When It Becomes Real

The biggest event in our month-to-come, or perhaps in our year-to-come, is the trip we’ll make to Taiwan beginning in the wee hours of the morning of January 6th.  The flight takes off from Chicago, so we’ve got to get there. Yesterday we bought a set of tickets on the bus AND a set of tickets on the train. If the weather forecast for the 5th looks nasty, we’ll get up early and board the train, which will go no matter what the weather. But, if it looks good, we’ll cancel the train reservations, sleep later, go to church, even have an afternoon nap before boarding the bus after 4PM. (Sadly, the bus tickets we’ve bought are non-refundable).

Making those decisions and booking those tickets began to make things feel real.

Today we put vacation holds on the mail and the newspaper. Then we called the credit card companies (like many people in Taiwan and the USA, we have too many separate accounts) to make sure we wouldn’t be cut off while overseas.

 

 

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Those calls made it even more real.

We wrote a thank you note to an association of Taiwanese churches in North America that sent us a check at the end of the year.  A note like that is, of course, a typical thing to do, but in the note we mentioned that like many other Taiwanese people, we’ll be returning home to vote for the president’s re-election.  

It’s very, very real.  Now it’s time to begin packing.

 

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

A Not-so-fine Distinction

Sarah Kay, the spoken word poet, was an example I used when teaching “stage presence” to ministerial candidates in Taiwan a few years ago. After that course I “filed her away” until a short article about her appeared in The New Yorker last May.  She is a master of her art.

Last nightI listened to a speech she gave at an event in 2015. In her 50-minute address she took breaks to perform poems illustrating the points she made. Her oratorical style differs between performance and speaking, that’s to be expected, but her animation and patterns of speech in the lectern are heavily influenced by her poetic style.  I wish that more of the thousands of sermons, lectures and speeches I’ve heard since I began to attempt to listen had more of her presence. Even more, I wish that I’d had some of it in the hundreds of sermons and lectures I’ve delivered. There was no poetry in me, either.

If there’s a hell, my torment there can be no worse than to have to watch all the lessons sermons and speeches I’ve delivered on an endless loop of video tape. If there’s a heaven, part of its joy will be the good news that the burdens of my poor and misguided public pronouncements have been rolled away. 

Ms. Kay also observed a difference that’s become apparent of late, a difference that I hadn’t been able to articulate. I’m rewriting some devotional poems by a high school classmate whom I met for the first time at a reunion last August. Her collection was privately published four years ago.  As I turn her verses into song and set them to tunes, I sometimes wonder if it’s worth the trouble. Ms. Kay mentioned that early in her own transition to poet, she discovered that lots of her original work was “journal poetry”, not meant for publication. I think that my classmate failed to make that distinction. She gathered pieces that were meaningful to her; heartfelt, passionate, and revelatory; which likely should have stayed in the journals.

The “deal” between us is that I may set her work to tunes and share the results with her alone.  Since the style of music her church is different from the tunes I find in the public domain, publication, distribution and use are highly unlikely, anyway. Nonetheless, I find it to be an interesting project, and the skills I’m developing have their uses elsewhere.

As for those old sermons of mine, I’m coming to see them as “journal stuff”. I’m glad that none of them got printed, precious few made it to video, and those which remain on discs, hard-drives and in the cloud can be deleted. 

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

Passing the New Year before Noon

On the morning of December 31st, sitting in Holland, MI where snow had fallen the previous night, we were totally immersed in events 13 hours away, where the new year was about to be marked with a spectacular fireworks show in Taipei. We managed to call up the outdoor New Year concert in Taoyuan, connecting the TV to a computer in order to watch a Korean boy-group sing in Chinese, hear masters of ceremonies alternating between Mandarin and Taiwanese, and enjoy an intensely acrobatic female song and dance group move about on stage in costumes of varied skimpiness. The lead  singer gets to change outfits every few minutes, the dancers don’t even get to stop moving. There are even about a dozen 8-foot-tall dinosaurs! 

All the time in lower left corner of the screen there was a countdown clock going. The thermometer indicated the temperatures nationwide, from 10 to 18 degrees Celsius at sea level to below zero in the high mountains. And there’s a headline scroll across the bottom giving us updates on what’s happening around the nation. 

The screen is jammed with information. It feels very familiar. 

We’ve decided that this event, leading up to 11AM here, will be our “midnight” one this year. 

Happy New Year

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan, but will return to Taiwan to vote for president in January. 

Midnight Calls

Guys my age (68) are familiar with waking up in the middle of the night from symptoms of internal pressure which are relieved by taking a short walk down the hall. On occasion these “awakenings” happen in the middle of dreams connected to other things that are going on in life.

In the wee hours of January 6th We’ll board a flight to Taiwan, going home to vote in the presidential election. The trip coincides with what we’ve heard will be the departure from Taiwan of friends who, like ourselves, spent decades in Taiwan. Not being high-volume communicators, they’ve not said anything directly to us.  When we originally heard of their leaving, we assumed it was for a vacation, and were glad to be arriving in time to see them at all. But this seems to be even more crucial. We later learned, though, again not clearly, that they are leaving for good. 

This must have been on my mind while I slept last night. I dreamt that I was conversing with my colleague who was telling me of the situations that prompted the decision to leave. As I woke, I felt satisfied to have learned his processes and prospects going forward. Then I realized that I knew nothing at all about situations, processes or prospects. Like Sergeant Shultz, I know nothing.  

Some middle-of-the-night wake-up calls are necessary, get easily taken care of, and are forgotten. Others, like that dream, are unnecessary and NEED to be forgotten. Whatever I learn next week, I look forward to seeing my friend again.

 

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

Tangerines

With Christmas just passed, and standing, as I am, on the cusp of January, my thoughts turn to tangerines, which are the winter fruit of choice in Taiwan.  If you understand spoken Mandarin Chinese, you can find a TV report about them from December of 2017 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJMFtt-fVTI

Thoughts come to me because of the current season, because I’ll be in Taiwan in a week’s time, and because yesterday I peeled and consumed a couple of the little branded fruit sold as “Holos” at lunch. Though what I ate here in Michigan, most likely a product of Texas or Florida, didn’t compare to my memories of the ones sold on the fruit truck a block from home in Tainan City, they will have to do for the time being. 

Soon, I’ll be enjoying the real thing.

 

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan. 

Watts

For twenty of the 25 years we lived in Kaohsiung, I bought electrical bits (wire, switches, light bulbs, etc.) at a little shop on Kwang-fu 3rd Street. This was not a self-service place. One had to know how to ask for what one wanted or say, “Let me look on your shelves because I’ll know it when I see it.”  (An American friend who needed an outlet for a 3-prong electric dryer once went in there and said, “I need an outlet for something very big.” It only took a few minutes to find.) It was in the customer context there that I learned the Taiwanese word for “Watt” (the measure for how much electricity a bulb consumed.)  It’s “Oa” (sounds like “Wa). Bulbs were purchased by asking for the “25 Oa” or “100 Oa”. Better brands came in nicer packages, cheaper ones wrapped in ways that made one wonder if they were embarrassed to be seen.

It was sometime about 15 years ago that the cheaper bulbs became unavailable, and the sign outside advertising the better brand disappeared.  Taiwan had outlawed incandescents. For most folks this was no big deal, they’d been using 4-foot-long or circular florescent (known as sun-light) tubes anyway. For us, with table lamps and night-stand lamps, it felt different. 

We eventually made the shift to CFL equipment, the kind purported to make the American President look orange, and now are comfortably ensconsed in the LED universe.  Moving into the old house that we bought in 2018 eventually involved replacing what was in ceiling fixtures with what will outlast us. In a basement cabinet I recently discovered what I’d removed, and recalled the “wonderful days of Oa” that we lived in Kaohsiung. 

Indeed, they were wonderful.

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan. 

Photo by Júnior Ferreira on Unsplash

Culture Shock

The first time I took up long-term residence in Taiwan I suffered from culture shock, but that was in 1976 and the things that “shocked” me then eventually became so normal that I can’t recall what they were. I only remember spending large amounts of time alone, writing letters to folks overseas, until I got my feet on the ground again. The culture shock experience that I remember most clearly happened when I returned to America in 1986 after  4+ years in Taiwan. 

Between 1982 and 1986 we had transitioned from American convenience foods to things purchased at the massive Ling-ya fresh market around the corner from our apartment in Kaohsiung. It was so convenient that a daily trip to shop for groceries was usually sufficient.   Dishes took up more space in our cabinets than foods. What we forgot, however, was how to shop for groceries in America.  

We had a young born-in-Tawan child. Upon arrival in the second half of 1986 we took up life in a Midwestern town where I’d never lived before. We acquired a car (which we hadn’t had for those 4+ years in Taiwan) and we began to settle in for what turned out to be 13 months. The aspect of culture shock that really struck me was the supermarket. Instead of one example of a particular product, we had to select from among several, even when it came to things like rice and flour. We also had to learn how to shop for a week instead of for a day or for a meal. 

I thought of that today when shopping for the holiday entertainment we’re planning in the next few days.  Char had gone to a big supermarket to do the lion’s share of things, but we divided the list so that I’d make a separate trip to a place that I like in order to pick up staples at “friendlier” prices. The man running the cash register appeared to me to be either from west Africa or Haiti (Though I didn’t ask, his cheerful greeting, thank you and Merry Christmas came with a francophone accent that has led me to assume.) Whether he is here from either place (rather than from France or Quebec) both the abundance of food in a small American grocery store AND the variety of stuff purchased by the people who come through his line must be shocking. 

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he’s been here for most of his life. Maybe his accent comes from the home and community where he grew up. Maybe he is as much of an American consumer as I. 

Maybe.  

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

Cleans like a White Tornado

When I was a child, the giant corporation that owned the Ajax brand of home care products reformulated, repackaged and rebranded a standard liquid cleaning solution and advertised it as something that “cleans like a white tornado.” I doubt that the same company would use such a slogan today in most of America. Nonetheless, that’s how I began to feel about 20 years ago in Kaohsiung, and how I’m feeling in the runup to Christmas in America this year. 

When our son was really young we employed a house cleaner to spend a couple of mornings a week in our home doing the kind of cleaning that was just too much for us to keep up with. But as he grew older than 6, we assumed that his care would be less time-absorbing, and we dispensed with the hired help. The only problem was that neither of us picked up where the help left off, and the house would get progressively grotier until we’d spend a day in toil and not get it half-done. 

Then soccer intervened. A local youth recreation organization began to offer soccer training on Saturday mornings. It was far enough from where we dwelt in the center of the city that separate trips for drop off and pick up would consume and time gained in the house, so Char took over the driving, and I took over the cleaning. I found that without a “standard-bearer” in the operation, I could get the house picked up, dusted, vacuumed, mopped and the bathrooms and kitchen cleaned in the couple of hours available. A teenage daughter sleeping late didn’t get in the way. Some days I even had time to do such shopping as was available in the neighborhood before the rest of the family, with the car, got back.

This pattern continued after soccer ended, and after we moved to Tainan as empty-nesters. Saturday morning saw me cleaning the house and doing the shopping. Saturday afternoon was consumed with a long nap and music practice before going to rehearsal for the recorder band to which I belonged. 

Of course, the cleaning, whether in Kaohsiung or in Taiwan, was done at high speed. I cleaned “like a white tornado.”  Today, in preparation for the arrival of Christmas guests arriving tonight to stay for a couple of days, I repeated the performance.  Whether it looks good around here, or like it’s been hit by a tornado of any race or color remains a matter of opinion. 

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan

Happy Holidays

 

May yours be filled with all sorts of good things.

 

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

They’re ALL my Holidays

I heard a Taiwanese friend who spent a few years of his graduate education in Tennessee tell this story more than once. During his first January in Memphis he learned of an event commemorating America’s Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. He planned to attend, and asked a white classmate if they might attend together. In response, he heard, “No, it’s not my holiday.” 

When we lived in Taiwan, we learned a bunch of holidays that were new to us, and participated to some degree or other in all of them, especially those that offered a day off from work. These included the artificial ones declared by the Nationalist Party: Taiwan Retrocession Day, the Birthday of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the Birthday of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, Constitution Day, and the Establishment of the Republic Day. There were Commemorative holidays of wider import: teachers’ day, childrenns’ day, youth day, women’s day. And, of course, there were cultural holidays: Lovers’ Day, Dragon Boat Day, Mid-Autumn Festival, Spring Festival, Winter Solstice. These were a LOT of holidays that didn’t belong to us in our hometowns in California and Michigan. 

Today it was my privilege to join with neighbors in celebration of Kwanzaa. It was loud (African drumming), rhythmic (dancing and clapping), inclusive (old and young, black and white, women and men). Smiles were on so many faces. One participant was honored for her life work in serving and accompanying people who were despised or disincluded for many reasons: standing with African Americans excluded from a Christian school in Cicero, IL 50 years ago; sitting with a friend of the 2 boys who shot up Columbine High School to whom nobody wanted to be near, and Muslim women in Kosovo during the war there. 

As a holiday, Kwanzaa didn’t get started for anyone until the 1960s. My own marking of all those special days and cultural holidays in Taiwan, and the Nationalist Party ones that no longer matter, didn’t begin until the 1970s.  Now I’m here, and only the cultural ones come across my radar any more. The artificial Nationalist Party ones evaporated in the 21st century. Kwanzaa is new to me, but I adopt it as among my own while I live out the rest of my days, months, seasons and years here. 

David Alexander now resides in Holland, MI after 39 years in Taiwan.

“Kinara in Oakland YMCA lobby” by allaboutgeorge is licensed under CC BY 2.0