If there's one thing this book isn't about it's teaching English in Taiwan. David Barton is a young Canadian professor at the National Central University in Chungli (中壢), but until recently he also ran a combined bar and art-gallery, living above the premises. This bizarre self-communing diatribe owes considerably more to the bar than to the art gallery, or indeed to academia itself. It's a brawling, pornographic, scatological exercise in self-indulgent, learned, bohemian fantasy in a tradition that stretches from J.P. Donleavy's The Ginger Man to Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting. It's extraordinarily invigorating to find such a work emanating from contemporary Taiwan, and from Chungli at that.
Teaching Inghelish is also a postmodern text replete with ancient photos and photomontages, fact and fiction inter-spliced, in-jokes and spoof shamanisms. It's a surreal narrative containing the kind of tales people tell in bars, sentences flung like arrows at a target (some missing but a few, like "the toxic rhapsody of Taiwan," hitting the bull's eye), and a sequence of high-aspiring forays penned in various states of inspiration and self-confessed quasi-madness.
The book contains some hilarious, but often touching and sometimes beautiful, extracts culled from Barton's students' essays. What is so winning about him is that he loves these inspired transpositions of Chinese urban poetry, and doesn't want them corrected but instead treasured as a special form of the language to be held on a par with Jamaican, and to hell with TOEFL and "Business English."
Teaching Inghelish in Taiwan opens with one of these student essays quoted at length. It's like something from J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. The writer, one of the "Strawberry Generation" - beautiful to look at but easily damaged if touched - is disappointed that at 18 he's still a virgin. Chungli is "the most cool place … full of rats and scum, just as I am," he writes. Initially I thought it was a pity the whole book didn't carry on in this vein. But Barton has other cards up his sleeve, and I wasn't disappointed. Indeed, some of the book took me onto a level where comedy and wonder mixed. It's hard to say whether it's better to read it while drunk or otherwise inspired, or simply to let it take you up to the heights on its own, often vigorous, wings.
The main part of the text alternates between the imaginary memoirs of Barton's European ancestors adrift in the South Pacific in 1902, and two modern Taiwanese trying to retrieve their badminton "bird" from a neighbor's backyard. The first includes attempting to copulate with goats, finding "a plateau of hallucination unknown to non-Oceanians" and pondering (in Buenos Aires) on "the compatibility of cocaine and the European nostril." But despite the greater comic potential of these ancestors, it's the thoughts about contemporary Taiwan that prove in the last analysis the most memorable.
There are dissertations on the color yellow, then on gold, then on Taiwan's "pollution for profit system." Taiwan is seen by turns as absurd, over-blown, over-polluted and over-rich, too profitable to leave and its women far too attractive to ignore.
There's a page written in mirror-writing, reminiscent of Laurence Sterne's squiggles across the page in Tristram Shandy back in 1759, and there are many Sterne-like digressions, as perhaps is only to be expected from such a work, and which maybe even characterize the genre. This one's most wearying is a protracted tale of a man changing into an orangutan, modulating into a celebration of a cannibal feast - the result, perhaps, of a single long session at the keyboard added to beef up the word-count.
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