Absolutely Not Your Monkey
Reading this story on one user’s discovery of what she felt was a critical flaw in a new e-book reader -mainly that she felt vaguely troubled by the fact that she didn’t know where she was in the book, how close to the end, etc.- reminded me how bound most of us are to the traditional construction and ensuing emotional needs involved in storytelling. When stories come in standard formats like a 250-page paperback novel, a half-hour TV show or a 90-minute movie, we base our expectations of what’s happening and what’s going to happen on where we are within the story. When I was watching American Gangster last Wednesday, there’s a scene involving a raid on a warehouse. I found myself looking at my watch to ascertain whether it would be successful; if we were at one point in the movie it would work, whereas if it were earlier than I thought, it probably wouldn’t. It turned out I was right. When I was watching Ratatouille, the winning of the restaurant felt like it came too soon, but it turned out that it was not the major obstacle in the plot, which differed from most Hollywood story-telling conventions in interesting ways. If this doesn’t make sense to you, surely you’ve encountered watching a TV show you know for a fact to last only a half-hour, minus commercials, and at some point it becomes plain that the plot cannot be resolved in time. Sure enough, it’s a two-parter. Tune in next week for the exciting conclusion!
It seems that a measure of our enjoyment of a story in any form is the reassurance of knowing where we are in the dramatic arc. This knowledge may remain on the subconscious level for the most part, but it’s definitely a part of the experience, perhaps a part we’ve come to take for granted. But as the e-book phenomenon shows, things are changing. With the advent of such technologies as well as more downloadable, variable-construct media being made available, it may seem like we’re in danger of losing our place in the story.
My guess, however, is that although the next generation will see things differently as a result of different constructs, the power of good storytelling will prove more resilient than the medium that conveys it. My hope is that, with the breakdown of set formats for our stories, as well as the inevitable fierce competition resulting from the ability of just about anyone to produce content, will result in even stronger, more dramatically engaging stories that pull us in and give us a sense of where we are without the need to for surreptitious glances at watches or the folded corners of tattered paperbacks.
For all of you Muddy Basin Rambler afficianados not fortunate enough to actually live in the Muddy Basin itself or with family members exiled from our fair island, our self-titled album chock full of foot-stomping jug band goodness is now available online for purchase at CD Baby. Yeah, I know, I should have put this up earlier so you could all send MBR CDs to each other for Christmas. Sorry. Go buy some anyway; you won’t regret it.
In other news, after a growing sense of unease created by the indecisiveness of various media industries and their continuing suicidal inability to decide on a single format for high-definition content, coupled with the fact that there is simply no other way for me to access HD content in Taiwan, I purchased a TViX HD4100 media box and stuck a 500Gb hard drive inside. It’s basically a media player with HDMI and other AV connections that plays just about anything I can throw at it, HD or otherwise, on my TV, all the way up to my Sharp Aquos’s 1080i resolution limit. I plug it into my computer’s USB2 port and shuttle stuff over, then hook it up to the TV, though it has an Ethernet port. With the remote control, it feels just like a DVD player and works just fine with both HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, AVI, XVID, DVIX, MP3, MP4 or whatever format. The video looks gorgeous and the sound is great. So, all of the rest of you, go on clawing at each other over whether Blu-ray or HD-DVD is better as long as you like, but try to keep it down, ok? I’m watching a movie.
Christmas sucked, for the most part. Sure, I had a nice Christmas dinner party on Sunday night with Darrell, Judy, Maurice and other friends at their friend Barrie’s incredibly long Banqiao apartment. We had delicious roast beef and huddled around the glowing TV screen, picking out Youtube favorites to show each other and chatting during the downloads. Judy baked me my favorite kind of cake, yellow with chocolate frosting, and Maurice brought wrapped gifts for everyone. I got a retro glass.
But Christmas Day, i.e. Tuesday, was a different story. My stomach was upset after eating the disasterous results of Webster’s turkey experiment at The Source the night before, and I sat in the office all day plowing through a sudden onslaught of monotonous extra work, shivering because the people in the meeting room next door mistook my air conditioning controls for theirs, and instead of figuring this out, decided to turn the thermostat to precisely 17 degrees in an effort to make the meeting room cooler in the face of the fierce December heat.
I finally got done some time after 8pm, and I had arranged to meet Prince Roy, Wayne and some others at Citizen Cain, which promised a genuine turkey dinner with all the trimmings. When I arrived, however, the waitress pointed to a long table in the back surrounded by a pack of people wearing santa hats. “They just came in and ordered 32 turkey dinners,” she told me. “We’re all out.” When I tried to order off the main menu, she told me they weren’t serving other dinners until after the Christmas Dinner period was over at 9.
I was in a foul mood as I sat watching Prince Roy chat with his friend Aaron, who greatly resembles Chandler Bing of Friends, about learning Chinese, for that is what Chandler is doing here. Wayne arrived with a lady friend, and we talked a bit about cameras just to bore PR for our own sadistic pleasure. Dinner, when it became available, was something with chicken.
Afterwards, Prince Roy walked me back through the nearly empty streets to the MRT station, and I sat on the three trains back to my little cave, where I turned on the Christmas lights on the balcony, watched them blink for a couple of minutes, then unplugged them and went to bed.
Jorees has written an interesting post about life in Taiwan as a minority: Being an ‘other’ in Chinese culture
As you can imagine the pressure of dealing with everything regarding my current schedule has been a lot to deal with. One particular factor has also been getting to me. Being an ‘other’ in Chinese culture. When you are an ‘other’ you are different than the dominant socioeconomic majority. This can be defined through race, class, sex, or gender.In Taiwan I am ‘othered’ through language, culture, class, and race. My white skin is different. My nationality is different. My language is different. In addition, my job is high paying which many Chinese understandably resent. This ‘otherness’ is not always present. However, it has been adding to my stress level recently. As an ‘other’ my mistakes are more noted. More is expected to produce a success. I feel ‘othered’ in certain schools where I’ve worked and in a few graduate level classes. I am “othered†in subtle or not-so-subtle ways. Most commonly ignored during a social interaction. Or spoken to in Chinese when it is known that I will not understand. If I do try to speak Chinese what I say is not understood or mocked. Assignments or group work will not be explained to me in class as I am not part of the social ‘group’. My name will be miss pronounced or I will be referred to by another name on purpose.Part of this ‘othering’ has to do with the competitive attitude of graduate school and I was put through the same social duals during my M.A. at McGill. Social combat and competition are part of being a graduate student. Leaning to deal with high powered people is one of the unspoken lessons learned during a graduate degree. As the only English student in a Chinese program I also should not expect to have others look after me and should expect to be ‘othered’ due to cultural difference. But it still takes a lot out of me.It is also present in the workforce at certain language schools. Here I am not perceived as a person but as an ‘other’. This petty attitude of ‘othering’ usually comes down to simple economics. I make more money and come from another culture therefor my social worth is less. Often an authority figure at the school will not acknowledge my contribution to a class and small mistakes are constantly picked at. Some days, I find people can have a hot or cold attitude when it comes to dealing with me regardless of my behavior. Again this is because when you are an ‘other’ your actions or personality have little impact to the dominant majority culture. The culture does not see your actions but instead views your skin color. Your personality does not have value in comparison to your minority culture or language. As an ‘other’ you produce no impact accept for the purpose of being ‘othered’. Taiwan has given me many gifts and I feel very thankful for the professional opportunities here and my life in Asia. However, their is a dark underside to being a minority in Asia. Today I feel like making that small darkness heard.
My first thought on reading this was simply a snarky “Welcome to life as a minority,” something I got used to long ago, but then it got me to wondering if the situation in Taiwan today as a person of non-Chinese ethnicity is much different in this respect than it was 20 years ago. In other respects it has changed a lot, of course, in that it is much easier for such people to live here without integrating into the local society now than it was then. By this I mean mainly having access to the Internet as well as a wide range of Western and other non-Chinese media, entertainment, food, styles, and even languages than before.
In the late 1980’s, there was one MacDonald’s in Taipei, and virtually no other foreign cuisine options outside of Tienmu, where I never went. The MRT hadn’t even been thought of, and all transportation was via motorcycle or bus. It was all well before the Internet, of course, and letters from abroad would come once every few weeks. Exposure to Western stuff came in the form of a very limited selection of books from Caves and the occasional Hollywood movie from whence most Taiwanese people formed (and still seem to form) their views of what life outside Taiwan in American and European countries was like. Most foreigners that I knew at the time hung out with other foreigners for the most part, their only contact being their Taiwanese girlfriends (often resulting in hilariously feminine accents in their Chinese) but I don’t claim to have any authoritative knowledge on the subject because, as Prince Roy can attest, I pretty much avoided foreigners in a fairly religious fashion. This was a combination of insecurity on my part, a desire to learn more about and become more a part of the local society, and just plain stubbornness on my part.
Today, all of these things have changed drastically, and not just in the capital city. Over the last couple of decades, I’ve also become more secure in my own identity and place in this society. I wonder, however, if the current ease of access to attributes of their original culture causes people within the non-Chinese minorities here to feel more isolated from the people around them in daily life, which seems to be the case here (though I can’t be sure as this is pure assumption on my part). In fact, do such people even see themselves as minorities? It seems to me that some foreigners, especially white foreigners from white countries, still can’t bring themselves to realize that fact, even though they have lived here for a substantial period of time.
From the start, I never expected local people to take pains to adapt to what they thought were my limitations in this respect, but the fact that it bothered me when some people did so sounds similar to what Jorees is talking about here. However, it seems to me that most of this “othering” that Jorees mentions occurs in situations where non-Chinese are likely to be found, e.g. in an English-language teaching environment or at an international business. Outside of these environments, I’ve found it far easier to “just be a person” and a normal part of society. But I don’t expect people to mispronounce my name, and they hardly ever do as it is a fairly common Chinese name (though some Japanese people say it is also a normal Japanese name), and when they speak Chinese to me, I place all of the responsibility for understanding on myself. Occasionally I will encounter people who insist on treating me in that bizarre fashion that somehow combines a sense of fascination and revulsion with my very existence, but, as with any other unpleasant person, I can choose to stop associating with them and move on with my life.
Jorees’ difficulties aside, there is always going to be a natural pressure to conform to the society you live in, and there are always going to be people within a society who try to take advantage of perceived weaknesses in others. But all in all, this phenomenon is another reason to persist in integrating with the society we live in, at least to a certain degree that doesn’t result in the nagging personal discomfort that Jorees and many foreigners seem to be vulnerable to. Of course this is an oversimplification of the situation, as I am not a social studies expert or even actually social. But I still think that, just as the reason Taiwanese deal with foreigners the sometimes-odd ways they do today is the result of decades of imported entertainment sources combined with social exclusion on the part of foreign businessmen and soldiers with no interest in learning the language or culture, the way we deal with these issues will influence the way the average Taiwanese person deals with immigrants in the future.
CKS Hall was mostly back to normal after the ruling DPP changed the inscription on the massive gates last week after barricading them behind barbed wire to keep protesters away. I wasn’t able to come last week due to a couple of Jiayi gigs with my band in any case. A Christmas rock music concert was thumping from the center of the square, but fortunately nobody was crowding our group on the balcony.
I did forms for a while and got some instruction for backwards stepping from Teacher Xu. I’d been having some problems stepping back with my left foot as it seemed to put too much pressure on that knee for some reason, but it turns out that I wasn’t twisting in the right places, and the places I did twist, I “connected” too much. I have that problem in general with tuishou as well.
Little Qin arrived and did the sword form with a wooden stick. Afterwards we did some tuishou, which was instructive. Little Qin tends to grab wrists and lock them in place, but unlike the Tree Root Master, he doesn’t react violently when you try to push him, instead either relaxing and melting away from the push, or simply not reacting, secure in the futility of pushes from a certain angle.
He also gave me some advice for sword, echoing Teacher Xu’s earlier instruction to project one’s focus and energy along the blade. But Little Qin also added this: “Project your awareness to a point just beyond the tip of the blade,” he said, telling me to practice this by poking at things with the sword or whatever I happened to have on me at the time. “It’s like tossing stones.” The reason for this was, he said, that when we’re are in an actual confrontation, we tend to withdraw our awareness a little, so in that case our focus will be at the right place. The same goes for empty-handed movements, he added.
Late again to practice, but everyone was already paired up, so I went through my forms while they practiced tuishou. Chatted with Teacher Xu for a while, then paired up with Weeble, who was very talkative, not unlike Mr. You. He said he missed the Tree Root Master. “He is very solid, very hard,” he said admiringly. Weeble went for the quick, fast shove occasionally, and I managed to refrain from that myself. Still need to work on dealing with that better.
After class, did some sword practice and went home. That’s it. I’m afraid this isn’t a very interesting entry. No breakthroughs or revelations, just more practice. Perhaps I should wait for something to happen before I write in here instead of writing after every practice or two, lest it get too boring. Or maybe I just need to work harder.
The train station was busy on Saturday morning, when we had arranged to meet up for the trip. Slim was outside leaning against a wall when I arrived, and Thumper’s wife Christina waved from inside the station entrance. David and Conor showed up not long after, but Sandman was nowhere to be seen even as our departure time approached. Not wanting to miss our bullet train south, we descended into the bowels of the massive structure, loaded down with instruments and luggage, and boarded while David scouted Sandman out via the latest in phone tag technology.
It was my second trip on the high speed rail, and Jiayi would be the furthest I’d ever gone on one of the new trains. I once again pondered the wisdom of traveling the short distance from Taipei to Banqiao on such a train, but soon enough we emerged from the tunnel system onto the arrow-straight elevated track, where we accelerated to almost 300kph. It didn’t feel that fast; the distance to the ground made it seem a much more reasonable speed unless you looked at the small size of the things on the ground. I tried using my phone’s GPS to track us, but we were going too fast for the relatively weak 2G signal; Google Maps couldn’t quite download satellite images fast enough to keep up with the little blue dot that was us.
We were in Jiayi in less than an hour. No mess, no fuss, though I nearly broke the train doors getting all my gear in and out. The Jiayi HSR station is a rocket launchpad in the middle of green farmland. We caught a handful of taxis, assisted by Ah-bing, and were taken to the Songyou Hostel in Zhongpu, where we’d booked a few sunny, peaceful rooms on the second floor. The hostel, as are so many buildings in Taiwan, was built with an almost gluttonous excess of concrete, but it was on a quiet street and had a garden with tables and chairs next to farmland and greenhouses.
I slid the three mats, which had been huddled in one corner of the room, apart as we got settled in. Afterwards, a delicious lunch was had in the garden across the street. Christina even hopped onto the karaoke machine while we ate.
Our first show was at 7:30 at the Sanzhu temple in Shuishang, and the soundcheck was at 4pm. The stage was set up at one side of the parking lot in front of the temple, with a rainbow balloon bridge on the other side and a scattering of white plastic chairs in between. Our greenroom was actually a blue tent with red chairs on the lawn behind the massive stage.
The sound guys were surprisingly competent. I’d say it was one of the best sound jobs I’ve seen (or heard). They brought out a little flat mic shaped like a landmine for the washtub bass that boomed down into registers most mics couldn’t dream of reproducing. Afterwards we wandered in the golden hour as the sun set behind the temple. I found Christina chatting with the owner of a shanty shop across the street.
He had an interesting face, so I took a picture. Turns out he’s also a village official. He said there was a DPP campaign rally that night so not many people would show up at the show.
As showtime neared, the Ramblers reappeared out of the nooks and crannies of the temple and woods. The mood in the air was a little strange. The stage was too big. No foreign band had ever performed there before. The audience was there but had no idea what to expect. I felt a strange lack of motivation during the show, possibly due to eating too many almond cookies beforehand. But we were also too far away from each other, too disconnected, and it felt like we weren’t really playing together at many points. Despite the strange canned applause being broadcast over the speakers, the audience seemed to enjoy us, though I didn’t see any dancing going on, as is usually seen when we play. After the show I didn’t feel like talking to anyone, and sat inside the tent on one of the red chairs waiting to leave.
My mood improved considerably back at the hostel, however, after everyone changed back into civvies and adjourned to the garden for a long night of drinking, music, chatting and photography. Almas John and Thumper spent a disturbingly large amount of time lifting each other into the air, while I borrowed the latter’s new 30D, accompanied by very nice L-series lenses, to prowl around the area looking for interesting night shots. The revelry lasted into the wee hours of the morning, ending on the balcony of our room, passing a bag of potato chips between us.
Conor’s snoring woke me up the next morning. Well, that and the harsh whisper of Slim saying “Stop snoring!” over and over again. I sat up and threw a slipper at Conor, who did in fact stop snoring. But I was up already, and an outdoor kitchen was being set up downstairs, so I got dressed and hiked up the main road to look for some breakfast. Down the road I found a breakfast place that was still open. “I’d like a danbing,” I said. The woman behind the greasy counter pointed at a small yellow lump on the tray and said, “We’ve got one left.”
I looked at the unbroken eggs on the counter and then at the hot grill, and wondered if I should broach the possibility of making a fresh one. I decided that anyone who considered the possibility of eating a cold danbing wasn’t the kind of person who should be making one, so I said no thanks and went a couple of doors down to another breakfast shop where they were happy to make a fresh one for me. I chatted with the staff a little, and one woman asked me, “When did you get here?”
“Last night,” I said between mouthfuls. She looked shocked.
“Wow, really? Your Taiwanese is amazing!”
After breakfast I walked back and past the hostel, stopping here and there to take pictures. The weather was great, clear and cool. I walked through the fields past a nice new ranch-style house being built in the middle of some fields. A family of four, from the city by the look of them, exited as I walked by, piling into a small green VW and driving off. I waited until they were out of sight before peeking in the windows.
Past the house were more fields and a canal with a bridge, on which I decided I could go through my tai-chi forms while listening to the insects and tumbling water below.
The other Ramblers roused themselves around noon, reanimation via coffee and sunlight commenced. Slim and I took a walk down the road, exploring old Japanese-style houses and wondering at the sense of space and quiet. As we walked across a deserted intersection, I turned my head to look down the intersecting road and was surprised to see it vanish into the horizon, something I seldom see in Taipei. That and the empty old wooden buildings reminded me vaguely of Oklahoma.
Our show that night was at 7pm at the Zhongpu Township Hall. David and I were in the last car, and the sun was low in the sky as Ah-bing drove us over. It turned out that the stage was actually the portico in front of the imposing stone building’s front entrance, and umpteen microphones were crowded like a flock of black storks on the red carpet in between the pillars. The area seemed deserted, and I wondered if anyone would show up. Sure, a few faithful friends were there, but who else would seek out this desolate location?
Turns out I needn’t have worried. Soon after we began playing the seat filled up, and the crowd was soon roaring with pleasure. My confidence was restored, though the bass was booming off the portico and smothering the sound. After the show we sat at a table and signed CDs for a while, which I’d never done before.
Getting all of our gear as well as ourselves into three taxis back to the HSR station turned out to be an engineering challenge worthy of a Mythbusters episode, but we managed, and soon enough were speeding along the highway. Ahead of us, in the distance, a bullet train streaked across the horizon towards the station.
Conor got a warning whistle when he walked too close to the edge of the ultra-modern platform. A few minutes later we found out why when a train blew past only inches away from us at a startling speed. The ride back was just as quick and smooth, aided by celebratory wine, and seemed even more like magic in the dark, as the sense of speed was diminished even further. Before we knew it, Sandman, Slim and I were on the MRT, heading south and home.
I was going to name this post “20 years at CKS Hall”, but it hasn’t quite been that long since I sat for four days and three nights in the large square between the opera house and the concert hall as part of the “Wild Lily” student protest in early 1990. Of course, your perspective changes as you get older, but I couldn’t help but recall those times when I saw the protests against President and DPP Chairman Chen Shui-bian’s moves to change the name of the hall and remove the inscription from the main gate in the run-up to legislative and presidential elections.
I knew about the appropriation of the inane title “Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall” (is Democracy spread out on a slab inside now? Maybe they’ll put it where CKS’ Cadillacs used to be), but I didn’t know about the latest developments in the DPP’s campaign to remove the characters “Da Zhong Zhi Zheng” that allude to the formal title of late President Chiang Kai-shek until the government announced that it now had jurisdiction over the hall and would commence with the move on Thursday. The DPP’s choice to replace the offending inscription is the painfully unoriginal title of “Liberty Square”.
I noticed a few protesters sitting under the massive gate as I walked by on Tuesday evening after badminton practice, so I went over to talk to them. A couple of them were dressed in red from head to foot, and they had improvised a small fake “shrine” to Chen Shui-bian with a cardboard sign predicting that anyone who took down the inscription would suffer a stroke, just as controversial Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu did after doing something similar down there. They huddled in the cold wind and sat on cardboard, waiting just in case the DPP was planning to jump the gun and tear down the inscription in the middle of the night.
I didn’t have my 20D on me at the time, so I went back the next evening with it and took some pictures. The number of protesters had grown, but it was by no means a massive crowd. The media practically outnumbered them. The protesters were a motley group and included serious young men, dumpy middle-aged housewives and one dapper elderly gentleman with white hair wearing a black overcoat and red scarf, looking not unlike a Chinese Peter O’Toole. Another man wore camos and boots. “The Second-wave Anti-Chen Movement: Now is the Time for a Million People to Bravely Take to the Streets!” read his placard. Police barricaded the main memorial stairs and milled around, apparently not sure what they were doing there. I went up to one officer and asked, but he looked away, ignoring me. I picked out another, apparently senior officer, and asked him what the workmen were doing. “I don’t know,” he said. “We’ve just got orders to be here to ‘assist’.”
There weren’t even a hundred protesters, much less a million, of course. Most people know that the move is purely for election uses, to gain the support of our deep-green friends down south as well as goad the deep-blue contingent into making themselves look bad on TV. At one point yesterday a small truck ran into the crowd, which had spilled out onto the streets after police put up a barbed-wire barricade around the gate, seriously injuring a cameraman. Police are investigating whether or not it was on purpose.
I went back to the gate last night to take another look, and the gate was still behind barbed wire and barriers reading “Safety First”. The politically incorrect characters had been torn off in the afternoon by a couple of workers who took hours and many tools to wrest them from the gate, though their imprint could still be seen on the stone surface. The workers had painted over the company name on the crane before the job.
That night, police and reporters still lingered on the scene, chatting and playing chess on makeshift tables by the TV trucks. Only a handful of protesters remained, however, moving a single ROC flag around in front of the wall of barbed wire and taking pictures of the empty space.
I was at a movie premiere last Wednesday, and slept too late on Saturday, so yesterday was my first practice in a while, and I was even late for that. I was still tired; my knees have been aching lately for some reason. I did some stretching and then practiced with the interior designer, who has become quite pliant but still resorts to The Big Shove strategy a bit too often. I let him shove away, sometimes stepping back so we could get back to more subtle tuishou. For my part, whenever I felt that I was resorting to brute force, I’d reign myself in. “What’s wrong,” my partner asked. “Why don’t you follow through?” I didn’t answer, mostly because I can’t really explain it, and I didn’t want to implicate him in any anti-Big Shove rhetoric I might let slip.
After everyone had left, I stayed behind to go through my forms, which were terrible. I felt stiff and sore, but doing the forms half a dozen times improved things, at least to the point I felt I could finish my practice with a free conscience.
