Sailing Towards Enemy Ships

One-handedly Fending off Falling Barrel While Locked in Deadly Combat

Going to the Seashore

Checking out Funky Aphrodisiac

Doin’ the Horizontal Tango

Watching (blind) Lover Engaged in Mortal Combat with Mutinous Sailor

Announces He’s Been Doing the Pirate Princess’ Fiancé

Receiving Ransom Note for Captured Pirate Princess

Discovers that the Man who has Captured the Princess is his Lover’s Older Brother, Who also Poisoned Him as a Child and was Responsible for him Becoming an Occultist Assassin

Discovers that his Lover Murdered the Former Attorney General While still Employed as Occultist Assassin

Standing by as Lover Gets it on with said Attorney General Whom He was Supposed to have Assassinated but Actually Only Stabbed a Bit

You see, life isn’t easy for poor Ayace — what with a confusing love life and all the glowering, sword-swinging, brooding, glowering, and glowering. I therefore propose that we start a special fund to buy a new facial expression for him. Even something along the lines of “impassive” would do a world of good. Donate now!

But despite being surrounded by such scintillating ephemera, I shall not be distracted from researching Sarah Palin newspaper articles for my News Story Analysis. No, there shall be no distraction or procrastination. None at all. Not one skerrick. Not a smidgeon, bit or bob. Hm.

Anyway, stay tuned to this RSS feed for future updates on the wonders of gay pirate manga, the philosophical marvels that can be found on the outside of spring water bottles, and a long rant about the only three ESL students who turned up for my class yesterday, who (it turns out) do not find prepositions and cloze gap activities nearly as exciting as I do.

If you’re not in Melbourne — or in Australia — you can also toddle over to Sticky’s Mail Order (once there, scroll down) and buy a copy there, whereupon it will probably arrive on your doorstep or in your post office box at some unknown time in the near or distant future.**

If you don’t know what I’m talking about there’s also a new review of my zine here.

In other news

• I am currently recovering from my first month at university during our one week Easter break. So far this recovery has entailed sitting up in bed with my laptop reading internet scanlations of pirate manga and nibbling at pieces of toast people have been shoving under my door in ultimately vain attempts at combating Anti-Social Teenager Malnutrition. Four days in, my vision has started to develop fuzzy green patches, not unlike the coat of a radioactive dalmation, but I’m sure it’s nothing another week’s sleep and several trips to the optometrist can’t cure.
• My next zine is closer to being print-worthy (I just have to get the parts in Chinese checked over for errata and then re-Pinyinise everything), so I’ll update here when it’s out.
• Finally, I want to announce my undying devotion and gratitude to JSTOR, which is the only online scholarly article database thingy I have access to that will allow me to download obscure academic journals in full for my essay on the infiltration and impact of Mandarin in Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan and it’s probable links to national identity. Or something. I need to re-check the essay question.

Anyway, I hope everyone had a good Easter and found better things to do than gorge themselves on chocolate or its infernal substitute, known more commonly as carob.

*shivers*

Update: Leopoldina van Wowser-Ainwright now has a Facebook page! Become her fan and listen to her pretentious words of wisdom, dispensed free to all.

*FYI North Americans: Mills & Boon = Harlequin.

**Order tracking not available.

“After my intense stomachache incident today, I decided to have a c-section in the future instead of giving natural birth. I know it’s RANDOM, but who have thought of that too??”

“You can’t escape pain: I had two natural births and felt fantastic afterwards. Several friends of mine have had planned c-sections and felt like they’d been run over by a truck for 6 weeks. Babies are meant to come out your vagina, that’s what its made for xxx”

“Not my vag!”

“2 posh 2 push”

“You’re a woman, you’re supposed to be strong”

…

Stay tuned for the next riveting installment.

Probably because I was in denial over being uni-bound the next day (and probably because I ate too much spanikopita at the Sydney Road Street Party), I didn’t check my university email or do anything vaguely preparatory before my first official day at Melbourne Uni. Not that it mattered, really, except I was late for my first lecture and everybody there seemed to actually know what the “media and communications” part of our Media and Communications course means. Huhn. Well, I still stand by my “enrol in things randomly and it will probably work out” method of life advancement.

Also, they used a lot of big words. Sure, I knew what all the words were; I’d just never heard anyone say them aloud before.

Lunch

Didn’t meet anyone from my course. Ate lunch near (not actually on) the South Lawn, trying to work out how many people gathered around the Young Liberal BBQ were actually young Liberals and how many were just there for free sausages.

Japanese Lecture

Met some nice international students from Malaysia and China while waiting for the lecturer to arrive. Determined not to f**** up my brain by speaking Mandarin minutes before I started learning Japanese, so we chatted in English. Not that it made any difference. The Chinese students sitting in the row behind me spoke Mandarin throughout the entire lecture until I could barely control myself from turning around, grabbing a fistful of their glossy salon hair and screaming 闭嘴!!!! at them and other assorted Chinese curse words, if I knew any beyond “pighead” (which made me sad I didn’t learn any swear words in Shanghainese while I had the chance). This spectacle was avoided when the lecturer announced that we were expected to have learnt all forty-something hiragana (Japanese phonetic script) by the end of the week. Shit.

Language and Power in Asian Societies

Signing up for this seemed like a no-brainer, considering I’m currently learning two Asian languages. And it actually looks good. Really good. Especially once I get over the ferris wheel-like shift of lecturers and the fact that the subject has no textbook or reader or anything resembling hardcopy background reading material.

Tuesday

Tutorials don’t start until next week, so I actually had a day off. Finished reading Turnskin. Cleaned room. Taught my ESL kids how to structure an essay for one and a half hours, at least to those that managed to resist the doubtless temptations of the school swimming carnival and actually turned up.

Got home and stared at Finder no Shinjitsu scanlations until my eyes started bleeding, both from its incredible brilliance and borderline porno-ness.

Didn’t sleep until 1am. Woke up at 2am and wrote down first line of fourth novel. Double shit.

Wednesday

First Japanese tutorial. Discovered that several of my classmates already knew hiragana from primary school. Bah. Otherwise enjoyed Japanese’s omission of pronouns and articles. It makes life easier.

Chinese 2E

Which is apparently the level I’m at, at least according to the course coordinator and the one sentence of Chinese he heard me speak during the previous week’s paltry excuse for a placement test. The problem is my level is a lot higher than the textbook, or at least my vocabulary and reading comprehension is, but then I still struggle with the use of  extremely basic grammatical particles like ‘了’ and ‘过’. Urgh. Do I stay or do I go?

Thursday

Double Chinese today. With a four hour gap in between, of course.

Wowed the listening comprehension teacher by knowing what 混血 meant (mixed blood) without having any myself. Managed to work Taiwanese idol dramas into the class conversation.

Was blown out of the water with the difficulty of our listening pre-test after half an hour of my classmates (some of whom have only been learning Mandarin for two years compared to my seven!) mumble out their names and occupations. Listening test speakers sounded like they’d had an all night bender at a sake bar.

Spent four hour lunch break eating cheap pizza and copying my scrawled lecture notes into crisp Korean cat-patterned workbooks I bought in Shanghai.

Chinese Writing Class

I got to do some translations, which were fun until one of my new “I liked Chinese in High School but what on earth possessed me to enrol for this” friends informed me that I couldn’t use my electronic dictionary on our end of semester exam. Not even a print dictionary. In fact, we are allowed NO DICTIONARIES. Hmmm. Must start practising how to write 电影 from memory again. And every other word I’m supposed to know.

Friday

Japanese writing class in the morning, which was fun and relaxing once our tutor had finished her requisite “this course is too big: if your email us, we won’t answer you” speech. She is excellent, though, in the way that all tough-but-fair teachers are. And I met a girl called Ember. Yes, Ember. I want a noun for a name too.

Had lunch with bff at Tiamo on Lygon street. Ate pumpkin pizza and bitched endlessly and cathartically about life and whatnot. As you do. Then we laughed ourselves silly in Borders’ Romance section and then I went back to Northcote High to once again expunge the benefits of good essay structure to an ESL student with impending exams.

Something tells me I’m going to start having nightmares about body paragraphs.

V explains to her class of 16 Chinese International students that she has not read their prescribed text, Euripides’ Medea. Much shock ensues after this admission, followed by much groaning as the students begin to realise she expects them to use their brain this afternoon.

V: “Can someome tell me how Medea starts, please?”

Likely-looking student: “Jason and Medea get married.”

V: “But they’re already married by the start of the play, aren’t they? Can you tell me what happens in the first scene?”

Unlikely-looking student: “Jason goes to find the golden fleece.”

V: “Yes, that’s right, but that all happens before the start of Euripides’ play. Remember, Medea is set in a city, where King Creon reigns. Can anyone remember what the city’s called?”

Class: *silence*.

V: “It starts with ‘C’?”

Class: “C-coh…”

V: (narrowly avoids face-palming herself) “Corinth.”

Suspicious-looking kid: “But you said you hadn’t read it, Miss.”

V: *stares*

The Synonym Game

After a somewhat unsuccessful half hour attempting to teach her charges what synonyms and antonyms are (only to belatedly realise that knowledge of linguistic terminology is somewhat irrelevant to their course), V introduces The Synonym Game, a mainstay of her primary school years in which a student stands in front of the class, back to the whiteboard, while their classmates throw descriptions and hints at the word written on it behind their head until they guess it.

V writes “apple” on the board.

Student in class: “Ping Guo!”*

Student in front of whiteboard: “Apple?”

V: “No, no, no! Only give hints in English.”

Another student writes “magic” on the board behind their friend’s head.

Students in class: “Kai Xiu! Kai Xiu!”

Student in front of whiteboard: “Oh, uh…Magic?”

V: “I said to only speak English!”

Student in class: “But ‘Magic’ is Kai Xiu’s English name.”

V: “But you still gave the hint in Chinese.”

Student: “But it’s his English name.”

V writes “fish” on the whiteboard.

Several students make swimming motions with their hands and bodies.

V dismisses the class.

*The Chinese word for apple.

Kinokuniya (Shinjuku Main Store)

Shinjuku, 3-17-7, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo-to

What can I say? I love Kinokuniya, the famous Japanese bookstore chain that has managed to somehow make Sydney worthwhile visiting (as they have the only Kinokuniya in Australia, grr). I’m also very fond of the Taiwanese stores in the Breeze Centre (Taipei) and Hanshin Department Store (Kaohsiung, near the arena). I only managed to visit one Kinokuniya in Japan, but that was enough. 8 floors, a large English section including a good selection of Japanese as a second language books and two shelves of English-language manga (US prices, unfortunately), with the ground floor devoted to all things manga and anime. I was a bit too overcome with glee to check out the DVDs, but I had a good prowl through the enormous selection of manga catering to all genres and tastes, from shonen to shounen-ai, hentai to yuri and goodness knows how many other demarcations I managed to miss (and misread).

Bookoff

Shinjuku-Nishi

I passed this bookstore several times before I noticed the enormous shelves of manga within and later realised it was part of the second-hand bookstore chain called Bookoff (though they also sell DVDs, CDs and games). Unlike new manga none of their stock was wrapped in plastic, hence the ever-crowded aisles of old and young comic fans alike, reading after a tiring day at school and the office. Most of the manga I looked through was in excellent condition and ranging from about ¥100 to ¥350, which was definitely easier on the wallet than Kinokuniya. Here I bought several random BL manga and the first four volumes of Kuroshitsuji (黒執事). (Again).

Mandarake

Shibuya

I’ve already written quite a lot about my first trip to Mandarake’s Shibuya store, but that post was focusing on their huge array of doujinshi, when they also have an enormous collection of manga, CDs, DVDs, art books and other anime memorabilia (though they really specialise in yaoi and hentai). Their website describes coming into Mandarake as “treasure hunting”, and it really is like that. I could have spent hours going through their maze of stacks looking for rare gems and popular series alike, and probably would have if my time in Japan hadn’t been so short, and the things to see so vast. Definitely worth another visit.

Did somebody say "doujinshi"? Just one set of shelves at Mandarake.

Unlike other parts of Asia I’ve visited, Japan has a thriving zine culture in the form of “doujinshi” (lit. same person magazine, as in “zines written by and for people with the same interests”). Like zines, doujinshi can be virtually any kind of self-published booklet or book containing original material and/or a synthesis or expansion of other peoples’ work (e.g. fanfiction and fan art). Doujinshi containing short stories or manga (Japanese comics) using the characters of other popular manga, anime, video games and celebrities are the most common types of doujinshi you’ll see lining the shelves of bookstore-distros, though unknown and already popular artists and writers also use the unconstrained nature of self-publishing to create entirely original doujinshi. To avoid prosecution for using copyrighted characters and other material in their work, Japanese zinesters and groups of co-authors known as “circles” generally keep print runs low, which in turn can make prices for rare doujinshi extremely high if you’re lucky enough to find them at all.

Japan’s twice-yearly Comiket (aka “comic market”, arguably the largest zine/doujinshi event and exchange in the world) had ended a month before I arrived in Tokyo for my four day visit, so I did the next best thing and headed to Mandarake, a Japanese pop culture fan’s paradise store, selling manga, anime, collectables, CDs and, vitally, a huge array of doujinshi. This was the first time I’d seen real Japanese doujinshi in person, so after kind of dying of joy, I began scouring the shelves for anything I
recognised.

The first thing I noticed about Japanese zines was the binding (go figure). Virtually every doujinshi I picked up was perfect bound — not a staple or wonky page in sight. I already knew professional printing was cheap in Asia, but this was ridiculous. The quality of most of the art was also incredible, whether it was stylised versions of popular characters, or artwork so well emulated I began to wonder if this “fan art” wasn’t the work of the original artist after all (which does happen too). Almost immediately I began to understand the allure of collecting doujinshi, particularly if it’s re-imagining and re-interpreting your favourite fandoms, and clearly the other customers in Mandarake (90% of whom seemed to be female, though that’s not surprising considering how much yaoi they stock) had long since passed the “stunned” stage into buy mode. I saw at least half a dozen customers come in, pick up one of the shopping baskets stacked by the door and move progressively through the store’s labyrinthine shelves until their basket was full of doujinshi.

It looked like classic retail therapy to me, so I thought I’d give it a go. Unfortunately my Japanese is practically non-existent and having to pull out every doujinshi to see what it was because I couldn’t read any of the shelf labels started to become tedious (also the non-zine-interested person I was travelling with was starting to throw me dirty looks). So eventually I settled on the few shelves whose labelling I could read either because the name of the original franchise was in English (e.g. Death Note) or because the Japanese name was the same as the Chinese name (e.g. 黑執事). The next problem was that all of the doujinshi were packaged in plastic, and so the merits of any given doujinshi had to be assessed by its price (the cheapest I bought was¥140 (AU$1.70), the most expensive ¥1200 (AU$15)), the quality of the art on the front cover and any other peripherals like a list of contributing artists and R18+ labels. Unfortunately all of these competing factors became too much for my addled brain and the five doujinshi I wound up buying were not what I was expecting: one turned out to be a short story when I thought it was a comic, and the other four contained certain images of much-loved characters doing things I’ve since attempted to expunge from my memory.

All in all though it was fantastic being in Japan and seeing how they contribute to local and global zine culture, and I can’t wait to go back and do it all again (this time with a shopping basket).

Taipei 101: inside and out.

The last time we’d been at the Tower was in 2008, and after a frustratingly long walk from the nearest metro station in bleak, drizzly weather we arrived at the base of the tower to find nothing had changed very much since then (the weather included). The shopping mall attached to 101 was still filled with big name fashion brands apparently devoid of customers, and the bookstore Page One was still as cavernous and arty as I remembered it, but now with the added advantage of several new bookshelves worth of Chinese-language manga (though seeing as I’d just bought no less than 26 manga at Kinokuniya the day before, I somehow managed to abstain).

Even the people movers need a break occasionally.

A slightly more noticeable difference was the Tower’s basement foodcourt, which was packed with business people, tourists and locals where it had been virtually empty the first time we’d eaten there. After a rapid circle of the court looking for anything vaguely vegetarian-looking we found a “Japanese-style” outlet with a separate section of the menu devoted to vegetables and whatnot. I’ve been overseas long enough to go through the “does it have meat or fish — yes, that includes shrimp — in it? Did it once have a face?” rigamarole, and once that was over with, it didn’t really matter what wound up on the plate. As ever, most Taiwanese eateries pertain to be Japanese, which easily reflects the large number of Japanese tourists in Taiwan and the two countries’ mutual affection for each other’s cultures — and particularly their popular cultures.

Hey, I'm no exception. After eating I sought out a Pokémon toy vending machine and got three Eevees in a row. Gosh darn.

Outside 101 tower are stone boulevards, linear parks and several other up-market malls, including a Shin Kong Mitsukoshi and a strangely hilarious complex called New York New York that I remembered from last time.

Liberty's paint job is definitely new, though.

All this wandering around and reminiscing was quite tiring though, so vgag and I went back to the area around our hotel and I acted as interpreter while she got an hour long foot massage. Massages have never done much for me and I’d had a foot massage only the week before in Shanghai, so I was content to sit back and scroll through the parlour’s TV channels (they have better MTV reception than us — no fair!) and flick through a Taiwanese gossip rag given to me by one of the ladies running the place until vgag’s feet had been rejuvenated or whatever.

The foot massage parlour itself was a hilarious mixture of interesting and kitsch, and the pudgy silver tabby cat that had the run of the place did a lot to endear me to the experience.

After her massage vgag suggested we go to one of the Italian restaurants reccommended on the Hungry in Taipei blog, so we metro-ed our way to Da’an and ate at a gently snooty Italian restaurant off Fu Xing South road. The food was good, the servings small, and again I fell into the very Shanghainese habit of not dressing my language up enough when talking to wait staff, at least judging by the waitress’ expression when I responded to her offer of a dessert menu with “不要, 买单” (“No, cheque”). Sometimes I actually feel as though I’m going through China-Taiwan culture shock, and not only because of the slight but surprisingly common linguistic differences in everything from “orange juice” to “metro”, but because I have to remember to be polite again and stop shoving people to get into elevators. You can imagine the stress.

By then vgag and I were well and truly figuratively knackered, and though I’d planned to go to sleep at a reasonable hour for once, I wound up reading a Chinese translation of Crimson Spell into the wee hours again, even if I didn’t understand half of the words and there was way too much demon sex.

Cute, right? Now I just have to forget that the protagonists in the book I’m currently reading eat squirrels for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Other highlights of today’s mountain hike stroll around Yang Ming Shan (阳明山) included being given directions by a strange local woman with clear intentions of usurping the park’s tourist information centre by declaring it to be filled with non-English-speaking imbeciles, crossing paths with a group of men who looked like local mobsters (an effect somewhat ruined when they abruptly broke into song), a ticket inspector slapping a fine on a scooter illegally parked on the mountain trail…

…and the green bean gelati vgag and I indulged in after the disappointment of realising it would take hours to get anywhere near some actual wilderness. And then there was the ride in the shuttle back down to Bei Tou (北投), which should really repackage itself as an extreme theme park ride involving heights, skidding, an endless snaking road and the requisite sensation of wanting to throw up said gelato.

Three hours, four metro line changes and a bowl of fried eggplant later, I realised I’d actually had a good day. But like everything in Taiwan, it wasn’t quite what I expected.