A week of rest

Not that my usual life is stressing me out, but it is nice to have a week of vacation now and then. It is the third day of the lunar new year, and there's still quite a different feel to the city here. Much quieter, but when I do hear people out and about there seem to be more kids running around. Plus, there's a lot of random fireworks being let off at all times of the day.

On the new year's eve, I had a dinner of kimchi hot pot with some friends who weren't able to return home for the holidays because they had to work in Taipei this week. The next day, I ate with a classmate at a friend's shopfront. I hesitate to call him a friend because we are very different and we don't exactly hang out, but we have occasional conversations where he tells me what he finds important about Chinese culture and essentially trains me in understanding really thick Taiwanese accents. But the weird part is that he will discuss classical literature (Shuihu Zhuan, Xiyou Ji) and Chinese philosophy in his impenetrable Taiwan guoyu in exactly the same voice you'd expect from the worst kind of taxicab driver (not that I have anything against them). In any case, he also knows the old veteran from Kwangtung who I like to talk to at the coffee shop I occasionally frequent, and had invited him over seeing as he doesn't have any real family in Taiwan to celebrate with. It was a pretty interesting time, and I think we certainly made a sight, two very white Minnesotan boys sitting out front of a betel nut shop, talking to the proprietor with his lazy eye while the freshly 85 year old veteran sits off to the side observing the conversation. He is, by the way, temporarily toothless, because the nurse accidentally threw out his teeth.

Anyway, I will be returning to school next week and I intend to make the best of it. But until then, I just downloaded the demo for Supreme Commander, the sequel to Total Annihilation. As unrelated to Chinese or Taiwan as it is, I have nonetheless been waiting 6 or 7 years for it. So I hope it brings back a little of that anticipation I used to feel: I can still remember reading the instruction manual to the previous game in the car before the family even got home from the computer store. I was obsessed with that thing, and I lived in a world framed by computer games and science fiction from a young age. I'd like to document their influence on my world view, which is not insignificant, but I don't know that the intellectual climate allows that yet. Was there a time when film was influencing young people but hadn't yet attained enough legitimacy to be claimed as a source of inspiration? Some video games, and those for PC in particular, are as moving as any film and more detailed than a novel. Those that have actual ideology or meaning are harder to find, but they still exist. And one can always make it up, if it's not already there. In any case, I still have to go play the game.

Plus, I saw Di Hai Zhan Ji, or Tales from Earthsea, yesterday. It's pretty good, and reminiscent of the Japanese director's earlier works (Princess Mononoke, Totoro, etc.). But it was actually written by Ursula K. LeGuin, whose original novel from Earthsea I read in high school science fiction and fantasy literature class. I spent a lot of mental energy deciphering the Chinese subtitles, because the voiceovers are all in Japanese. But I also got to eat some good mushu pancake thingies. I don't think I've ever eaten them in their American Chinese incarnations, but I like them quite a bit from the one place in the Breeze Center basement. Try them sometime, if you have the opportunity. Reminds me more of flaky flour tortillas. Good!

English is hard

I learned three new words from reading this Economist article about the political situation in Bangladesh: begum, factotum, and rusticated. I was pretty sure from context what rusticated meant, but as for the other two I had no idea. (For the record, a begum is a Muslim woman of high status, and a factotum is essentially a right-hand man or all-purpose servant).

What this illustrates, in case you're wondering, is that learning languages really is a never-ending process. After twenty years, there are still thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of words in the English language which I do not know and probably will never even hear spoken. Chinese almost certainly isn't as burdensome as far as wordage goes, but begum just goes to show that there is no such thing as complete mastery. English may be spoken by you and me, but it isn't controlled by us. Language is a thing bigger than any one person, and the best we can hope is to use it well, if not perfectly. As a note, there are more than 500,000 words in the Oxford English Dictionary, even excluding a further half million scientific and specialty terms.

I'm obviously not quite so advanced in Chinese, but I am beginning to be able to read the Taiwanese equivalent of Time. I'm pretty slow and there are obviously some judgements to be made by context, but I am almost at the point where I can seriously consume news in this society. I am planning on buying up all the textbooks at ICLP and taking them back with me to the United States, because from now on the material becomes actually interesting. The lessons are on topics which I would be excited to think about in any language, and that makes a big difference. I can see myself reading that stuff for fun (is that a good thing?)

I can hear birds outside my room right now, and a few people walking down the street. It's pretty quiet, though, because it's Saturday. In about a week, it ought to be even more quiet. Chinese Lunar New Year is coming up soon, and apparently most people travel down south for the holidays. I guess it's similar to how people might travel to the big city for work, but when the time comes to celebrate Christmas, everyone really wants to be back home with the family. Taipei is supposed to be pretty dead that time of year, although somehow I don't really believe it'll be as dead as all the cabbies claim. I guess I'll find out. New Year's in Taiwan is a pretty strange situation for most of the foreigners, as a lot of them don't have anyone local to eat with and are also burdened by the fact that most shops and restaurants close for the holidays. So there's nothing to do, except hang out with other foreigners and complain. I still haven't exactly decided what I will do, although I think I'm going to try and do something very traditional, e.g. find a large Taiwanese family and go get stuffed with awesome food.

Right now, however, I'm just glad I can sit in my room and do nothing but read and listen to music. And then I'm going to watch some X Files.

(X檔案, if you're curious. And x-rays are X光).

EDIT: I found a passage in an article about the idea of copyright in modern society which very elegantly describes the idea I touched on earlier about language's place as something which no one person controls and yet remains under everyone's influence:

"The world of art and culture is a vast commons, one that is salted through with zones of utter commerce yet remains gloriously immune to any overall commodification. The closest resemblance is to the commons of a language: altered by every contributor, expanded by even the most passive user. That a language is a commons doesn't mean that the community owns it; rather it belongs between people, possessed by no one, not even by society as a whole."

This selection is from "Influence" by Jonathan Lethem in the February 2007 edition of Harper's Bazaar. He happens to have written "Gun, with Occasional Music," an unusual scifi novel a friend lent me in high school.