “I was supposed to go for a year, but I missed him so much I came back early,” she said, sitting a couple of seats away from her husband. “Really?” I gave my generic response, thinking, that’s pretty sweet. She tossed her head a little as she laughed: “Of course not!”) Finally we dropped Che and JZ off by their motor scooters, promising to go singing and drinking next week, and Section Head and My Former Object and I drove off to Jennifer’s bar, which I realized is where they had been gunning for all along.
Once there, Section Head admitted that he had never been to “this sort of place” before. Usually when we gather with our friends, he explained, it’s at a restaurant, there is a lot of food, and you drink along with the food. Ah, or, otherwise, if you’re just drinking, maybe you’ll go somewhere where there are young ladies to accompany you while you drink. You can go by yourself or with a group of friends. The young ladies might get paid by the hour, and also by how much beer you drink, so there is a little pressure to drink more beer. Anyway those sorts of places I am used to. But this sort of place, you don’t really come here to eat—gesturing at the assortment of snacks we had gotten—and you don’t come here to converse with a young lady. I guess this is a place where you go if you just want to hang out and talk with a few good friends. Are there a lot of places like this in Taipei? The fact that he’d never gone to a western-style bar before seems pretty normal, but I am kind of surprised to hear him ask this last question. Taipei is bursting at the seams with bars and café’s. The density of places to go with a group of friends to enjoy their company is kind of unreal, and it is part of what gives Taipei that atmosphere of busy relaxation, of something for everyone, of buzzing social networks. It is, in my opinion, part of what gives Taipei its own particular character; and the Section Head is in charge of the section that is charged with figuring out what kind of character Taipei has and making it more so, in a way that is ever more attractive to its own citizens and, of course, to foreign visitors and investors.
Aside from this initial comment, both Section Head and My Former Object spend most of the time taking turns telling me how great the other one is, how he is very promising and talented, and how they have known one another for fifteen years. This is an unfortunate turn of events for me—both of these people have a habit of going off into abstract discourses on how things ought and ought not to be when asked questions about specific occurrences, and both of them tend not to leave any room for anyone else to speak (which is good in principle, especially when you’re recording, but, it turns out, makes me a little tired and dilutes my focus), and putting them together only exacerbates these tendencies, so I was somewhat relieved when it became clear that Section Head was not going to want more than one beer, and that My Former Object was not going to insist on having another one. I walked out with them but started chatting with Jennifer on the porch, and when they walked away I turned around and sat back down. There were people there that night but t Jennifer did not have to spend all her time taking care of them. Everyone was in more or less self-sufficient groups: a group of IT workers headed by Jennifer’s former colleague, another group of guys I didn’t know, and a very lively table of very drunk lesbian artists who had been dancing barefoot in the bar’s very little remaining open space when we came in and had only gotten more drunk and more lively since then.
I was really just picking up my stuff to start off for home when one of the artists came outside and squatted next to my chair. “How do you feel about old ladies?” She asked. “Come have a drink with us weird aunties.” She looked younger than me, but people here tend to. There was a lot of affection going on inside, with everyone falling all over each other in indistinguishable variations of hugs, kisses, and dance, standing, sitting, and lying down on one of the long benches at the long table they occupied. A glass of whiskey appeared on the table before me. Everyone was a little too drunk to engage in conversation so I sat around waiting for things to happen and participating in whatever was happening to me—when pulled up to dance I danced, when sat down to hug I hugged. The woman I was sat down next to said she worked in metal, and had recently started working in silicone as well. These happen to be two of my favorite materials, and I started going on and on about something, something about how amazing the versatility of metal was and then about how I’d just discovered silicone on my trip to Italy last spring, when I happened to see some incredible silicone sculpture and jewelry in a place in San Gimignano—I’d liked the woman’s work so much I actually bought something, which is almost unprecedented. Maybe not every girl she meets in a bar starts off telling her how much she loves metalwork and silicone. For my excitement she gave me an interesting look and a card. One character of her given name means sunset; and the other means the glow of dusk or dawn. Which made Jennifer conclude it was a taken, not a given, name.
A little while later we were joined by their friend A-he, a publisher of pornographic comic books in the Japanese manga style (“We also do literary stuff! And we have connections with European authors. Currently we’re doing a manga version of Remembrance of Things Past. I’ll give you a copy. Along with some other stuff.”), and his girlfriend, a corporate lawyer. Things livened up when A-he got there, I don’t know if because he is more talkative or because he was less drunk, and somehow someone eventually started agitating to go to a real dance club. So the evening ended with me somehow finding myself, with A-he and the girlfriend and one of the artists, at a huge, warehouse-sized dance club way out in the northeast part of town, having my eardrums put to the test by mediocre electronic dance music that was having a difficult time imitating a nice hip-hop beat. Which was really all I wanted. (I’d heard that this dance club was the disco to end all discos, but actually it’s just really big and a little too clean. It has four separate rooms, each large, each with its own live dj putting on equally mediocre music in different styles.)
A couple of days later I called up the metal woman. I wanted to see her stuff, and I wanted to show her the necklace I’d gotten in San Gimignano. I went over to her studio, where she explained to me the difference between welding and soldering (I never knew!) and showed me some of her stuff, among which were some necklaces in the shape of scissors (the blades point downward from the dip in your collarbone, and the handles go around your neck; to put it on or take it off, you open the scissors as though to cut), saws (like if you cut off the teeth and one inch of what goes beneath them and wrapped it around your neck), and hooks (a jointed, moveable piece that is simultaneously delicate-looking and kind of dangerous—the edges of the hooks are sharp). There was also a purposely rusted-over piece of metal whose shape I could not even get a grasp on visually, much less verbally. Ah-ne, one of the guys who shares her studio, was in the other room teaching a Mama how to hammer out a metal wine glass, and his boyfriend, visiting from San Francisco, was practicing his Chinese with another friend in the front room. After the hammering lesson was over and the Mama had left, we sat around chatting for a while before going out to dinner and then driving almost an hour to go to a nice hot springs in the mountains (“Are you busy tonight? Any plans? Okay then.”).
The San Franciscan boyfriend is staying in Ah-ne’s home, with Ah-ne’s family. “His parents would probably be happier if he weren’t, but they don’t seem to have a problem with it. His father puts on music every time I come into the living room. They’re being really nice.” On the way back from the hot springs, Ah-ne mentioned how his parents had told him to change his name when he was 25 years old. They had gone to a new fortune teller, who had told them that his original name, in combination with his bazi (the result of all combined data about the time and place of your birth, on which auspicion can be judged), rendered an imbalance of yin and yang, the feminine and masculine principles. So they should change his name to bring the feminine and masculine principles into greater harmony. There was a very soft collective giggle in the car as he explained this. “And,” I asked, “did it bring your yin and yang into better balance?” “Well,” he said from the front seat, taking his boyfriend’s hand, “I have a better wife.”
[1] Recently nominated pan-Asian best TV drama actress! Winners announced in Japan next week.
[2] There are jokes about foreigners saying this wrong or misinterpreting it, one of which I had actually acted out at Ten’s that afternoon: after we had finished eating, her boyfriend called to arrange something. On the phone with him, she called out, “He says you have a great body,” to which I distractedly (I was writing something in her little guestbook and was blanking on a character that every first-year Chinese student knows how to write) responded, “Nali (where).” Saying it only once makes it sound more like a question, so of course he had to respond, and she had to call out, “Everywhere!” Then she came out and thunked me on the head to remind me that you have to say twice for it to have the appropriate effect of false modesty.
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