It was raining hard yesterday and the day before. Many parts of our apartment face outside and have no windows - and even those parts with sliding screen doors are not immune to the water, which builds up outside, inches upon inches until it can leak through the vacuous joints of the old building and flood the interior. Not that I mind - I just let it flood, and then let it dry. The result is MOLD. Hard to keep things dry here. Mold is common. Military planes have been flying overhead, bearing their brawn, convincing the Taiwanese that they are prepared for a war with China. A few weeks ago the government did a computer analysis of war strategies and concluded that in a year war, Taiwan wouldn't lose.
Downstairs someone is wailing terrible karaoke. A woman and a man. It sounds a little like native American chants, but with amplifiers, reverb and off-key singing. Lots of warbling. They are singing for the god that sits at the end of the alleyway, whose temple I can see from my bedroom window. Nobody else sees him; the alley is out-of-the-way. If his handful of devotees didn't visit constantly, burning paper money, performing in front of him, then he would get bored. I'm on the 5th floor, but the noise carries for blocks.
"Pearl Harbor" has been playing constantly on TV, several times a day. It's even harder to take the obese patriotism now than it was the first time, having just read "Obasan" and "No-No Boy", which talk about how America and Canada rounded up all of the citizens of Japanese heritage and through them in disgusting concentration camps, forced them to live like animals while at the same time seizing all of their properties and bank accounts - most of which was redistributed to whites. And that was all before the dreadful atom bombs which peeled the flesh from their skins. Go America.
Tonight I'm teaching idioms to my private student.
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