Figure: Interior of Bookstore Nine Chapters.
In February 2020, I saw on Facebook a post saying that Nine Chapters [九章], a mathematics bookstore, was to be closed at the end of 2020, and that they were having a clearance sale. The post was written by the shop owner, Mr Wenxian Sun [孫文先] himself.
On March 3, fearing good books would soon get sold out, I visited Nine Chapters, years later since the last time. Recognizing the plaque in calligraphic style, I pushed the glass door, which struck the wind chime, and entered the once-familiar room with shorter shelves in the center and taller shelves in the surroundings. On top of the shorter shelves were various puzzles, games, and models, including the Rush Hour, the Soma cube, the Tower of Hanoi, and wooden polyhedra, many of which I owned when I was a kid, as if my childhood memories were some donated organs, taken out and being dissected on an operation table.
When I was in elementary school, I was a quiet boy. When my classmates played basketball at recess, I avoided them by reading at my seat. When my classmates talked about «Naruto» or «Slam Dunk», I didn’t even know where to borrow comic books. One day the instructor asked us to take a favorite book to share with classmates, and I took an album of Maurits Escher’s engravings, and sat attentively like a dutiful guide in a museum, waiting for anyone who appreciated for a second the marvel of hyperbolic tiles.
When I was in the second grade—at which time Taiwan saw a flurry of popular science publications—Father bought me translations of «Mathematics: The Man-made Universe» by Sherman Stein, «Trigonometric Delights» by Eli Maor, and «In Code» by Sarah Flannery, among others. I kept reading and pestering him to buy me more of them, such as «Mathematical Sorcery» by Calvin Clawson and «How to Ace Calculus» by Colin Adams and others.
Then, when I was in the eighth grade, after finishing an introduction to Euclid’s «Elements», I resolved to read «Elements» itself, of which Nine Chapters had published a translation. The translation wasn’t found at downtown bookstores, and Father accompanied me to Nine Chapters to purchase. I read the «Elements» within some 3 months, which I remarked on the copyright page.
Nine Chapters’s puzzles soon attracted me, so much that I almost thought that all that mathematics was, was a long series of puzzles. I fashioned a Soma cube with clay according to an article of Martin Gardner’s, and constructed a slide rule copied from a plan in «Scientific American». I liked to study the Lonpos pyramid [龍博士魔術金字塔] and the Rush Hour, and I built molecule models from magnetic balls and sticks. (Once I lost a ball, and Father intended to purchase another set for me, but Mr Sun gave him just one ball for free.) Eventually, Mr Sun must have remembered us, who visited so often, and he sometimes gave us discounts.
In the ninth grade, I spent little time preparing for the Basic Competence Test [基本學力測驗], which wasn’t difficult for me at all. I would rather read Nine Chapters’s expositions on advanced mathematics. I forced myself to read several pages a day on Gödel incompleteness theorem and Fermat last theorem, though I doubt how much I really understood by then about recursive functions or elliptic curves. I was also fascinated by the software Super Sketchbook [超級畫板], which made use of Gröbner basis in a polynomial ideal to decide geometrical propositions, a fact I learnt many years later.
Mathematics is some precious certainty that provides good company for me. It is an amusement park built exclusively for me. I know when the recorded scream is to be played in the haunted mansion, and I am going to enter again. One broken slot machine lets me enjoy another pathetic victory. I ride the carousel in eerily vivid colors, and laugh hysterically as many times as I want. Every day is sunny underneath the painted sky on the ceiling.
Mr Sun and his wife established in 1978 Bookstore Nine Chapters, named after a nine-chapter mathematical treatise in the Han dynasty, since he found educational materials on mathematics to be lacking. By then, Taiwan and Mainland China had made temporary peace, but the Cold War hadn’t ended; Mr Sun grasped the opportunity of introducing books from the other side of the strait (especially Simplified Chinese translations of Russian books in the Soviet Union), and typeset those in Simplified Chinese again in Traditional Chinese. In their prime, many dissertations of top university students used to be formatted by Nine Chapters.
Their book covers look so shabby, I suspect they are done by Microsoft Paint. If you inspect closely enough, you will find traces of manual typesetting: the letters aren’t perfectly aligned, and some strokes are fainter; they must have cut and glued paper scraps on the master copy. What’s worse, equations are riddled with typos, which can confuse me for hours. However, they don’t have time to fix all of that, but they will scan their older publications and release the electronic files for free.
TeX and LaTeX matured in the 1990s, and digital typesetting of mathematics has gradually become the norm. Moreover, books from China can nowadays be shipped to Taiwan with one click, and kids are getting more than accustomed to Simplified Chinese. Now, Bookstore Nine Chapters is having a clearance sale.
Today, I had a hard time finding any book worth buying. Olympiad problems, classical geometry, and solitaire board games, they no longer seemed important anymore. I had learnt analysis, statistics, and algebra, not too much but enough to take them lightly.
Yet there are grown-ups who don’t even consider analysis, statistics, and algebra to be important, except of their cars, houses, and children. And maybe they will end up being correct. Or maybe we will get old enough to realize that nothing matters whatsoever. Everything is a puzzle we play to feel being here. I wonder which is more devastating: finding something you once cherished to appear foolish, or knowing something you now cherish will appear foolish.
I picked «First-Order Logic» by Raymond Smullyan, «A Modern View of Geometry» by Leonard Blumenthal, and a guide on Olympiad inequalities. I wasn’t sure why I needed those; I just wanted to pay for something.
Mr Sun asked me by the cashier, “You really don’t want the Chinese translation of Olympiad inequalities, which is so much cheaper?”
“Um, no, thanks.”
“Well, if you say so. Strangely, I can’t find the record of the price. How much is the Olympiad inequalities?” He called his wife. “Whatever. Young man, let’s just call it 400 NTD.”
“Oh, really?” I paused, overwhelmed in memories.
“What’s up?” He asked, not recognizing me.
“It’s nothing. Thank you very much.”
I didn’t come to Nine Chapters again, and I visualized the place being remodeled to a shoe store or a Boba tea stand, which might make me sentimental on seeing it.
However, another one and half year later, I heard recently that Nine Chapters was still open, because several loyal customers appealed Mr Sun not to close it. I told myself that I should check it out, but somehow, I didn’t feel any more urged to go either, perhaps so I could stick to the picture of it being torn down.
The building, I imagine, is about to be obliterated, where the shelves have collapsed, the polyhedron models are dislodged from the latches, and toy blocks are littered all over the ground. I have to carefully step over broken glass to enter the unlit room. Curling up in the corner, a little boy is playing the Rush Hour again.
“What are you doing here?” I ask him.
“I can’t get the red car out.” He says. “It’s stuck in a traffic jam. There must be one and only one way to do it.”
“Leave it alone. We have to get out of this place, not the goddamn toy car!”
“What if the car gets lonely?”
“It doesn’t; you do. You get lonely sometimes, and you play puzzles, one after another. But playing puzzles never stops you from being lonely. So put that down, and come with me.”
He weeps. “But I must get it out! Help me get it out!”
I part the debris to cross my legs beside him, as sands and rocks keep falling. “One more puzzle, and we leave, okay?”
❧ October 24, 2021