THE CHINESE ARE VERY SECRETIVE ABOUT THINGS WHEN THEY GO WRONG. You can't just go online or read a paper to find out what happened with this gloriously wrong-looking demolition in Chengdu. I heard a man was injured by debris, for example, but there seemed to be no way to confirm or disprove this. The site was fenced and there were multiple sentries posted throughout the day to keep people out, so this was taken at around 4am, using only the ambient light of Chengdu that reflects nicely off the ever-present canopy of mostly industrial smog.
If you head north along the Los Angeles coastline, you can find a once posh neighborhood that slid into the sea back in the 1930s. On the way, you’ll see a lot of loading cranes on the horizon, just like the ones Oakland pridesters like to wear on their hoodies and t-shirts. In fact, there are many more of these cranes in the Los Angeles harbor than there are in Oakland, where I live. Whatever. As far as I’m concerned, they’re either symbols of dirty transoceanic shipping that can be found in almost any port city, or they’re symbols of George Lucas’s frenzied imagination of imperialmilitary might. Either way, it’s hard to see where pride or geographic specificity figures into it. [UPDATE: Maybe now that Oakland managed a general strike and shut down the Port of Oakland, it's a better symbol.]
After the cranes, and at the end of Fermin Park, is a tall fenced gate and barricade. Past the fence, the road continues to an abrupt end, and well below that is the so-called sunken city of Los Angeles. Between a dozen and two dozen homes were destroyed in quakes and ongoing slides as the cliff here gave way. A manhole cover sits two inches from the edge of a cliff. Between several improbable palm trees, tall grass, blooming fennel and wildflowers overtake broken, wildly angled and heavily graffiti’d roads, pipes and curbs.
On a recent trip to Los Angeles, I stayed at a bland beige corporate hotel chain with paper coffee cups that thanked me for making a difference. The cups were made of 100% recycled material, and despite there being no other choice for a cup in sight, I nevertheless apparently now get to save the world and make a difference just by drinking my coffee. No, thank-you, green capitalism. Thank-you for caring.
I had several days to kill, so I decided I was most interested in seeing Los Angeles in ruins. This involved spending almost as much time on freeways, in traffic, as it did actually seeing things of interest, but I mitigated that misery with a good soundtrack: The Doors, Darker Than Blue: Songs From Jamdown, 1973-1980, and a lot of very loud Popol Vuh.
Not far from West Hollywood, in one back corner of Griffith Park, are the bizarre ruins of the old Los Angeles Zoo (1912-1965), where I made my first stop. WPA workers in the 1930s hand-sculpted a variety of animal-scaled stone (concrete) caves, stairways and cages for the zoo, perhaps attempting to approximate the feel of the animals’ native cage environments. They also courteously placed several picnic tables just in front of the bars, so visitors could sit down and enjoy lunch without having to move away from the entertainment.
These days, urban China is made of people, cars, and ubiquitous green scaffolding and yellow-orange cranes flying the red Communist Party flag over construction sites. Everywhere you look, edifices of glass, concrete and stone predominate. By day, construction; through the night, construction. It stops for nothing, not even torrential downpours so heavy that the cab of the crane can’t be seen from the ground.
In western Sichuan, the rains have fallen particularly hard this year, causing floods and mudslides that have killed several dozen people and blocked key roads.
One of those key roads is the one that takes you from Chengdu, where I’ve spent most of my time in China, to Lhasa, the epicenter of Tibet, which is just now laboring under its 59th year of Chinese occupation. It’s rugged country, and the Tibetans are rugged people, accustomed to harsh conditions and high elevations.
The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.
Here is a girl, standing at the end of an alleyway in Chengdu, in the Sichuan province in southwestern China, in the early days of the Gregorian year 2010. The longer I look at these photos the more love I feel for her.
What will she become, and what will life in the place and time she was born into allow her?
When we first made eye contact, she made a grim face, turned abruptly, and marched with purpose the other way. Then she stopped, executed a surprisingly martial turn, and stood surveying me for a pregnant moment. I waved, and she seemed not to respond at all; just stood there stone-faced, or so I thought at the time. After a moment of standing there like an absurd soldier, she vanished into the doorway of what I assume was her home.
In this moment, so many things went through my mind: My god the Chinese are rigid; even this little girl in pink and turquoise walks like an expressionless soldier! What a dirty alleyway; aren’t they loathe to hang their clothes outside in this grime after they just washed them? What is she thinking about me?
When I got the chance to look at these pictures in more detail, I saw that there was a glimmer of a smile on her face, mostly around her eyes. I have very poor vision, and my camera, with its optical zoom, sees far better than I do.
Yes, the Chinese are, for the most part, quite rigid. But you would be too if you lived in an authoritarian state (it’s not communism, it’s a dictatorial form of coordinatorism) where creativity and dissent are often punished, and you knew almost from the start that you were going to have to compete against billions of other people if you hope for any control over the terms of your life. Authoritarianism and a crushing of people’s ability to dream and define the terms of their own lives is mutilation and psychic murder. The Chinese people make the best of the lives their government allows them, and this little girl is a great example of why it’s important to oppose governments and corporations, not peoples. The Chinese people are not to be feared or damned for the vehicle they’ve been shoved into. Their spirit in trying to advance and overcome is to be respected and admired.
This little girl’s alleyway holds several things of interest and relevance. To touch on the simplest one first, the grime is a byproduct of industry and sheer population density, and industry is, in our globally metasticized consumer culture, how people raise their standards of living. And maybe the U.S. didn’t invent it, but we sure did refine it, give it some steroids, and begin exporting it to the world on a massive scale. There are great and obvious distinctions to be made between the U.S. And China of course, but perhaps the largest and most important, as cartoonist, author and occasional New York Times essayist Timothy Kreider observed recently, is that in China, the government owns its corporations, while American corporations own our government.
Second among the things that interest me in this alley is the red and gold tracksuit, probably an older brother or cousin’s national team uniform. It takes passion and determination and focus to excel in the athletic arena. That’s why governments and businesses spend so much money and time on their sports teams. It creates a strong emotional bond between the athletes and those who admire them. It’s an entirely natural thing, the same way one might admire a swift or elegant bird. Then those natural human feelings are appropriated and welded to artificial jingoism. This little girl’s likely older brother or cousin (the one-child policy, while powerful, is not as rigid as is commonly reported) probably takes order and discipline very seriously, and if he’s on a national team, it means he’s achieved some level of recognition for his efforts in a highly competitive society. Even before politics and ideology, this little girl is surely absorbing these things like a sponge: How does one make sense of the world, how does one find one’s way through it? You learn from what’s closest to you. You don’t have to understand ideology to be shaped by it.
As a counterpoint, consider the blue jeans. What do blue jeans mean to the Chinese? Although it’s a glib generalization to talk about “the Chinese,” in much the same way talking about “Americans” is somewhat foolish, asking what blue jeans means is not a silly question to ask in an age of mass-produced culture and mediated conceptions of identity. We live, after all, in an age when people see nothing weird or immediately sad about expressing aspects of themselves through the choice of which mass-produced item they selected for purchase.
And “America,” among many other things, is a brand, embedded with all manner of code that is exported aggressively to the world. “Freedom,” “happiness” and “opportunity” are its dominant brand values. Consider how identified with “America” blue jeans are, and then further consider that the Chinese word for America is meiguo or “beautiful country.” (To be fair, the Chinese mostly see it as just a word, not as a word with literal meaning, much like people in the U.S. rarely think of Chicago, Manhattan or Seattle as Indian words with actual, you know, meaning.)
That said, I have been called meiguoren (美国的, literally, “beautiful country person”), probably several dozen times in my short time here, and it always makes me feel a stab of pain that’s related to the pain I feel when I look around at the ubiquitous Western beauty ideals on display here. Really?, I think, a 5000-year old culture of several billion people with a staggering amount of cultural achievements and it’s own beautiful people and land can’t think of anything better to aspire to now than material wealth and the trappings of hyper consumer culture? They want to be like…. us?
Even a cursory study of China makes it obvious how much yearning and rage course through the people, much like an underground waterway. One of my all-time favorite songs, “Once in a Lifetime,” by the Talking Heads, has a line about there being “water under the water, carrying the water,” and I think it describes the humanity and dogged spirit of the people laboring under the yoke of Chinese government and ascending commerce quite well. They yearn, they long, and, when it boils over, they can exhibit shocking rage. The surface is not the reality.
At the beginning of this, I quoted Wilhelm Reich, Sigmund Freud’s cohort and fellow psychoanalytic theorist, who was the victim of the only U.S. government-ordered book burning in history, and who died in prison, a mad man, after being imprisoned for what he dared to think and write. (Sound familiar?) Freud thought people were violent sadistic animals, who had to be controlled and taught to “civilize” themselves for the good of society and stability. You can fairly say that Freud’s ideas were status quo – he never asked whether conforming to a sick society was natural or not; it was just assumed that being “well-regulated” and conforming was desirable and healthy. This makes me think of the deeply moving and staggeringly far-reaching speech Martin Luther King gave (presented in 1963, at WMU, and well-worth reading if you aren’t already familiar with it), where he attacks the concept of being “maladjusted” in a society to which he did not want to “adjust”:
Reich thought people were loving and good, and that it was the mutilations of society and government, the imposition of unnatural order, that caused neuroses and dysfunction. It was the systematic and unnatural control of people, in other words, that caused them to be violent, and to behave irrationally. Think of a house cat going slowly loopy, eating houseplants that make it sick and playing manically with a toy mouse when all it really wants to do is be outside, eating real mice, rutting at the appointed time, and following its nature. Reich thought eros was the highest expression of human health and actualization, and that it should be given free reign and support if we were to link hands with our higher selves. There are a great many things to take from Reich’s theory and story, but the one I think of most often, and which springs most readily to mind looking at this little Chinese girl caught between repulsion and friendliness is this: Love is both dangerous and beautiful, and sometimes you have to zoom in and pay attention before you can see it looking back at you.
“{It is} something unearthly . . . If there are sentient beings on other planets, then they play Go.” — Emanuel Lasker, international Chess Master
First things first: No, outside of there being white and black pieces placed in alternating turns, it’s nothing like Othello. And it was invented by the Chinese, but is most often referred to by its spiffy Japanese name: Go.
Go, or wéiqí, was created by Chinese emperor Yao about 4000 years ago and was allegedly invented to help a stupid son learn to think better. Or it was invented by Chinese tribal warlords as a strategy aid. Or it began as a fortune-telling medium.
The reality of the game is more interesting than the lore: Go (碁 in Japanese), baduk (바둑 in Korean), and wéiqí (围棋 in the original Chinese), is a game with true majesty for those who devote themselves to it. For its devotees and for mathematicians in almost equal measure, the game inspires reverence and awe. Due to its extremely open-ended play and staggering mathematical possibilities for variation, the game is by far the hardest to teach computers. That fact, along with the clip below, from Darren Aronofsky’s film, π (or Pi) sealed it: Go was the game for me.
“Listen to me. The possibilities of game play are endless. They say that no two Go games have ever been alike. Just like snowflakes. So, the Go board actually represents an extremely complex and chaotic universe. That is the truth of our world…there is no simple pattern. — From π, or Pi
Until recently, Go resisted a high level of mastery by computer intelligence, but advances in artificial intelligence and computing power appear to be making lamentable headway. I’d like to think maybe it was just human beings manipulating things behind the scenes that led to this breakthrough. Call me a human sentimentalist and anti-silicon bigot if you like, but I’m just not into the idea of carbon-based people being bested or replaced by our silicon-based creations. I interviewed a Carnegie Mellon robotics expert, Hans Moravec, several years ago, about a book he’d published arguing that people like me are just squeamish and failing to see that robots and machines are simply “children of our minds.” And I can see his point, in a way. If I were someone who spent all of my time with machines and mostly tinkered away happily in my basement, sans human contact, I might find the ineffable qualities of human experience trivial as well. I might mistake a program for a child.
Speaking of children: Watch out for them and do not take them lightly when playing Go! Many are much better than your calcified adult mind might think. When a friend and I took a dawn train from San Francisco to Palo Alto last year to play at a “qualifying” tournament (to become official card-carrying members of the American Go Association), we faced mostly skilled Korean and Japanese teenagers. And in Chengdu, in the Sichuan province, where I’m presently staying and receiving instruction from an 8-dan master, I lost to one of his many students, a 12-year-old kid dressed very oddly like an American Boy Scout.
Earlier today (late-March), I had lunch at a Buddhist temple in Chengdu with my wéiqí teacher and five Russian business students (one from Siberia, the rest from Moscow). Before meeting them, I had fancy visions in my head of meeting some Serious Russian Go Players, but Svetlana, Alexandra, Dmitrii, Anzhela, and another woman who was too cool to offer up a card, turned out to be newbies who were drawn to the game more for its reputation than for anything more substantive. I learned during our meal that they had contacted my teacher to learn more about the game because they thought the principles of Go might be useful if applied to business. They wanted to know: what competitive edge might Go-playing give to aspiring businesspeople?
During the lunch, I wondered if I might have offended any of the Russians when I said that Go had ruined me for chess. “Why?” asked Dmitrii pointedly. “Well,” I explained, wary of giving offense to a game that many Russians revere and are quite skillful at, “chess is mechanistic and deterministic, whereas Go is more open-ended, with many more possible plays and patterns to understand. That’s why it’s easier to teach a computer to play chess than Go. In some ways I think it rewards creativity more than memorization.”
One odd footnote to this meeting was that while writing this post, I thought to hop over and email the Russians about some of the questions they’d had, about travel Go sets, about good Go tutorial books, and about online servers for Go players. (Several of them offered “visiting help” if I made good on my plan to take the Trans-Siberian train back to Moscow before returning to the U.S.) Every single email address bounced and came up as “invalid.” So either they were traveling with bogus business cards for reasons you could speculate endlessly over, Gmail was being blocked by Russia, or the internet or IT department at the school that issued their cards (Skolkovo Moscow School of Management, a real institution) was having a particularly bad day.
Whatever the case, they paid for a bunch of delicious food and I do believe I was the most ravenous of the eaters present.
But I digress. Play Go. Immerse yourself: Start watching Hikaru No-Go, a highly addictive Japanese manga series credited with reviving the popularity of Go in Japan. Then check out Sensei’s Library and learn about the theory, practice, and culture of Go. Learn the ABC’s through an interactive tutorial at The Interactive Way To Go. Solve ranked and categorized problems at Goproblems.com. Then log-on to one of the two major online Go servers: KGS or IGS. Both are free and allow records of games for review. KGS tends to be friendlier and new players can often find helpful instruction and tutorial games with other members.
Then, for a game, email me or come find me on KGS, username: loudcanary.
I was taken on a lovely tour of the fog-wreathed high mountain tea country in Nantou County, in the central and only landlocked part of Taiwan. It’s easy to see why the Portuguese dubbed this place “formosa,” which means “beautiful island.” Butterflies and lush vegetation abound.
Among the many interesting natural sites, I also saw the “bamboo house” that Nationalist (KMT) leader Lord Chiang would retreat to in the years after he lost his struggle against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and was forced to flee mainland China. I’m not sure if he went here before or after he contracted from his concubines the gonorrhea that would eventually sterilize him and leave him with only one biological son, but it was definitely before the “White Terror,” during which he imprisoned or executed upwards of 140,000 people, including a fair number of the Taiwanese intellectual and social elite, for opposing the Nationalist KMT government in Taiwan.
The issue of Taiwanese independence remains complicated today. A significant portion of Taiwanese, especially “mainlanders” of the business class who lament the economic limitations of being a small island economy with “only” 23 million people, favor re-unification with China. One of my partner’s uncles, a businessman who supplies shoes and handbags to high-end retailers, spoke bluntly of wanting unification: “Taiwan is too small,” he said. “To grow, we must unify.” He did not seem concerned, as a member of the upwardly mobile business class, of what freedoms he might lose were Taiwan to unify with China. Others, especially those of native Taiwanese descent, like the farmer I would cut bamboo with several days after photographing the bamboo house, above, feel differently: “In China,” he said, “the government owns everything and you own nothing. In Taiwan,” he enthused, “we own everything, and we have freedom: you can go to 7-11 for something any time of the day or night.”
It’s hard to know, given my own lack of command of Chinese or Taiwanese, and his far better, yet still limited English, if this was truly how he saw the issue of democratic freedom — as a consumer — or if it was simply the way he could explain it in English. It could very well also have a lot to do with the fact that there may be more 7-11′s in Taiwan than there are Taiwanese.
After my tour of the mountains, I was invited to visit a local tea aficionado to learn more about the history, process, art, and etiquette of Taiwan’s second-most-acclaimed product (the first being the creation and modern defense of a functioning democratic Chinese society and government).
We entered and began the tasting: Spring and Winter varieties of Rose Oolong, Jasmine and Black teas were in the offing, and it was surprising just how distinct the flavor of each season’s tea was. I learned that the best tea is grown at the highest altitudes, where it takes the longest to mature. Winter tea is the most prized, and most expensive, though I personally favor the spring tea for its greener, and more precisely chlorophyllic aroma and color.
[I found a visually compelling personal video about one Taipei man's journey of self-discovery to tea country in Taiwan that's worth checking out, though it doesn't teach you much about the actual tea-making process. If you're curious about the actual process, check out this video.]
I am a mostly unapologetic hedonist, and I often have as much trouble limiting my enjoyment of something pleasurable or delicious as I do stopping an interesting conversation, or leaving a beautiful place. So I kept accepting one cup of fine tea after another as my host offered them. I was at this tasting with my partner F. and her parents, and courtesy dictated that if I accepted more, more would be served. I was having a grand and fabulously caffeinated time, completely engrossed in asking as many questions as came to mind while everyone translated for me. What was the difference between black tea, green tea and oolong? (They’re all from the Camellia Senesis plant, but black tea is fully fermented/oxidized, oolong to a lesser extent, and green tea not at all). Why was the first short steeping of the tea always discarded? (To “wake” the tea and to wash away any residue on the leaves before drinking). Why were there so many steeps of each tea, and why such tiny cups? (We were performing a ceremonial method called gongfucha, and the exacting chemistry and temperature of the ceremony dictates smaller cups with hotter water). Would a person get fat from eating so many of these delicious biscuits, peanuts, and cookies between each serving of tea? (“Not as long as they’re consumed with tea!,” chirped my comfortably stout host.)
I also learned just how intensive the human labor of tea (especially oolong) is. The vast majority of it is picked by hand, a pound of tea requires tens to hundreds of thousands of leaves, and pay is generally very low. Taking this into consideration, the slower and more deliberate consumption of tea makes perfect sense.
It was not until many hours and maybe 50 cups of tea (small ones, but really: 50) that I realized just how very much tea had been consumed. I was tea drunk. When we finally tore ourselves away, my obviously great love of tea led our host to offer me a very fine traveling tea set and some lovely spring tea to take with me on my travels. Score!
That night, I worked merrily through the night while F. and her parents complained bitterly the next morning about insomnia and bad sleep.
It is not simply national chauvinism when the Taiwanese tell you, as they often do, that the very best tea is from Taiwan. Much of the choicest tea they produce is bought up by men doing business in mainland China, who use it as prized gifts with which to grease the wheels of commerce. This is so common, I was told by a merchant for one of Taiwan’s largest tea producers, that it’s sometimes hard for the average Taiwanese to get any of their prized winter tea. I noticed that the Wikipedia entry on oolong tea does not mention this fact. Then again, as great as Wikipedia is, you can’t be too trusting of anything you read online…
We arrived in Hong Kong early in the morning, en route to Taipei.
Our landing was rough. Stomach-vanishing rough. During the worst of it, I looked over and saw a stone-faced woman next to me with a pendant necklace hovering straight out from her body instead of resting on her neck. I suppose flight is for the birds, and that most of us humans take it far too much for granted, rather than as the miraculous (if deeply ecologically problematic) thing it really is. [See for yourself] One of my favorite comedians, Louis CK, has a great bit about this, and about how privileged and spoiled most of us have become about the wonders of modern technology:
After touching down in Taipei, we took a bus and high speed bullet train to Zhushan, a farming town of about 30,000 in Nanto, central Taiwan. We’re staying at my partner F.’s family’s home, the center of what used to be a large farm. The grandfather and patriarch of the family is 8th-generation Taiwanese, but recent times have seen the decline of the farm that parallels the stories of much of the area, with sons and daughters alike alighting for potentially more exciting and presumably less laborious work in business. In F’s family, it’s mostly the shoe business. The family’s land has been sold off over time, and what remains is a courtyard with seven or eight homes arranged in a horseshoe around it.
I didn’t sleep on the flight, so when we finally arrived, I was dead on my feet, and went to bed almost immediately, smelling fire under simmering bamboo soup, and many other things I couldn’t identify, and that my nose may well never have experienced before.
It’s worth mentioning that since taking a perfuming workshop in San Francisco several weeks ago, my sense of smell has been in hyperdrive. On the plane, I smelled every foot, every lotion, and every other less-appetizing thing there was to smell. In the Zhushan countryside, the smells are better. From my bed, I smelled well-seasoned Taiwanese sausages (rice wine, garlic, Chinese cinnamon powder, and soy sauce paste) curing in the next room, along with glutinous rice and daikon cakes that are fried then fed to the gods at New Year’s, but then eaten by mortals once the gods have had their fill. It was explained to me that the gods eat only the cake’s essence, which works out well for everyone, I suppose.
After sleeping for 14 hours, I awoke to an eager rooster crowing well before dawn, and decided to walk into town, about 20 minutes away. I took a shoulder-less road flanked on one side by an open mountain spring-fed culvert.
As I walked, I saw several trucks with water barrels and long-nosed suction pumps pull over along the road, drivers climbing directly from cab to bed to extract some of this water, and was told that people travel from other places for this mountain spring water, because it makes the best tea. Lush vegetation rioted happily in family gardens on all sides: banana trees, corn, plots of sweet potatoes, and more lettuce than I expected, given the seeming lack of lettuce in the Taiwanese diet.
I do not speak Taiwanese or Mandarin. F.’s grandmother and grandfather speak only Taiwanese, and everyone else in the family seems to speak both Mandarin and Taiwanese. I keep making all manner of small mistakes relating to my cultural ignorance, then struggle to understand what I’m being told. For example: my first meal with the family, I put my chopsticks down in my bowl to rest, so that they were pointing upward. This is a no-no; chopsticks are to lay flat when not in use, and are only placed downward in a bowl when offering food to the gods. I felt stupid and sad to have made a disrespectful blunder, but, of course, I had no way of knowing about this custom. As an American, I marvel somewhat at the complexity and reverence displayed for the gods here. I have come, over time, to believe we occupy an animistic world, where everything is alive in the simplest sense. Not only does this jibe with what knowledge I have of nature and quantum physics, but I also have this sense that something about materialism and monotheism, not to mention scientific ascendancy, have robbed meaning and magic from a great number of important and vital things. But it’s one thing to believe such a thing in an abstract intellectual way, and quite another to experience a culture where none of this is an abstraction, and where there are gods for everything, who must be respected and paid attention to. Offerings are made to the earth god, and it was explained to me that every region has its own earth god. The temple for the earth god of this area is just several hundred yards down the road, and the patriarch of the family, now over 90 years old and mostly deaf, walks down to pay his respects every morning.
I was happy to see that animals are largely unaffected by linguistic or cultural barriers. I made fast friends with a still-nursing female dog raising her three pups in front of a house, and right by the busy road. After approaching shyly and seeing I was friendly, she became enthusiastically friendly herself, and has since come out to greet me and walk me down the road in either direction every time I’ve passed. In the picture to the left, she is approaching me from the direction of the temple of Zhushan’s earth god.
I passed a large, two-story roost for homing pigeons (more on how I learned this, later) just before the foggy countryside gave way abruptly to cityscape. I bought two “tea eggs” from a 7-Eleven, the only recognizable western chain I’ve seen here so far. Tea eggs are hard boiled eggs that are then gently cracked and simmered in a broth of black tea, soy sauce, anise, cinnamon, sugar, peppercorn and mandarin peel. You get them from what looks like a crockpot filled with a dark brown broth, and the whites of the eggs are tan, with darker brown marbling. I found them delicious. At 7am, the streets of the city were an organized bedlam, with pedestrians and people on scooters navigating what seemed to me, especially at first, like impossibly limited space.
Since I couldn’t read any of the street signs or speak the language, I decided against a complex walk, made just one turn near the city center, and weaved the length of the street, before turning back and returning the way I came. Many, if not most people in Zhushan ride scooters — not just adults or boys. Grandmothers, fathers with daughters, mothers with three kids, mothers with two kids and large potentially explosive propane tanks nestled between their legs — everyone.
About half of those on scooters wear what appear to be surgical face masks. I say appear because that’s what I thought they were at first. Such masks were ubiquitous at the Hong Kong and Taipei airports, covering the mouths and noses of all food service workers and most administrative staff. We were even given a “flu kit” as we left the secured area of Taipei Airport. It was surprisingly elegant: a bright red package containing a well-constructed face mask with cloth strings, some pleasant-smelling soap, and a packet of disinfectant tissues. F.’s was plaid and relatively tasteful. Mine, unfortunately, had a tesselated pattern of hearts and American flags. Someone later explained to me that the people on scooters wear these not for flu-prevention, but in order not to breath the noxious levels of exhaust they’re exposed to, and my brief walk through town convinced me of the wisdom of this. My sense of smell may be peculiarly heightened right now, but the haze in the air and sooty grime on any available surface corroborated what my nose was telling me.
One seemingly significant aspect of the overall decline of this area has to do with air pollution. My partner’s mother tells me that the main reason tea farms, a significant part of the local economy, have left the area and moved to higher elevations is for “clean air.”
Still, urban grime is offset by gardens in almost every available patch, growing right up to the edge of the road, nestled next to busy intersections, in planters on rooftops, or in someone’s 10′ x 10′ front yard. Such gardens are commonplace here in Zhushan, and they make me wonder why more people, especially in the fertile Mediterranean climate of Northern California, my adopted home, are not doing the same. After preparing the soil and planting the seeds, as long as you’re willing to weed every now and then, it’s free and healthy food.
I returned to breakfast in the courtyard: delicious oolong tea, grown at the higher elevations here in Taiwan, along with freshly picked bananas, the aforementioned delicious sausages, and fresh milk. Afterward, I was teased (nicely) about my healthy appetite, and was strongly encouraged to eat two pickled, sweetened olives by my partner’s aunt, a brassy and assertive woman who made soothing motions on her belly and explained: “For digestion.” They were so tart my right eye twitched and fluttered as I thanked her, “Xiexie!“
In the courtyard, two young kids whose family rents a place from F’s family, kept yelling “Meiguo ren!,” the Mandarin word for “American” over and over again, which was kind of funny, but quickly became annoying. F. finally yelled “Taiwan ren!” (Taiwanese!) back and they stopped. Now they just want to play all the time, and run around in the courtyard yelling “Where’s the American?” or “Where’s the other American?” in Mandarin.
Later in the day, we took a walk up a beautiful path behind the family place, through bamboo forests and banana mangroves, and past dozens, if not hundreds, of large spiders with markings startlingly like a human face on their backs, and bright yellow dots and red egg sacs on their undersides, maybe 4 or 5 inches in span, and who do something I’ve never seen before: they spin two-colored webs. The main web looks normal enough, but the top strand that holds it all up is thicker, and bright yellow.
I guess I never really knew what the pods/clusters of bananas look like — somewhat akin to inverted artichokes, but instead of the meaty part near the root you find in artichokes, bananas grow there, first as tiny embryonic versions, maybe half-an-inch long, that will eventually grow into maturity.
We also passed several striated hills that used to be used for growing tea, but are now abandoned and brown. When I first met F.’s mother, she was most animated when showing me the proper preparation of tea. When she explained to me that it was to be steeped for absolutely no more than 25 seconds, she spoke as if personally aggrieved by the ongoing widespread murder of tea by ignorant fools. So: Steep for 25 seconds,using only half a teaspoon of tea, then pour out the water so that you may re-use the leaves and enjoy several more (small) cups! If you do not follow these directions, if you let the leaves linger in sitting water or steep for too long, they will lose their essence and you will have ruined a potentially exquisite experience.
