One of the main things I got out of my recent trip was a reassessment of my relation to the US. Perhaps over the extended period of time I’ve spent in Taiwan,  a period that already covers most of my life up to this point, my recollections and impressions from my American childhood have assumed a greater status in my memories than they actually deserve. This is natural, I suppose, and comes to most people with the passing of the years, but on this trip I realized that who I am today is actually more the result of my experiences and choices as an adult in Taiwan than my experiences as a child in the US. I’ve never lived as an adult in the US. I’ve been out of touch with the on-the-ground culture there for almost a quarter of a century, if I ever really was in touch with it when I was growing up. We all attribute great meaning to our formative years, of course, and being away from the place where those years passed for me has accented that time and place in my memories, set them apart as something special and important. Which they are, but it was when I started to make my own choices that I began creating who I am today.

This point was particularly driven home when I was dealing with my relatives: I was the baby of the family when I was growing up; my older sister and brother seemed infinitely wiser and more in touch with the world outside than I was. Communication with my parents was difficult as I wasn’t coming from anywhere in particular. Their viewpoint was the only viewpoint, and if it didn’t make sense to me, I had nothing to fall back on. Now I see my brother and sister as equals, friends and  companions, and even difficult conversations with my parents are somewhat easier because I no longer depend on their judgement for my sense of self worth.

While I have changed significantly over the decades since I left the US, the country itself has changed as well, though it’s difficult to be objective with a moving target. Americans these days seem larger in frame, yet somehow diminished in daring.  Children don’t play, adults don’t wander. Cars, grocery stores and meals have all become huge, while people meekly submit to a general paranoia and mutual suspicion actively engendered by the government in various official acts seemingly designed to strangle open discussion. Perhaps one is a reaction to the other. Perhaps the two phenomena are symbiotic parasites.

Or perhaps I just don’t know what I’m talking about. How can I tell all of this after a couple of weeks flying and driving around the country? Obviously I can’t; it’s just my fleeting impression. Of course, Taiwan has changed as well, though this is even harder to note as it has happened day by day over a long period of time.

But when I returned to Taipei after my trip, I felt it: The familiarity, the comfort, the intimate knowledge of a place rushing back into your environment that signals the simple fact of coming home.

I’ve started another site (“Oh no, not another one!” you’re no doubt saying. But I’m just carrraaazzy that way). It’s called From my cave and it’s just photos that I take with my phone here and there, shots I don’t really want to bother with on my computer, things that I happen to see for which my usual cameras, for whatever reason, aren’t suitable. No text or commentary, just the snaps.  Uploading phone shots to my flickr account always seemed wrong somehow, and of course Facebook is just a walled garden, so I figured there might just be a use for this tumblr thingy after all.

Anyway, enjoy (if that’s your thing).

I was invited to attend the final presidential TV debates this afternoon up at the PTV studios in Neihu. Chenbl and I took the MRT out to Nangang and then up the Neihu line to Huzhou Station, which is now surrounded by a lot more nice new apartment buildings than I remember from the last time I was out there. It seems the MRT really does make a difference.

After a bowl of noodles at a nearby shop, we walked through the drizzle up slippery sidewalks lined with policemen to PTV and waited at a barricade while the candidates’ vehicles swept past up the hill. Some truant reporters were yelling at the policemen to let them through NOW, but the cops told them they had to wait like everyone else until the motorcades had passed. The reporters didn’t think much of this.

We walked up by the protest groups and through the layers of reporters into the studios, where we were shown to some sofas in the lobby featuring some snacks and cute little bottles of water, and waited while the other guests showed up. Each candidate could invite 25 people. These included some middle-aged women, an elderly fellow from Taichung, a portly photographer from Penghu, and the head of some government office. After about half and hour, we were led into the studio and sat down in folding chairs (Chenbl, not being an official guest, had to stay in the lobby where he could watch the debate on TV with the reporters there). I was seated right in the center of the central section, just behind King Pu-tsung and two rows behind Vice President Siew, Premier Wu and the first lady. One of the officials in the row in front of me was using a tablet computer.

I chatted with the old guy from Taichung, mostly in Taiwanese with some Mandarin thrown in here and there, until we both realized that we were the only ones in the room talking and that we really should shut up. The announcer appeared at her podium and called the three candidates on stage, to general applause. The cameraman counted us down to the brash opening music of the opening segment, and then the debate started.

After the opening statements, all of which included saying “Hello everyone” in as many dialects as possible, the candidates were called on to answer questions from various cultural and social groups. I won’t get into all the specific questions here, as that will be the topic of discussion on many other sites. President Ma was in the center, flanked by People First Party Chairman James Soong on the left and Democratic Progressive Party Chairwoman Tsai Ying-wen on the right. While discussing the various topics, all of the candidates managed to fit in little political jibes at each other, but they didn’t really get into it, as all of their answers were limited to a minute and a half, after which their mic would be turned off and they would be left muttering to themselves while the announcer said “Next!”

We had a ten-minute break, during which I grabbed some water and chatted with Premier Wu a bit in the line for the bathroom, and then the second part of the debate began. When the candidates appeared on stage this time, it was very clear by listening to the applause just which section of the audience had been invited by which candidate. In this part, each candidate was allowed to pose a minute’s worth of questions to the other two candidates, and they’d each have two minutes to answer. Now we were really getting into it. Ma had opened with an attack on the recent Yu Chang controversy involving Tsai during her time as vice premier, and he returned to this at a couple of points, but mostly he kept pointing to his record and quoting relevant statistics. At a couple of points, when it was his turn to ask questions, he would call on Tsai to answer this or that accusation without addressing any question to Soong, who, when it came his turn to “answer”, said, “Here we go again!” to general laughter. It almost seemed as if he wasn’t taking himself very seriously as a candidate.

Tsai seemed subdued, almost distressed, something that didn’t come across in the debates I watched on TV last time. She issued a rare smile or two, but on the whole she gave the impression that she felt she’d been wronged, possibly due to all of the recent accusations, or possibly a head cold. Ma and Soong both countered her charges with numbers, and there was a lot of “Yes your administration accomplished that but it was my administration’s groundwork that let you do it” going on in all directions. Soong, when answering a question about high housing prices, said, “You do realize that Taipei is pretty much the only place this is happening, right? Man, you two you have lived in Taipei for too long!” He wasn’t a comedic foil, though; he brought both candidates to task on various subjects, and chided them for wasting efforts on what he called “senseless political bickering”. Ma, I felt, did better this time around than during the first debates, though that might have been because I was in the room instead of just watching on TV. But he stayed on message, and seemed more confident and assured than last time, though none of the candidates avoided at least a couple of verbal stumbles.

Finally, we had the closing statements, and the cameraman told us we were clear. “I thought that went pretty well,” I told King, who agreed. Ma walked over to thank us for coming, and I chatted with him for a bit before he left. Outside, the rain continued, and we walked back down the hill for some more noodles before taking the MRT back downtown, and then home.

A fairly interesting weekend. On Saturday Chenbl and I went out to Banqiao to a big campaign rally for President Ma. It was held in a stadium, the stage in the center of the field, surrounded by a sea of seats. Vendors were selling various paraphernalia around the track. It began to rain almost immediately after we arrived, but that didn’t stop droves of people flowing into the stadium. I helped out on stage by wrangling some of the people dressed in those blow-up costumes of various anthropomorphized items, such as drinks, other goods, and airplanes on stage during one of the shows. I led either a 747 or some kind of dragon around by the wing lest the person inside fall down in an embarrassing manner. At least they were protected from the rain, though I wouldn’t relish having a battery hookup in there to keep the thing inflated in that kind of weather.

President Ma and his running mate Premier Wu spent a lot of time shaking hands and talking with people before they got up to the stage, where Eric Chu and other KMT officials were filling time with speeches, permeated with a lot of “Diu-m-diu! (Right?)”

“DIU!” the crowd shouted back in between mouthfuls of lunch. We took advantage of a short lull in the rain to slip away after the president’s speech, following a steady stream of people making their way through the downpour to the train station. I spent the rest of the day among hundreds of prints on my living room floor, trying to make some sense out of it before I meet with the publisher.

The sun was peeking out on Sunday morning, so I decided to go to 2/28 park for taichi practice. Most of our usual practice area was covered in water from the previous day’s rain, but I found a sufficiently large patch to practice the forms and some sword before going over to practice tuishou with some of our group, who had congregated on the pavement in front of the fountain. It was a good, refreshing practice.

After some lunch at Mos Burger, I headed over to the new Bobwundaye for Lo Sirong’s CD launch party. David and Conor played on the album, and they played several songs from the album while we munched on some delicious snacks prepared by Katrina and sipped whiskey provided by Sirong for the event. It was a beautiful afternoon outside. Most of the other Ramblers were in attendance, with the notable exception of Slim, who was indisposed, so we followed with a couple of sets of our own. Slim was notable by his absence, and I couldn’t hear the bass, so I played as well as I could by feeling the vibration in my foot on the tub. It wasn’t a bad set, but rather rough around the edges.

Afterwards David introduced me to his taichi group, which practices at Xinglong Park in Muzha on the weekends. They were very interested in the whole lineage thing, who I studied with, which always reminds me of parties at the Hamptons where people ask which family you’re from (I’m guessing, having never been to the Hamptons and all). When I mentioned Teacher X, they said, “Oh, he is the student of our master!”

“His masters are dead,” I said. Which is true, both Master Yu and Master Song died years ago. Only Little Qin, my “elder brother”, also studied with Master Yu for a short time before the latter’s passing.

They were very nice, and invited me to join them at the park some time. But one older fellow, a tall, slim man named Mr. Li, seemed eager to try me out then and there. He kept making little illustrative pushes as we talked, as if he were sounding me out, and when I put down my bass string he advanced in earnest.

Mr. Li is very good, and, both of us having more than a few drinks under our belts, things got a little, uh, animated. My response was probably ill-advised, but then again I’m not used to doing tuishou in bars. We went back and forth rapidly a few times, but Mr. Li was making annoyingly quick grabbing moves, and I ended up pulling him around me. As he stumbled, his glasses flew out of his pocket and hit the floor. I could feel everyone staring at us, and I apologized to Mr. Li as I helped him pick up his glasses, which thankfully weren’t broken.

I felt bad about it, though, and I’m sure I made a horrible impression on the group after they were so nice to me. They left (I can’t blame them), and I took a seat at the bar and had some more whiskey while chatting with David, Kat, Conor and Jay until late. Though Kat had pulled the steel door halfway down and doused the exterior lights, such is the location of the new place that groups of patrons kept pouring in every so often, all “just for one drink, we promise!” I think they’re going to do quite well.

David and I shared a cab back, a Toyota Wish with skylights, and I spent the latter half of the journey staring at the lights shining out of the windows of various expensive apartment towers living the rivers of New Taipei City.

My sister drove me to the airport in Oklahoma City. We’d left the house before dawn, the bobbing oil wells at work pumping light into the sky as we hummed along the highway. The handful of tallish buildings that make up downtown were barely visible on the horizon.

At the airport, I found that United had once again canceled my seat reservations. Not a single flight’s seat assignment had survived, and I ended up forking out $119 just to get a seat that wasn’t a middle seat on the long flight from Chicago to Tokyo.

During the inevitable stage of TSA initiation maneuvers, the guard asked me if I had a shirt on underneath my sweatshirt. When I said yes, he told me to take off my sweatshirt; prudery is apparently a more important motivation than actual security. At the gate, near the store selling headrests decorated with the US flag, not only were members of the military allowed to board first, the airport staff told everyone in the waiting area to give them a round of applause. Everyone clapped, looking around to see if anyone wasn’t clapping; I kept looking at my phone. I’d stopped asking questions by the time they said I could only have two carry-ons and would I please stuff my camera bag inside another bag to comply and then take it out again on the other side of the door. I suppose that’s the point; wear people down with enough idiocy and they’ll fall in line just to save the trouble of arguing.

The bright, perky woman at the gate in Chicago recognized my W&L sweatshirt, and told me she was a “W&L mom”. I felt embarrassed by her chatter as other people were behind me waiting to be served. She told me that my seating assignments had vanished because United was changing its seating configuration from 2-5-2 to 3-3-3. “Be glad you’re on the 3-3-3…they’ve got seatback video screens!” she told me, apparently unaware that the rest of the world has had those in airplanes for years now.

We were on our way to Tokyo when I realized that I hadn’t gone through any sort of customs or immigration checkpoint. Is that normal? I have no idea. I watched movie after movie over the course of the flight along  the top of the world,movies like Captain America, Transformers 3, Lost Swordsman, Hangover 2, sprinkled with various TV programs like Monk and Family Guy episodes I’d seen before. I concluded that I was glad I hadn’t seen any of the films in the theater as it would have been a waste of time. But there on the airplane with nothing to do for half a day, they were a welcome distraction. Another distraction, though not a particularly welcome one, was the announcement, “Is there anyone on board…”

…who can fly a plane? I added mentally during the ensuing, unsettling pause. But the message went on, “…who is a doctor or medic or fireman?” That’s odd, I thought. Half an hour later they came back on, asking for diabetics with insulin, and I wondered if someone had had his or her medicine confiscated for security theater performance-related reasons and were now in trouble as a result. But we didn’t hear any more.

In Tokyo, we all went through more screening, scuffling the churchwalk line into the X-ray machine once again as Japan doesn’t seem to trust the original airport screening. It was a good thing I didn’t have a connecting flight any time soon; in fact, I wouldn’t have minded a day or two in Tokyo to decompress, but I didn’t have the time. Instead I lay down on a sofa near the gate for a couple of hours trying to figure out how to utilize the free wifi.

The flight back to Taipei left, and arrived, early. Having no checked baggage and utilizing the new facial recognition-powered automatic immigration gates at the airport, I literally didn’t have to break step until I stepped on the bus back to the city. Chenbl was waiting for me, and I was crossing the bridge at Bitan only an hour or so after we’d touched down. It was good to be back, a relief to be in familiar, comfortable surroundings once again.

So that’s my trip to the US; two weeks of bizarrity in the land o’ plenty. Hope you enjoyed the show. I’ll probably have a video of it up at some point.

I was glad I’d seen my parents on this trip. It was interesting, and I learned quite a bit about things, questions I’d stored up in my head to ask them when I had the chance….things like why we moved around so much, what various years before my birth were like, etc.

But the atmosphere was getting to me…just a hint, but the hint was more than enough. I’d been there for three days, a reasonable amount of time. Both my brother and sister have maintained distance over the years; my sister hadn’t seen our parents in many years, and my brother lives in Kentucky. I won’t get into all of it here.

My parents drove me back to Norman, back to my sister’s house, in the late morning. “You should stop doing all of the dangerous things you do,” my mother told me.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You know you’re always going to these really dangerous places and doing dangerous things.”

“Could you give an example?”

“No. You do it and you know you do it.”

I tried to stay out of the conversation on evolution, instead staring out the window at the long rolling browns and greens of the countryside, the tractors and the bales of hay, the occasional oil well pumping up and down like a  giant bird.

We arrived. I was dropped off. My parents didn’t go inside. They drove away, and I have no idea when I’ll see them again.

My sister Leslie was taking me to a local shin-dig that evening, to be attended by her friends and their friends and whomever else showed up; we went to a store for snacks and stuff, and once again I was awed by the sheer, unadulterated embarrassment of riches that is the typical American grocery. Aisles and aisles containing 87 versions of everything you can think of. I don’t recall them being that way when I was a kid; I don’t even recall them being that way the last time I was in the states, just over a decade ago.

Lunch was burgers at Sonic with vanilla Dr. Pepper, though I couldn’t really taste the vanilla; it’s one kind of sugar mixed with another kind of sugar, and I just couldn’t taste the difference. Interestingly enough, the servers at Sonic don’t take tips, though it seems to me that they work harder than most waitstaff. We stopped by a liquor store in search of CC rye whiskey, and were directed to the whiskey aisle, and then the rye aisle, where we found more or less what we were looking for. Leslie was interested in trying my preferred drink comprised of rye and ginger ale.

Our gracious host Kim had just gotten off work when we arrived and still sported her “work hair”, which I thought was actually very cool, but she appeared later with regular hair which was also cool, and she’s such a cool person it didn’t make much of a difference. There were all kinds of food as well as a chocolate cake; the frosting bowl was in the sink, and I helped myself to several fingers of the delicious stuff, feeling like a particularly tall eight-year-old. People congregated on the back porch, beyond which stretched a comfortable, distinctly un-manicured lawn. Trains hooted in the distance as evening fell. I was asked many things by many people, and met a woman from Southern China who had brought egg rolls and many other dishes. One man emerged from the house wearing a small Nikon on a Black Rapid strap, but he took it off and put it on the table instead of taking any photos. I had the rabbit with me and took a few shots, but this vacation hadn’t really called for photography; I was seldom alone long enough in one place to get a feel for it, much less explore and take the shots I usually take. That’s ok, though; I’ve long felt that photos are always there if we need them.

One woman was asking a lot of financial questions about the Water Curtain Cave, which was a bit strange. Later I learned that she was a bit of a prude and would have loved to screwed with her a bit, but I didn’t know to do so at the time. Another couple who was known for their stories of adventure and daring-do in Taiwan failed to show, which was disappointing; I’d been looking forward to chatting with them.

The evening ended reluctantly; I was tired and had to get up early for my return to the other side of the planet, a day-long journey, but before I left Kim and her husband led me on a great round of 20-or-30 questions. My favorite books, movies, sci-fi series, superheroes, etc. It was great fun.

I slept poorly again in the home of my parents.

We visited the Chickasaw Cultural Center, a spanking-new institution outside the town of Sulphur, staffed by Chickasaw and featuring tasteful and informative exhibitions on Chickasaw stories, culture and legends. The tone was moderate, even subdued in the face of the horrors of history, but I thought it was very well done. My parents…not so much.

Back home after a lunch of huge barbeque sandwiches, we watched Jeopardy in between commercials for food that caused conditions treated by medicine advertised in the other commercials. When an ad for the Ellen Degeneres’s show came on my father called out, “Ellen Degenerate!”

“‘Ellen Degenerate’? Seriously?” I asked.

“She can’t decide whether she’s a boy or a girl!” my mother opined.

After dinner I went along with my father to walk their two dogs, strangely silent creatures that show their need for affection while never making a sound. Eerie. On the next street we encountered my parents’ Chinese neighbors, who are from Shanghai and have two kids, both born in the US. Their English wasn’t the best, so we spoke in Mandarin. The husband was working on genetically-modified food research at a well-funded local institution, and we talked about that as well as their opinions of the differences in eastern and western societies. Their son, who looked to be about six, didn’t speak Chinese very well. I would have liked to have chatted with them longer as they seemed like interesting people in the face of my isolation, but the dogs were struggling to get at a local cat, so we had to move on.

That night I retreated into my guestroom after tiptoeing around the scatterings of pillows and chatted online with a Seminole fellow who lived in the area.

I slept poorly last night due to not being used to the place, the ceiling fan noise, and the place, though it’s quiet enough; only the occasional freight train breaks the rhythm of the crickets. My parents aren’t used to the idea of wifi and the Internet on one’s phone, and see wifi as a kind of appliance that you only turn on to do something, like a toaster. And they have a magnificent toaster.

We drove downtown to have lunch at a grand Mexican restaurant located in an old furniture store, the central atrium open to the patterned ceiling above. Afterwards we drove around the area looking at houses, houses and more houses, including the one where my father was literally born, where he played with the other kids in an empty lot, the house in which I remember my grandparents living, etc.

Back at the house, I spent a couple of hours leafing through old yearbooks. My parents have pretty much thrown most of my stuff out, which they claim was with my permission, though I don’t recall that. I also went through several old photobooks, selecting a few here and there to scan onto my USB drive. Some are old and faded, and will need some color adjustments.

I went out with dad when he walked the dogs around the block; it’s a very quiet neighborhood, mostly older people, mostly white with some Indians and one Chinese family down the block. We ate dinner while watching Wheel! Of! Fortune! (hosted by ageless aliens) and then watched some British cop shows and finished off the evening with a little light haranging.