Hello readers! Happy 2023, and happy Year of the Rabbit!
Albert here. We’re sorry we’ve been so out of touch. Since we last wrote, Michelle’s brother, sister-in-law, and adorable nephew visited for two weeks; I hosted a two-day international conference on superstition in modern China; and all four of our parents came down with COVID (they’re fine now, thankfully). We had the general busyness of Christmas and the New Year, both Western and Lunar, to contend with. Michelle finished teaching a class, whose thirty students gave it rave reviews (one told me it was the best class he’d ever taken), and my institute has been particularly busy, as the loosening of pandemic regulations has resulted in a slew of European and American visitors coming to Taiwan to give talks. Besides that, many old friends are in town after having been unable to visit in the past three years.
In short, it’s been a rewarding and wonderful month, but also a very hectic one. We plan to be back regularly for the rest of the year, with a dispatch every other week. We’ve got several exciting posts lined up, including an interview with Nomi Stolzenberg and David Myers about their award-winning book American Shtetl. But for today we’ll ease back in with some photos from the past month.
For Michelle’s birthday we went with her parents and our child to Jiufen, an old gold-mining town. It’s become quite touristy, but it’s impossible not to be won over by the gorgeous red lanterns that light up the night.
We’ve started a new birthday tradition of little hikes. This one-hour climb took us to the top of Mount Keelung, which offers a beautiful view of Taiwan’s northern coast. (Shout-out to Taiwan Trails and Tales for their guidance.)
We took Michelle’s brother’s family and their parents to Hualien, on the eastern coast. We spent two days at Taroko Gorge and checked out a new site, a marvel of a suspension bridge. After initially panicking—I took about twenty steps and turned back—I overcame my fear of heights and walked it with everyone else.
We also traveled along the eastern seaboard, where baby P. (no longer a baby) and her cousin said hello to the Pacific Ocean.
In Yilan, we were utterly delighted by two world-class museums and heritage sites. (Thank you to Tricky Taipei for the tips.) The first was the Lanyang Museum, a dazzling building that blends in with the surrounding lake, clouds, and mountains. Its exhibits explore local history, geology, forestry, and folk religion. Our favorite was a model of the qianggu, the enormous flagpole that people climb during Ghost Month, a ritual we wrote about back in August.
The second was the National Center for Traditional Arts, which recreates a village from the 1940s and 1950s. The Center seeks to revive traditional arts and culture from that period, including pottery, dyeing, and puppetry. We especially loved the hand puppets, among them the pantheon of gods from popular Taiwanese folklore. We also learned to identify all the characters from Journey to the West, the classic story of a monkey on a spiritual quest to retrieve Buddhist scriptures.
For Lunar New Year, everything shuts down in Taiwan for a week or so, including childcare. As annoying as that is, it also means there are bunny sculptures, bunny balloons, and bunny pictures everywhere.
Some happy news: last week, Lin Jingui was declared innocent. In 2007 he was convicted of killing a taxi driver and given a life sentence. In 2016 the Taiwan Innocence Project (TIP) took on his case and successfully argued for a retrial. He was released after ten years in prison, and has been in legal limbo ever since. Last year Michelle tagged along for the court hearings and TIP gatherings. Readers of our post about the media and the death penalty may recall that a court exonerated him five months ago. At the time, we didn’t know whether the prosecutor would appeal. He did, but last week a high court rejected that appeal, ending a sixteen-year ordeal.
We plan to write a more detailed post about it later this month, but we recommend that everybody in Taiwan go to the Taipei Fine Arts Museum to catch the Wild 80s exhibit, which covers the literary, artistic, political, and cultural movements that flourished in Taiwan in the 1980s. The excitement, confusion, and intellectual fervor of the time are all on display. The exhibit begins with an extensive retrospective of avant-garde experimental theater, which sparked many artistic currents. In the early eighties, when martial law was still in effect, experimental theater troupes would create Dada-inspired, Surrealist flash performances on the street. One performer would crawl on all fours, while another pretended to be a cat. (Early readers may remember our interview with poet and translator Jack Jung, who described how poets in Korea, influenced by Surrealism and Dadaism, incorporated equations, diagrams, and drawing into their poetry, in part to evade censors under Japanese rule.)
The exhibit made us think a bit about the political theater so common in Taiwan—pun only sort of intended—and how it can be indistinguishable from the absurdist approaches of experimental art.
Book Club: Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant
For our next book club we’ll read Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. The next club is Friday, January 27th / Saturday, January 28th at 3 p.m. PST / 6 p.m. EST / 7 a.m. Taiwan time. (Apologies, in our last post, we got the time wrong. It’s 6 p.m. EST, not 4 p.m. EST.) As always, email ampleroad@substack.com for a Zoom link; everyone is welcome!
And we’ll close with this photo from Yilan. At this temple you can bring your dog, who will receive a candle, blessed water, prayers, and treats.
Love this post.
Happy New Year of the Rabbit, and thank you for sharing with us these illustrated glimpses of your vibrant lives!