 Photos courtesy of the author
Today: Brian Hioe, Taipei-based editor, translator, activist, DJ, and co-founder of New Bloom; and writer and editor Maria Bustillos.
Issue No. 166Taipei Apartment Hunt
Brian Hioe Ben Smith, Pragmatist
Maria Bustillos
Taipei Apartment HuntAfter six years in my current apartment, I’m finally moving. I’ll still be in the neighborhood—my life is so connected to Bangka that it would be hard to leave. But I decided it’s time. Perhaps it was the relentless smell of fried chicken from the stall in the ground floor of the building. Over time, admittedly, I stopped being able to smell it as much, though I did become paranoid that I myself might unknowingly smell of fried chicken. Or it could be the water and electricity outages. Sometimes, with no warning at all, the building would just suddenly have no water or electricity. And let me tell you, it’s quite hard getting soap off of your body when the water stops with no warning. Even last week, as I was moving out, the hot water for the apartment suddenly stopped working. And then there was the time that leaking pipes soaked everyone’s mail. At the time, I wrongly suspected Wang Wang, the local dog I was friendly with, of urinating on the mail, but it turned out to be the pipes. Though I enjoyed the chance meetings with the many odd strangers that lived in the building, they could also be tiresome. I once encountered an elderly woman in the lobby who wanted to see about an empty apartment a few floors up, complaining that the landlord wasn’t picking up when she called. “It’s 1:00 a.m.!” I said. “You’re not helping yourself, calling him at this hour, if you want to rent there.” When she tried to follow me upstairs, I told her to leave. It occurred to me that she might have been trying to see which apartment I live in, so I was cautious. I’ve been threatened before by weird internet stalkers. The exchange exhausted me. Some of the building’s residents seemed to be gangsters or sex workers. Police sometimes came by for “spot checks,” going from apartment to apartment to see who was living there. I wasn’t too sure of the legality of this, but I just went with it to avoid trouble. They never seemed to realize that I was a long-term resident. And occasionally there’d be a full-blown police raid early in the morning, with blaring megaphones—the same kind that they use for protests—calling on someone to come out. I would be jolted awake, and stay in bed a bit longer. A few years ago I was stopped by a police officer who demanded my ID, since I was walking around late at night. The cops often did that during the pandemic, targeting individuals they suspected might be “runaway” migrant workers. It was racism, really, with the prejudiced view that migrant workers were more likely to spread Covid. Obviously I wasn’t a migrant worker, though. The cop–another young person about my age–seemed surprised that a young person who worked as a journalist would live in my building. “It’s a mess there!” he said.
I went out for breakfast one morning and found an old man collapsed in the building lobby. He usually used a set of crutches to get around, and had fallen. I helped him up and slowly escorted him back to his floor. I wasn’t sure if he was injured. Despite repeated inquiries, he didn’t say a word. I suspect he was too proud to ask others for help—or even to acknowledge any weakness. I found a piece of paper, wrote down my number, and told him to call me if he needed anything, but he didn’t call. A lot of the people living in the building seemed lonely and friendless. Still, there was a certain sense of communalism among the residents. One couple in the building ran a potsticker stall I often ate at across the street. They seemed to be friendly with a sex worker who was always sitting on a scooter outside the building. Rain or shine, I would always run into them chatting. Or I would spot the owner of a nearby lunchbox place in the building, delivering meals to mobility-impaired residents. And I befriended Wang Wang’s elderly owner. I’m not totally done moving out yet, but I can already tell it’ll be bittersweet. I found two apartments in the nearby youth-oriented shopping district of Ximen, both in large shopping malls. One was in the Lion’s Plaza building, which is often reputed to be haunted, and the other in the Ambassador Theater. No agent or landlord appeared to show me the place in the Ambassador Theater, but the voice on the other line told me to go look at the room on my own and that the door was unlocked. Okay then. I took a look and quickly decided it was not for me. I’ve been off the housing market for six years, but it struck me right away how many more (and more obvious) scammers there are these days. A lot of brokers demand a deposit even before they’ll even show you an apartment. And some of these operations are surprisingly slick, using influencer aesthetics to appeal to students, and inventing various labyrinthine and bogus “rules.” Once I went to see an apartment and two young guys on scooters, dressed all in black, arrived at my meeting with the landlord. Why two people? And—given the neighborhood—they weren’t gangsters, were they? The landlord turned out to be very nice and honest, making it a point to show me what he viewed as the shortcomings of the apartment rather than trying to trick me into renting. Afterwards, I concluded that the scooter duo were probably just clueless kids. They messaged me nearly every day after that, asking me if I would rent. I saw that same apartment appear on rental websites about six times every day for the next week. Well, I decided that apartment wasn’t for me, either.  Advertisement for a Taipei apartment rental I came across a futuristic capsule hotel, which was about half the size of my current place and half the price, though tenants will have to endure constant neon-blue lighting. Another place had a giant mural of an anime maid on the wall, suggesting it had been a maid cafe in the past, though one that seemed to have no windows. A third one had a stripper pole in the middle. The search for housing in dismal conditions is an experience quite central to modernity, it seems. But the ties between people—what knits together a community—make up for otherwise drab living conditions. My apartment hunt continues.
FLAMING HYDRAS HITHER AND YONSam Holden was a Baltimore, MD area art and news photographer who shot for Baltimore magazine and the alt-weekly City Paper, as well as for national, commissioned, and commercial projects. As an educator at Towson University, he was committed to keeping the process of analog photography, darkroom processing, and printing alive in the face of the movement to digital. He embraced all techniques and technology, but his heart always defaulted to analog prints on paper. It’s been ten years since we could enjoy Sam’s company, and the majority of his work is now housed in his archive in the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), Special Collections Library. Flaming Hydra-head Joe MacLeod has been involved in curating a few photo shows to keep Sam’s work in the public eye, and the most recent is hanging right now at one of his favorite spots, Baltimore’s Rocket To Venus. The prints are now part of the archive, but remarkably high quality reproductions of all the work in the show are available for purchase. All proceeds go to the Sam Holden Scholarship fund. If you’re in the area, check out the show, which is running until Nov. 17.
Ben Smith, Pragmatist Screenshot from Columbia Journalism Review panel, September 2020, via YouTube What with Ben Smith’s views on journalistic ethics so much in the news in recent days, I realized I’d spoken on a panel with him on this very topic almost exactly four years ago, before the election—in the middle of the plague!—and before J6! We’d been invited by Kyle Pope to discuss “Assessing a journalism that doesn’t work” at a virtual event hosted by the Columbia Journalism Review. While I think Ben’s position on the matter of sexting with sources was absurd (there’s an excellent rundown on that in the Indignity piece linked above), I’ve long appreciated his refusal to put the profession of journalism on a pedestal. His preference for getting down to brass tacks appeals to me, though obviously, as this episode demonstrated, it can go too far. But it’s Ben’s refusal to believe that journalism can change for the better, so clearly visible in this exchange, that I disagree with entirely now, just exactly as I did then. Ben affects a world-weary cynicism and is prone to both-sidesing, but at least his long career has demonstrated that he understands that there is a left and that it’s worth hearing from. Still, he appears to believe that the world is pretty bad, we have to take it as it is, as journalists, and accept that money is tainted, wherever it comes from. With respect to new business models for journalism, he said: I think the sort of models where journalists who are with small publications that are kind of owning their own work, like Brick House, like Defector—and where the audience is very intensely involved with the work—you can kind of see that that’s working, and that there’s excitement around it. Almost by definition, there’s not the kind of money there was sort of floating around like there was for places like BuzzFeed and Vox and others, you know, five years ago, and so you’re not going to see hiring sprees at the same level.
I also think nonprofit news is really kind of finding its feet; and that is a big, untapped form of civic engagement basically, rich people in big cities are starting to think of giving to local news organizations as like giving to the ballet, or giving to the opera, or giving to museums—again, that creates its own problematic dynamics, where the local rich people own your publication, more or less, they sit on your board, and, you know. None of these models are necessarily that pure.
Okay but if you want to accept that the money for journalism can come only from impure sources, and the world is what it is, perhaps that is how you wind up getting $10 million from Sam Bankman-Fried, which then has to be replaced by money from, among others, Henry Kravis, and the Koch-funded organization Stand Together. The clip above plays from late in our conversation and is funny and sad, and the answer is, now as then, to give actual writers more money.
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