The Swimming Pool

I'm reading through my first translation of Taiwanese literature and I've got mixed impressions. First, I'm moved by the simplicity of the stories: a universal heartbreaking glimpse of the death of country life in the face of urbanization. Surprisingly, the resentment of rural Taiwanese, after having undergone three separate waves of colonialism, has only intensified. The remodeling of the country under the Japanese has been all but forgotten after the Mainlander takeover and then again by the zealous modernization of the Democratic-Capitalist era. Every new blow to the countryside is taken as a novelty by both the expanding city and the receding countryside. I saw a silly movie, Pom Pocco, about a group of Raccoons outside of Tokyo putting up a futile effort against urban sprawl. Rustic spirit, interpreted in this case by magical shape-shifting powers, will always loose to guns and obese land developers. Nature will loose against modern appetites.
In the book I'm reading through now, The Taste of Apples by Huang Chun-ming, the same drama is played out on many smaller stages. The inevitability of defeat doesn't diminish the suspense, the joy of the battle or the sublime moment of the death of the cause. Life cycles, more or less.
What does diminish the story, though, is the terrible translation. Perhaps Howard Goldblatt is well read, perhaps even well-adjusted to the culture he is speaking for. He is not up to the task of turning a beautiful Chinese phrase into a beautiful English one. I am withholding ultimate judgement on Howard before reading his other, highly acclaimed translations. Could it be that the original book is as bland as its translation? The collection of stories has been compared too stridently to Faulkner because of its focus on small town existence. The first story is about a boy failing to carry a Bonito fish back to his mountain home. A Faulknarian topic, I suppose. But the lack of distinct voice, thought and tone fails epically to live up to the comparison.
So what am I thinking? I need to learn more Chinese. I need to understand what is good and bad in the native language. I need also to read more translations and seek a voice with real pathos. Translations in the other direction, I gather, are equally as lack-luster. The translations which Murakami has benefited from cannot serve as the norm for Asian language translation. Or maybe Taiwan has yet to produce its own master. The island doesn't boast any Nobel Prize contenders, in any case. But we'll have to wait and see. And read.

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Location:XiYuán Rd,Siansi Township,Taiwan

housework

I just spent another hour washing my clothes. I fill up the bathroom sink and a garbage bin with hot water and soak my work shirts before scrubbing at the colors with laundry bar soap. I always say I choose Taiwan because its first world but maybe I regret leaving Cambodia before I really got that self-made feeling. Anyway, manual labor is the key to life. The inhabitants of every Blue Zone, a region where people routinely live past 90, always do housework by themselves. During college I grew a grudge against the dishwashing machine. Now I think I'll do away with the laundry machine, too. I like the idea of scraping off and cleaning out what you wear and eat; it keeps everything in your hands. Laundromats and dishwashers are for people who would otherwise pay someone else to clean up after them. There have always been those people and I don't think we're any better by acting like them just because we can afford it.
Not that it's wrong, per se, to own and use household appliances. Rather it's what we're missing out on when we toss dirty things into a box and let an engine work in place of an arm. Maybe instead of a half hour of exercise and genuine purifying you sit and watch TV. Maybe you even read a book. But now you're distanced from the idea of cleanliness, just like a spoiled child who has his mother clean his room. I could also connect this to my general gripe about society's shift away from large interdependent extended families to small independent nuclear ones. That's another post.
Suffice it to say that housework is a secret balm for the lonely soul.

Location:Lane 67, JǐnXi Rd,Hemei Township,Taiwan

Profound Insights

It's easier to live life without having to look for new ways to digest beauty.
I just finished a great book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. The book is an evenly-spaced weave of two journals recording the same small drama of a high-class apartment building in Paris. Both protagonists, a 12-year old girl and a 54-year-old concierge, are exceptionally intelligent, culturally attuned and in pursuit of the authority to steer their own fate. It's a slow-moving story kept alive by the wit of its two narrators more than anything else and by the end I was beginning to feel just how well I fit into the novel's target audience. It's an audience most readers would want to be included in: smart, socially repressed bookworms.
Throughout, the journals play off each other in more than just theme and tone: Barbery meticulously builds up the solution to one protagonist's woes in the discoveries of the other. What this leads to is an agreement upon beauty in both Art and Choice. Beauty is consonance: as democratic a proposition as any other. The book draws heavily on Japan as a culture wholly aware of its own beauty. Sort of a feng shui thing in addition to a mystic sense of time. It's the kind of thing that some liberal is always trying to keep holy by setting it apart from both science and religion through deft application of literary rhetoric. I've done it my whole life, personally, but I've always thought of it as a hobby instead of a raison d'art. I recently read another French book and encountered the same level of devotion. In Camus's A Happy Death we are treated to a much more lyrical version of the same striving for artistic perfection as a means toward happiness. In both novels the hero dies soon after achieving this perfect state and we are therefore robbed of any notion that this might be a healthy lifestyle in the long term. Still, I'm anxious to discover a more complete defense of beauty.
For the time being I've found that, in my own life, the more time spent contemplating beauty the less likely I am to go out and find it. Whenever I forget the abstract, that's when I find it. The notion of keeping beauty as an idol, either actively pursuing it or keeping it locked away in a journal, has enticed me away from God a number of times.

Location:Lane 67, JǐnXi Rd,Hemei Township,Taiwan

Taiwan 101

I was reminded via email that I had a blog a year ago. What better way to vent my thoughts? I still prefer journaling on paper because of the experience of writing by hand, but it’s nice to have a sort of permanent and random audience. My last post was rather pathetic, so I’ll try harder to be both positive and engaging.
I’ve been teaching English in Taiwan for 6 months now and I still haven’t made any white people friends. I set out to fail and I have failed admirably. I’ve got a handful of Taiwanese buddies instead and spend my free time carting around with some local church folk or the girls I work with. My only real guy friend is only a language exchange partner named Li-Lin. He plays basketball religiously but I’m hesitant to make a habit of the one sport I truly loathe. I’m content with my peripheral existence for the most part. I haven’t decided to dive in to anything that I know won’t possibly last. Noel, my sole confidante, has suggested as much: “Fall in love! You’ll find a great girl and everything will be okay.” I’m a man, though. The idea of some other person magically appearing and solving all my problems, apart from being juvenile, simply hasn’t ever popped into my imagination. Instead I have visions of Hemingway-esque relationships in content ruin tied together more by style than constant affection.
There’s always a church, to be sure. When I first came here I thought I’d find Buddha. I’ve met a couple of seemingly devout believers but the evangelizing I suppose I’ve come to expect from all religions has been completely absent. Apart from some sutras with helpful bopomofo there really isn’t any wide gate through which a foreigner might come to Buddha. So, with an eye on my future back home, I’ve gravitated back to the eager embrace of a Christian fellowship. Still haven’t told any of them about William. My revelation, my testimony as it truly deserves to be called, will be quite a present for my brothers and sisters with their hearts set to kingdom work. Only I’m not exactly pumped about ‘acquiring the fire’ again while I’ve got so much work to do on my own before I go back to reality and take up my real father/son role. In other words, so long as I’m hear what’s the point in having a God to rely on?
That’s harsh. I’m re-reading this and seeing that, as my Writing: Research, Theory and Application monograph would say, the voice is writer-oriented. I’m talking as if to myself; you’re a silent observer to my self-concerned ramblings. Before pointing out the comment box, though I think it would be wise to expand the scope of my entry.
I’m reading too much. I read too much in college and during most of my time in New York. I go out with friends and I’m always thinking about a book. But I rarely talk about the books to any real end. This past weekend I met Noel in Taichung and sat in a city park to watch dogs. There were two cats but no Jack Russel Terriers. Noel’s friend’s friend was a Frenchman with a great sense of himself. I decided like sharing what I was reading. It was Borges. My second time through. I was in the middle of the first story from Labyrinths: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Teritus. I told him the plot twice but that was it. Later I said something about symbolism in FLCL. It was the first time I’d talked like that to anyone in Taiwan. I’d been waxing poetic some late nights with Noel but never with any invitation to ponder any philosophical enigmas. It’s a language thing, of course, but I’m also wondering just how much of my life in America really lived up to all the books. I’ve had great conversations, no doubt, but never sustained to any meaningful conclusion, any plan of action. Confucius say the man of action, who, thinking a thing a also does that thing, is a true master. By this measure I am a worm.
So with regards to Jesus, my church family and building up friendships I can really rely on I don’t suppose I’ve ever been any more successful than my current state of stalemate.
My next post is going to be about books. That makes me happy




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Location:HéXiàn Rd,Hemei Township,Taiwan