Today’s Laundry

31 December 2009

Pingtung

Yesterday we drove along the coast, south towards Eluanbi. Narrowing quickly, the coastal plain thins down to a point where the mountainous backbone of Formosa slips into the South China Sea. Eventually the highway and the old, Japanese-built railway run nearly together, the latter ducking in and out of pitted concrete tunnels that I figure were built to protect from high seas, landslides and, perhaps, were intended to camouflage it from the air.

As you head south of Pingtung there are banana plantations and factories. Apart from the mountains to the East, just kilometers away but difficult to spot through the sea haze, the plain is as flat as a pool table.

We didn’t make it to Eluanbi – it’s not far but we stopped and took a nap on the coast just north of Kenting. When we woke it was time to drive back.

This morning we drove to Dongkang, the fishing port. The boats don’t get in until 2 pm so we had to settle for yesterday’s catch. However, since we were buying shellfish, prawns and the like, they were live anyway. Once bivalve, a greenish clam-like being, looked delicious and I’m told they are very good with basil and butter. They stick a stalk-ish appendage out of the shell and then spit at you. I will have my vengeance at our New Year’s Eve dinner tonight.

We reminisced as we drove, this route past cane, rice and corn fields, remembering mutual childhoods when the sugar-cane seller would sell a foot-long piece at a time, to Ting here in Taiwan and to me in Sonora (I still wonder where they grew it, certainly not in that desert!). You would chew the fibrous interior and the taste of that sweet juice is a memory that lingers, always there.

Later, back in the relative chaos of Pingtung (relative because it is nothing compared to the bigger cities), we stopped along the street at a bakery that produces marvelous fresh cheese bread and loaves filled with sultanas and nuts. How these people remain so slim is something that still baffles me. Perhaps it’s the water?

Schools were letting out and I think I was the only gwai-lo on the street so that every one of them wanted to shout ‘Happy New Year’ at me. Chinese teenagers seem so naïve compared to their Western homologues.

Ugly?

28 December 2009

Pingtung

On the surface our town here has all the charm of a strip mall. Scooters side-swipe cars and pedestrians with equal insouciance; public sidewalks are extensions of whatever commercial establishment that front them, providing extra display space for clothing racks, stacks of plastic utensils and bowls and bike and cycle parking. The kitchens of eating shops are often outside the premises, on the sidewalk, where it is cooler for the cooks in summer and where the frying and sautéing and stewing acts as a both a visual and olfactory advertisement of the pleasures to be had at the narrow, slightly dirty tables of the establishment. Mostly, too, they are right, those advertisements, the food is basic but flavorsome and prepared with a flair that comes from a combination of a millennia-old cultural fascination with cooking and eating and a need, born of scarcity, to use all of the fresh, edible ingredients that are available.

The bakeries produce soft, fresh pastries that are unrivalled except by the best croissants in Europe. But here they are made in bewildering variety, cheese, cinnamon, sausage, onion, fruit, cream ….

I am still on a crutch, just one now as my recovery from a broken leg proceeds, and limping across the streets is a challenge. I hobble across the intersection; no one intends to kill me and no one does; one old woman, plump and with crooked teeth that she’s proud to show, smiles at me as I hobble by, gunning the hand accelerator of her scooter. It’s a nice smile.

The 7-11 is gleaming and offers not just the usual mix of chips and beer and cigarettes but an aisle of fresh packaged food that is appetizing to look at and smells delicious. The clerk, seventy if he’s a day, enjoys selling me the English-language paper, speaking a combination of Mandarin and a version of English that is just enough for my scant Chinese that we can transact some business. Business done, we smile, wave and say ‘good-bye’ and ‘tsai-tsien’ – ‘see you again’. I hope we do.

Outside the bakery I sit and read the paper and sip at a cappuccino that is as good as any I’ve had in Italy.

Later. I still have the smile that the chubby lady on the scooter gave me this morning.

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.

Today's Laundry

19 December 2009

Madrid

So Google has been fined about 400,000 euros for digitizing French language books. What idiots occupy these positions of responsibility in the French Government? Language, and literature, are, if not originally, open-source cultural tools, aren’t they? Yes, if you write something and copyright it, it’s yours for a time and you get to make money off it. Fair enough. What doesn’t make sense is for some narrow-minded linguistic chauvinist to participate further in the murder of a beautiful language. A hundred and fifty years ago – I was going to write ‘a hundred years ago’ but my asseveration wouldn’t have been true – French was pretty much on a par with English, a world language. Today you can speak it in France, at least in France outside of Paris where any attempt by a foreigner to communicate in the local lingo is regarded as an act of lese majeste. You can try it in the countryside of that beautiful country and it’s bienvenue, no matter how fractured your pronunciation and limited your vocabulary. You can speak it in Quebec, in Gabon, in the rest of Francophone Africa, in Haiti and a few other places but that’s pretty much it. When I was in college we were conned by French language grifters who persuaded us to take courses in the tongue and then disillusioned further when we learned that if you wanted to work in a French speaking country, you were more likely than not to end up in some desperately poor, malarial dictatorship.

So, we’re witnessing the further decline of French. The lesson is that if you don’t make your cultural patrimony accessible, it becomes ossified, fit only for a museum. Literature – even the bad stuff – needs to be available if it’s going to make any difference to people. In France they’ve decided not to participate in the democratization of literature and culture that is being delivered for other tongues across the internet. You won’t be able to call up a free copy of an out-of-print and out-of-copyright book in that language. Spanish has sped by French as a world language and English is completely dominant (I recall over-hearing a business conversation some years ago in the lobby of a Seoul hotel whose participants were Finnish, Chinese, Russian and Japanese, all speaking some form of English). Chinese is not far behind and Arabic and the Turkic languages will no doubt all have an international role. Only French will not be at the party and that’s because the fools decided not to attend, despite being cordially welcomed if they did.

And in Catalunya they continue to march backwards. A meaningless referendum was held for about a third of the voters in the region this past week. About a third of that one-third actually bothered to vote. The vote was to express support for Catalunyan autonomy/independence. So, let’s see, one-third of one-third is about one-ninth I think. Seventy percent of that one-ninth voted for some form of independence, amounting, in the end, to less than 10% of the voting age population. Hell, I bet that you’d get more voting for Texas independence!

So what is Catalunyan independence about? I reckon it’s about inferiority. The entire region is riven with a resentful, hard-headed dislike of Madrid and Castilla in general. There’s a history behind this, Franco was rough on the place. But Franco died a long time ago and Spain is now part of the EU. The central Government spends a lot of money on Catalunya and there’s no reason for this silly posturing.

Catalan is a ridiculous language. It is something between French and Spanish. If it wants to survive and people want to speak it, I’ve no problem. When the misbegotten regional government in Barcelona decided, however, that there wasn’t enough of it being spoken and it began to promote its use over Spanish, it was a body blow to the economy. Catalunya has always had a strong, industrial economy. Its people are creative and enterprising. Hobbling it with a requirement that forces the use of Catalan in place of a more international tongue is even worse than what their cousins across the Pyrenees are doing with French. There are very few people who speak Catalan but there are now signs in Barcelona that tell you it’s okay to reply in Catalan when someone addresses you in Spanish. The schools require students to learn Catalan. It’s no surprise that more and more back-office work is being transferred to Madrid where I suspect the regional Government doesn’t care whether you answer your phone in Spanish, French, English, Mandarin or even Catalan; the point is to communicate and get the work done.

Barcelona needs to take a lesson from the Dutch. There is no stupid language posturing. The Dutch speak Dutch, German, French, whatever they need to get things done. You can walk into a shop virtually anywhere in the country and do your shopping in whatever language you want, your money is what does the talking. Be practical Catalunya!

Whew! I feel better.

Sunday coffee ....13 Dec. 2009

Madrid. It is before 8 AM and the sky is cloudy. It is a Sunday morning in early September. We are in the barrio of Salamanca, the most expensive area in the center of the city. I can see a woman in high heels perched on the window ledge of a brick building, some four floors above a courtyard. The building is modern compared to its neighbors, built in the 1950’s; those that abut it date from the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

The woman is blond and even at a distance I can tell she is dressed fashionably. She is holding on to the bricks around the window. She is edging her way along the ledge to an open landing, about a meter away from the window. If she stretches, she can just reach the edge of the wall and pull herself into the open stairwell.

I am standing on my roof terrace, peering over the edge, watching the woman.

She is a thief.

A handbag is strung over her shoulder. I am certain that it contains the jewelry that she has stolen from the apartment whose window she has just climbed out of.

I think about yelling at her, about calling the police. I am afraid, though, that if I do the first, it may startle her and she could lose her footing – the high heels she is wearing are far from suitable for second story work. I think about the risk of her falling. Her life would be forfeit if she did lose her balance, the courtyard below is paved with limestone slabs and it is a drop of 30 or 40 feet. If I elect the second course of action, without startling her by calling out, and I just call the police, by the time they come she will be long gone. I muse that the purpose of their response will change radically to an investigation of death by misadventure from presumed thievery if I do yell and she loses her grip and crashes onto the stones below.

A few seconds only have passed and the woman climbs safely onto the landing. She straightens her dress, I notice that she is tall and slender; whether she is pretty I can’t determine, her features are too vague at this distance. I am certain she is Eastern European, probably a Romanian. Or perhaps I am wrong? I have deducted her ethnicity from my experience of the city. It is full of economic migrants; many of them work – as plumbers, carpenters, electricians, maids, waitresses – but many are criminal, pick-pockets, muggers and, more daringly, robbers who climb into carelessly open windows, left so by their tenants, seemingly secure because they are several floors above the street.

In an instant the blond thief moves off down the stairs and I know that within a few seconds more she will be at street level and out of the building. She will make her way down Ayala, which is empty at this hour, to Serrano where there are already a few pedestrians on their way to early Mass or to buy a loaf of bread or a newspaper. She will blend in and vanish.

There is no time for me to go down from our seventh floor roof terrace and around the corner to pursue her; among other things, I am in my bath-robe and I would surely lose her trail if I stopped to change. The alternative, scurrying down the street in my bathrobe and slippers, is embarrassing and I discount the option. I ask myself if my behavior is actually cowardice and am I just looking for excuses for my inaction?

My early morning coffee on the roof, usually a time of inchoate, multi-directional musing, has turned into a period of singular reflection. How have I behaved during this drama? What did I see? Why have I chosen to interpret it the way that I did? Have I witnessed a crime? I saw a woman leave an apartment in an unorthodox manner; she climbed along a ledge and I concluded that she was a jewelry robber, a second-story woman if you will. But, was she? Could she have simply been the resident of the apartment and lost her key which in this case was required for both opening and closing the door, inside or out?

That line of speculation is spurious, I move back from the edge of existentialism. I know that she is a thief and that I witnessed the last moments of her crime – the escape. I have never seen her before. No one would take the risk of death like she had if they weren’t up to no good. There remain a couple of scant possibilities: Perhaps she was leaving a lover? Perhaps she murdered someone inside the apartment and by climbing out of the window she supposed that suspicion would be directed towards someone other than her?

The sun has risen higher and the chilly temperature of the dawn has given way to a pleasant warmth that I can feel through the terry cloth of my robe. My shoulders are relaxed as I lean on the wall that encloses our roof-top garden. I take my coffee and turn away from the scene of the crime and move back to my chair. I sit and look up. The sky this morning is calm. There are a few cirrus clouds scudding about, propelled by winds several thousand feet above the calm at ground level, diverting me by their shape-shifting. I can no longer see the neighboring building, the open window that has been violated is now a mental picture only and what I’ve just witnessed is already fading into a mind imprint that seems unreal. It will be a memory that one morning, this morning, months later, will, without conscious thought, float to the surface of my ruminations.