What are the roots that clutch

I guess my blog posts will get briefer and brisker, less heady with introspection, as my time here lengthens. I don’t expect to think less, just less verbally— will know things in sudden rushes of sensation, that dissolve away inside the shackles I’ll try to fashion out of words. At the same time, though, my language will ossify. The sentences will stretch long as they begin their stylistic crawl backwards through the decades, the centuries. The words will take on a faint powder residue of the archaic. I will speak in passive voice. I’ll have to remind myself to use contractions, as the English takes on an unfamiliar heft on my tongue and at my fingertips.

At least that’s the way it happened last year. So I’m telling myself this now to ward off the guilt that will leak from me like old ink, when my Anglophone pen goes rusty. That was a tacky metaphor. I see that now; maybe I won’t be able to in a couple of weeks. I don’t really mind. It’s a pleasing enough thought, so pretty it’s almost worthy of cliché, that when a diarist’s life grows thick with happenstance he won’t have time to write. That was a convoluted way of putting it, but let’s say that I’ll be busy going about the business of life.

Despite these fortune cookie platitudes that leak from me sluggish as the ooze of oil, I feel like I’ve seen a lot. My feet ache. I’ve been rehabilitating myself to flats. Last term I trekked up Prospect to the Div School in high-heeled boots, even in the sleet, because somehow after an adolescence of sensible shoes I’ve become that girl. The heat curls itself around me like pestering hands, an oppressive shawl. The makeup I apply in the mornings like donning mess dress, a matter of pride, disappears in a mist after the first hour, leaving a ring of indigo blue around my sunstruck eyes.

In Vietnam, by Cat-Cat Village, we sunk our shoes into muddy cliff-faces in the tropical heat, reciting “The Waste Land” in ragged voices, my roommate and I. It’s different in a city, with the roads giving off warmth, but also the people moving past you unbothered by the weather, stylish and slim. I saw men in western business attire, dark-suited and dignified, walking on the winking sidewalks.

You can duck into subway stations every once in a while, savor the cool in the air-conditioned trains. I love the Taipei metro system, idiot-proof as it is, so that not even illiterate foreigners could possibly come to harm. I spent the day riding around the Xindian and Danshui lines with Winnie Tong PC’11, after dragging her on a silly grail quest for this random temple the metro tourist map told me I should visit. We found it buried in a little market, small and anticlimactic— just a little sliver of spirituality with a single incense burner and a filigreed door. We made a circuit around another temple after grabbing lunch from this food court filled with salarymen wolfing down cheap, efficient meals— pretty sure we were the only foreigners in the building. This one was more impressive, tall with glossy surfaces and sleek contemporary lines. But I found the modernity faintly deflating.

In Taipei I feel kind of fearless— brazenly tourist with my map and sunglasses, jabbering to Winnie in English and addressing salesmen in deeply non-Taiwanese Chinese. It’s interesting that I’m less marked here in a sense, than I was in Harbin, where people knew me for a language learner, either American or Korean. In Taipei I’m taken for a mainlander; they place my accent in Manchuria, which I thought left no dialectical trace.

After Winnie and I part ways, I wandered around Gongguan, bought dinner on an impulse from a Buddhist buffet where they sell you vegetarian fare by the weight. I think I was the only patron under sixty, although the manager said he got a lot of foreign students. I really liked it, for some reason even though the food, though good, was unspectacular and the environment not particularly redolent of dharma. It felt safe, I guess, to use a word I always feel kind of silly about deploying outside the context of my spoken word collective, where it takes on a specific communitarian meaning. I think that’s my point— it feels like community. I promised to go back, assuming I can find it again, among all the little restaurant-dotted streets that snake around the Gongguan station.

I budgeted enough time to get home before sundown, leaving a little navigational slack for the ten minutes spent wandering up and down this road wondering if it was the right one. (It was.)

Today I said I wanted classes to start already so I could fill up my empty hours with something concrete. But I actually like wandering uninhibited by purpose, taking advantage of my jet-lag to wake up early, so I can fit in a full day before lunch time— when, if stateside, I’d finally drag myself out of slumber.