South of Cancer, North of Capricorn, East of Bengal

27 December 2009

Pingtung

The windows are open and the early evening breeze rustles at the curtains. In the empty lot behind our house there is insect call – chirping mostly. There are a few birds but the last of the butterflies has gone for the day. The grass was cut a couple of months ago but it has grown back and is now thigh high. There are a couple of renegade banana plants and a few trees, mimosas I think.

A fountain drips; the water masks most of the puttering of scooters a few streets away. For Taiwan the neighborhood is quiet, calm. Although the markets are still open and the food stalls are lighting up for the evening, the pace is slower on this Sunday. It may not yet be a day of rest for these industrious people but they are learning to make it a day at half-speed.

We are surrounded by our things – photos of Alex as a little girl, a picture of us on our wedding day, my books, candles, framed remembrances, the Encyclopedia.

There are smells, sounds, feelings that define what it is to be back here. Our house is in Pingtung, now virtually a suburb of Kaohsiung, second city of the island, a huge place. Thirty or more years ago I recall walking the streets around the old port, which was then still a dangerous place with sailors pitching out of bars and lost ex-pats playing dice and whoring. Container cranes have replaced swaggering Greeks and beer-soaked Yanks. The last of the hangers-on after the US closed the airbase are gone. There is a Costco, an Ikea, the Dream Mall (either the biggest or one of the biggest in Asia) and Starbucks and McDonald’s, there is even a modern metro whose lobby is ceilinged with stained glass.

I would stay at the Kingdom Hotel. The Ambassador, on the other side of the Love River, was more modern, plastic. The Kingdom was comfortable, smoky. Middle class Japanese businessmen and western expats on assignment stayed there. The bar was carpeted and traditional: stools, Taiwan beer on tap, bottled Guinness and Heineken. Sometimes you played ‘balut’ to see who bought the round – a game with five dice in a cup and a scoring system whose complexities increased in proportion to the amount of beer ingested.

Across the street from the Kingdom there was a ragged row of bars and cheap, Western-style restaurants. The bar girls spoke the hoarse English of bar girls everywhere in the Orient from Seoul to Saigon, raspy and strangely exotic. The customers at the Kingdom bar were a mix. The most interesting were often the Westerners, mostly Americans in Taiwan with the occasional Brit, who had come out years before, during the War or as engineers or commercial officers for one of the hongs and who had fallen down the black hole which can be Asia. Frequently they were well read and intelligent. Mostly they were lost and their stories were the stuff of fiction, wars and bright lights. I would drink with them, beer fuddled and seduced by their tales, into the early hours. Sometimes after hours of drinking and suddenly hungry, we would wander to a nearby night market and eat noodles and pork belly.

We were all, in a way, the off-spring of tea planters, opium traders, China Marines … even a few missionaries.

They call this half of the ring out here, the Asian edge of the Pacific, stretching from Jakarta through Singapore, Bangkok, Manila, Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul, Osaka and, now, Shanghai and Shenzhen, the rim. It is the edge, still.