Ferris Mx’s Reviews > Taipei Story > Status Update

So Paolo was right after all. I hadn't lied about anything, but I'd massaged my message, manipulated my phrasing to secure the friendliest reception. I couldn't do that in Chinese.

And then, several months or maybe a year from now, there hopefully existed a version of me who wasn't crying all the time. She would be very glad to have had all these cultural experiences, and disappointed if she'd squandered her summer abroad. So if it made no difference to me now, I might as well create some good memories for that future self.

Why did that require killing a fourth of the population?
To rid the country of reactionary thought.
Why didn't the West do anything to help?
Because the West didn't know. Because the West wasn't looking. Because the leftists in the West, the only people who could have found Cambodia on a map, thought that th Khmer ROuge was carrying on a glorious revolution, and were cheering it on.

Take refuge in the back roads of the self, said Marcus Aurelius. Choose not to be harmed and you won't feel harmed. Don't feel harmed, and you haven't ben.
It didn't work. I wasn't resilient enough.

We read an experimentalist science fiction short story by Bei Chuan. I had to read it a few times to understand it. The main character's father has recently passed away, but the main character keeps seeing him pop up on street view in Google Maps. Eventually he is able to confront his father's ghost, who reveals that Google hires ghosts of the recently deceased to photograph distant locations for its navigation apps.

I could pretend that the entire world was limited to things inside my bedroom: my bed, my desk, and my books. I would stay there until the danger had passed. In college I was assigned to read passages from Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and I learned that this mindset was called Stoicism. You couldn't control external events, but you could control your reactions to them. Things hurt you only as much as you let them.

Or, if I ever fought back, she would say, "Would you prefer that I leave your life forever?" I never knew if she meant this as a threat, or if she herself was afraid - if she was musing out loud about a world where she couldn't be with us. Either way, this terrified me. This made me work very hard to regain her love. If I didn't, then I might not have a mother anymore, and it would be all my fault.

We had revealed too much about how circumstances made us feel, and now we had to kill ourselves.
...
after several silent minutes in the shade, I no longer felt that life was not worth living.
...
JC reached out and snaked his fingers around mine. I had seen this coming. I had felt his hand knocking against mine for the last few minutes, like a boat attempting to dock, so I didn't flinch when at last he made contact.

Anna's mother and Auntie Wen had competed for the same US graduate study, and her mother had won. An American visa was a source of great envy at the time. AW was wealthy now and could hire a private driver to take her across Taipei to eat in a restaurant inside a hotel. But still Auntie Wen had to take Anna's mother down a peg. My parents had their own rivals who liked to call me fat, so I understood the situation.

"But I sound like an idiot," I said.
"In fact," said Teacher Sun, you have always sounded like an idiot. It is considerable progress that you can now hear it."