A Bolt from the Blue

https://tinyletter.com/grahammoliver/letters/a-bolt-from-the-blue

Friends,

Two months ago I wrote that it was a terrible time to need to write a newsletter. I’m not sure it’s gotten much better. Life progresses on fairly normally. I’m counting down the minutes until our winter break as I’ve done many semesters before. I’m struggling with lesson plans, test writing, Chinese class, exercising, eating healthily, maintaining friendships. In short, everything feels like normal. Then, a bolt from the blue, I remember about what’s going on in the US: a pandemic, a refusal to take a pandemic seriously, an insurrection, a maybe refusal to take an insurrection seriously.

In fact, lately life feels like a series of bolts from the blue. Walking along, minding my own business, and then suddenly being struck by the thought of a bookcase left behind in the US, or the thought that we’ve already been here a year and a half, or that it’s almost time to try and fail to figure out our overseas taxes. Or, oh yeah, hey, you haven’t read a book in how many months? Or something small like the sudden realization that I bought a bag of dried red beans and they’ve been sitting in our cupboard for six months and we don’t even have enough kitchen space for me to feel comfortable buying a second spatula but I should go ahead and buy that spatula because what difference does it make but maybe first I should finally cook those beans. (Around here there would also be the mention of the oh yeah I have no idea when I’m going to be able to visit the US, but we push snooze on that one.) Or, oh wow, my birthday, and I’m how old again? Like a series of flash realizations, even more so than usual, and I think it’s because I’ve given up on holding it all in my head, that it’s too difficult to process looking at Austin’s new case numbers and then alt-tabbing back to grading a student’s thesis statement and so my brain compartmentalizes everything very, very thoroughly.

“They say that goldfish have no memories; I guess their lives are much like mine. And that little plastic castle is a surprise every time.”

My friend Henry says the pandemic has taken over his dreams, that he dreams of doing something completely normal and then suddenly remembers there’s a pandemic and there’s suddenly a great terror that he shouldn’t be doing what he’s doing. And I guess maybe these are the brain’s ways of handling massive adjustments in normalcy, denial and the subconscious and parceling it out, reality on a dose by dose case only.

And then it was 2021. Like a bolt from the blue. Happy New Year. Did you make a wish? Did you make a resolution? Did you make a little time to pause and consider what went well for you in 2020?

“A bolt from the blue” is just a fancy way of saying a lightning bolt, but it’s so much more fun to use than just “like a lightning bolt.” In English, we have so many good sayings involving the sky: “the sky’s the limit,” “pie in the sky,” “reach for the sky,” “skyscraper,” “the sky is falling.” The Chinese equivalent is 晴天霹靂, qing tian pi li, literally “clear sky thunderbolt.” But Chinese has other uses for the sky. 天 does a lot of heavy duty lifting — it can mean the sky, heaven, or a day, depending on the context. For example, 天氣, tian qi, “sky”+”air,” is the weather. 天下, tian xia, literally “under the sky” or “under heaven,” is the name of a very popular magazine here, but its name would be better translated as “the world,” as in that stuff that’s under the sky. (Interestingly, the magazine does have an English version, which they’ve chosen to call Commonwealth. Shameless plug, I wrote an article for them last month.)

But my favorite sky-related idiom has to do with dragons: 天龍人, tian long ren, literally “sky dragon people,” is a reference to the elite/wealthy class here in Taiwan. Taipei is considered the sky dragon city, and in Taipei there are districts where Taipei’s even more elite sky dragon residents live. I teach at a sky dragon people school. I’m not having enough Chinese conversations yet to know how it’s being used in its natural habitat, but I imagine it being used the same way Yankee was used when I was a kid. Scene: you’re on the lake, enjoying a stress-filled day of jetskis and sunscreen, when another boat passes that’s either driving too dangerously, too slowly, too suspiciously, or is just too new and shiny. “Must be a damn Yankee,” someone might say, in such a situation. Maybe a shiny looking scooter almost causes an accident in rural Taiwan and the response might be to raise your fist and shake it at the sky and say, angrily, “天龍人!”

Or not.

Further reading:

• Has anyone been as much of a formative personality in my life as that of Shigeru Miyamoto? I doubt it. What a joyful and jealousy-inspiring interview.
• One of the best parts of Christmas this year was Mohammad Hussain analyzing the holiday from the perspective of someone who had never participated but was roped in this year as a result of quarantining. It’s great.
• Speaking of Christmas, if you still need to buy someone in your life a gift, you can never go wrong with Helen Rosner’s recommendations. Including eleven feet of salami.
• Speaking of salami, King Arthur Flour is employee-owned and awesome. Here’s a piece from my brilliant former classmate Meghan McCarron about how they handled the lockdown-induced baking boom.
• My favorite Instagram account right now is savedbythebellhooks, which as you might guess from the title, overlays bell hooks quotes onto stills from Saved by the Bell. It’s a wonderful way to get a little dose of needed perspective from my fellow prestigious Kentuckian.
• I’ve written before about the disturbing video they play on buses here in Taipei, where a girl is not feeling well and all of a sudden three strangers start patting her on the back as if that’s going to help. Besides that horror movie, though, they have some other great stuff, including intense university advertisements and this kitschy video of the mayor riding the bus. They also play little clips from this cute little bus route-crossed lovers movie. I highly recommend it.
• Did you know the Peloton CEO drinks water from his sink using the palm of his hand every morning until he feels like he’s about to throw up because he once read you should try to get eight cups of water every day and he thought this was the best way to do so? If you didn’t, now you do, and now you are cursed like me. Lift the curse a little bit by reading Dan McQuade’s silly little analysis of the cat palm water method. I bet he had fun writing it.
• Every day my understanding of the depths of selfishness around us gets a little deeper. While recent events have surpassed it, at the time, I remember thinking how horrific this article is about needing to continue making a living photographing weddings mid-pandemic.
• New textbook means new readings, so this year was the first time I came across this essay, “Joyas Voladoras” by Brian Doyle. It’s a beautiful brief meditation on the fragility of life and love. I think it’s a great essay for your beginning-of-the-year consideration.

It’s been unusually cold here, which means not that cold compared with the locales of most people reading this, but Taipei cold sufferers still deserve your pity. Everything is concrete and the insulation is awful so cold permeates everywhere, especially at the school where all the rooms have tons of windows and the hallways are outdoors. The humidity is still at 90%+ too, and it’s been raining a ton, and damp cold is special cold. Finally, there’s also the matter of our very limited wardrobe space, which means an extended cold spell becomes a logistical nightmare, compounded by dampness making laundry slow.

Long story short, I have an electric heating pad in my lap as I write this, and I’ve been teaching while wearing a scarf and jacket all week, and my shoes are blocks of ice, but I’m pretty sure we’re going to make it. I hope you are too.

-g