Artifact or Artifice

A couple months ago a digital archivist I met in New Jersey asked if I’d brought back any artifacts from my long sojourn in Taiwan that he might scan into his files and return to me. I don’t know exactly what he had in mind, maybe things like elaborate carvings or skillful embroidery. The only thing I could imagine at the time was the gewgaw pictured here, the medal that is part of the Order of the Brilliant Star with Purple Cordon (3rd class) that was awarded to me by the president of Taiwan in December of 2015. 

As we unpacked the boxes of stuff we shipped to Michigan from Taiwan last year, other things emerged, but nothing particularly scan-worthy. And insofar as the award has any value, it’s rather artificial.  Soon after I received it a friend looked for similar stuff on e-bay and found one for sale, that had been awarded by Chiang Kai-shek himself! I suppose it was part of an estate sale, and that my example of such will meet a similar future fate, sold to the highest bidder over the floor price of I-don’t-want-to-imagine-how-little.

In the army, back when a cup of coffee at a restaurant ran about $1 (that long ago), we used to joke about particular medals that were awarded. “That and a dollar will get you a cup of coffee,” we’d say.  I think that the obscurity of an award from the president of Taiwan is about that valuable today. It’s all artifice, though, to be sure, well manufactured artifice.

The things we carry in our hearts, though not salable on e-bay, are more valuable. Taiwan is available to me when I look at old pictures, when I view the maps on our walls, and for the price of a plane ticket. But Taiwan is in my heart as much as it is anywhere. I’ll keep it. 

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

Wrap and Roll

Lots of cultures around the world feature foods in which one substance is wrapped in another. When I was a kid in Los Angeles, I remember enjoying something called “paper wrapped duck” at a Chinese restaurant where my father took us.  As a young man in Taiwan I learned about Bah-chang (Taiwanese) or Chung-tze (Mandarin) which are made of many ingredients mixed with sticky rice, wrapped in bamboo leaves, tied with string and then boiled or steamed. (In 2011 or thereabouts I attended a workshop given at a local university where I learned how to make them, but my tying wasn’t good, and mine fell apart.) Somewhat later I learned that the Paiwan people of Taiwan have a traditional food known as cinavu, the outside of which is made of millet with other stuff inside. If you can imagine a Mexican tamale, cinavu look like that, but taste completely different. 

My mother took full-time employment when I was still in elementary school. After a while, I learned to cook for the family, basic Mid-western fare centered on beef or chicken. Mom would sometimes make and refrigerate a pan of enchiladas to be warmed up when supper time came and she was still at work.  Like cinavu, enchiladas are a wrapped food. They were the first of the kind  that I learned to make, getting the lesson over the phone. 

Between high school and college I was in the army. By the time I finished my enlistment, my parents had divorced, lost the house to foreclosure, and such of the “core family” that continued living together was composed of my mother and sister, who shared a small apartment.  I moved in with a couple of friends from high school who were studying at a nearby university. One evening I remembered those enchiladas that my mom used to make, so I called over to her place and asked her how. “Get this, fry that, add this, wrap and bake.” With such simple instructions, how could I go wrong?

Many ways. I may not have found ALL of those, yet, but have learned, and repeated, several of them.  After one foray into tying Bah-chang, I learned to appreciate those made by other people more and more. I’ve never tried cinavu.

Yesterday while shopping I bought this and that. Today I fried some stuff, boiled some stuff, wrapped some stuff, and, as I type, enchiladas are in the oven. The smell is good. I’m hoping they’ll taste good when done. 

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

El Infierno en el Cielo

Taiwanese, like many languages around the world, is replete with “death oaths”, expressions like “tired to death”, “afraid to death”, or “doesn’t fear death”.  Of course nobody MEANS death in using these expressions. Kind of like how “hell” is an expression of degree in English. Back when I was in community college (a long way back), an instructor pointed out that expressions like “mad as hell” were not sensible. He offered “hot as hell” and “stinky as hell” as plausible alternatives, because hell is thought of as hot and sulphuric, but mad?

The plaster ceiling in our kitchen has begun to come loose from whatever holds it up there. This is a result of the house having been vibrated and shaken as the street and infrastructure under it have been replaced over the past couple of months. A few weeks ago some guests pointed out how visible the sagging had become. I looked up repair of a plaster ceiling on YouTube. That clued me in to what was required short-term and long-term. I did the short-term stuff and we decided to wait for construction out front to conclude before going further.  

Last week the sandy lane which our street had become, was covered with crushed rock. After it was graded smooth the vibrating steel roller passed by a few times, shaking everything on the roadway nicely into place, and loosening more of the kitchen ceiling. This morning I was back up there on a step ladder. The jack from the car trunk and a 2X4 raised sagging stuff back to the joists. A lot of screws with big washers went through plaster into wood, refastening the ceiling. I feel more secure walking around in there again, but it looks like el infierno en el cielo, or, as it is said in English, “Hell up above.”

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

Sorting Leftovers

A year before we left Taiwan, Char’s parents downsized from a 3 bedroom home to a 2 bedroom apartment in a retirement community. Sorting through their many possessions, they set aside a lot of stuff things for us because we were “coming soon.”  They did this with generosity and thoughtfulness. When we arrived here to settle in,, there were reclining chairs, bedroom suites, cabinets, a formal dining set with 6 chairs, a set of china, and lots more. We furnished the rest of our new home from thrift stores and a few judiciously chosen new pieces. 

But before we got here, Char’s dad died. When the furniture that had been in storage was delivered to our house, every item was sentimentally loaded, if not for Char, then for her mother, who visited regularly.  One way she helped us move in was directing as Char put china and glassware into the hutch that’s in the dining room. At our place it looks exactly as it did in her place, including the doilies!.   

Four weeks ago, mom died. A certain amount of what’s in the 2 apartment will become part of the eclectic collection in our own place, which is already full. Things that fit into boxes might go directly into the basement.  But the grandfather clock, a bedroom set, a rocking chair and another recliner will join us for the long term. Thankfully, with no one to be slighted at a gift not being on display or in use, some things can be “eliminated.” 

This morning I disassembled a 1950s-era bedroom set and relocated it to the garage in preparation for disposal. Before the recliner from the apartment joins us, I’ll “de-accession” two that are in the house. We’ll be getting a matched set of lamps, which will mean some thrift store ones will leave the premises. The electric piano we’ve newly acquired will replace the one we haven’t yet used. Mom’s cedar chest will replace a chest of drawers that came with the house when we moved in. The two additional sets of dishes (one for daily use and the other for Christmas dinners) will replace others that we’ve been using for the past year. 

Packing up and leaving Taiwan involved a lot of getting rid of stuff. Now we get to do it again. Feels like home.

Do you know anyone who wants a pair of reclining chairs?

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

 

Narcissism or Just Plain Vanity?

I was a late adopter of the cyber world. It wasn’t until going to work at the Taiwan Church News in the second half of 2000 that I began to do searches and the like. I’d been posting signed news articles about Taiwan and church affairs to a web service for a while when I learned the basics of Google. One day I “googled myself” and found my name on many things. I was embarrassed, partly for being “out there” and partly for having looked. As my paltry cyber skills grew, my vanity kept pace.  I began to post articles I’d written to places like Scribd, Researchgate, and Academia.edu.

Eventually I figured out how to search for myself in Chinese. When I discovered that I could look up pictures and videos of myself, too, I discovered that some churches where I’d gone had posted videos of me preaching in Taiwanese. This was REALLY embarrassing, because I learned how often I touched my face while behind the pulpit. 

A few months ago I was asked to put together a “story of your life in mission” for a digital archive. The first place I went for pictures was our own collection of prints & slides; scanning what helped. Then I waded into the mess that is our digital picture files, scattered over several hard drives and .usb sticks. When I thought a picture of a location would be helpful, I searched it out on the web. We didn’t take movies, but that doesn’t mean we weren’t in any video materials. There’s even a YouTube playlist with 18 of them: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA1730D300E82323D&feature=plcp

I wonder if adding a list of those to the end, since they’re in Taiwanese, will be of ANY value to ANYONE beyond my own vain self. 

Part of me wants to make the transition to life in Holland, MI.  Another part of me wants never to let go of Taiwan, and to make sure that everyone around me KNOWS I’m from there. 

Wretched man that I am, who will rescue me from this body of death?

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

Early for Late

Something’s afoot on the Southwest Chief, the daily train from Chicago to Los Angeles.  Nothing as serious as Murder on the Orient Express, but concerning nonetheless. Recently in both directions it’s been running hours late, as many as 12 or 13, on some days.  It concerns me because I have reservations for a round trip in mid-August. I made the reservation back in February when I decided to attend my 50th high school reunion. As the date draws near, I’ve been wondering if I look too old, too fat, too bald or insufficiently successful (these are, apparently, the concerns of many 50 years after leaving high school). Last week I started worrying if I’d even get there on time. The reunion starts 8 hours after my train is scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles, but I’ve got to rent a car (which can take some time) and drive an hour to get there, and I ought to shower after 2 days on the train, too. 

So I called Amtrak, if they can’t make trans-continental trains run on time, they CAN and DO operate a wonderful, friendly and helpful call center.  A young-sounding guy who gave his name as Eric soon had me all sorted out. I’ll go a day earlier, giving the train a full 32 hours of potential late arrival time before the reunion begins. 

After living in Taiwan, where there were plenty of trains that generally ran pretty close to “on time”, it comes as something of a shock to realize that the options are so few in America. But this is a BIG country and it’s been wedded to the automobile and interstate since the second world war. Riding the train is comfortable enough, but riding ANYTHING for 40 hours or more gets tiring.  The blessing of living in Holland, MI is that there is a station here, with a daily early morning departure to and late evening arrival from Chicago every day. The station is near enough to our house that we can gauge, by the train’s horn, whether it’s on time, and it generally is. 

 

All aboard!

 

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

Picture That

Were we really too busy, or was it just that we didn’t want to face sorting and labeling all of those digital photos we’d taken and uploaded to the computer since about 2004?  Because we lived in Taiwan for most of the months from our beginnings at digital photography and until we retired in 2018, large numbers of the pictures were taken there. But we were perhaps a bit over-enthusiastic when visiting relatives in the USA during those years, too, and have far too many pictures of kids in swimming pools, vistas over the Great Lakes, and holiday meals.

We’d occasionally look at the files on one hard disk, thumb drive, CD or another, and despair of ever making heads or tails of the file names assigned by camera, computer or photo processor. Like many people with boxes of snapshots, we figured we’d have time later.  Now that we’re retired here, we’ve perhaps arrived at the time and place where the time is available.

But, in the meantime, how does one find anything?

It became a question, and then a problem, because someone who runs an archive encouraged me to write down the highlights of “a missionary life” before they slipped from my mind. He also wanted pictures and scans of objects.  If he wants trophies and gewgaws, we’ve got boxes of those. But they really don’t say much, and because the writing on several of them is in Chinese, they don’t mean much here.

I started the writing thinking I’d do a “year by year” thing.  That wasn’t working, so I decided to get the pictures first. I dealt mainly with slides and prints, thinking that the digital ones would be easier to sort through. Not only was I wrong about the sort, but getting pictures first to help in writing didn’t work either. So I went back and got chronological, starting with each of us as children in families. Eventually that got us to Taiwan, then the chronology was the back-and-forth between Taiwan and the USA  for the next 42 years. It worked. I got 39 pages. Another helpful thing was writing in the third person “about” Char and Dave in Taiwan. Once the events were in order in a file, it was time for the pictures. Digging through boxes and hard drives has “succeeded”. 

Now it’s time to go back and edit the 3rd person text. Then it will be time to write 1st person things in sidebars and fill in more 3rd person stuff about things forgotten on the first pass. Will it be a book?  I hope not. The world has too many books, and “…the only books worth reading are books written in blood” (Frederick Buechner, The Clown in the Belfry, 1992, p77.). Will the exercise prompt either or both of us to arrange the photos and digital files? I hope it will, because that is at least something tangible. 

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

Thanks for the Memories

It took a few flights and spending time in three airports. (Flights I don’t mind, but airports I abhor.)  I got to schmooze with Taiwanese people, speaking Taiwanese, for several hours. I was in Manhattan, and in New Jersey.  These are things I enjoy.

As I’ve related the story to folks back in Michigan, one or two of the “characters” who I met have featured in the stories. They were pleasant, though it’s more fun to relate where they approached being as annoying or ridiculous as myself. But all is forgiven, because today I received a couple photos from the event, one of which is here.

Thank you, annoying person, for your kindness.

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

In Other Words

Among the many things that helped me, a child of Southern California and “mature” man of Taiwan, to choose Holland, MI as a retirement spot, is a group of men who have been meeting once a week to cook and share breakfast at Hope Church for over 60 years. Recently the last charter member, who is now 97, retired from the group. He had already been exempted from any responsibility on the cooking rota, but found himself no longer up to the early rising time on Wednesdays, nor to the joyful conversations around the table.

Each Wednesday, 2 of the guys cook and set the table for everyone else. There are between 15 and 20 in the group. Food has to be on the table promptly at 6:15 or the razzing starts. Then, after a short (the shorter the better) prayer of thanks, we dig in, eating and shooting the bull for about 20 minutes. The plates are removed, and coffee cups are refilled, after which a few pages of whatever book we’re working through are read. That takes up about 5 minutes, after which discussion of those pages commences. Sometimes the talk stays “on topic”, sometimes it wanders. 

I wandered into this group one Wednesday morning in 1990. I was a stranger, and they took me in. Participants at that time included a retired accountant, a retired dentist, a semi-retired physician, a truck driver, a retired English professor, and a bunch of other “old guys”. I was nearing 40 years of age. The next youngest guys, a pair around my age, related that their spouses had opined they were too “young” for the group.  Six months and several breakfasts later, I returned to Taiwan. But every time I came back to town I’d show up on Wednesday morning and eventually be back on the cooking rota for so many months as I was around. Through the “book” part of breakfast I was introduced to authors like Frederick Buechner, Anne LaMotte, N. T. Wright and Marcus Borg. When arriving here in 2018 I was dropped into Speaking Christian by Marcus Borg.  We’re nearing the end of that book, a chapter on “The Lord’s Prayer”. One of the guys is a little touchy on that topic, because he wants the prayer said by everyone, everywhere, in the words as he learned them when a child. In his estimation, there’s no equivalency between “save us from the time of trial” and “lead us not into temptation”. 

The discussion sent me to my files, where I discovered 38 “rewordings” of the Lord’s prayer that I’ve penned since 2001. I can vaguely recall even more, but they’re lost somewhere in cyberspace or locked in defunct hard-drives. I put together a document, mostly with my breakfast buddy in mind, and I share one with you. It can be sung, by the way, to the tune of the Mexican Hat Dance.

Loving Father eternal you own us. That your name’s holy is quite a bonus.

May your kingdom be coming among us. Do your will both in heaven and earth.

Give us daily the things that we’re needin’, and forgive all our sinnin’, we’re pleadin’.

As we likewise are others forgivin’. Keep temptation away, evil end!

All the kingdom and power and glory that have always been part of your story,

these are yours since creation, eternal. Then and now and forever AMEN

 

Tune: Mexican Hat Dance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g8CEOpVSZU

 

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

Purple Martins

Sometime last month, using a panel of a yellow door I’d cut up, a pencil I’d gotten as swag from a display at a meeting, and some blue paint from a can I’d originally purchased to touch up some walls where I’d patched the plaster, I created an imitation Agnes Martin painting. It wasn’t very well thought out; neither was it very good. I took a picture of it, then leaned it against the garage wall where it gathered dust for a while.

A couple weeks back I picked up the board and used a miter saw to cut it into four smaller “paintings” which I framed and hung in a group as “A Flock of Martins”, but it bothered me. Where martins live, they consume mosquitoes in large quantities. There’s a public park in Paullina, Iowa that is surrounded by the particular kinds of nesting boxes that martins like. But martins are not yellow and blue. They are purple.

Today, with nothing better to do, and not wanting to get into any more trouble than I’m already in, I decided to do some purple Martins (which are different from purple martins). This time they’ll be on paper. I’ve painted one piece of cardboard white, and tinted another purple. The white one was dry first, so I proceeded with my free swag pencil to draw a grid on it, mix up some purple oil paint, and put a mark in each box. The paint left over was thinned to a wash and poured over the other piece of paper. When it dries (probably tomorrow), I’m planning to draw a grid with that same pencil and use white paint to make marks in the grid there. Purple on white, white on purple. When I eventually cut these to size for framing, I’ll have hang them as “Flocks of Purple Martins.” Now the only challenge is to find a wall upon which to display them.

David Alexander resides in Holland, MI after 39 yars in Taiwan