We'll Always Have Paris ....

17 January 2010

I’m back. The trip from Taipei was fine for the first 13 or so hours, I boarded around midnight and went into a coma as we passed over the Eurasian land mass. It was dark the whole distance. And then came Paris, the city of ‘half light’ on a gray winter day. Europe has been wearing a cold blanket for the past several weeks. England, poor England, is covered in snow and paralyzed. Spain is coping with more snow than it’s had in years.

Charles De Gaulle didn’t seem so bad. There was a bit of dirty snow alongside the runway, it looked like it had been scraped off the tarmac about two or three days before. After getting my luggage and stepping outside the terminal for my first cigarette since leaving Taipei, the weather was brisk and slightly humid but not impossible. The skies were low and gray but that’s winter and it’s to be expected.

I wandered away from Terminal 1 and found the train that took me to Terminal 2B and Easyjet; well, not actually to Terminal 2B but within a kilometer of it. My flight wasn’t yet ready to board, I’d gotten in at 6 and they weren’t taking any baggage until 8:30. There was a kiosk selling undrinkable coffee that I gagged down and a croissant that I’m going to write to Sarkozy about. I thus passed an enjoyable half-hour before I got the chance to consign my bag to Easyjet.

Freed of the responsibility of hacking around with a suitcase filled with Taiwanese treats for my daughter, I found another kiosk whose proprietor was in cahoots with the operator of the first I’d been to but this time I found a convenient bin into which to pour the contents of the cup of ‘coffee’ he sold me before they ate through the cardboard cup.

Flight time approached, I went through security – always fun when you’ve got a metal hip on one side and 15 screws holding your leg together on the other. I moved to the front, waving my crutch at folks so they would know that I was one of those needy souls who required early boarding. I found a chair near a couple of families coping with babies who were not pleased with the way things were going and, as is the wont of babies, were robustly expressing themselves. So far, so good.

Of course, they didn’t board us on time, but with the weather in Madrid and over a lot of other European cities, a delay was to be expected. Forty-five minutes later, a half-hour after we were scheduled to have taken off, the ground staff vanished, literally vanished – I think there may be hidden stairways behind those desks where they stand near the gates, always seeming to be very busy, huddled over their monitors, playing World of Warcraft.

So, about a hundred and fifty of us stood or, in my case, sat, and stared at each other, wondering what to do. I’m not like that, though, I’m a man of action, at least I was after 20 minutes or so. Of course, the onset of initiative may have been helped by the fact I needed to pee and there were no toilets on this side of security. I got up and hobbled back through the friskers and past the x-ray machinery to the check-in desks, stopping at the toilet. Back at check-in I was informed our flight had been delayed an hour. I figured, selfishly, my fellow passengers would eventually deduce without any assistance from me that the flight wasn’t going for some time so I wandered away through the terminal rather than back through security, deciding that I would take another shot at finding a palatable cup of French coffee.

You know, it’s a wonder to me still that you can cross the border down there near Monaco and stop at the first cruddy looking station on the Italian side, ask for a coffee and be immediately transported to cappuccino heaven. How can that be? What is wrong with France?

You’ve probably figured out that our flight was delayed even more than the hour I was told about and you’re right. We were postponed another 45 minutes and then another hour and then two hours. At some point the young Walmart Welcomer who stood at some type of lectern just before the ribbon-tape maze that you line-up and shuffle through at all airports, so that you can be informed that you have to pay extra for your bag, actually had no idea about the flight at all, she even asked me for information. I was beginning to slip into a Kafka novel. Clearly action was required, drastic action.

Now, the French are still struggling with the art of coffee making but they’ve got a modest reputation for wine and I decided to put that to the test. I found a slightly plastic bar-cum-bistro manned by a surly and completely unmatched couple. The female was a blue-black-haired (that stuff seemed to suck in the light) twenty-something type with an interesting, albeit also frightening tattoo that spread its sinuous tentacles up her neck from somewhere below the collar. The male half of the sketch was a shaven headed young North African immigrant, pleasant, rather shy and without a clue about what he was to do as a waiter.

I sat down and asked for a glass of wine (which I can ask for in twenty seven languages, including French!). After conferring together, the couple determined that what I wanted was a glass of wine, red wine. There! First time out of the box they got it right! And the stuff, at four or five euros the glass, was very, very drinkable. I had two. Landing on the scant contents of my stomach (half of a stale croissant), the pair of them (the wine, not the folks running the restaurant) quickly imparted a nice glow. But, they improved the young couple running the bistro at the same time. Their attitude got better and the female’s gleaming midnight hair was, I realized, actually just one of those French fashion things that they can pull off and I can’t. The snaky tattoo thing was actually a bold statement using the side of her neck, and who knows how much more of her body, as a canvas on which to write a commentary about post-industrial life. The North African was not just a new, nervous employee whose waitering skills were tested every time he brought a glass of wine, struggling to keep the tray balanced but a symbol of the new France, the Rainbow Nation of Europe.

Pretty soon I was feeling left-bankish. The plane had been delayed again, I’d confirmed that because there was a conveniently situated departures monitor which I discovered outside the toilet after my third wine. I pulled a hand-made notebook out of my backpack and a beautiful new pen my sister-in-law had given me for Christmas. This was just the moment! I was here, in this enormous concrete carbuncle of an airport, sitting at a bistro table. This was France, this was the place where Sartre and Camus and Derrida and so on had helped to frame the literary and philosophical dialogue of the world after the War.

I ordered another wine and began to write. Here, let me quote from my new notebook, which has a lovely green cloth cover decorated with painted, elegant Chinese characters: ‘This is my notebook’. Yep, that’s it, I deconstructed the notebook; I captured in that short sentence the whole existential anguish of the airport. My notebook was real, the wine was real (the second and last sentence of the entry is: ‘I’m having a wine’) but the flight, Madrid, the airport, that was all getting a bit blurry. I think it may well have been fading away as a nice case of jet lag arrived to help things along. Or it could have been some break-through in my perception of the material world although I think it could have been the ‘vin’.

And so the afternoon wore on. I eventually ate something, it was good, lamb I think. I had one more wine and then it struck me that, attractive as it was, I really didn’t want to sit at that little bistro for the rest of my life so I ordered a coffee! I can report that although my senses were ever so slightly affected by the wine, they were as sharp in the afternoon as they had been those eight or ten hours before when I’d had my first coffee on arriving at CDG (that’s Charles De Gaulle for short or, possibly, it may stand for Café Du Garbage). Night was falling, set off by the warm glow of institutional fluorescents, my flight had reappeared on the departure list, life was good. I paid and leisurely wove my way through the thickening crowd, through security and onto the plane. I got on the right one by cleverly confirming with everyone that this flight was going to Madrid (the one in Spain, just to be double-sure).

The rest was easy, I let the crew take care of the flying bit and the taxi on the Barajas end the driving bit. Our doorman was kind enough to take responsibility for the get my luggage out bit and push the elevator button part. I easily found my way down the hall to our apartment door and after only two or three tries was able to make the doorbell work. That attracted my daughter’s attention, who intelligently (she is my daughter, after all!) linked the door bell’s sound with the presence of someone without, wanting in. I was back in Madrid!

Fate...

6 January 2010

Pingtung, ‘Los Reyes’

I like the word ‘irascible’. I think it’s onomatopoetic. It just sounds just like irritability should sound.

So, I think that describing fate as irascible is both just and evocative; it sounds as if it’s pissed off. And, much of the time, it appears fate is, basically, a curmudgeon. I write this because my experience of the fellow – I think he’s a ‘he’ but she could as easily be a ‘she’ (I don’t want to be accused of sexism on this topic) – has frequently consisted of cosmic practical jokes, with me as the butt.

Today, for instance, fate decided to test me. I was sitting on the roof terrace, enjoying a beer and a quiet cigarette, ashing my smoke in an empty can left over from the previous evening that I scrounged from the bin we keep on the roof. There was a pleasant breeze and the wind chimes, from Santa Fe, which have adjusted nicely to their new Oriental home, were playing something classically Chinese. Overall, a nice way to spend some ‘me’ time.

Of course, just when I was having some out-of-body, peaceful experience, fate interfered and I ashed my cigarette in the beer I was drinking rather than the empty can (note to self: use different brand cans when drinking one and ashing in the other). The choice I was left with was whether to abandon the cold, refreshing beer I was drinking or carry on bravely, ignoring the ash content.

At first I rashly tried to pour out some of the beer, assuming the ash would float off. I checked myself just in time and stayed my hand, this is, after all, beer we’re talking about.

I don’t think I’ve ever drunk beer mixed with ash before – at least not the first one. There’s always, though, a time for these new experiences and, with two and a half flights of stairs between me and the refrigerator, this seemed the ideal time to try it.

Well, I can report that apart from a slightly gritty taste, the beer seemed to be unaffected. I sipped away, contented, the breeze wafting across the roofs, tinkling the chimes and me, slightly prone and very relaxed.

So, although irascible fate has tested me yet again, I do not think I have been found wanting. I have taken a few roughs with the smooth, a bit of grit with my brew, and have emerged, beery but unbowed.

Tainan

2 January 2010

Pingtung

Tainan, by the admittedly low standards of urban design and beauty that prevail on this island, is a pretty city. Before they were all bulldozed, the city woke up to the fact it had a few interesting relics of the past. Chief among those was the 17^th century Dutch fort which was besieged by Koxinga/Zheng Chenggong, a pirate who is frequently mentioned as a national hero of Taiwan. Still standing, the Dutch fort, called Zeelandia, was originally on Anping Island but the tidal inlet between it and the mainland of Formosa eventually silted up so that today it sits several blocks from the sea at the Western end of Tainan city. When Fred Coyett, the Dutch Governor, surrendered the fort to Koxinga in 1662, it brought an end to 38 years of Dutch presence on Taiwan.

By the way, Fred was called ‘Frederik’ but I think, being an American, that the shorter form sounds more accessible …friendlier.

In the center of the city there is a 17^th century Confucian temple and school. It sits in a park. It was the first Chinese institute of higher education on the island. I liked it; the architecture was still Chinese with those curved roofs supporting dragons perched at the ends but inside it was very simple, austere even. Compared to the architectural chaos of the Taoist temples that dot most cities, this place is refreshingly understated.

In front of the temple there is an impressively large Banyan tree which has apparently been sick (I’m not completely surprised, after all, it’s reputed to be several hundred years old) but the good folk of the city have been working to make it well; it’s been a symbol of the temple for a very long time and they rightly would like to keep it so. A dead tree is not nearly as attractive a symbol as a live one – the same thing applies to the oak (or something) that grows in Guernica and is the symbol of the Basque nation. Here in Tainan they’ve put up several plaques to honor themselves and their efforts to revive the tree. I can report that, apart from the encomiums to its saviors memorialized in eternal bronze, the tree lives still, but it looks poorly and I suspect that full recovery is a considerable way off.

There was a food fair in the park and blaring popular Chinese music. The food was good but I couldn’t help wonder what the ghosts of the students who buried themselves in the Analects when the place was an institute of education would have thought about the noise. Unseemly would seem a good guess.

Still, Tainan has sidewalks that are open, broad streets and a number of parks. Rather than build up, they’ve built out, the place is geographically bigger than its population would lead you to guess. It may be, though, that some of the building out is from fear – a lot of the land is reclaimed and the Japanese will tell you, ruefully, that the reclaimed land turns into something like water in any decent earthquake; better to build low and spread the weight than build up.

We drove along National 17 when we left the city; it follows the coast for a while as you head down towards Kaohsiung. The murky air makes the sea the color of dirty bathwater but the authorities have made the best of it and built paths, public areas, parking lots and benches from which you can look out at the water and watch bobbing barriers that mark the line between various commercial fish farms. Wherever there was a tidal inlet, the bridge over it was lined with people fishing. I liked it but, then, I always like coastal areas.

Buddhist Banquo?

1 January 2010

Pingtung

Eccentric, that’s the word. I’ve been trying to find a term to describe the latest stage in the evolution of my Mother-in-law’s character. When she elected to become a Buddhist nun, sometime in her 50’s, I would have described her as devout, determined to spend the rest of her time on this coil performing various exercises that would ensure her next rebirth would be less filled with work and disappointment.

Over the years I think she has moved from devout to ever so slightly potty and frequently a bit grouchy. Yesterday was one of those grouchy days. She always gets up early and wanders down to the kitchen where she spends way too much time over a pot, stirring up some virtually inedible concoction of bean curd and vegetables (no onion or garlic please!) but the family assures me that she was always a pretty miserable cook so no real change there. What impresses me is the amount of time that she invests in cooking and eating. The quantities of the muck she consumes are impressive – I figure she stays rail thin because she has managed to boil out all of the food value of whatever ingredients she mixes together. Even the smell is faintly repulsive; normally Chinese cooking is a welter of smells, many exotic but virtually all enticing (except for a type of pickled bean curd whose olfactory characteristics are not attractive).

So my Mother-in-law finishes her cooking and eating – she needs to rush because she will have to begin preparing her next meal shortly. Meantime, my wife is busily cutting and chopping and so on, getting things ready for a family shabu-shabu in the evening (our New Year’s banquet if you will). The ingredients are fresh – seafood, beef, lamb, tofu, vegetables.

My Mother-in-law looks over my wife’s shoulder, ‘What are you preparing?’. When informed that it’s a meal for the family and the ingredients are enumerated she mutters and wanders off, ‘I guess I’ll have to go to the temple’.

Buddhists are generally the most tolerant of the religious amongst us. I frequently tell people in the middle of arguments about how Christianity is a religion of the emotions that no one ever charged into battle shouting the name of Buddha at the top of their lungs. This doesn’t, however, seem to be the case of my Mother-in-law on one of her grouchy days.

My Mother-in-law is now getting on for 80. I suspect that her mental faculties are as good as ever they were. What I also believe is that they don’t come into full use except when she is grouchy. It is during those periods that she gives play to a sharpness that is otherwise disguised by what I suspect is a form of piety that includes both generosity and an inward focus that seems to be an objective of being Buddhist.

So, Mom-in-law was not pleased, on this grouchy New Year’s Eve, by the notion of a family dinner where the attendees would stuff themselves with God’s creatures. All day, after learning it was her plan to go to the temple, I wondered what would be the end-game. Evening and the arrival of family brought the answer.

I should explain that ‘Amah’, as she is referred to by the family, is not exactly Kate Moss. She shaved her head when she became a nun and has kept the same hairdo ever since. It’s not unattractive, it’s just there – and I think that’s the point of shaving it for Buddhist nuns and monks, you get rid of sexual differentiators. And her clothes? She dresses in a loose shirt-like thing and some even looser pants that are tied at the waist with a string. The color is a becoming and uniform washed-out gray (from daily laundering).

Amah’s teeth were pulled a couple of decades ago and, since then, her smile has been one of the sights of Pingtung, enhanced as it is by her brilliantly white dentures. But this evening we were not to be graced by a dazzling display of her oral prosthetics. I saw her half an hour before the first relatives were to arrive and she was toothless, her lips compressed into a depression around the gums. Very attractive. It was clear that she was heated up and not in a party mood.

Recently Amah has taken up making notebooks of cheap computer printing paper with covers made of intricately decorated cardboard from used boxes. I am not digressing here ….

New Year’s Eve and the pending arrival of family for a slap up dinner was, in her view, exactly the right time for Amah to decide that she should park herself on the marble steps just inside our door to cut used Christmas boxes into notebook covers giving her an excuse for being there so that, toothless, she could glare at every relative as they came in, wordlessly condemning them for the cannibalistic rite in which they were about to participate.

Being Chinese and inherently polite, everyone made note of Amah’s presence as they entered, nicely circling around her and making appropriately respectful noises. They then traipsed into the dining room to eat. Eventually with all the guests at the table and Amah absent (after everyone was here she managed to trans-substantiate herself from the downstairs entrance, past the dining room and upstairs to her room, unseen) I innocently supposed that we had seen the last of her for the evening; she would go to bed, it was getting on for 7:30 or 8:00 and that’s lights out for most Buddhist nuns. I was wrong.

So there we were, talking away, piling the beef, shellfish and other sinful ingredients into the shabu-shabu pot. I, playing gracious host, was intent on keeping every glass filled with plum wine, beer or some other alcoholic beverage, aiming to get 80 year-old Grandfather inebriated enough so that he wouldn’t go off and gamble whatever he had in his pocket (a winning evening would be even worse) and the rest of us could just relax and enjoy the time together.

It was at this point that our Buddhist Banquo showed up. Gliding down the stairs, all gray and toothless, Amah percolated into the room. Refusing a seat at the table where the slaughter was underway, she hovered behind various chairs, murmuring vile imprecations while still commenting on our cooking techniques (around a family shabu-shabu pot, culinary skills vary widely, mine being particularly unique).

We managed to wind the evening up very nicely. Everyone ate their fill and I rate the dinner a success. The shadow of Amah hung over things for a bit but optimism in the face of adversity is our watchword and, with enough alcohol, specters become illusory. The last guest stumbled out and we went to bed just after midnight to the echoing booms of what were clearly celebratory bombs.

The rest of the night passed peacefully except for the ruckus around 3 AM when a spectacularly lit neighbor’s wife noisily tried to prevent the man of the house from taking a leisurely drive around town. Ultimately she convinced him that bed was a better bet but by then the first dawn of 2010 was on us.

Today’s Laundry – Wash Before Wearing

1 January 2010

Pingtung

There is a little enclosed garden space off the living room. The garden wall is covered with orchids, all types, hanging in little nets, their roots spreading along the tiling. Some have thick, long leaves and others small delicate ones. Roots climb along the spaces between the tiles, taking in moisture, feeding off the rich air.

Crystal skies are a rarity, the humidity is high year-round and frequently a light sea fog moves inland from early morning into the night. Nimbus clouds hang above the shrouded countryside. The sun is diffuse, its rays cut and weakened by hanging, microscopic bondings of hydrogen and oxygen.

There is a strange appositeness about the climate; in winter the atmosphere is like a cotton sheet that lightly covers and in the hot season it is a blanket that suffocates. What nurtures also consumes; mosquitoes flourish, termites feast on anything wooden, even concrete and steel cannot defeat this environment – the concrete becomes pitted and prematurely aged, the steel corrodes. New aluminum structures are soon covered with a patina of moisture and mildew that erodes the brightness of the metal, creating hoary monuments of even the recently constructed.

The orchids – and this time I have fooled myself (and, perhaps, you) because the seeming digression after the first paragraph above was not a digression at all but, rather, part of the point of this splurge of words – are compensation for the weather; they bloom, brilliantly effusive, long-lasting, apparently delicate but surprisingly hardy, giving us color, light and beauty in a small, exquisite package that can make the corner between walls a reason to reflect.