Illustrious Musings: Southern pastiche

Distributing incense at Taipei temple

As I rode the airport bus into Taipei, I sent a text message, almost as an afterthought, to the friend of the friend of the friend in Beijing from whom I had borrowed a Taiwan SIM card, asking if he wanted to meet up after New Years festivities wound down. How naive of me to think that I would not immediately be invited to his extended family's New Years Eve dinner, and several hours of praying ("拜拜") at Buddhist temples, well into dawn.

I was quickly welcomed into Mark's family, especially after it turned out we have the same surname (葛), and after eating gargantuan amounts of food, and then waiting for midnight to arrive, we drove in circles around Taipei, visiting as many temples as we could. At each, we offered incense to a number of likenesses of the Buddha, carrying fruit and snacks along with us. I thought we might leave the food as offerings at the temples, but instead, we snacked in the car between pilgrimages, the point being that the fruit had been blessed by the smoke in the temples. At about 4am, gorged beyond holiness, I was finally dropped off at my hostel, but not after Mark's grandmother gave me a hongbao (红包), a red envelope with money, traditionally given by elders to younger members of their family (or, in other contexts, as bribes to politicians). The pattern of extreme kindness by strangers in Taiwan was repeated ad infinitum, as I was given candy, boxed lunches, tea, and portions of others' mahjong winnings.

Papers thrown into a furnace at a temple in Taipei on New Years Eve.

Altar on Taipei street

Macao just before New Years

Taipei temple

"Business temporarily closed for New Years inventory." Massive swaths of Taipei were closed for days on end after New Years. Other areas, in particular those that looked like Shibuya in Tokyo, were packed with shoppers, and the most absurd English:

CATTLE OFFAL!

Shockingly refreshing hybrid caffeinated beverage, resting on the laurels of that mainstay of East Asian vending machines, Pocari Sweat.

New Years also meant 20 some days of uninterrupted fireworks. Most of these sounded like small car bombs. Peter (my Beijing roommate) and I abruptly woke up one morning in our Taipei hostel convinced that the mainland's campaign to reclaim the renegade province was in full swing.

Big Buddha on Lantau Island in Hong Kong

foils of Big Buddha

distant Big Buddha

enormous Zhong Tai monastery in central Taiwan, where on the last day of a bonsai and bronze exhibit, vegetarian vendors set up stalls in a field nearby. A guy selling peas told me that he had traveled frequently to Johnstown, PA in the 1980s, before he retired from the steel business. Peter and I approached a woman who incessantly sang an inane jingle that she clearly had just invented: "Hamburger, hamburger, tastyburger, luckyburger, makes you lucky all day long," and grabbed the microphone to sing the verse (in Chinese) ourselves. She looked impressed before continuing on her zombie-like determination to promote the mysterious soy protein. No one bought any.

Peter and I tried to get information on the return schedule of the bus from the highway (15 minute walk from the monastery) back to the major town nearby. The monks at the information desk insisted that no such bus existed. It was irrelevant that that very bus was precisely how we arrived that morning. They took pity on our resorting to supposedly fantastic lies and gave us a ride to town in a large van, not before making it clear, in a kind of guarded generosity, that we were receiving special treatment that we might not expect in the future.

Taipei temple roof

CEMETERIES

envious graveside views at Lamma Island, Hong Kong

Muslim cemetery, partitioned from Catholic cemetery and overlooking the latter, in Hong Kong

SNOWSTORM

During the snow disaster that devastated much of China in late January, train service was paralyzed. I almost went to visit Ivy in Guangzhou but ultimately decided that even though I could easily take the express train there from Shenzhen, it was not worth facing the estimated 600,000 unhappy migrant workers I would meet upon disembarking at the Guangzhou train station, waiting for their only chance each year (New Years/Spring Festival) to visit home. Shortly after I decided against the jaunt, news came out that someone at Guangzhou station had been trampled to death in a stampede of passengers running for a train that finally began to operate. Below are comparatively modest scenes of passengers waiting in the Shenzhen station.

These people had been camped out for days. 随地吐痰 was in full swing.

Passengers watch news of the storm on flat screen televisions apparently especially set up in light of the disaster. In the Shenzhen subway, I watched videos of soldiers heroically shoveling snow off of highways in central China. Without the material infrastructure (snow plows) to deal with snow storms (in part because these areas rarely experience such heavy snows), the story of the storm became one of human heroism.

Mini-fight breaks out over relief supplies being handed out.

Chiang Kai-Shek's cadillac ostentatiously displayed at his Memorial Hall in Taipei.

Pro-independence photo at the Chang-Kai Shek Memorial Hall.

National Palace Musem in Taipei, arguably the best collection of Chinese art in the world. Most of the pieces were smuggled from the mainland after 1949. An exhibit painstakingly detailed from which rooms in the Forbidden City (Beijing) the objects on display originated. Several Taiwanese told me that if Taiwan becomes independent, the new nation would be morally obligated to return the art to China.

I am in theory not against amplified karaoke being broadcast through seaside parks (Taidong), but there should be some stricter guidelines.

On the walk from what we later learned was an imaginary bus stop, to Zhong Tai Monastery.

Oolong tea fields in Ruili, mountainous central Taiwan

Ruili

Ruili (Fog! not pollution! Finally!)

Notice at Taroko Gorge, Taiwan

Hong Kong-Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture, Hong Kong side, at a colonial era prison, later an immigrant detention facility largely for Vietnamese immigrants. Now a museum space. . .