IF I HAD ONLY twenty seconds to describe the small Southern city in which I live, I’d tell you about our kids’ soccer games, how the parents maneuvered their pickups and SUVs straight up to the edge of the field and watched through their windshields, engines and air-conditioning running, radios on—how isolating and sad that felt. Or I’d tell you about Market Street, the main thoroughfare we traveled to get to the soccer field, how it was lined with fast-food joints, each with a drive-through window, each with a vast cracked parking lot radiating the Southern heat, a dead zone.
I didn’t want our kids to grow up thinking that this was how the world was supposed to look. I wanted them to know that this was a choice, a very particular American choice, so I took us all to Taiwan, where my wife and I got jobs at a university, teaching American studies. It was my first return to Asia in two decades; we were there for a year.
If I had only twenty seconds to describe Taiwan, I’d tell you about the campus cafeteria where we’d eat after Mandarin class, our heads still hot with strange new words for things we’d never thought of naming. It had sliding glass doors that were always open and the birds would fly about the long low room, twittering. I’d tell you about Harbor Road, the big avenue outside of campus, where nobody paid attention to the stoplight when it turned red. I’d tell you about the motor scooters, and how the scooter drivers wore surgical masks and raincoats to keep the exhaust fumes off their clothes and so looked like a million careening doctors rushing to the operating room. Sometimes there’d be a dog perched between their feet, sometimes a child standing in front of the handlebars, gripping the side-view mirrors for balance, sometimes a girlfriend on back, hugging the driver—a heartbreakingly profound sort of intimacy that everyone treated as invisible. There must have been couples that rode all night, just to touch in that way.
We lived on campus, in a ramshackle Japanese colonial house, exuding rot and charm: wood floors, sliding doors, big windows, swooping tile roof. There were geckos walking across the ceiling and frogs in the kitchen. Outside there were cobras in the tall grass, bats at dusk, cranes with long, elegant legs. The main walk through the university was lined with banyan trees, their branches looking as if they were dripping into the ground. Jonah and I would walk to the tennis courts and play in the dusk, the bats swooping down to catch the ball and then arcing away in the blue half-light. Afterward, we would stop by the basketball courts to watch the students play till it was so dark that watching became a form of listening.
The Taiwanese believe that you have ten different souls inside your body. Sometimes one may slip out, like a cat that’s found the door left open. To get it back you need to stand at the crossroads and yell your name, over and over, till it returns to you. Once, unable to sleep, I stood in the darkness outside our house, listening to the immense rush of insect noise, the cicadas, frogs, lizards rustling in the bushes. I felt the wet heat on my skin, imagined the snakes moving in the underbrush. I closed my eyes and felt the place inside my chest where my missing soul should have fit. But I did not call it back. I decided to let it wander out in the world like another pair of eyes.