Covid cases are surging in Taiwan these days. I say “surging” in our context, which is after months of just a handful of cases now and then, suddenly seeing hundreds a day and probably over a thousand soon, which while by Western standards is paltry, is unprecedented here. Part of this was likely inevitable, considering the virulence of the Omicron variant as well as the situation in many other countries, but it’s also part of The Plan. This is because, having seen not only the disastrous results of Western nations just giving up and pretending Covid isn’t a Thing but also the differently disastrous results of China’s zero-case approach, our government has chosen in the face of skyrocketing cases to take a kind of middle path, continuing to ease restrictions slowly, keeping mask mandates and tracking in place, and letting mild and asymptomatic cases quarantine at home. So, each day we are greeted with “record numbers” of cases in the headlines, where they are generally located, and….well, that’s about it. Just wait for more shocking numbers tomorrow.

As we’re just coming off the tomb-sweeping holiday during which a huge number of people traveled around the country and gathered in large numbers at various events and temple ceremonies, it would be surprising if we didn’t see exponential spread in the coming days, limited only by limitations on testing capacity (which is a significant factor). Currently we’re at 84% first shot, 79% second shot and 53% boosted, which aren’t bad numbers, but the elderly have rather poorer numbers. I’ve had conversations with some of them about getting vaccinated, and it’s quite frustrating. Generally it comes down to their assumption that they know better because they’re older, and there’s nothing you can do about it. They’re at once sanguine and fatalistic almost to the point of pride:

“Have you been vaccinated?” I ask.

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“I have (some ailment such as high blood pressure or cholesterol, etc.).”

“Did your doctor tell you you shouldn’t get the shot because of that?”

“Nope.”

“What did your doctor tell you?”

“I didn’t ask.”

And that’s that.

It’s partly a cultural thing as elderly people tend to be respected and given a certain amount of leeway here, something that might change as the population in general ages. But for now, I also feel that government policy should have not only been able to enforce some standards on our admittedly shoddy media coverage, but also been able to suggest that doctors work actively to convince their elderly patients to get vaccinated. Alas, that didn’t happen, and now I’m thinking, if this gets much worse, which it most certainly will, our aging population suddenly might not be so aging, if you know what I mean. The costs of disinformation, so sadly avoidable, are great and likely only realized, if at all, after the damage has been done.

Speaking of which, of course the white dudebros on Forumosa and the other expat groups are fine with that, as their convenience apparently outweighs other people’s welfare and lives. Many of them are still saying that vaccines are a hoax and masks are tyranny, and IMHO the people that run those sites and let them post such things should be held responsible for spreading disinformation. My theory as to why white people and especially white Americans are so anti-mask in general is because they have become so used to being judged as individuals instead of by their race that anything that potentially takes away from that “freedom” of individuality is a horrendous crime in their minds. It’s no wonder that being anti-mask has become known as a kind of dog whistle for white supremacy, a way to say the quiet part out loud.

In any case, we’re in for a ride as the government grapples with what is shaping up to be an unprecedented surge in cases here. Serious cases, for which the elderly population is at much greater risk, will have to be managed without overwhelming our medical capacity to the detriment of other patients. We are fortunate to have national health insurance, but our system is not without its flaws, mainly overworked staff, and this is something that has the potential to greatly exacerbate that situation.

For now I am still going to work as usual, as I have throughout this whole thing as we never had WFH, and our classes are continuing as usual. I have tried to make the places we go for photo walks more remote and hopefully safer, avoiding huge crowds. I don’t know how much longer that will last; it depends on evolving government policy, as I can’t imagine that we will get through the semester without at least some cases at the college and/or the office. For now the only thing we can do now is just try to take the only precautions we can, avoid crowds especially in enclosed spaces, keep masking up, and just hoping for the best because, on this ride, the only way out is through.

Recently my friend Sean Lotman tweeted about a Richard Linklater movie he’d seen that he said gave him nostalgia about growing up in the states, so I took a look, expecting a generic childhood in some random American town, but when the flick started:

“The time is spring, 1969,” the narrator, voiced by Jack Black, says at the beginning of Apollo 10 1/2. “The place is Ed White Elementary School in El Lago, Texas.”

I went to Ed White Elementary in the late 70s/early 80s. We lived in El Lago for six years. Damn.

So I’m just going to go through the film and comment on what stood out for me. From the start, it’s interesting what they got exactly right and what seemed off. The sound of the kickball game is exactly right, but their depiction of the school doesn’t look quite right. I know it was supposed to be 1969 and I only started there in 1976 or so, but still, it doesn’t look like they had any actual alumni on staff, and the school’s been added to over the years. It was from that kickball court that I watched the first space shuttle fly on the back of a 747 over the school, possibly while I was wearing my puffy silver astronaut’s jacket, complete with patches, but I never had any aspirations in that direction. They did get the big fields next to the school right, but the hallways had windows at the top that don’t show up in the movie. I remember being so frustrated that I kicked my bright red plastic lunch box into those walls so hard that it broke into pieces. I also remember the beatings that the film passes off as just the way things were then. To me, Texas was a different world from Florida where we’d lived prior to that. Toxic masculinity permeated the entire society. From what I read on the news, it still does.

The houses of El Lago look different in the film too, smaller, simpler, with simpler, smaller yards. That doesn’t seem like it would have been too hard to research…you can go on Google Maps and look at them to know what they look like; they’re still there. Ours was built in 1960, like most of them, but the movie claims everything was being built in the late 60’s, which I don’t think was the case. It said there were no trees in 1969, but if that was the case the large trees we had everywhere grew very quickly in only seven years. We even had treehouses. Perhaps Linklater grew up in Houston, but I don’t think he grew up in El Lago.

I do remember the Astrodome games and the electronic sign. The interior decor of the film’s family’s house looks a bit too modern, too stereotypically 60’s. I can’t say whether our decor was in step with the times, but it seems to me from seeing other people’s houses that our Ethan Allen standard wasn’t too far from the norm. We certainly did have that coiled rug though; I spent many an evening and Saturday morning lying on that thing watching our big Zenith.

I remember the occasional flooding; to this day I get nostalgic about walking on grass with a few inches of water over it. The U-tote’M, yeah I remember that place where I spent my allowance on Mad Magazines and Hubba Bubba bubble gum. I also remember the rocket in the playground. I think one of them is still there actually, according to Google Maps. The TV shows and cartoons seem largely the same, though the ones we saw were largely already in syndication by the 70’s. These kids, though, they were allowed to stay up til midnight? How?

I remember “sewage park”, though we never called it that. It was just a field by the plant; we had to ride our bikes through the fenced-in bottleneck between the two to get to and from school without going miles out of the way. You can see it here, complete with some kid riding their bike towards the bottleneck after school. Substitute that red bike for a black Huffy Bandit and it could have been me. It was, alas, a great spot for bullies to ambush kids, which I managed to avoid until my last day of 5th grade, when I was attacked and all my stuff from my elementary school career trashed and strewn around that damn field. In fact, there was plenty of trauma during those years.

I don’t recall the fumigation trucks, and certainly nobody thought it would be cool to ride bikes behind those things. As for “Big bike adventures”, I would explore the woods nearby, finding an old cemetary that I now realize probably should have been a protected historic site, and unwisely hid in a storm drain in the rain. It’s all condos now.

I remember the Baskin-Robbins (damn, it’s still there too?), but not the bowling alley or arcades. Then again I didn’t really have many friends, got into too many fights, and my brother and sister were too much older to want to have much to do with a little kid like me, so I was alone a lot of the time. We did have that same stereo cabinet to play records, and I had a small radio to listen to music to make things seem ok late at night. We never had parties either; perhaps my parents also didn’t really have friends, or, as they both worked and were raising three kids, they were just too tired.

Astroworld I remember going to but not much else other than that it was across from the Astrodome. I have much better memories of concerts in the park and at Jones Hall. Our station wagon was a 1973 Pinto Squire, baby blue with fake wood trim, but the family car was a 1969 Buick Electra 225, gold and white two-tone. We called it Burt, or at least my sister did, as she was a fan of Burt Reynolds at the time.

Then again, the film Apollo 10 1/2 is about the summer of 1969, and things were different by the time I came along. I missed the moon landing, and by the time we were living in El Lago moon missions had stopped, Vietnam was over, and indeed the whole culture was undergoing huge changes. We left in 1981.

It’s nice that Linklater is nostalgic for his childhood, but it was apparently very different from mine. The film, while light-hearted and interesting, just brought back too many ghosts, and I kind of wish he’d picked somewhere else.