Merry Christmas, etc. (It's Been A While)

In which I am not apparently as much a grinch as the rumors would lead me to believe.

This is not going to be terribly long, nor terribly informative, but I thought I'd tell everyone who is still looking at this that I'm having a pretty awesome holiday season, and I got more than everything I wanted, and I hope all of you are having a lovely time as well.

My students are adorable and of course the most intelligent creatures to walk the planet, and life is pretty dang good right now.

Best wishes to everyone.

A Good Day

In Which Sometimes Things Just Go Well

Today was one of those days in which even the frustrating things added up to a harmonious whole. I had two classes today, a 1A and a 4A, at different schools. My 1A has five students, who are as rambunctious as the six- and seven-year-olds they are. They finally began to settle into the class routine today, and we didn't even lose much time of actual curriculum to acheive it. Even better, I think it's sustainable.

In my 4A class, we wrote silly questions as preparation for writing a paragraph, or set of paragraphs. My students will be writing about things like "Why do polar bears like chocolate?" "How big is the sky?" "How much water is there in the ocean?" and "Why does Joe laugh all the time?" During the break time, they drew a butterfly on my hand with facepaint sticks.

After the 4A class, I went to Subway to grab a very quick sandwich before the open house at the first school. The sandwich I got had very little on it, but it was sustenance. Nevertheless, I don't think I'll go back there at night. It occasioned a pleasant conversation with another teacher, however, who thought of me and wanted to know if I wanted anything when he went to get dinner. I declined, but the overture of friendship was nice.

The open house was even better. The parents of three of my students came in, listened to the general speeches and introductions, and then came to my classroom to talk to me. They cared about the education of their children. They asked pertinent questions and raised well-considered issues. They brought up the ways in which their children were feeling frustrated, and about what they felt confident. They were eager to participate themselves in their children's education, and when they left, one of them shook my hand and said, "We are lucky to meet you."

And after all of that, I met with the manager for Columbia Schools to talk about a proposed change in the presentation of the curriculum for my Saturday class. It's a group of teenagers, bored, on Saturday morning, with vastly different skill levels. Different kids are coming and going all the time, so it's challenging to keep the whole class on the same page, and would be even if they were willing to lift their eyes above the level of their knees. I want to make the class into a game like I have mentioned here previously. I described to our manager what I wanted to do, and when she understood, she said, "Yes. Please do this. And if it works at all, please let me know, because we want to watch it happen and see if we can use it for the other Saturday classes." I couldn't have been more thrilled.

I walked to the MRT station through the courtyard of the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial Hall and felt pretty good about life.

On The Bright Side

In Which My Internet Is Still Not Working (Sorry)

My friends, I have found the Promised Land. It is a five-minute walk from my front door and goes by the name of 1868. It is, perhaps, the best coffee shop I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing since the Black Cat, and that, dear readers, is saying something.

You don’t know how amazing a decent sandwich on multigrain bread with real cheddar cheese is until you’ve subsisted on oil soaked vegetables and variations on noodles with cabbage for a year. It was marvelous. They make their own bread and their own coffee, and the tea that Tiffany served me was excellently prepared. She used a timer.

Tiffany is the Taiwanese woman behind the counter. I get the impression that she’s also the manager. She’s cheerful and talkative and has a heterochromic cat named Xiao Naiyou, because his fur is not quite white. She has pictures of him on her laptop, and happily displayed them. She had her laptop out because she was playing a game on Facebook in which she was the … manager of a restaurant called 1868. Somewhere, Benoît Mandelbrot is chortling in delight.

And speaking of the French, I’ve met my only neighbor. His name is Alex, he’s French, he works in logistics, and he’s learning very basic Chinese from me. He’s also leaving in two weeks, which means that I will have the entire floor to myself for the foreseeable future. At least until this internet thing gets fixed. It’s been nice to know someone here. Leaving Kojen was absolutely without question the best thing I possibly could have done, but it was nice having friends at work. In time, I’m sure, I’ll get to know my co-workers at Columbia.

In the mean time, I’ve reconnected with Sarah and am still hanging out with a few of my old co-workers. Yuki and I took a trip down to Hualien this past weekend to see Taroko Gorge. It was pretty, and big, but not quite as impressive as I’d been led to believe. Nevertheless, we had a good time walking around and relaxing. We stayed the night in a charming little bed and breakfast that had a few live birds in a stack of old-fashioned cages and a miniature Chihuahua named Muffin.

With that, friends, I'll leave you for the time being.

Delta Stands For Change

In Which Many Changes Are Enumerated And Explained

I have been here for one year, peerless readers, and two weeks. In the last three days I have changed schools, moved, and lost my roommate to the lure of identifiable food lacking MSG. I am now living in a little fourth floor efficiency with huge windows that I shall have to Do Something About when winter comes. They do not quite close all the way. Given a choice, however, between that and endless repetitions of Madonna from a bar downstairs, I’ll take the draftiness. I haven’t finished finding a place for everything yet, but with luck and perseverance I shall win out in the end.

I am no longer in the employ of Kojen English Language Schools. The reason for this, it pains me to relate, can be laid entirely at the feet of [...imagine longwinded fulmination here - leave a comment for details...] I shall miss my friends among them.

I shall also miss Katy, who flew back to the United States on the last day of August. It will be odd to live alone again. I expect it will involve a good deal of going to bed earlier, and more wandering around. Perhaps I shall even improve my Chinese! I will also have more time to devote to studying calculus and drawing. Poor exchanges for a near constant companion, but I believe it is time to catch up on my self-improvement.

My classes now number four. I have two on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, one on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and one on Saturdays. The latter two are known as “boost” classes, presumably for students who are moving more slowly than the curriculum otherwise allows, or more quickly. The Tuesday/Thursday one is two hours long and ends at 7:00pm. The Saturday class is three hours long and ends at noon. The students are struggling with concepts like “finding the main idea of a paragraph.”

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays I have a two-hour class ending at 3:30, and another ending at 6:30. The first is a lower-level class just learning basic nouns and verbs. The second is a higher level class in which I am permitted (nay, encouraged) to read from a Roald Dahl book, and teach them science. For illustrative purposes, here is a somewhat exaggerated unfinished cartoon depicting my reaction to that last.

None of my classes ends later than 7:00pm, which means that I can stroll leisurely towards a bus or from the MRT, passing fruit stands redolent with pungent guava and sweet mango, stopping at one of the multitudinous 7-11s to buy an Australian ice-cream bar, having dinner at a little Taiwatalian restaurant or getting take-out from a tiny Thai cart. It’s cooler here at night, and walking alone in it reminds me of things – Madison before I knew it as a college student, Chicago after seeing a play, New York City while visiting a friend. Perhaps it is something about being solitary that refracts the night into sounds and smells and sights that match memories of places I’m not, and some of places I’ve never been.

Choices

In Which Death Is Mentioned, Society Is Further Maligned, And More Seeds Of Future Posts Are Sown

We went to the beach.  I put those pictures up some time ago.  It was a good time - a group of mutually benevolent people hanging out with a relative minimum of high-school behavior.  Afterward we came back and I opened my box.

It was a little boring, to be honest.  The most consistent predictions were that I'd no longer be vegetarian (false), that I'd have a cat (also false), and that I'd be married with a kid or two (1/3 true - the marriage isn't probably what they meant, and while I've got some 40 to 50 kids, it's not quite in the same way).  I'm hoping the next one will be better, or at least more interesting.

We also went to Ali Shan when Katy's friend Aidan was here.  I didn't really feel like there was enough time to do anything there, but the train ride was cool.

I went back to Yingge with Thomas, who's going back to Australia in a few weeks to start law school.  He made a saki set.  I made a few more containers of various sorts.  We ate at a delightful restaurant of a hole-in-the-wall variety, and then came back for a TED talks gathering chez Katy and Rowan.  In some ways it's very nice to have a bunch of intelligent friends with whom to discuss ideas.  On the other hand, I do get the impression that we often intellectualize happiness into non-existence. 

Our jobs here are the same as ever: the same challenges, the same rewards.  My H-class put on a play that none of us wanted to do for parents who resented having to take the time to watch it, so that our director could stress out and try to make us stress out, all for the sake of face.

Which brings me, indirectly, to the next point.  Last week, someone we met here near the beginning of our stay committed suicide.

Now, I'm pretty isolated here, and I have a feeling that this is making my viewpoints less and less connected with the society I left in the United States, so take what follows with a shaker-full of Pacific salt.  Death isn't an easy thing to process at the simplest of times, and it gets more complicated when it's a choice someone's making.  We humans sometimes get offended by much less permanent choices, like who someone marries or how someone cuts his hair.  We get positively irate over choices like where to eat or what color to paint the house.  When someone chooses to die... we don't know what to do.  We feel guilty, usually, and sad, and probably angry.  We think, "If only I'd done X," or "Why didn't he/she value me/my friendship enough to live?" or "Now I will never see him/her again."  We think that our existence ought to have had more bearing on their decision.  A decision as final as death, though, is sometimes a response to exactly that kind of pressure from friends or family or co-workers or society.  Family members tell someone to live his life this way, friends advise something else, co-workers say "just do this," society tells him to put on a happy face and be strong, and no one takes the time to let him do or even say what he'd prefer.  It is too frequently entirely unimportant.  From the time people enter school until they retire - most of their lives - they are battered by a constant onslaught of opposing pressures to do a very narrow set of things and practice a vary narrow set of behaviors.  You're an American girl who doesn't shave her legs? SHAME.  You're a Taiwanese boy who wants to be an artist? FIE.  When there's no real outlet for personal happiness or even opinion, the only way people can assert their right to control their own lives, it often seems to them, is to end them.

So we should feel guilty, I suppose.  We should, but not in the narcissistic manner to which we're accustomed.  We shouldn't feel guilty because we as individuals were so important to a person that by one action or lack thereof we could have made them realize that life was worth living.  That is simply not the case.  We should feel guilty collectively.  A person's decision to die should make us consider whether we've allowed others the room to be themselves, or if we've decided that we are so omniscient that we know exactly how they should proceed with the rest of their lives, and that we're so important that we have the right to deny them the right to ever choose anything again.

To end on a brighter note, I found a little children's book recently in Chinese that is the first chapter of a book I read growing up and have always sort of loved: The Finn Family Moomintroll.  It is the inspiration, in fact, for my sub-headings.  I was very glad to get it.  It's relatively easy to read, but I'm learning new words with it, too.

Next up, I hope, the long promised entry about education.

Well Worth $59.95 + Tax

In Which Rowan Journeys South And Anticipates An Anniversary

About a month ago, my friend Thomas suggested that we go south to Kenting to find a desert he'd heard about.  "We'll hang out on the beach, look at the moon, drink a coconut, wander around in the desert, it'll be great."  

So I went to Kenting with Thomas and Matthew (a friend of his) last weekend, and it more or less blew me away.  I used to play Monkey Island when I was in fifth grade (hello, Aaron, if you ever read this), and the southern tip of Taiwan is just like that, unpixelated.  After taking the high speed rail that wasn't ("Dude," said Matthew, "You took the slow train!"), we got there at nine or so on Saturday night, and rented a scooter to get to our campsite.  We thought we'd be renting tents, but the guy running the camp told us that we could stay in a cabin for a very reasonable price, so we did that instead.  The beach was across the road and through a little gap in the trees, and it was both beautiful and deserted.  It was apparently used in the movie Cape No. 7, which I have not seen, but will now have to look into.  We hung out on the beach for a little while that first night, and I wandered alone down to the shore.  It was many things I've sorely missed: a large body of water, quiet, and dark.  Really dark.  The third night, the milky way was actually visible.  That first night was cloudy, and there were strange, tiny glowing things washing up with the waves.  They landed on the beach and shone blue there for about five minutes before fading out.  We waded around for a little while before turning in.  Thomas found a rather large cockroach in the shower with his foot, which was the evening's entertainment for Matthew and I.  We all more or less passed out right away, and I woke up at 5:30 the next morning to sunlight, birdsong, and a kick in the side.  

I took a shower and walked barefoot down to the beach, where I got to watch the light come up over the hills behind me to hit the waves.  Matthew and then Thomas came down when they woke up, and we went to grab breakfast at a little outdoor café that had very brightly colored koi in a little pond.  After everyone was actually awake, we started on our journey towards the desert that Thomas had heard about.  I rode on the back of Matthew's scooter and we occasionally stopped for pictures, when we couldn't deal with how pretty everything was anymore.  We drank coconuts, as advertised, and eventually came to a place where we could see what we were heading toward.  It looked like a sand dune to me, but that was alright, too.

It was a dune, more or less.  There were even dune buggies irritatingly scooting around on it, with screaming girls and smug looking guys.  It was pretty cool looking anyway, even if I did get a bit sunburned.  I'd bought sunscreen just before we left, but hadn't put any on yet, and by the time I did the damage was already done.  Thomas slathered some on his face and neck around the same time I did, and we went walking around the dune and surrounding area.  I collected shells on the beach and scraped my knee climbing a wall, but we had some shade and food at another small cafe and headed back to our scooters.  It was at about that time that we started to realize just how sunburnt we had gotten, so we headed back to the cabinsite.  The very charming and friendly host took one look at Thomas and told him that we could use his own personal garden of aloe plants to apply to our scorched skin, so I snagged a piece and daubed it on myself before taking a nap.  The gentlemen decided to wash Matthew's scooter and take a walk, insisting that they didn't want a nap.  When they came back, I'd woken up.  They both fell asleep, so I went back to the beach and walked along it for a while before deciding to go wake them up for dinner.  We ate at a great little Thai place that had some wonderful coconut drink and some decent food, then went back again.  We had a few beers and stared at the stars and the waves for a while before going back to bed.  

Matthew had to leave on Monday, so we spent the morning walking around a forest area (where the evil sun couldn't reach us).  First, though, we went and got Thomas a very fine hat.  I bargained the lady down because of a smudge on the brim, and we wandered through the forest happily.  We encountered some interesting snacks in the visitor's center, and Thomas was enamoured enough to buy three of them for the toys included.

Matthew took off after we left the forest, and Thomas and I drove down the coast (we only got lost once) to see the sun set at the southernmost point in Taiwan.  Then we drove back.  We talked on the beach for a few hours, and then I positively had to go to bed or pass out head first in the sand.  Not having any aspirations of being a large flightless bird with a frightening kick, I chose the former.  We went to sleep after a hilarious interaction with our host in which we tried to pay him what we owed him, he reduced the amount by 1000 NT, we tried to pay him what we owed him, he refused, etc.  It was bargaining, but backwards.  We headed out first thing the next morning, at just the right time.  I was still sad to leave, but it was just before I'd have started to get sick of something, like the way my hair wasn't ever really getting clean.

Tomorrow I will be opening my 10 Year Box.  I'm a little apprehensive about this.  I anticipate feelings of inadequacy, hilarity, wistfulness, and pride will abound.  I intend to post results soon.

跟我自己 or With Me Alone

In Which There Are Changes And Journeys

I purchased new glasses a few weeks ago.  You can see the new glasses over there on the right.  They're photo-greys, which is convenient, and also represent the first time I've substantially changed the style of my eyewear in about ten years.

Anyway, while I was at the ocudoc's (I really want to make a joke about Doc Oc, here), I naturally got my prescription checked and readjusted.  They did this with the most fascinating tool I've seen in a while.  Glasses.  But not just any glasses.  Spectacularly Victorian spectacles.  Naturally, I had to try them on, and I convinced Sarah to do so as well.  The results were, perhaps, predictable.

Katy's father and step-mother are here, and we went on a few tours in the early part of the week.  I think they plan to do more, but I'm occupied with work and can't join them.  The first few were lovely, though, and I was glad to be able to go.  We first went to a little temple in a name-of-which-I've-forgotten place.  It was charming, in a gaudy sort of way, although I have still not gotten used to seeing the swastikas everywhere.  Then we made a trip to Yeliu, which was lovely.  Very weird, but lovely.  There were rock formations of sandstone that looked like morel mushrooms, and little round holes in the rock shore that made for very nice rock pools.  We didn't stay nearly long enough, but it was drizzling and we had a tourist shop to get to, so we left.  I got a lot of pictures out of it, though, and Katy and I think we'd like to go back some time.  The famous bit of rock there is called The Queen's Head, and Danny, our guide, told us that it will be gone within twenty years.  Poor girl's head will snap right off when her neck gets too thin.  He also told a story about a noble (but poor, naturally) fisherman who saw some kids swimming in the ocean thereabouts and a storm came up and the kids started drowning, so the fisherman jumped in to save them.  He managed to save one before drowning himself, so the government at the time, wishing to present itself well, paid for the fisherman's five children to attend school.  This is a very Chinese story.

We went on another tour that same day to a little rest-stop-ish place where we looked at the waves and admired the strange stone jacks that were apparently keeping typhoons at bay, but it was a bit of a let-down after the bizarre formations of Yeliu.  Then we went to Jiufen (9 shares), an old gold mining town that's since turned into an artists' village.

The next day we took a trip to Yilan and saw some really fascinating cultural stuff, the best of which was a trio of musicians (later with a singer) playing music which I will try to upload here.

This one contains the trio of musicians: one was playing a hammer dulcimer, one a mandolin of some kind, and one that looked like an autoharp, but a very large one that was tuned by moving around little pyramids under the strings.

Let me know if you'd like to see the other one - I know these get pretty hard for people to load if they've a lot of video or images.

Anyway, the Williams family took off on Monday morning, and we are back to normal before the next visitor shows up.

The Game

In Which Public Education Is Roundly Abused, And Rowan Is Decidedly Delinquent In Her Updates

Some time ago, when your negligent (my deepest apologies, again) guide was but a tot, my father and I played a game.  We, being imaginative souls, called it "The Game."  (A recently ironic name, since The Wife and I have taken to calling Society "The Game.")  The Game of old was based on a large square of maroon canvas, various pieces of felt and wood, and an abiding and dedicated sense of curiosity.

The canvas was a map - those of you with predilections for scoffing may begin now at this clear reference and precursor to tabletop gaming - and the smaller squares of felt were decorated with trees and mountains, caves, lakes and streams, farms and fields, anything my small, voracious brain could conjure as an appropriate backdrop for adventure.  We sewed them ourselves.

Using this constantly changing terrain as a geographical guide, my father told me stories in which I was expected to participate (I doubt very much whether he or the proverbial wild horses could have stopped me) by answering questions and choosing directions and courses of action.  I might have been unable to cross a bridge until I brushed up on my French because a troll was guarding it and wanted an answer to "Est-ce que ceci n'est pas une pipe?"  I would have to go learn what the troll was saying (and possibly look into surrealist artists) and figure out the right answer before I could cross and continue.  Maybe there was an item priced in lira when all I had were pesos, and I'd have to find the correct change.  Perhaps a dragon or ghost appeared in a dream, demanding that I tell them the name of the secret malefactress in the book I was reading at the time.  It was a game that stitched together the sometimes disappointing mundanity of the waking world and the wildly colorful and challenging scenarios of my imagination, and my father's.  It was a multiplayer game without the computer, a mix of Carmen Sandiego and the brothers Grimm, in which I was both character and storyteller, in equal parts.

I loved it.

"But Rowan," say my Patient and Forgiving readers, "what on Earth has this to do with Taiwan?"  Well, my Gentle Public, today I went to the orphanage again, something I have now done four times, and began a very basic variant of that Game.  I presented Ken (either he's changed his name or everyone's been getting it wrong all this time) with a little green notebook in which I had written the following:

One day, you find a book.  On the cover, there is a picture of a crying woman.  When you pick up the book, you see a ghost.  The ghost says: "Do you have any threes?"

I had him read it aloud, and then we played Go Fish, in which we practiced the constructions "Do you have _____?  Yes, I have two _____s.  No, I don't have any ______s."  I played up the character of the challenging specter, and Ken took great pleasure in trouncing me, gleefully using the correct English phrases the whole time.

I am brought thence to the subject of Public Education, which can be roughly defined as the practice of carefully and thoroughly eradicating our children's desire to learn.  Children seem to naturally thrive on curiosity and its satisfaction, and regularly reach out for more information and more answers and more questions.  The kids in my lower level classes have to be restrained from gathering around the whiteboard in their enthusiasm to write the words correctly (and how counter-productive is that idea? making sure that children never believe they have a place in educating themselves), and jump at the chance to answer questions and play games and draw and learn.  The upper level classes, after a period of slightly caustic wariness, also settle into an honest desire to wield knowledge with skill and inquiry.  All it takes to encourage them is a concrete and consistent set of rules (not too many, not too unreasonable), and a genuine desire to share what you know and learn alongside them when you've no idea.

Why is this so hard to come by?

Reflecting

In Which I Do Hope The Readers Will Bear With Me

I went to Ghana, stayed 5 1/2 months, and learned how people are the same, and what brings us together.  Here I am in Taiwan, just passing the 7 month mark in a probably 24 month stay, and I'm learning about all the ways we do our damnedest to keep ourselves estranged.

When I was growing up, I was told I could do anything I wanted to, be anyone I liked.  This is a very American concept.  It is also a very American lie.  While it is true that, technically speaking, I can do anything I want, no one mentions the consequences.  No one says to a four-year-old, of course, honey, anything you want, unless it's being a garbage collector, because then people won't respect you.  We have constructed for ourselves a giant isolated bubble in which negative consequences are universally to be avoided.  Anything with any negative side effects at all - any decision that rates a black look from the neighbors, any accidental step that makes us "look bad," in short, any mistake - is ruthlessly weeded out of the society we have so carefully constructed around ourselves.  It's very easily done, too.  We do it by the extremely simple expedient of offering our children carefully tailored choices.  By the time most of us get old enough to realize that we can make our own choices, we're so accustomed to having them all but made for us that we don't know what to do.  We just go on with the plan, get a job that pays the bills and is otherwise totally mundane and uninteresting, get married, have the requisite 2.3 children and wonder vaguely why we feel so damn unprepared for all of it.  Most of us have some kind of crisis after college (Oh God, not Real Life!), and another at 45 (What have I done with my life?), and if we're lucky we manage to keep it down to two and slip into resigned acceptance of the way our lives have turned out.

Being nudged into this kind of society with a well meaning You can do whatever you want is somewhat akin to being taken by your very particular Uncle Steve to the biggest bookstore in the world and told to choose just one in the space of an hour.  You know that there is a right one, or at least a right several, and that you will be judged on your choice.  

What am I learning here?  Partly that it is too late for me, in many ways.  This world is no longer my world, and I have wasted my time in it browsing shelves in the areas of the bookstore that Uncle Steve doesn't care for.  I can no longer labor under the pretense that it is my story in which I'm living.  My story left me competent in nothing but learning.  "Well," said a friend, "What a useful skill," and I agree wholeheartedly, but it is not, unfortunately, a terribly marketable one.  Sadly, marketability sets the boundaries of this no-longer-mine world that I live in, so I am left, in effect, not a useful member of a society that doesn't value real education.  

I've spent quite a lot of time thinking about this, and it troubles me.  It is, as I've said, too late for me.  I will never be the kind of person that society - as it is - welcomes with open arms and a friendly word.  At best, this society will leave me alone with no more than a half-admiring, half-bewildered sidelong glance.  But it is not, perhaps, too late for the kids who are now who I was.  This world now belongs to people who are right now running on small, unsteady, bare feet under swing-sets, reaching for stuffed animals, being carried by grandparents.  People even now being told that they can do whatever they want to do.  I cannot make the world into one that accepts me, or them, but perhaps I can offer them a space and a chance at self-awareness and true choice.

This is all leading up to a later discussion of the problem of education and potential solutions, but this part had to come first.

Our Hearts We Cannot Steel

In Which An Orphanage Is Visited

My new student's English name is Kevin.  I don't know his Chinese name, but that's pretty standard.  He's an athletic kid, a little stocky, energetic, desperate to be special.  He knows more English than he lets on, but he's embarrassed by how little that really is.  It's less shameful to pretend that he knows nothing, and start from scratch.  

The orphanage is in the southern part of Taipei, right up against a mountain (possibly a little taller than Yuan Shan).  The city around it feels a little different than the rest of Taipei, a little cleaner, a little fresher, a little less oily with consumerism.  The stores are similar, but they seem less looming.  Perhaps it's just that they don't have overhangs.  

There are birds in a cage outside the door - parakeets and finches, hopping around and making enough racket for a small family of howler monkeys.  Sandy, the woman who met me at the MRT station today, took me in and introduced me to Christina, one of the secretaries, before leading me up to the 3rd floor classroom where I'd be teaching.  Classroom is deeply misleading.  It's a room with three empty bunk-bed-desk combinations in it.  It's spacious and bright and airy.  It has wood floors.  Kevin came in and we sat on the floor and played with alphabet tiles and conversation.  I taught him basic pronouns and am/is/are, and how to say "I am a boy," and "I live in Xindian."  I gave him flashcards and vocabulary to memorize.  Next time I'll bring chocolate for prizes and a CD with which he can practice his listening skills.

The Joy Orphanage itself was first put together in 1951, in the wake of Japan's retreat from Taiwan.  The granddaughter of General Governor Liu Mingchuan (builder of railroads, among other things), drew on her familial connections and lands to provide a place for the children left without families after the war.  At its opening, there were some 400 kids living there.  Now they have two facilities, and 70 kids total - 25 or so in the emergency facilities for temporary and immediate placement, and 45 or so in the permanent facilities while they wait for adoption.  A family from the United States is interested in adopting Kevin, but there are still many legalities to go through, so "nothing is certain," said Sandy.

I am not at all sad that I went, and I hope it's something with which I can continue to be involved, whether the tutoring keeps going or not.

Numbers

In Which It Is A Typical Tuesday Night

There were seven people in the teacher's room tonight after classes were over at 9:00.  Rita the librarian, Steven, Wendy, Stacey, Jasmine, Jesse, and me.  We trickled out as we finished our post-class clean-up, made plans for the week, and said our goodnights.  By the time I left, in conversation with Steven, Rita was the only one left.  The light in the room was yellow.  I thought of leaving a Subway at 11:00 pm in Ashland with three friends.

I got to the bus stop just in time to catch the 226.  Nine people were scattered through the bus, and the light was the same yellow light--the kind of light that accompanies quiet, and separates people, even if they came in together.  Someone's cellphone rang, a MIDI of the first four bars of "It's a Small World," but it was cut off.  It wasn't answered, but I could nevertheless hear with perfect clarity how the conversation would have gone, even in another language, and even though I'd have understood the first two words and then perhaps one word in four after that.  I could hear how each word would have fallen perfectly into prefabricated holes in the silence, made to fit them, sliding into place with nearly audible clicks and resting there level with the quiet and nearly indistinguishable from it.

I left the bus at the stop across from the coffee shop near our apartment.  There were two employees left, cleaning up under the same yellow light, facing in different directions, moving with equal slowness.  Above the street, the fat moon.

In the park, fourteen older women learned a new line dance, moved their feet in almost perfect synchrony.  Tomorrow they will probably add music.  A boy gave a girl a stuffed animal on one of the benches.  Someone was smoking.

Two doormen and four bouncers were on the ground floor of our apartment building.  One of them was also smoking, and pushed button three for three of the girls in the elevator.  The two men got out on the fourth floor.  I got out on floor five.

It is 10:30, and I am happy to be where I am.

The New Year (Part The Second)

In Which Eastern Holidays Are Experienced, And More Visitors Come To Town

People ask me, with relative frequency, "How's Taiwan?"  I never know what to say to this.  When people ask "How was your day?" or "How is the food?" acceptable answers include "Fine," "Good," "Delicious," "Started out great, but it's raining a lot now," or possibly "Lovely, but I wish it weren't so pink."  I don't know how to encapsulate Taiwan in a single phrase or sentence, and I know better than to believe that anyone asking so flippantly wants a full blown dissertation of an explanation.  I suppose I could direct any and all inquiries here, but that seems a bit arrogant and presumptuous.

Taiwan - Taipei, really - is a city in which I'm living, like any other city I've inhabited.  It is a place, to me, not a tourist destination, and certainly not something I can break apart and offer to people who want it in convenient chunks.  I can only approximate my experience of this city in carefully thought-out and nevertheless longwinded and untidy parcels.  I cannot make them stand alone, because they are part of something much larger that even I don't have a handle on.

Katy's parents came for the week of Chinese New Year, which is the major holiday here.  It's a bit like Christmas and Thanksgiving all rolled into one, and while the actual celebration is an Eve and a Day, the vacation time lasts all week.  The Roads (Hi, guys) arrived on the Friday before the holiday, late in the evening, so Katy went to collect them while I conducted my last A10 class. (I will miss them, but they're being combined with another class for A11 and transferred to another teacher.  The class next door to the A10 never got along with their teacher, so I have rescued them from one another.)  

I got home on Friday in time to welcome the Roads family back from the airport (sans Paul, who is still in Spain), but I had to get up for my Saturday morning class, so I went to bed.  I think they crashed shortly thereafter.  I didn't see a lot of them over the week, since Katy took them south to see the rest of Taiwan - or some of it, anyway - and to have some family time, but it helped solidify the difficulty we (or I, anyway) face when asked to be an interface between representatives from the home we came from and the home we share now.  I didn't feel nearly adequately prepared to show the city off, because to me it is just where I live.  I remember my grandmother saying similar things about Chicago (Hi, Grandma), and about being eternally startled when she saw tourists there.  Since I'm not here for tourism, I can't see the city in that light.  

Apart from feeling woefully unprepared, the week went well.  It was good to see Katy's family, and very nice to have a week off.  Although, I confess that I missed my students.  I spent Chinese New Year's Eve at the home of one of my co-teachers.  Her family was very nice, and there was a lot of food.  After dinner, she and I and another of our co-teachers went to a night market, bought fire crackers, and lit them off in an empty lot until someone told us to stop.  I discovered I don't much like fire crackers, although I'll admit to being a total girl and enjoying the sparklers.  (What? They were pretty!)

While Katy and her parents were in the South, I slept a lot, and went to Sebastian's house one evening for a very enjoyable bit of conversation and friendly banter with his friend Michael and himself.  Sebastian was one of the people in China via the program I used, and it's nice to see him on occasion.  I also went to the National Palace Museum again with Yu-Cheng.  I think I could spend a long time there for several days (or perhaps weeks, or months) in a row without knowing everything it could teach me.  When the Family Roads returned to Taipei, I joined them at Taipei 101.  We went up to the very top and wandered about, looking at the ridiculous golden sculptures of ants and butterflies, and peering out the windows at the city below, which drifted in and out of fog as the light faded.  We had dinner in a restaurant with a similar view, a floor or two below (although we had to go all the way down to the bottom again and take a different elevator to get back up to the restaurant).  The food was quite good, and we returned home well-fed and sleepy.

They spent the rest of their time in Taipei seeing the sights, and I spent my last day of freedom trying to get in as much rest as possible before the next morning.  The winter classes are ending tomorrow, and it will be nice to have the ability to wake up at 7:30 without an alarm, instead of at 8 with one.  I don't pretend to understand the way my subconscious rules my sleep schedule.

I am now back into the swing of teaching, and it's going pretty well.  There have been no spectacular successes (or failures, fortunately), but I am beginning to feel more confident at the front of the classroom.  The A7 class that I just took over seems quite nice, although hopelessly adolescent.  Adolescence is something I can commiserate with, however, having fallen prey to the disease myself not so long ago, and they seem willing to cooperate.  This week I taught them about "What a day!" and "Such an idiot!" and "So much money that he could buy the Earth."  They are to write an adventure story for me by next week.  I look forward to reading the submissions.  One of the ideas submitted was "turned tiny and climbed into the principal's underpants."  I'll keep you posted.

Katy and I are reading the Lord of the Rings.  We've gotten about 1/4 of the way through the first book.  It is a delight to see her reactions to things I have always considered established parts of my personal history.  It's a little like reading it for the first time again myself.  This is why I love reading to people, why I love teaching.

And speaking of teaching, I'll be starting to volunteer at an orphanage on Sundays for the next couple of months.  I know, I know, just when I've managed to get Sundays off, I take up a volunteer position.  But this is by my own choice, not because I've been half-tricked into it.  It is for one hour every week, tutoring an 11 year old boy who has been adopted by an English speaking family so that he'll be able to communicate at least a little when he reaches his destination.  Reading this over, I realize I sound nauseatingly ... well, nice, but it is something I genuinely find myself looking forward to.  I am not doing it because it would be the right thing to do, but because it appeals to me.  I like the kids I work with, and I am downright delighted to have this opportunity.  Don't hold it against me.

Skipping

In Which I Rediscover An Old Form Of Exercise

I've been looking for some form of exercise since I arrived.  The exercise I can enjoy must fulfill the following:  It must not be tedious (running is out, sorry guys).  It must be cheap (ballet's out, so are tennis, ice skating, and anything else that requires special and expensive equipment).  It must be available to me at any time (my class schedule doesn't really allow for taking other classes at regular times).  

One of the other foreign teachers at School 8 is a former boxer, and out of the blue one day he said, "Rowan, how do you feel about skipping?"  I thought he was talking about the practice of avoiding school or work, but he clarified - "You know, skipping rope."  I think the last time I jumped rope was in third grade when we pledged to jump rope for a syphilis cure (I'm sure it was something like that).  I hated it at the time, because I was being forced to do it.  But suddenly it sounded like a fantastic idea.

So I went out and bought a jump rope for the equivalent of US $2.  I took it with me to the park across the street last night after class and skipped for a while.  And you know what?  I think it's workable.  It requires enough concentration that I don't get bored, the rope was cheap, and I can pack it up in a little bundle and take it with me.  

Maybe next I'll try Hoop Rolling.

Xǐ Bù Xǐhuan?

In Which I Get More Personal Than Usual 

I have no shortage of friends and family that find it difficult or unacceptable to talk about their feelings.  I don't mean to imply that my social sphere is populated entirely with expressionless stoics.  However, while I know many people who will discuss their deepest desires and shames at the drop of a hat, I also know quite a few who run almost entirely on logic.  I was not raised to run exclusively on logic.  I understand it, and it helps me, but if I were asked (as I have been in the past) to ignore my feelings, or to not feel them at all, I wouldn't know how to respond.  The ways I feel about things - my likes and dislikes, my awe and fear and excitement and anger, my love and faith and hope - are as much a part of my interface with the world as is my skin.  I could no more peel it away than I could flay myself.  Sometimes, because of this, it's hard for me to interact with those who do not admit feeling into their spheres of life, or at least their spheres of discourse.  I say something like, "I am sad about such-and-such," and they say, "Just change it," and the conversation is over.

I recently had a discussion here about making plans.  A friend and I were trying to decide what to do over Chinese New Year.  My friend asked me to suggest some places, so I considered for a few days and concluded that I'd like to see the Palace Museum again, and also take a little walk somewhere in the mountains.  Then, having given my input, I asked my friend, "What would you like to do over Chinese New Year?"  Communication suddenly broke down.  

According to my friend, this is a cultural difference.  While I agree wholeheartedly, I don't think that the cultural split in this case lies on international political boundaries.  Some people both here and in the States appear to be as open to feeling hope and sadness and anger and glee as most people are to seeing shapes and colors.  And some, in both countries, seem to be deliberately closing their eyes, saying that the information is too much, too confusing, too extreme.  Too inconvenient, too dangerous.  There is, perhaps, a traditional predisposition towards that kind of thinking here.  There are so many rules, and sometimes it's easier to follow them than to think about them.  Taiwan's Yoda says "Do or do not, there is no like."

Call me a hippy (and some of you will, derisively), but I'd much rather be affected by love and wonder and loss than live in a world that had none.  I am a collector and collator of data, and how I feel about the world is information as valuable to me as logical thought.  I see no reason they cannot co-exist and improve upon each other.

Perhaps all of this sounds a bit defensive.  I am grateful to my friend for talking about this subject, one which I've never found anyone "stoic" able to talk about before.  It made me think, and I'm glad to have a better understanding of why someone might choose only logic, why someone might choose only black and white.  More, I'm glad to have that understanding and still know that I choose to like things.

(Note: The title of this post asks "Do you like it or not?")

The Visitor

In which Hobbes Sees Our Lives Up Close (Poor Thing)

Hobbes flew in on the evening of Saturday the third.  Katy and I took a bus (a very posh bus) to the airport.  We were both excited, and reminisced about our own arrival.  Katy made a welcome sign in Chinese.  We held it up through various stages of excitement, anticipation, hope, and then weariness at entirely the wrong terminal for a while, before figuring out that there was a much bigger terminal accessible by sky train (creepily deserted, but effective).  We collected a somewhat worried Hobbes and found our bus back. 

We came back to our apartment and more or less slept immediately that first night.  The next morning I had a one-on-one class at School 8, so we met up afterwards and had dinner at a very nice little noodle place next to Da'an park.  After eating, we went to to see the flowers again.  Katy and Hobbes hadn't seen the show yet, so we wandered around for a bit and tried the candied tomatoes (Hobbes was a fan).  I saw some sections of the display I hadn't come across yet, but went home pretty quickly afterward due to exhaustion.  Katy and Hobbes split off and went to find dinner and the meditation group.

The week was, for me, a blur.  I left on Monday morning to do some editing, met Hobbes and Katy at the vegetarian buffet that I frequent, took Hobbes with me to the School 8 area, and deposited her at a Starbucks with instructions to meet me there after I was done with my classes.  I unfortunately (and unusually) had two that day - a regular class and a make-up.  I picked up Hobbes at 9:10ish and we made our way back to the Linsen area.  On Tuesday Hobbes and Katy went up to do some walking in the northern area of Taipei, while I prepped for my Tuesday class and graded their homework.  They had an oral quiz, and all did pretty well, apart from the two girls who have been entirely uninterested in the whole class.  

Wednesday morning Hobbes and I went to walk around the area with the art park and the art museum.  The art park was closed, but we finally made it into the Story House.  Weird stuff.  It was, when we went, housing a display of television and newspaper advertisements for nine or ten Taiwanese brandnames.  Soap, soy sauce, snake oil, stationary, toothpaste (see hei ren for a somewhat amusing history), and the necessary overpriced gift shop.  No photos were allowed in the building.  After my Sanchong class, Hobbes hung out at home until both Katy and I returned from our classes (another unusual thing - I had another make-up class on Wednesday).  On Thursday Hobbes took herself around and saw the touristy bits of Taipei - Taipei 101, etc - while Katy and I had class and editing.  I got done at 7 on Thursday, after a somewhat disturbing class in which one student was upset and wouldn't tell me why, and met Hobbes at the Taipei Main Station where we got some dinner and hit up the cultural gift shop for "hey, I've been to Taiwan" gifts for the folks back home, I presume.  I tried to find a trinket with the Taipei Railroad symbol on it, but the only one available was a hiddeous little alien figure with the symbol for a head.  Anyone wishing to take up metalsmithing is welcome to send me a Taipei Railroad symbol necklace.  Perhaps I'll find an arc-welder.

Friday morning we headed to the Peace Park area.  It was a pretty park, and we had lunch before-hand at another vegetarian buffet that was quite tasty.  The Peace Park (2-28 Park) commemorates an incident on February 28, 1947.  We wandered around until both of our cameras lost batteries, and then I had to go into work.  I dropped Hobbes off at the Starbucks again, and she uploaded her photos while I taught a couple of classes.  I finished my classes at ten, by which time Katy and Hobbes had eaten dinner at a little restaurant somewhere in the Da'an area.  We all met up back at our apartment and Hobbes and I stayed up while Katy took a nap.  We left the apartment to find transportation to the airport at 4 AM.  The busses weren't running yet, but we were approached by an extra-enthusiastic taxi driver who insisted that he could take us there.

The taxi driver was very nice, in spite of our initial suspicions.  He charged a bit less than the others (we considered the possibility that it might be a scam), and he was non-intrusive for the duration of the forty-minute ride.  He played a CD quietly and let us be giddy from exhaustion in the back seat.  At the end of the ride, we noticed that the music had a lot of harmonics in common with ABBA, and no sooner had that occured to us then a Chinese version of Gimme Gimme Gimme came on.  I asked him to write down the name of the guy singing, and he pulled one better and gave us the CD.  It turns out to be a CD he burned, and written on the disc are the words "hǎo tīng de gē."

We arrived at the airport at about 5:00.  It was deserted.  There was no one at the check-in desk, and after some peering blearily around, we discovered that it would not open until 6:15.  So we sat down in the waiting area and variously went to sleep (Katy), noticed our surroundings (Hobbes), or fought an all-consuming battle against startlingly heavy eyelids (me).  The staff got there promptly at 6:15, and Hobbes checked in and we hugged our goodbyes, then Katy and I made our way back to the terminal from which the busses left.  On our way to the sky-train, we ran into a young mother with a kid on her hip, one on the way, and a touchingly devoted husband who was having trouble with their metric ton of luggage.  We helped them get their baggage together and listened to her spout "Ai-o!"s and gratitude.  We made the bus and I spent most of the trip back staring vacantly at the seat in front of me.  When we got home, I made myself a cup of tea and promptly fell asleep before being able to drink it.

The New Year (Part The First)

In Which Western Holidays Are Documented

First, of course, you all must indulge me in a small bit of reminiscence - as far back as mid-December!  The Christmas decorations in Taiwan started going up before that, of course, but I'm only willing to delve so far into nostalgia -- even in the spirit of seasonal goodwill.  

I went with Sarah to a Chrysanthemum show a while back, and am finally putting up a few of the pictures.  It was surreal and dim, but lovely in the way that gardens are at night.  We wandered around for a while before coming back to join Katy for a game night we ended up not attending.  That was the last extra-curricular thing I took pictures of for a little while, apart from the views to and from work every day.

The daily commute featured such things as Strange Wall Decor, Stores With Dubious Wares, my students' Writing Books, Buildings, the Santa Clause Bus Drivers (none too pleased), and Sunset.

Sarah and I went out to dinner at a thoroughly charming little restaurant that reminded me in a not unpleasant way of the Black Cat Café in Ashland.  On our way there we were dizzied by one church's display of Faith and Electricity in honor of the season.  We ate and talked, and determined to return someday (we haven't yet, but we've been unavoidably distracted by other things - like holidays).  On our way back, Sarah declared her desire to introduce me to a friend of hers (I believe I mentioned him in an earlier post), Xie Yu-Cheng.  I met with him for a lovely dinner shortly thereafter and we have been having charming and extremely helpful (for me, at least) exchanges since.

My A10 class had a unit on ghosts, so I told them the story of Taily-Po.  Ann, the oldest girl (14) started out skittish, and when I got to the point where the story goes "Boo!" everyone jumped.  But Ann screamed.  It wasn't a little shriek of startlement, either, it was an outright scream.  One of the teachers next door stuck his head round, and I reassured him.  The rest of the class thought it was hilarious.  To my delight, about five minutes later the quietest girl in class pulled the balcony curtain aside a little, peered out, and said in Ann's general direction, "Oh! What's that?"  For the first time, that class was unified and interested.  They spent the break drawing their rendition of the monster.

On the twenty-third, there was a new addition to Taiwan from their mainland cousin, commemorated by very cute bread-things in the local bakeries.

We had a quiet and homey Christmas/Chanukah dinner.  Katy and I made dinner and invited Sarah and Jenny to join us.  We had mashed potatoes and squash and latkes (I made them in a wok) before opening presents under the bamboo-cum-Christmas-tree and lighting the menorah (while wearing a Santa hat).  Oh, we are so terribly multicultural it hurts.

I had dinner with Yu-Cheng on New Year's Eve, then went to Sarah's house to see the fireworks.  Her family's apartment building has a roof from which there's a pretty clear view of Taipei 101, and at midnight there were a lot of fireworks off of the building.  I'm not entirely certain of how to take photos of fireworks at night - anyone with input is welcome to advise.

New Year's Day, I went to Da'an Park with Sarah and her family.  There were a lot of flowers.  We met up with Jenny and Katy and went back to Sarah's house to bake cookies.  They were delicious.  Cranberries and chocolate chips and coconut and walnuts and lip-smacking goodness.  I do like making cookies.

Further New Year updates when Chinese New Year comes around.  In the mean time, our friend Hobbes is coming to visit (hi, Hobbes!) for a week or so very soon.  Our first visitor!