Life on a Fault Line

I have a very slow reaction time.

Source: Taiwan’s Central Weather Administration

Last night, at around 9 pm, while my husband and I were watching TV, we felt a sudden thump, and we immediately paused the TV. After living in Taiwan for a decade, I now feel alert to a specific kind of rumbling or creaking of the walls that tells me an earthquake is happening. Last night, there was a pause after the thump (which other people would say they felt as more of an up and down shake), followed by the Presidential Alert warning us of earthquake on our cell phones, followed by the unmistakeable shake and sway of our building. We live on a relatively high floor of a high-rise building, so the sways feel a little more dramatic. I watched things in my apartment move back and forth — the dangling Christmas lights I never bothered to remove from my shelf, this animal pocket toy I have tied to a baby gate. It was only when the swaying of these items stopped that I knew that the sustained sense that I was in a boat was in my head and that we had, in fact, stopped moving. Initial reports when I Googled said the earthquake had been a 4.1, which felt low to me, then it became 4.9, which still felt quite low. Now the official report seems to say 6.0.

I grew up in New Jersey, free of earthquakes (though we did do earthquake drills in elementary school), and aside from a couple of small earthquakes that supposedly have happened in New York in the last couple of decades (I never felt them though friends of mine did), earthquakes are not really a thing where I’m from. However, they loomed large in my imagination (or rather, my nightmares) as a kid. I was seven when the Loma Prieta earthquake hit San Francisco, and I recall seeing images of broken up highways on television. Not long after, we went to SoCal for Christmas. It terrified me to know I was in the same state, a state known for earthquakes. Every night of that week, I prayed to God that no earthquake would hit while we were there. I had never felt an earthquake before, but the images really scared me.

As an adult, the first time I experienced an earthquake was when I moved to San Diego in my late twenties, and yet both times, I didn’t clock that an earthquake was happening. The first time, I was at a seaside restaurant with a friend. While we were chatting, one of the plastic things they put in the middle to advertise specials slid off the table and I caught it as it fell off the edge. Too engrossed in our conversation, I didn’t think about how odd it was until I got home and saw on the news that there’d been a mild earthquake. The second time was when I was at a beach bonfire party at night. The body of water before us was a bay, ie: calm waters. At some point there was a sudden surge of currents, bigger waves that I chalked up to a boat that must have gone by. Only later did I realize that big boats did not go past where I had been sitting.

The only other time I experienced an earthquake besides that was one time when my mom and I were in Vietnam. We were sitting in our high rise hotel, when suddenly my mom breathed, “Earthquake.” I felt nothing, but when I went to the bathroom, the water in the toilet bowl was sloshing.¹

So okay, I’m not very sensitive to earthquakes. Or, I wasn’t.

Then I moved to Taiwan. The first Lunar New Year after I came here, Taiwan experienced a big earthquake. It was around 4 in the morning; I was awake, texting friends back in the States when I heard a strange creaking and then it was like I was on a raft. I lived in a studio apartment; my bed was lofted on a sturdy platform above my kitchenette. Now, the loft felt very precarious, as if it were held up by stilts. My apartment was only on the second floor, but I had visions of my bed collapsing. I froze, not sure what to do. Finally I rushed down the stairs, but by then, the earthquake was over. In the morning I’d learn the earthquake was clocked at a magnitude of 6.4 and that buildings in the south had collapsed.

Over the years I’ve learned to brace myself after the telltale creak or rumble of the walls. Almost every time, I initially think, “Is that a truck passing by?” before settling into, “Oh god, another earthquake.” Now there’s that Presidential Alert, but it often doesn’t go off until after the earthquake is well under way or already over.

After many earthquakes, I’ve learned that I have absolutely the worst reaction response. One time, I was sitting on my couch when the earthquake hit. I looked up at my lamp swinging and thought, “Should I get up? Should I run outside? What should I do?” but then it was over. (They say to get away from windows and to crouch near a heavy piece of furniture, but in my tiny studio apartment, there was literally no place far enough from windows, and my heaviest piece of furniture was my coffee table which has a large slab of glass on top of it and a ceiling lamp hanging directly over it.)

Another time, an earthquake started and went on for a long, long time, and my reaction, for some reason, was to THROW my phone away and slowly sink into a crouch in the middle of my room because I did not know what else to do!

Since I’ve had a child, my slow reactivity ends up turning towards him. When he was an infant, I’d think, “Should I run in his bedroom and pick him up? Even though he’s napping? Should I wake him up??” (If you’ve ever had an infant you will know what a choice this is — you can imagine how hard I had worked to get him down to sleep! If this isn’t a BIG earthquake, is it worth it??) One time, after we had begun co-sleeping, I woke up to an earthquake, sleepily checked on him, pulled him into my arms, and then continued sleeping.

The scariest earthquake I’ve experienced was last April, when Taiwan was shaken up by a 7.4 magnitude earthquake in the morning. My baby, who had only just learned to walk a few weeks earlier, was playing beside my bed where I was half-dozing. I heard a rumble through the bed, and my first thought was, “That’s weird, how do I feel a truck passing by from this up high?” before I realized it was an earthquake. My husband came running in, picked up my kid and pinned him down on the bed next to me, covering him with his body. The shaking seemed to go on for a long time. We heard things crashing in our living room and kitchen. We fled our apartment after that (using the stairs!), not wanting to be home to feel any aftershocks. Later, we would see all the terrifying footage from the earthquake, the scariest of which were the huge boulders rolling down mountain faces in Hualien, striking trucks and other vehicles. Buildings collapsed, the MRT cracked, people died.²

Now when there’s an earthquake, I still tend to stare aimlessly and wait it out (or if my son is awake, I scoop him up and hug him), not ducking for cover, but just sort of trying to make sure what I feel is actually an earthquake and then hoping it’ll pass pretty quickly. I hope I never have to do more than that, though I know I should probably take the time to think about where I’d actually hide in the event of a big one. I truly don’t know as my apartment is filled with cheap particle-board furniture that would not save me were things to come crashing down. But let’s be honest: even if my reaction time was faster, it’s not like there’s a lot of time to do much when an earthquake begins. I’ve thought about running out my apartment and down the stairs, heading somewhere else, but most of these earthquakes last for mere seconds, barely enough time for me to even leave one room and go into another, and by the time the synapses in my brain have fired and gone through the possibilities, it’s over. Thankfully. (Obviously I know bigger earthquakes could last for much, much longer, and I should be prepared for that.)

The longer I live in Taiwan, the more…. used to… earthquakes I become. Hmm, that’s not quite the right term. I guess what I mean is, it becomes part of life here and doesn’t fill me with dread the way it might have when I was seven years old, if you had told me I was living somewhere so earthquake prone. Yet, each time there’s an earthquake, I have a momentary feeling/thought — that I am at the behest of nature, that what’s going to happen will happen, and there’s not much I can do about it. In that moment, it’s unnerving, as you wait it out, seeing how big this earthquake is going to be, hoping it passes quickly. And then it’s over and you’re texting your friends and you’re on social media seeing what people are saying and you’re Googling to see how big it was and if it was worse elsewhere, and then, most of the time, you move on with your day.

It’s just part of the fabric of life here, I guess. One of the things I don’t love about living here but I can live with now.

(Someone tell me the safest place to hide in my apartment though.)

*Knocks on wood*

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Things I’m…

Eating

旺旺來亞洲咖哩屋

It’s been awhile since I posted here and a couple of decent meals have come and gone without me mentioning them. But recently my husband discovered that the area where I take my aerial class is by Myanmar Street, a street filled with Sino-Burmese eateries. (There’s an interesting history behind this, having to do with a contingent of KMT soldiers who fled to Myanmar in the aftermath of the Civil War.) So every so often, if he is able to drive me to class, we eat at a Burmese restaurant in Little Myanmar. I really liked this one, which is Indian Burmese I guess? The tea leaf salad was so yummy and I really enjoyed the curry too! My husband got lamb biryani and that was really good too.

Watching

Chernobyl (HBO)

Recently finished this in like two days with my husband. I knew very little about the Chernobyl disaster aside from the fact that it was a nuclear disaster and that the area is a no-man’s land now, but this mini-series really got into the nuts and bolts of how the disaster unfolded and its aftermath. You really get to be angry at the bureaucracy involved. I’m not sure though, how much was dramatized for effect, but regardless, what happened was truly awful in a myriad of ways and I truly hope nothing like this ever happens again.

Listening

The Retrievals (Season 2)

I’ve been listening to this Serial / NYTimes podcast recently, in small doses, because it’s about the fact that some women can FEEL ALL OF THE PAIN OF THE C-SECTION BEING PERFORMED ON THEM because their doctors don’t believe they’re feeling pain or choose to ignore it. As someone who did an emergency c-section but DID NOT FEEL IT, I was already traumatized so it is very hard to stomach. Also it’s enraging. But also really gripping.

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Self-Promo(ish)

I’m coming to the East Coast for two weeks in October to do a bunch of events, which I’ll rattle off details for soon! Hope I’ll see some of you there.

1. My mom hates earthquakes. She has childhood memories of the terrifying shaking, and she cites earthquakes as a reason she couldn’t move back here permanently (nor could she move out to the West Coast. She is afraid of the Big One.) So of course she would notice the earthquake when I didn’t!

2. A couple of days later, New Yorkers back home freaked out about a small earthquake they experienced, and while I totally get why it would be unnerving — it’s rare so of course scary and also I highly doubt any of the buildings are earthquake proofed? — some of the posts were so hyperbolic that it really irked me, because meanwhile I was reading about people in Taiwan dying and the injured and the buildings that had fallen. But I kept my mouth shut, because I knew it was an unkind part of me wanting to lash out after being so freaked out from the earthquake we had had here.