Notes from a fascinating world.
The world is like a bazaar, full of interesting odds and ends, and I've been exiled into it. This is my all-over-the-map (literally and metaphorically) attempt at capturing some of the world's many wonders.
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One must be terribly grateful in these times to be able to do any traveling at all. A couple of months ago, I returned to the land of my birth, Taiwan. Being still a citizen here, I had the right to return regardless of Covid-19 border restrictions. And I must be doubly grateful that here and my other country, New Zealand, just happen right now to be the two safest places on earth as far as Covid is concerned. And recently I got out of the capital city of Taipei to visit the south and the offshore island of Kinmen. All of which—against the backdrop of the pandemic as well as events in Washington—makes me reflect upon what it means to be a remnant, to be an heir to lost causes I’ll explain. But let’s start in Kinmen and the 17th century.  Sunset in Kinmen.  In recent years, I have made a point of writing a special blog post the week of July 1, in observance of the anniversary of my departure from the US. Although his blog has been dormant since Covid-19 sent me to New Zealand, this week I must insist on tradition. Sure, I never thought that the fifth anniversary of the beginning of my peregrinations would find me trapped behind closed borders. But is that any excuse to let standards slide? It was only last week when Maria Konnikova’s excellent new book, The Biggest Bluff, came out. I had been looking forward to it since I heard that she was working on it as long as two years ago. The book follows the author, already a respected science writer and a psychology PhD, as she learns to play to poker as a way of studying decision-making in the face of uncertainty. Within a year, she had studied the game so well as to go from total novice to tournament champion, winning hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money. In the book’s final pages, underscoring the inescapable nature of chance or “variance,” Konnikova recounts a fable all too familiar to me. Here is her version: A farmer loses his prize horse. His neighbor comes over to commiserate about the misfortune, but the farmer just shrugs: who knows if it is a misfortune or not. The next day, the horse returns. With it are twelve more wild horses. The neighbor congratulates the farmer on this excellent news, but the farmer just shrugs. Soon, the farmer’s son falls off one of the feral horses as he’s training it. He breaks a leg. The neighbor expresses his condolences. The farmer just shrugs. Who knows. The country declares war and the army comes to the village, to conscript all able-bodied young men. The farmer’s son is passed over because of his leg. How wonderful, the neighbor says. And again the farmer shrugs. Perhaps. I’ve always said that New Zealand is the place you’d want to be in the event of the zombie apocalypse. I just never thought I’d actually test the proposition. I was in Belgrade when COVID-19 went global, and I had thought I’d ride out the storm there. To go anywhere else, particularly going home to distant New Zealand, seemed to present significant risk of catching the virus. In contrast, if I simply stayed in my apartment except for grocery shopping, I would have almost no exposure to anyone. But with each passing day, more and more COVID-19 cases turned up in Serbia. The writing on the wall was fairly legible that the kind of exponential growth seen in Italy might repeat itself in the Balkans. President Vučić of Serbia seemed to agree: he declared a state of emergency last Sunday and closed the country’s borders to all non-citizens. But my landlord, affable Aleksandar, remained optimistic. A man in his forties who watched NATO fighters shoot down Serbian ones in the 1999 Kosovo War, he felt that his country was too familiar with trauma not to handle the situation with aplomb.  Near the Serbian-Romanian border. I had to learn how to play “chess” twice: once from my grandfather, and once from my aunt. And the reason I had to learn it twice is that I was learning two kinds of chess: Chinese chess and Western chess. The two share a common origin, and in considering them side by side, one can glean a hint of a history of the world. (I’ve barely started writing and have already tied myself in linguistic knots. In Eurocentric English, “Western” chess is simply “chess,” while Chinese chess must be distinguished by that ethnic descriptor. In Chinese, “Chinese chess” is called xiang qi, which can be translated as either “elephant chess” or something like “symbolic chess.” The elephant connection will become important below. Chess of the European variety is instead called “xiyang qi,” meaning “Western chess,” or “guo ji xiang qi”: “international elephant/symbolic chess.”)  A 13th century depiction of Knights Templar playing chess. Will Westerners, not generally well-informed about Chinese cities and provinces to begin with, now forever associate Wuhan and Hubei with the novel coronavirus of 2019? The thought pains me, as I know it pains many others, not least because my family’s ancestral seat is located in Hubei, just a couple of hours outside Wuhan. Family lore says that in the third year of the reign of the Hongwu Emperor, i.e., 1371, a general of the Ming Dynasty surnamed Han was sent to take up command of a garrison in what is now Hubei. There he put down roots. Over 600 years later, a small town in the area is still named after my family, and it remains substantially populated by people related to me to one degree or another, people who called me “cousin” and “uncle” and “brother” when I visited in 2015. Thus I would prefer that the outside world think of Hubei and Wuhan not as some diseased hovel (the image that they are rapidly gaining in the Western imagination) but as the storied and fascinating places that they really are. Here are a few things you may wish to know about the province of Hubei and its capital.  A corner of Lake Dongting. Being in UAE and Qatar tends to put things in perspective for me, uncomfortable perspective though it is. I was barely able to find an actual Emirati in the United Arab Emirates. Similarly, now as I look around Doha, I see only one young boy in Arab clothes who is plausibly Qatari. In fact, foreigners account for almost 90 percent of the population of Qatar. And obvious racial hierarchies obtain. South Asians (Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis) besides Filipinos dominate in numbers. On the humbler streets of Doha, it’s easy to wonder whether one has mistakenly landed in Manila or Dhaka. They power Qatar’s service industries, working in the jobs that, one assumes, the Qataris consider beneath them. Without the Filipinos, most of the shops in the malls would have no attendants, restaurants would have no waiters, and hotels would have no maids. Without South Asians, most of the city’s taxis would have to stand idle for lack of drivers.  The gleamy skyline of Doha, a city powered by imported labor.  A plague doctor outfit outside a costume shop in Venice. I have long held a somewhat morbid fascination with plague narratives. Now, with the new coronavirus, it seems that the whole world is collectively living through one.
As a genre, stories of epidemics or pandemics cut across the categories that we normally impose on texts: fiction and nonfiction, highbrow and lowbrow, literature and film and even video games. And they span history from some of the earliest human efforts at storytelling to recent Hollywood blockbusters. Here’s a distinctly incomplete list: the biblical plague that God sent against Egypt in Exodus; the plague of Athens in History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides; the plague of Justinian as described by Procopius; the Black Death in Italy as told in the framing chapter of Boccaccio’s Decameron; Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year; Samuel Pepys’s diary describing the same plague in 17th century London; Camus’s philosophical novel Le Peste; Blindness by Portuguese Nobel laureate Jose Saramago; sleek Hollywood productions like Soderbergh’s “Contagion” and entries in the sub-genre of zombie stories like “World War Z,” “The Walking Dead,” and many others. I’m sure that a book or film with a title like “The Year of the Coronavirus” will be out before we know it. “The world is what it is,” V. S. Naipaul famously wrote. “Men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.” I wonder whether I have allowed myself to become nothing. Despite being a lawyer, I have never been a good liar. I never lied for my clients. Technical truths? Sure. Outright lies? Never. For a while I tried to practice lying, because mendacity is such a useful life skill. I got as far as telling obviously ridiculous fibs about my job at cocktail parties: “I am a hamster farmer,” I might say. “I work at the circus as a lion-tamer.” But these were only jokes. But the emblematic figure of our age, the dominant mode of existence, the era-defining vocation, is the confidence man, the scam artist, the fraud.  Cloud Gate, a.k.a. The Bean, Chicago. All surface.  This is not me. This is Simu Liu. But you get the idea. I think it was Professor Elaine Scarry who defined beauty as the quality that inspires the desire both to possess and to replicate.
It’s always struck me as a very good definition. And, living the way I do, I constantly see the idea in action. At every scenic spot, every brilliant sunset, every famous castle or palace, hordes of tourists snap photos of the same things. In the age of the smartphone, one marvels at the thought of how much of humanity’s collective data storage capacity is taken up with endlessly repeated (and mostly bad) photos of the same sights and things and places. But unlike many other seasoned travelers, I do not judge too harshly the amateur photographers. First of all, I’m not sure I’m in any position to throw stones. Secondly, they do no more than what beauty requires of them: taking a photo of something is at once an act of possession and of replication. But a recent piece in the New Yorker by Jia Tolentino on the “Instagram face” has me revisiting this concept of beauty. Scarry’s definition applies to human appearance as much as it does to sunsets and paintings and vistas. Beautiful people inspire eros, and sex is at once an act of possession and of replication in its possibility of multiplying the species — which was why Freud equated it with the will to life itself. I was recently in Venice for the third time in my life: it seems that, without so planning, I go to that most splendid city once every decade. When we miss a destination or decide to skip it, we always say “next time” or “it’ll still be there.” But Venice actually may not still be there by the end of this century. A city of marble built on a lagoon, there is a very good chance that by then it will be underwater, a modern day Atlantis. Mere days before I arrived, the city had suffered terrible flooding. The interior of the iconic Basilica di San Marco was knee-deep in water. And that’s only as far as our climate projections go. Projections never say what happens after 2100, as though climate change will magically stop the moment the clock ticks over, because we neither can nor want to contemplate the possibilities. Look around Venice and you see the celebrations of the achievements of past centuries: wings in the magnificent galleries are devoted to the trecento then the quattrocento then the cinquecento — the 1300s, 1400s, and 1500s — down to modern times. But there will probably never be a Venetian art of the 2100s. Not only is the time horizon of our climate projections pathetic when compared to the reckoning of the earth, but it is pitiable even when measured against our own humanistic achievements.  Venice and the water that will one day blanket it. |
AuthorWriter, traveler, lawyer, dilettante. Failed student of physics. Not altogether distinguished graduate of two Ivy League institutions. Immigrant twice over. "The grand tour is just the inspired man's way of getting home." Archives
March 2020
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