04-APR-A-4
THE FIRST OF MY “
ON THE FOUR-DAY LONG
IN HONOR OF THE ANCESTORS:
BEGINNING TODAY WITH NANHUA
UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT’S CAR AND DRIVER TO VISIT
THE MUSEUM, THE
April 3--4,
2004
Today marks
the start of the long weekend—a holiday in
DOWNPOUR DAY
DAMPENS
SEASIDE TOURING
We went first to a small farm which is run by a plant pathologist who has grafted a group of trees; we also saw his five thousand year old stump that is carved into nine dragons. We admired the antiques of great value from mainland and ancient Formosan sources. Among the different antiques and special items were a group of special teapots, which seemed to be small but were highly significant. Just how so was a surprise but we had a very extensive demonstration of what would be a scientific “Oriental Tea Ceremony” with a porous pot, which absorbs water and the heat stays with the tea leaves and the special rituals used in the sequence of teas to be drunk all on a wooden stump that weighed three and a half tons all polished with a special trough in the top of the table made of the stump with elephant shaped stools adjacent to the table. We heard a lot of the tea ceremony stories and then I was formally presented with the one-of-a kind teapots which is fragile so I have to carry it in hand on the return trip—along with the film and other items that are part of the extensive carryon baggage. I have tried to lighten my load by mailing the books to the limit of what I could send back. I have a group of other items to carry out and now I am getting more items that are souvenirs of the stay here in Taiwan with the enthusiasm of their donors which means I will have still more to get home.
It seems that every day there is more and more expanded detail for expected return trips in the cong year, with more and more ideas of my remaining here as someone who will develop a program that I do not even yet understand and two thirds of which I would disagree as hokum nonsense in the “natural healing science: which is long on belief and short on science. If I were running the program or any part of it, there would be a lot of science to prove or disprove the vaunted claims for a lot of nostrums.
We had seen the fish pond which he had fed with the fish food as the sky opened up and soaked us again—and the entire day was more of the same. It was a long ride through the rain when we went to a statue visible from a distance of a general named General Jin. He is the hero of the island since it was he in 1661 who had come to terms with the Europeans whom he beat with a huge force and his very large swords and other implements of war like battleaxes which were on display in the museum built inside the 108 meter statue in ten stories high. I climbed to the top but our driver and Nimit were not up to the high altitude exertion, but preferred to drink beer in his special covered ice-containing coffee cup that he horses all day with his “life support system.” I learned that the Europeans who were defeated and agreed to return to Europe allowing General Jin to take over and to develop the island as an independent Oriental kingdom where Dutch!
We also passed a party with a large dragon dancing through the various levels of a new house with a loud clashing of the bands and a great spread of food out under a tent. Without knowing how it happened we got caught up in the private party for the dedication of a new house. I figured I should send the team over to Derwood since mine is being readied at a large cost and heavier involvement in architects than the same one here getting the full benefit of the imitation party. We stopped along the road to see another temple and its careful reconstruction after recent earthquake damage.
We ate sticky rice and duck soup on the street then nothing would content Nimit but to have more beer and to insist the I get a special roast dried squid So, I finally had to eat a whole roast dried squid and to be able to swallow the dried salty squid I had to have a beer to get to take it in. So, I had only one beer of the eight or nine that I was behind him. There followed a very long drive in the rain to go to the East Coast to see the harbor at a place called Dubain but all I saw were extensive aquaculture fishponds with aerating fishwheels and flocks of egrets whirling around them. In the ocean side there were extensive boom floats suspending chains with the oysters being farmed for cultured pearls. We walked the harbor town where an extensive highway system was started and then stopped when they ran out of money, so, like San Francisco, the highways just go ff into flyovers that stop in mid-air. We saw the women shucking oysters and a rather dismal not yet prosperous town where there is a ferry port that goes off to an island called Pungha that is a special scenic site. It is an all day affair going out to the island on the ferry for a few of the sights to be seen in an island environment that looks like a few of the Pacific islands seen on Discovery Channel kinds of documentary.
The continuous rain made some changes for the next day. The rain means that there will be mudslides and earthquake instability on Ali Shan and the remote mountains we were scheduled to get to again made that a nonstarter. Sp, we are not going to have a trip on the next day, so I made plans to run in the morning and to write a few letters and take a day off on campus, while getting to the two day overnight trip the following day.
YOUNG WOMEN
WHO LIVE IN GLASS HOUSES
SHOULD NOT
SELL BETEL NUT
Along the roadways in the rural areas—not in the developed part of towns, are glass boxes that look like the normal kinds of kiosks that sell vegetables and farm produce, except they are glass with blue neon trim around them. In front of them is a rotating red and/or blue light that flashes when the small glass booth is occupied. The occupant is often a startling looking young woman dressed, at the very least, in a short, short miniskirt, and with a lot of makeup and sometimes even—gasp—cleavage! This is a salesperson, dressed in the kind of attire or nearly dressed in it that one would find on any urban street as a hooker. Here they very well might have that same function, if they could only draw the curtain designed to keep the glass box from becoming an oven by the bright sun of mid-afternoon, but they are not supposed to leave the glass box except to get to the customers’ car out in front. There they are to deliver the specially lime-wrapped betel nut in a coca leaf, a high value item like that of the Khat (or “chat” in Somaliland) and a barely legal stimulant chew.
The filthy habit means that there are bright maroon streaks of spit on the sidewalks and streets, but often as well dribbling down chins and staining teeth lips and gums. The sales “girls” are very stylized in their approach and wear their special revealing costumes as an advertisement for their wares—at least some of them on the public display for sale. The driver simply slows down and she recognizes a customer and pops out of the box to bring out whatever wares she has and pauses long enough to tell whatever other specials of the day are on sale.
This is an epidemiologic picture I needed to take, since it is the source of at least two different contagions. One of those is the filth of regular betel nut chewing produces carcinogens that give very nasty head and neck cancers, which cause erosion and fistulas from the oral cavity. The big cases I had seen in the All India Institute of Medical Science (their NIH equivalent) were based in the betel nut traffic, and it is also common along the Eastern coast of Africa among the cab drivers and those who believe the betel nut helps them stay awake longer to work more hours. It may do that by the usual method of shortening life overall, but no one makes such a calculation as a youth, while smoking, lying out in the sun, tanning, or chewing khat or betel nut. The habit had caused petty crime and worse in places like the Northern Marianas when I was in Saipan as a requirement for the use of cash and the stresses that it imposed on having to pick up such a readily disposable income. The same stories as are revolving around the legalization of pot are the ones already subsumed by betel nut.
We drove along the areas of the rural roads where such glass boxes are common, before the major freeway, and outside towns, where there is community pressure not to have half dressed young women on display next to the grocery market. I got my epidemiologic picture, since I believe that the high value mark up comes not in the delivery of betel nut alone, but in the ideal “market niche” the purchasers of this product fit as consumers of sexual favors on the part of the long haul drivers, and it becomes an etiologic vector in the purveying of other contagions along the way. It is a quasilegal advertising for many products and services that would otherwise be illegal.
THE TWO
QUESTIONS I AM ALWAYS ASKED:
WHAT DO I EAT?
AND, WHO DO I
MEET?
What do I eat? I can say one thing for sure: if I were not already adept at the manipulating of chopsticks and the purveying of various foodstuffs to my mouth with these two fulcrumed sticks, I would be out of luck in the orient, since no special accommodation is made for the chopsticks-impaired westerner. Second, if I were squeamish about various forms of dead sea life delivered as potential edibles, I would not have started in toward calorie balance. I could not imagine myself being here as a few of my colleagues who once announced “I don’t eat red meat or fish” therefore limited to chicken. And even the chicken turns out often to be duck. There is a lot of vegetarianism with a large number of fungi and other items included in the diet, as well as a lot of curd in one from or another.
When we go “up market” to eat out at a specially fancy place, it is often Japanese. It is usually the case that if one is to have a fancy expensive dining out experience in the US it is French, if in the Middle East, it is Lebanese, and here it is Japanese. So most things are soy-soaked, with Miso Soup a specialty and a large number of seaweed specials—kelp, agar, algae, and a number of bottom-feeder sea life such as sea cucumbers crabs and other low life forms
I was once a variety-impaired eater, during a period of my life in which I subsisted largely on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. But, when I finally began eating seafood, and for health reasons made it a preferred substance for protein, I got to know a number of arthropods and other items that were quite tasty in a variety of menus not stuck to the old “beef and potatoes” of my ancestral stock. If I had not made that transition before becoming a widely traveled explorer, I would have done most of it hungry...
WHOM DO I MEET?
I was going to hold on to this question that I am often asked. I thought I might be able to make it throughout two weeks in Taiwan and be able to make this statement now at the conclusion when John Daly arrived from NIH for his first visit to Taiwan, that his presence has now DOUBLED the number of Caucasians in my presence. Not so.
When I had first arrived, a group photo of us was taken in the temple with the Buddhist nun who was our host of my first night in Taiwan when we had the lecture and demonstration of the Grand master of his ability to project energy and the healing aura. I was skeptical, but everyone else around me was a true believer. We had a group photo taken and only when I saw this picture later did I realize that I was the single and sole representative of the West—the only Caucasian in that crowd. Well, I have now made it out two weeks, and the “frame” of that picture has now been expanded. I remained, until the very day I walked out on the suspension foot bridge near the temple in the town we visited in the rain where we had seen the sesame seed cakes being squeezed of their oil and the special sesame oil sold along the market streets. I walked out along the footbridge and there were two young men in rain jackets over the required white shirts and ties with a lapel tag announcing their names as Elder James from Las Vegas, and Elder Robert from Las Vegas---an obvious pair of Mormon missionaries with their umbrellas, having recently got off their bicycles and touring around the town looking for a pair of other Mormon believers whom they had been told might live in this town. They were greeted by Nimit who said “Hello” to them. In looking at Nimit, the first thing they did was to try to address him in Mandarin. Of course, they found out that he spoke far better English than they did Mandarin, so they said they were from Las Vegas. “What are you doing here?” asked Nimit. “We are with the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints and t his is Elder Robert.”
Perhaps it is a mark of my advancing age to have an 18-year old refer to himself as my elder come as some surprise. I said, “Well, it is four months after Christmas, and you are allowed to call home I believe on your Mother’s birthday and Christmas, so how soon is your mother’s birthday?” “Oh, you know!” said Elder Robert.
So, on an unlikely place on an unlikely day the first encounter with another Westerner has occurred since my arrival in Taiwan. There would undoubtedly be far many more encounters if I were in Taipei or if I hung out in n International hotels, or if I were not in so southern and central a university small farming town. But, it really is remarkable that I have not noticed until now that I had been alone without the Westernization that seems to percolate and infiltrate everywhere. It is more apparent when I had spent a long period of time in the Congo in 1994, in 1996 and 1998 when I was in remote Central Africa and no one of my skin color could be seen anywhere around me. But today is the first time I had made that same observation about how thoroughly “oriented” I have been.
“SO TIRED,
HOT, BUSY,
AND THAT BOY
IS SO STUPID!”
Yuth Nimit is a very thorough host, and has the habit of making sure no detail is beneath his attention in being sure that I am accommodated. He pays for every morsel that I eat or drink, and at least one of those items, he continually offers me, even though I may have refused four times earlier before noon and a dozen times after that in the later part of the day “Beer?” he asks, pointing to his special refrigerated “lunch box” in which he carries his “life support system.” Each morning he takes out of the refrigerator a six pack of beers he has frozen in the freezer and nurses them during the entire course of the day. He must time the use of these, and carries an insulated covered cup in which he must pour the non-ice component parts of the beers as they slowly thaw in the remarkably efficient insulated bag. All day he carries his “coffee cup” in which you can hear the clinking of the ice as he swirls it. He explained that he had taken out ten thousand NT in anticipation of my visit, but did not have much money after his preliminary stop to see that I had sufficient beer (make that, that HE did not run out, since I have had fewer than on e of his daily six pack rations in my several weeks.) He bought 12 cases of beer, Taiwanese, Chinese TsingTsao beer and even US Busch beer, and has them stashed mainly in my “wooden house” with a refrigerator full in my house as well as his. His “bearers” are any student walking anywhere near him, who must realize that one of their jobs is to carry whatever he has in hand, and that always includes the several beers in their disguised containers.
He is an intrusive host, in that there is not much privacy time. I recall two literary references that typify the kind of attention to detail that comes along with his attentiveness.
First was a description written by George Eliot in “The Rise of Silas Latham.” In the book there is a New York Dowager whose imperiousness extends, Eliot describes, to “no detail that is too small for her not to observe and quickly interject her evaluation and imperious directives about it.” Nimit went through the bag packed up by his Thai “boy”—a graduate student who is trying to finish a masters degree in the program of the Dean, the Buddhist monk whom Nimit considers his nemesis, and in the bag he found a hair dryer, sun screen—all for an overnight trip to the beach, all of which seemed quite reasonable to me. “Why he carry al this? He does not need this!” was Nimit’s judgment. I would allow that he could carry anything he would like and would not intrude into the details of his life, such as a number of them in which he was an interested observer. For example, the conference in Thailand that is potentially forthcoming is one in which he would like to use this fellow (all are called “boy” if anything less than a few years younger than he) and he insisted he take the time to go with him. But that is in the middle of the exams for his master’s degree.
He insisted he go to each of the teachers and get an agreement to go anyway, getting the exam earlier or later or excused altogether, saying he would have the president of the university sign a letter permitting this. The “boy” declined, since he did not want to offend the Dean of the program that would be the single person who could block his graduate degree program output. Now granted, I may to believe that the program and its title warrants a degree program myself, since I was a keynoter in it—the graduate degree is in “Death and Dying.” But, it is the reason that the “boy” is here from Thailand and living in the Buddhist monastery, so he does not want to blow it at the last week of his graduate program, something which I would understand as quite reasonable. “So stupid!” is Nimit’s summary response.
I do not believe I have ever categorized up front anything that anyone else has said or done with which I might disagree as “so stupid.” But, that is the most frequent adjective that is assigned to anyone who is not part of the program to push forward his agenda. It is one thing I would learn from him to abjure.
He is almost always “too hot.” This means that when he enters a room—any room—he immediately throws open the windows and turns on the overhead fans to blow away all the papers lying around and turns the A/C on to give a cold air shower to anyone sitting anywhere inside the room, since his presence in the room requires such ambient conditions, whether or not the others might feel similarly inconvenienced by a temperature not of their choosing.
The other literary reference I have is to Malden’s “A Walk in the Woods” about his hiking the Appalachian Trail. He has this incorrigible companion who is out of shape and is always “chucking” away anything, no matter how essential and that would be critically needed later, for the immediate gratification of not having to carry it at that moment. So, he has “Katz” characterized as a slob who is foolish in the extreme, until he metes the “single most disagreeable person he has ever met.” This is a fat girl on the trail whom he keeps bumping into like a bad penny he cannot get away from. She is the one who reports an experience about everything with an expertise that outweighs that of all others and a ready judgment on all items in the control of the person she is addressing. Besides immediately eating both the cupcakes that Malden had set side as a special award for the delayed gratification of the completion of a strenuous part of the hike, she would look over whatever equipment he had and make a summary judgment upon it: “Where did you get that?” she would ask. He would reply that he got it in a catalog or bought it in a sporting goods store. “Big mistake!” she would say immediately. She would then expropriate it, since he was now on notice that he had no further need of it in her judgment.
Big mistake, is the first thing that Nimit had said about my Derwood remodeling project with about the same amount of carefully considered judgment as the fat girl would have in advance about the gear that Malden was carrying, and al other equipment that I am considering getting is immediately judged, not in terms of my possibly greater expertise in weighing the advantages of such an item, but in the interference of his own plans. “You are going to get an EdD degree? How stupid! Big mistake!” Each of these items, from “This is the Digital Camera you should get…” to “This is how you should spend the next year, and forget whatever is going on at GW…” I have a ready source of instant judgment—like Malden’s fat girl. And anything I have already selected is a “Big Mistake” or “So Stupid.” I may have made some big mistakes and done some things that are stupid, but I would concede up front, that the person best able to make such a judgment is the one most intimately involved with the details of the living out such decisions and consequences, and I decline to make those summarily up front for anyone else. It may not mean to me that I have Malden’s judgment on the fat girl as “the single most disagreeable person” he has ever met, despite his fascination with her assumptions of her own innate superior ability to judge for all circumstances for anyone else whether any choice of theirs was anything but a “Big Mistake.”
I am more bemused by this than annoyed, however off-putting, since I am not convinced by anyone else’s summary judgment against the more careful input I have made into such decisions as affect me, that anyone should even deign to opine that anyone else’s’ life or choices in it is a Big Mistake or So Stupid is not even a conceivable option for me, and I find it to be a strong reflection, all right, not on the “boy’s” choices, or the qualities of a digital camera, or the launch of a large remodeling project, but on the quality and depth of an individual willing to make such summary judgments, particularly in the face of –in my opinion-- contrary evidence, or with a quite different agenda. I choose my own agenda, thank you, and they do not involve, typically, the totalitarian immersion in someone else’s’ goals evaluated by how well my activities and plans float their own boat. That would be “stupid.”
A DULL DAY
WITHOUT THE PLANNED EXCURSION
BUT, AT LEAST
BEGINNING WITH A RUN
I have little to report from the second day of our four day weekend, since nothing much happened. We were supposed to go to the Ali Shan mountains, but since it had rained so hard it was unlikely that the mountains would be safe, since mudslides and flooding would be a problem. Yuth Nimit called his student Dr. Lam repeatedly, since he has a car, and was going to go to visit his father who is a ninety year old natural medicine practitioner and still in practice! But, there was some disagreement between father and son; so that there was a possibility that Dr. Lam would not go there, a circumstance on which Yuth was counting. I went off for a run through the sleepy village streets in the morning while he tried repeatedly to call him, and, much to his annoyance, found out that Dr. Lam had gone out to visit his father, despite their earlier disagreement. “Stupid.”
We had a vegetarian lunch at the Buddhist monastery after I simply hunkered down and read my book for the remainder of the morning. When we got to the monastery, we heard after we had eaten lunch that the whole of the group in the monastery has come down with diarrhea—hardly an advertisement of the healthy vegetarian lifestyle. But, Nimit had an immediate reason of this---the place is swarming with flies. The reason for the flies he attributed to a chicken farm nearby, but it must be pointed out that he is probably the immediate source of that many flies being inside the building since he immediately opens all the windows and doors. The other reason that the flies may swarm on in peace is that it would be against all Buddhist principles to swat a fly. So, we left the Buddhist monastery after lunch and continued about our tasks which included trying to get on the internet, which did not work at the monastery so we went to the office to do so.
To my surprise, again, he asked why I have not yet written up and submitted my proposal to spend the next year here in helping to develop the natural healing program? I was unaware that it was my idea to do so, and certainly clearly not my imitative, since I am reluctant to do so. But, he insists, I simply have to propose the sabbatical leave to the National Academy of Sciences, and then, if they allot the money for it, then I can decide whether I should do so, but then he recommends that I NOT take a sabbatical leave, but simply agree to be here for months at a time while traveling back and forth. This does not seem to be a highly likely probability, and although grateful for the hospitality that I have extended a lot further than I had planned now, I am not at all committed to returning twice more in the next months and especially not as I am just now finishing and furnishing the new home in which I had hoped to be spending some time as my home base, with a new graduate program nearby that will require my presence near DC in addition. So stupid. Big mistake!