Two Dishes But To One Table

Talking to a Tourist About Taiwan Presidents

I have to learn not to bring up Taiwan politics with people I don't know.  I am a foreign interloper with just enough knowledge to make a fool out of myself.  Just yesterday I got into it with a Taiwan tourist who was asking directions.  We ended up chatting awhile over a coffee on Christopher Street at Factory.  Predictably things broke down along Green-Blue party lines and the notion of Taiwan’s President faking an assassination attempt last summer.  No matter what one believes about that episode, I think it is something to which we can never know a conclusive answer.  We can lean one way or another on conflicting versions of the events but I keep running into people who are absolutely convinced of their conclusions.  I can understand the divisiveness and passion for the DPP and KMT but I think people project their partisan feelings onto the question of what happened that day; what someone thinks happened breaks down along party lines. 

More surprising though was this tourist's opinion that Bush is bad and so is Chen Shuei Bien.  The comparison seems senseless to me because the politics of the two countries are so different and what divides the electorates is so different.  Thinking about the five Taiwan presidents I don't think any of them correspond to any US president.   I want to say Bush senior is like Lien Zhan due to his privileged background and plutocratic tendencies but that fit is not even apt.   I don't see how the KMT and the DPP can be an analogy to anything we have here either.

This tourist, a chemist and world traveler finally gave the opinion that Taiwan under Chiang Kai-Shek had been great because there was no corruption back then.  Chiang Kai Shek kept organized crime in its place and would have stopped 2-28/White Terror if he could have.  At that point I successfully changed the subject.

Tubthumping, 2001

Back in 2001 I realized that I wasn't reading much anymore.  Books, though, are like exercise and like friends – one can MAKE time for them.  And so I started setting my alarm an hour earlier and drinking coffee upon arising (coffee had long been afternoon only for me).   I now nostalgically recall those early morning reading sessions. 

Every day at 5:30 AM I would pad across the cold tile floors of the apartment -- since it was Taiwan, every single room was tiled.   I would squat on the tile near the two burner range in our no-oven, highly wok-oriented kitchen, studying the ring of flames from the kettle burner, the room lit only by the blue glow of the natural gas, waiting for the kettle to sing.  Once coffee was assembled, I would carry it back through the dark apartment to my bathroom, run a bath, and settle into the hot water with the day's reading material. 

Most of the time it was "From Dawn to Decadence : 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present" by Jacques Barzun.  Many are that book’s water-wrinkled pages and many are the colors of pen used to underline passages in it.  Another big tub favorite was miscellaneous American media, downloaded to AvantGo on the Palm Pilot.  Salon, NY Times, Pitchfork Media, and the Economist all cheered me in my Asian tub.   

Sneaky Blogging Inside Mainland China.

"Over 1000 words, including “dictatorship”, “truth”, and “riot police” are automatically banned in China’s online forums.. . . but bloggers are quick to find euphemisms so that they can continue conversation despite keyword filtering. "
(From a brief history of Chinese bloggers in  New Scientist)

Rock It Inna Rub-A-Dub Chinese Stylee, Man

If you want to order CDs by rock bands in Taiwan and Japan, there is a huge site, Yes Asia.  If you can spell it, they have it: Faye Wong, The Brilliant Green, Sticky Rice, Utadu Hikaru.    And Wu Bai:

Anticipating The Bound Version of This Cookbook

These would be the only recipes I have ever read for entertainment value.  All from Erf at Oberlin:

Recipe 1

Recipe 2

Recipe 3

Taiwan TV

Taiwan Tiger has a half dozen screen shots of TV in Taiwan. It's a nice cross-section. It reminded me of many TV favorites I had and which I'm sure are still on. If he gets more screenshots maybe he can add the following Taiwan TV shows:
1) a panel show of "amazing foreigners" who can speak Mandarin making jokes about themselves and about other foreigners
2) Some TV commercials that sell the product not based how the product can help improve you but on how it can improve your family, especially your parents and children. Clean water machines, nutritious food, safe cars, all can help your family.
3) A comedy from Hong Kong where two cute people meet and have to sneak away from their expensive, wedding to have some time to themselves.
4) Billiards! Live!
5) Cartoons of Cherry Ball (young schoolgirl), Shao Ding Dong / Doreamon (part Felix part Calvin and Hobbes. A blue cat who pulls magic devices from a marsupial pouch), and Shao Buo Buo (white Euro-mouse).
6) Yokohama mini-skirt police (the ones with the vinyl police uniforms)
7) Any TV news segment showing flooding
8) Lee Ao's show, the red jacketed, ex-presidential candidate, history professor, Ben Franklinish lady-charmer and ardent mainland re-unifier.
9) The two AWESOME local Taiwanese comediens who dress up as women -- one might even be a Geisha. The guy that has the electric guitar on his knee wears a silver wig sometimes. I guess they tell "cold jokes". The souvenir I missed most from Taiwan was a cell phone cover with their faces on it.

It's surprising what makes it to number one.

I wonder if anyone will be mad: a Yahoo Images search for "cultural revolution" turns up a bunch of cheery/corny governement posters from Maoist China. The one that is less cheery is the #1 hit, my page (strangely), a bonfire of burning 1000 year old wooden Buddhas. And then when I search Google images I got nought from my site (which is as more appropriate). Lesson: it's worthwhile using both engines to get maximum results on image searching.

UPDATE: If you want the real deal, hundreds of PRC propaganda images, Stefan Landsberger has the goods. Navigate his site by using words at the bottom of the page like more and by clicking on the pictures themselves. I spent a half hour there and never plumbed the bottom of the collection.

Walking on Chinese Stones

In Taiwan one common garden feature is the river stone path. It is a self-massaging walkway, made of black polished rocks set in concrete. Visitors to the garden are invited to remove their shoes and tread carefully across the rocks barefoot. It hurts.

As I said, it’s common. Anyone who has been to a Taiwan public garden has seen one. They aren’t used by that many people, though. I often found myself alone on them or maybe seeing just one old person. I’m not too into walking backwards while slapping my butt or any of the other weird Taichi exercises but I always enjoyed the stony paths very much.

The paths come in different degrees of difficulty, depending on how sharp or round the stones are. I have seen boastful old men striding potently over some of the sharp ones, calloused feet or mental strength being implied by their ability to walk these rocks. I pick my way along like a mountain goat, standing for a long time on any one spot, letting the effect sink in. I think this is how they’re meant to be used. It’s an auto-massage in the end. Chinese doctors like variations on massage. For them, the bottom of your foot is just one more accessible place to press, suction, moxybustify, or needle you. Depending on where you stimulate the foot bottom, various effects should show up elsewhere in the body. A lazy or malfunctioning liver can supposedly be stimulated by pressing on the corresponding location on your sole. The path then presents an easy alternative to getting a professional massage. You massage your entire body by walking on these stones. I have seen a miniature version of the stones that is constructed as a Dr Scholls type shoe insert. A pair of these in your shoes can allegedly give you the massaging effects of the stony path all day long. I don’t believe these really work. I think a stone in the shoe is just that, a stone in your shoe.

What got me thinking of all this is that here in Michigan, on vacation, I run on a trail that crosses a river and I have to go barefoot to cross it. The overall sensation is like the stony paths and I have to assume the practice of walking on the smooth stones must have originated in a real riverbed at some point. Crossing the river this way every morning excites me. And makes my feet happy. No way to tell if this ford here stimulates my liver. . .

Here are the Chinese-Americans

Data from the last census describe how many people live in New York's two Chinatowns. The statistics also show the breakdown of origins of these residents. In Flushing, 55,000 people are from China, 2,200 are from Hong Kong, while 3,000 are from Taiwan. In Chinatown, 25,000 people are from China, 1,800 are from Hong Kong, and only 206 are from Taiwan. The statistics is based on the 2000 Census and does not include illegal immigrants.

Canon Chinois

I like getting the Albert Wu translation on this cannon stamp.  Albert claims he is new to blogging but let it be known that he ran the original Albert's Column at KKZ Hard Drive (NEHS) back in the day so AMW is an O.G. at this thing.