Friday Evenings in Tainan

There really is not a shortage of things for me to write about these days. Life in Taiwan has become less surprising, but not much less extraordinary. Subtleties of everyday happenings I have become more and more accustomed to. Yet, instead of this resulting in a numbness to life’s absurdities, it has accentuated my perceptions.

But in many ways everything I experience is set in a very 'different' context, and it is exceedingly difficult to convey the peculiarities without first setting them in their proper environment. Rather than spend my time documenting I often prefer to engage, and so I am increasingly particular in my choice of scenes to convey.

A bit troubling, though, is that my recent intentions to write about particular events do not result in any sort of product, and many really rather entertaining or enchanting experiences fade into memories that I only hope to recall. There is a line to be straddled between a focus on engagement and a dedication to recording that engagement.

...

Last Friday evening I came home from work early: the private tutoring session I usually hold with Stephen’s daughter Sophia had been cancelled because she was busy. The next morning I was teaching at LiMing Zhongxue, but I had not yet finished my lesson plan.

As an aside, these lesson plans tend to take several hours to complete because I am not using a text and the class is large and long enough (40 students for three hours) that it demands I have what would seem an excess of material. If I were to do every exercise with every student I would probably only need to prepare a handful, but everyone would be sleeping until I called on them. Thus I am forced to be inventive and creative and entertaining while only covering a marginal amount of material.

I was in the process of being this inventive, creative and entertaining person when my cell phone rang, a rather rare occurrence. It was Judy, from my adult class, which had just the day before indefinitely postponed further classes because someone’s father was in the hospital. The class consists of three young-middle aged ladies who have incredibly disparate commands of the English language and listen hard and pretend to understand everything I say despite my best efforts to get them to confess when they do not. They are kind and have lives outside of our class and seem very unwilling to study.

I like them very much. They are a nice change of pace from the children, two times a week for two hours at a time.

So Judy, who is the most conversational in English, called to say that there was a big problem and she would be over soon to pick me up. It was 10:00 pm or so, and I had a significant amount of work to do on this lesson plan, but I of course told her I would be waiting outside.

We scootered to a place not far from the school where I teach, and parked and disembarked. The street was pretty quiet already, and not many people were around, but the room we parked in front of on the bottom floor of a large building was well lit with fluorescent lights and full of six or seven young-middle aged women, all working ferociously on computers.

Shelly, one of my students, was one of them. She had a report due the next day for her marketing class. The emergency was that she could not understand the English research paper on which the report was to be based at all. She handed me a copy of the 30 odd paged report, and asked if I could help.

I sat down and immediately felt like a real university student again. I had never read any marketing papers in my life, I had just been handed 30 pages of dense material and a report was due in several hours.

The only difference was that I was in Tainan in a room which turned out to be the bottom floor of the house of one of my youngest students, Tony, and was full of these women who were apparently all classmates. I asked Judy why everyone studied here. Everyone studied there because it was quiet and bright and there were lots of computers. Never mind it was what would normally be the living room of someones house.

It was actually amazing. This room, the bottom floor of this house, had been converted into what could have been mistaken for a black market brokering room. There were more computers than people, but all the computers seemed to be in use. Desks created a maze through which Tony’s father had to walk to get to the stairs to his hopefully more tranquil and less illegal upstairs. Instead of the 'quiet' that Judy described, there was a constant back and forth of chit chat. The doors were wide open to the city street outside.

Judy sat down in a large office chair and another lady immediately and silently stood up from her desk to begin massaging Judy's back. Judy is a larger lady, and a bit older than the rest. She is very kind, but has a burly kind of appearance that demands respect, the kind of lady you would never talk back to or interrupt. She has worked at the post office for decades, and this has probably accentuated this trait.

I returned to the research paper, but was forced to look up again when the belching from Judy's chair reached levels no longer ignorable. The lady doing the massaging could have been trying to kill Judy. She was striking her with such blows as to produce a belch nearly every time. I would not have been surprised, but may not have been able to retain my laughter, if the lady had simply grabbed the back-underside of the chair and flipped Judy onto the ground where she could more efficiently deal life threatening blows with the heels of her feet and point of her elbows.

Instead, both women were content to proceed as things were, and of course no one else was at all concerned or surprised or displayed any emotion at all.

I once again returned my gaze to the paper and carried on amidst all the black market trading and belching and studying in the living room of Tony’s house.

Not surprising at all, but no less extraordinary.

An Accidental Weekend

So I was going to go to the tea farm last week, but then the typhoon came. There was a large earthquake a few years back and apparently all of the soil in Taiwan is now extremely unstable. As a result, heavy rain (aka typhoons) create massive landslides in the mountains, and other sorts of things that kill.

So the trip was postponed until this weekend, which was a three-dayer. We left Friday morning with the intention of coming back Saturday evening. We got on the...

Well, let me preface this. People are not excellent drivers in Taiwan. That is to say, when the traffic lights go from green to red, people in the "halted" lanes continue to drive through the intersection for 2-7 seconds. That is also to say that before the lights go from red to green, people in the "waiting" lanes tend to be at least halfway through the intersection.

Okay. So really, maybe Taiwanese drivers are especially excellent because I have never seen any accidents - until this week.

I was going to work on Thursday, obeying traffic lights on my landlord's bicycle, when a car running a red light hit a girl on a scooter jumping the gun on the green. She slid perhaps fifteen feet, laid on the ground for a minute, and stood up. The driver of the car opened his door, got out (but did not come out from around the door) and asked if she was all right. She seemed like she was in fact still alive, and upon the establishment of this the driver of the car, a young professional looking type, helped her upright her scooter and walk it to the side the road. At this point he got in his car and drove away. No exchange of information, no yelling, no nothing. I was stunned.

Right. So fast forward to Friday morning. We get on the freeway and I am sitting in the back seat with tea shop lady's older sister trying to explain the bath houses in Korea in Mandarin, and just when I succeed and everyone laughs with joy, our celebration is interrupted by somewhat hysteric bursts of shrieking from the driver of our car. I am not wearing a seat belt because, one, it does not work, and two, older sister explained that people in Taiwan do not wear seat belts in the back seat - they are not necessary.

It turns out she was right. I think I looked up about three seconds before we hit the car in front of us. It took one second to realize that it was going to happen. It took another second to slide as low as possible into my seat to avoid whatever might have happened. And then about a half second of waiting for the inevitable.

No one was injured: I think we were probably going 25 or 30 when we actually hit the car, and no one was caught off guard thanks to the shrieking. But the car in front of us had a detached muffler and the rear wheel wells were rubbing quite hard up against the rear tires. Our car had a severely bent hood, and all the lights and bumper were completely destroyed. I think if we had been going even a mile or two per hour faster the radiator would have been smashed. But as it was everything under the hood just compacted a bit, and the car was able to run. The two drivers of the cars, both ladies, hugged each other and we continued on our journey. Though, it had to be cut short by a day.



The tea farms did not care that we hit a car and lunch still tasted good and in fact no one seemed to mind too much about anything at all.



We came back home that evening and I hung around the tea shop for a while as family members dissipated. Drinking tea at the massive, unitary piece of wood that serves as the tea table, I was less surprised than I would have been twenty four hours previously as I watched another car collide into yet another car, right outside the front door...

Tainan Sleeps Too

It was very early in the morning. Riding my landlord's bike home, I was struck by how quiet and empty the streets were. The sides of buildings, normally aglow with artificial hues of neon light from massive signs, were cast in a dim moonlight. The occasional motor passed me by. I saw a mother on a bicycle, her young daughter riding in an affixed seat behind her. As I passed, I was able to hear the creak of her pedals.

I turned down my alley to find a local taking pictures of buildings and streetlights and sidewalks - like me, enjoying a different city by night.