Hello from the Net Road
By: Graham Oliver
Tags: Taiwan, Expat, Taipei

Friends,

The assorted succulents above, pictured foregrounding a typical summer afternoon Taipei rainshower, have a story. The story is that they were neglected in the teachers’ office, but then a UV lamp was going to be used to disinfect the teachers’ office and that anything living needed to be removed, so someone took the neglected succulents outside and set them on the little wall that looks over the courtyard, and there they have sat since, and there they sat when I arrived last year.

I am not sure what the point of the story was, though I have heard it three times now. Did the succulents look much worse off or less healthy in the office, and this is a tale of how they thrived outside? Was the story just a tale about how no one really does anything with these succulents yet they manage to sit there year after year, largely undisturbed? Like a lot of my understanding of the school I have worked at for a year now, it feels incomplete. It is a surreal workplace, sometimes. About half of what happens at my job outside of my immediate classroom I don’t understand because of the language barrier. The other half that is inside of my sphere of understanding is built on a very shaky foundation, given it has to do with a group of very high turnover foreign employees. A handful of the people I worked in very close proximity to for ten months last year are gone, replaced with new faces from Texas or Toronto or other schools in Taipei, and already a week into the semester they are a normal fixture in my life with our own routine interactions, until they or I leave the school as well and quickly fade from the school’s world. And it’s not even the people I’ve directly interacted with — so many little stories and explanations float around about the teachers who were there a year or two before I arrived, people whose actions caused shifts in policy or tradition or expectations.

I don’t think I’m stating this well, but there’s been a very odd feeling for me this week, the first week of the semester, when I think about how much of my energy and thoughts have gone into this school over the past year, how much of my life has revolved around it, in a way that wasn’t true of any job before it or graduate school or anything else, and then one day at the end of the spring semester I’ll leave it and it’ll probably be pretty decisively closed.

(While there are people who make a career out of working as a foreign teacher at schools abroad, they are the minority. For the people who don’t, there’s an interesting parallel between the job of teaching at the school and the experience of going to a school that one day I should write about but am currently incapable of.)

The above is part of the reason that I’m so thankful for our friends here in Taiwan, people who have allowed us into their lives despite the fact that the uncertainty of duration or geography of our future friendship. Relationships as adults beyond people you see on a daily basis take so much work, right? Our time and energy is valuable, and so we must be choosy about who we’re going to put in the work to continue being close to. We’re going to our first Taiwanese wedding next month! How exciting.

Your Chinese lesson for today requires some zooming in. 網 and 綱, wang and gang (long A sound like raw or lawn), mean totally different things despite only having a tiny difference in how they’re written. The first means “net,” but you see it most commonly next to 球, qiu, which means ball. 網球 net ball = tennis! Or 路, road. 網路 net road = internet. 綱, on the other hand, is a much less common character but is used to talk about bullet point-style outlines. If you look closely at the character, in the bottom right corner is this character — 山 — shan, which means mountain. So, an outline has a connection to a mountain, makes sense. But the same spot for net has this character — 亡 — wang, which means death, and doesn’t exactly make sense until you realize it means you can say that the internet contains death and hey, everything fits into place.

Further reading:

The English department started our first meeting of the year off asking people to say what they’re looking forward to during this year, which is a good habit for meetings in my humble opinion. I answered truthfully that it was incredible to see my students grow over the course of last year and that I couldn’t wait to continue to watch as they developed into their own, full people over the course of this one.

What are you looking forward to?

-g