First Week Collage

From top to bottom: Two pictures of the National Palace Museum (a great place to visit), two pictures of nameless people (except Lynne) who took us to unknown parks, two pictures of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial in Taipei (another great place to visit), kids from the student center playing ball (barefoot) at another unknown park, and finally a student from church and Teresa in front of some unknown building. Chinese people love to take pictures, especially with people in them, and then they give you copies of the pictures you were in. Unfortunately, we did not know enough Chinese to understand where we were or who we were with. So I have lots of pictures of Lynne and me from those early days in Taipei, and all I can do is post them as a collage. The picture added to the header is a formal family portrait from 2004: parents-in-law (seated in front), Liz, Joshua, Teresa, Phoebe, and Joanna standing behind. We have more photos of the descendants from Joshua's parents and their living spouses (34 people in all), and I will change the background of the banner from time to time, so you can see them. The bio pic is of me in my traditional red Chinese cheong-sam wedding dress. I'm sitting up in our bedroom while hordes of women and children file through to get their picture taken with me. Later, I go downstairs to the banquet tables in the living room and under awnings in the street outside the house to toast the guests with Joshua, his father, and his elder sister. We had a small wedding feast of 21 tables; it only took up the block in front of our house. When my younger brother-in-law got married, there were 150 tables of guests and the wedding feast tent went out and around the block. My brother-in-law married a woman from Taiwan, so more of her family and friends were able to come to the wedding.

The Market

Vegetable Pushcart in the Alley near the Market

Taiwan now has supermarkets with neatly packaged food, and today there are a couple of Costco stores on the island, but when I first went there in 1982, the government had not even allowed the McDonald’s franchise to enter its borders. Very soon after our arrival, I was scheduled to cook breakfast for the 30 to 40 people living in student center housing. We had to have breakfast ready by 6:45 so that people with early morning classes could get to school on time. That meant we had to get up a little after 5 to go to the market.

In those days, when you wanted to buy food, you went before noon to the market. Even today, every neighborhood has its market. Some vendors drive their trucks in from the outlying farms, park along the alleys near the market entrance, and sell their wares out of the backs of their trucks. These are usually the fresh fruit and vegetable vendors, although I have seen butchers’ trucks with pig carcasses hanging from wire frames along the sides and a chopping block on the tail gate. Another truck had a nanny goat tethered in the back, and you could buy goat’s milk fresh from the source. The alleys near the market were even more crowded than the alley between our apartment and the student center. Once again, my Chinese guides and co-cooks grabbed my hand and led me along like a child. I was 21 years old, but I felt like a two year old. I couldn’t understand anything people were saying, and I couldn’t read a word on any of the signs. The alleys twisted and turned, and the trucks now became permanent stalls with awnings along one side of the street. Then there was a sharp turn into a dark alley that was jam-packed with women and totally roofed over. My guides led me into this alley.

As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, the thing that struck me most was the stench. The stench even overpowered the noise for a moment. It was all I could do to keep from retching. Up and down the aisles were fishmongers, pork butchers, chicken butchers, fruit and vegetable stands, booths that sold spices, and here and there a cloth merchant or a tailor thrown in. As my nose accustomed to the stench of blood from freshly slaughtered meat, my ears began buzzing with the constant drone of vendors hawking their wares, customers asking for help, and bartering and haggling going on everywhere.

One of my guides was an English-speaker from Hong Kong, and she had ascertained that Lynne and I did not eat well at all the day before because we were so slow using chopsticks the boys kept beating us to the food. My cohorts decided to make a pork, dumpling, and vegetable stew that would give us more in our bellies than watery rice, a peanut, and a bite of tofu. Later, I noticed that for the next month or so, even the congee had some meat and vegetables in it to give us a fighting chance at getting full, so I guess someone relayed the message that we had left the table hungry.

We had 300NT to spend for everybody’s breakfast. In those days the exchange rate was 40NT to 1USD; we were going to feed about 35 people on $9.50. The biggest expense was going to be the meat, so we first went up and down the aisle with butcher stalls. My friend from Hong Kong taught me how to look for stalls that washed down their cutting blocks after serving every customer and that had fans with swatters twirling around the meat to keep the flies from laying eggs in it. The butcher stall aisle had flies everywhere, and the floor was red and sticky with blood from the freshly butchered meat. We decided that we would spend 100NT on the meat and use the other 200NT to buy vegetables, flour, eggs, and herbs for flavoring. The kitchen provided oil, salt, soy sauce, and hot sauce, but we needed to buy things like garlic, ginger and green onions fresh each day.

We found a nice, clean piece of pork shoulder without too much fat, and the butcher sold us a 600 gram chunk for our 100NT. I remember thinking that it looked a little smaller than the pork roasts my mom made for our family of four; I thought, “Well we have enough for the girls at my table, but what are those hungry boys going to eat?” I soon found out that we would all fill up on veggies. For our 200NT we got 600 grams of flour, 5 potatoes, 3 cabbages, 4 monster-sized carrots, and several bags full of other vegetables that I had never seen before. By the time we were finished washing, chopping, and stirring, we had an industrial-sized pot full of stew. Everyone got full, and there was still some left over. I think that was when I realized that from now on, meat was going to be a condiment to give flavoring to dishes, and it would no longer be my main food source.

First Impressions of Taipei, 1982

The Alley Outside our Apartment on a Winter Afternoon

In my last post, I left off my tale when we were awakened before six in the morning by music that sounded very much like an ice cream truck. We did not go chasing it that day, although the weather was hot enough to make us want something cold and frosty. We had been warned not to drink unboiled water, and we discovered that most Chinese people drank warm water even in the heat. There was a thermos bottle of hot water in our room, but we turned up our noses at it. In those days, most apartments were not air conditioned, so we had sweated a lot during that hot, muggy night. We showered again, and our roommates took us to the student center for breakfast.

As we walked out into the streets by the light of day, it really sank in that we were in a totally different world. Taipei is divided into grids by large thoroughfares, and in 1982 the superblocks formed by those thoroughfares were a rabbit warren of cement and brick apartment buildings set on narrow alleys. (Even today the alleys do not always run in straight lines.) Most of the buildings were surrounded by high cement walls topped with broken glass or barbed wire. Every building had a steel entry door, usually painted red, with an intercom and rack of mail slots beside it. Interspersed among the buildings were patches of what the Chinese call “short houses”, one-story shanties of brick or wood, usually roofed with corrugated plastic or steel. These “short houses” were often linked together, and foot paths off the alleys ran among them to houses that were otherwise inaccessible from the larger streets. Many of the “short houses” that directly abutted a larger alley had a store in the front and living quarters in the back.

Every morning the alleys were alive with people. Some families who lived in the “short houses” did their laundry in tubs with washboards right there in the gutter beside their front doors. In other families, the kids got ready for school by brushing their teeth outside and spitting into the gutter. A husband and wife in one of the “short houses” across the alley from our apartment were always yelling at each other at the top of their lungs right there in the middle of the street. There was a corner where a retaining wall intersected a “short house” across the alley from us, and old men would always stop there to urinate. And through it all, there were street vendors on bicycles or motorized tricycle carts wending their way through the teeming humanity screaming or playing scratchy recordings to announce their wares.

Our roommates grabbed us by the arms and pulled us along like children. We had to thread our way through the people in the alley to get to the student center for breakfast. On the first floor of the student center there was a large kitchen and dining area. Breakfast and dinner were included in our rent. Our Malaysian friend quickly ran over to help us, and she explained that everyone living in the student center was expected to help cook breakfast at least once a week. My name was on the schedule for the following day. She led us to a table where we filled three of the eight chairs. Our roommates brought us steaming bowls of plain congee (a fancy word for rice gruel or rice soup). The student center had no forks and knives. We had to learn how to use chopsticks and to grab our food from the plates in the center of the table. Each table had four plates of food. One plate had tofu and soy sauce, one plate had scrambled eggs, a third plate had peanuts, and the fourth plate had some kind of pickled cabbage. By the time we had managed to pick up one peanut and one bite of tofu with our chopsticks, the rest of the food had been scarfed down by the hungry male students at our table. Student center rules said that each table should seat 4 men and 4 women. Now we knew why; there wasn’t enough food to feed a table of 8 men. After washing our own bowls and chopsticks in cold water only, we went with our roommates back to our apartment to take another shower before unpacking and settling in.

A Red-Carpet Welcome

Lynne's Bed in Taipei

My friend Lynne and I experienced many delays on our flight from Seattle to Taipei. We had been traveling for 20 hours without sleep when we were greeted at the airport by a group of cheering students from the place where we would be living. The vans transporting us seemed quite decrepit and had absolutely NO air conditioning. We were given the best seats in each van: the front passenger seats. These seats were directly under the small metal fans that had been bolted to the steel frame above the windshield in each vehicle. The fans moved the air, but it was so hot and muggy, they did not really cool anything.

Both vans pulled up in an alley beside a cement wall with broken glass embedded along the top. One of the girls pushed an intercom button next to a red metal door, and we were all buzzed in. The girls pulled us upstairs while our luggage was driven away with the vans. We were herded up three flights of narrow stairs to an apartment. All we wanted was a bed; we could even wait until morning for a shower, but no, there were even more people crowded into the living room of this apartment at 12:30 am, singing a special welcome song to us and plying us with tea, fruit, cookies, and cakes. We would later learn that we were being given the red-carpet welcome as honored guests, but all we really wanted to do was get some sleep.

Finally, a gentleman named Peter, who spoke intelligible English, entered the room. Peter informed us that we were in the church student center of which he was the manager. He lived in the apartment where we were sitting. The students living in that building were day students at NTNU and all spoke some English. We would not be staying in the student center; we would live in an apartment around the corner with the Yeh family and 8 night-school students, who didn’t speak any English at all. The church leaders were enthusiastic about helping us learn Chinese, so they took great pains to give us an environment of total immersion. Peter droned on for quite awhile, and then he invited us to give speeches. He suggested that we encourage the Chinese students to study English with same dedication that we were giving to our study of Chinese. Lynne and I looked at each other and then at Peter; we told him we really just wanted to get some sleep. Peter’s wife then pressed us to eat a cookie before we left so we wouldn’t wake up hungry. As we nibbled on the cookies and pretended to drink the tea, the students sang their welcome song to us again. Finally, we were dismissed to go home with our new housemates.

We learned that we would be sharing a small bedroom furnished with a metal bunk bed, two small wooden desks with folding chairs, two arm chairs, and an end table with a fan on it. Lynne took the bottom bunk, leaving me the top. When we opened our suitcases to get out our pajamas, there was no place in the room to walk. The beds were just boards covered with a straw mat, a pillow, and a towel in lieu of blankets. An English-speaking Malaysian girl from the student center came to help us settle in; she told us that since no one used sheets in the summer, we needed to shower every night before sleeping or the ants and cockroaches would be attracted to our sweat and infest the beds. The jolt of adrenalin produced by that statement woke us up enough to shower before we tumbled into bed. We had been going for a full 24 hours without sleep, but the board bed was hard and my rear was sore. Despite my fatigue, I did not sleep very well. All too early, it was morning, and we were awakened by music that sounded like an ice cream truck at a little before 6 am.

Culture Shock

The two preceding posts were the preface and introduction to my memoirs. You have now turned to the title page of Part One: Culture Shock. On the page you see pictures of Taipei (well links to pictures), a short poem, and a prelude to the next few posts.

http://www.molon.de/galleries/Taiwan/Taipei/

http://funfever.blogspot.com/2007/11/taiwans-modern-toilet-restaurant.html

The Sounds of Taipei

Hello, Silence my old friend,
When will I be with you again?
Kids and dogs, a battle raging,
Ice cream trucks that pick up garbage.
Street vendors sell “Da Whey,”
“Fix your screens.” Oh, how they scream.
These are the sounds of Taipei.

--May be sung to the tune of "The Sounds of Silence" by Simon & Garfunkel

The first step of any cultural journey begins with culture shock. For me, a typical Westerner, arriving in Taipei meant that the differences in manners, food, technology, and lifestyles all sent jolts through my system. But the two things to which I had the most trouble adjusting were the population density and the constant background NOISE produced by the closely packed masses of bustling humanity.