Taichung Journal: 2021

Friday, January 29, 2021

Little Black Penguin Classics

A week ago, I was at Eslite in Chung-Yo department store when I saw this two foot long log of 80 little books in a white case occupying an entire shelf in the world literature section. I looked closely and recognized most of the authors but few of the titles. I didn't realize Penguin had chosen selections from classics and re-titled them. I thought it would be a nice addition to my collection but the price 4375-$150, seemed a little steep. Flash ahead to a few days ago when we returned to the store. My wife was there to apply for a 15% discount birthday present. In addition to the monthly first purchase discount of 22%, it brought the price of the set down to $112; a saving of $40. A Nice deal! The books now sit on the counter of antique Taiwanese cabinets perfectly. The first book I started was #1 (see the list below). I can't say I'll read the rest in order; I looked over #9 next.

The Guardian reviewed the 2015 collection of 80 books with selections from the Penguin catalog, one for each year. "No notes, no introductions. The texts stand or fall on their own."

Read Guardian book review here

"Contemplating the books en masse is like being let loose in a sweet shop. Austerely desirable, but also playful in their way: some familiar authors have been given unusual titles – It Was Snowing Butterflies for a selection from Darwin’s Beagle voyage; Mrs Rosie and the Priest for a story from The Decameron – and others are discrete, self-contained, such as De Quincey’s On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts, or The Communist Manifesto. I do not know The Dhammapada; now I can get a taste of it. Ditto Pu Songling, Kenkō, Akutagawa and Shen Fu. Buying the lot doesn’t seem like a crazy extravagance."

Little Black Classics – the list in full

1. Boccaccio Mrs Rosie and the Priest

2. Gerard Manley Hopkins As Kingfishers Catch Fire

3. The Saga of Gunnlaug Serpent-tongue

4. Thomas de Quincey On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts

5. Friedrich Nietzsche Aphorisms on Love and Hate

6. John Ruskin Traffic

7. Pu Songling Wailing Ghosts

8. Jonathan Swift A Modest Proposal

9. Three Tang Dynasty Poets

10. Walt Whitman Alone on the Beach at Night

11. Kenko A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees

12. Baltasar Gracian How to Use Your Enemies

13. John Keats The Eve of St Agnes

14. Thomas Hardy Woman Much Missed

15. Guy de Maupassant Femme Fatale

16. Marco Polo Travels in the Land of Serpents and Pearls

17. Suetonius Caligula

18. Apollonius of Rhodes Jason and Medea

19. Robert Louis Stevenson Olalla

20. Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx The Communist Manifesto

21. Petronius Trimalchio’s Feast

22. Johann Peter Hebel How a Ghastly Story Was Brought to Light by a Common or Garden Butcher’s Dog

23. Hans Christian Andersen The Tinder Box

24. Rudyard Kipling The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows

25. Dante Circles of Hell

26. Henry Mayhew Of Street Piemen

27. Hafez The nightingales Are Drunk

28. Geoffrey Chaucer The Wife of Bath

29. Michel de Montaigne How We Weep and Laugh at the Same Thing

30. Thomas Nashe The Terrors of the Night

31. Edgar Allan Poe The Tell-Tale Heart

32. Mary Kingsley A Hippo Banquet

33. Jane Austen The Beautifull Cassandra

34. Anton Chekhov Gooseberries

35. Samuel Taylor Coleridge Well, They Are Gone, and Here Must I Remain

36. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Sketchy, Doubtful, Incomplete Jottings

37. Charles Dickens The Great Winglebury Duel

38. Herman Melville The Maldive Shark

39. Elizabeth Gaskell The Old Nurse’s Story

40. Nikolai Leskov The Steel Flea

41. Honore de Balzac The Atheist’s Mass

42. Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Wall-Paper

43. CP Cavafy Remember, Body...

44. Fyodor Dostoevsky The Meek One

45. Gustave Flaubert A Simple Heart

46. Nikolai Gogol The Nose

47. Samuel Pepys The Great Fire of London

48. Edith Wharton The Reckoning

49. Henry James The Figure in the Carpet

50. Wilfred Owen Anthem for Doomed Youth

51. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart My Dearest Father

52. Plato Socrates’ Defence

53. Christina Rossetti Goblin Market

54. Sindbad the Sailor

55. Sophocles Antigone

56. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa The Life of a Stupid Man

57. Leo Tolstoy How Much Land Does a Man Need?

58. Giorgio Vasari Leonardo da Vinci

59. Oscar Wilde Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime

60. Shen Fu The Old Man of the Moon

61. Aesop The Dolphins, the Whales and the Gudgeon

62. Matsuo Bashō Lips Too Chilled

63. Emily Bronte The Night Is Darkening Round Me

64. Joseph Conrad To-morrow

65. Richard Hakluyt The Voyage of Sir Francis Drake Around the Whole Globe

66. Kate Chopin A Pair of Silk Stockings

67. Charles Darwin It Was Snowing Butterflies

68. Brothers Grimm The Robber Bridegroom

69. Catullus I Hate and I Love

70. Homer Circe and the Cyclops

71. DH Lawrence Il Duro

72. Katherine Mansfield Miss Brill

73. Ovid The Fall of Icarus

74. Sappho Come Close

75. Ivan Turgenev Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands

76. Virgil O Cruel Alexis

77. HG Wells A Slip under the Microscope

78. Herodotus The Madness of Cambyses

79. Speaking of Śiva

80. The Dhammapada

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Wednesday, January 20, 2021

Life in Taiwan under Covid-19

Life in Taiwan under Covid-19 since its outbreak in early 2020 had plunged the island into darkness. It caused panic-buying and changes in the way we lived. Against all odds, thanks to our government’s response, we survived, as poet Leonard Cohen wrote in a song, “As through a crack in everything, where the light gets in.”

We survived the pandemic in the glorious light from a crack between darkness. When Covid-19 hit, it seriously changed peoples’ lives in other countries but few local cases were found in Taiwan thanks to an all-out effort to restrict travel from overseas. As the pandemic worsened, Taiwan was an alternate universe of health and prevention as people in other countries suffered and died. We felt proud of being Taiwanese with no credit to the World Health Organization for excluding our direct contact. Instead, our government did a great job on its own setting up a task force and carrying out policies of mandatory mask distribution, body temperature checks, and social distancing. We did as we were asked and, as a result, saw the light as others in the western world were plunged into darkness. We feel that Taiwan’s containment was one of the world’s best.

The panic-buying that existed at the onset of the pandemic was frantic as people in Taiwan anxiously purchased toilet paper, face masks, hand sanitizer, and other items they feared would become in short supply as time went on. Schools were closed as a precaution and the winter break was extended to contain the virus. As more and more cases were reported, everyone felt worried and insecure, but as fewer and fewer cases started cropping up, we started calming down and accepted the new normal way of life. We couldn’t believe how close we had come to death.

Now we are living in Taiwan’s light co-existing with the darkness of other nations. The shadow of fear that covered us has made me realize not to take life for granted; everything we do must be cherished. How wonderful it is that we can breathe, shop freely, and get together with loved ones; simple pleasures that Americans and the western world can no longer enjoy. How great it is to be in Taiwan! We are survivors and must reflect our brightness till it shines on every corner of the world.

But the darkest spot for Taiwan remains under its lighthouse. While the government pumps up its separatist designs, cases of Covid-19 are not a thing of the past and Taiwan should not be so proud. Lunar New Year celebrations have been cancelled and people are under new measures to avoid social situations; the usage of masks is increasing where it had gotten slack a few months ago. We can't let our guard down.

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Monday, January 11, 2021

Authentic Sichuan in Taiping, Taichung

135 Xinxing Road, Taichung City,

Taichung City 411, Taiwan

太平區新興路135號

0962 097 758

https://m.facebook.com/1714055208819059

I had been pining for authentic Sichuan food in Taichung,Taiwan since I retired here eight years ago. I'm sure there must be a few in Taipei but that's an hour and $50 high speed rail round-trip ticket away. The Sichuan food establishments here are mostly watered down versions with a vague spicy taste that Taiwanese can tolerate. There are plenty of hot pot restaurants that offer a Sichuan soup base but that is mere mimicry. All that changed last year in a chance visit to a little Sichuan rest my wife spied on-line, a place that happens to be a ten minute ride away from Beitun district in Taiping. Thank goodness for the fiery hell of delight from Chengdu Sour Vegetable/Fish Restaurant

A perfect set of fiery delights with only their delicious ma-po tofu
not pictured; her specialty is authentic hot pot, by the way.

Chicken with a sauce that you better not throw out when
the meat is eaten; we bring it home to mix with wanton for
a delicious continuation of heat in the home

Green beans deep fried with garlic and pepper kernels
so salty hot that I won't let a nib get by my chopsticks
till it is all tucked into my mouth

Lamb with scallions in a sauce of its own,
I must emphasize; all the heat is of different
texture and taste. No two fires taste the same.

The chef, as sweet as her dishes are hot, will be glad to chat with you if she's not busy in the kitchen. She is a Sichuan native who moved to Taiwan from Chengdu a number of years ago to be a foreign bride. Her skills of child-raising and cooking were put to use as her family grew, but now she is bravely flying solo.

The chef was shown a menu from a five-star Sichuan restaurant my wife and I frequented in New York City and recognized every dish; she could make them all if she wasn't a one-woman operation. In fact she has received offers to make her establishment larger and franchised out but she refuses to let business get in the way of being a single working mother and letting the quality control get out of her hands; she is happy to serve her loyal customers that come from all over Taiwan to taste her dishes in her small establishment.

I highly recommend you get there early, especially on the weekend when the six large tables are filled to the brim; a weekday lunch is my favorite time. Certainty you can Uber or Food Panda it to your home just the same, but she places in-house customers in line first so deliveries may have to wait.

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