Easy Treesy

Growing used to living as a foreigner in Taiwan over our nearly 40 years there, we “crossed a line” with the culture around us. In the 17s and 80s we were more oriented toward having an American-style holiday celebration, an aim that diminished over the years, even as Taiwan seemed to move more in the direction of Santa Claus and fancy trees put up earlier and earlier, then forgotten and left up until about February.

During the early 80s we’d buy a potted live tree and try to keep it alive in the house or on the balcony. Few, if any, of these trees saw a second year of holiday use. When our kids were little we shifted to that which was decidedly artificial, and in our final decade had a tree in a box that got taped back around it and hid in a closet. After our final Christmas in Tainan (2017) that tree was one of the first things thrown onto the garbage truck.

These thoughts come back because we bought a house in Holland Michigan in 2018. The realtor has sent cards two years in a row now, entitling us to claim a free “real” (chopped down) tree at a one-day event on the edge of town. The event was today (December 7) and I went alone. I met kind and helpful people who gave clear directions and helped me get the tree partially stuffed into the trunk of the car. Now it lies on the front lawn, awaiting installation and decoration on the unheated porch (for indoors we have a more elaborate artificial one). 

Kind and helpful people carried us through the many Christmasses we marked in Taiwan. Whether they, or we, understood what we were attempting to celebrate, kindness and help are always welcome.

The porch will hold a tree. Noel!

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

Windy Windows

Except for the years from 1982 to 1986, our time in Taiwan was spent in “vintage housing”. In 1987 we moved into a “once luxury” place in Kaohsiung, but its “luxury” days were long past by then. We stayed there until 2007, then moved onto the campus of Tainan Theological College, where the housing stock was late 50s to mid-60s. So long as things are kept reasonably clean, painted and leak free, older houses in Taiwan can be rather pleasant. They have character lacking in many of the things built in the 21st Century. BUT window technology has improved considerably over the years.

Our 20 years in the same building in Kaohsiung included a lot of window-rattles and leaks during typhoons. And THOSE windows had aluminum frames. When we moved to Tainan, the house’s windows were large, heavy, and wood-framed. Frequently in windy seasons I had to fold up newspaper to stick between the places where frames slid across frames.  The problem was noise. Whether wind blew in or not was a minor thing.

Not so where we now reside.  It’s winter here. The temperatures this week hovering around 1 degree C. When wind blows it finds the cracks.  Last Spring we had the other major cracks in the house sealed up, but replacing windows is an expensive deal, so we’ve foregone it. Our bedroom faces north. The upstairs bathroom faces south. A few weeks ago we purchased some shrink-wrap plastic film to tape up over them. That required purchase of a hair dryer (to shrink the wrap) and then we were busy with this and that.  Yesterday we began installing in the bedroom. We covered 3 of the 4 windows there. This morning the storm windows furthest out from the plastic were clear. On the one set we hadn’t covered there was condensation inside. 

The bathroom on the south-facing side changed more dramatically. While putting up the sheeting, with top and sides taped down, the amount of air coming out where the bottom wasn’t yet sealed was amazing.  Now that everything on that end is “tight as a drum”, midnight runs to the toilet won’t be as chilling.

We’re certain that shrink wrap plastic sheeting is used all over Taiwan, for products in stores, but not for windows. Maybe there’s money to be made.

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

Train Noises

When I resided in Pingtung from mid-1977 to mid-1978 my room faced the rail line several kilometers south of the main station. There was a little country station, Guilai, not far from where I dwelt. Often at night, a local train had stopped there, I could hear the whistle blow before it started again. If the wind was in my direction, I could even hear the chug of the steam locomotive pulling out.

I left Taiwan in 1978 and spent over three years in North America before returning. I didn’t go back to Pingtung, but took up residence in Kaohsiung, where other noises drowned out the trains. I sometimes imagine that I saw some steam locomotives in use after 1982, but can’t imagine if that was fact or dream. Still, though, even a diesel or electric train leaving a station was accompanied by particular noise. A man on the platform flipped a switch that rang a bell indicating that the doors would soon close, and after they did, the train driver would toot the horn before letting loose the brakes (with a whoosh of air) and opening the throttle on the diesel. 

Not so any more. Especially if one rides Taiwan’s high speed train. And not so if one rides Amtrak in America, at least, if last week’s experience can be used as a guide.  We boarded in Chicago for a ride that would cross two state lines and take us home. With just a little shake the whole thing started moving, right on time. Something slowed it down during the first hour of the ride, and the hour was late. We’d been away for 4 days and wanted to be home. As it made its first stop, we wanted it to “go again already”. And when it did, again, no alarm or sound. 

There’s enough noise in this world, and trains are not all that quiet when rolling down the line, whether slowly or fast, but I still think back to those trains stopping and starting in Guilai, and how their sound, especially in the middle of the night, made me imagine going somewhere.  Now, far from Taiwan, I imagine them taking me home. 

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

Thanksgiving Collection

During some of the years that we lived in Taiwan we were included in what could be called “affinity group” Thanksgiving meals. On year when at our home we invited just a few people to join us on that Thursday night. Among those invited was a friend 20 years our senior She had seen her 3 offspring leave Taiwan after high school, and her husband was out of Taiwan on business that week. Upon arrival she was taken aback that we were serving spaghetti. At our house, we didn’t do turkey.  When in the USA every few years and resident during November, we’d gather with family members around the extended table at Char’s parents’ place. The number of people around THAT table expanded as grandchildren “acquired” spouses, children, and significant others. 

One hears of noble people in every state and town who plan Thanksgiving dinners paying attention to who might otherwise be alone on the day. They invite diverse groups of friends and acquaintances to feast. This year we found ourselves in one of those categories, (hint, not the “noble people” one). We were guests at “the Young family Thanksgiving feast.”  Bob and Shaomay Young are Chinese. They came to the USA in the late 1960s, met in graduate school, married and settled. They had two children. Bob did well in business, working with Motorola during the early years of the “cell phone” thing. Their home is on the north side of Chicago, just over the county line. They had a son and a daughter. We became part of their extended household when our daughter, Kate, married their son, Gene. 

We’d heard about their parties at Thanksgiving and Chinese New Year, but had never been present for one. After they “received “ Kate into their clan, they “adopted” our son, Grant, when he chose a college near their home for his undergraduate studies.  When Grant married Katelyn, SHE became part of the family, too. Bob and Shaomay have a wide network of friends. Thanksgiving this year included 21 people. Long term friends, those friends’ children, those children’s spouses, and those spouses parents. Illinois, Michigan, Maine, Virginia and one guy who was in town from China for a week. 

We’ve now got a different “affinity group”, and hope to be included in it during future years. Noble people come from many places. It is wonderful that they extend invitations to such as ourselves.  We’re going to have to pass this kind of favor along.

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

Squirrel Feeding Festival

We resided in Kaohsiung from 1982 to 2007. For 20 of those years, in Manhattan terms,  we were only “a block off of Central Park West”. Kaohsiung’s Central Park was nothing particular to write home about for most of those years. It included a rather run-down stadium (suitalbe for track meets), a run-down covered arena (suitable for basketball), a run-down decorative garden with monument to the Rotary Club and bronze statue of Taiwan’s once military dictator, Chiang Kai-shek, and a run-down antiaircraft battery with 50 calibre machine guns. All of that run-down stuff is long-gone. What the park always had, though, was a lot of trees. Once I even saw a squirrel there. I’ve no idea what it ate.

When we moved to Tainan in 2007 our residence was on the campus of Tainan Theological College, a parklike oasis in the middle of the city. The place was OVERRUN with squirrels, who ate fruit from the many neglected mango, dragon eye, carambola and other fruit trees that fill the campus. 

In retirement, we’ve relocated to Holland, MI, another place overrun with squirrels, but which don’t “chatter” like their Taiwan relatives. These eat walnuts, acorns and other things that grow on trees, and, in the autumn, seeds from pumpkins that are displayed on front porches.  We had a stack of pumpkins on our front steps. Orange on the bottom, green in the middle, and white on top. We’d put them there around the 20th of October, when they looked quite festive. By the middle of November, the one on the bottom was looking rather flatter than it had when “Fresh”.  But not one of them had been approached by a squirrel. We wondered what was wrong. Gnawed pumpkins are such a common sight that I’d begun to think of the annual decoration as “squirrel feeding festival”. 

It turns out that the squirrels at our end of the block are only interested in the pumpkin seeds and the placenta they grow in. They didn’t want to bother chewing their way through the pumpkin shell to get to the goodies. It took breaking the treasures open to get anyone attracted.  A few days after the “opening”, I went out to move the remainders onto the compost heap. In one place I found pumpkin mash surrounded by “opened” pumpkin seeds. Even the hulls had been rejected.

We’ve got some very picky rodents out there.

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

 

 

Snatched from Blind Ignorance

We’re going home to Taiwan to vote in January. We blithely assumed that it was just a matter of showing up at the polls with our ID cards on the 1/11. It turns out that we were wrong, but we’ve been “saved in the nick of time” by a word from someone concerned that we not travel Trans-Pacific in vain.

Search of election regulations on government websites related elections and to “Overseas Chinese” (the category within which we now fall) voting in elections turned up very detailed information, including the fact that certain documents have to be filed at a particular office in Tainan City no later than close of business on December 2nd.  OK, we’ve got a week, and we can scan those documents to a friend who lives there and will be able to make the application for us. BUT, the rules mentioned a particular application form. We we couldn’t find that ANYWHERE on the various websites that we consulted.  

 

在國外之中華民國自由地區人民返國行使第15任總統副總統選舉權登記申請委託書 茲委託　　　　　　（國民身分證統一編號：　　　　  　 　 。戶籍地址：     省（市）   縣（市） 鄉（鎮市區）   村（里） 鄰            路（街） 段 巷 弄  號 樓 電話：　　　　　　　 　）代辦第15任總統副總統選舉返國行使選舉權選舉人登記之申請。

We called the Taiwan consulate in Chicago. The nice lady there sent the forms by e-mail.  So, we’d ordinarily be set, BUT, we’re out of town. Our passports and household registration certificate are on the other side of Lake Michigan, where we’ll not “be” until late on Friday night. We’ll send everything to our “agent” in Tainan well in time, and will hope that papers can be filed on the 2nd. Problem solved.

Had it not been solved as it was, we’d probably have gone to Taiwan anyway, just to be in the tropics and miss two weeks of Michigan winter, and to see many friends. It would’ve been OK, just not “super”. 

So, on the cusp of Thanksgiving day here in America’s heartland, we are grateful to and for those friends near and far who care enough to help and to inform. There are not white canes and guide dogs for our kind of blindness, but there are kind people.

Thank God for that!

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

Smarter by Far

Two realizations came slowly, delayed, perhaps,by the enormous physical fact of the Pacific Ocean. I lived on one side of it. Each of my offspring was on the other. I’d long since slowed in the area of intellectual development, each of them had begun to sprint, each a calling far different from my own. Each has also far outstripped the whatever graduate study achievement I’d reached in my 20s.  

Yesterday afternoon I sat in an audience listening at my son’s doctoral dissertation defense. His field is Chemistry, and his school is Northwestern University in Illinois. Following the “public” part of the defense most of us were dismissed and a professors questioned him directly. After an hour of that he was told, “congratulations Doctor.” 

Before yesterday distance allowed me to pretend that though his achievements in Chemistry far outdistance anything I’ll ever make in any field, I was still OK. I’d been willing to grant him superiority here or there, but I felt that having 40 more years of life experience counted for a greater “breadth of accumulation”.  I can no longer maintain that facade.

 

The other Dr. Alexander in the family took her advanced degree in East Asia Languages and Cultures 3 years ago.  I’d probably told myself that my additional 35 years of accumulation PLUS being residence in East Asia likely had me ahead of her, for a while. That’s been thrown into re-evaluation, too. Another facade falls.

They’re smarter than me, smarter by far. They’ve been so for a long time. God love ‘em. 

Now I can relax.

 

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

The Value of a College Education

About a dozen summers ago in Taiwan I was dispatched to Taipei from Tainan to take part in an exchange involving Canadian and Taiwanese theological students and faculty. I was a poor choice for this assignment. I had neither taken my theological training in Taiwan nor had I started teaching yet. I was sent because the organizer of the exchange had sent the invitation late, only after other potential representatives from Tainan were already “booked” for that week. 

You can’t have people come all the way across the Pacific (as the 10 or 12 Canadians had done) and only have them sit in a room to “confer and exchange”. At least one day has to be given over to touring around. One stop was Aletheia University’s main campus in Tamsui. The school grew out of the missionary work of a Canadian, George MacKay, whose gravesite is on campus. It’s an obligatory stop when Canadians visit.  As the university chaplain showed us around one visitors inquired about the cost of getting a Bachelor’s degree there. The chaplain answered with confidence because his son had just finished one. “$NT 1,000,000” he said. That was a comprehensive number, including things like pocket money allowance and bus tickets.

The relative costs of education at different colleges came up in a conversation with friends lately. The dean of sciences at the local private college mentioned his school’s market position viz the University of Michigan, a nearby State University, and two comparable 4-year liberal arts colleges, one in Michigan and another in Ohio. He talked about having to make a case for the higher price of the local school.

That started me thinking about putting relative costs into parallel columns. It turned out to be kind of fun. I created a pair of hypothetical high school seniors who were statistically equal in every way, each desiring to take an undergraduate degree in business administration. I sent one to the nearby state university with a little bit of aid, where she lived in the dorm, ate in the dining hall, had summers off to work, and finished in 4 years. I left the other at home, where she did an online degree (in 3 years). I set each one back $30,000 a year that she could have earned if she went to work in a local factory instead of doing college. The difference in “cost of college plus missed earning opportunity during the years of study” between the two was phenomenal: $206,324.  OK, the state university degree will probably be worth more in the long run than the online one, but that’s a LOT of money to “pay back”. In fact, at 6% for 30 years, it comes to $1,237 per month. 

And THAT was the state university. The private liberal arts college would be more. 

We go to college for many reasons, and “paying back for” anything more than the money borrowed to make it possible is a ridiculous concept. The $206,324 difference between the university and the online program that formed the basis of this comparison is absolutely artificial. 

And my comparison quantified things in terms of dollars and cents, so ignores things like the friendships made, independence experienced, and maturity gained when having to navigate the slings and arrows of outrageous fate while not under the roof of the parental home. In the long run, the online diploma, though from an accredited institution, may not have the earning power of the one from the state university. But for how many years of a career do the schools where we’ve obtained our degrees matter more than the value we add to the situations in which we are employed? 

College is many things. It’s a (relatively) safe place to try one’s wings; a life-partner hunting ground; a mid-way point between secondary education and full-time employment; a staging point for relationships that may last a lifetime; a smorgasbord of learning opportunities, and more. If one’s primary goal is primarily a combination or mixture of these, a secondary school student may well consider alternative ways of achieving some of them. Enlisting in the National Guard, for example, can offer half-a-year away from home for training, during which one might learn new skills (beyond the military ones) and make some of those relationships that a college experience offers. Non-credit online courses (MOOCs) offer variety far beyond what ANY single university might avail. Of course, as a life-partner hunting ground, college can’t be beat. But social networks, workplaces and voluntary associations totally unconnected to a learning environment have proven their worth in getting people matched up for so many that these can’t be ignored.

The “straw women” I created for my comparison were and are not real. The numbers I used in the comparison, though, were.  One woman came out of her tertiary (undergraduate level) education much further behind in terms of dollars and cents than the other.  That, in itself, might be worthy of consideration by parents of high school students; by students themselves; and by counselors who help families navigate the processes through which choices are made.  

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

It Was So Much Simpler There

During our 39 years in Taiwan, most of our income came from overseas. We were missionaries of the Reformed Church in America, which paid our salary directly into our bank account in $US.  Anything we earned from Taiwan sources was paid in $NT and reported to the National Tax Bureau in either Kaohsiung or Tainan, depending on where we resided. Every year I’d go to the tax office with forms in hand testifying to both American Taiwan incomes. It usually took two visits, more if I’d forgotten something. The staff at the tax office would compute what I owed and present me with a bill. Sometimes this took several daily visits to an ATM to assemble the amount, after which I’d visit a bank and pay what I owed and then take a receipt back to the tax office to file. 

We left Taiwan at the end of July in 2018 and officially retired 2 months later. It was a crazy year on the income side. Our “tax guy” got us a 6-month deferment because of the greater complexity of the return. We paid in October. The amount came as a surprise.  This current year has been crazy on the outgo side. Home ownership involves a lot of things we’d not imagined. Car expenses are higher than they were in Taiwan, and the car we use now is just about as beaten up as the one we used for 21 years in Taiwan. Phone and cable charges jumped to “normal” after the great first year rates we’d negotiated upon arrival in 2018. 

I think and write about late in November because we are drawing up a loose budget for next year. I had to put all sorts of things on it that I’d never really bothered with when we were in Taiwan.  State income taxes, for instance. American-size health insurance premiums, for another instance. 

In the deepest part of my heart, I know that leaving Taiwan upon retirement was the right thing to do. Without our regular jobs there, had we become volunteers or whatever, we’d just be in the way of people trying to do their jobs. And even with the small things we might have done as volunteers, we wouldn’t have built much of a life. Our opportunities here are so much more filled with potential. Yes, this is the right place.

But, it was so much simpler there. 

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

Tailings

Refining techniques used by 19th century silver miners in Nevada to extract silver from ore required a lot of water. Water is almost as rare as silver in parts of that state. There’s a place where miners carried super rich ore 12 miles on mule-back to a water source sufficient for the refining process. In the process of choosing what went onto the mule, and what got left behind as “mine tailings”, a LOT of moderately rich ore got left behind. 20th century refining techniques could get the silver out of those tailings, and could even go after the dross left around the refining site. Motorized transportation in the 20th century also carried rocks to water more efficiently than mules could. The results were “second fortunes” pulled out of things previously considered not worth the effort.

I was only an adjunct member of the faculty of Tainan Theological College from 2008 to 2018. But I was welcomed to submit articles to the school’s semi-annual academic journal and to present papers at the once-per-term faculty research-sharing events. The academic journal was rather minor in the scheme of things, and the research-sharing events didn’t go beyond the walls and ceiling of the room where they were held. Things that emerged from my computer for brief glimpses of sunshine were soon relegated to a tailings pile. Now retired and sifting through the dross on various hard drives and flash drives, things have began to emerge again.

Had I been a visual artist, they’d hang on a wall (OK, maybe a closet, basement or garage wall, but a wall nonetheless). Had I been a musician I could or play my recordings through loudspeakers hidden in the bushes in front of my retirement home. I suppose I could gather articles into a “Festschrift in honor of Me” and have a thousand copies printed for distribution to  friends near and far, but I’d no doubt begin to see them in thrift stores within a year. 

Academic tailings and dross have a place to go. There are web sites! I’ve sent several articles to one of them, and a few more to another, to which I’ve lost my user name and PIN.  These places’ contents are found by doing a search on the googles. Some people following research interests have run into things I’ve put there. It costs me no money. The company that hosts the site often invites me to upgrade from the free plan to “premium” status, but though I’m vain enough, I remain a cheapskate, so haven’t yet taken the bait. I do get to see the date and location of people who stop by, but unless I pay, that’s as far as it goes. I’m always thrilled to notice that a researcher in Africa, East Asia or Europe has come across something of mine. My curiosity is engaged when I see that more a widely dispersed group of people have, during the same week, all looked at the same article. I suspect this is because of international online courses. I get worried when something more risky gets popular. I suspect that it’s being used as an example of bad writing or wrong theology.

Websites like the one I’m using can be seen as mine tailings or dross of the refining process. For me, though, they are places for presenting the precious metal I’ve refined, the jewels I’ve polished, and the art that I’ve produced, now framed and hanging in a gallery. 

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