前幾天Mr. 6寫了一片文

DV8, the musty, wood-covered site of many late nights after work at the newspaper as well as a scene in the movie, is closing its doors for good after Chinese New Year’s, so David, Thumper and I met up there on Friday night to see it once more. A fair share of people were there, including Gavin, Bob from Carnegies and Matthew Lian. We did the traditional DV8 thing, that is we drank, hunted through the music collection, argued about politics and played some pool downstairs.

Our old co-worker Ronnie, who is now at the Taipei Times, wrote a story on the old place’s imminent demise. It was good, but one part made me laugh:

Kenbo Liao remembers one such hazy moment in 1996, when China was launching missiles over Taiwan. Lots of people had left Taiwan, but he was here with a few regulars. “The missiles were probably shooting over our heads,” he said. Around 2am they got together and pledged to defend Taiwan against China. “We were comrades,” Liao said.

Ah, Kenbo. What a character. It’s hard for me to get all weepy about his selfless act of heroism in drinking in a bar, however, as at the time my military unit in Hsinchu was on high alert, so with all the snap drills I didn’t have the chance to express my patriotism in such an eloquent fashion.

David was roaring drunk by the time we hit the street in the wee hours of the morning. He had a flight the next day to Australia, the lucky sod. After we had walked about 50 feet from the door, I turned him around to face the bar, from which music was still emanating, and said, “There it is. You can see it, and you can hear it.”

The next day was Chinese New Year’s Eve, and I spent the evening at a friends house in Nangang eating good food and playing with their new Wii. They only sell the Japanese version here, so we spent a bit of time squinting at the squiggles on the screen, trying to guess what they meant. It was a lot of fun, though. The tennis was probably my favorite, though I didn’t get to play the pingpong. The bowling was ok, as was the baseball. The boxing was just frustrating, as the punches seemed to bear no relation to one’s hand motions.

I got back to Bitan, exhausted from the food and the Wii-related activities, at about 2am, and the fireworks were going strong. I longed for sleep, but the constant barrage outside my window made it impossible. I tried going downstairs to the common room, but it was just as loud there. Then I tried my bathtub, which was even worse as it cut off my circulation and made me dizzy. In the end I just laid on my bed waiting for it to die down, and took a nap the next morning.

When I went down to the lobby, I saw a newspaper article posted on the bulletin board, about the strict anti-fireworks measures being undertaken by the Bitan Police. Patrols every hour, on the hour! The residents are suffering! More news from bizarro-land, ’cause it ain’t happening here.

Tonight looks to be more of the same, colorful explosions-wise. In fact, it will probably continue for several nights, and as I’m a bit short on money this month, I can’t afford to go stay at the Love Hotel just up the road for a night or two. I wonder if I have any old all-night sauna coupons left…

It being Valentine’s Day, I was expecting fewer people to show up. I was wrong; most of the usual crowd were there. They started pushing as I went through my forms, and everyone was paired up, so it was a while before I got to do any tuishou.

My mission that night was to test a theory, a theory that holding yourself responsible for your opponent’s degree of rigidity will get you closer to the idea of real tuishou. That the main mission. The secondary mission that I’ve committed myself to is to “lose until I know” tuishou (trust me, it sounds a lot more comprehensible in Chinese). I figure that every time I start wrestling with someone in an attempt to win a bout, I lose in the long run. From now on, I’ve decided, I will not resort to force. If I can’t use real tuishou methods to keep from being pushed over, I’ll just let myself be pushed over.

I put these ideas to the test this last time around, with mixed results. One of the guys I was pushing with was ecstatic at his sudden “improvement.” Mr. You exclaimed, “You must have really improved; he’s usually really hard to push!” as I let myself be pushed over again and again.

I switched to Mr. You for a while, following his narration, and then pushed with the guy who is not from Hong Kong. I found it very tempting to resort to force, but I did my best to resist, doing only as much as I could with technique and feeling. Whenever a strong resistance built up, I would try to find a way to disperse it. I figure this is the first step in a long process. I can’t expect to be able to control the rigidity of my opponents right away, but I can at least aim for it.

Teacher Xu told us about keeping your palms relatively open. “You can’t control your opponent’s energy with your hands closed,” he said. But he wasn’t talking about the muscles in our hands, but our perception of what we were doing when we practice tuishou.

I was the last to leave, after everyone wished everyone else a Happy New Year, but I met Mr. V on the subway back. I tried to explain what I was trying to do with a different approach, but he just told me that I needed to strengthen my backstance. I think I need more than that. Still, I felt a lot better about this class than I have in a while. I was caught at a roadblock, and hopefully looking at things differently will help me get past it.

Though it’s been blogged about extensively, I just have to express my amazement at the city of Boston’s reaction to its recent discovery of a few publicly placed LED boards with cartoon characters on them. Spurning chance after chance to realize what they were dealing with, their reaction to international derision over the matter seems to have made them simply more eager to “prove” that there was some kind of “threat” involved. Now apparently they’ve cooked up some numbers for “restitution” for their blunder and have forced the head of the Cartoon Network to resign.

What I find most significant is that this is the first time I’ve ever witnessed such a huge disconnect between what the mainstream media is reporting and what is blatantly obvious to everyone else. It’s almost soviet. Even living here in Taiwan and being a bit older than the targeted demographic, I still know about the TV show the character is taken from. So, it seems, does everyone on the Internet. But despite the fact that both the show and the Internet have been around for years, the mainstream media in the US seems almost willfully ignorant. I suppose in the first couple of hours after the story broke such ignorance could have been explained, but even today, weeks afterward, they don’t seem to have been able to understand just what happened. It’s like the real world is a foreign land to which they cannot imagine. It really makes one wonder, if the major US media players can’t even get this right, what’s the point of their existence?

Seriously, this was just as perfect a test as you could ask for, and they failed spectacularly, right down to the scapegoating of everyone but those actually responsible for the hysteria. The media, the authorities concerned and city officials decided to ignore reality and spend all of their efforts trying to push their fantasy on the public. Before the Internet it might have been possible to do this successfully (and it no doubt has been). But after the laughter dies down and they’re still putting up their claims as “truth,” I think the general public will realize that it has a genuine cause for concern on its hands. Basically, this incident has shown us that we cannot trust them. Even in this kind of situation, they’ve proved themselves not only useless and only concerned about saving face, but untrustworthy and even dangerous. But it seems that those who are charged with fixing such problems have become the problems themselves.

“Excuse me,” the little gentleman said, “Where are you from?”

Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? thought Dr. Daruwalla. It was always the question. For his whole adult life, it was the question he usually answered with the literal truth, which in his heart felt like a lie.

“I’m from India,” the doctor would say, but he didn’t feel it; it didn’t ring true. “I’m from Toronto,” he sometimes said, but with more mischief than authority. Or else he would be clever. “I’m from Toronto, via Bombay,” he would say. If he really wanted to be cute, he would answer, “I’m from Toronto, via Vienna and Bombay.” He could go on, elaborating the lie- namely, that he was from anywhere.

I just finished A Son of the Circus by John Irving. I spent the first half of the book wondering what it was about and whether I should continue reading it, but, as is typical in my experience with Irving, I was eventually rewarded for my patience, though later in the book than I would have liked (A Prayer for Owen Meany won me over immediately, but Hotel New Hampshire took a while. The Ciderhouse Rules never did anything for me).

Though it wasn’t the best Irving I’ve read, I was able to identify with the main character of Dr. Daruwalla, who, though he can act the various parts, doesn’t seem to truly belong in any one culture. Early on, he is told that, once one is an immigrant, one is always an immigrant. Much of the book focuses on this subject, which is portrayed in a melancholy yet matter-of-fact fashion.

As an immigrant myself, as well as someone who admittedly encounters a certain amount of discomfort while dealing with various cultural environments, I can somewhat relate to this fictional character’s situation. In the book, Dr. Daruwalla knows deep down that there will always be people in Canada who, based on the color of his skin, will only see him as Indian, as well as many people in India who will point out that he is not truly an Indian either. All of this translates into a kind of helplessness in the book until, towards the end, the doctor is asked where he is from by a child on the street, and he comes up with a uniquely accurate answer to the query, that he is from the circus.

Granted, you’ll have to read the book to know what that really means for Dr. Daruwalla, but it seems to me that there are more options in life than simply Nationality A or Citizen of B or of the C Ethnicity. And when I consider what my life would have been like if things had turned out differently, I wonder if I could have taken what a more standard path would have dealt me.

But that’s neither here nor there. I could wonder endlessly about such things (and I often find myself doing just that), but in reality, while I sometimes dislike dealing with the various cultural baggage that comes with an inter-cultural identity, I often find, as with a large, noisy party, that I am more comfortable outside than in. Perhaps that is a common point among immigrants in general, that restlessness that flies in the face of the natural desire to belong. Some immigrants cling to one culture or another, either retreating into the comfortable familiarity of their childhood or making a show of unreservedly throwing themselves into their adopted culture while daring anyone to notice anything out of the ordinary, but I think that, to a degree, we all reserve a section of ourselves that transcends the absoluteness of any one culture, environment or identity. Just in case.

I am not American, not officially anyway; I have never lived there as an adult. I don’t remember my birthplace at all. While my English remains a bit better than my Chinese, I don’t know anything about contemporary US culture that can’t be accessed through the Internet. Americans seem foreign to me. While my upbringing will always be a part of who I am, it is a static part and only changes in relation to the person I’ve become since.

I know Taiwan better than any other place in the world. It’s my home, and though I love to travel and explore different parts of the world, I always want to come back here. I am a citizen with all the rights and obligations of a Taiwanese national. Yet a random stranger on the street, seeing my features and skin color, will automatically assume that I am a cultural novice and completely unfamiliar with this land and its people. I will be treated like a child or an idiot by some, fawned over as exotic by others. Only those who get to know me will ever know any different.

Such inconsistencies are simply part of my reality, an unfamiliar aspect to many people who (understandably) rely on assumptions to get through life. It may seem like this kind of existence makes a lot of unreasonable demands, and it does, but with culture and identity, as with physics, there is only so much me to go around. Perhaps that is why some immigrants tend to stay on the outside, in order to allow them at least the illusion of control over their identities, even as they fly apart at the seams.

I went to the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall on Tuesday after work, as that is when Teacher Xu holds his forms practice, and I wanted to work on the empty-hands form I’m slowly learning. A handful of students sat on the veranda, stretching along with the teacher, who later showed me some new parts of the form as well as correcting some mistakes I’d been making in earlier parts.

Afterwards, I was talking with Teacher Xu about tuishou, and apparently one of the students heard me talking. “Do pushhands with me!” he said excitedly as Teacher Xu and the others packed up and left after practice. That should have been my first warning, but I’m always up for tuishou with someone new. Sometimes you find out interesting things.

It soon became apparent that he took winning quite seriously. I tried to start out soft, but soon failed to maintain it as our pushing deteriorated into something more like wrestling, which then became more violent. I felt this a bit dangerous and sat down, but he wasn’t ready to quit. Even after being pushed off balance, he would yank me forward, determined to appear to win the match. “You’re too rigid,” he lectured, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he was even more tightly wound than I was.

At one point I managed to push him over despite all of this, using stupid and rough force that has nothing to do with tuishou, but he continued to pull and we both fell in a heap. “That’s it!” I said. “If I wanted to learn about wrestling I would have gone to a wrestling class.” He just looked at me. “Someone’s going to get hurt, ” I added. I was in a foul mood.

So on Wednesday when I went to the actual pushhands class, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it as I usually do. Predictably, I spent the time having it pounded in that despite the amount of time I’ve been doing this, I haven’t managed to integrate anything that I’ve learned. What Teacher Xu does to push over his opponents seems like magic to me; I have no clue how he does it. As for the students, I know how they do it. Except for Mr. You and Yang Qing-feng, most of them just use brute force. Muscle. I can keep up with that for a while, but it’s tiring and it just ingrains bad habits. Pull a guy off the street and he can probably do the same thing.

Teacher Xu says that once you have a reputation, you can’t be seen losing any more, so we should take advantage of this stage to learn all we can by losing. You’d think I would have gleaned something from all these years of losing. But no, I actually haven’t.

It occurs to me that this account is altogether too optimistically titled. “The Misadventures of Teacher Xu’s Least Promising Student” is a bit long, however. Perhaps, someday, Monkey will truly learn to push, but it’s not going to happen any time soon.

Occasionally in Taiwan I encounter what I like to call the Airplane! treatment. For those of you who haven’t seen this brilliant 1980 movie, some of the jokes run thusly:

Rumack: You’d better tell the Captain we’ve got to land as soon as we can. This woman has to be gotten to a hospital.

Elaine Dickinson: A hospital? What is it?

Rumack: It’s a big building with patients, but that’s not important right now.

The Taiwan version of this usually involves a conversation with someone who possesses the intellectual knowledge that I speak Chinese but also has some sort of cognitive dissonance that prevents them from successfully internalizing that fact. They’re perfectly willing to speak with me in Chinese, but sometimes, out of the blue, they’ll feel the need to explain some perfectly obvious thing, reminding me of the Airplane! jokes.

Some Person: I won a clothes dryer at the office party, so my wife had a baby girl.

Me: So you’re saying the reason your wife had a girl instead of a boy was…

Some Person: It’s a machine that dries clothes.

Ok, so that might not be the best example, but you get the point. In any case, I wonder if the people I’m talking to, when they see me break out in laughter, think that I’m just ecstatic that I’ve finally learned the Chinese word for “clothes dryer” or whatever everyday thing we happen to be talking about.

It doesn’t happen that often; friends and people who know me well enough don’t usually do this, as they know I’ll ask them what something means if I don’t understand it. But when it does happen, I keep waiting for them to add “…but that’s not important right now.”

Today was a bit frustrating.

It started out ok. Nice and bright. Xian-rui and I played ping-pong downstairs, and I managed to keep the ball in play for literally seconds at a time, a big improvement over the last time we played.

After Xian-rui left I took a shower and headed over to a Thai restaurant on Jinan Road where the “Little Bear Village” was having its annual New Year’s party. I didn’t know anyone there. Well, I did, online, but I’d never met anyone there face-to-face before. I was seated at the geeky table, apparently, with a few exceptions. I knew one guy from chatting online before. I noticed that there wasn’t a whole lot of animated discussion at the other tables. A round of weak alcohol seemed to help matters, as did the handing out of the exchanged gifts, along with a short introduction of each recipient.

I noticed a guy across the room who seemed familiar. And also very interesting. After the party broke up I went over and sat down at their table after seeing that one of the guys there had received the gift I brought. He turned out to be the cute guy’s little brother. We chatted for a while, and I was feeling pretty good about until I realized that he was already spoken for. What really smarts is that we’d exchanged messages online years ago but never got together. It’s too bad, really. He seems really nice.

So I left with my NT$200 red envelope and walked around the city’s alleyways for a while. I looking for a place to piss when I ran into an old acquaintance from the News. He’s still working there and was on his way to a bar that used to be Roxy 99.

It was still relatively early, and I decided to go to JB’s to watch Clay Soldiers on TV. The waitress switched the little TV in the corner to CTS, which for some strange reason was just starting “Free Willy,” as a drunk English woman put her ashtray on my table, sat down and decided to spray me with her repugnantly sweet perfume. As politely as I could, I refrained from punching her. I figured she probably had friends there and I didn’t want to miss the show over a bar brawl.

The time CTS had told me came and went, however, and no Clay Soldiers. I switched around the channels a bit, and then gave up. CTS was still showing Free Willy, and every time I saw that damn whale I just wanted to see a harpoon pierce its gaping maw. Preferably with the kid attached.

Discouraged, I waded through the crowd of soccer-watchers and left in time to catch the last train home. When I got online someone told me that they had seen the show, but very faintly on channel 11. CTS is channel 12. I’ll call tomorrow to see if they can explain what the hell was going on. Right now I need to take another shower and get this damn perfume off me.

UPDATE: DOH! It was on channel 11, one of CTS’s other channels. Oh, well. At least we’re being broadcast.

我們2003年拍的片子, ‘殘傭‘ 二月三日晚上11:30要在華視文化/教育台 (應該是11台吧) 播出. 二月19日同一個時間還要重播一次. 搞不好以後還會再重播.

前幾天三立電視台的一位小姐打電話給我說她們想訪問我. 我問她是關於什麼事時, 她就說到一些跟我