A Chinese Odyssey

It is my last week in Taiwan.  It has been almost a year since I arrived here.  I am ready to go, but not because I want to leave Taiwan.   I am ready to go because I am going to a wonderful new job, full of interest and challenge for me.  As I get ready to leave I cannot help but contemplate the many contradictions of my experience here.   Taiwan is a place where you can live like a queen for pennies a day, or develop road rage even as a pedestrian, a place where you can loll about in the ocean, or climb high into the mists of the mountain or the steam of the hot springs, a place where many buildings are crumbling and covered with mold, but garbage is nowhere to be seen, a place where exotic fresh fruits are commonplace, but finding a drink without sugar in it is a big project.  All of these contradictions have provided me with a year of tremendous learning.

I have come to love the sight of darkened, shadowed and even crumbling concrete, embraced by strands of the ever-growing green things that fill every free crack.  I can’t say I love the relentless tune of the garbage truck, but I do love the fact that you can easily dispense with your garbage pretty much anytime day or night.  I have come to feel comfortable in the damp air, though the heat in the center of the day nearly suffocates me.  I have grown very accustomed to the sound of Chinese, even testing it out when I am talking to myself (well, I’d rather practice on my own ears than the sensitive ears of the neighbors).  I have learned so much about communication and language, about people caught in a cultural context not always of their own making, or suitable to their own sensibilities.

I have always felt this kind of cultural contradiction myself, in my own culture, the sense that the culture grew up around me without my express contribution.  This always led me to feel as though I must have come from a different planet.  Since living here in Taiwan, I no longer feel a stranger.  Mapping consciously the difference between humanness and cultural custom, has opened my eyes to a whole new kind of personal engagement.  In my own culture, I couldn’t make this distinction, at least not easily.  I couldn’t tell what was me as a human being and what was the cultural custom thrust upon me both intentionally and unintentionally.  After a year of navigating a language that is so much about context, so immersed in the cultural history as it emerges in any given moment, I feel I have finally begun to feel more at home on this planet.   It is odd, to feel more at home when you know that the context is not your own.  I do wonder how I am going to feel once I am back on the soil of North America.

So my plan is to keep writing here, to continue the odyssey with all the amazing lessons of learning Chinese.  I may no longer be writing from an exotic island in the Pacific, full of Chinese, Japanese and Aboriginal influences, but I will be writing from the place inside me that now has a little bit of it all.

It is still compulsively raining here in Taiwan.  I have been back for a week now and every afternoon it breaks into huge deluges of rain with thunder and lightening often continuing through the early evening.  Really, it is like winter here, only summer, where you can’t really play outside and you have to have some mechanical means to ameliorate the temperature.   Yesterday, I played with a Taiwanese friend and we simply walked through the huge rain until our shoes were squishing water and then we sat down to eat our dou hua 豆花 (silky tofu with sugar syrup and a host of tasty additions like red beans, peanuts and seaweed jelly, plus piles of ice if you like).  We were almost unable to converse because the sound of the rain was so loud.

For the almost year that I have been here, I have been thinking about going to China, what people here call, Zhong Guo Da Lou, the Chinese continent, the mainland.  Taiwan has a unique relationship to China.  The Taiwanese, for the most part, consider Taiwan an independent country but their cultural connections are deeply shared with mainland China.  The government of China doesn’t see the island of  Taiwan as an independent country, but rather as a part of China proper.  Most of the current Taiwanese have genetic origins in the south of China, some even have recent history there, but still Taiwan is a very different place from mainland China.  As I readied myself to step off the plane and into Shanghai, I prepared myself mentally for the chaos that so many have said is the experience of China.

Oriana in the stairwell to her apartment

Chaos it was, though, very fortunately, I had a friend who was meeting me at the airport.  We plunged into the Shanghai traffic and began the trek through the city past the huge area designated as the Shanghai World Expo.  The Expo is represented by a huge blue figure who looks like the spawn of Sponge Bob and the Jiffy Lube guy.  Very scary, but he is everywhere.  China is very proud of this expo and every single Taiwanese person I spoke to before I went asked me if I planned to go there.  What with the reports of 10 hours in line to get into one exhibition hall and the 400,000 per day visitors, I said decidedly “no” I did not plan to attend.  Each and every person was confused and consternated by my blatant lack of interest.  As far as I am concerned the real reason to go to China was to see history in the form of old buildings and geography.  I am not much interested in the almost universally hideous new buildings that dominate the cities.  So, most of the time I was in Shanghai, I spent trying to get out.

Shanghai street

The first day I went with my friend to see her school, Fu Dan University.  It was unremarkable and compared to National Taiwan University where I have been going to school, it was ugly.  But I got to ride the subway, where every car has a little TV screen listing the current number of visitors at the Expo.  The second day we went to the fabric market with a friend who wanted to have some suits made.  This was a very Shanghai experience.  The market is indoors and has 5 floors.  We only made it through two and didn’t even really finish the second one.  It was quite a thrill for me to talk with the merchants about colors and fabrics and finally to choose one who seemed both economical and very skilled at making garments.   Our friend ordered two suits which would be ready in a week for about $75 a piece.  Quite a deal for wool fabrics and tailored to fit.

QiBao canal

On the third day, we went to visit a place called QiBao, an old part of Shanghai situated on the river and canals that make up the Yangtze river delta.  Unfortunately, it has become a very touristed part of town and much of its original charm has been compromised.  But I enjoyed it nonetheless, slowly getting used to the crowds and intensity of being in China.

house on the canal in QiBao

On the fourth day, we were finally able get out of town.  After some research we decided to visit ZhouZhuang, another river town fairly close by, only an hour and a half by bus.  We didn’t actually realize that for $10 (there and back) we had also signed up for a guided tour.  The tour guide literally talked for the entire hour and a half ride there.  We determined to escape as soon as possible after we arrived, feeling overwhelmed by the 40 other people (all Chinese) and needing to go at a slower pace than this tour guide promised.  This meant we spent the first half of the afternoon wandering around in a strange ghost town of empty shops and hotels and restaurants that looked like they had never been used but built on behalf of some giant amusement park that would one day blossom.  It was very strange.  We kept trying to figure out what we were there to see.  We started to feel regret that we had ditched the tour guide.  We started to get hungry.  Finally we trekked back nearly to where we had started to find some lunch and happened to notice a sign pointing down the canal to something called the old town.  We resolved to go there after lunch.

temple on the canal at ZhouZhuang

chair (wheel?) in the wall on the corner in ZhouZhuang

The old town was packed with tourists, temples, stone walkways and old buildings.  I was happy, except for the crowds.  We spent a good 3 hours wandering around, found a huge lake, a huge Buddha statue, some strange exercise equipment and some Chinese tourists who wanted video footage of my friend (who is tall and blonde) and said not a word to me (not in Chinese or any other language) since I was obviously too short and dark to make any impression.

Oriana on the strange exercise equipment

Somehow, in the end, China did not make such a huge impression on me, but I want to go back.  I want to see more.  In contrast to Taiwan, where I no longer feel so much like a tourist, in China, I not only felt like a tourist, I was happy to be one!

Son of Sponge Bob

It is the season of big water, monsoon season, 雨節, raining season, here in Northern Taiwan and that is what it does basically every day, rain.  The air is so wet that there is almost no point in showering.  Needless to say that makes for a bad hair season altogether for anyone who isn’t Asian by birth.  This week during my school break, I decided to head for the ocean.   Despite the relatively small size of Taiwan, the top half and the bottom half have very different weather patterns.  So I went as far south as I could get to the southern eastern tip which is really a peninsula and is dominated by Kenting National Park.  Down there it is comparatively dry, (which isn’t to say it is dry, just compared to the north it is dry) and it is starting to be quite hot.  I wanted to go surfing but the waves were too small for much more than bobbing about getting sunburned which is exactly what I did.  Being in the ocean, this big body of water, restores me to a kind of happiness I know nowhere else in my life.  Though I haven’t yet had my first official surfing lesson, just bobbing about with a board made me completely understand the devotion and intensity of most surfers.  It is both a motherly and fatherly sort of sport.  You feel both nurtured and challenged by the power of the water.  It is both rhythmic and unpredictable, laughing fun and hot dog fun, laid back and intense all at the same time.

I did  a lot of reflecting (both physically i.e. sunburn and metaphysically) while in that big water.  Reflecting on my time here in Taiwan which I may soon be leaving, I realized how much this place where the air is nearly as wet as the water and where hot water bubbles up from the ground all over the island, has been like a womb to me.  I have felt myself slipping around, contemplating all manner of things, all the while feeling contained, almost oddly cocooned in a way, knowing that at some point I would emerge.  Finally surrounded by the salty ocean, I felt the strength and energy of new life, new possibility.

Floating-being, surfing-doing.  The balance between doing and being is always interesting to navigate.  In the doing there is some kind of momentum, sometimes even a rush of energy that can be just as invigorating as a good cup of coffee.  In the being there is a deep sense of relaxation and peace, an unspecified knowing that things are perfect just as they are.  This last year has been a time of re-negotiating the balance for myself between the being and the doing.  One of the most interesting things that I have noticed is that often when I think doing is required, it is actually being that is called for.  Like learning Chinese, for example, my daily endeavor.  I can do, do, do, writing characters, memorizing dialogue, doing homework, but when I open my mouth only being will save me from complete humiliation.  Strange, isn’t it, how this seems to work.  Packing in knowledge and then finding a way to let go into the being of the moment.  Rocking along in the water, when suddenly the wind picks up and a big wave heads for me and my board.  Instantly, I must be up and doing.  From complete rest and surrender to up and at attention in a millisecond or I will slammed down on the sand without mercy.

Normally, I don’t crave danger, risk.  But this ocean reality, this constant flux of energies that provides relaxation and demands attention, well, I think I am addicted to this.  I am in awe of both the power and gentleness of this big water.   I crave this lesson over and over.  I try to remember this lesson as I sit in my apartment again in the thundering noise of big rains, restless and wanting to move, but instead surrendering to the inner reflections resulting in a lot less sunburn and perhaps equal amounts of doing and being, if I can just learn to surf…

This last week a very strange thing happened.  I was on the subway on my way to buy butter candles.  It was mid-afternoon so the trains were starting to get kind of crowded.  An elderly woman and what appeared to be her daughter got on.  I immediately noticed them due to the lavender dress the elderly woman wore and the neat way they were both attired.  On subways in Taiwan there are signs everywhere that say you should give your seat to old people, disabled people, pregnant women and women with children.  They are called 愛座, aizuo, love seats to be precise.  That value is right there in the language.  In any case, the woman sitting next me, got up immediately and gestured for the elderly woman to sit down.  For reasons I still cannot discern, neither of the two, the older or the younger took the seat.  Halfway to the next stop when the train was lurching into high speed, I got up and rather than gesture, I looked at them and said, 請坐，qing zuo, please sit.  So they slowly shuffled over and the older woman sat down.  There was still a seat beside her since both myself and the woman sitting next to me had gotten up so I looked at the younger woman and gestured for her to sit, but she just shook her head.  So the older lady was sitting in my previous seat and the seat next to her was empty.  The younger woman stood in front of her, while I stood across the aisle.  After another stop or two, someone finally sat down beside the older woman in the lavender dress.  And someone sitting in the seat at a right angle to that seat got up and the younger woman also sat down.  Phew! I was feeling relieved for some reason when the younger woman turned to me and asked me in Chinese, 妳是中國人還是外國人？ni shi zhong guo ren haishi wai guo ren? are you a Chinese person or a foreigner?  Well, you all know what I had to say, but,frankly, I was stunned.  Most of the time, unless you request otherwise, when someone sees a western face, they immediately try to speak English with you.  This woman was genuinely inquiring, and even after I said I was a foreigner, she looked confused.  So I said, it might be possible that my grandfather was part Chinese, which is true, although we will never know if it is actually true.  And she said, no wonder I couldn’t tell whether you were from China or not.   And yes, the conversation was all in Chinese.

I feel strange for so many reasons, that most of the time, I do not attribute it primarily to the culture I find myself in.   Sometimes now, I kind of forget that I am in Taiwan and when I hear voices, I think I hear them in English, or maybe I just think I understand what they are saying, which technically is probably not true.  Chinese seems to have entered my being on some level that clearly escapes my rational mind.  In fact, I have almost decided that using logic or rational explanation is completely useless when learning Chinese.  The experience of Chinese is simultaneously so visual, aural and visceral, that it bypasses most of my thinking processes a good part of the time.  When I do think, I think that I have to understand, and, often, I get to feeling like a failure since I am in a vast sea of sounds, words and meaning that I can’t possibly absorb all at once.  And then, there are those moments, usually it seems, on the subway, when some thing is perfectly clear.  On that day, strangely, I felt that I could have been a Chinese person speaking to other Chinese people in a land that was not home to any of us.

love seat on the Taipei metro

This weekend I went to see A Moving Sound, a group of musicians based here in Taiwan close to where in I live in Xindian City.  For a moment during the show, I was moved to tears by the presence and beauty of two sufi dancers as they bowed to one another before they began their whirling meditation.  They bowed from the waist in a slow and deliberate offering, so clear and humble that it seemed to contain all that was ever important about being human.  I felt full, happy, sad and something I guess I am calling homesick.  Not the kind of homesick where I actively want to go home.  I don’t even have a home.  But a kind of homesick that is really a kind of heartache.  A kind of happy/sad/longing that feels like some kind of knowing about what it means to live in this world. To live in a world where all things are temporary, where daily earthquakes, crazy motorists and hair loss all conspire to remind me that not only is everything around me temporary, but my own physical form is also temporary.  Here the word for this sensation is xiang jia, thinking of home, thinking of family.  The Taiwanese not only understand this sensation, but they would think it was weird if I wasn’t homesick.  This culture is centered around family and home.  But, truth is I am not thinking of my home (since I don’t have one), nor am I particularly thinking of my family, though I may think about talking with them.   I feel sure that homesick is the word for what I am feeling, yet the sensation doesn’t coalesce around any person or thing.

A Moving Sound plays music that they create, using voice, drums, bells and strings, some traditional Chinese string instruments and some modern.  This performance was the beginning of their Spring tour and their theme is world village.  They are playing not only their own creations but some music from other cultures re-arranged to fit their style and instruments.  They told everyone that just by showing up at the theater they were now a part of the tribe.  There was a time I would have just ignored that kind of remark, thinking it irrelevant to my love of the music, thinking it a stage invention, a hype .  Somehow after living among the Taiwanese people for 8 months now, I couldn’t hear it as hype.  They want to be a part of the world.  I want to be a part of the world.  In fact, we are a part of the world, so why not a part of the tribe, the human tribe, the tribe of people who want to love and be loved, who love to sing and dance.  I know it isn’t that simple, but music can make you think it is.   And why not let the music keep it simple, keep you right there with the rush of emotions, the everything at once in the world in the room sensation until you can just see and be that simple movement of gentle open heart, bowing and dancing, singing and playing, alive and in the world.

Blogging, it turns out is a strange new kind of commitment.  A commitment to get something in print before it loses it’s fragrance, it’s fresh flavor and quality of real time.  Timing, commitment, two  hot-button issues in my life, but here I am and in something close to real time.

Last Friday I went to Hong Kong for the first time.  Mysterious, hideous and bizarrely captivating, the Chinese name for Hong Kong is Xiang Gang, Fragrant Harbor.   A city with a long past that looks like a scene from the future, with tall honeycomb buildings sticking up everywhere amidst florid green mountains, Hong Kong has long held a special place in my imagination since my grandparents went there frequently before I was born and when I was young.  The story I heard was that they had their clothes made there by British tailors for a much reduced price so it was worth the trip.  I think they just liked it.  I, however, was definitely not sure about liking a place crammed with people and a decidedly materialistic focus on money and fashion.  Even the trains and subways have TV screens with Paris fashion models striding down the runways.  The TV is  always on.

The first shock was that all the Mandarin Chinese that I have been learning seemed entirely useless.  I have become completely accustomed to the sound of Mandarin Chinese, I’d even go so far to say that much of what I experience here in Taiwan has lost a quality of freshness now that I can understand a lot of what is being said.  The sound of the Cantonese dialect of Chinese is a whole different sound.  And despite the fact that most of the people in Hong Kong can speak English unlike in Taiwan and despite the fact that all the signs have English on them, a gift, of course, from the British, I found myself at odds with every encounter.  I’d open my mouth and try to speak Mandarin, they would come back with English and I would just be confused.  The worst moment was when I tried to explain to the subway guy in the booth that I had jumped the entrance because the machine had taken my money and not spit out any ticket and I needed to go only one stop but I needed to do it immediately.  After several minutes of total confusion and sweating on my part, he finally got the idea, but seemed oblivious to the information that the machine was consistently taking money and not giving tickets.  (two Australians before me had the same problem and I, of course, didn’t believe them so became the third victim).  I still had to jump the gate at the other end, but nobody seemed to care.

Finally, I was off to the giant office complex that contains a travel agency masquerading as a Taiwan embassy that would allow me to apply for a new visitor visa.  China does not officially recognize Taiwan as a separate country so you cannot officially go to China and get a Taiwan visa-they don’t think  you need one.  Hong Kong has special status since the British were in charge until recent history, but still the place has to call itself a travel agency.  I got there in the nick of time to get my visa rushed out by 4 p.m., feeling right at home in a marooned travel agency speaking to a Taiwanese lady in Mandarin!  It was something of a highlight in what had thus far been a trying morning that started at 4 a.m.

Fortunately, a friend here who has had to make this same visa run, advised me that there was a huge and lovely park with the entrance just across from the Lippo Centre where the travel agency is.  The day was overcast and cool but not raining, the kind of light that makes all the colors seem saturated and rich.  I headed first for the fountain my friend had described with rapture, a kind of man-made waterfall structure shaped like a gazebo.  Immediately, with the sound of water moving, I began to relax.  I even began to enjoy myself.  I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering around in the park, through the tai chi garden and the open outdoor aviary.  I was moved in a way that I hadn’t anticipated by a monument in the tai chi garden to 5 doctors who had died during the SARS epidemic in Hong Kong.

I don’t know if it is me or the place, but over the day, Hong Kong began to take a hold of me.  I started to think about coming back.  Though I cannot imagine living in a place where I saw not even one house, and I am completely repelled by the sky high apartment idea, the mix of eastern and western sensibilities is a unique and fascinating situation to experience.  Hong Kong is a place where the best of both worlds seems to meet in a display both sweet and sour, a popular flavor here in Asia.

This post is a little break from posts about life in Taiwan.  You could say it is a little commercial break, a little reflection on some deeper currents in my experience and a commercial for the value of spending time with your own reflections.  So much is always happening here in Taiwan, so much is new, unfamiliar and interesting, but there is also a slower, deeper flow, sort of like the lava from the underwater volcanos that rock us here in Taiwan daily, bubbling up intermittently and expressing itself in various ways.

Today the images of a horse and a gardener came to mind as I contemplated writing further about divination, what it is and why I do it.  These images are metaphors for developing our skill in observation and relating with change.  I am neither a horsewoman nor a gardener, but I am, persistently, in love with metaphor, with the sensation of resonance between an observable external phenomenon and an inner experience.  So, the horse, an extremely sensitive and intuitive animal, strong yet responsive, often energetic and expressive, inspires me.  To one long-time friend, a true horsewoman, I have commented that I am more like a horse than a rider.  Yet, what intrigues me about riding a horse is that it is so practical and so playful, so elegant and so efficient, qualities I myself would like to emulate almost anywhere in my life.   You can ride a horse, even own a horse, but you cannot predict what will happen when you engage a horse.  Just as you can’t predict what will happen when you engage another human being.  It is risky.  Compensating for that risk requires being very sensitive to change, change in the wind, change in the food, change when an emotion or a thought captures my attention.  But the sensitivity itself never changes.  It is a built-in feature.  So I may tire of having to feed myself a certain way or dress a certain way to prevent discomfort or illness but as long as I live in this particular body this sensitivity is my own.

Which brings me to the gardener.  Gardeners don’t have to be sensitive in the same ways that horses are since earth tends to be more forgiving then your average homo sapien, but they are at the mercy of nature.  Whenever, wherever we garden we have to look at the nature of the soil, the nature of the plant we are dealing with.  What will grow here?  What will it need?  Not everything can grow everywhere.  Somewhat sadly, I found this out the hard way in Vermont where I attempted to grow the azaleas that I love, only to have the flowers routinely eaten off by wandering deer.  (Here in Taiwan the azaleas are everywhere, effortlessly blooming in all their wondrous delicacy and gentle showiness.)  A good gardener is sensitive to the weather, the timing of their planting season.  They know when something should show up above ground and when to nestle the seed below the ground so that it will rest and receive nourishment.  It is true that there is the bludgeoning sort of gardening, where you hothouse, water, and generally protect the plants from the natural changes in the environment.  Somehow that kind of gardening speaks more to the person doing the gardening than to the plant or the place you find yourself in.  I am interested in the other kind of gardening, the kind where you observe, watch, wait and use your senses to determine when planting or harvesting should occur, the kind where you are a subject of the sun, the moon, the wind, and the rain.

So I am a loyal subject, an open, receptive, alert to change subject.  In this funny place that seems to be nowhere and everywhere, I am constantly challenged to utilize my sensitivity, ride the horse of change, all the while tending to the inner garden full of life’s questions sprouting their bright possibility in every free corner of my attention.

azaleas at TaiDa (National Taiwan University)

Coming soon, a new page, The Odyssey Oracle, with, as you might guess, more about divination.  Why ask, why divine, what is it really about.  Something is growing in the little space in the eastern corner of the garden…who knows what will sprout! Stay in touch!