The humidity in Taiwan ruins it for me. It’s always warm and muggy in Taiwan. It’s true what they say. It’s not the heat; it’s the humidity. Even when it’s not really all that hot, maybe 78F, it still feels hot in Taiwan. That’s the humidity doing that. When it’s very humid, your body can’t cool itself down with sweat. But that doesn’t stop your body from trying. And try it does. If you’re not a native to Taiwan, your body will keep sweating in a vain attempt to cool itself down. I don’t know how the locals stand it here. I guess they get used to being sticky and sweaty all the time. They wear long sleeves and pants here all the time. I can’t even. It gives me a sense of claustrophobia. I gasp for air, like I’m drowning in the humidity.

It’s weird to see all these Chinese people. Occasionally, I see the lone blonde woman out on the street teeming with busy Chinese people. It’s always the same one. Her blue eyes don’t meet mine as I look at her curiously. I wonder if she feels just as strange, being a minority, as I do being in the racial majority for once. She doesn’t acknowledge my look. I’m invisible to her; she must get the same glances every day as she walks down the sidewalk. She’s drowning in humidity and Chinese. There’s too much of both here, and I’m an utterly unremarkable part of the background.

She’s not wearing any make-up. Nor do any of the Chinese women I see today. I don’t blame them. When it’s so sticky, I can’t imagine putting something called lipstick on. Make-up would be called facestick here. I can see the layers of paint bubble and crack on the ceiling of the Chiang Kai-Shek memorial. I imagine that’s what the humidity would do to make-up here as well. It’s a losing battle. There’s a better chance that Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek leaps up from his resting place in his mausoleum to conquer mainland China for the Kuomintang than to conquer the humidity here.

I can’t tell if the blonde woman is pretty or not. I can’t tell if any of the Chinese women are, either. It’s not racism. It’s the humidity. No one can look good here, with or without make-up. I’ll bet if you took some of these Chinese women out of Taiwan, they would be really pretty. It would be like taking someone who had been wearing weights on their ankles all their life and putting them into a track and field competition without weights. They’d naturally be amazing athletes after being saddled with weights that had suddenly been removed.

Feeling sticky, sweaty and muggy is a remarkably unsexy feeling. It’s like you’re really sweaty and out of breath after a long hard fuck, but subtracting all of the post-coital bliss of the long hard fuck. It’s just the clean-up part where you want a cool towel to wipe down your sticky and stinky nether regions. It’s hard to breathe and you’re just stinky and sweaty without the fuck and without the cool towel. There’s nothing sexy about humidity here. Maybe a southern gal in New Orleans could fan herself on the porch with a pitcher of lemonade and a sultry smirk. But that same gal and her fan would wilt under the humidity in Taiwan. The fan would be useless because the unrelenting humidity prevents any evaporation of sweat from the skin even in a light breeze from a fan. The stereotype of a Chinese girl with a fan came from northern China, not the sub-tropical island which is Taiwan.

I gasp for air again, just as a carp gawps at the top of the water for food. It’s so humid, Aquaman could breathe through his gills here. He must have gills, right? What is the biology of Aquaman? Does he release his seed as a swirling hazy cloud over Aquawoman’s eggs? I envy Aquaman for never having to use condoms. He just unleashes his seed bareback right into the ocean every damn time. Guaranteed safe sex. What a lucky guy. However, I can’t get too envious. He’ll never know the intimate feeling of skin-on-fin contact which is presumably very nice. I wonder when they’ll address this in the upcoming movies where they feature Aquaman. Now, Aquaman fertilizing some Easter eggs would be something to sit through the credits for. Imagine that cloudy emission floating straight at you in 3D, and the virtual tadpoles that emerge from your face. That’s the ultimate culmination of computer graphics and 3D, is to have Aquaman simultaneously inseminate an entire audience on opening night. That such a happy ending is in the realm of the possible is going to make all other possible endings disappointing in comparison now that the idea of that spoogy possibility has been disseminated to you. Likewise, the attractiveness of a woman in Taiwan cannot be determined because the platonic ideal of that same woman not being in the swampy, sweaty, junior high locker room air of Taiwan always exists in theory .

The humidity in Taiwan ruins it for me; it really does. Aquaman releasing his cloudy seed into your face in 3D at the end is merely a mild metaphor of how the humidity ruins it for me here in Taiwan. That  metaphor is barely a single tadpole compared to the hellspawn that is the actuality of the humidity here. But enough exaggeration and metaphor. The simple, unadorned truth is that the humidity in Taiwan makes rainy summers in Houston seem tolerable and almost nice and refreshing in comparison. That is no exaggeration, but simple truth.