EDWARD GAUVIN

A chilly day in Taipei, though more perhaps indoors than out, in heaterless apartments whose tile and concrete hoard the cold and return it with sullen stony glower, pervading house and dweller with icy damp. Outside: mid-fifties and several shades darker than overcast, though mercifully dry. Today, the good people of Taipei hug themselves and hide their hands while hurrying home to shed their coats and, with grateful sigh, unwind scarves loop after woolen loop onto the wooden backs of chairs. I should be drinking tea somewhere, wearing a cable knit sweater several sizes large, replete with belly rumple—smug, behind my table with spread paper, as a landlord, and lifting my gaze only rarely to peer over my glasses, through the steam from my mug, at passersby.

The garbage truck pipes its pied tune up and down the streets of town, quarter by quarter, all nights except Sunday and Wednesday. Nine at night is when I’m likeliest to see my neighbors, few of whom I recognize, all lined up in the fluorescence of the corner Family Mart’s sign, their blue municipal trash bags in hand, neatly knotted or blithely bulging and taped over at the top. We’re all in sandals for the five minutes we’ll have to stand and wait, a community of purpose, watching the yellow truck get caught in its sidewalk crawl by the nearest red light. Meanwhile, the recycling vanguard has arrived and set out its barrels for paper, plastic, and pig slop. That’s spoiled leftovers, but nothing too peel, rind, or compost-like for swine to down. For this, many Taiwanese families have dedicated buckets they dump, rush home, and rinse, but with my fruit fly issues I’m loathe to keep rotting food around, even covered. » Read the rest of this entry «

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.

The Oxford-Hachette Dictionary, this translator’s tool of choice, has this to say:

rentier, –ère / 1A~tje, E1 / nom masculin et féminin person of independent means

Not I. A little joke, then, on this struggling artist and serial renter. Posts in this category, or thusly tagged, will examine the rooms my life and travels have dragged me through, places I’ve lived or merely survived in. Adulthood is owning a home. In the meantime, there’s that two-month security deposit.

“…And every chambered cell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Before thee lies revealed–

…He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more. ”

Build thee more stately mansions, indeed.