Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Nation Without a Name

Ask the average American what they know about Taiwan. The first thing you'll probably hear is something along the lines of “where your shit comes from,” vague memories of “Made in Taiwan” stamped onto the plastic undercarriages of the Matchbox cars they had as kids.

And of course many will know about the country's occupation of a gray zone in international law, the fact that it doesn't officially exist as an independent entity, the legitimate government of the Republic of China in the eyes of certain old Kuomintang stalwarts, the group marching under the banner of “Chinese Taipei” at the Olympics, a requirement for awkward phrasing for all but the 17 of the world's recognized sovereign states who still regard the Taipei government as the legitimate single China.

Until not very long ago at all, my response wouldn't have been much different. Because to Western eyes, the country is a cipher, a country people know, but seem to know little about, and even fewer visit.

Which means that like all ciphers, it can be visited without preconception. TripAdvisor can only take you so far. Without knowing all that scaffolding that typically constitutes “nationhood” in the popular imagination – an awareness of traditional culture, literature, film, pop music, cuisine, iconic architecture, and natural scenery – you're at a loss.

Even after spending some time in the country, it was hard to create a cogent metaphor, a unified image. I suppose Taipei 101, one of the world's tallest buildings, and the tallest from its construction in 2004 until the completion of the Burj Khalifa in 2010, functions as something of a national landmark. I didn't go.

Instead, I explored the back streets of Taipei, the dizzying night markets where patient queues serve as a rough metric for quality and local reputation, the neon alleys of Ximen pulsing with Mandarin pop music, the banyan trees and decrepit arcades of the older quarters, the grand shopping boulevards of Da'an, the mouldering mid-century architecture, a legacy of the importance of Taiwan in the old Japanese colonial empire, the militarist aspirations of both early Showa Period Japan and the corporatist governance of the country in the wake of the Chinese Revolution.

Outside the city, the West Coast of the island forms a great megacity, town after town blending into one another, apartment complexes and light industrial parks punctuated by tiny fields of rice and pineapple between them, never either fully urban or fully rural, managed with the mindset of a nation with a bare minimum of arable land.

And the East Coast is wild and rocky, cut apart by steep canyons between high mountains of heavily warped schist and gneiss, a testament to the country's position on multiple fault lines, a landscape the Japanese army lost countless men trying to build roads across, still remote enough for there not to be a public transit route that crosses the mountain ranges that divide the island.

That lazy old line from geography textbooks, “a land of contrasts.”

With transportation being dirt-cheap, I managed to get in quite a few miles. To the little town of Jiufen, supposedly (although apparently not) Hayao Miyazaki's inspiration for Spirited Away, with its black beamed tea-houses and hanging red lanterns that dance in the anabatic winds that blow up the mountain off the Pacific. To Shifen, with its waterfall, its fire balloons, its train going down the middle of the street to save space in the narrow gorge of the townsite. On a boat across Sun Moon Lake, where branches full of cherry blossoms hung low over turquoise-bright water. Over the Zhuilu Old Road, through the Taroko Gorge, where I clung to a narrow cliff face over a 1000-meter drop to the valley floor. Up rough trails through forests of palms, bamboo, cedar, laurel, and pine as I ascended higher and higher, and through Taiwanese aboriginal villages where woven-rattan walls still enclosed yards of clucking chickens, the faces of the forest gods carved into trees, the birthplace of the Austronesian peoples before they migrated south and west as far as Madagascar, east as far as Easter Island. On a rickety train through the half-abandoned coal mining towns above Ruifang, where old murals of merry citizens living the legacy of Sun Yat-Sen were left to gather grime along the railway sidings, where at the little free library on the station platform, about 30 books were made available to take or borrow, the only one I recognized being a Chinese translation of the Marquis de Sade's The 100 Days of Sodom.

I ate incredibly strange meal after incredibly strange meal. Noodles with pig intestines, boar in numerous forms, shoved into fatty sausages and served on skewers with cumin, massive sugar apples and durians, sausage stuffed with mullet roe, a stew of beef tendons and tripe, smoked shark, raw duck, the hearts, livers, and gizzards of geese, a sweet green bean drink, country millet wine, “lovers' tears” algae, pig blood cakes, lotus greens, some kind of funky identified slop wrapped in sticky rice that apparently merited a 20-minute wait in the eyes of the locals, raw squid with mayo, “mountain pepper” that tasted less like pepper than Kix cereal soaked in limoncello, venison stir-fried with celery, multiple kinds of fern, and the national dish, stinky tofu, both in its fried form (edible, if not something I'll seek out again, a testament to the egalitarianism of the deep fryer) and its stewed form (which smells like wet dog and has a texture like overcooked scrambled eggs).

But beyond the concept of Taiwan, I also had to address the larger concept of China.

When Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek's armies crossed the strait to what was then widely known by the old Portuguese name, Ilha Formosa (the beautiful island) and its outlying islands, the Pescadores (the fishermen), they claimed to be the sole legitimate inheritors of this very old idea, the idea of China.

The National Palace Museum sits on a high slope in the Taipei suburb of Shilin, and it's where the treasures of the Forbidden City were either absconded with (according to the People's Republic government) or preserved (according to the ROC government), and carefully arranged in rotating exhibits, only a fraction of the museum's vast holdings being shown at any one time.

Anyone who's ever dealt with the influx of Mainland Chinese tourists in Southeast Asia knows the score. Like Americans in Europe in the '50s, suddenly finding themselves moneyed, they behave, by and large, like absolute pigs. The Ugly American has become the Ugly Chinese in this part of the world. Sure, you could blame Mao Zedong's seizure of the Nanjing capital in 1949 and the chaos that ensued in its wake, but the truth is that Chinese civilization had been in decline for centuries... what Mao inherited was a culture on the verge of exhaustion.

Yet in the National Palace Museum, you see wonders you couldn't imagine... delicate jades, intricate strolls, pottery in the most gorgeous shades of cobalt-blue, celadon, saffron, vermilion, and aquamarine, with detail on a level that almost makes you think they had 3D printing technology to achieve this degree of mechanical intricacy. The realization hits that Ming Dynasty China was the most refined civilization the world has ever seen, and in all likelihood, ever will see. Nothing like this will probably ever exist again.

Then, a tour-group member comes by and is taking a video of the every exhibit on her phone, not even bothering to look at the damn art.

I thought of Napoleon on Elba, the man who commanded armies now stranded on an obscure island, of Thibaw Min, the last king of Burma left to rot in a port town in India, living off a government stipend and occasionally appearing in ads for cigars.

I boarded a plane at Taoyuan International Airport, did a little light duty-free shopping, looked through my notes and my few photos. Schist canyons, Tang Dynasty scrolls, boiled goose hearts.

And I thought of the dialogue in Calvino's Invisible Cities between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, whose relics I'd probably seen:

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.

'But which is the stone that supports the bridge?' Kublai Khan asks.

'The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,' Marco answers, 'but by the line of the arch that they form.'

Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: 'Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.'

Polo answers: 'Without stones there is no arch.'”

Tuesday, April 2, 2019

The Politics of Horniness: A Study in Internet Anthropology

It seems strange to me how people seem to forget that it has its own anthropology. Given the infinite number of niches one can occupy, it seems inevitable that communities arise, each with their own vocabulary, strictures, taboos, cultural patterns, and general ethos. And one obscure Reddit community, for instance, can reflect something odd about the cultural landscape at the present moment.

DuckDuckGo is a particularly useful search engine for online ethnographic research. Not only do you not get your more fucked up searches mingled with your Google search history, but given the anonymity of it, you aren't forced into a filter bubble. Furthermore, the search algorithm is just screwy enough to send you to the wrong place sometimes.

I don't even remember what I was looking for, but I knew it had nothing to do with feet, or with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and yet first page of search results, there it was. WikiFeet, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Huh.

It was a remarkably active community. Which made sense -- if there are active forums dedicated to leaked nudes of celebrities, revenge porn posted by grumpy exes, upskirts of Korean secretaries, the bikini shots of girls of questionable age, etc., then the population of foot fetishists, which is larger than many imagine, would concordantly have its own forum for porn that isn't porn as such, but is consumed pornographically. Especially given the fact that most people aren't particularly bothered about covering their feet.

I wasn't quite sure what I was expecting, but it was mostly innocuous shots of the young congresswoman at official functions.

What was less innocuous was the comment section, and what I found so fascinating is that despite the fact that, according to at least one recent survey I'd seen, Americans as a whole had a generally positive impression of the representative (although men surveyed leaned slightly against her, with 52 percent having a "strongly" or "somewhat" unfavorable perception), the dedicated foot fetish community had a decidedly different opinion.

“Why do Socislists [sic] ( OPPS [sic] I MEAN LIBERALS ) look like this. While Conservative Women Actually look Hot.”

Of course, she had her defenders too, and there were also a few old souls who actually were able to separate her ideology from her feet, but interestingly, she didn't seem to have any fans of her politics who disliked her feet – granted, a quick overview of the forum suggested that its users skew strongly rightward (I thought about doing a detailed analysis of this, but the idea of putting together an Excel sheet based on a fetish website was unspeakably depressing) – but this shows that Internet denizens on the left are likewise largely unable to separate their political stance from their dicks.

This is nothing new – how long have Fox News et al been propping up archetypally blonde conservative commentators? Or how long have thirsty right-wingers lusted after Mediterranean bombshells in the IDF armed with Uzis?
 
As I was preparing this piece, I was informed by an acquaintance that there had been an actual incident in which a supposed quasi-nude of AOC was actually debunked by the Wikifeet community as a fake. The investigator who reported his results to Vice went into frankly clinical levels of depth. And it makes you wonder why this level of forensic scrutiny isn't being as applied as it should be to things unrelated to things that give Internet men a funny feeling in their pants.

Of course that happened, I thought.

But alas, all of these things have been exacerbated. We live in a world in which a mass shooter in New Zealand screams “Subscribe to Pewdiepie!” and the head of the Gambino Crime Family was killed not by a rival mafioso, but by some 24 year old QAnon dork.

And just today I found out that Elon Musk released a Soundcloud rap about Harambe. Shut the fuck up.

This is of course the danger of being extremely online. Everything is real, everything is false, and above all else everything seems a parody of everything else.

Perhaps this truly is the modern incarnation of the Athenian agora, as those early '90s net-optimists said it would be. But it isn't in the way they thought it would be. Because let us remember that in those open squares under the sunny Peloponnesian sky, while Plato taught his pupils that he had nothing to learn from the mountains and city life made man free, most of the gawkers around him were probably watching a guy eat dog turds for drachmas.