One Hundred Days

One hundred days after my grandmother was cremated, we moved her from her temporary resting place to her formal eternal resting place.  Her urn was strapped to her eldest son and a small procession of golf carts climbed up the tomb-laden hill that would hold her entire family's final resting places.  She is the first inhabitant.

Chinese traditions and a lack of space on a small island have created huge parks of tombs which range as widely in architecture and appearance as the residences of the living do in Taiwan.  Our family invested well in eternal real estate - the windswept hill is neatly kept by a professional company, all smooth reflective grey marble, silently overlooking a rugged seashore below.  We chanted buddhist rites and made offerings to the god of the earth and to our grandmother.  We burnt her paper money to play mahjong with so she could make friends with her new neighbors.

Rest in peace, Nai-nai.  You are home.

A Taiwanese Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is one American holiday that hasn't made its way to Taiwan yet.  So they're not sure when exactly to start putting up Christmas decorations and playing Christmas songs.  I've been seeing Christmas trees and hearing jingly songs for a week already.  Has this already started in America?  I'm not sure if they celebrate Christmas here either, or if it's some kind of corporate gimmick for pushing products or a homogenizing side-effect of globalization.

One of my coworkers knows that Thanksgiving has something to do with Indians because Pet Society on Facebook started featuring Indian-themed items or something, and another coworker learned about turkey stuffing in his poultry science class in graduate school.  Poultry science?

Anyways, today was Thanksgiving.  My mom told me to eat something special and record it, so here it is.  I went to Guang-Hua Technology Market with some co-workers and ate the following things:

Black bean tofu soup with peanuts, mung beans and 粉粿 (a kind of chewy jelly made of sweet potato starch)

Green scallion-oil-pancake (a literal translation - I have yet to see an appealing, yet accurate, translation of this dish)  The message on the wrapper is particularly fitting.

(Not pictured: one of those rice triangles wrapped in seaweed and stuffed with some kind of meat (salmon) that they sell at 7-eleven)

Okay, it's not much of a Thanksgiving Dinner.  But I got to spend it with some nice people, and isn't the core of Thanksgiving about spending it with people?

Enjoy Thanksgiving!  I miss you all in America!

Monkey!

Man, working in the zoo is awesome. Sometimes I feel like I'm in a children's story. Yesterday, a lady came in and told us to take care of her monkey for her. The monkey ran around and got into all kinds of trouble and we had to clean up after its mess!

Oh no!

But seriously, little monkeys are really neat. Maybe because they're so close to human. I think it's funny how we were casually given responsibility over a monkey.


His name is Lychee. He had to be raised separately from his mother because his father broke his arm when he was little.

What do you do

...when you have a chance of realizing a former dream, but you're too busy trying to live your life, now?

For a while I wanted to learn kung fu.  Like, super-learn it and have it permeate the fabric of my everyday life.  Like Wong Fe-hong stuff.  If a cup fell off a table, I'd catch it without thinking kind-of-thing.  And I was lucky enough to have some teachers willing to teach me, for free.  I did my best to learn what they had to teach, but in the end, I just felt like it was exercise.  Occasionally, I might get this glimmer of a feeling that my body had a potential to achieve the grace of movement and composure I had only imagined and seen in movies; but I thought about it too much and my movements remained coarse and approximate, and it all was just exercise in the end.

Yesterday I attended a Bagua Quan class at Jiang Kai-shek Memorial.  I had seen them practicing whenever I attended kickboxing class (definitely more exercise) and I noticed that their movements were like what I dreamed of: efficient, graceful, composed.  The class was how good traditional kung fu classes have been described to me: no belts, just practice, and at a slow pace.  The students moved with precision, having completely mastered each movement before learning the next one.  I learned how to make circles with my hands.

I have confidence that anyone who is willing to learn diligently from this teacher will learn very well.  Just watching him demonstrate moves is like viewing art: in order to describe it, inspires metaphors.  He wasn't quick or powerful; he was water, he was a whip.  He was a really nice guy, but discerning.  He knew I went to kickboxing.  "Don't you get enough exercise?" he asked.

His classes are four days a week.  They cost 4000 NT (120 USD) a month.  I cannot afford that much time in a month.  And if I don't go to all the classes, he won't feel like he can teach me, and the money is wasted on me trying to learn and relearn the same thing.  When I was in Beijing, I payed for a week of classes on Yi-quan, where I learned how to stand in different positions and feel Qi.  I only remember one now.

But for all my rationalizations and excuses, I am just afraid of committing and possibly abandoning a lifestyle I have already constructed.  There are schedules, applications, people to attend to.  Today I went shopping with my cousin instead of my second Bagua class.

I could have told my cousin I didn't want to go shopping with him and left him at my grandfather's house where we had had dinner, to go to class.  I don't even like walking around looking at expensive stuff you could dream of buying.  But he's a nice guy.

The students of the class never talked to me unless the teacher told them to.  They looked right past me, never acknowledging me, even when class was over.  I thought they were stuck-up assholes.  But then again, I never liked talking when I was practicing.  I wanted to concentrate.  I could be like this.  I could leave my cousin who is excited we are going to play Red Alert 2 and aloofly practice kung fu.  But I would lose something else.

The one thing I learned from ANTH 146: Moral Consciousness was that being human means a series of choices that are each a sacrifice.  There is no right answer, only constant sacrifice.

This may sound a little heavy for thinking about whether or not to take a kung fu class, but I think this dilemma is part of a larger problem.  I am unwilling to sacrifice.  I want the good parts of both sides.  This is why I switched my major every semester.  This is why I can't figure out what to do with my life.  There is always something I don't want to let go of, and so I can't sacrifice.  I am thus stuck in between.

Sorry if you read this entire thing.  I'll go back to posting pictures and blurbs soon.

Conferences

I attended the International Asiatic Black Bear Symposium that was held here this week.  I got to hear talks from experts on black bears from all different aspects of research.  Besides the tracking and genetic stuff you'd expect, there are also people analyzing heavy carbon and nitrogen ratios to determine what kind of foods bears ate.  I'm getting interested in what people can do with biology and geography.  Biogeography.  I want to look into that.

Conferences are great.  You get a lot of free food.  That's one of the main reasons why this office was empty during the conference: free food.  The speakers are interesting, if you can understand them.  The conference was in English, and sometimes I couldn't understand the speakers.  I don't know how much my Chinese coworkers understood.  The same as if I went to a conference in Chinese and most everybody spoke Chinese funny because it was their second language, I guess.

But you know what annoys me about conferences?  There always seems to be someone in charge of the microphone who is super paranoid about it and has to mess with it.  I have noticed this is common in Taiwan and this event was no exception.  This one guy would always creep on stage slowly and then wrangle with the microphone stand on the podium, all the while bent over as if he had something to hide behind.  I think he must have chickened out halfway through readjusting the microphone, because he always ran off stage leaving the microphone pretty much in the same position as it was before.  All the while with the bewildered speaker (and audience) watching.  And there was this one broken microphone that made a lot of static that they kept giving to people.  I think they kept getting all the microphones mixed up and forgot which one was the bad one.

Owl

The last few days at Turtle Island became super busy when a bunch of people came to live with me in the visitor center.  The coast guard commander went on leave (he's a nice guy, by the way) and was replaced by up to 8 people all living on the floor and couches.  A-Hong and the graduate student were there, along with some zoo coworker transients on vacation and two (2) separate camera crews.  This project must have a lot of people watching it.  With A-Hong there, we went on nightly walks and bat watches, each trip was sure to find something new that I would never see if I was living on the island alone.  I don't really go out at night alone.

One day, A-Hong and the graduate student picked up an owl.  It practically flew down to A-Hong.  It was a severely undernourished Brown Hawk-owl with a poorly healed broken wing.

We fed it crickets by hand, then 6-inch long centipedes and geckos.  It would sometimes refuse to eat, and we had to rip apart the larger food and slowly feed it in small portions.  Over several days, it grew stronger and could fly up to the ceiling, but it would never be able to be self-sustaining.  So we brought it back to the zoo with us.

Transporting birds is usually done by stuffing them in straight tubes so they can't move their wings or get out.  A-Hong wrapped the owl in his shirt and taped it up.  Man, did it look mad.

So now I'm back in Taipei, and the owl is at A-Hong's house.  I'm going back to Turtle Island on the 20th.

Career choices

I was looking at grad schools and I realized for the nth time that I have no idea what I want to do for a graduate degree.  I pushed away from the desk and sighed in disgust.

"What's wrong?"  I had forgotten he was there.  He was the new commanding officer on Turtle Island, probably about my age and not long out of college.  He has taken up the habit of coming to the visitor center where I live and playing Warcraft 3, sitting opposite to me at the visitor information desk where the internet is.  He never looked like a commanding officer to me.  Right now he's wearing a white t-shirt with its collar stretched out, and he usually walks around in flip flops and shorts, with a blue uniform jacket that looks like the high school gym uniforms in Taipei.

"I'm contemplating graduate school"

"Choosing schools?"

"No, a major."  I smile, embarrassed.  "Are you going to graduate school after this?"

"No, I'm a soldier."

"So this is... your work?"  Usually, Taiwanese males complete their compulsory military duty and get on with their lives.  I always got the impression that it was a brief but necessary obstacle, but it never occurred to me that being a soldier could be a job.

"My career," he affirmed.  Sensing my confusion, he explained: "I didn't know what else to do."



Maybe I should let myself get drafted, after all.

Birds, wind and dogs

Turtle Island is a rest stop for migratory birds.  Some of these birds have flown long, long distances and may have a long ways to go still.  So you see a lot of tired birds here.  I guess this one was so tired it fell over and died.

The Northeast Wind has started blowing, fiercely, relentlessly.  The air has turned cool, kind of like how fall is in my distant memories of America (I have been here that long).  I like to run up to the sea wall and stare at the roiling white caps and the spray against the tiny concrete dock, and lean against the cold, wet sea wind.  It makes me feel like I live on a lonely, rocky, windswept island in the North Atlantic.  Like a lighthouse keeper.
Of course, I am not alone.  There is the Coast Guard here, and their four confusing dogs.  They seem to alternatively like and dislike me, but I think it is just part of some grander scheme.  Once, they came barking and circling down the path towards me, and the white one came to stand confidently by my side while the black ones kept their distance, unwilling to come near me.  I felt like I was in the middle of a standoff.  Keep me out of it, dogs.

Sometimes I get bored and imagine dog politics.