Close Encounter

I was at the park with my delightful daughter last night, alternating between pushing her on the swings, doling out the M&M's, and sipping on a cup of cheap, but overpriced coffee from 7-11. Each time I go to this park, people talk to me. It's nice when it's not an interrogation. That is, it's good not to be ostracized as "That Big-Nosed Foreigner," but it's good when there's a little give-and-take in the conversation.

Bumped into a couple of Mormon missionaries, late, after the park lights came on. They sort of arrived out of nowhere, announced by the bright white shirts subdivided by black ties, before their faces came into focus. Nice guys.

We didn't talk about Romney. We just, y'know, "shot the shit" as they like to say. I think sometimes, when you're a missionary, you need a break and maybe it's just good to talk to someone from "back home." Who knows. They'd been on the island for three months and six months, so they....

....  I can't even remember what it felt to be three months into a stay in Taiwan. I think I probably still looked at Western faces on the street in the hope that they might be willing to spare a moment or two for idle small-talk. Christ, how long has it been since I felt like that....

I tell my students, occasionally, if they are looking for someone to practice English with, taxi drivers are possibly the worst choice, but Mormons are a pretty good bet, but they should be approached with care. With a plan. The game, I told them, they could play was, how many questions can I ask before they talk about The Book of Mormon? I usually stretch the conversation towards 5 minutes before they bring up their church about the same time that I remember my appointment.

It's a bit of a rude game, but I'm getting better at it.

Last night, we discussed reasons for coming to Taiwan, plans for the future, foods, courses of action for language learning, who learns Taiwanese vs who learns Mandarin. We talked about the Mormon settlement in Nauvoo, Illinois that I visited as a child, finding common ground. As individuals, they were friendly, interesting, and polite when I told them that as a potential convert, they would be best to write me down as a "lost cause."

I didn't bring up coffee, or multiple wives, or ask them if they took their family dogs on vacation tied to the roof of the car. I didn't think to ask about baptizing Anne Frank. I have my opinions about missionaries, and they likely have their opinions about dirty hippies. But it was nice to have a relaxing, late-evening conversation in a park, with a couple of kids from back home.

My daughter was tired of the conversation before I was and reminded me that it was time to go get her brother from math class. We said goodbye and got on the scooter. Before I left the park, I zipped around and found them unlocking their bikes and told them the story which is my reason for not giving Mormons shit when they come up to me:

When I first came to Taiwan, 12 years ago, and was lost on the weekends and couldn't find my way on a map, I used to walk to the nearest major intersection and wait for the Mormons to come around on their bikes, because they were not only the most-visible Westerners in the city, they were also the ones who were most likely to know where shit was.

So, fellas, I continued, if you go two years and don't make a single conversion, you may well make an impact in other ways.

Just a note about a conversation. Please do not seize this opportunity to contact me regarding The Book of Mormon, or services at the local temple. I'm not interested. But, feel free to see me for a chat on the street.

Lost

Last weekend, on the Sunday morning, early, we put on our go-to-meetin' finery and set off, map in hand, for family pictures on the kindergarten's dime, being our dime, as we pay the tuition and they don't just give services away for free. The invitation said 0900 in a such an obscene manner that you couldn't imagine. There's no good reason to be up that early on any Sunday. And to be lost amongst Chinese street signs makes the injury a double blow.

Car radio don't work, wife slept late, kids are hungry. And picky. We left the house at five minutes before we were to arrive across town at the photo studio. The street signs weren't making any sense. Our target was just this side of Chungde Road off to the right on a side street. We missed it the first time. As well as the second. The fourth time around the block, I opened Google Maps and experimented with several spellings before giving it up as a poor investment in my sanity.
After an exploration off to the right which turned up nothing more interesting than a hospital, I asked Maggie what the big, black box on the lower left represented. Turns out it was the B&Q on the Northeast side of town. There were other strange illustrations as well, perhaps the most interesting of which being an upside down isoceles triangle pointing at the character 北, which it may be helpful to point out indicates the general position of North on the map.
"What stupid Motherfucker puts 'North' at the bottom of a goddam map?" is a sentence pattern which you would be surprised to hear my sweet four-year old daughter spit out before she hears me repeat it a few more times and I hope it shall never come to that for as it is the only person I've encountered who sees this as normal is a Taiwanese photographer who uses a printed backdrop of a grand staircase in his studio for family portraits for people who want that fake I'm-in-the-money look.
There was no hurry to get there, though. Although all the graduating Kindy kids were supposed to be there, few could find the place.
Both the kids and both the adults in our family thought the photographer was an asshole. From the over the top costumes from 1001 Nights to the gimcracks the assistant put in Gretchen's hair we wanted out. I pulled Maggie aside, conferred with out eyes, and understood that we weren't buying any of it. And this was before he started whistling to get my daughter's attention as if she were a showdog.

Train Gone

I just had a brain freeze. I mean a thought. One of those glorious ideas that you get when you’re flying down a dual carriageway at half-past ten at night with your son on the back of your scooter and you can’t reach into your pocket to get out your iPhone and once you do anyway you do a search for Dragon Dictation at the red light and fail to find it and try to record the thought but you don’t because you didn’t put it back on your phone after getting the phone replaced for a dicky battery so you attempt to redownload it and continue to have more and more great thoughts while the app isn’t downloading because of spotty reception and traffic, but when you get to your basement parking lot and dismount you can’t download it because you’ve got two floors of concrete above you and the signal is non-existent and by this time the revelation is getting weaker and weaker until you think it’s actually a bad idea and not worth the hassle of even opening your lap top to record.

THIS is why I haven’t been blogging. Or writing at all. Or being creative in the least. I know better than to say it’s because I have kids.

What to do what to do.

Another school year has begun and everyone around me is freaking out 24/7.

...and that was last week. Completely lost the train. Maybe later. 

A Sketch From The Ocean Park

The stars of the dolphin show at the ocean park in Hualien are likely more intelligent than the presenters. But they were both light years ahead of the volunteer from the audience, a ten-year-old boy who was asked to give an addition or multiplication problem whose answer would be ten or less. The dolphin was to give the answer with slaps of his tail. But the kid couldn't come up with the question, instead settling on the tired and true fallback of "I don't know." This went on for far too long before the bubbly host went for the fake and told the kid to whisper in her ear what his question for the bottle-nosed dolphin was. " Eight Plus Two" she shouted to game approval from the crowd of a couple hundred. The dolphin gave the answer with ten slaps of the tail and the crowd was about as excited as you could imagine. The audience volunteers were to be given prizes in exchange for their cooperation and an assistant emerged with a picture of the mascot with maybe a button attached to it. The reticent child spoke distinctly when he said into the microphone not "Thank You" but "Can I change it for something else?" to which a few dozen audience members quickly fell just short of booing to show the brat their disappointment. We all watched on the giant screen as he scampered up the steps of the arena to meet his approving mother.

The Road Not Taken

We just finished up the poetry unit in summer school and I'm in the middle of grading exams. The first couple classes were ... well, dismal. The last class will not require curving and has provided some smiles and laughs. Especially question 21. Especially S's interpretation of the poem.

On The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost
21. What do you think the poem means? What is the poet telling the reader about?

Refresh your memory if you haven't read it in awhile. It's good for you. Skip down to the end if you're lazy.

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;	5
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,	10
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.	15
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

And the student's response:

He is a traveler, I think. Maybe it's about love, so he needs to choose which would be the better one. He decided to break up with two girls at the same moment.

I'll admit there was a WTF moment upon reading the answer, but then I looked at a couple lines of the poem, figured, yeah, why not, and gave him full marks.

• Yellow, in Chinese, can mean pornographic, as in "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood."
• The line "...I stood/and looked down  one as far as I could/To where it bent in the undergrowth/ Then took the other, as just as fair" certainly could be interpreted as being "Yellow" as they say around here. 
• But the next phrase about the fair one "...having perhaps the better claim/ Because it was grassy and wanted wear" hits it out of the park. 

The student didn't use specific examples from the poem to defend his answer, but another one that could offer him some help would have been "And both that morning equally lay."

I shall indeed be "telling this with a sigh/somewhere ages and ages hence" whenever I teach this poem as a morality tale about running around with loose women. God bless that kid. Drove me crazy all year long and then provided me with the biggest gut laugh I've had in quite some time this morning.

Job Security

I've been in Taiwan ten-and-a-half years and I'm STILL seeing mistakes
like this on the road? Perhaps I need to rethink my position. Is there
a market for grammatically-correct T-Shirts in Taiwan?

Successecities!

I first got my Taiwanese learners' permit about 5 years ago so that I could legally drive the family car when it came time to take our first child home from the hospital. I went up and borrowed the test study guide, a collection of 90 pages' worth of questions from which the test is composed.

I had had a drivers license in the States since the 80's and laughed off the suggestion that it was something which needed to be studied for. The motorcycle test had been easy enough.

I got about halfway through the computerized test, though, and was humming a different tune. It was the most profane humming one has ever heard. By the end of the test, I was telling the computer to go plug it's USB into its mother, in similar language.

As I exited the test area I was sure that I could save the world by just giving the bastards my business card and telling them when they were ready to clean up the language on that piece of shit, I would be wiling to help them out. Then I let the door hit me on the ass on the way out.

Five years I waited, and they never called asking for my help in rewriting the test. I still shake my head about this lost business opportunity. I probably should have done a PowerPoint presentation to show the woman at the counter, but it would likely have had just about the same effect as shouting at her in the kind of English that one learns early on from his older brother.

It's time to take the kids back to America and show them the land of the free etc. But to do this properly will require a bit of driving. There's really no difference between driving without a license in America and driving without a license in Taiwan, except the American cops are more likely to know phrases like "step out of the car and put your hands behind your head" that make the eventuality of getting stopped by the fuzz more daunting than in my adopted home.

So, another trip to the DMV was in order. My learner's permit was expired, so I needed another physical exam consisting of an eye check and one deep knee bend with my hands held parallel to the ground administered by an extremely aged doctor in a clinic that was blaring a Sinead O'Connor tune on the radio.

I marched back with my sharp eyes and fully functioning knee joints and ran upstairs to sit down at the computer terminal where I had a choice of about 8 languages to take the test in. I figured English would be challenging enough, and put on the headphones to find out that the feministic voice on the recording was reading slightly different sentences than were on the computer screen, so I turned her all the way down and trusted the Force.

This time, I had no questions at all about taxi driving, or about how to load cargo on to a truck. Absent also, were questions about how many years I would need to have a private license before I tried to get a bus driver's license.

Dig:

True or False: Traffic laws maintain traffic order. The most important principle of maintaining traffic order is not only to understand but to obey the spirit of law can achieve an objective of good traffic safety.

The spirit of law being more important than the letter, or character.

True or False: Driving is both physically and mentally tiring. Only by leading a regular life, driving safety can be ensured.

Is that about eating enough roughage, or not working 6 days a week?

True or False: I find two drug dealers whispering in my taxi In order to help my country, I should think up a method to report the police station and not let them escape.

I don't pretend to understand how detaining a Ketamine dealer in Taiwan is going to help the USA, but as the openings for Western cab drivers are as few as they are far between, I don't have to worry about narking on one.

True or False: A car should break down because it runs out of oil or water.

I stared at this question for a full two minutes before I flipped a coin. I answered correctly, but have no record of what the correct answer was. Personally, I don't think it should ever run out of oil in the first place.


I missed three and scored 90%.

Wednesday, I went back for the road test. (here it is in Google Maps)

The road test is the most horrific thing that has happened to Taiwan ever. Worse than the White Terror. Those who have tried and failed to get past it speak of it in ominous tones and avoid eye contact. Something about an S curve.

Before you do the course, though, you have to be aware of and understand "The Rules:"

1. Self car should be parked at the assignment area to practiced in the test area is prohibited.
2. Bring your identification card, test admission, and some papers all the time for review and to be on time to test
3. While on your waiting interim should obey order not allowed to stay, to stroll, or to racket in the test area.
4. To explain the road test rules to score standard and to test route on pretest if any question please offer them in time.
5. A role call based on the number and check identificaiton photo then to get on car to test on order
6. In accord with the invigilator's instructions and respect their duties
7. A testee has reached over 30 score deduction that is judged that has failed his test should terminate his test and get off his car to sit on rear seat and then the invigilator will drive the car back to the initial test line
8. If there some illegalaties of insult or bribery occur to the inviligators while on the his test will be prosecuted right away
9. If someone help testees with gestures languages on the test will be rubbed off their scores
10. If one of them the cars facilities damaged while on his test should restore them or compensate their own prices
11. Those who are bare feet, bare shoulders or wear clogs, slippers that are not admitable. Also not allowed to smoke, to chew betelnuts on the test.
12. Those who are not obey the rules or use an inappropriate means to attend the test will be prosecuted by the item 70 of the traffic safety rules.

Many foreigners will leave at this point. The stout hearted, or those who don't read the rules, get into the car with an instructor or two. I was blessed with two invigilators. Each of them told the other one that they needed to practice their English on me, but neither made any serious attempt. They both rode in the car with me as we did a practice lap of the Test Course, explaining in triplicate over each other about how many points were deducted for each crossing of lines. The invigilator at the wheel demonstrated that if one were to cross one of the unseeable border lines between the road and the curb, sirens would blare, lights would flash, and a sign post would light up showing how you how many points had just been deducted from your total.

Lose 30, and you're driven back to the terminal in the back seat. In deep shame.

All those touchy-feely New Age self-help books talk about visualizing success or some such, and in the hours leading up to my test, I visualized a trip around the track like a pro drifter or the Stig in a Bugatti Veyron.

The S curve is created to test your ability to drive into those narrow alleys that you see on Penghu when you get lost heading out of Makong. (You're better off renting a motorbike there anyway.) This emasculating alleyway looked simple enough, but when I saw the sensor cord hidden by the edge of the curb, the Toyota suddenly seemed as wide as a Hummer.

There's no hurry at all, so it took about five minutes to drive 10 meters in and back 10 meters out. This was the hardest part of the test, without question, but I made it through without a buzz.

I backed out onto the road, hit the turn signal and ambled over to the next obstacle where I simulated backing into a parking garage space. This one was a bit more realistically narrow keeping in mind how difficult it is to park in some of the shopping malls. I lost my 16 points here with a jarring siren in my left ear that caught me by so by surprise that I farted. Fortunately, the invigilator was assessing this part of my performance from outside the car.

It's quite possible, though that it wasn't me. When you sit at the terminal pondering the instructions and trying to work out what an "invigilator" is, the empty course is alive with alarms. It could be the wind, it could be sticks falling from the trees. It's imaginable that a squirrel, frightened by my approaching rear wheels, scurried for cover and landed with all of his weight on the sensor setting off the alarm, and that my test was, in fact, flawless, because in the parallel parking, stopping on a hill, and slow and steady, I never made another mistake. I even managed to keep my head together and come to a complete stop at the fake railroad and pedestrian crossings that rounded out the test.

The three people who came out to watch me do the test all congratulated me on my fine motor skills and said something like, "If all drivers in Taiwan had the skill that you have demonstrated by passing this extremely difficult test on the first try, then Taiwan would be a much safer place."

I couldn't agree more.

Ten Years On/In Taiwan

When I left Indianapolis a solid DECADE ago today, it was my intention to stay here for two years, complete two contracts at a chain school, take as my second contract bonus the proposed return ticket to the States and Start Over.

Things don't always work out the way we plan them for one reason or another.

From time to time, though not as often as before, people stop me and ask why I decided to come to Taiwan in the first place, and I usually say 921. 9/21 was the day that a massive quake struck the central part of the island back in 1999, killing thousands, and sending hundreds of foreign English teachers looking for safer surroundings.

At the time, I was teaching ESL at IUPUI in downtown Indianapolis and eager for a change. After lunch, I was supervising students in the language lab when I saw a headline on CNN about the massive tremor. And the events that brought me to Taiwan began to unfold. No reason to bore you with them now.

If I'd had a few more days to ruminate over them, I'd have collected a basketful of changes that I've seen in the past ten years, but honestly, it wasn't until I was signing homework books this evening that the numbers 12 and 17 placed so close together struck me as somewhat familiar. When it dawned on me why, my respiratory system attempted to sigh and gasp at the same time and my chewing gum went up my nose.

Now that I've been here 5 times longer than initially anticipated, I figure that I'm about halfway through my time here, having started a family and a business in just such an order. There's a list floating around somewhere of signs that you've been in Taiwan much too long. One of them is "Your friends and relatives stop asking when you're planning to move back."


I have no idea if anyone has ever asked me that question, because I surely can't remember the last time it happened. Once I got over here, there was so much on this side of the world that I figured I owed it to myself to go see, and Taiwan was the sort of place where you could live simply and save up some cash and go out and see stuff.

A beautiful woman who's as good with numbers as she is with people has the power to change everything. Except I still throw my socks on the floor. And here I am. Still. In 2009.

China still hasn't invaded, so I guess I'll stay on living here for the next little bit.

Health Care In Taiwan

I live in Taiwan where we had two kids delivered two years apart for about $12,000NT, or 400US. That included the delivery, and three days care for mother and child in a private room.

She then spent the rest of her month off from work (paid) in a maternity center where she was fed 6 meals a day and the babies had round-the-clock care. It was clean, quiet, and the food was excellent. This was a private hospital, though, and it cost a whopping $500US or thereabouts. To insure my family of four, around US$90 is deducted from my paycheck every month. We go to see the doctor whenever we need to, and see whichever doctor we choose. Our family physician will recommend a specialist if needed, or I can just turn up at the hospital and ask to see a specialist. Each doctor's visit costs between $3-$5. Trips to the emergency room are unavoidable, but with a fifteen-dollar price tag, it's not an agonizing decision to make whether to stay at home to see if the swelling will go down, or go ahead and get an X-ray to see if the pint of ice cream really did break my hand.


When my kids are sick, I don't have to wonder if it's serious enough to call the doctor's office and make an appointment for god-knows-when, instead, my wife and I take them by the doctor after work. Convenient, huh? We work evenings, but the office is open until 10 at night. What time does your doctor go home?

There are several pediatricians in our district and there are absolutely no restrictions on who we can go to see.
Do we have time for one more? My knee surgery with general anesthetic cost about twelve bucks American. The MRI had cost me four. I honestly cannot understand why so many of my countrymen are allowing themselves to get so worked up over this. There's a lot of vitriol being slung, including footage of a woman yelling "Heil Hitler" at someone who was trying to talk about the health care system in Israel. Whoa!


I have yet to hear a rational argument as to how the current system in place in the States can provide better health care than I am enjoying in Taiwan. "Death Panels" and "Socialism" are just scary sounding catch-phrases that have nothing to do with the current situation. Taiwan is not a socialist country and National Health Care would take America no further down the road to Communism than Eisenhower's Highway Projects, or NASA have. The Death Panel bureaucrats do exist, but instead of being government employees, they're the ones who work for insurance companies that decide that your grandmother's bone marrow transplant is unnecessary.


Walk into any small town convenience store in America and there next to the cash register is a jar with the picture of a young, happy, child, whose parents cannot afford to pay for his new kidney. When you argue against Health Care, you are arguing for a slow death for the children who stare up at you from the counter. Pro Life? Yes, Please.

Typhoon Morakot

This time last week, we were a giddy bunch. At my day job, there were no classes because the students had been taken on a field trip to Miaoli for a BBQ. As the day wore on, it became more and more obvious that our presence would not be required the next day, and a holiday atmosphere began to well up within the teacher's room. We talked about typhoon days from the past, and near-typhoon days on which coworkers had gone ahead and gotten too drunk to stand up and teach anyway and not been able to come in to teach. This is the life of the English teacher in Taiwan.

Last Thursday, I said have a nice weekend to job #1 and went to job #2, and didn't get wet, so my typhoon was going well. By 1900hrs, they had cancelled school for Friday and I was happier than a pig in shit. Come on, a three day weekend in a country where those are in short supply. Who could blame me for being enthusiastic for the storm?

The wind came through my neighborhood on Friday morning. I know this because I had left an empty water bottle outside my window for the purpose of watering plants which are no longer there. When the wind picked up, that bottle rattled around the safety cage like a bingo ball in a retirement center on Tuesday night.

All day Friday we stayed inside and played with the kids. My neighbor came upstairs and helped me finish a few beers before noon. Typhoon Day is that kind of a holiday. We watched movies, and ate dumplings. There were plenty of provisions thanks to a last minute shopping spree at Carrefour that ended around 2330. We didn't turn on the news until later that night when I called my brother on Skype to talk about the slowly passing storm.

The news was all the same, I said. Just like a snowstorm in the American South, I said. Same obvious news stories on each channel. There's a typhoon. It's raining. People who walk outside in the rain get wet. People on scooters are getting blown over. It's windy. Here's a picture of some rain in Taipei and a sign that fell on a car. There were the obligatory pictures of people shopping.

I can't remember if it was CNN or Wunderground where I first saw the phrase "over two meters of rain." In less than two days. That means, if I was standing in a hole 2 meters deep, I would be in over my head. I think that's what that means, though it sounds like a story problem, and I shut down at the start of a story problem.

The problem with this story is that I had no idea what was going on while it was going on. Saturday morning, we had a below average breakfast at some new place on Chung Ming Rd and I remarked dryly at the number of leaves the staff was clearing from their treeless tiny front yard.

Then, I started noticing the stories pop up on Facebook. The first was of this hotel falling into a river.




The guy who works at the Starbucks where I occasionally go for decaf told me that he was about100m away from the building when it went down. He was sure there was no one inside at the time. Good news as earlier reports had said there were perhaps a hundred trapped inside. He noted that most of the people staying in the hotel that day were tourists from China. No Comment.

The video above was our first clue that the effluvia was hitting the air moving device in Southern Taiwan. Then there was this one of the water under the high speed rail in Tainan County.



But it really wasn't until Monday, I think, that the gravity of the situation began to flow into our heads. Monday when we were all going back to work. Monday when the party was over.

700 missing in one  single village.




Rajen Nair, a writer based in India, emailed looking for some first-hand accounts of the storm, and as I could only tell him what happened inside my apartment, I enlisted the fine folks at Facebook who came up with Tony Coolidge who writes about Living in Taiwan at LivingInTaiwan. His story is in The Guardian here.


Nair followed up with this harrowing survivor's account

After the storm passed, and before fingers began to be pointed with any vigor, Michael Turton, the omniscient blogger of The View From Taiwan, collected some serious money in a very short period of time and headed south with a van packed full of cleaning supplies.  His updates are a testament to the hard work of volunteers who flocked to Tainan and Pingtong in the days after the landslides. In those early days that the Central Government was refusing aid offered by both the US and Japan, I was glad that American expats in Central Taiwan were able to put together a few drops in the bucket.

Now, ten days after what is now to be known as "8-8" (which is Taiwanese Father's Day) the first American military aircraft in 30 years has landed in Taiwan delivering much-needed supplies. The international community is being allowed to respond. The international press is not being kind to the Mayor/President/Mr Ma who is just over one year into his term as head of Taiwan. His lame excuse five days after the worst typhoon related disaster in five decades was that he had "warned residents to evacuate and they just didn't." Echoes of the mess in New  Orleans were that most residents of the villages that have been wiped off the map were the elderly and the very young.