9/21
By: Kevin Chen
Tags: History, Earthquake, Climate Change, 九二一大地震, Taiwan

Today is the 20th anniversary of one of the deadliest earthquakes in Taiwanese history. I was on my school’s annual graduation trip, en route to the mountain city of Nantou, when the quake hit. (Middle school in Taiwan ends at 9th grade, high school at 12th, and sophomores and seniors go on the trip together — I have no idea why the trip is at the beginning of the school year instead of the end.)

We were staying overnight in a crumbling veterans’ hotel. I remember lying awake in bed and feeling everything — not just the floor but the walls and ceiling — shaking back and forth. There was a cacophony of brutal, deafeningly loud crashing noises just outside, which I interpreted as China finally getting around to bombing us, beginning the apocalyptic life-as-we-know-it-ending invasion that every Taiwanese person born after 1949 has lived in terror of all our lives. (It turned out to be just the elevator cables thrashing against the elevator shaft.) I was deeply suicidal at the time, and I remember realizing that I was about to die, buried next to all these other damned souls in one last act of inexplicable random violence, wondering what it would be like to travel from one hell to the next.

We survived. The veterans’ hotel was ancient and decrepit, but it held — the architects of Taiwan are long accustomed to earthquakes. (Few buildings fell in the populous coastal cities, including the one in which we were staying.) After a brief discussion the rest of the field trip’s itinerary was immediately cancelled, and the buses took us home to Hsinchu City. We returned to a surreal alternate Hsinchu, its riot of lights dark and its motorbike-teeming streets silent, hordes of people just wandering the streets in boredom, with no television nor Internet nor light to read until the power and telecom utilities resumed service, pulling fallen trees out of roads and trying to survey the damage with flashlights. Restaurants and street cart hawkers scrambled to sell off their inventory before the freezers and refrigerators failed.

I remember stepping outside my little house at the foot of the Eighteen Peaks (十八尖山), looking up over a thirty-foot razor wire tipped stone wall at a gigantic luxury condo skyscraper built into the slope of the mountain, where two of the girls in my class lived. It was one of the few buildings in the city to have its own generator, and it loomed, immense and overwhelming and shining like a lighthouse, over my leafy little neighborhood and miles of darkness in all directions. I remember reading a fantasy novel in a sunbeam flooding through my window from the distant light of my classmate’s apartment, and correctly predicting that the peace that moment brought me would be bad for my future relationships with women.

I remember my best friend from my childhood in America spending an exorbitant amount of money to call me long distance the next day to check if I was all right, telling me he had seen the Taiwanese president on CNN begging the international community for body bags. I remember this was the last time I trusted CNN, and that it was the reason I did not believe the news at first when 9/11 happened (during which I returned the favor, and called him).

I remember finally arriving in Nantou ten years later, on vacation with my parents, and being awestruck by the devastation — the coastal cities were spared because the shockwaves had pinballed through the mountains, obliterating everything in their path. Mountains split asunder, the trees on one side half the size of trees on the other. Ground become cliffs, split off and hanging above the ground once beside it. Neighborhoods built on top of malls and supermarkets inundated with gravel higher than I was tall, with leaning buildings still condemned. An entire aboriginal village at the nearby epicenter, completely annihilated, a civilization gone without a trace, among the thousands dead.

I remember the memorial sculpture in Taipei that had been erected on the earthquake’s tenth anniversary. It was a pair of cupped hands at the bottom of a tiny aqueduct, between rows of LED candles buried in green glass, with a plaque at the bottom. I remember how gaudy it was, and how strange it felt to be memorialized as a living person. I remember accidentally stumbling upon the memorial again and again during visits to Taipei over the years, watching the glass cloud and chip and grow dirty and rough, the plaque vandalized and worn by the elements until it could no longer be read. I remember, this spring, eating a rice ball by the memorial and overhearing two teenagers, no older than I was during the earthquake, have this conversation:

“What is that thing anyway? It’s so ugly.”

“I don’t know. It’s always just been there.”

I remember, just after the earthquake, having this conversation with a friend, who as the son of a diplomat had seen no small share of trouble:

“You know what this is, right? It’s the end of the world.”

“Don’t be such a dumbass, Kevin. There’s always earthquakes and wars and riots and shit. They’re like typhoons. They just come, and then they’re over.”

“No, stupid. Not the earthquake. What you just said. That there’s always earthquakes and wars and riots and shit. You think things have always been like this? Even the typhoons — you don’t get the feeling they keep getting bigger? This is it. This is the end, over our whole lives.”

“You’re so melodramatic, Kevin. You see anyone else freaking out?”

“They’re freaking out, all right. They just don’t know it yet.”