EDWARD GAUVIN

Weekends in Taiwan are happening, in an old car, upon small towns where your uncle remembers some regional delicacy, sold by a man in an apron from a cart the only other time he’s ever passed through. He was probably in college then, but still favored the same Hawaiian shirts. The cart is now a storefront packed with people, on whom the man your uncle met looks down, from a framed photo on the wall, beside the copy of some certificate, recognition, or signed newspaper from the day the president passed through and had lunch—handshakes and beaming faces all around. This is at the one crossroads around which the town clusters, a graph of rooflines in all directions quickly nearing the zero of neatly furrowed fields or, below field level, concrete-bordered paddies in which float the somber distant mountains over clouds. Still, the center bustles; girls cross against the only light, between mopeds, in full view of the miniature precinct; kids bounce for fifty cents on snub-nosed planes or plastic motorcycle rides with scratched paint, while siblings try their luck at bubble toy vending and a lone eighth grader sinks hoop after sideshow hoop. His grandmother tends three trays of steamer buns from a pushcart; his cousin wraps betel nuts in a glass booth. Up and down the street, buildings thrust forth their signs of a shameless carnival air, here adorned with a trio of revolving lights, there fanning a neon rainbow. Your uncle passes by, remarking the crowds but not recognizing the place which only a farmer on the edge of town, straightened from his toil, tells him is the one he seeks: he hangs a U across the empty two-lane and in minutes the concrete houses shack up again, crowding out the fields between; there’s the fairground where fresh garlic, chives, dyed pussywillow boughs are being sold. Cars begin to clot the shoulder before storefronts where hang fruits, roast meats, and through a gap, by the brook behind town, the brilliant temple can be glimpsed. At that store, once a cart, now an institution, the large round tables are still full at a quarter to four downstairs and above, a level not immediately obvious and reached only by squeezing past the entrance to the kitchen. You watch a party of five file after a waitress there while the air buzzes with the hostess broadcasting names and orders. The canteen’s renown seems disguised in the total lack of décor, from the red plastic stools exactly like its emptier neighbors’ to the open storefront through which its cement floor flows indistinguishably into the sidewalk. People are still milling there, in and out of that range within which nearby vendors loose cries to buy or sample that hang in the air, invisible ripples around them. Five girlish secretaries hand a local man their tiny cameras and huddle in front of the famed eatery. The wait for take-out is forty minutes.

I am a God of Extermination with my electric mosquito paddle. This is a badminton racket-shaped swatter strung not with catgut but twin layers of wire that hum with menacing discharge at the press of a button on the handle, creating between them a crackling field (I exaggerate) that—and herein is genius—makes it impossible to miss. Because if you swat an insect, even a tiny one, it won’t make it through the field. In essence, you can miss, and still a blue spark (I exaggerate not) and a sharp snap will inform you of the target’s spiraling demise. Swish! Swish! No longer are surfaces needed! A swipe through the air, the merest contact, and death to pests. Fruit flies, had they brains great enough to know fear, would fear me.

Here it retails for around five Yankee dollars. I am told these are available in Chinese-dense areas of California. What are you waiting for? Run, ye mortal fools, and get one!

The shower water pressure’s good but the flush strength in both toilets is feeble.

I’m told I should shut the door to the kitchenette before taking a shower, thus ensuring any natural gas from the wall-mounted water heater there will go out the window and not insidiously into the apartment. I’d lend this precaution more credence if the shower weren’t two rooms and a hallway away, and if, every time I cranked the kitchen tap to warm to wash dishes, I weren’t standing right beside said water heater, close enough to see its pilot flare blue. Am I sucking in natural gas then? Not olfactibly. All the same, that window, the apartment’s only to face north, never gets closed, even though it would seem to provide the poorest ventilation, giving as it does on a building well. Curiously enough, this window has been getting the best breezes lately, whipping wildly the blue flames beneath the wok. It’s also the only one, naturally, without a sunshade; whatever wind drives down the hollow through the screen also brings in the rain. When I moved in, soot from the poor air had settled over floor and counter in a layer where the last rain could be read in spots. Overlapping tin awnings hide what’s below; across from me, the corrugated canopy to a neighbor’s window cage gives a green cast to his perennially drying shirts.

I’ve returned safely and uneventfully to a Taiwan I dimly recognize as having lived in, ticking off, like the taxi meter and its miles, the landmarks between the airport and home: the signs to Taoyuan, the toll plaza, the freeway flanked by elevated routes, the buildings I remember being grey as warehouses hiding their grime in night and laying claim, with countless lighted windows, to the animation of newness. Be they wrecks in the day, patched with corrugated awnings and bristling with scaffolding whose ragged bamboo edges seem a frame exposed by rot or breach, by night they are freighters on a dark sea. We haven’t crossed the river yet, I bet myself, and when a few minutes later we do, the sight of Taipei 101 congratulates me. On a hill to the left, the Grand Hotel bright as the bathhouse in Spirited Away, and then we’re swerving southeast into town.