Response to Pico Iyer, Lola Akinmade Åkerström, & Alain de Botton

It's 1 o'clock on an Easter morning (does 1 a.m. count as part of Easter morning?), and I'm in the middle of grading, but I was looking through materials from the travel writing course I taught in the fall of 2020 for an essay I wanted to forward to a friend. And of course, I got sucked into other parts of the course materials. I can tell that even though we were in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were enjoying the class and each other's (virtual) company. (Unfortunately, the English Department doesn't seem to want to let me teach the course anymore. Departmental politics. *sigh*)

Anyway, I wanted to share one assignment from early in the semester and my response to it. I've had to fix some links in it, and one reading I can't legally share online:

Watch "Pico Iyer: A Portable Life" and read Lola Akinmade Åkerström's "When Home Morphs into Space" and Alain de Botton's "On Anticipation." Use the questions below to form a response to these three pieces. (Note: it isn't necessary to respond one by one to each question--in fact, I'd prefer that you not try to answer all of them. But consider them as you think about your response.) In your letters, include quotations from the passages you are responding to.

• As you are watching the Iyer video, write down some of the things that he says that connect with you, either through similarity, difference, or some other kind of relationship. What does he say about travel, home, place, and the self in motion that evokes a feeling of recognition in you?
  
  
• What is your definition of "home?" How does it compare with Akinmade Åkerström's definition of home as "the space where I’m allowed to exist without explanation"? What parts of her essay did you find compelling or did you resonate with?
  
  
• With what parts of de Botton’s chapter do you resonate? Looking back on your own travels (including, possibly, coming to Boston or NU from your hometown), write about your experiences of anticipation, reality, and memory, with de Botton as your “guide” (as he does with Huysmans). In other words, write about the experience, showing how it reflects the connections (or disconnects) with de Botton’s descriptions.
  
  
• What points of intersection (comparison, contrast, extension, …) do you see between de Botton, Akinmade Åkerström, and/or Iyer? Try to lay out some of these connections with an eye toward thinking about how they might influence your own views concerning the relationships among preparing for, experiencing, and reflecting on travel. Try to use specific examples from your own experiences to illustrate your responses.

Here was my response:

I think the first thing that struck me about Lola Akinmade Åkerström’s essay was the way she opened it up with her Swedish husband sending her photos of cuts of meat while she was at home, pregnant, craving Nigerian food. I was in the position of her husband when we were expecting our son--I was the one texting her pictures of Taiwanese food from Kam Man in Quincy to find out if I had found the right thing. One difference, perhaps, from Akinmade Åkerström’s experience was that I had spent almost two decades in Taiwan before we came to Boston, so I approached the experience of shopping in an Asian market with a combination of familiarity and nostalgia. I remember when we first found Kam Man several months after arriving, the familiar Chinese packaging lining the shelves, combined with the Mandopop playing in the background, took me out of my immediate surroundings and back to the Taiwanese supermarkets I used to frequent.

It’s probably hard, though, for someone who hasn’t lived abroad to identify with someone’s impressions about something as pedestrian as grocery shopping. When I was living in Taiwan, my parents would sometimes mention in letters “trips” that they had taken by going to slide presentations or watching Rick Steves programs: “We took a boat cruise on the Rhine this evening and didn’t even have to leave the house!” It was like des Esseintes with a vengeance, as though they were asking me, tauntingly, “What [is] the good of moving when a person can travel so wonderfully sitting in a chair” (De Botton 11)?

Part of the difficulty of sharing my experiences of Taiwan, then, seems to come from the mundanity of my life there as compared with the “distilled” nature of the travel experiences my parents got through Rick Steves and the slide shows. Pico Iyer says of his ordinary life in Japan, “Every day when I wake up, it seems as if the day lasts a thousand hours,” making that sound like a good thing. But sometimes standing in line in another country is not that much different from standing in line in your home country. De Botton suggests, though, that over time, the tedium might disappear from travelers’ memories, possibly leaving them with more interesting stories to tell as a result of everything they had forgotten (14-15).

But that “interest factor” also raises in my mind concerns about how faithfully I’m representing that life abroad. I find myself identifying with an often-repeated saying that those who visit China (or anywhere else, I'd say) for a week write a book about it; those who visit for a month write an article; and those who live for a year or more write nothing. The longer you're there, the more nuance you see, and the more tongue-tied you feel. How do you write about a society--any society--that is in constant change, without oversimplifying, overgeneralizing, or relying on clichés like, “X is a land of contrasts”? What authority do you (I) have to represent others?

It’s this hesitance to publish my impressions of Taiwan that makes travel writing both intriguing and intimidating. It comes not only from the worry about “getting it wrong” (it’s always going to be wrong to someone), but also from the feeling that what you say is permanent and has effects on people in ways that you might not imagine. One summer Sunday, a minister at my parents’ church announced to the congregation that I was visiting them from Thailand, and I found myself having to argue with an older woman who insisted to me that I was living in Thailand and not Taiwan because that’s what the pastor had said. Iyer declares, “The first rule of travel is, the minute you arrive somewhere, all your plans go out the window.” I’d add that the minute you write about somewhere, all your intentions go out the window when your reader gets hold of your text.

Works Cited

Akinmade Åkerström, Lola. "When Home Morphs into Space." Modern Adventure, November, 2018, modernadventure.com/magazine/november-2018/home-the-art-of-lagom. Accessed 23 August 2020.

De Botton, Alain. The Art of Travel. Vintage, 2004.

Iyer, Pico. Interview by Don George. NG Live!: Pico Iyer: A Portable Life, n.d., youtu.be/I6GB1uAy3gE?feature=shared. Accessed 23 August 2020.

Saturday trip to the Quincy Shipyard to look at trains

This afternoon my son and I were looking for something to do while we were in Quincy, and of course his thoughts turned to trains. He wanted to find some kind of abandoned railway or something in the area, so I was googling around for something that wouldn't be too far away. We came upon some information about the Fore River Railroad near Braintree and decided to go there. 

I guess I didn't look at the information on that link very carefully because on our way to where the GPS was taking us, I was surprised to pass the Quincy Shipyard.

After driving around a little, I thought we might as well go into the shipyard because we had seen some tank cars on railroad tracks there, as well as a diesel engine or two. I'm always a little hesitant to poke my head into one of these kinds of industrial sites because I'm not sure I belong, but I didn't see any "no trespassing" signs.

We parked the car near a couple of cabooses (caboosi?) that were sitting on some tracks.

I saw a sign about the USS Salem, which sounded like it was a ship you could visit, so I aimed my son in that direction. As we walked to the ship, we passed some more tank cars.

My son studies a tank car with fascination.

I nudged him along until we got to the USS Salem, a Navy ship built in Quincy that is now a museum.

We went aboard, equipped with a guide, and wandered around the ship for as long as my son's attention span would allow (about 20 minutes, though I successfully kept him on board a bit longer). 

I had to explain "Kilroy" to my son, who thought this was a picture of Squidward. 

I took a lot of pictures of the ship and its guns, etc., but since my son was more interested in the trains, we'll turn back to those briefly. He was interested in this diesel engine, which he explained to me is a switcher (a kind of engine that stays in the rail yard and shunts cars around--also called a "shunter").

He enjoyed looking at the engine, but fortunately he didn't try to climb on it, since an employee came by to warn us not to climb on the trains.

The engine above is, I think, out of service (though I might be wrong). The engine below is, I'm pretty sure, still in service. My son is admiring it safely from afar.

So he got to see his trains, and I got to see my ship. A good way to spend the last afternoon of April.

Wednesday walk

Today was fairly warm, up to the upper 60s (really the calm before the storm, since they're predicting 6" of snow for Friday). So this afternoon the little guy and I drove out to Millis to take a look at an old train station. 

There's some good info about this train station on this site. One thing it doesn't answer, though, is if the station was built in 1886, why does it say "1885" above the windows on the turret? 

Front of the Millis Train Station

Side of station

"All aboard!" shouts the diminutive would-be conductor.

Instead of waiting for a train that was clearly quite late, we headed southwest along the tracks. 

We came upon a number of levers along the way that controlled the switches. This switch stand was patented in 1930. (If you're fascinated by this kind of stuff, check out this PPT on switching and other equipment. Slide 8 contains more information about this particular switch stand.)

The tracks from the station go by a warehouse at 1073 Main St., Millis, a little over half a mile away.

End of the line

All in all, it was a nice walk on a beautiful afternoon. I found some more information about this train station here. Now the wind is howling outside, and the temperature has dropped 30 degrees. Love me that New England weather...

Saturday morning trip with the little guy

My son and I had some time this morning while my wife was teaching in Quincy, and I had seen something about the Granite Railway Incline Plane on Atlas Obscura, so we decided to check it out. 

As they say on the website, the railway ruins are located in a neighborhood near the highway. Google Maps took us right there.

Entrance to the Granite Railway Incline

Sign providing a history of the Granite Railway Incline Plane (Click to enlarge)

Plaque introducing Granite Railway

Looking up the incline from the bottom of the hill

Looking downhill from near the top

When we got to the top, we walked for a while along a pathway for awhile. We came through the woods to a clearing and found out we were in the middle of an old quarry (see this description on Atlas Obscura). 

The scene from the clearing (apologies for the jerky video!)

The little guy, running as usual

View from the top of the quarry

As we were leaving, we ran into a group of men who were headed into the quarry from another direction. They were either going to film something there or play musical instruments (one guy had drumsticks, I think), or maybe they were going to film themselves playing musical instruments. We didn't hang around to see what they were up to, though. (Maybe we should have!) 

We'll have to go back sometime, perhaps before it gets much colder out.

summer 1985, allentown pa

Here's a poem I wrote about Uncle Erich back in 1985 after I spent a summer in Allentown living with the Salomons and working at Salomon Jewelers:

summer 1985, allentown pa.

uncle erich the watchmaker

comes home from the iga w/ ring bologna 

& $5.22 worth of fruit & cereal & a-

treat to get his 1/2 priced 5lb bag of

granulated sugar

uncle erich the watchmaker

stands up from the table & pronounces

the meal "sehr gut" as he reaches into

the refrigerator for the ring bologna

then returns to his chair and eyes the

the bologna closely

uncle erich the watchmaker

begins cutting a piece of bologna off

the ring, separating the thin slice from

the ring carefully, as if he were

opening the back of a mid-19th century

pocket watch.

uncle erich the watchmaker 

brushes mustard on the slice, surely

thinking he's cleaning the back of that           

railroad watch & we sit tensely for a

moment, hoping he doesn't go up to his

workroom & dry the bologna in sawdust

before popping it into his mouth

Formosa Betrayed screening at First Parish Cambridge Unitarian Universalist Church

Sunday my wife and I went to a screening of Will Tiao's movie, Formosa Betrayed. Based on historical events, it tells the story of an American FBI agent sent to Taiwan in 1983 after a Taiwanese-American professor is murdered in the US. The agent quickly finds himself in over his head as he balances his desire to get to the bottom of the murder with the pressures on him coming from the US and from the martial law government in Taiwan. After witnessing (and experiencing) the brutality that the US-supported government visits upon the pro-democracy Taiwanese citizens, and after getting no help from the American liaison in Taiwan, Agent Jake Kelly returns to the US and, disillusioned, quits the FBI.

We'd seen the film before (in fact, we have a DVD of it), but what drew us into Cambridge was the chance to see Tiao (writer, producer, and actor in the movie) and ask him some questions during an after-screening Q&A session.

There was a good crowd in the church. The people who were there--at least the ones who asked questions--didn't seem to know very much about Taiwan's history, so I was hesitant to ask the questions I came to ask, preferring to hear the rest of the audience ask their questions about Taiwan's history. It was gratifying to see how interested they were after watching the movie. I think that's Tiao's point. As he said, Taiwan is basically the only reason that might lead the US and China into an armed conflict (though I think I'd phrase that differently, as China's attitude or actions regarding Taiwan are the only reasons), so it's important that Americans have some understanding about the status and history of the island. While this movie is a fictionalized representation of the kinds of events that actually took place during the martial law period in Taiwan (which only ended in 1987), it does a service to the cause of helping Americans understand some of the recent history of Taiwan.

I asked Tiao about what the main character Jake Kelly would do next, and he kind of laughed and said, maybe join an NGO? He talked about how Jake represented friends of his growing up who had an idealistic notion of how democracy was supposed to work and then found out that it's not working the way that you'd hope that it would. I think Jake is in some ways a George Kerr-type figure, though Kerr knew more about what was going on in Taiwan than Jake does at the beginning of the movie. Jake's also sort of a Ralph Barton figure (though Tiao told me he never read Vern Sneider's novel, A Pail of Oysters). They all (including Kerr, actually) come to know Taiwan and the Taiwanese through personal relationships, and it's through the suffering of those people they've come to love that they are given a different perspective on how things are actually operating there. Their later commitment to Taiwan also grows out of the suffering of their loved ones. My guess is that Jake Kelly is going to write articles or a book about what happened, or start to make public speeches about what he saw and experienced, much as Barton commits to doing at the end of Vern Sneider's novel. (Some people might find it amusing that I'm speculating about the future of a fictional character, but I think it's worthwhile to think about the trajectory the plot would take if the story continued, particularly when the story is based on real and contemporary events.)

Interestingly, an earlier treatment that I quoted years ago from the movie's website concludes with Kelly "return[ing] to the States, frustrated with his knowledge and lack of power to do anything about it—when he is invited to testify before the U.S. Congress in Washington D.C. and finally given the chance to declare the truth." This last part didn't actually happen in the final version. I wish I had had the chance to ask Tiao about the change to the ending. Maybe he'll comment on this post and let me know what led to the decision to change the ending. Thanks in advance, Will!

It was also fascinating to find out that Tiao grew up in Manhattan, Kansas, where his parents were graduate students. I had read several years ago that there was a lot of Taiwan Independence activity at KSU in the mid 1960s (see the oral history, 一門留美學生的建國故事, for details), but I hadn't yet met anyone who was that close to such activity. He mentioned that KSU was often referred to as the 'military school for Taiwan independence' (台獨軍校).

Anyway, it was good to see the movie as a member of an audience larger than two people, and the opportunity to talk to the man responsible for putting it together was great. Thanks to Karin Lin for organizing this event!

Starting summer courses tomorrow

The spring semester here ends in mid-April, which means that a lecturer like me typically wouldn't see a paycheck between the end of April and the middle of September. This summer, though, I've picked up two courses in the first summer session. This will supplement our income nicely.

I've taught summer courses before, but never two intensive writing courses at the same time. Fortunately, I've taught both of these courses before (a first-year composition course for multilingual students and an advanced writing course, also for multilingual students). I'm using the "lighter"(?) summer load to do a little experimenting with how I'm running the course, in hopes that I'll figure out some better ways of evaluating and grading students' work, particularly in the murky areas of peer work and journal writing. We'll see how this works out.

I've been fortunate to land a job here at a school where I can work a lot with international students. I've also had some good classes with USAmerican students, but I feel my strengths are really in working with students from other countries. Like some of them, I sometimes feel like a bit of an outsider in the US and find that "alternative" ways of doing things or thinking about things are not always accepted, tolerated, or even understood.

Well, I've meandered pretty far from the topic of summer school starting tomorrow.

Update, 5/6/13, 6:18 p.m.: Speaking of meandering, this afternoon I fell asleep on the commuter rail and missed my stop. Ended up having to walk 2 miles to get home. (Good exercise!)  

Why 外 not?

I haven't written much about my "return" to the US in 2011--I'm not even sure I am comfortable calling it a "return" because that implies sort of a sameness about me and about the US that isn't the case. I enjoyed reading Mark Wilbur's post on "Returning to America," though, because I had some of the same feelings as he did after he came back to the US after years of living abroad (particularly the feeling of going back in time whenever I'm at the commuter rail or subway stations!).

One difference between living in Taiwan and living here is that I no longer see this on my Starbucks cups:

It's not clear, but it says 老外.

So I guess I'm saying I'm not seen as a 老外 anymore--at least not here. (And of course I'm a fan of cheesy bilingual puns, too.)

Pilgrimage

Little did I know when I was writing posts on this popular theme that they would culminate in a trip to this historic site:

Home of the first Dunkin' Donuts, Quincy, MA

How was I able to locate this sacred place? Research, my children! (OK, I googled it...)

A shot of the interior

Of course, as with all good pilgrimages worthy of the name, ours was fraught with danger (though that was mainly because I didn't have any coffee until we got to DD).

After our trip to DD, we found our way to a huge Chinese supermarket nearby. The selection of instant noodles alone was enough to make us 喜極而泣...

A visit to Tunghai from former Shansi rep Tom Gold

I finally got to meet another of my dissertation interviewees in person last Thursday (6/23). Dr. Thomas B. Gold, who was an Oberlin rep to Tunghai in the early 1970s, came back to visit the campus before he participated in an international conference in Taipei. Tom was very helpful when I was working on my dissertation, providing me with lots of background and helping me with my analysis of the texts I was working with.

Linda and I had a nice time with him, walking around Tunghai's campus and chatting about what has changed and what hasn't since he taught here.

After a hearty lunch at a Hakka restaurant near Tunghai

Walking around Tunghai's campus

Looking for Tom's old room in the men's dorm

Found it!

The shower room had changed somewhat; most noticeably, a natural gas fueled water heater has replaced the one Tom remembered (for the old heater, he recalled, you literally had to gather sticks and light a fire to heat the water)*

Enjoying the view

Enjoying some Tunghai ice cream (I'm holding Linda's "Tunghai-sicle" as well as my own)

________________
*David Decker, who was acting chair of the Foreign Languages Department in 1980, told us about how he informed incoming teachers of the need to gather sticks to heat their water and (exaggerating a bit) that the Department would equip each teacher with a bow and arrow so that they could hunt for their food.