By Sophia F
Over the past semester I’ve been so busy I’ve hardly had the time to think, much less write—I’ve found that NSLI-Y has been a wild ride from start to finish, with few free moments. In the time since my trip to Kinmen, summer came to Kaohsiung. So did: final projects; more volunteering; a trip to the Taipei LDS temple; Korean fried chicken at dinner time; OPI test prep; a weekend in Chiayi for Mazu’s birthday; summer rains; some light highway-walking by the Gangshan Eye; mango season; an afternoon at a succulent farm; the garbage truck; adventures in new transportation routes; Duke housing applications; the tide. As I’m typing this I’m watching the last sunset I will ever see in Kaohsiung: a big mango-red sun like a coin in the sky slowly disappearing underneath the highrises around Wenzao. While there’s a lot more I’d like to tell you, I might not have time to detail it all until after I get home. Instead, I’d like to finish this last post written in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, by talking about my day yesterday.
I woke up late. I keep my window open day in and day out, and at night I set the fan running. These days it’s too hot for blankets or full PJ sets: I sleep on a bamboo mat and in a big t-shirt, and sometimes when I wake up I’m not even sweating. For breakfast I had two mochi-donuts that my host mom bought for me on the living room table from Mr. Donut, a chain I only discovered in Taiwan. I walked the fifteen minutes to the MRT: through my neighborhood past the woman who is always washing chicken breasts at the sink; across the park where boys come out to play basketball at night; underneath the big arches made by the pillars that hold up the station.
I took the red line from my station, Oil Refinery Elementary School, down to Aozidhi, left the station, crossed the road four times because I got mixed up, and took the tram down towards my old house in Gushan. I hadn’t taken the tram in almost two months since moving out, and it was a bit nostalgic: the smooth hard plastic seats, the air conditioning, the low, wide windows looking out, the way that people on the tram have much more of a propensity to chat than on the close, warm-lit subway.
I got off at the Neiwei and Fine Arts Museum park. It was very hot. There was a cool wind coming in from the port, and lots of palm trees: the two plants that make the biggest sound when the wind goes through them are the palms and the bamboo thickets. Looking to the east I could see Shoushan mountain, very dense and green. It was a pollution day, so everything was a bit misted over, but more grey-blue than the heavy brown haze that rolled into Kaohsiung last December.
Walking past the sloping hills down to the lake, I passed an older man doing tai-chi. He was by himself, alone on a hill, in a blue t-shirt. The water was coming in with the wind. In it I saw three turtles and two coconuts, one of which had sprouted. From across the lake I could hear an old Taiwanese ballad being played on a radio.
When I went to look for it I found it was an older woman with a bicycle. She was tying something to the back—sometimes the old grandmas around here will collect recycling on their bikes and sell it later; my host grandmother sells produce from her garden in the countryside of Qishan every week. She had a bright red floral-patterned bucket hat on and was standing by an official park sign that said “No Hot Spring Bathing.”
After leaving the lakeside I made my way towards a lily pond at the other side of the lake, passing, as I did, another official park sign that said “No Duck Roasting.” I used to come to the park quite often. In December I skipped a day of class to spend a morning writing by the lakeside, and the lily pond was empty; in February I was back one afternoon and they had placed potted lilies at the bottom of the pool and were slowly filling it up with water. Yesterday they had all bloomed, everything from deep purples and mangentas to whites so cool as to be blue and baby pinks.
At noon I met my classmate Amol at the tram station. We made our way down towards Gushan District Office. Looking out the right side of the tram Shoushan Mountain came clearer and clearer into view—越來越美—until the old Buddhist tombs came into view.
We stopped at Gushan District Office. I liked sitting there in the morning because there were always crickets, and always only at that station, somewhere in the grass between the tram tracks. In the square behind the station the bamboo shoots were growing straight and tall by an folk god’s shrine—three hollowed out bamboo poles painted with characters behind two sticks of burning incense. Across from the square, the temple. I was really afraid to go to the temple when I first went to Jenny’s house, so it was my first time going in: like most Taoist temples in Kaohsiung, it was small, dark, smoky. There were thirty-six figurines of smaller officials set up in front of the icon of the main god, and on the offering table, a guava and a peach. As we walked out, a group of three grandmas were sat chatting around a table.
We walked down to Gushan Station because I wanted to see the old houses. I’d forgotten how quiet it was: no cars or buses or motorcycles, just sun and occasional bird calls. The old houses go down two blocks, low tin-roofed things, and outside the cluttered doorways there’s all these chairs just piled on top of each other. We passed a few houses with open doors. Inside, we caught glimpses of linoleum tiled-bathrooms, a washing machine piled with wooden charms, an aunty stirring rice over an iron burner. As part of the murals that go down all the way until Pier 2, the sides of the houses are painted with a baby blue and bright orange in vivid swathes, right over all the old half-rusted tin. (One rusty old fan, broken, the grate all bright blue with paint.)
We decided to take the 219A. On our way to the bus stop, we passed a car garage. Inside it was an oily dark, cluttered with old motor parts and unused tires. There was a car parked half outside the open garage door: a grey Toyota Vios, three doors open. Inside, stretched out in the front seat, a man sleeping with a dark grey t-shirt draped over his eyes and a portable battery-powered fan propped up on his chest.
On the 219A, there were bright red New Year’s posters—恭喜發財！新年快樂！—affixed above the LED panel board. I was short of the 12 NTD bus fare by one yuan, and a woman at the back of the bus pulled out her wallet to help me cover the fare. I paid the fare and sat by the window: outside, a betel nut shop.
We stopped at Hamasen Railway Park. It was very green and very quiet. When I lived closer, I used to visit often—one Saturday morning in January, I came with my painting gear to paint en plein air. I had been sitting by the rail tracks for maybe thirty minutes when it started raining, so I ran all the way up to the Sky Bridge and finished my painting there, half-soaked. Another night, I walked past the railway cars out for display to find a couple kissing against the old car doors. On Thursday, though, there was nobody: just the grass growing green and long, bending under the breeze. We walked up under a tree where a man was sitting cross-legged on a stool with his eyes closed—he was meditating—and lay there in the grass for a while, listening to the far-off sounds of the port.
I ended the day at Cijin, the small island off of Xiziwan Bay. As I walked down to the ferry station, I passed a family burning ghost money: a father, a son, and a daughter. The burner was out halfway on the road, the fire maybe half a meter high into the air, a startling orange against the faded plaster-yellow of the old shops. On the ferry, we passed a patched-together fishing boat coming from Cijin. The nets hung over the sides of the boat, half-dragging in the water, and the white paint of the boat was stained yellow with rust.
Here’s something I won’t forget: the slope of the mountain against the setting sun, the lighthouse silhouetted against the rosy sky. In the empty ferry in front of us at the port, the first floor—usually cluttered with motorcycles from commuters—was a warm expanse of scuffed wood, glowing warm in the sun.
What can I tell you? The old street at Cijin is like every street market in Kaohsiung: no street lights, just the smell of gas, the exhaust from the motorcycles, the fruit vendors selling pineapples, guavas, mangos, some chopped and some whole, squid on the grill still slippery-pink and white, the claw machines bright and garish under neon lights, the old temple where fisherwives used to pray every morning to the child goddess Mazu to deliver their sons and husbands safely home from the brutal South China Sea, ginkgo seeds for sale by the half-kilo, aiyu jelly stalls, the street food vendors’ signs a mishmash of different type fonts and materials and levels of cleanliness. At a seafood shop, they kept the lobsters and the crabs alive in open tanks, and the oxygenator sent bubbles rolling through the murky blue-brown of the water.
Once at the beach, I started walking down the black Xiziwan sands towards the pier, past the infamous Sunset Bar where all the foreigners come from NTU to drink and dance. The horizon was just ships, thirteen of them, some of them cargo and some of them fishing. The waves came in big, clear, green-blue. Over in the east—it was hazy, a pollution day—the sky was a faded baby blue, and in the west, something out of Monet: the surface of the water a warm wash of orange like watercolor, blue-green in the negative spaces, and the reflection of the sun so vividly bright and orange it almost looked metallic against the water.
There were no stairs going up to the pier, so I climbed one-handed—I had a gift bag in the other from a second-hand bookstore I visited after Hamasen—up the boulders to get to the top. A foghorn was sounding low and long from the port behind me; and in front of me on the horizon, stretching just as low and just as long, the sun was setting like a great big perfect coin in a hazy red sky.
Well, I took off my shoes and socks and I sat down to watch it, and in the space of five breaths it was gone. A big red sphere—it gets bigger and redder until it almost starts looking like a blood moon—and then, just like that, completely enveloped. But, you know, things keep going. The light from the lighthouse at the top of the hill start flashing. And all the lights on the cargo boats started blinking on, until they were absolutely studded with them, small and white, like stars, almost. On the boat back to Kaohsiung, Sirius was high over the old British Consulate.
For all that it felt like the end of something, nothing ever really stops: in some egotistical way I expected the credits to roll, or the train not to roll into Formosa Boulevard Station on my way home, or the bus driver on the 6 to give me some solemn look as I took it for the last time to Ciai Building Station, the bus stop outside my house. Instead, it’s two in the morning and I’m typing this in a hotel room in Taipei. In Kaohsiung, there’s still a college grad taking the night shift at a 7-11. The motorcycles are still whining down the streets in Nanzi. Tomorrow morning, the woman by my house will be washing chicken breasts by the sink. At the end of it all—which is to say nine months—all I can be is grateful to have seen it for a little while.
So, thank you, Kaohsiung! Thank you, Taiwan! And thank you all for accompanying me in spirit for the past year! 台灣，再見！
