Taipei: A View from Singapore

The campus of NUS (National University of Singapore), where Philippe and I live at the beginning of 2017 looks like a luxury retirement home for adolescents. There are even those little cars to move from one area of it to the next, a free service of shuttle buses, a swimming pool, museums, restaurants and shops. It is immaculate, just like a golf field: the grass is green of an enhanced green; the air is clean of an orchid-scented cleanliness; the flora equatorial: I have rarely seen anything as sumptuous as a Singaporean rain tree.

The NUS campus is different from the campus of my Taiwanese university: greyness, nano-nerds, the usual all-around lack of glamour and ugly architectural pastiche. In Taiwan, rubbish trucks run the streets twice a day announcing their arrival to the sound of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.” You hear them and run down the stairs with your bags of garbage. My Taiwanese campus smells of honey waffles, a snack popular with students: dirty stray dogs, youthful chaos, bicycles and umbrellas. The only immaculate things on campus I can think of are the shirts and trousers of the Indian students, always perfectly ironed.

Here in Singapore, it’s difficult to tell if the students in Starbucks are studying or shopping online. I hear them talking of Alibaba and their assignments could very well involve online shopping. Western students mostly wear flip-flops, a tan, a fresh blow-dry, and that beach shabby-chic Roxy type of attire that only girls as flat as surfing boards can pull off. They are so young I am sure no one of them has ever asked the time to a random person in the street. Some students wear a helmet to mono-cycle from one building to the next, even if the worst possible danger is falling on a patch of green grass.

NUS is a Stepford campus, filled with silent warnings, slogans and admonitions. From the campus swimming pool, one can see newly-built buildings, each one carrying a luminous catchword: create, achieve, succeed, innovate…The university offers financing to students’ start-ups, so that on campus there is an area of start-up incubator-houses, each house mysteriously locked, and in front of them someone is recreating a full-scale ocean-wave in a pre-disposed area.

Seminars are offered on job-interview preparation, and that’s not odd for a university, but workshops are also offered on how to tell “successfully” a joke at work; meditation courses are advertised on the rationale that Steve Jobs was apparently very mindfully aware. Therefore mental awareness, the message implicitly goes, is not only for sissies, it can actually help you to make money. Student canteens offer jobs cooking Korean chicken and washing dishes promising “leadership opportunities.”

Some time ago, I saw a poster advertisement for the university: the usual bunch of multi-ethnic students holding fake books and folders. The slogan went: “NUS, no boundaries, only opportunities.” Just like that. As if there could be opportunities without boundaries: as if opportunities were not actually built on boundaries, as if it was ok to lie to students.

Singapore is beautiful, within and outside the campus, a superb city-state built by immigrant labour workers. During the day, we see several of them sitting on the grass, picking up the dry blades from the green one by one, under the equatorial sun. In the evenings, I sometimes see them going back to their dorms sitting in small trucks. Those trucks look like Taiwanese-unglamorous pieces of reality in an otherwise uniform spectacle of luxuriant wealth.

Singapore has a special sun, blinding and potent, a light constant and without pause, just like the equator. Philippe dislikes Singapore to an extreme degree; he finds it robotic, and it’s too hot for a Quebecois. At the moment, we are both applying for as many postdoctoral fellowships as we can: an activity so time-consuming and alienating that it has made me resume my exacting ways of going around by myself. But in this heat it’s not always easy. I feel this city is a giant microwave oven that cooks me from the inside: my guts first, so that I wake up wanting to do things, and I find my body doesn’t have the energy to follow.

I have seen, so far, a patch of pluvial forest inside the botanic gardens, old Indian and Arab quarters that look like abandoned theatre wings, so small next to the new buildings, like old wooden children toys scattered around a newly furnished living room. I have seen a park of and for birds, frangipani trees, buildings shaped like durians, and shopping malls made to impress. For an Italian person, Singapore can be quite unsettling, because its architecture is contemporary and  beautiful. In Italy there is no such thing as consistently beautiful contemporary architecture, there is mainly the beautiful old and the ugly new, an opposition that has solidified into a persistent prejudice against contemporary constructions. But in Singapore, when you lift your head, you are likely to see sky-high gardens coming out of glass buildings, imposing but light, sometimes decorated with waterfalls of vegetation pouring to the ground.

Recently, Philippe and I went to a pub in an office area full of western expats. Some people, most of them wearing a conference pass, were having a drink after work and the atmosphere was positively British: the drinking and smoking and chatting while standing, the language, the blondness. One single ray of light was cutting the scene into two halves: London in a Singaporean Light, I thought, like one of those capriccios I used to see at the National Gallery during my lunch breaks. There is one, for example, of St. Paul Cathedral towering at the end of a Venetian canal, a beautiful contrast, the imaginary encounter of two worlds that at the time of the painting were probably perceived as distant as Europe and Asia.

Singapore made me see that I have developed, over time, a form of mature affection towards Taiwan, probably deeper than I like to admit. Maybe it was inevitable after six years there. I left for Taiwan in the summer of 2009 only because, after my Master, I won a scholarship to study Chinese at the Mandarin Training Centre in Taipei for a few months. My plan was: see if you like Taipei, if you do, you could stay and do a Ph.D. there, if you don’t, you will apply from there to other places. The most important thing for me, at the time, was the Ph.D., as I felt I wanted to keep studying. And, as it’s often the case, an unexpected combination of all this took place: I didn’t like Taipei, and I stayed.

At the Mandarin Training Centre I met Philippe, just a few days after my arrival. We used to spend long afternoons talking in coffee places, especially Cavaralli, an unusually Italian-looking coffee shop in the centre of Taipei, a successful capriccio nearby the university. Philippe convinced me to stay with a calm but repeated invitation to give Taipei a chance, stay open to new possibilities, and continue our friendship.

I am older than him, and I sometimes picture our lives in parallel between Europe and Canada during the years before we met. What was Philippe doing while I was going through my divorce? One recurring image is him as a young boy, walking slowly on snowy streets wearing a baseball uniform. Of course, this is a stupidly exoticized image that by conflating snow with baseball reveals very well my crass and undetailed knowledge of his country (as if anyone in Quebec would play baseball in winter).

My primary school used to be next to the Coliseum, his in a pine tree forest; my childhood apartment used to be heated, in winter, by the oven of the bakery downstairs, Philippe’s house was very warm and yellow inside and very cold and white outside; my summers were spent at the beach, Philippe does not know what this means; Philippe didn’t know, until recently, that ice cream and amaretto di Saronno go well together and he didn’t know the taste of figs. I didn’t know Italian grocery shops in Montreal and I had never seen, before going there, any Inuit art. I didn’t know that there are, in the world, dedicated traditional bagel shops, that you can eat maple syrup with snow and put it in your salad, that cold air can make breathing difficult, racket shoes and salmon cooked with mustard. One evening, in Taipei, I made a dessert that was meant to represent our encounter, a culinary capriccio: maple syrup tiramisu’, unfortunately not particularly memorable.

Philippe and I moved in together in Taipei just after a few months we got there. Everything worked smoothly from the beginning: Taipei, somehow, always made me function well, it always kept me busy throwing opportunities at me. Most of my time there was divided between my Ph.D. and two teaching jobs. I went through three full years of intense course-taking (mostly in Chinese), exams, and an Italian teaching job in a private school. In 2011, I started teaching Italian at National Taiwan University, the university where Philippe was taking his master’s degree. I only interrupted all these activities once, for several weeks in 2012, because I had to have an operation.

Several tumours had to be urgently removed from my uterus. They came at a moment of intense happiness and productivity; not to punish me, I am not saying this, but to remind me of something: the consequences of old problems can present themselves again after a long time, as familiar memories of somebody else.

The drugs and painkillers I took after the operation had a devastating effect on me, making me cry and panic. In my hospital bed, I had a dream in which I was walking on a white and sunny beach, but there was no sand, only small pieces of glass that made my feet bleed. I could only keep walking to get somewhere safe, but I couldn’t move forward because of the pain. I woke up with a taste of glass and blood in my mouth. Over time, I have understood that I am too prone to anxiety, panic attacks and claustrophobia to react well to substances that unsettle me, I can do it only gently. Wine is fine, but a pill of morphine shuts my brain down a well too deep to breath. I remember I was given a large quantity of pills when I got dismissed from the hospital, and I threw them all away. If it is even remotely bearable, I prefer physical pain to desperation, and truth to denial.

My mother flew to Taiwan on that occasion, and Philippe, who had only met her once in Italy, took care of her. He didn’t panic, he just did it: he took her out to lunch and dinner, ordered food for her, and gave her his side of our bed. They must have gone through very long silences, since at the time Philippe couldn’t speak a word of Italian and my mother’s English is not fluent. I still sometimes picture them trying to communicate in a restaurant: a little English, a little French, a little Italian, my mother in Taipei, taking the underground, going to the local market, and dining in a Japanese ramen place with my Quebecois husband, another multiple funky capriccio, and it’s just so easy to love them both.

It took Philippe and me a long time to recover from the operation; it felt long especially because we were expecting a sudden positive change: we both expected me to heal in a relatively short time, leave it all behind, and start again as strong as before. I had the operation in May 2012, after which I went back to Italy for a period of recovery. During one of my routine visits there, I discovered my hyperthyroidism, my autoimmune disease, and what it was doing to me.

Simply put, my immune system had been attacking the body’s own cells and organs. The wings of my thyroid, a butterfly-shaped gland at the front of the neck, had been chewed away at by my own blood cells. The thyroid’s wings are rounded, not geometrically sharp, and now they were even less even.

The doctors asked me how long I had been in that “state,” and I honestly had serious trouble understanding what they were talking about, I could not tell the symptoms they were referring to apart from what I believed were very familiar and not so odd personality traits of mine. Apparently, I had been in that “state” long enough to confound it with the rest of myself.

I remember explaining myself nervously to them, moving my hands, shaking a little, and occasionally drying the sweat off of my forehead with my fingers. Sweat would come out suddenly, in large quantities: not drops, more tequila shots. I kept asking “what do you mean, I have always been like this, this is me: I have always talked like this.” I explained to them the excessive sweating the same way I had explained it to myself: I had always suffered the heat a great deal, my brothers too, but it turned out that that too was a recognized symptom of the disease.

I suddenly recalled all the times I would go for short invigorating walks in London under the snow wearing a t-shirt and jeans over bare legs. People who knew me generally thought I was showing off, but I didn’t feel a thing. My legs, especially, were insensitive to the cold. I took it as a sign of health, of good blood circulation, and this is what I told the doctors. I remember one of them using a popular Roman expression, telling me I was “fuori come un balcone,” “as out as a balcony,” out of my mind.

In Taipei, as soon as I arrived, at the end of summer of 2009, I started losing hair in the shower, a lot of hair. At some point, a small bold patch appeared at the top of my head. I had gone through a period like this already, after my divorce, therefore I attributed the hair loss and general nervousness to the stress of relocating once again to a new place. Still, I got scared of losing more hair, so I cut it short, by myself, and wore it short for a few years.

I was finally able to put together a few past episodes, strange ones. I have always lived together with my anxiety and apprehension, with my heart held firmly in my throat, as we say in Italian (il cuore in gola). As all healthy people, I just didn’t think I could be sick, not even the time I ordered a cappuccino at a 7/11 and a sudden spasm in my arm made me throw it to my face. I couldn’t have done it more disdainfully if I had done it on purpose. I told myself it was something that must happen all the time to other people too.

Philippe told me that when he met me once in the university locker room, he got almost scared by my breathless way of speaking and fumbling with books and the locker key, apparently I was behaving as I was being chased; a colleague at work told me we once took the lift down together, and she thought the lift was too small to contain us two as well as my heavy breathing.

As soon as I was diagnosed with my autoimmune disease, I was prescribed 6 pills a day to calm my thyroid down. I remember the idea of assuming such a quantity of medicine scared me very much, but then, after maybe two days of taking it, I thought I could not live without it. The immediate effect was a diffuse sense of peace for my heart and my brain.