an affinity for round things

The following itinerary goes out to my brother, who has shown more explicit interest than anyone in the culinary (or should I say gourmandistic) side of my fieldwork. Yesterday, on the Mid-Autumn Festival, my coworker JT invited me to his house for some grilled meat.[i] I took along My American Friend (everybody loves Americans, there’s always room for one more—especially a like-sized one). We started eating grilled meat around noon and ate on, alternating with fruit, with nary a pause until around four thirty in the afternoon, at which point we drove out to a smaller city about forty minutes outside of Taipei to go to another coworker’s family home, where we were fed an entire meal of non-bar-b-qued things before they even got the grill going, upon which people attempted with not much success to feed us more grilled meat. We left there around eight and by shortly after nine I was at J’s place, wishing everyone a happy holiday and insisting that I couldn’t possibly eat another bite, until around ten, at which point I devoured the rest of the shrimp and started in on the bacon-wrapped scallion.

The tradition on Mid-Autumn Festival is to eat moon cakes (sweet sweet sweet cakes usually filled with red-bean paste which everyone claims to hate) and pomelo (which are roundish, and in season, and which nobody is silly enough not to like) and to gaze at the full full moon from within the full full circle of one’s family. Asked why we also grill meat on the Mid-Autumn Festival, JT gave a long, animated, suspenseful explanation about something that happened around fifteen years ago, which in English could be summarized by the term “marketing gimmick.” Apparently there is no specific term for “marketing gimmick” here, which is kind of astounding, since Taiwan is All About marketing gimmicks. On the way to the second coworker’s house JT played for us a popular hip-hop-y song (which I’d actually heard bits of before in some hip adolescent venue) with the chorus: “Take off your coat, take it off, take off your coat. Take of your shirt, take it off, take off your shirt. Take it all off, take it off, take it off, etc.” (Of course in Chinese you can put the clothing item first as topic, and then “take it off” as the comment, making it altogether a more efficient and smooth way of getting the message across.)

Perhaps prompted by the (pretty funny) nonstop take-it-off, JT started wondering if there would be a “pole dance show” at the second coworker’s house, and even asked him when we got there. His family home, the place he’d grown up in, was in the alley right behind the night market. When he was a kid, he said, there were pole dance shows all the time, permanently, in the night market street, advertising things. Like what? “Like what? I don’t know, like health insurance.” We had spent a little while looking for the full moon from his alley, but it was nowhere to be seen: too cloudy. Oh well. Finally, after refusing the last hot dog and getting a tour of the family house (complete with a very large altar for the ancestral tablet, with Guanyin, Guangong, and Tudigong standing next to it, in a room specifically dedicated to the ancestors), we got ready to leave.

About a minute into the drive, as we were turning in front of a temple onto a bigger road, we finally saw it: the pole dance, minus a real pole. A girl in pretty impressive boots was writhing about sexily on a little stage arranged right to the side of the temple. After a minute she jumped down from the stage and started accosting various men in the audience, most of whom looked like they wanted to run away. Finding herself in the middle of the temple next to the incense stand, she turned to the altar and made the baibai motions, then sashay-waddled in the impressive boots, swishing the transparent skirt, over to the smaller altar to the left and bowed to it as well. Around this time I looked up and saw the full full moon above the temple, although no one else seemed to take much of an interest in it. So what with that, the stripper, the grilled meat, and the final return to what is more or less family here, the Mid-Autumn Festival was pretty much complete.


[i] The word for bar-b-que is a verb-object combination, which is a common way of forming verbs and seems basically to be a way of getting around transitivity. For instance, “to eat” is a transitive verb—you have to eat something—but so you don’t always have to specify what it is you are going to eat exactly, there is an unmarked version of thing-to-eat, which is rice. So when someone asks if you would like to eat-rice, they might very well be thinking of pizza. Bar-b-que is kaorou, to grill-meat. Of course other things might potentially be grilled as well, but somehow although I barely even associate the “rice” in eat-rice with actual rice anymore, I always think of bar-b-que as specifically grilled meat. Although it might very well be green peppers (there were some in the afternoon) or octopus eyeballs (there were some shortly before midnight: really Q).

“Sku-u-uchno” : Down, and out, in Taipei, take two

The following is cobbled-together bits of what was recently judged to be a bo-o-oring story, so consider yourself warned. The reason I’m putting it up is that I now have pictures of me and Jennifer in post-gua situations and I wanted to share my lobster neck with the whole wide world. If you don’t want to be bored, you are welcome to just swoop down to the pictchas.

I had my first encounter with a local illness a year and a bit ago, on the day before The Neighborhood festival. It was Saturday afternoon and we in the choir were having our last singing rehearsal in an air-conditioned room in the local. The next morning we would perform for the president, the vice-president, the mayor, the scholar popularly acknowledged (along with hot weather) to have led Taiwan out of the SARS trap, and the assembled masses. We had been standing up to rehearse for a long time and in a moment when the women weren’t needed I sat down to rest my knees, which have been bothering me a bit lately.[i] A woman behind me asked if I was okay and someone else nearby said I must have zhongshu.[ii] Although I’d heard of zhongshu before and I knew it happened when it was hot, I was never really clear on what it meant or what you were supposed to do about it. But I was kind of tired, and I’d been sitting around outside all day folding paper origami cranes, and I didn’t feel like going into a long explanation of how my knees start bothering me when I stand up for too long because your knees bothering you does not seem to be a universal and acceptable sort of illness, so I just kind of nodded, yeah, sure, whatever, I guess I zhongshu.

Zhongshu, I ascertained later, means ‘to get heatstroke,’ but it’s usually not something you’re sent to the hospital for—it’s something that happens to you all the time, which is what you’d expect with this weather. “I feel awful today,” one of Jennifer’s bartenders complained to me one day, “I went to bed at three in the morning and slept straight up until I zhongshu.” While we were gathered in a conference room at City Hall waiting for a meeting to start, the community planner who is planning the park for our neighborhood turned to a couple of the women to complain about feeling really out of it. “I probably zhongshu.” At this Zhou Taitai, ever prepared, whipped out some tiger balm that she happened to have on her, along with a plastic tool that somewhat resembled a shoe horn (or maybe a small deer antler), rounded on one side, flat on the other side, and with a discernible edge in between the two sides. She rubbed some tiger balm on the back of his neck, on that flattish place to the side of the spine where the neck is just starting its descent into the throat, and started rubbing with the edge of the plastic deer antler, using vigorous downward strokes, until the skin turned bright red. The planner obediently leaned his head forward and after a few minutes emerged from his zhongshu a new, much more together-feeling, man. Some people use that deer antler thing and other people use the edge of a spoon, but you can also just use your fingers in a pinch.

So I was sitting down and the women around me had decided that I zhongshu. Without a word, one of the women behind me started massaging my neck and shoulders, then another one joined in. It felt terrific. Another hand came up and, thumb pressed tightly against forefinger and middle finger, rubbed the tips hard and fast along that flattish place on my neck, to the side of the spine. That hurt like hell. The singing teacher noticed all the attention I was getting and looked surprised: “Only now do I know that foreigners can zhongshu too.” Upon which I suspect all eyes turned to me. I don’t know if that increased the heat I was feeling. We finished practicing shortly thereafter and as we were leaving the classroom, a whole gaggle of women gathered around me. Everyone was talking about how to deal with zhongshu and some people just went ahead and dealt with it—I don’t know how many hands I had rubbing vigorously up and down the back of my neck, at any rate I there was no room on my neck for any more hands. I think people may have been switching off but since I couldn’t see them behind me I can’t be sure. I just stood there obediently with my head bent forward. Someone took out some tiger balm which she just happened to have on her and rubbed it on my neck, and people continued rubbing for several minutes.

At this point I was realizing that I did, actually, feel kind of out of it, and that I had, actually, just spent the entire morning outside in the heat, and so I myself was starting to suspect that maybe I had zhongshu. The vigorous rubbing continued to hurt like hell unabated, but it also felt really good in some weird way, like it was getting all that heat that was stored up in me to rise up and escape through my neck.[iii] By the time they were done, I felt cool and light and peppy, and ready to go back out in the heat (with an umbrella, of course) and practice singing in the park.

And then recently I tagged along with Jennifer’s malady, manifested in a general lack of pep and a tight feeling in the back of the neck that was uncured even by the blind massage place down the street, [iv] and which was universally interpreted as having zhongshu. This time Vany applied the cure with a ten-yuan coin (roughly the size of a quarter—so you can try this at home). Vany, a taciturn t, is one of Jennifer’s three employees. (T as in “tomboy,” as in butch.) She lives with her sweet, soft, po girlfriend near a popular adolescent shopping area where the girlfriend sells jewelry and little wooden figurines and wooden keychain hangies that she inscribes herself with a tiny little pen-sized blowtorch. (Po as in 婆, old woman, wife, mother-in-law: femme).

Apparently sick of Jennifer’s complaints, Vany finally went out and got the tiger balm that she just happened to have in her scooter, took Jennifer into the other room, and started to guasha, which is what the scraping-rubbing action is called. She progressed from the neck all the way down Jennifer’s back, and even to her upper arms, right around the shoulders. Jennifer was going “Ow ow ow that hurts!” but that, of course, is the point. As Vany rubbed the first stroke on her upper back, the skin turned bright red instantly, and within two more strokes it was a kind of grainy, bumpy red that was a little painful to look at. The skin’s turning so red so quickly when being rubbed vigorously is proof of the fact that the person has indeed zhongshu. This strikes me as kind of Salem witch-hunt logic, but Jennifer buys it. I ask if there is any skill to the gua-ing, and Vany explains that you have to rub downwards, and outwards, never up or in. And you have to rub hard, she laughs, as Jennifer yelps again. Once Jennifer was red and bumpy all over and feeling great, it was my turn. I had actually been feeling a little tense, but hadn't bothered to give it any local-illness type interpretation. But my neck was bright red in no time. I mention how when I first got to Taiwan and saw all these women with bright red marks on their necks (it was summer then, and ghost month too, and there was a typhoon, just like this time), I thought, "Boy, the men here are really rough on their women," which cracks them up (and leads Jennifer into a typical, disparaging, "Please, Taiwanese men?"). The bottom line, the end of the day, the long and the short of it is: it works. I feel great. Loosened, lightened, clearer, brightened. I’ll teach you when I get back and then we can all walk around looking pummeled, but feeling energetic.

[i] It’s okay, it has to do with some really stupid stretching maneuvers and my typical over-enthusiasm for elongating muscles without thinking about the things that keep the muscles connected.
[ii] Zhōng first tone is ‘middle’ but zhòng, the same character with a different tone, means ‘to hit a target’ and, by implication, ‘to achieve, to get, etc.’ Shu is ‘summer’ and also ‘hot.’ So I think of it as being hit right to the core by the heat. At any rate, that’s what it should be, given the summers here.
[iii] Which is, of course, what is supposed to be happening.
[iv] For some reason real, trustworthy, professional masseuses in Taiwan are supposed to be blind; others are suspected of not knowing what they are doing, or of being prostitutes. Teri Silvio told me once about seeing on TV that a bunch of seeing masseurs were protesting, claiming the same respect as their blind colleagues. A few years ago, Taipei’s extremely clean-cut mayor Ma Yingjiu, in a quest for decency, wanted to find a way to punish people who offended public morality more heavily than the standard fines and punishments for merely the offenses themselves (mostly gambling and prostitution) allowed. The way that was found was to use the City Planning Code’s zoning regulations—the fine for disobeying zoning codes is much higher than the fines for gambling and prostitution themselves. Insofar as gambling and prostitution are illegal in any zone, this method seems a little strange to me; at any rate the net effect is that the 1st Division of the Department of Urban Development spends a whole lot of its time examining these public decency charges (brought by the police), determining whether they are justified (based on police reports, mostly, though occasionally also on field trips to the place), fining the people, collecting the fines, and turning off their water and electricity if the fines are not paid within some limited period of time. Everybody hates doing this and insists that it is not their job; people have said that about a third of the projects or cases they handle are now of this kind, though it’s not like anyone is doing an inventory. Anyway, the point is simply that one of the public decency infractions I have seen listed has been non-blind massage; which is strange because I’ve seen totally open, public non-blind massage places. I don’t think it’s a euphemism for prostitution, because there is a category of ‘sex work’ that is separate; it’s probably a euphemism for what in America is euphemized as ‘full release’ massage. I guess I could ask, but…

lobster neck

lobster bod!

a partial post: I inhabit the role of "girl," the city government inhabits some bulldozers

From what I could make out from the yelling right outside my door last night, my silent Taiwanese roommate seems to be remiss in paying his (admittedly exorbitant) rent; and my locquacious Brazilian roommate—what they call the “second landlord” in this land of widespread urban homeownership, the person who rents the apartment from the owner and then rents pieces of it out to others—is exasperated. He’s also exasperated because of the weather. He’s organizing a Fun Cultural Event for Tuesday’s festival involving people in big, white, moonlike costumes performing something or other outside the presidential palace—that’s his job, is Fun Cultural Event Organizer—and if Tuesday looks anything like this last week or so, he won’t have much of an audience. I caught him apologetically this morning—he is no doubt ripping us off, but still it must be frustrating to have someone who had agreed to an exorbitant rent decide he doesn’t want to pay it after all—to tell him I had a little problem. You know how sometimes you can see someone on the verge of an exasperation-tizzy? What kind of problem did I have, now? Well, two of my ceiling lights had burned out, and they seem to be some special sort of lightbulb, and besides I am too small to replace them myself—I always end up having to ask a guy to help me with ceiling lights—so could he possibly help? And it was like I’d handed him a kitten. His eyes almost seemed to change shape and he blinked slowly, smiled sweetly, and said in a brand new, Downy-brand softener softened voice, “Of course, I’ll help you with that.” I guess all the Taiwanese girlness in the air is rubbing off; if only I can retain these masculinity-bolstering instincts in non-Taiwanese environments. My apartment will never be dark.

Tuesday is the Mid-Autumn Festival, a day for bar-b-queing things with your family and looking up wistfully at the year’s fattest moon. Recently, however, the moon has fled, and paced upon the mountains overhead, and hid her face amid a crowd of clouds. We’ve been sitting on the edge of yet another typhoon and it has been either drizzling or pouring for several days. Yesterday in the middle of the day there was a sudden parting of the clouds and such a ray of sunlight as you’d see in a Renaissance painting, but in a minute it was replaced by the same old grey. I’ve noticed a pattern to the drizzle-pour alternation by which the really heavy rain tends to start when I set off to go somewhere on my motorscooter, and ends shortly after I’ve parked. (Luckily body-sized plastic bags with buttons are widely available and offer pretty good protection against the rain.)

Saturday night during a brief respite from raininess Tiffany took me and My American Friend to the half-destroyed, then mostly-rebuilt, housing block called Sisi Nancun, Four-Four South Village.[i] Actually I had heard a bit about Sisi Nancun before: a guiren told me about it right when I first came to Taiwan in 2001.[ii] Sisi Nancun was a “military village.”[iii] These are areas settled by soldiers fleeing the mainland with the KMT in 1949. Some of them, the houses for higher-ups, are legal and built by the government, like the little housing block where Jennifer lives (her father was in the military). This consists of around ten four-floor cement apartment buildings (with several rooftop apartments built by the fourth-floor residents for use by their married sons, their spinster daughters, and the odd anthropologist). Other military villages are more modest but also government-built—like where Jennifer’s maternal grandmother lives in central Taiwan, in an orderly row of one-story brick houses.

But most military villages—and what most people think of when they hear the term—were places with “complicated” ownership relations and buildings rights, and relatively "backwards" living conditions. These were places settled by soldiers who had nowhere else to go, often built up around their workplaces (in this case some sort of military-run factory), with one-story houses, bad facilities, no planning, and no formal land rights. They did not own the land that they built on, but they did own the houses that they built, but those houses were technically illegal, but they were soldiers and had nowhere else to go. A classic case of fuza, complication. People could sell their houses, but probably not for much—the buyer would be taking the risk of getting kicked off the land, and besides these were poor, marginalized neighborhoods to begin with.

The complication of rights-relations seems to lead to the result that a state agency that wants to kick these people out and reclaim the land that they’ve been using for forty years can do so, but not without a ruckus. In the 1990s, when Chen Shuibian was mayor, the residents of one enormous military village located in an otherwise middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhood protested for months against the threat of having their land converted to a park. They held rallies themselves and recruited some people from the world of Scholars and Experts, who ordered their students to participate in the protest (now that's democracy), and it was all very loud and big. Then one morning it turned out that the place had been bulldozed overnight. People were unhurt but the buildings had been razed. (Maybe this was before everyone owned a cell phone?) Now there’s a big park there, and the land rights are no longer considered complicated.



[i] Si is pronounced like the si in “sir,” kind of. It’s not “sissy” so don’t even start (you know who you are). The “c” in this romanization system is pronounced as “ts.” Romanization systems, by the way, are yet another thing that gets translated into the terms of unification / independence here. There was a group set up by the government to choose the official romanization system for Taiwan about two years ago, and although I think they themselves in their public discussions did not explicitly relate their choices to their stands on cross-Straits relations, everyone who talked about them did. The Tongyong Pinyin system that they finally voted to officialize differs only slightly from the Hanyu Pinyin system that we learn in America, the major difference being that Tongyong Pinyin not used by anyone else in the world. In fact, it’s not even really used in Taiwan. Throughout most of Taiwan, romanized names (mostly of places and streets) are derived from what seems to be a pretty random combination of the various romanization systems out there, plus maybe people’s own sense of how it ought to translate. And in the city of Taipei, streets are now romanized into Hanyu Pinyin, any mistakes in which are my fault—they had me correct all the maps last year when I started at the city government (where everyone seemed impressed with my uncanny ability to unhesitatingly write out a character’s pronunciation, despite my explanation that “I just write it like I hear it”). So the whole hulaballoo over an “official” romanization system seems in the end to have been little more than a chance for people whose positions on cross-Straits relations were already well known to take an official vote which unofficially acknowledged those positions.

[ii] Guiren貴人 (the characters are ‘expensive’ and ‘person,’ so: ‘valued person’ or ‘valuable person’) is someone who helps you in your hour of need, a benefactor. Yudao guiren 遇到貴人, to "happen upon a valuable person," is a stock expression, e.g. a friend of mine used this phrase recently when describing the kinds of things he baibais (prays) for (“You know, like, Guanyin, oh, I need a little help, I need to yudao guiren, stuff like that”). The fortune teller I went to last year with Jennifer told me exactly how many guiren I would have in my life (I think it was three), and, at Jennifer’s prompting, even specified their ethno-nationality (they were all “foreign,” as in non-Taiwanese, which is kind of disappointing). This was the same fortune teller who told Jennifer, aged thirty-six, with no apparent desire to find a partner, and with a stated antipathy to childbirth, that she would marry and have three children. Jennifer figured she had to either take it metaphorically or start looking around for a child-saddled divorcee. I similarly take my three guiren quota metaphorically: “three” is sometimes used for “many” in Chinese sayings and besides if I take it literally then I’m done for—I’d have used up my supply long ago. This particular guiren in this particular instance really brought home the monetary nature of the character gui, expensive or valuable: his description of Sisi Nancun inspired the as-you-can-see-I-have-no-idea-what-I’m-talking-about grant proposal that has funded this (only be sure always to call it please) “research.” Now that’s gui.

[iii] Military village, juancun 眷村, would be more accurately rendered as “dependents’ village,” though I don’t think that they were built only for or by people with families.

an interlude of emptiness and sirens

Last wednesday there was an eerie feel to the office: everyone was talking very quietly, and the lights were still off even after universal post-lunch nap-time when everyone is slumped over at their desk, sometimes with a jacket over the head (roughly from 1:15 to 1:30 pm). My desk-mate told me to go out to the department store across the street. At 2 pm the air raid sirens would go off, it would be illegal to be out on the street, and the city government building would have to be evacuated, with all its electricity turned off and all the people crowded into a couple of rooms in the basement with minimal lighting and airflow. "It sucks," he said, "You should go shopping. Go now while the elevators are still working." This picture here is a picture of nothing: aside from parked cars, you'll notice that this street is empty. The air raid practice is a yearly exercise in getting attacked by the mainland; in the minutes leading up to it an older man from another section stopped by to share his views on how the PRC will attack, when it comes to that. "Surely you're thinking too much!" My desk-mate, fifteen to twenty years younger, reprimanded him, impatiently stapling some papers together -- for his generation it's clearly a joke, and one that gets in the way of getting the work done. Not so much, I suspect, because they don't think the PRC would ever attack, as that they have doubts about the utility of practicing sitting out the half-hour attack in a department store, or in an airless basement room.

update: on non-oppositions

A couple of posts back I mentioned the District Head who had had his District Administrative Building exorcised, do you remember? It turns out that aside from its ritually offensive height and location, the building was also riddled with construction problems: like any big construction effort, especially one using public funds, there were several layers of Black Way hands grabbing at the money, gangsters scooping off the top of the pile and passing it on to other gangsters who scooped off the middle and passed it on to people who built a parking lot that you couldn’t fit cars into, an elevator that regularly trapped its passengers, and a toilet system that spit up shit. The old District Head was a bureaucrat by training and profession, and when he was told that the building was not up to code, simply delayed moving the offices there until someone had gotten around to fixing it, which never happened during his tenure. The new District Head, on the other hand, was trained as a construction engineer and has spent some of his bureaucratic work life in departments that construct things. So he actually went to the building, figured out what was wrong with it, and started fixing the problems one by one until the place was finally inhabitable. (I don’t know how much money this cost or where the money came from.) I remembered that he had also held a bunch of religious rites in preparation for moving into the building. Although she seemed doubtful about its ritual accuracy, Tiffany expressed interest in my theory that the eighty-something unclean things that the District Head had exorcised from the building included things like unparkable parking lots and shit-spitting toilets.

taiwan: not germany

Yesterday I spent all day at Academia Sinica which, aside from the aforementioned life-saving gym, is also home to Taiwan’s best-ish library system. This weekend is probably the last chance I will have to even think about written materials for the next two increasingly crazy-looking months or so, so it was particularly enjoyable to spend an entire day by myself rifling through stacks and making copies of things. Half the things I see cited in various places are completely un-track-downable, either because they were published in 1994, went out of print in 1996, and were never heard from again, or because they are cited in some clever way that makes them impossible to ever actually find. Which is a good thing, actually, because it means less reading in Chinese. (Horrid, horrid, Chinese!, an updated, globalized Cecily might say.)

Academia Sinica has about twenty different Institutes, and each one has its own library, and every library has its own rules – in the Ethnology Institute you can't take your backpack in; in the Modern History Institute you have to leave an i.d. at the front desk. This seems extremely efficient all around, both in terms of giving you the chance to get the book even if everyone else wants to get it too (as the same book often ends up being bought by three or four different Institutes) and in terms of compatability with the universal goal of Full Employment (as every library has its own staff to enforce its own rules). Luckily some things are unified across libaries, like the library card you use to charge your books and the web-based catalogue.

In this catalogue I recently looked up a book about the history of urban planning in Taipei. The catalogue said: "1 copy ordered for the Taiwanese History Institute on May 15, 2000." So I traipsed over to the library of the Taiwanese History Institute and went up to the desk to see if maybe it had come in yet. (Expecting to hear the immortal line, “It’ll be ready Thoisday.”) The librarian typed various informations into her computer and replied: “Oh, yes, we do have a copy. It's just that after we ordered that book, the author himself presented us with a complimentary copy, so we cancelled the order. That’s why it’s still listed as on-order in the catalogue, you see.”

fact of the day

I just learned yesterday that to get a driver's license in Taiwan, you do not need to take an on-the-road test; but you do need to drive down a windy path, and then drive it again in reverse, without touching the edges. That explains a lot. I didn't mean that! I meant that Taiwanese drivers are phenomenal backer-uppers. Really. Jennifer can back into places I couldn't get into going forwards. Not that I'm much to judge from, I realize.

yin and yang, secular and religious, and other nonoppositionals

This has been a multi-part weekend in mime format, with the result that I have kind of lost track of when is what and the backwards and forwards of any given item, so there is going to be a little bit of fragmentation going on while I search for the essential narrative quality that surely underlies it all, plus try to get some sleep after several consecutive days of talking into the wee hours. Please bear with; and be warned that digressions outnumber actual narrative by a ratio of quite a bit.

Friday was a wonderful evening spent in Jennifer’s bar, talking to my friend Tiffany (her taken, not given, name, obviously—I figure English versions are easier for non-Chinese speakers to keep track of, and are also pseudonyms of sorts) and stealing food from Canadians (J’s Place was hosting a bar-b-q for some Canadian expat group, and I was very hungry). I was asking Tiffany about where people go to pray in The Neighborhood I study (aside from being one of my best friends here and a professor in landscape and urban studies—loose translation—she is also a resident of The Neighborhood and one of the early participants in the protest movements there.) The Neighborhood has about three small temples within about five minutes’ walking distance of one another; about ten or fifteen minutes’ walk away is Longshan Si, one of the oldest, biggest, and most important temples in Taipei. People come from all over the city to pray here. (It was also the site of a lot of early democracy movement events, meetings and speeches that were held in the courtyard in front of the front gates; it’s been called “democracy’s birthplace.”) Tiffany drew the distinguishing line at native place: people who grew up in the area tend to pray at the local Neighborhood temples, while the majority, who moved in around the late 1970s-early 1980s, go to Longshan.[i] A propos of the relation between the religious and secular spheres, she also told me a nice story about the newly appointed District Head of that area and his newly built District Administration Building.

The District Administration Building has been under construction for over ten years now, and one of the reasons that it’s been taking so long was that nobody, no District Head, had dared to use it. The Administration Building, which was going to be very tall, was being built, for whatever reason, just a little ways away from, and looking down onto, Longshan Temple. Worse yet, the District Head’s office itself directly faces the temple gates from above, a “very disrespectful” position. This newly appointed District Head, whom Tiffany happens to know pretty well from her student days, is a very devout Buddhist who has been “reading Buddhism,” practicing seriously, for decades. When he first got the appointment, the building hadn’t ever been used. He first “cleaned out the building,” getting rid of over 80 “unclean things”—ie he had it exorcised—and then held a ceremony in his office, in which he offered his respects to the main god of the temple, the Guanyin Buddha. Now, he told Tiffany, when he goes in to work every morning, the first thing he does is face the temple and read a sutra.

The stand-alone temples in The Neighborhood are relatively small affairs (there’s at least one altar in an open room of whose status I am uncertain—I don’t think it’s a full blown temple). The two smaller ones have just one room with a big altar and a place to burn incense, lay offerings, and kneel. The biggest one includes not only two temple rooms housing gods, but a little courtyard complete with a betel nut and soda stand at the edge, and bounded by a pretty decent sized stage at the other end. This space is used for things like hanging out (all the time), traditional Taiwanese opera performances (during ghost month), banquets in the courtyard with karaoke on the stage (on gods’ birthdays and other important feast days), and political speeches (for instance, when I went to the Cultural Association meeting a couple of weeks ago, I caught everyone just as they were heading out to the temple courtyard to listen to a DPP city councilor talk about what a farce the whole KMT investigation into the alleged fakedness of the assassination attempt on the President and Vice-President was). They also, it turned out when we went to ascertain the next day, are all yinmiao, temples of the dark, or at least the somewhat darker, side.

Yinmiao (as in yin, the dark, lunar, feminine opposite of yang, the bright, solar, masculine; and miao, temple) have been explained to me in a couple of ways. On the one hand their yinity can have to do with the origin of the god(s) that occupy them: these temples are usually not official offshoots of other temples, opened with the normal ceremonies of transferring some god and some incense to the new temple and asking the god’s spirit to come reside there. Rather, they are found-god assemblages occupied by gods that are usually fished out of the river or otherwise found in some not altogether wholesome state. (Gods fished out of the river, for instance, haven’t had their eyes covered while they’ve been wandering about, and so might be occupied by all manner of thing.) On the other hand, Tiffany described it as a function of the scope of their responsibilities: yin gods are the ones to pray to for things like revenge, and for winning the lottery. “Guanyin Buddha is not going to help you suddenly get rich, that’s not the sort of thing she’s interested in; for that you have to go to an yinmiao,” says Tiffany. She says there was an explosion of yinmiao in the early eighties, with the introduction of the national lottery.

On Saturday afternoon I tagged along while Tiffany went to visit a neighborhood in northern Taipei. The next day she was supposed to participate, in her capacity as urban studies scholar and neighborhood activism expert, in a little roundtable there to discuss potential neighborhood projects; she wanted to check the place out first. The neighborhood has two points of interest: its temple and its dragon boats, which are carved by an elderly resident for the summer dragon boat races down the river.


[i] Everyone in The Neighborhood, and in my experience most people in Wanhua, the district in which The Neighborhood is located, will tell you that, since this is the oldest settled section of Taipei, it has seen the most movement and change; most people who live there are migrants. In The Neighborhood, at least, they are mostly people from southern and central Taiwan (中南部 zhongnan bu, how we talk about the rest of the country, more or less) who came between around 1975 and 1985. Aside from some city government administrators who have worked with Wanhua neighborhoods directly, almost every other non-Wanhua resident I’ve talked to about the district has told me that, because it’s the oldest settled section of Taipei, it is mostly populated by permanent, multi-generational, non-migrant residents.



dragon boat from afar

dragon boat from aclose

dragon boat in profile

The temple houses a huge number of gods.



the sanjiao du temple from outside (the god orphanage)

right half of sanjiaodu temple altar

left half of sanjiao du temple altar

Some people in this neighborhood still fish on the river (mostly small shellfish) and often fish up gods that other people have thrown out. They’ve created a kind of found god orphanage, with a much larger array of gods than you normally see at such places. The temple sits just outside the levy, facing the river. It’s an illegal structure, and originally they had had it on wheels so that if they police came by they could just shut the whole thing up and roll it away—like the peddler stalls down the middle of every night market street, who will occasionally pick up and disappear down an alley when the whistle comes that the police are stopping by, a bustling charade played out several times a night. “It’s outside the levy, so it should be an yinmiao,” says Tiffany, although when I draw the conclusion that “temples placed outside the levy usually are yinmiao” she hesitates. It makes sense though. These gods and the topic matter they’re in charge of are peripheral to the yang world (not in the sense of unimportant but in the sense of being not quite a part of) spiritually and socially, so why not spatially?



look yin to you?

So if yinmiao are usually spatially peripheral, how did the three yinmiao in The Neighborhood end up right there, very centrally located? Well, it actually has to do the with city government. Once upon a time, these temples were all also tiwai, on the riverbank beyond the levy. Around 20-25 years ago, the government was building up the levies and constructing the big roads above them and the smaller roads and park between the levy and the river. As illegal structures sitting on land that was about to be used for a road, these temples technically ought to have been torn down.

But tearing down a temple—well, it’s a serious endeavor. I mean, the beings who live in the temple are not going to be happy about it. And the beings who live in the temple are not just anybody, they’re not citizens that you can pay them off or just override them and not worry about the repercussions, nor can you have a meeting with them and explain the necessity of the road and come to a consensus in which you impose your will and they accept it. Especially the beings in an yinmiao, who specialize in the hazy side of things, are not going to be the kind of beings who sit around reaching consensus in meetings. And who bears the brunt of their unhappiness? The people who keep up the temple, the neighborhood residents, who are in an ongoing relationship of mutual aid and unilateral anxiety with the beings who live in the temple.

So some people were very unhappy about this plan to tear the temple down; and even people who might not have been very unhappy about it would not stand up and insist that they did get torn down. That would be really asking for it. The city government couldn’t change the placement of the road, but it did offer to move the temples to other locations, thereby preserving them. These locations ended up including the little park bordering Heping West Road in the northern part of the neighborhood, the little park an alley or two down from that, and the little park across from Zhous’ rice store. All three plots still appear as “park land” on my city government issued urban planning map of the area. In fact that was basically it for parks in the neighborhood (until Sugarcane Park was created a few years ago).

I was walking down the street with Zhang Mama and asked her where she went to pray. She first offered a lament for the godlessness of the present day: “Nowadays honh, people all, we ‘clutch the Buddha’s foot at the last moment,’ only when we have to take a test to we pray, only when there is trouble do we pray.” (The Buddha’s foot is a reference to a saying, “Doesn't light incense normally, but clutches the Buddha's foot at the last minute," used to describe e.g. cramming for an exam). Then she said she goes to Longshan Temple. So you don’t pray in the neighborhood? I ask. “Yes, I do—I go to Longshan Temple.” This is the only time I’ve ever heard Longshan Temple, which is a fifteen minutes’ walk away and right next to all the brothels and hostess bars, referred to as part of this neighborhood.

Zhang Mama is a migrant who came here around twenty-five years ago, but I have a feeling there is something else going. There’s been this movement in Taiwan lately, maybe the last fifteen years or so, a kind of Buddhist revival that has a different angle on the purposes and practices of ritual than the normal “common people’s belief.” Instead of prayer as a kind of deal-making with the god to help you out in some endeavor, and religious participation as manifested primarily in pilgrimages, festivals, and everyday offerings, this newly popular strand of Buddhist (rather than the Buddhist-Daoist-Inbetweenist mix that most people participate in) leans towards psychological well-being and peace as the goal of prayer, and sees religious participation as properly manifested in good works. A kind of Protestantized Buddhism. This development has gone along with the rise of several enormous, and enormously wealthy, Buddhist organizations. (There have been a couple of financial scandals, as you’d expect with large religious organizations that take donations. But at least one of these, Ciji, was also famously the first on the scene after the devastating earthquake of September 21st, 2000 that ripped apart large stretches of the island—they were at the epicenter setting up camps for displaced people and helping to rebuild while government agencies were still wringing their hands and pointing their fingers at one another.)

Anyway I’ve noticed that a lot of the people (particularly women, of course) who belong to the Cultural Association in my neighborhood (who tend to be of that part of the neighborhood that is of a slightly higher economic class and/or educational level) also lean toward this kind of religious practice. This is manifested not only in their connection to one of the big Buddhist organizations, Fo Guan Shan—our choir class was organized through them, and the Neighborhood Mama’s will sometimes trek over to the other side of town to hear an inspirational lecture by a famous monk—but also in their own everyday practices and possessions: the ancestral tablet altars in their living rooms tend to have a big, very Buddhist-looking figure of Guanyin. In contrast, other people’s altars tend to have (in addition to or in place of Guanyin) more local, and I think more Daoist or “common people’s belief”-ist, gods: Mazu, who is kind of the Daoist version of Guanyin; Tudi Gong, the place god who Jennifer now makes offerings to. Even if they have a Guanyin, she doesn’t really look the same—the really Buddhisty Guanyin are taller and thinner, and have a look of ethereal peace about them; while the more Daoisty or CPBy ones look more like other traditional Taiwanese god figures, with flatter cheeks, longer noses, and not so much expression on the face. So anyway the point is I think it’s class and education and class-aspiration, as well as native-place origin, that goes into a person’s choice of where to clutch the Buddha’s foot.

“Do you ever go for instance to the temple next to Mr. Zhou’s rice store?” I ask Zhang Mama. “That’s an yinmiao. I honh, we are not so likely to go to that kind of temple.” Yinmiao is also a word you wouldn’t say to someone who runs one; it would sound a little impolite. Which means I have to figure out what you do say to refer to it. Last time I was in The Neighborhood, I ran into Mr. Zhou of the rice store and asked about “that temple across from your store.” Mr. Zhou grew up in the neighborhood and has been praying at that temple since he was a little kid. He’s now on the board of directors and, he continues right away, that temple is really ling, really powerful. As long as you are earnest and honest with the god in your request, and you thank him properly, he will help you out.

This might explain why I’ve felt so peaceful the last couple of days. That morning, before I saw Mr. Zhou, I was wandering around The Neighborhood while a big Earth Day event was going on. The Earth Day event consisted of our chorus singing several of our Taiwanese favorites while a small crowd looked on.



chorus with teacher

audience. ouch. hot. (the main failing of the Cultural Association, in my opinion, is to always have its activities fall on unbearably hot days)

some of my key folks taking a break from singing

Then a bunch of people gave speeches about, more or less, how this year’s event was much larger than last year’s event. Then all the participants split up into teams and went around the neighborhood picking up garbage.



harvage collection

(Apparently it is things like whatever this girl is picking up



that is the real cause of pollution in Taiwan.)

At some point during the day I slipped away and went for a walk around by myself, stopping in at the temple across from Mr. Zhou’s rice store. For some reason I decided to stop in and ask the god for a favor. I walked into the room of the temple that faces the courtyard, kneeled down on the red cushion in front of the altar, and put my hands up in namaste. “Listen,” I thought to him, “sorry I just disappeared like that. Let me off the hook, will you? Could you make me stop being so damned regretful about everything already? I need a little peace here.” I said most of it in English. I figured he’d understand. Anyway, if he’s anything like everyone else around here, he probably has some relatives in L.A. Eventually someone will translate it for him. The last bit came out in Chinese: 讓我心理平安, rang wo xinli ping’an. Put my heart at peace.

The word 安 an, which means safe, peaceful, is my Chinese surname, and I therefore have a rather ambiguous relationship to it because of something a teacher of mine once told me. My full Chinese name is安雅仁, An Yaren. The character Ya appears in words like文雅 wenya cultured, and優雅 youya, sophisticated. The character仁 ren is one of the eight big Confucian virtues, and is usually translated as humaneness, it’s a kind of loving-kindness toward others, a morality that can only happen in relation to other people. A teacher of mine whose tongue is like a scalpel once commented that it’s the Chinese custom to name children for qualities that they lack (according to their bazi, their astrological reading). “Now your name, for instance, an-ya-ren, peace-sophistication-humaneness, is a perfect example of this practice.”

I dropped a coin in the contributions box and went on my way. And you know, I’ve been feeling a lot more peaceful lately. I mentioned to someone that I seem to go crazy every time I am in Taiwan during ghost month, even though I don’t believe in Chinese ghosts. He said: “Well, the ghosts probably don’t care if you believe in them or not.[i] You should go to a temple and get a protective figure [ie a fetish]. Go to a big temple, it’ll be more powerful.” Maybe that will be a little project for this week.



The Neighborhood yinmiao: altar



[i] This response reminded me of one of my favorite parts of that Arthur Wolf article I mentioned a while ago, where an old woman explains to him what one’s priorities should be in praying. This is not an exact quote but she says something like this: “A man can believe in the gods or not believe in the gods as he chooses; but he has to believe in the ancestors. Otherwise they will come back and make trouble for him.” Since ghosts are in some sense just other people’s ancestors who are not getting cared for properly, I would think that the same should hold for them.

The Neighborhood yinmiao: approach

The Neighborhood yinmiao: spirit money burning chimney

The Neighborhood yinmiao: incense holder

The Neighborhood yinmiao: side view

bureaucratic universals

I’ve been sitting around the city government office lately, trying to figure out what to do with all the ingratiation I’ve been doing (I started a little twice-a-week English conversation hour at the request of the section head and now I’m everyone’s favorite American). I haven’t written any stories about the city government because it is, naturally, not nearly as exciting as karaoke and ghosts and so on (or at least the parts of it that I see aren’t). But that there also is a way of life, at least for those people for most of their day. So although I find big offices deadening and fall asleep in meetings (and have determined that my next ethnography will be some situation in which I am exposed to neither), I think I should try to write about stuff that goes on there too.

So for instance, a meeting the other day. Protagonists: the presenter, a chubby man with a Ben Franklin haircut, who is a partner in a private urban planning and design firm; our section leader. Auxiliaries: a co-worker in our section; the presenter’s silent partner; a guy my age responsible for pushing the button that moves the PowerPoint presentation from slide to slide; and me. The city government is trying to get its hands on a piece of land right in the heart of Taipei that has been occupied by a military installation and off-limits both to the public and to the city government itself. The military offices are being moved elsewhere, and it’s unclear who will get the land and the buildings currently on it. The land is technically nationalized, being a military installation, but now that it won’t actually be used by the military there is some chance that the city government can make a strong enough case for it to be given to them. It doesn’t seem like a very good chance—it’s prime real estate, and the city mayor is KMT, which not the president’s party—but I guess they figure it’s worth at least presenting a proposal, which is where the planning and design firm comes in.

We’ve already determined that we would like the space to be used as an “international cultural exchange center” (that’s a translation). We don’t, however, know exactly what that would entail. In fact, we have no idea what we mean by it. From what I can tell, someone came up with this name in a meeting a few months ago, and everyone figured that it sounded like it fit in well with the general city government policy of promoting Taipei as an “international city” at every turn, as well as with a pan-government policy of desperately, if not always efficiently, trying to create international ties wherever and however they can (for obvious reasons). So where the planning and design firm comes in is to figure out for us, over the course of several months and at the cost of several thousands of dollars, what we might mean by this title, and then to write it up in a proposal that can be presented to the central government. As the section head explains about half-way through the meeting: “We’ve already decided we want to use this space; what you need to give us is the reason.”

The presenter starts out his presentation as follows: “The self (自我, ziwo, ego). From the Republic of China government on down to the Taipei City government, nobody knows what the self is.” I am sure that many philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists would agree with this assessment. His point, as I understood it, was, however, not that we need to read more Mead, but that governmental agencies at all levels in Taiwan have failed to come up with a concise, coherent formulation of identity in terms of which their projects can be justified and their realities explained and assessed. With dramatic PowerPoints, he then presented his case, something like this:

Taiwan has been integrated into the global economic system, but it is losing its grip there as mainland China comes to substitute as the provider of a variety of goods that used to come from Taiwan; even Taiwanese businesses are moving to the mainland in large numbers, and don’t think that silicon valley even thinks about Taiwan anymore. Moreover, given current worldwide concerns about terrorism and the uncertain future of America’s war on terror, not to mention the increasingly tight alliance between the US and PRC governments that it has given rise to, the future economic and diplomatic distribution of power is even more uncertain. In fact, we don’t even know the present distribution of economic power, as the latest figures comparing Taipei and Shanghai markets, and detailing Taiwanese businesses in the mainland, have yet to come out, or at least we haven’t been able to gather the relevant information. In short, the future is highly uncertain, and it is still unclear what the best direction for Taipei to go in is. We need to do more research, figure out the Shanghai situation, and get an overall grasp on where the money is really going. At present we just can’t know.

Okay, so, I’m sorry to subject you to this—surely you have read at least one page worth of stuff on globalization in your life, and you may have also read maybe a newspaper article or two that mentioned Taiwan, so there would have been no new information for you in this presentation. You’ll notice, also, that there was nothing in the presentation about how and why a military installation might be converted into an international cultural exchange center, or what an international cultural exchange center might actually do. I’ve never worked in a government office outside of Taiwan, but I assume that the general form of this approach—what people here sometimes term “overly idealistic (過度理想 guodu lixiang),” but which I was taught by less polite people on the mainland to call “garbage-speak (廢話feihua)”—is in some sense universal (cf things like plans to spread democracy and liberty all over the world). Still, its contents are surely culturally specific and reveal something about the particular concerns of the Taiwanese people, as well as about the specific internal workings of the Taiwanese state. Right? Or else why am I sitting there listening to this when I could be out eating mango ice (they’re just about out of season) and listening to Taiwanese pop?

This presentation reminded me of something I saw on TV the fall I first got here. There were city council elections that winter (there are always some sort of elections going on, for reasons that I am too hungry to go into right now), and some TV station was giving spots to the candidates to air their political platforms. I happened to catch one candidate explaining his political platform. If elected to the Taipei city council, he would make Taiwan the fifty-first state of the United States of America. You might ask him, he continued, “Is this plan really implementable (可行不可行kexing bu kexing)?” And he’d tell you: “Kexing, it is implementable.” Why? “Because the Chinese people in Taiwan want it; and the Chinese people in America, also want it!”[1]

So what does it mean for Taipei to define its ziwo, its self? Where would such a definition come from? How about New York? In the late 1970s, the Taipei city government hired a university research team to devise a set of zoning ordinances for the city. Taipei had already had some differentiated land-use rules since the Japanese colonial period (I currently don’t know anything about these but I will at some point, once I’ve read a couple of books that I now, finally, at least possess). This type of zoning was relatively general, it was horizontal but not vertical (that is, it designated certain geographic spaces as district-types but did not address the question of mixed use in a multi-story building), and it consisted of prohibitions on certain types of use in certain places, rather than a positive listing of the uses allowed in a given place.

I had a chat about this with someone who’s had a lot of experience in the city government and so must have a very good sense of how things work and where impetus comes from, but who talks, regardless of topic or venue, like she’s reciting a fairy tale. I had to interpret for her once when there was a foreign visitor and found it quite taxing in the same way as much of the rest of my translating work for the city government is taxing: for some reason it’s particularly difficult to translate things when they have no content. As a dedicated and responsible worker, I have to constantly ask myself, “What is the most appropriate way to convey in English the exact level of vagueness, the utter vacuity, of this statement?” So when I ask this person why zoning legislation was introduced in Taipei in 1983—what were the factors motivating the writing of these new laws—it is perfectly okay for her to answer, “[It was] felt that zones ought to be demarcated more clearly.” Like talking to someone’s grandmother about her garden.

In the kind of Lobachevskian move that is typical of law formation in Taiwan, the zoning laws were created “in consultation with,” that is “by copying from,” the zoning laws of New York City. But, there are some problems with implementation. “Although we’d like to separate residential, commercial, and industrial districts more clearly like in Euro-America or Japan, it’s not like that. We’d like to arrange it so that there would be stores on the street but not in the alleyways; but when we go into an alley, hey, there’s stores there, on the first floor, on the second floor—we can’t really see any zone differentiation. This is because in earlier days, our custom was to have commerce and residence all together: on the bottom floor, there’s a store, and behind it or on the floor above, the residence. These few decades, these few centuries, that’s been our custom; it’s unchangeable. It turns out that if there is, say, a restaurant next door or a store above us, we’re actually likely to feel that it is very convenient, rather than be upset about the noise that it causes. So really, we have not been able to enforce these regulations.”

This fact—that Taiwanese laws tend to be imported from other places rather than based on realistic assessments of Taiwanese society, and therefore tend to be unenforceable—is the thesis of a really great essay by Jane Winn.[2] I was kind of surprised to have a government administrator tell me the same thing, though, and in a way that did not seem to suggest that the implementation of the laws might raise questions about either the process of their development or their aims. I recounted this conversation to a friend here who has lived in America. I’m not sure if he found the situation as funny as I did, but he smiled, thought a while, and then commented, “Well at least they chose New York—imagine if they had copied the laws from Chicago!” Chicago being, I guess, about the least convenient, least happening, least-like-Taipei place he could think of.

[1] The phrase he used for “Chinese people” was Huaren華人, which is the most ethnic, least national, way to put it—it’s a good way of getting around things like arguing about whether the people who live on Taiwan are “Taiwanese” (Taiwanren台灣人) or “Chinese” (Zhongguoren中國人); whether there are differences between the “Taiwanese” (benshengren, 本省人, ‘this province people’) and the “mainlanders” (waishengren, 外省人, other province people) living on Taiwan, and whether there are differences between the people living on Taiwan and those living on the mainland. Huaren is something I think most people accept themselves as being, regardless of their political position.
[2] Winn, Jane Kaufman. 1994. "Relational Practices and the Marginalization of Law: Informal Financial Practices of Small Businesses in Taiwan." Law & Society Review 28, 2:193-232.

this picture goes out to anyone who managed to make it through the entry above: because you deserve something more amusing!

simple pleasures

My utterly silent Taiwanese housemate and I seem to have silently worked out a land-use arrangement regarding the public space in this apartment (this as opposed to my rather talkative Brazilian housemate, who is out of town for a week and is mostly up on the second floor, which is his, or out partying—once more I have had pretty good luck with housemates, by which I mean I rarely have to interact with them). He spends a couple of hours in the evenings sprawled out in positively gymnastic positions on the couch watching Japanese soap operas (which sound like soft porn to me, the girls are always breathing and sighing in the oddest ways), and I am there in the mornings, setting up my computer on the very Ikea table across from the windows as I write my (unbelievably boring to anyone who is not me) summary of the history of land control relations in Taiwan and other random efforts.

Through the windows on the far side of the room, I can see, peeking out from behind the building opposite us, one little triangular edge of the sloping yellow roof that tops Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, which is right across the street. A block-sized park surrounds the memorial, which is built in the style I think of as Cement Traditional, an unfortunate combination of old Chinese forms with not-new-enough materials, which was popular for way too long. The other biggie, the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial, built presumably after his death in 1975, is in this same style. Given that Taipei is one of the cities with the least per capita green space in the world, I am currently sitting probably five capitas taller than most everyone else in the city; although like most parks here, this one is also made up to a significant degree of cement.

In the mornings I sit around out there, looking out at the space (it’s always great to be able to see anything out of a window that is not the building directly next to you, especially sky and space), and eating some fruit that I buy from the man with the van out in the parking lot next to my house (a parking lot that is literally a block long), with whom I have conversations like this:

你祖國在那裡? Where do you come from? [Where is your ancestral country?]
美國. America.
來這邊學習中國語言? Come here to study Chinese?
eh, 對. Um, yeah.
講的不錯. You speak it not-bad.
那裡. 我來這裡做研究. Not at all. I’m here doing research.
做研究honh. 結婚了沒. Oh, doing research. Are you married?
還沒. Not yet [this is the only acceptable way to say “no” to this question].
那你長得還可以. 還不錯. Well, you are [using a resultative combination that technically means “you have grown up with the result that”] okay-looking. Not bad.

And the other day I saw a café by the name of Fag. The Chinese name was 非果, fei guo, clearly a name chosen not for what its characters mean but because it sounds not-Chinese. There’s something very cool, I’ve been told, about having a name with characters that are clearly not in line with everyday Chinese usage, very cosmopolitan. Be that as it may, what these characters, 非果, actually do mean is: “not a fruit.”



can you spot sun yat-sen memorial hall?

keeping the local officials happy

Jennifer’s family is basically not religious: they make offerings to her father’s spirit on his death day, of course, and prepare a meal for the ancestors and burn spirit money to them on Chinese New Year’s, and also burn spirit money on the Mid-Autumn Festival I seem to remember, but not on any other days, and they never go to temples. For the most part, for whatever historical reasons, Mainlanders on Taiwan, unless they are very assimilated (for instance by marrying into a Taiwanese family and speaking Taiwanese), tend to participate in these sorts of activities less than Taiwanese people. I’d heard this described as an ethnic difference by several people and I’ve seen it attributed at least in one place (though I don't recall by whom) to the fact that Mainlanders are a very diverse bunch who came from all over the Chinese mainland in the late 1940s, most of them fleeing the Communist revolution, and so they had neither the time to properly transfer their gods to the island, nor the social networks on the island to properly reinstate their worship practices once they got here. But now that Jennifer has opened a retail establishment, her bar, she has started making offerings too. She explains it like this: “I’ve opened a store [any retail establishment is a 店 dian, a store] so I have to baibai [拜拜, pray, make offerings].” Why do you have to baibai if you open a store? “I don’t know. Everyone says you do.”

So I have the feeling that the Mainlander worship differential is the result of some sort of interaction between ethnic history and occupational structure (which itself of course is based on ethnic history, so it’s kind of circular logic): at least according to Hill Gates,[i] who was writing about this in the early 1980s, Mainlanders tended to be employed in the government and in big firms, while Taiwanese tended to work in or own small, family-run affairs—the small and medium-sized production and retail establishments that made Taiwan’s economy famously so adaptable and postmodern from the grassroots. And if you own a small establishment like this, it seems you have to baibai. And not only if you own it yourself: from what I’ve seen of people setting up tables with fruit and incense in front of their stores and restaurants, the family that stays together, prays together.

So now on the 1st and the 15th days of every lunar month, Jennifer sets up a table on the patio of her bar to Tudi Gong 土地公, the god in charge of each neighborhood or locality. She puts out three different kinds of fruit and three shot glasses of—hey, isn’t that supposed to be some kind of liquor? It looks like water. “Yes, it’s water. You know Tudi Gong is vegetarian; vegetarians usually don’t drink alcohol, right?” Umm…that’s not the case in my experience….[ii] “Well anyway, I figure everyone else always gives him liquor, so by the time he gets to me he’s probably thirsty and should really drink some water; otherwise he’ll get a headache.” I can’t believe it: your store is filled with liquor! You own a bar and you’re too stingy to give the local god a couple of drinks? “話不是這樣說的”—‘speech is not said like that,’ a phrase suggesting that someone’s utterance is “ugly” or “difficult to listen to,” without suggesting that it is technically incorrect.

Jennifer asked around about how to pray properly—Vany grew up baibai-ing and has worked in various small establishments so she is a good person to ask; the people across the street, the hairdresser and the tapioca-ball-milk-tea place, which are on very good terms with Jennifer’s bar, also gave her advice. So, first you write out one a piece of paper the relevant information that Tudi Gong has to know in order for the offerings to be of any use: your name and address. Then, after setting up all the stuff on the table outside, you light the incense and start praying. What do you say? “Tudi Gong, protect my store, give me good business, bring me customers, keep my workers happy, don’t let anything break, stuff like that.” How do you say it? “Well, they all pray in Taiwanese, of course, but my Taiwanese is terrible, so I just say it in Mandarin. I figure he’ll understand. And everyone usually prays out loud. But you know, I just can’t do it. I just say it silently to myself.” Then you wave the incense up and down three times and stick it in the incense pot—in this case a glass with used coffee grounds (it is after all a café and bar). You let the incense burn down halfway before you start burning the money. How come? “To give him a chance to eat the fruit you’re offering.”

[i] Gates, Hill 1981. "Ethnicity and Social Class." In Gates, Hill, and Ahern, Emily. eds. The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society. Palo Alto: Stanford U. Press. pp. 241-281. Another super duper article.
[ii] Of course here people are usually vegetarian out of Buddhist principles, and vegetarianism includes not only not eating formerly living beings, but not eating things that can incite or excite you, like garlic, chilli, and ginger, which seems like a relatively miserable lifestyle to me.



you have to write out your name and address so that Tudi Gong knows that the offerings are from you

lighting the incense

the offerings

Jennifer opens communication with Tudi Gong

praying with the incense, silently, and in Mandarin

While we wait for the incense to burn down to around the halfway point, we eat our own lunches, biandang, convenient boxes (it’s actually the Taiwanese transliteration of bento, as in bento box, from the Japanese colonial period). A biandang is a thin cardboard box with a thick layer of rice, topped by a variety of things: usually a green or two (cabbage, green beans), a stewed hard-boiled half of an egg, some form of tofu, maybe a fish ball, and a main dish. Today as a main dish I have bought something that shocks even me: kourou, a thin layer of pork topped by a thick layer of fat and skin, stewed heavily in a sweet brown sauce. I remember one of my teachers commenting that she didn’t care very much for what she called the “white meat” part of kourou, which where I come from isn’t even “meat” at all, but “fat” pure and simple. This is a very popular dish in the restaurants that cater to pilgrimages and other long-distance karaoke bus-based excursions, and the first few times I went out on trips with people from the neighborhood I study I was handed large slabs of this disgusting, quivering, lardy mess. It was absolutely nauseating. But there you have it, the gradual assimilation of the taste buds.


a little break for some offerings to our own stomachs: kourou

incense half-burned, it's time to start offering spirit money. Jennifer informs Tudi Gong that she's about to pay him off.

all the goods, including the red spirit money burning pot, half-burned incense, water that should be liquor, fruits, paper money, and the owner of the store

light the first batch on fire (notice the totally authentic, traditional-style flame thrower, originally imported from the southern Fujian coast in the mid-seventeenth century)

then you put it in the pot

burning bills

separating spirit bills from one another -- so they burn better

pennies for heaven

ouch! hot!

good brothers

Ghost month just ended yesterday, and about time too. Ghost month is the seventh month of the lunar year (what they call the “farm calendar”). As the lady selling me my lunchtime shrimp gung[1] not-explained to me last ghost month around, “You know it’s, it’s that time of year, you know what time of year. It’s the time of year when the gates open, you know the gates, and, you know what comes out of the gates, right? We don’t need to talk about it.” She was hedging on general principle, I assume, but probably also because of our actual physical location: we were in a little alley that borders what I thought was a temple. It has a curved roof and a statue of a jolly little multicolored man hanging off its chimney (I guess so the spirit money you burn can go straight where it is supposed to) and a big incense pot and a bunch of statues that look for all the world to be of gods.

That day it was also very busy: they were having a traditional opera performance in honor of the you know what. I innocently asked if all the temples in the area were having such events (there are about four temples within seven minutes’ walk of one another here); but she denied that this even was temple. This isn’t a temple, this is just好兄弟hao xiongdi, ‘the good brothers.’[2] And this one in particular, she continued, this altar to the good brothers, it’s very very ling, very active and powerful, so you have to be careful what you say around them. If you go to the big famous temple down the street and you mess up the ceremony or say something wrong, that’s okay: the god will understand that it’s just a mistake, that you don’t know any better. But these ones here, these good brothers, you have to be careful around them.

The term ‘the good brothers’ was later glossed for me by someone who actually knows something about Taiwanese religion as “the not-good not-brothers.” It’s a polite term for ghosts. Nobody likes to be called a ghost; this is a way of saying “the differently spiritually abled.” The you know which gates that open during the you know what month are the gates of hell, and the you know what that happens is that, well, all hell breaks loose. In this month you are not supposed to do anything that doesn’t need doing: you shouldn’t move, get married, get born, die, or generally make any big decisions.
Ghost month tends to fall right around typhoon season, at least in my experience, and although I can’t vouch for the causality, all hell breaking loose is not so outrageous as a description. It has also come to my attention that I tend to come to Taiwan during ghost month, promptly try to make a lot of big decisions and to move, and end up feeling a little insane and mildly possessed. I used to attribute it to the shock of the heat and humidity, but this time around the humidity has been at a completely reasonable under 90% pretty much the entire time I’ve been here (except when it’s actually in the middle of a typhoon and there’s flooding all over the place), so I think ghost month may be a better explanation.

It never hurts to give offerings and burn incense during ghost month, but it’s especially important to do so on the 15th and the 30th days, the middle and the end of the month. Jilong, a port town to the north-east of Taipei, has some pretty famous ghost month ceremonies to go along with its world famous in Taipei night market. I ended up going to a mid-month event but I am currently a little drowsy, so I will leave you first with an image of just a couple of the many wonderful things that can be bought at the Jilong night market, and will try to continue this tomorrow.



squid on a stick and other delicate delicacies



[1] Shrimp gung is actually pretty much what it sounds like. I am not totally familiar with the entire production process, although I’ve seen people making it while squatting around a huge bowl in an alley near where I used to live before I moved into this absurd, boring, shee-shee neighborhood where everyone is trying to sell you spaghetti and “English-style tea.” What it looked like they were doing was taking little shrimps and rolling them around in a thick but quite wet brownish batter. Most often though by the time you get the gung in your mouth, you can’t really find the actual shrimp in it—it tastes like a shrimpy batter all the way through. Maybe other people use shrimp powder or cut up little bits of shrimp. Once there are a bunch of discrete pieces of batter-wrapped shrimp (or batter-wrapped batter), they are then, like all good things, deep fried. Deep frying done, they are then thrown into a thick, sweet-and-salty soup. For me, it is this initial crispification by deep fry followed by the subsequent mushification by soupy submersion that is really the essence of gung. Gung also comes in pork and squid varieties.
[2] Of course it being Chinese, it’s actually “the good older brothers younger brothers,” because that’s the only way to say “brothers.”

So the day before the 15th day of the 7th lunar month I happened to stop by Jennifer’s bar in the evening, a not unheard of occurrence (especially now that I live a five-minute walk away) and sat around chatting with her and two of her bartenders, Vany and Little Wai. Vany is currently our resident expert on all things slang and Taiwanese. The relationship between Taiwanese and Mandarin, especially in her demographic of twenty-something nightlife kids with a pre-college education, is very lively: Mandarin on Taiwan gets so much of its slang from Taiwanese that non-Taiwanese speakers often don’t even realize that that’s where it comes from. I like Vany a lot partly for personality reasons but partly for foreign-speaker reasons: she doesn’t seem to modulate her language around me at all, and she never acts like she thinks I don’t understand something, but when I tell her I don’t understand something she lets out this cute little thinking-it-over grunt, stops what she’s doing for a second, and then comes up with a succinct, dependable explanation of what the expression means and where it comes from. This happens pretty often, as I am better trained in formal city-government Chinese than normal-people that-rocks that-sucks Chinese. Anyway it was Vany who suggested that we might want to go to Jilong the next day and watch the festivities; though it was Vany who then, when the time came the next day, backed out of going. But Yushou, my friend who used to be at the city government and has recently moved on up to the Economic Reconstruction Council but still, happily, spends most of the day logged in to msn messenger, said he would join us.

So we took off for Jilong, about a forty minute ride, and first walked around the night market (hence the squid on a stick). One very satisfying thing about this evening for me personally was that I felt like my Chinese abilities recovered a bit—every time I go away and then come back, a piece of my Chinese gets chopped away, and it always takes a while to reconstruct it. (In fact I don’t think it ever gets fully reconstructed—I peaked around two years ago and it’s all been a big attempt at recovery since then.) This kind of context, though, seems to be one that considerably aids the recovery process: out with two good friends eating all sorts of delicious snacks and having a long, uproarious conversation that starts out at innuendo with the chewy noodle soup,[i] moves into hijinks at the grilled dried shredded octopus with bar-b-q sauce,[ii] becomes definitively ribald around the shredded ice with four toppings and condensed milk,[iii] and has become so unabashedly dirty by the grilled crabs and Hong Kong shrimp to be pried open with a long toothpick that one of us actually says at one point, “there are other people around,” before continuing merrily along in the exact same vein. Something about the challenge of being cruder and slyer than the other guy that pries my mouth open, along with all the great tastes passing through it. So as usual with activities in Taiwan, it turned out that the actual, main activity of the evening was eating (and talking); the actual ceremony was a kind of visual dessert.

After stuffing ourselves silly on the foods enumerated above, we moved towards the park where the ceremony was to take place. Actually the middle of ghost month is the time of a number of several different ceremonies. Originally all of them took place on the 15th day, but, as the Jilong city website informed us, recently they had been schedules for slightly different times in slightly different places: thus the ceremony of floating paper lanterns out on the water had already taken place the night before, as had the ceremony of sending lighted paper lanterns floating up into the sky: one had been at the harbor and the other in a park. There were a couple of other pieces of ceremony that had been similarly re-allocated. The finagling with the dates was presumably for the purpose of lessening congestion, but maybe it worked too well because by the time we got up to the top of the hill in the park where this thing was supposed to take place it looked like there was barely anyone there—maybe fifty people total milling around aimlessly in front of a huge temple, whose facade was decorated with the family name Xu. (The responsibility for organizing the ceremonies rotates among the big Jilong families, and this year it was the Xus’ turn.) There were little stages covered with protective tarp set up on your right- and left-hand sides as you faced the temple; the stage to your right gave way to a nice little cliff. In front of the temple façade, a bunch of paper gods were lined up in rows on mini-god-sized bleachers, and in front of that, in the courtyard that had been effectively created by all the structures, was an enormous installation featuring the king of hell, maybe ten feet tall, and many of his companions.



hellking



[i] The noodles are made by lathering a layer of batter around the sides of a wok big enough to boil me plus your chicken soup chicken and covering it with an enormous wooden slab. There’s some water boiling in the bottom fourth of the wok; so the batter is crispy-fried from the outside but steamed from the inside. It comes out as a porous white bandage, which is then cut up into small pieces and put in a fishy soup. A Jilong specialty.
[ii] YUM!
[iii] Topping choices include sweet red or green bean sauce and about a million things I don’t understand but whose main characteristic is that they are Q, a particular kind of resistant chewiness that is the main contribution of a whole variety of Taiwanese foods.