Take that, you, you … flag!

I’ve not waded on this kind of thing for some time as there are a load of people doing it bigger and better than I am able, but the scenes I saw all over today’s papers and news channels of people (including legislators) burning the flag of the Philippines were embarrassingly adolescent but all too familiar.

Most of the angles on the spat itself have been more than adequately covered, though the incredibly one-sided depictions in the Taiwanese media of just what went down (the constant reference to “disputed waters” when this looks like pretty obvious dissembling, and the almost universal failure to mention the alleged ramming provocation by the Taiwanese) are noteworthy. But the one thing that really irks me, more than Ma’s lame posturing and oh-so-ominous 72-hour ultimatum (which has just passed) is how these threats target the most vulnerable people, people who have, and doubtless want, nothing to do with this debacle.

Various groups have pointed out the spitefulness of targeting migrant workers over something that  “has nothing to do with underprivileged laborers”. But it should come as little surprise. It was the same last time round with the the extradition/deportation case of the Taiwanese fraudsters in 2011, where Ma’s admin made exactly the same threat.

They didn’t follow through on it. I wonder why. The government has dismissed any suggestion that these moves might be cutting off their nose to spite their face, as Filipino workers are apparently easily replaceable with workers from other countries. The tone of all this rhetoric seems to be “we’re doing you paupers a favour by letting you earn a living here” as if there were no benefit to Taiwan. As with all such nationalistic/xenophobic rabble-rousing against immigrants (in any country), it’s nonsense, but nonsense that never fails to pull the wool over people’s eyes, which is doubly handy at a time of plummeting approval. It’s not far removed from Chen Shui-bian’s classy bid to pin blue-collar unemployment on foreigners back in 2000. Interestingly, in that case, “the development of a more democratic, responsive government” has been cited as paving the way for the scapegoating of migrant workers. ¹

Let Taiwan start freezing applications, rejecting visas and refusing reentry to those whose three-year permits expire. Better yet, why don’t we start booting out these undesirables, the lot of ‘em? After all, if they are so easily replaced with other Tailao (泰勞) …

Only, Ma and the government, despite appearances, aren’t that stupid. As with most countries that face ever-dwindling birthrates and an upwardly-aspiring population who aren’t going to do these jobs, they know that they need these immigrants. So, regardless of the short-term import of this posturing, we should be under no illusion as to the vacuity of the rhetoric we’ve been hearing.

Unfortunately, stoked by the media, flag-burning parliamentarians and a self-perpetuating mob mentality that quick spirals into utter irrationality, people don’t seem to be able to step back and see these issues clearly.

Finally, Michael Turton has already been here, but I can’t help but revisit this unwittingly hilarious countdown during a 10-second  silence for the fisherman who was killed. (Ten seconds? Who the hell does 10 seconds? Was he worried that’s all they could hold out for?) A friend also pointed out that, while Ma calls for everyone to rise in respect, and then be seated at the end of the 10 seconds, he doesn’t seem to move so much as an arse cheek. Don’t put yourself out too much, mate.

UPDATE:  They’ve recalled the envoy and suspended applications. BBC correspondent Cindy Sui’s inset background on the spat reads in parts like government propaganda. We are told:

Experts say underlying these clashes is long-time resentment in the Philippines over Taiwan’s bigger and more sophisticated fishing industry, which is able to tap the marine resources near the Philippines in ways its fishermen cannot.

And that:

Now, Taiwan wants to not only seek justice for the dead fisherman’s family, but also hassle-free fishing for its crews and a more lasting solution to the problem.

This last line could have come straight from one of the local rags.  I’d expect better from the Beeb. As for “hassle free fishing”, maybe stopping incursions into the terrirorial waters of other countries might be an idea. We’ve already heard that the particular crew in question had been “hassled” (from Ma, no less) on several previous occasions. Why?

SECOND UPDATE: This courtesy of a commenter over at Turton’s. Four days after signing an agreement with Japan, they’re at it again.

The exterior of the building that houses the store. Despite the large poster and sign outside, I’d walked past it several times without noticing it. The store is on the second floor (first to we Brits).

Perhaps not from the very minute I started this blog,  but fairly early on,I realised that, with a fair number of  blogs relating to Taiwan already out there, I wanted it to be a little different. I don’t mean stylistically, though that too, but in the actual content I would present.

Generally I try not to write about stuff other people are writing about and, if I should sometimes stray from this defining maxim, stumbling down well-traversed paths, in doing so, I try my damnedest to leave deeper footprints than those who’ve gone before.

Trinity Indian Stores is well-known to gourmands, restaurateurs and most Taipei old hands worth their cardamon seed. When I finally managed to locate it just a couple of minutes walk from where I’d been doing some voice recording yesterday, I felt like I usually do in secondhand bookstores:  giddy with excitement at the breadth at so much good stuff ; picking up everything in site and replacing it without even properly looking; wanting to buy everything and invariably walking out with nothing.

In fact I did makes some purchases for a BBQ at mine tomorrow: chickpeas and  seasoning for one of my flagship simple but effective dishes (chana masala), a chicken tikka masala BBQ marinade, and a palak paneer sauce. I also put in an order for half a kilo of paneer (similar to cottage cheese), which they only order in every few months. At other times, Neville Chen and his brother, who man the store in the absence of its Indian owner, will make it for you if you order in advance.

Chen is an engaging chap. Chewing on leaf-wrapped, double-hit binglangs that are flecked with sour plum powder, and taking breaks in his narrative to attend to his empire-building in whatever multi-player RPG it is he’s playing,  he gives me a detailed rundown of how a Hakka Chinese ended up being born and raised in West Bengal.

“My grandfather ran away from China during World War II,” he says in a familiar Indian-English accent that is amusingly peculiar coming out of the mouth of a Chinese person. “He was running from the Red Cross, you know? Not the emergency medical one. But that fucking bastard Mao Zedong.”

“The Red Army?” I offer.

“Yes, that’s it. Well those fuckers wanted his land and there is no way you cab get out of it or get it back later. So there is no point in staying there anymore. So he ran away.”

Were they KMT supporters?

“Nothing to do with that. KMT, Mingjindang (民進黨) [there was no point in pointing out the obvious here as he was in full flow and it was fun], it doesn’t matter. Those bastards just tell you they want your land and that’s it.”

Neville hard at “work.”

“Let me explain,” he said, standing up to better act out the story, the same way I do, a habit that friends and family find either annoying or silly. “My grandfather was a good guy. He didn’t rip off the farmers. I’m not a farmer, so I don’t know the exact amount, but let’s say you made 20 k.g. of whatever on your land. After that, he would say ‘Every extra kilo is yours.’ He allowed his farmers to live and eat and do well for their families. But the Red Cross Army, they don’t think like that. They ask you ‘How much do you need to eat everyday?’ Let’s say you need just one biandang (便當) for each of your family. You tell them 500NT. But they say, ‘Noooo … We can see you are doing well. You don’t need that much. You can have 100 and we’ll take the rest. That is what they are fucking doing …”

As I left the store, Neville was going into the kitchen. “I’ll do that paneer for you now. My brother will be here tomorrow. He’ll have it for you.”

Today, I went back during my lunch break to pick it up.

“Paneer? No, no paneer,” says bro. He get’s on the phone to Neville. “Oh, he forgot.”

Neville’s a nice enough chap, warp-speed loquacious, and liberal with the invective, but in a way I like. I do suspect that he is allows  computer gaming to dominate, though, when he should be handling his biz.  I’m definitely asking for a discount tomorrow.

Goodness.

Trinity Indian Stores: 2/F, No.137 Zhongxiao East Rd., Sec. 5, Taipei (台北市忠孝東路五段137號2樓). The shop is in a normal residential-type apartment building and is pretty easy to miss. Get out at City Hall (市政府) MRT, exit 4, turn left and walk for a couple of minutes max (if you’re a snail pacer) and you’ll be there. If you get to the corner of Yongji Rd. (永吉路), you’ve gone to far.

Tel: (02)2756 7992

e-mail: trinityindianstore@gmail.com (You might catch Neville there as there’s a good chance he’ll be on the computer.)

These compulsory purchases (a term which, along with “collateral damage”, belongs in the oil-stained pages of doublespeak lexicon) were the subject of much debate. Featuring those chalk-and-cheese Michaels – Turton and Fagan  – the best tit-for-tat on the issue can be found here.

There are some complicated and emotive issues at play here, and I have to admit I do find myself intuitively baulking at the idea of eminent domain, as it known in the U.S. But, short of positing an ontological basis for property rights (as is Fagan’s wont) which, however philosophically tenable, just muddies the issue by failing to acknowledge the facts on the ground, Turton’s points halfway through that exchange seem to me decisive, and are worth quoting here: “Those farmers in Miaoli have that land because it was expropriated in the name of the collective good from some big landowner in the land reform and then handed out to the farmers. Except that the big landowners had that land because the state promoted them in the Qing or Japanese colonial periods and enabled them to acquire it. As a collective good, of course. Or maybe the Miaoli farmers got that land by finagling it from the aborigines, usually in defiance of Qing law, which was often quite enlightened. Which local magistrates did not enforce because such appropriations were a collective good.”

To be clear: Arguing that state requisitioning of property or land constitutes a violence against the individual and a breach of an assumed moral right to property is all well and good; but when multiple redistributions have occurred under similar or more inequitable circumstances, one seems to be in something of a bind. Turton has doubtless read Shepherd’s seminal Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600-1800 (possibly the best book on Taiwan that I have read), which corroborates his points about the Qing large-rent system for pingpu aborgines and the willingness to turn a blind eye to exceptions that tended toward the general good. Turton continues: “You can talk about “property rights” in the abstract but in the real world they are generally historically contingent, and again, contingent on state action/inaction in the name of some collective good.”

With these things at, if not the forefront of my mind, washing around somewhere in the recesses, I recently engaged in a discussion of the KMT’s Land Reform Act (實施耕者有其田條例) with a friend who lived through the era and has personal experience of the state appropriations that began in 1953. “Simple theft” he said, questioning the almost uniformly trumpeted transformative power of the program and pointing out that other countries had achieved similarly equitable economic development without state coercion (Malaysia being his main example). His main gripe was that many people labelled as “landlords” were in fact small landowners who were stripped of their property on the grounds that they were  fleecing their poverty-stricken tenants. “The situation,” he said “was not comparable to the feudalism in China where landlords abused peasants.” (Interestingly, the authors cited below agree with him, though their chronology seems to be a tad awry.)

He insists that the system that existed in Taiwan was relatively fair and that abuses were not tolerated, certainly under Japanese rule. Naturally, most of the dispossessed agree with this analysis and continue to call for redress.

Taiwan Land Reform Museum (土地改革紀念館) is located in a lane behind the Land Bank of Taiwan near the corner of Zhongxiao Dunhua S. Rd, Sec. 1 (忠孝敦化南路一段) and Bade Rd, Sec. 3 (八德路三段). There’s never anyone there and there’s not an awful lot to see. The vaunted figure of 37.5 – the percentage of yield that tenants were required to pay under the first stage of reform from April, 1949 – is emblazoned on nearly every exhibit. There are some models of behatted country folk working the land, a few diagrams and graphics, chronologies. The little spinning block’s puzzle (what would one call that?) with the character for rent is probably the coolest thing there.

It’s worth a rainy half hour, though, as Frank Ho, the curator, will stick a video on for you. I think he’s chuffed just to have someone there. The film is a thoroughly cheesy affair but what strikes you in the images of soil-toiling pride is how easily these images could quite easily be from the propaganda of the bandits (共匪) from across the strait. (I was struck by a similar notion when listening to a South Korean “tour guide” denounce the criminals over the border while visiting the DMZ.)

The best thing about the museum is they’ll give you a couple of CDs, one of which contains PDFs of two books that are on display. One is Land Reform in Taiwan by then Premier and Vice-President Chen Cheng (陳誠). The second is Land Reform in Free China by Tang Hui-sun (湯惠蓀), chief of the Chinese-American Joint Commission for Rural Reforms, with oversaw the implementation of the land act. I’ve yet to plough right through them, but even in the forewords one cannot miss the dissembling, unwitting irony and pompous bullshit that seeps from some of the choicer passages.

In Chapter 1 of Free China, we are told that reform in Taiwan was “was an urgent necessity, especially in view of the maldistribution of land tenure, which hindered agricultural production and forced down the farmers’ standard of living.” ¹ There then follows a nebulous attempt to ground reform of the “irrational system of tenure in Taiwan” ² on Sun Yat-sen’s gospels (a standard procedure that was used to justify some of the worst abuses of the regime), the applicability of which “to the conditions of Taiwan is only too obvious.” ³

Right.

Most interesting are the cross-strait comparisons. Like Old Peanut’s statue at Fuao Harbor in Mazu, the authors gaze wistfully out across the strait, posing that perennial post-hangover conundrum: “How did we manage to fuck up quite so spectacularly?”

The title of Tang’s book (a none-too-subtle barb at the bandits) is a good barometer of what is to expect from these two works: in between the “facts” (tenant rent “in extreme cases … might be as high as 70 percent” ⁴ of annual yield) and figures, iterated references to the paragon of KMT policy are juxtaposed with the shocking abuses of the Communist regime. The terrifying excesses of the land reform movement in China are so well documented, that there’s not much I can add to the record.

But what is fascinating is that the authors are not denouncing the struggle sessions, which often involved the settling of old scores, gun-point dispossessions, torture, beatings and (up to) two million summary executions of “class enemy” landlords in China. Quite the contrary. Though the accusations set off in the realm of unchallengeable fact with the claim that “in the name of agrarian reform, the Chinese Communists have created a reign of terror”⁵ they quickly board a flight to Reverse World (反轉世界).”Chinese farmers,” says Chen “have fallen into the status of serfs.” ⁶

If one were drawing up a list of the many communist failures, a regression into feudalism (at least at that time) would seem a peculiar choice to headline with. All the more so when followed up by this most telling caveat:

We are sincerely sorry for our failure to carry out Dr, sun Yat-sen’s land to the tiller ideal while we were still on the mainland. Though that failure may be partly attributed to internal disturbances and foreign invasion [really, you couldn’t make that one up.], it was due mainly to the selfishness of a small minority of people, to their shortsightedness and lack of courage. ⁷

So there you have it. If people hadn’t been so spineless and selfish, everything would have been cushty. Of course, this has been thrown in there to address the poser that will have struck any half-sentient reader: If the commies were so awful, why did they win? The fact is, the PRC approach (if it can be called that) to land redistribution that the authors condemn (for, as I have said, completely the wrong reasons) was the main factor in the hearts and minds campaign that won them the country. ⁸

Still, remorse for these failings can only go so far, and the authors make it clear that actions speak louder than words:

We are determined, on the basis of the experience gained on Taiwan, to put the land-to-tiller policy into effect on the mainland after its recovery. Our brethren there then may be delivered from starvation and slavery, and come to enjoy the freedom stability, and happy life that they are entitled to. ⁹

 Taiwan Land Reform Museum

Address: 10F, Dunhua South Rd., Songshan District, Taipei 105. (Entrance to the museum is actually round the back in the lane.)

Tel: (2)2579-2509

Opening hours: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. except Saturdays, Sundays and national holidays.

Admission is free. It’d have to be.

In 1336 Petrarch hiked up Mount Ventoux, near Avignon. Supposedly, no one before him had made such a trip just to see the view. Once on top, Petrarch opened a copy of St. Augustine’s  Confessions (obviously a different kind of climbing gear was carried in the trecento) and happened on the passage where Augustine rails against those who “go wondering at mountain heights … and to themselves they give no heed.”

Suitably abashed, Petrarch scuttled back downhill. But during his brief sojourn upon the Ventoux peak, the poet stood astride the medieval and modern ages–the first European to climb a mountain for the heck of it and the last to feel like a jerk for doing so.

–P.J. O’Rourke, All the Trouble in the World

The last few months of my life have been riddled with hindrances – those contributing to my failure to touch this blog in 2013 are  among the most irksome, but unavoidable. It is no fun to say that what is keeping me from writing is writing (of a mind-numbing variety). 

Still, the long weekend for Tomb Sweeping Day, was failure distillate. Let’s start at the top. Or about 10 metres shy of it. For, after more than six hours of walking, we quit within frozen gobbing distance of the peak at Yushan (玉山).

The early hours when we couldn’t see the woods for mountain mist.

We’d started the walk from the hostel at 4 a.m. and got back down to the same spot at 3:20 p.m. From there, it was a three hour-plus journey back to Chiayi (嘉義). The whole day was about 15 hours and it rained doggedly for about 12 of those.  I have to admit that I was more than a little scared at several points during the ascent, but when I no longer had any feeling in my fingers and the chains attached to the rock face began to slip through my grip, I called time to my partner and “team leader” The Inveterate Bede.

I actually told him that I’d cling to the rock I was perched on while he made the final push;  but he was also in a real two-and-eight by this time, unable to see a thing through the fogged up lenses of his glasses and, hands almost as numb as mine (I think my fearful clutching of the chains throughout had exacerbated things; indeed, worryingly, I still have not regained full sensation in my two ring fingers), terrified he  would lose his specs to the white abyss.

Flecks of snow spattered off the rock as we stood there prevaricating, but the swirling veils of wind sealed it. Bede reluctantly conceded that, yes, it was getting too hairy. The retreat began. We had been agonisingly close and as we made our way back down, Bede was already playing out plans for his next assault in his mind. An hour into the descent, it was a few months off. By the time we were back in Chiayi, he had decided to apply for another permit immediately.

Although I, too, am thinking of having another go, I wasn’t half as gutted as he was. In fact, the other frustrations that beset our trip were as grating, if not more so, for me. Some attractions in the city were closed for the whole holiday, including the Chen Cheng-po Cultural Foundation (陳澄波文化基金會), which I had very much wanted to visit.

“Chiayi Park” by Chen Cheng-po in, funnily enough, Chiayi Park.

Chen Cheng-po

Coincidentally, I had first heard about the painter Chen Cheng-po just the week before from Christopher Young, grandson of another renowned artist and target for the KMT during the White Terror era, Yang San-lan(楊三郎). Patrick Cowsill has a short blog on the gallery that Christopher runs dedicated to his granddad’s work. I’ve not had the chance to visit yet, but shall do so when time permits.

Yang eventually fled to States via Japan. Chen was not so fortunate. Just weeks after the start of the 228 uprising, Chen was executed along with other civic leaders and intellectuals. As with many such decent, law-abiding citizens during those horrific months, they were lured 100 flowers style  into openly expressing their views, the chimaera of reforms and a part in a future government cast before them by Governor Chen Yi. Expecting reasonable negotiations with the authorities  they made their way to the airport where the military were engaged with protestors. Instead, they had their hands tied behind their backs with wire and were paraded through town before being shot like dogs in front of Chiayi Train Station. Their corpses were left to rot for days as a warning.

A friend related this personal anecdote about Chen’s body: “Among the witnesses was the then 8-year-old immediate past vice president (Mr Hsiao Wan-chang¹) whose mother handed him a lit incense stick and asked him to walk over to Mr Chen’s body and say a prayer. This was an unusually courageous act as the body was guarded by armed KMT soldiers.”

Late last month, Chiayi residents marched in commemoration of the fallen. Particularly apposite was the observation by one of the march leaders that Zhongzheng Park (中正公園) opposite the cultural center is named in honour of “the main culprit” of these atrocities, with a statue of the murderer still taking pride of place. “This is just absurd,”  Chen Ying-hua (陳英華) said. Disgusting, I would say. The demonstrators called for the renaming of the park and removal of the statue. In the meantime, they made sure the late dictator couldn’t observe proceedings by covering  his old peanut dome with a bag.

Chiayi apparently has something of a reputation as hotbed of artistic talent ² and Chen Cheng-po was the preeminent Taiwanese oil painter of the colonial era and one of the few to be accepted as a peer of his  Japanese contemporaries. He was noted for his representations of Danshui (a perennial favourite with aesthetes, it would seem) and reproductions of these and other paintings can be found on fringe of the park.

The not-so-dear leader just yards away from where Chen’s paintings are displayed and the cultural foundation dedicated to his life stands.

It took as a while to find the cultural foundation as it is basically through a courtyard in a nondescript residential building opposite the park. The concierge confirmed that it was closed until the following Monday, which meant we wouldn’t get the chance to check it out on our final Saturday afternoon in Chiayi, the day after the Yushan hike.

*

My biggest regret (I can’t really say failure here) is that I didn’t get to see another former Chiayi native who also had a significant part to play in the White Terror period. It was by chance that I happened upon Elegy of Sweet Potatoes: Stories of Taiwan’s White Terror when stopping by a friend’s bookshop in Taichung. She told me that, shamefully, a stack of copies of the memoir had been found en route to a dustbin down in Tainan (I think). A friend had rescued them and she gave them a home.

Tsai Teh-pen’s (蔡德本) fictionalised account of the year-plus he spent in custody on ridiculous, trumped up charges of sedition is without doubt the most moving of the several books I have read on 228 and the White Terror era, even managing to edge out George H. Kerr’s seminal Formosa Betrayed in terms of poignancy, if not historical value.

Chiayi Old Prison, which doesn’t look old anymore.

Cells along one of the prison’s corridors.

I learned from a friend that Mr. Tsai was still alive and now living in Tainan.  A couple of weeks before we were due to set off on our trip, I had managed to get hold of phone number for him, and  I started to think about whether I might change my plans and head further south for an afternoon post-hike. I called and spoke to his wife a couple of days before we left. At first she wasn’t sure what I was about, but once I convinced her that I wasn’t trying to cause any trouble, she remembered that our mutual friend had mentioned that I might call.”I’m afraid to say he’s unable to communicate properly anymore,” she said of her 87-year-old husband. “He wouldn’t be able to talk about this stuff.”

“Can he still understand you?” I asked.

“Well, yes, but ….” The line went quiet. Realising that she thought I was still angling at some kind of interview, I explained myself: “I’d just like you to let him to know that I thought his book was really moving and that I liked it very much.”

“Thank you, she said. That’s very kind of you.”

*

On the Saturday after the hike, we visited Chiayi Old Prison, the only prison to be afforded Class One National Monument status. On my checklist, this was pretty much the sole success, and it was crap. Firstly, the old facade of the archway has been completely redone, but instead of restoring it with contemporaneous materials, as is often the case, they’ve made a complete pig’s ear of it, using the ugly slabs of concrete that you expect in public buildings of the current era.

Then there are the dummies of prisoners scaling the walls to “escape”. Classy. If you’re up for a bit of role play can also be a  prisoner, guard, prosecutor or “correctional officer”; only on weekends, mind. Finally, I quickly realised from the description, diagram and photo in Mr Tsai’s book that this could not have the facility in which he was initially interrogated and held, so the one thing that could have been a redeeming feature of the place wasn’t.

A great way to add some gravitas to a historical monument.

A home-made tattoo gun – about the most interesting exhibit at the prison.

At a later stage, I intend to put up some more of the many resonant passages from Elegy of Sweet Potatoes, but, then, I intend to do many things. Our mutual connection asked me to put something down for posterity as there really isn’t much about this widely available in English. So,  for now, I shall leave you with a couple of passages that stood out for me, primarily because they show an optimism and pride that quickly turned to disillusionment and disgust as the Taiwanese realised their hopes of a say in their own future were naive pipe dreams.

Youde recalled the day when Chiang first visited Taiwan soon after the war was over. ³ On that day Yu-kun had clung to a tree branch and over and over, in his already hoarse voice, shouted ‘Long live President Chiang!’ … Yeh and Wen-bang, too, both astride the same tree branch, were shouting ‘Long live President Chiang.’ One by one, Chiang had sent these patriots to the execution yard, these young me who had once admired him and welcomed him with such fervor.⁴

It is ironic that the most whole-heartedly celebrated Double Tenth Day took place during the first two years after Taiwan’s restoration in the midst of a dire shortage of material goods. Even in a small town like Putzu, people insisted on having not one but two parades: one parade of flags in the morning and a lantern parade at night. ‘We felt then the day was indeed the founding day of our nation,’ Youde reminisced. But now Youde could only consider this day the founding day of a conquering foreign regime. No matter, the day must still be an eagerly awaited holiday for the children. Youde thought to himself: I wonder how my parents felt when I, as a youngster, celebrated Japan’s founding day and the Emperor’s birthday? Is it the destiny of the Taiwanese people to forever celebrate the national day of a foreign regime? An Aggression Memorial Day was more like it!⁵

Stone-carved monkeys are all over Chiayi. They’re a relatively new-fangled, touristy “tradition”. This one is outside the Kagi Shrine (a former Japanese shinto shrine) that is now the Historical Relics Museum.

Chiayi Park, which dates from 1910. Bede wasn’t so impressed but I found it a nice, leafy retreat. Several of Chiayi City’s main attractions adjoin the park or are within ambling distance. It reverted back to its old name in 1997, having been slapped with the ubiquitous Zhongshan in 1949.

Your name IS down? Well, you’re still not coming in.

Peter Whittle’s comprehensive walloping of the unfunny joke that is Section 9 of Taiwan’s Nationality Act assails every inch of its target with heavy, precision blows.

Two years ago, Whittle submitted a suggestion on reform of the blatantly discriminatory provision that requires foreign passport holders to renounce (at least one of ¹) their other nationalities.

Back then, the numbskulls at Taiwan’s Ministry of the Interior summarily rejected his suggestions his with – to be charitable – the flimsiest and most specious of reasons and – closer to the mark – “deeply unsavory attitudes and prejudices” that hold that allowing dual citizenship for foreigners could “be harmful to the quality of life” of Taiwan’s citizens.

Whittle has pretty much covered everything that will have ever occurred to any sentient foreigner living in Taiwan, including  the observations that “the renunciation condition brings absolutely no benefit to Taiwan, either tangible or intangible,” and that it “is an exclusionary rule that reflects very badly on Taiwan’s attitude toward assimilating non-Chinese immigrants into its society,” and which “constitutes a serious blot on Taiwan’s nationality law and international image.”

What I liked most of all was the statement that it “can only have a negative and undermining effect on families that a new immigrant is debarred from holding the same dual nationalities as his family members.” Why did this particular line strike such a chord? Because the numerous other criticisms play to the rational egoism: This is in your interests Taiwan; this will make you look good.

The emotive, social point though, addresses what I feel at a gut level (and I’m not talking my Yuletide-exacerbated paunch here): how can a family ever feel like a family when one of the parents is always Other? Unfortunately, in my experience, it is the common decency approach that is most likely to evoke rolls of the eyes and knowing smirks when invoked in polite conversation. “Oh, like it’s ruining your life” seems to be the thinking. Well, no, it’s not ruining my life as such. But it’s always there gnawing away in the background and it’s not nice.

Perhaps the only thing one might take Mr Whittle to task for is the fact he goes over several of the issues again and again, percussively, as if he were speaking to a moron who needed to have this shit drilled into his head with a trephine. But then you remember he pretty much is. This should be obvious to anyone who has argued in circles with knee-jerk defensive types who reveal the exact opposite of what they intend by their insistence that nothing is wrong with anything.

So, well said Mr Whittle. The full text is here.

Ami singers at last month’s event at Huashan

There are some blogs that just won’t be written. At times, I’m frustrated by the feeling that these are potential pearls; that if I could somehow prise them from their unyielding shells they might outshine the rest of my largely ephemeral output. Mostly, I lose focus or interest. Or I feel that the effort I’d need to expend is not commensurate with any satisfaction I might get.

Sometimes I put it down to time constraints. These are real but it’s a cop out to blame them. If I really wanted to get it done, I would.

Countless half-arsed posts have fallen by the wayside; several much larger projects fester on my desktops at home and work or on hard drives in various stages of frazzle. I’ve lost some.

It’s been a month since my last post here – possibly the longest elapse between posts since I started writing this blog. I’m not sure. During that time, I’ve toyed with putting up one of several other posts that I have in reserve. The longer I leave certain kinds of post (usually the more personal kind), the less likely they are to ever get finished. An  apprehensiveness that gets closer to disgust with each revisit takes clammy hold.  So, it’s satisfying to be able to sweep some mess into a pile here, even if it has taken a month.

This post really began life in early spring last year. So many things have happened since then, so many changes and changes back again; for my two friends who were physically present only for the start of what follows, but have remained in my heart throughout, and to whom I dedicate this scrawl: so many whats, what’s, what ifs, what nots, what happened? what happened, what should have happened and what possibly was never meant to.

*

For the Aesthete and Great Yu. Excuse me if these words aren’t even close, let alone not quite. Almost impossible to do.

*

The three of us were at the old sugar factory at Dulan (都蘭), having arrived after a two-hour ride from the mountains of Taitung County’s East Rift Scenic Area (花東縱谷國家風 in and out of the rain for the last stretch along the coast. We’d made it bang on time to see the aborigine singer Long Ge (龍哥)  perform his weekly set at the bar.

In those heady days when, loafing in his dank, shoe-box hovel on Roosevelt, the Aesthete and I first used to drown a couple of sets of substandard tennis in King Robert’s finest,  he had presented me with a pair of eclectic CDs of local music, ranging from the likes of punk nutters LTK Commune (濁水溪公社)  to Minnan (閩南)-speaking cabbies’ wailer-of-choice Wen Xia (文夏). Long Ge was one of the featured artists on the compilation and I remember the Aesthete’s pithy liner notes had him down as  ”an ugly old fat man.”

When we finally saw him in the flesh, this slur turned out to be as reliable as the Aesthete’s backhand volley, though the “Dragon Brother”  did seem to have one leg. (“Polio,” I conjectured. “Prosthetic,” the Aesthete insisted.  From what I remember, the lad was right on this one.) Although he’s an Ami, Long Ge sings mainly in Mandarin. Once the official jam was over, however, he and his clansfolk got down to business with some polyphonics in the back yard.

I wrote one blog about a minor detour on our way down to Dulan, here. The main post of the epic trilogy I had in mind was on Lidao Village (利稻) and Lisong Hot Springs (栗松溫泉), the very raison d’être of the trip. Emotionally, I was in a strange place when I began penning that piece; it went through about six revisions and currently sits in my Gmail drafts, perhaps never to see the light of day, at least not in its current form.

It had also always been my intention to say a few words on the sing-song that night, so here we go.

The only photo I could find of Long Ge (龍哥) from that night last spring

This was the first time I had been exposed to off-the-cuff, free contrapontal singing of this quality up close. That’s not to say I hadn’t come across this type of vocalising before. Like many people of a certain age, I’d heard it the best part of 20 years ago as a sample on Enigma’s Return to Innocence; but I had no idea that these were Taiwanese aborigines until, I must reluctantly concede, my old housemate schooled me (added to your harrowing triumph over Davy Graham’s “Angi” that makes it about 79-2, I reckon G.) in my first year here.

The rendition of the Elders Drinking song, as it is best known, was performed by Ami husband and wife duo Difang and Igay Duana. I shall leave the shameful tale of thievery that saw the German cheesemeisters co-opt the vocals as the chorus of their worldwide smash to wiki here and this here. Check out a short clip of Difang and Igay singing the original here. So much more powerful without that 90s synth pop crap behind it, eh?

At various events, ceremonies, and cultural activities over my years in Taiwan, also, I had heard this stuff (NB I’m talking specifically about the kind of polyphonic singing that the Ami and Bunun are famed for) but it was always in rather sterile, disembodied surroundings, where the performers seemed as if they were on display – romanticized noble savages going through the motions, which can be the case with native cultures around the world, even when the intentions are good. ¹

In Dulan, what we we heard was the Ami equivalent of freestyling, with people from around the beer garden popping in and out of the main group to partner whoever happened to be leading the canon at the time. (At times they sang in pairs, at others, one person led three or four overlapping followers;  sometimes this was akin to the simple rounds that most of us have sung as kids (think Three Blind Mice or Row, Row, Row Your Boat), but usually it was much more sophisticated.

It was clear that Long Ge, who seems to have lost touch with this facet of his culture,  was not the star of this show, his repertoire in his native tongue ² being noticeably limited compared to many of the (interestingly, younger) singers. What I found particular interesting was the way whoever was leading the song would almost reject a partner they didn’t think was up to it by falling silent or appearing to lose interest. While there are set phrasings, they are weaved in out out of each other in layers with remarkable dexterity.

The unrequited would invariably shuffle off down the garden to the minor leagues (there were other groups strumming guitars and singing) or wait for the chance to wedge their way back in.  Most of all, though, the raw onomatopoeia set against the intricacy of the counterpoint ³ can hear the method ‘Call and Response’ that is usually used by black people in their gospel or spiritual, ” and that we can, therefore, “imagine that human beings in the world perhaps have a resembling cultural developing trace” is, I think so well-intentioned that it would be hard to take umbrage with its typically naive expression.] bespeaks a skill so ancient, yet refined, that  it takes restless children, the fully drunk or insensible, or psychopaths, not to be moved once an ear is given.
A plaintive tenor or lower-pitched voice, usually a male (on this occasion it was a stocky young woman of particularly fine voice),  anchors the whole, with one or two (usually no more than that in even a larger group) rhythmic falsettos providing the wailing, wavering punctuation that never fails to put my hairs on end. It’s mountain people calling to each other, separated by a just-out-of-reach gap, somewhere  in Taiwan’s wooded high mountains; farmers welcoming their family home from a taxing day in the fields; friends proposing a glass or two of millet wine ⁴   We stayed til late-early. Things went pear shaped. Complicated. I started a row with the Aesthete. He left me semi-conscious at a 7-11. The next day was difficult. I owe my sanity to a young Japanese fellow who dragged me from my quagmire of self-pity. It all comes round …

*

A year and half and a half later and I had an unforgettable weekend of music. Perhaps not so much for the sounds themselves but the emotions they triggered and how everything seemed to click. The videos and pics I’ve posted here are mainly from the aborigine ensembles I saw at Huashan. I could and still can find next to nothing about this event online (apparently it had something to do with this) but I learnt about it from sausage supremos Mark and Elsa.

Despite some extraneous annoyances, it was a lovely evening and I was really impressed with what I heard: unsurprisingly the Ami and Bunun were the highlights but the Paiwan double-pipe player was a slouch with neither mouth nor nose; the Kavalan (Gemalan) plains groups were none too shabby either.

The preceding few weeks had been strange. Friends from far afield had all come back into a picture that was way too cohesive for my haphazard life and spookily coincidental for an anti-superstitionist.  From LA, the Aesthete had dropped some aesthetics my way in the form of my first paid commission in ages; Great Yu was over from Frisco for family, and, out of the blue, the young Nipponese Facebooked me asking if he could kip on my couch.

After the aborigines, I dragged me old Miaoli mucker McDuff – up in the big smoke for a teaching symposium – over to Revolver. I’d been told by my associate R. “Bring Me the Strong Stuff” Strawbree that they were playing old-skool hip-hop and I should take a look. I was suspicious. Old skool to Taiwanese youts is Eminem. When a so-called “pimp” and “b-boy” I know got wind that I had interviewed some rap legends in Taipei, he was eager to find out who. Cue blank face when I returned 90s household names. PE. Blank. Ice-T. Blank.

“OK, you must know Premo? He’s one of the most influential DJs in the game. One half of Gang Starr? Produced some of the era defining music in the 90s. Nas’ Illmatic? Jeru The Damaja …”

Ah, at last, a flicker of cognizance.

“Ja Rule? Yeah, man. He dope!”

Taking it back to da Old Skool at Revolver.

I was right. The ticket lady let us have a sample to decide if we wanted to shelve out NT$350 for the night. Joni Mitchell via Janet Jackson was as close as it got to the Golden Era in the 20 minutes we hung around, though we were admittedly old-man early. McDuff jumped in a cab back to his hotel; I stood on a corner drinking one last can, mind as blank as a hamster, trying to figure out my next move.

As I ambled back past the bar, on the way back to the MRT,  the bass reverberated from the first floor. I think I detected some Biggie. Things seemed to be f/phattening. I half thought about asking them to do me a half price deal for the hour I had left til last train to Beitou.

*

The following night, accompanied by the Inveterate Bede, I was at at the National Concert Hall for the San Francisco Symphony performing Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, tickets courtesy of Great Yu.

I don’t think I’d ever been to a symphony before. Don Giovanni in Prague, the Nutcracker as nipper at the Albert Hall. (It always makes me smile to think that, apart from that, my attendances at that latter esteemed venue were to observe movement of a very different type: The closest I got to balletic elegance was, perhaps, Kirkland Laing’s drunken artistry).

Aside from the Dance of the Knights section from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, which I once had to hum to an amused sales assistant in the classical section of Brighton’s HMV many years ago when I wanted to get hold of a copy (I’d like to say it was my Bobby McFerrin-esque vocal instrumentation that got it across but  they tune is so distinctive that you’d do well to mess it up), and Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain (OK, basically anything that might have featured as a Hammer Horror theme) I’d be hard pushed to identify a piece of classical music.

The little I do know has come over the last few years, passed down by Great Yu in the form of FB convos and Christmas pressies – some Mahler, a smattering of Schubert, Stravinsky and St. Saens (again, instantly identifiable but something most people couldn’t put a name to) for my boys. Before and after the show, I leafed through two books she had sent me: the thoroughly enjoyable and palatable Listen to This by the New Yorker’s music critic Alex Ross and Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy by Adorno, much of which is pretty much impenetrable if, like me, you don’t have a basic grasp of the rudiments of music.

Ross is something of a proselytiser, lamenting the current age of “culturally aware non-attenders” who would proffer views on almost any other art form but whom clam up when it comes to classical music and would never shell out for a concert. These types, he says:

“know the principal names and periods of musical history: they have read what Nietzsche wrote about Wagner, they can pick Stravinsky out of a lineup, they own Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations and some Mahler and maybe a CD of Arvo Pärt. They follow all the other arts – they go to gallery shows, read new novels, see art films. Yet they have never paid money for a classical concert. They almost make a point of their ignorance ‘I don’t know a thing about Beethoven,’ they announce, which is not what they would say if the subject were Henry James or Stanley Kubrick. This is one area where even sophisticates wrap themselves in the all-American anti-intellectual flag. It’s not all their fault: centuries of classical intolerance have gone into the creation of the culturally aware non-attender.” ⁵

Bar the Nietzsche, and the American part, this would actually be too flattering a description of me, but the point remains: classical music is eschewed by many of us who are happy to wax lyrical about visual art and literature. I’m not sure what’s at play here but I suspect that, in my case, it’s easier for me to speculate about words and drawings as I can make out what’s going on. You can get away with talking about art and literature without having to know the vernacular or the nuts and bolts. When people start talking even basic stuff like keys to me, I get the mildly panicky feeling I used to get in GCSE maths when I didn’t understand something. ⁶

So ignorant were Bede and I of the way these things work that it wasn’t until some time after the performance that we realised that, ahem, symphonies don’t generally feature piano soloists! We were certainly glad for Yuja Wang’s presence, though, in more ways than one.

The minute she walked in, Bede I were slobbering like ravenous Pavlovian puppies (well, more Bede – naturally I maintained a modicum of my trademark decorum). Apparently she’s famous for her rather racy attire and, our front row seats (oh yes, dear) afforded prime ogling position for the backless red number she wore that night.

But the music, of course, the music!

I’ve often said that, not being a musician myself, I cannot really tell the difference between a very good player and a brilliant one but Ms Wang is pretty clearly shit-hot. My superficial mesmerism was soon displaced by near disbelief at the her skill and frenetic energy.

Immediately I recognised the opening piece. I nudged Bede and nodded knowingly, chuffed that I knew some Mahler.” South Bank Show theme,” I said. I wasn’t wrong about this part but when I did a bit of hunting in the days that followed, I was dismayed to find the tune was “composed” by Andrew Lloyd-Webber. Surely a world-class symphony orchestra would not be performing the works of the man behind such masterpieces as Starlight Express?

Everything became clear, though, when I discovered it was a variation on a Paganini theme. For years my dear mother has cautioned people on pain of death never to utter that reviled, doubled-barrelled surname anywhere around My Old Man the Drummer, as a declamation of pantagruelian length on charlatanry, plagiarism and fraud  is sure to ensue. Dad’s accusations are hardly without justification. Says Dutch composer Louis Andriessen:

“There are two sorts of stealing (in music) – taking something and doing nothing with it, or going to work on what you’ve stolen. The first is plagiarism. Andrew Lloyd Webber has yet to think up a single note; in fact, the poor guy’s never invented one note by himself. That’s rather poor.”

Pretty damning stuff, though elsewhere (in the article that quote comes from), people have defended him, saying the stick he gets is not much different to the opprobrium that was heaped on Gershwin and Puccini by high-brow types during those two composers’ careers. Interestingly, though he has won a couple of suits, Lloyd-Webber settled out of court with Puccini’s estate, which brings me to my point: I grew up listening to my dad go on about ALW’s thieving and seem to remember that he referred to Paganini (perhaps in addition to Puccini) as one of his victims.

Now, I don’t know wherein the difference between variations or “quoting” as classical bods term it, and outright pilfering lies but ALW doesn’t seemed to have done much different from many musicians before him and since. The Caprice No.24 has been used as a basis for dozens of derivative works.

Perhaps the argument is that in his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Rachmaninoff is bringing rather more to the table. Either way, the sheer number of people who have, er, “variated” this theme – some of them acknowledged giants of classical music – makes it hard for me to condemn ALW on this particular count. It also makes me wonder at the derision that is aimed at hip-hop. At least the samples are cleared!

It was Rachmaninoff’s take on Paganini that we heard on the night and Wang served it up a treat. After the interval, it was on to the main event.

Before and since I have listened to Mahler’s Fifth and while it is becoming more familiar, I still can’t say I really get it as a unified piece. This quite possibly has nothing to do with Mahler and all to do with the fact that I haven’t – that I can recall – listened to any extended, multi-movement piece of classical music more than once, with the possible exception of a highly-abridged version of Rossini’s William Tell in music class as an 11-year-old.

However, Mahler, was a progenitor in going against accepted norms and, during his lifetime. Adorno notes, the “irregular, unschematic aspect” of Mahler’s compositions. ⁷ This led them to be derided by some critics as “gigantic symphonic pot-pourris,” ⁸ and jumbled mishmashes of “hackneyed melodies.” ⁹ While this view of Mahler’s compositions is now dismissed as “absurd,” Adorno admits that “it faithfully registers what made them shocking.” ¹⁰

So, re-listening, I do wonder if his unconventional style might make it harder for the uninitiated to grasp the whole than, say, the obvious, gushing romance I hear in Schubert. There’s also Mahler’s penchant for messing with the instruments themselves and having them do things that stretch their capacities. To illustrate how “Mahler’s technical method was guided consciously by such positive negation, by protest against the accepted ideal of musical beauty,” ¹¹ Adorno quotes from the diary of viola player Natalie Bauer-Lechner, a disciple of  the composer and one of his closest confidantes. She relates the following observation from Mahler:

Having said all that, the most readily identifiable, obvious and enjoyable bits of the symphony for me are the ones that caused the most consternation to the naysayers when it was performed more than a hundred years ago: the ostentatious brass Funeral March opening and the Adagietto, the latter providing a real contrast to the “vehemence” and “storm” of the opening couple of movements.

Predictably, Adorno (and I suspect a lot of Mahlerphiles) sniffs at the Adagietto, saying it “borders on genre prettiness through its ingratiating sound.” Whatever, Theo. I sat with my eyes closed for most of it, lapping up those luscious strings and harp. It really is a beautiful piece of music. (Here’s a snippet introduced by Michael Tilson Thomas.) I think string adagios are pretty much hardwired into popular consciousness  through cinema (this one from Death in Venice ¹³ and Barber’s Adagio for Strings from loads of stuff but most notably Platoon).

With no photos of the performance allowed, this was the best I could do.

By far the most interesting and comprehensible (to me) critique Adorno uses is that of the Novel. Here he notes “Mahler’s impassioned relation to Dostoevsky,” ¹⁴ and relates a particularly interesting, though probably apocryphal anecdote:

“On an excursion with Schoenberg and his followers, Mahler is said to have advised him to study less counterpoint and read more Dostoevsky, only to hear Webern’s heroically timid riposte: ‘Pardon, Herr Direktor, but we have Strindberg.’” ¹⁵

Adorno continues, “Mahler’s music so often sounds as if it were trying to tell us something that calls to mind the great novel. The curve it describes is novelistic, rising to great situations , collapsing into itself. Gestures are enacted like that of Natasha in The Idiot throwing bank notes into the fire.” ¹⁶

While  I think these analogies are instructive in terms of helping me understand something about the seemingly disjointed structure of the work, I have a tough time seeing what he Adorno is getting at by drawing in Balzac and, particularly, the Romanticism of Scott. Dostoevsky, yes, insomuch as he was concerned with psychology and portended Modernism.

“His historical position,” says Adorno “is that of latent Modernism, as was Van Gogh’s, who still felt himself to be an Impressionist and was the opposite” ¹⁷

Fin de siècle decay, change and rebirth defined the epoque, so why extend the literary parallels to Realism/Naturalism? And why the ironic barb at Strindberg, who surely exemplified the tendencies of the age? ¹⁸

One final thought, which brings us  pretty much full circle. Mahler regretted never having focused on counterpoint in his youth. What relatively limited use he did make of  polyphony was probably influenced by his youthful recollections of rambunctious folk music.

 Strolling through a village fête with Mahler, Bauer-Lechner recalls:

“innumerable barrel organs blaring out from merry-go-rounds, swings, shooting galleries and puppet shows, but a military band and a men’s choral group had established themselves there as well. All these groups, in the same forest clearing, were creating an incredible musical pandemonium without paying the slightest attention to each other. Mahler exclaimed: ‘You hear? That’s polyphony, and that’s where I get it from. Even when I was quite a small child, in the woods at Iglau, this sort of thing used to moved me strangely, and impressed itself upon me. For it’s all the same whether heard in a din like this or in the singing of thousands of birds; in the howling of the storm, the lapping of the waves, or the crackling of the fire. Just in this way – from quite different directions – must the themes appear; and they must be just as different from each other in rhythm and melodic character (everything else is merely many-voiced writing, homophony in disguise). The only difference is that the artist unites them into one concordant and harmonious whole.” ¹⁹

Adorno speculates that Mahler was probably influenced by multi-part Alpine singing known as überschlag, which literally means “turning over”  and refers to the accompanying voice being sung above the principal voice. This paper draws on research into Austrian folk music by Josef Pommer from right around the time Mahler was putting the finishing touches to the Fifth. Among the techniques and traditions detailed, a passage about the vernacular that accompanied them caught my attention:

“Pommer explains the expression dreispanig for a  three-part yodel as coming from gspan or gspanin (team[mate]) for the fellow singer.  Pommer explains ‘When a singer is called upon to entertain the others with a song,  one can sometimes hear the refusal “I can’t sing, my mate isn’t here today (I kann nit singen, es is mein Gspan heut nit da).”‘”

HANNAH HURTZIG, The Waiting Hall. Scenes of Modernity, 2012. Installation and performance. Installation view at TFAM, Taipei.Courtesy the artist and Mobile Academy Berlin.

In weaving this year’s Taipei Biennial (September 29, 2012 – January 13, 2013) around the theme of monstrosity, curator Anselm Franke has created a compelling, if at times elusive, premise.

The jumping off point is The Monster That Is History (2004) by Taiwanese scholar David Der-wei Wang. The monster in question is the mythical Taowu, which came to represent history itself in Chinese culture through its ability to see both past and future. Franke conceives of the creature as amorphous and appearing
in various guises.

“You can hardly pin it down,” he says, “other than saying it is a liminal figure of evil inclination.” Works by more than 40 main contributors occupy all three floors of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum — the largest Taipei Biennial to date. These are juxtaposed with six “mini museums,” featuring works by an additional 40 artists that, according to Franke, “liberate the works around them from having to carry the thematic weight.”

Charged with molding a show around the “global systemic crisis,” Franke immediately had several key contributors in mind. Foremost were filmmakers John Akomfrah and Chen Chieh-jen. Akomfrah’s The Unfinished Conversation (2012) is a three-screen narrative on cultural theorist Stuart Hall. Like Hall, Akomfrah was influenced by the work of Althusser. The Marxist philosopher’s rejection of “the logic of supersession” meshes with Franke’s observation that, “In the moment we have identified evil ‘out there’ and begin the purge, we apparently become the very monsters which we have just imputed onto others.”

Showing at the Paper Mill factory space a couple of miles away from the museum, Chen’s Happiness Building I (2012) continues the director’s treatment of urban disenfranchisement amid a changing society. Chen collected stories from young, unemployed people and turned them into a narrative concerning a group of tenants being evicted.

Finally, several off-site projects sparked interest this year, with Francisco Camacho’s The 360° Stroke (2011) meriting special mention. The Colombian artist ran a workshop at a local swimming pool teaching a kind of 360-degree spinning breaststroke — “a new way of swimming as an art practice.” But how does it relate to the monstrosity theme? “Well, I was eating so well there that I got a bit fat,” he admitted.

“This may be the monstrous part.”

Taipei Biennial runs at Taipei Fine Arts Museum until 13 January 2013. Tickets are NT$30. 

Chen Chieh-jen’s Happiness Building I and other works can be viewed at The Paper Mill, No. 31, Fude Rd, Shihlin, just a few minutes walk from Shihlin MRT station.

The set for the film can be visited at No.115, Sanjun St., Shulin, New Taipei City (located inside the the Yi-Ping Construction Material Company factory) until 31 December.

Both of these off-site projects are free of charge.

Kristina Mladenovic of France hits a forehand against Thailand’s Nudnida Luangnam during their second round match at the OEC Taipei WTA Ladies Open on Wednesday, 30 October. Mladenovic won in three sets and faces the world’s hottest 42-year-old Japanese tennis pro, Kimiko Date-Krumm today.

No Hsieh Su-wei (謝淑薇) at this year’s Taipei WTA Ladies Open. Taiwan’s No.1 and the world No.25 is featured on the cover of the tournament brochure, which was presumably put together before Hsieh confirmed her place in the season-ending WTA Tournament of Champions in Sofia.

The tourney is for the six highest-ranked tour winners (and two wildcards) who didn’t make it into the WTA Championships. Hsieh got in on the basis of her victory of Britain’s Laura Robson in Guangzhou in September and it was a given that she would take that spot. It appears Hsieh got a bit of a hammering in her round robin match against Caroline Wozniacki yesterday.

Her little sis Hsieh Shu-ying (謝淑瑩) was actually here this year as a wildcard but went out in qualifying. Another younger sibling and wildcard, Chan Hao-ching (詹皓晴), sister of Aussie Open mixed and doubles finalist Chan Yung-jan ( 詹詠然), went out in the first round of the main draw to compatriot Hsu Wen-hsin (許文馨). Ranked 483rd in the world, Hsu was beaten in straight sets by Japanese seventh seed Misaki Doi  yesterday.

That left fifth seed Chang Kai-chen (張凱貞) as the sole remaining local rep in the quarters. The world No.96 seed faces second seed Olga Govortsova of Bulgaria, the world No.55.  Chang, who lost to Britain’s drought-ending Heather Watson in the final of the Japan Open a couple of weeks ago, is actually partnering her opponent in the doubles.

Once again, the tournament seems to have been woefully promoted, a real shame especially as this year in became the first of the new level of WTA 125s, a new level of WTA Challenger tournaments, one down from the top-tier WTA Tour but up a notch from the ITF Challengers.

Granted, it was lunch time on a weekday when I popped in the other day but the Taipei Arena was virtually empty and, as in previous years, entrance is free. Aside from Wiki, it’s really hard to find any in-depth info about the tournament online and OEC, the sponsor, has obviously never heard of SEO. You really have to dig to pull up the tournament’s official Web site – I eventually got it through a link on the Wiki page.

The final will probably be pretty full up, if the last couple of years are anything to go by. Unfortunately I probably won’t make it for the singles as I’m working but I hope to catch the doubles (presuming it is played after the main event). I was trying to figure out how I made it last year with the Inveterate Bede but I’ve just checked and it was on a Sunday. Shame. I’ll probably go along tomorrow at lunch for another gander.

If you’re at a loose end on Saturday and enjoy live sports events, then get yourself along to Taipei Arena. Balls should be being bashed post 2 p.m. though my contacts at the Chinese Taipei Tennis Association reckon nothing has gone according to schedule so far. Hopefully it will start late and I might catch the tail end.

EDIT: Don’t know where I got the idea that the final was on Saturday but it’s not. It’s on Sunday again, so I’ll probably be able to catch it.

Haute cuisine. Oh, all right then … not. But you can’t really go wrong for NT$50 and an unparalleled ambiance.

Taipei Post Office (台北郵局), also known as Taipei Beimen Post Office (台北北門郵局) was the agreed-upon spot and as I had some document signing and mailing of my own to conduct, there was nothing particulalry out of the ordinary about this location as a rendezvous.

Once we were done, Bede whisked me around the corner from the entrance on Boai Rd (博愛路) and under the arches on Zhongxiao (忠孝). It was only then I realised we were going to dine inside the post office itself. Bravo!  To enter, we had to leave our ARC cards with the security guard, though Bede says this was not required on his previous visit (yes – he’s something of regular).  Almost as wide as he was high, the custodian grunted what I think was approval as we handed over the ID cards.

TV dinners: Chunghwa’s employees get stuck in.

We made our way across the parking lot and past the loading area, then down into the canteen, where about a dozen employees sat at tables, eyes flitting between their plates and several large TV monitors on the walls of both sides of the hall. A couple of faces tilted in our direction, something approaching mild bewilderment flickering across them before they turned back to more important matters on the afternoon news.

Let’s make no bones about it – something that cannot be said of the chef behind the rather unmeaty meat portion in my meal – Chunghwa Post won’t be winning Michelin stars any time soon – but at NT$50 for  three vegetable portions and one meat, you’d be a bit cheeky to grumble. Plus there’s unlimited soup (miso when we there) and rice – white and the healthier purple grain stuff. Next time I’d plump for the fried chicken breast rather than the sweet-and-sour pork (nice sauce but, as I said, feeble).

The loading/unpacking type area. Speed, safety and service are trumpeted on the sign.

But the level of grub on offer is beside the point. While pensioners, labourers and those trying to scrimp and save take advantage of the canteen out of pecuniary considerations, we were just loving the unmistakably Taiwanese quirkiness of it all.

Maybe Bede and I have just spend way too much time in one another’s company but he seems to know exactly the kind of thing that will delight me. Pretty much everyone I told about this was singulalry unimpressed, seemingly in inverse proportion to how tickled I was. Some thought it was downright lame. One of our brothers from across the pond concluded: “It must be a  British thing.”

Well, quite, eh Bede? 

Through the arch: Chunghwa’s vans wait in the car park. I was admonished for taking this pic by a security busybody.

I’m very slowly joining up dots between hiking trails around Beitou (北投) and further afield. To be honest, I’m still not completely sure of the boundaries of the Qinshan Hiking Trail (親山步道), a network of trails that appears to extend from Shipai (石牌) at it’s most easterly point, to Xinbeitou’s Zhongzhengshan (中正山) peak in the north and out toward the Danshui River in the west.

Several walls along Xueyuan Rd are decorated with friezes and murals. This set of beasties is at the start of the road.

From what I can see, all of these trails are part of the what the local government calls the Datun Mountain Range but I still haven’t quite figured out how or why all these separate mountain trails, culminating in peaks that all have their own names, fall under the Qinshan umbrella. I often get the feeling there is a proclivity for slapping on layer upon layer of nomenclature on any local heap of rocks, a kind of infinitesimally-branched taxonomy of  mountains, unfathomable to all but the most gnarled old misty mountain hopper.

A Xiangqi (象棋), or Chinese chess board etched on a stone table at the park.

Having notched off several main strands of the web over the last few months, including Zhongzheng with the Inveterate Bede a while back, I decided to have a sniff about at the Guandu end. A few months before, I’d walked the first section of the Guizikeng trail and had noticed on signboard map  that it seemed to link up to Guandu. I thought I’d see if I could find out how.

Though I failed in this endeavour – partly because I set off rather late, partly because I went slowly and made several stops along the way (I would add partly because of the inclement weather, too, but no self-respecting Englishman would admit to such a thing) – I had a thoroughly enjoyable time poking around the swathe of green that begins at Xueyuan Park (學園公園), and continues through the campus of Taipei National University of the Arts (國立臺北藝術大學).

Scattered in and around the campus, there are some interesting things to see. The various pieces of furniture design along the first section of pavement after the park, for example, and the pieces in sculpture park further up the hill. (See pics above. I’m really losing the will to live when it comes to adding captions in WordPress, so excuse the lack of explanation of photos in this post.)

A couple of minutes more and you are the Evergreen Tennis Club. The Guandu Hiking Trail head starts about 100 metres down the road from there. The mountain here is called Zhongyishan (忠義山) and, indeed, going this way around, you end up coming out not far from Zhongyi MRT station on Zhongyang North Road (中央北路).

As I’ve been put through the paces by the Bede with some actually rather scary climbs recently (more on that at a later date), this trail was frankly a piece of piss. It’s a bit slippery in places and there are some ropes to guide you up but it couldn’t have taken me more than 30 minutes max (I suspect it was probably considerably less) to get to the top and I was hardly going at a breakneck pace. This drivel here here is giving it nearly three hours for the whole, which, frankly, unless you’re over 80, rheumatic to the point of rigor mortis, and a couple of Rizla sheets to the wind is cobblers.

The top comes as quite a surprise, as you come out onto a fairly large plateau which, but for the long grass, would probably be decent for a Sunday afternoon kickabout. Not sure how that would go down with superstitious locals, mind, as it’s burial ground – probably the most spacious, in terms of number of interred, that I’ve ever come across in Taiwan. There are, in fact, just two tombs (these are really worthy of that overused word) and to say they are grand is an understatement.

I don’t know who Mr and Mrs Ho were, or whether they were husband and wife or brother and sister, but they must have been wealthy. You’d have to have a hunt around to find a more imposing civilian grave than Mr Ho’s. The whole is enormous and ornate and the intricate scenes that decorate the walls of the tomb’s floor are particularly cool. In between the two graves, in a little pavilion, sits the Tudi Gong (土地公) or the Fude Zhengshen (福德正神) as he is more formally known. The earth god is, naturally, associated with burial sites.

Just before the path back down, there’s a a sheltered area with some large metal benches and a massage table. It looks like a nice little spot for local oldsters to come and hang out. As one of the larger of the many sporadic showers of the day had just started, I enjoyed 20 minutes respite, reclining on the benches and waiting out the rain.

The path descends through cool bamboo forest all the way to the Xingtian Temple (行天宮站), a serene and worthy counterpart to its much better-known main branch in downtown Taipei. It think it merits a post of its own, so I’ll stick it in the queue of to-do posts, which is currently snaking its way around the corner and half a mile down the block.

On the way up, I had looked in on the university’s Paulaner Brauhau at the Arts and Activity Complex. Having been off the sauce for a couple of weeks, I’d promised to treat myself to a German beer. After visiting the Xingtian Temple, I wasn’t sure if I could cut back across the NTUA campus and ended up walking a couple of kilometres back along Zhongyang N., past Zhongyi MRT, right back to where I had started a couple of hours before.

As I ascended the hill for the second time dusk was falling. In the bar, a young lady was doing a passable rendition of Cole Porter’s Night and Day. At NT$270, the beer was bloody expensive and slapping a 10 percent service charge on top seemed pretty cheeky. Still, it was a nice end to the day.

I’m definitely going to do some more digging around Guandu when time permits. I’ve not yet been to the nature park and it’s been a few years since I stopped by the Guandu Temple, which definitely merits a visit. At some point I’ll do the trail again and keep heading north across the plateau, rather than do the loop back down. I’m hoping there’s some way of meeting up with the Guizikeng trail, though I suspect you might have to leave the mountains trails and walk along roads at some stage.

Directions:

When you get out of the Guandu MRT (I think either exit will do and the information counter will point you in the right direction), head for Lane 577, which gets you onto Zhongyang N. Rd. Do a left once you’re on the main road and then a right after the petrol station and you’re on Xueyuan Rd.