Due to the typhoon last Wednesday, there was no practice in Yonghe. As I approached the Concert Hall at CKS on Saturday, I spied Teacher Xu talking with an older white guy in black. For a moment I thought one of the Shaolin guys had come over, but he wasn’t from their group either. Just after I arrived, he and Teacher Xu left, so I couldn’t hear what they were talking about. Another foreigner, Zach, who I saw once a long time ago was there, as well as another student I haven’t seen in a while, the UPS guy.

Our group had moved to the east side of the balcony by the coffee stand to escape the construction. I practiced the form for a while but kept running out of space, so I pushed with Mr. Lin for a while. Afterwards, Teacher Xu returned, and said that the older white guy was a trade representative from the US who found out about our group from his hotel and introduced, for some reason, by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He must be pretty high-level. Teacher Xu said the guy really needed to relax his body; he was apparently a little unyielding. Now isn’t that just like a US trade official? I thought snarkily. Teacher Xu said he’d been invited to teach a symposium or something in the states: cool.

My uniform was dirty, so I was in regular garb that day. Teacher Xu must have thought I was ready for another video-gathering excursion to the other side to film The Other Group, saying I shouldn’t push my luck.

I pushed with Zach for a while. He’s moved down to Taidong and rarely gets up this way, accounting for his long absence. Zach has the habit of stepping forward into his pushes, giving him added momentum, but also resulting in my often being backed into a wall or column. Later I pushed with the UPS guy, who is tall, taller than I am, and with actual negative body fat. He’s good at tuishou and I tend to learn a lot when pushing with him, though he came close to mangling my wrists while teaching me how to escape certain grasping tactics.

Another elder student, who also studies Chinese medicine, was giving massages. “They’re chiropractic,” he said. “It’s popular in the US, but Taiwan has yet to catch up in this area.” It looked tempting, but I stayed away due to the memory of a tingly, slightly numb hand after a session a while back.

(Due to some complaints about the readability of this site, I’ve made the text slightly darker. Let me know if it’s too dark or if you any better ideas.)

I went to see Ratatouille on Friday after work, having forgotten that Prince Roy was going to see The Simpsons Movie until the last minute. It was the best movie I’ve seen in a while, and refreshing after so many sequels (the evil food critic was particularly good, voiced by Peter O’Toole). They also managed the dicey job of telling the story from two different points of view. As for the sequels: Spider-man 3 made me embarrassed for Sam Raimi (we just watched Peter Parker deal successfully with Great Power, and now suddenly he can’t? Huh?), Shrek the Third, while funny, was not up to the standards of the first two movies, and Harry Potter 5 seemed thin on plot and character in comparison with its predecessors, and the Chinese translation of the title mistranslated “order” as the kind you give instead of a group. Die Hard 4.0, while pretty good especially considering how long it’s been since Bruce Willis began the series, sometimes felt like a long Nokia advertisement. I was also disappointed that they didn’t get a single Mac/PC joke in Justin Long’s dialog.

Last week I also saw I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, the Chinese title of which is quite clever in that it copies a children’s song “When We’re Together” but includes the Chinese word for “fake” which, read in Minnan, is pronounced “gay”. Chinese title-related cleverness aside, it’s pretty much a typical Adam Sandler movie, with the usual stereotypes thrown in. The movie lost me when Ving Rhames adopts a lisp.

As an aside, is it just me, or is IMDB letting anyone post anything (in English at least) to their database now? It used to be that an IMDB listing denoted a certain level of professional filmmaking, but more and more I’m seeing cheap porn and student projects listed as well. It may be only a matter of time before they start listing Youtube videos. This is all sour grapes, of course, because they refuse to list Clay Soldiers because the documents proving it was aired multiple times nationwide are in Chinese. Heaven forfend a film is made in another country and includes, god help us, another language. Not entirely cricket, you know.

The weather’s been cool and rainy-ish ever since the duel tropical storms departed our fair island last week. We hammered out the last of the recordings for the long-awaited Muddy Basin Ramblers album over the weekend, practicing at the Sandcastle on Saturday and then getting the last three songs in the can at my place this afternoon and tonight. I managed to turn in a passable performance, all things considered. The final mixing will tell, of course. Sandman managed to refrain from trashing my place too badly, and we took some commemorative pictures afterwards. I’m going to miss these sessions; it’s always fun having a few good friends over to hang out and make some music. The session was followed by much rejoicing and a slightly drunken waltz, accompanied by singing, down to Rendezvous Pizza for a last meal before they tear the place down in the name of Progress. The owner appeared a bit sad about the whole affair, and told us she hoped that they would eventually be allowed back at that location instead of being condemned to the crowded street behind them. We hope so, too.

The rest of the weekend has been spent tidying up before practices, tidying up afterwards, film editing, tai-chi practice and taking pictures of El Mono Severo, who made a visit yesterday but had trouble moving my old, mildewed, concave mattress downstairs due to logistical issues involving elevatorial dimensions as well as a general lack of motivation. I’d given the “memory foam” mattress a fair shake, but after over a month I still wasn’t quite comfortable, so I sold it to a friend and bought a standard Ikea mattress to sleep on instead. Slim vowed to post El Mono Severo posters in odd locations all over the Taipei basin, but we’ll see if remembers his pledge in the morning, when tonight’s events are not quite as tangible. David thinks I should do an action comic series about El Mono Severo, with the Mattress Conundrum as Episode One. I have to say I am tempted. And that mattress isn’t going to move itself.

I pushed with a new student, an older guy, on Wednesday. He’s very polite and full of compliments. I’m wondering which direction he’ll slip into, the hard style or the soft. It seems most students go with the hard push style, the tree-root style. It’s possible that the soft style seems too counter-intuitive to most people. Maybe that’s why I like it. Yang Qing-feng is the best student at this, and seemingly one of the only students who truly studies that style. I heard that once he and the Tree Root Master once got into an altercation because the latter thought that Yang was out of bounds by pulling as well as pushing. I find that fascinating, though hard to believe.

I then pushed with a more senior student for a while, mostly successfully (I don’t count just being able to push someone over as success, but rather whether I find myself not succumbing to the temptation to push forcefully or not as a successful session). Many of the students say I’ve improved, even the ones who haven’t been studying that long. This confirms my long-held suspicion that most often, such compliments aren’t really worth getting excited about. It’s when the compliments stop that you know that either 1) you’re making real progress or 2) you’ve pissed everyone off completely or 3) both.

Last up was the interior designer, who started out well but soon resorted to the all-out-shove technique, over and over again. Lesson for the night: Your opponent’s energy like water; you can’t stem the flow, but you can manage it, make yourself more hydrodynamic and use it to your advantage.

Only Teacher Xu was at CKS Hall when I got there at 9am, but other students arrived shortly afterwards. I pushed with the Guy Not From China for a while, and then worked on the form. The construction hasn’t completely taken over our area yet, but it probably will soon. On the roof tiny workmen were chiseling away swathes of orange tile, which crashed periodically to the ground. The enormously fat man who cleans the area wandered through, bearing quite a resemblance, movement-wise, to Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri on the Sopranos. “Shouldn’t you be able to lose weight with all the exercise you get cleaning?” Teacher Xu asked him. Baccala just shrugged.

“When you turn or change position with force,” Teacher Xu told us later, “every part of your body is rigidly connected, making you easily pushed. If you adjust your position by relaxing, nothing is connected into a straight, easily pushable line.”

He also advised me to push the skin of my opponent, rather than trying to push their muscles and bones. “Muscles and bones move away from you, but you can stay with the skin,” he said. He also demonstrated the negative effect caused by concentrating on one’s own stance while pushing.

The other group, the group we’re officially a renegade splittist offshoot of, was practicing on the opposite balcony on the other side of the hall. I borrowed a video camera and went over to take a look. It was a large group, much larger than our little band, all attired in white uniforms with “Chinese Tai-chi Association” or something similarly official-sounding written across the front. The group included many foreigners, men as well as women. I stayed and watched a while, observing the different pairs busy pushing. Most of it seemed faster and more forceful than our style, though a couple of pairs were going more slowly. Occasionally those who lost a bout ended up being shoved rather roughly out of the vicinity. I could see a lot of similarity to our style, despite the differences.

At one point the teacher called the group together, and they went through the first part of the basic form together, the teacher counting out the moves one by one. My old teacher used to do this as well. Learning the form is quicker this way, as you can just look at the people around you and copy them if you forget. They then went back to pushhands practice. I wasn’t the only one filming; several of the group walked around with cameras filming themselves and others. Nobody paid any attention to me or told me to get lost, presumably because I wasn’t wearing our uniform at the time. Maybe they thought I was a tourist.

My curiosity satiated, I walked around the other side of the hall, pausing to talk to some Falungong members who had decided, en masse it seems, to form an orchestra and were practicing in the wooded section just west of the hall.

Back at our area, Mr. Qin had arrived and was busy poking a coke bottle set about a yard in front of him with a white stick he had apparently brought for just that purpose. I tried pushing with one of the other students, but he seemed more eager to teach me the basics than actually push, so I stood there letting him push me for a while before the idea of a nice lunch at Sababa became too powerful to resist.

“Dumbledore never told you what happened to your father,” Voldemort hissed in his high, clear voice, reaching out to Harry, who clung to the high castle railing, his severed wrist throbbing in pain. Anger flashed through him at the thought of his old mentor.

“He told me enough!” He shouted above the storm. “He told me you killed him!”

For a moment Voldemort seemed lost in thought as lightning flickered through the shadows of his face. Then his slitted gaze fixed itself upon Harry once again. “No, Harry. I…”*

Entranced as I am with the finale to the Harry Potter series, I have to put the book down, as the subway train is pulling into CKS Hall Station.

Of all the stations on the MRT, CKS Hall is my favorite, and no, it’s not just because it’s named after one of the last centuries’ more inept military figures. Mainly it’s because the high ceilings and multiple levels make it feel more like a genuine train station than any other stop, more even than the real train station platforms at Taipei Main Station. The lack of an upper balcony over the trains makes a huge difference, as do the shiny gold station name plaques set at intervals along the tracks. It’s the kind of station where a huge chandelier wouldn’t go amiss, nor a portly uniformed man with a pocket watch dodging the steam blasts of a locomotive.

Another source of endless entertainment at CKS Hall Station is the chaotic race across the platform you can witness if you’re lucky enough to stop just as the train from West Gate Station is pulling in. You can see the anticipation in the faces of the people in the other train as it draws to an excruciatingly slow stop. Will the train wait? How long will I have to make it? Oh, what will I ever do if I have to wait another five minutes for the next one!

After a maddening wait the doors slide open, and students, businessmen and office ladies are thrown aside as the champions of muscling through Taiwanese crowds, i.e. short, squat, middle-aged women with frizzy hair and Mister Donut bags stuffed with market vegetables, charge headlong across the platform to the waiting train, their feet barely touching the ground. Occasionally I’ve seen people in their way actually become airborne as a result of the ensuing collisions.

Breathless, the previous occupants of the other train rush into ours. But the show’s not over yet. At the sound of the door-closing signal, everyone begins making mental bets on who will make it and who won’t, wondering if they’ll get to see that rare and hilarious sight of someone stuck in the door. Those champions who rush through just as the doors are snapping at their heels are greeted as minor heroes, while a slight contempt is held for those who draw up short.

Alas, nobody gets stuck in the doors this time, though there are some satisfying thumps as would-be passengers fail to stop in time and hit the closed doors. Their disappointed faces slide backwards as the train leaves. The show is over, and I return to my book.

“No!” Harry cried, incredulous. “That’s impossible…”

*Please don’t take this seriously, Harry Potter fans.