Don't Know Why I Do The Things I Do

This scene is played out every day somewhere in Taiwan, but thankfully not so often in front of me. A man pulls his wife from the car by a fistful of hair while the other hand strikes at her with a cell phone, a shoe, a sandwich. A crowd gathers. The faces say, "Oh, what a shame," and "such a loss of face."

The faces with eyes that see are attached to heads with skulls which protect brains which command limbs to move and speech to come forth, but such impassive faces behave as if the last 30 minutes of a Steven Segal movie on AXN are hindering their internal debate on whether to have noodles or fried rice take out for dinner.

I'm writing this as an observation of how things are NOW in TAIWAN with a dose of cultural arrogance that in MY country on the side of the planet where I was born, this sort of thing would not stand. If I close my eyes real tight, I believe that at some point in my upbringing, we looked out for one another and I'm not just remembering the Hallmark version of existence.

I've lived here for nine years this month and just as I know that I will always be an outsider, I see myself as a passive observer of events and blog sporadically as a way of venting my frustrations with culture shock. The blogosphere is a pillow into which I scream. I don't have a thing, it's just, you know.... Up to this point, when confronted with the spectacle of public domestic violence, I've been a disgusted observer but have contented myself in dilluting the disgust with snark.

A few weeks back, there was an incident at the doctor's office. A ten year old girl didn't want to have a shot--afraid of needles, just like my boy. The mother, as we all sat and watched, grabbed the girl by the hair and beat her senseless with the other hand, at one point pounding the girl's head into the wall.

Shocked that all of this was going on within three meters of the doctor (note to self, look up Hippocratic Oath + Taiwan) and while all of his support staff and shocked patients looked on, I did nothing but hold my kids tight and tell them that I loved them both very much but not all boys and girls have someone to look out for them. I also asked how to say, "For the sake of your daughter, I hope you get breast cancer," but to her credit, my wife wouldn't translate, telling me it was the wrong thing to say. I'll admit to thinking it over and again to myself for a few minutes.

What burns me though, is that in these public situations when somone is obviously in need of assistance and there are human beings within reach of offering such, it doesn't happen. As closely packed as we are on this island, we insulate ourselves and refuse to reach out to make contact with a stranger who could benefit from it.

And here's me, the hyperjudgemental Westerner damning those rubberneckers left and right without lifting a finger on my own.

Each time I pound my palm with my fist and jab the air with my forefinger, declaring that this would NEVER be accepted in my country, by Jah, I am patiently reminded that we're NOT in America and people here just don't care because they don't.

Perhaps one doesn't need to look too far to see reasons to fear helping strangers. The White Terror that gripped the island for decades is not a far-distant memory for many people who recall a time when helping the wrong person could ruin your life. Plus, there are so many gangsters running around unfettered that helping someone who is getting their ass kicked just might result in you getting your own ass kicked.

Anyway, this evening, the dog and I were out for a walk, heading to the laundry. As we came around a corner, we noticed a crowd gathered near a car that was parked sickly askew. A man whose grip had found the scalp of his spouse in losing himself was in teh middle of a ring of people who told me that nothing was wrong when I asked. "That's his wife," said a guy about my age, pointing at a woman whose face I never saw, but who cried out with anguish at each tug as her husband tried to pull her up the stairs into the building.

A quick check was enough to convince me that these were not gangsters roughing up a hooker, but a case of domestic violence in which one or both of the parties involved were not communicating very well at the moment. Leica, the wonder beagle went to work and licked the face of the woman, giving me my introduction. I pulled the man up by the shoulders and placed myself between him and his target. He looked to be about 60 years old and wore a mask such as is common for people to wear on cold or heavily polluted days when they're riding their scooters.

I had at least a 30kg advantage over the guy who never once made eye contact with me, his eyes overflowing with rage. His shoulders were very tense and he tried to get around me to continue what he'd been doing before some idiot interrupted him. He was shouting in Taiwanese so I have no clue what was going on, but after shouting "Hare Krishna" at him a few times, I kept reassuring him that I wasn't going to hurt him and that he just needed to breathe. I told him he was a man and that real men don't hit women. Whatever was going on in his family obviously none of my business and I didn't want to hear. At some point, I caught a glimpse of his wife running down the street and around the corner out of sight. I patted him on the back and tried to let him know that everything was going to be ok and it was ok to calm down. He eventually did and went inside.

I'm not sharing this for any kind of recognition of my skill as a peacekeeper. Immediately after the disturbance, I was shaking like ... uhhh...like one of those electric football games from the '70's...but I was asking myself why I had gotten involved this time. I didn't know any of the people involved; it was not really even my neighborhood. After every other time that I see this sort of thing happen, I feel like such a coward for not doing anything at all, and I recognize that I did this for the purely selfish reason that I did not want to look at myself in the mirror again tomorrow knowing that I could have done something but hadn't.

I had to explain to Maggie why I was so late coming back from the walk and I told her what had transpired. She sort of rolled her eyes and said, a Taiwanese man would never do that. "But Why Not?" I continue to ask. I want other people to see me in super hero mode and think to themselves that they can do it too. Again, Maggie sadly shook her head, "It's because you're a foreigner," she said. Taiwanese men won't stand up in such situations.

It may be the messianic complex that "all" foreigners have, it could be adrenaline, it could be wild-eyed idealism...or it could be the wine...but kiss my ass. If it were my sister, mother, wife, daughter, son, getting beaten, I hope to hell that if weren't there, someone would have the balls to stand up and do what's right!

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To report cases of domestic abuse in Taiwan, please phone 113.
The domestic violence help line provides 24 hour emergency assistance in cases of domestic abuse and legal and psychological services for injured parties.

Do It

The Winds of Change

I've never given money to a political campaign except for the time that I bought a George H. W. Bush T-shirt in high school for the purpose of spray painting rude things on it. That changed yesterday. I paid a bit more than I did for the shirt, and I got a tiny little button to show for it, but I also got to sit in a packed Mexican Restaurant (El Gallo in Tianmu...just opened last week and already awesome!) with people who not only think that Sarah Palin is as hilarious as she is horrifying, but that our guy represents a breath of much needed fresh air.

I took my son to see more foreigners than he has ever seen in his life. The Tianmu neighborhood in Taipei is nothing at all like anyplace in Taichung. You can't swing a cat without hitting a cracker. There were white folks, black folks, Asian folks, Latino folks, all hanging out together clapping and laughing and reminscing. Frank thought it was a little boring until the snacks arrived, though he enjoyed climbing under the table and playing with his dad's new friends.

The headlining speaker was Terry MacMillan. Not that one, but not at all disappointing. She's the field director for the campaign in East Asia, currently living in Japan, and was kind enough to come to Taiwan on the eve of the year's largest typhoon to add her enthusiasm to an event that was brimming with it. She made quite a splash.

The weather was beautiful as we set out from Taichung. Such beautiful blue skies are such a rare sight in Taichung that it's worth taking note of and oohing and ahhing. The wisps of what clouds there were spread themselves thinly across the sky in hopes perhaps for maximum coverage, but they failed spectacularly and instead produced an effect not at all unlike the Sydney Opera House.

We had just met a videographer with the Discovery Channel in Taiwan to shoot footage for a special on natural disasters. He was headed down to Kaoshuing, and hoped to find a place to stay in Taidong to get the footage he was looking for, though it was likely that he'd be getting mostly the storm's aftermath as it was forecast to hit at nighttime. As our train pulled out of Taichung HSR station headed north, we looked at the sky and couldn't help feeling that the poor guy had wasted his trip. How could there be a wallop-packing storm lurking off the East Coast with a sky as pleasant as this?
Living in the cement forests of Taichung, it's often easy to forget how beautiful Taiwan is. A ride on the rails is the quickest way to lift the shade. Zipping along at typhoon wind gust speed we passed rice paddies, taro fields, plots of pineapples, little villages, and then more hillsides with tufts of unruly bamboo sticking up here and there. From my seat on the train, twentysome meters above the ground, I couldn't see any beer cans, empty or otherwise, or discarded blue flip-flops, or 7-11 bags.


Nothing is permanent except change, so when we came out of one of the tunnels below Hsinchu we shouldn't have been all that shocked to see the dark and forboding grey clouds of Jangmi flying overhead like an Imperial Star Cruiser (seriously, check out this video...why is the liberal media hiding this???) By the time we got to the Zhishan MRT station, there was a mist that hung in the air. The storm had, at some point,taken a turn to the north and was not expected to hit near Kaoshuing, but more likely at Yilan, a little east of Taipei.

When Frank and I went out in search of El Gallo, it was sprinkling, and the weather didn't deteriorate for the trip back to our hotel, but a few hours later the wind picked up and whipped rain against the windows. At breakfast the next morning, water ran down the windows of the hotel breakfast nook--housed in a leaking illegal structure on the eighth floor--like in the rinse cycle at a car wash.

Our plans for a Sunday in Tamshui were washed out and we had to hot foot it over to the train station to get a seat on a train before the system was closed at three in the afternoon. The MRT was running at half speed, which perhaps meant a train every 12 minutes or so. The HSR started south at great guns, but somewhere in Hsinchu County we got hit with a wind gust and the train immediately slowed down, followed by announcements in Chinese, English, and Taiwanese that the train would be slowing down due to the wind.

The tall stands of bamboo that I had seen on the way up bent gracefully under the sustained high winds until they looked like their tops had been tied to tent stakes higher up the mountainside and gusts of wind raced each other across rice fields as if the crop was radio controlled.

Safe home in Taichung,we watched as signs and awnings around the neighborhood took leave of their moorings and hung awkwardly in front of the businesses they represent. Up and down the street were the sounds of metal against metal. On the teevee were images of snips of women being blown down the street, knocked over, and dragged a few more feet. Homes are flooded, people on scooters falling over, and bridges still standing.

School is cancelled on Monday. Another long weekend thanks to Dame Nature.Thank you, Baby.

Active Learning vs Learning Activism

Students were apathetic when I was in junior high school, so I'm not saying that what I'm seeing in my classes is anything new or surprising. I was shocked, however, a few weeks ago when I found that out of a class of 11 students (small groups are great, but I'm not crazy about the prime number) no one could name more than two countries that have the Bomb. The same group tells me that Anne Frank was just some girl who died, "Big Deal."


I know that they've had some exposure to the Global Warming issue because their previous teacher told me they watched An Inconvenient Truth in class. How much of it sunk in I couldn't say. Might have just been a flavor of the week sort of activity.

The majority of the students I've met in Taiwan are just interested in getting through the next test so they can move up to the next rung. Several essays last week on "A Good Experience" recounted glory days of fifth grade when they got the only 100 on a science test, or came in 6th place in their class for the first time. When the sea levels rise, I suspect it will be much easier to float one's boat.


While American 8th graders don't do much trig or calculus, I suspect they know more about the coming Peak Oil crisis than do Taiwanese students, or even many American adults. There was a National Geographic article back in June 2004 about the end of Cheap Oil and the impact it would have on US--that is humanity as a whole. I liked the pictures, too, and then I moved on.

But a total stranger contacted me about a now defunct webzine Taiphoon (they haven't published since 2004) that I had linked on my graffiti page. We agreed that the lack of activism is disheartening. I thought that Taiwan, being an island and everything, would be an obvious leader in the fight against rising sea levels. He said global warming is nothing compared to what's going to happen when oil production fails to meet worldwide demand in the next 2-50 years.

He then sent me an ungodly amount of links to various articles about the Peak Oil crisis. Apparently this is something that's getting a lot of play in some countries, and very little in others. No one wants to break the bad news in an Election Year, eh? Remember when Jimmy Carter said:

I ask Congress to give me authority for mandatory conservation and for standby
gasoline rationing. To further conserve energy, I'm proposing tonight an
extra $10 billion over the next decade to strengthen our public transportation systems. And I'm asking you for your good and for your nation's security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense -- I tell you it is an act of patriotism.

Well, that was in July 1979 (click here for the full text of his televised address) If you're old enough to remember Howard Cosell, you know what happened next. Americans didn't like to be told not to drive the cars and they elected a smiling former governor from California who removed price controls and failed to fill up oil reserves with cheap oil. Oops.

I saw an old episode of Real Time with Bill Maher the other day. Sheryl Crow and Laurie David were hyping some global warming information spreading event or other via sattelite in Alabama of all places. Maher asked a question that gets right to the heart of the problem: "If every American was told that to end Global Warming all he would have to do was to not use his TV remote ever again, do you think he would do it?" Well, what do you think?

The following question, as far as I know, has not been addressed by any of the candidates. How'd they get around that?




I worry about stuff naturally. It's my nature. I shouldn't worry about most of the things, like getting docked 10NT per minute I'm late to work, or that students aren't turning in their writing assignments anywhere near on time. But, when I see a group of kids plugged into their iPods standing on a railroad track with a steadily approaching freight train bearing down upon them, I feel twitchy. Should I be worried that much of the world is oblivious to the Peak Oil situation?

Well, I am, because I have two beautiful children, and I wonder what will become of them and where we will end up. Is Taiwan the place to live in a post-oil age? If the Peak has already happened, when do I need to high tail it back to America, and then WTF is an English teacher to do?




http://www.rustletheleaf.com/ eco comic with lesson plans suitable for all ages.

http://www.esletc.com/-- injecting awareness into the ESL classroom.

Here's a warm & fuzzy Peak Oil essay from countercurrents.org

Also, ABC (Australia) has a great Peak Oil episode on their 4 Corners news program.

The NMiC Movement

I'd heard the story about an American family that decided to go for a year without buying anything made in China. Apparently this is not easy to do in America. Damn near impossible in Taiwan, I'm thinking. Used to be that everything in my toybox had Made in Taiwan stamped on the bottom. Nowadays when I see something that's still Made in Taiwan it's actually something of a happy shock. Factories have been relocating pretty steadily to China for the last decade or so, searching for, you guessed it, Cheap Labor.

Did a little more reading. The family is Canadian, but living in Puerto Rico. I thought they were American. Ok, Norte Americanos.

The safety issue is one that concerns me now. The news about toys in the States being recalled due to levels of paint in them makes me look with no small amount of suspicion at the toys my children are playing with at home and at the baby sitter's. The US has the Consumer Product Safety Division with this list of recalled toys. It's quite a lengthy list.

I am told that Taiwan has a similar Bureau dedicated to the task of determining which products are safe and which ones aren't, but I'm also told that the agents are buyable. So there's really no telling how much dangerous crap there is floating around. I mean, besides the dangerous crap that is floating around an obstructing my view of the mountains.

You may find this interesting. NotMadeinChina.net has all the horror stories you might expect to find about relgious oppression in China, along with loads of links to consumer safety sites and businesses that manufacture things in places that are ... well, not China.


Included is a Letter to Toys R Us which implores the corporation to stop using manufacturers in China for their cheap labor and maximization of profit. That's right, you too can participate all for the price of a First Class Stamp.

Why Boycott China? Well, one of my students puts it rather bluntly when he pronounces, almost daily, that "China Sucks." Can never quite move the conversation past this point. By buying stuff from small, local manufactuerers, you may be paying a little more, but you theoretically would be getting a better product and keeping locals in work, adding to the local economy etc.

Chinese people are, for the most part, I'm guessing, nice. I mean, to think that the greater part of 1.6 billion people were evil bastards would be just too pessimistic for even me.

Where to start? Well, if you're in Taiwan, a good start would be to refuse the chopsticks and little plastic spoons they give you with every order of takeaway food. If you don't have any bowls at home, go buy some for crissake. Same thing with those plastic bags. The only reason my wife takes me shopping is so that she can have someone to send out to the car to get the shopping bag she forgot to take into the store.

Look, I'm nowhere near flush with time to write a well organized blog posting, so this is what you get. Don't buy stuff from China if you can help it. Why? because my student says that China Sucks. I don't know, I haven' t been. Gary? What do you think?