Laowiseass

Typhoon victim protesting in clear view of Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou for a role in the resettlement decisionm-making process will probably get what she wants.
Taiwanese are just the most giving people, aren’t they, I heard more than once when aid began massing after the Aug. 8 typhoon that killed 770 people, displacing thousands more. I heard the same non-question queried after the May 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province of China, where 70,000 or 80,000 people died despite a record donation from Taiwan.
Here's how the giving works. Religious charities or government bodies go on the offensive for donations. Employers, my own included, ask employees if they couldn't spare five or ten dollars. Do you want to donate to the cause that everyone else is donating to, supervisors ask staffers and staffers ask one another. Eyes meet eyes. There's only one right answer. The war chest swells fast that way. I suppose some donors are sincere.
Turning to more routine cases of people in need, let's look again. My wife left a denim coat and her national health insurance card on a ferry in April 2008. An hour later both had disappeared. No one at the dock claimed to know about them. I left an arcane English-language book in the seatback of a high-speed rail train this past September. That was at the end of a line, meaning only cleanup staff would find it. I called the railway later that day and asked in person a few days later. No one found your book, they said. On another day, about five minutes after realizing my mobile phone had vanished in a minor bike crash, I went back to the relevant road segment to find, of course, nothing. Could you call my number to see if it's working, I asked a cyclist passing by. Phone off, he said. That doesn’t mean it's konked out in a roadside ditch. It means that within those five minutes someone grabbed it and switched it off for future personal use.
People on this island of generosity could report lost property but don't. But they cherish personal wealth from any source, of any value, especially for free. So they tend keep whatever they find unless under social pressure to help a popular cause.

Five of us, three Americans and two English guys, all white, got on a shuttle bus (see crap photo) to the Chiayi high-speed railway station in southern Taiwan last month with our partly disassembled bikes in black canvas bags. The bags are meant for transporting bikes, which can't otherwise board buses in Taiwan. The sniggering bus driver took pictures of us. As we sat with our cargo later at the rail station, a couple of families stopped to stare, silently and mouths open. More people lined up after we got off the train in Taipei to watch us reassemble the bikes.
Staring. Gawking. Photos. A show. Foreigners. Foreigners doing something unusual. Remind you of anything? If you said China, stop and I'll snap a picture of you as my mouth hangs open. But this was Taiwan, where people say they’re more refined than China's Chinese. True, folk here don’t stare at foreigners who do whatever everyone else is doing, as that'd be too brazen, where as the Chinese stare whenever they feel like it. Taiwan is refined to that degree. But as my Taiwanese friend Ken says, "civilized" just means "faking it".
Give the cultured Taiwanese an excuse and they'll grab front seats for the free freak show.

I don't want to make a mountain out of a molehill, but the city of Taipei has already made a molehill from a mountain.
Maps and markers along the Tienmu Old Trail, a 350-meter elevation gain over about three kilometers show hikers exactly where they are and how far they've come.
But the signs don't acknowledge a major trail that opens right across the street from the end of the Tienmu. The final Tienmu map, which is about 200 road meters from the next trail's start point, shows no trail existing there at all.
The problem is, it's someone else's trail. I mind mine and they mind theirs. The road department doesn't add signs to bridge the two because the road is the road and trails are trails.
Government offices linking heads to link trails would mean cooperation, which carries the risk of extra work, letting someone else steal credit for your upsides and exposing downsides to ridicule.
The city hardly cares if hikers can't find their way. They know that in Taiwan newcomers always go with experienced friends the first time. Never starting out alone, who'd need a map? The fabled experienced friend also should have a photographic memory, sparing the group any trouble with maps. At least the Tienmu trail signs acknowledged the peak where the adjunct trail leads. It's Shamao Mountain, 609 meters above sea level.
Once I found the Shamao trailhead after walking half a click the wrong way first for lack of maps (I had hiked it before lack a photographic memory), I saw that the national park to which it belongs had included that route as well as the Tienmu trail (see photo above).
It listed Shamao Mountain at 643 meters above sea level.
The hike is 2.2 kilometers, it said. Along that course the park posts markers every 200 meters. Just steps past a marker that says 1.8 km remaining rests another that indicates 1.5 km are left.
That reminded me of a bike trip earlier this month to Jade Mountain National Park. A roadside scenic spot places the visitor center at km 151, whereas the actual highway marker there is km 145. Not even government agencies that stick labels the same tract of land consult one another.
They mind theirs and we mind ours. Easier, safer that way.
The bedrock of the matter: signage is a metaphor for the whole Taiwan government.

South Luogu Alley in central Beijing has hit its brief evolutionary peak.
Once a lane of rustic one-story Hutong houses, this strip behind the Central Drama Academy has morphed into a kilometer-long theme alley of bars, baristas and boutiques. The merchants did this themselves, apparently, without the city forcing a master plan that would have meant tearing down the same old facades that now make the lane attractive to a guidebook-fed stream of foreign tourists as well as younger Chinese people.
Sure, the cappuccinos, pizzas served in a Martian theme diner and overpriced pseudo-Tibetan clothes you see on South Luogu Alley (Nan Luogu Xiang) don't exactly cry out "historic Beijing." But the ambience does. Passers-through can also turn off the lane in dozens of places to peek at non-commercial old Beijing. They will see stone walled homes with red-painted wooden doors, defended by lion heads, swung open far enough to show historic dusty Flying Pigeon bikes stored the courtyards. It's the Western-style bars open till 2 a.m. that draw foreigners into the side lanes. Old, new feed off each other. We're told that the denizens of the old homes are the ones earning money from the commercial strip.
This is the top of the curve. To forecast South Luogu Lane's future, I look to Sanlitun, the Friendship Store zone and other foreigner-intensive Beijing neighborhoods. Eventually riffraff arrive. Touts hound tourists with fake DVDs, doing deals with coffeehouses to pester customers inside for business. Pedicabs mob intersections, yelling at foreigners to take rides. Beggars ply the leftover spaces. As tourist headcounts grow, merchants jack up prices. Theft increases. The after-midnight noise level rises. Fights break out around bars. Neighbors start to resent foreigners.
Cool tourists who read cool guidebooks (or get up-to-date information from cool expatriates) will find a new, stress-free hangout, perhaps the arts-and-crafts lane forming near Yonghegong, pushing that zone to its evolutionary peak.

Our feathered friends were singing, warbling, chirping and chattering on Saturday at the Phoenix Valley Bird Park in Nantou county, central Taiwan. But bird songs do not create adequate atmosphere at a bird sanctuary. So the park also offers outdoor karaoke, ensuring that humans feel comfortable, a touch of home, in the wild unknown avian environment. The sound of outdoor karaoke in Taiwan is louder than a chickadee but a decibel or two short of an airplane taking off.

No bellyaching about it: Brews like these cure stubborn pains.
My wife, born in China and who I've sworn not to blog about, once said that a certain Chinese ointment suddenly wiped out a pain in her back side after nothing else could ease it. She also mentioned a certain shampoo that suddenly sucked off so much hair it clogged a drain and the other certain shampoo that suddenly grew it all back. Rain causes colds. Sweating cures them.
After years of studying my wife's science, which is rooted in Chinese folklore, I recently added my first fact to the household medical file: A chest pain had persisted for more than a month following a minor bike crash. A doctor, true to Taiwan tradition, found nothing wrong but prescribed some shiny pills anyway. I exercised less. I exercised more. I rested. I got up and quit resting. Nothing worked until one night in October I suddenly drank five pints of draft Beijing Beer. That chest pain vanished the next morning and never returned. A pain in my head replaced it but passed by mid-afternoon. Just shows, beer cures pain caused by cycling accidents.

Li Chunming, a former central TV reporter, said in October he would take his political dissidentary, a common social disease in fast-changing China, to the hilly Beijing suburbs as early as next year to farm the dry land and open an underground journalism school.
He also plans to go online for the first time.
But the ambitious plan hinges on Li, who has already trimmed his mane and tamed the rangy glare that made him look only slightly crazier than he is and that unhinged foreign journalists who he had offered to help over the past six years, getting a 600,000 yuan payout from his old central Beijing house that was razed in 2002.
Payout negotiations between Li, likely score of 0, and the city of Beijing, probable score of 1, are set to conclude by year's end, Li told Laowiseass in an exclusive Starbucks interview.
"They don't want me to disclose the settlement," he said, adding that he'd tell Laowiseass.
Li plans to buy a mu (go convert that yourself if you prefer hectares) of vacant land in the Mentougou district for a new house. He aims to plant corn on the remaining turf, on which he insists that a creek must flow. "Yeah right dude, this is the Beijing desert," Laowiseass said.
The house will also double as a secret journalism school, said Li, about 50, who fears that without training to do their own thing China's younger scribes will remain mere notetakers for the state.
But that ambitious plan hinges on Li dodging cops that trail him before every major government event to make sure he doesn't protest. Otherwise, the heat will blaze down on his one-room schoolhouse, blazing a trail to reeducation camp for for both the headmaster and his students.

Student sits out a class in China
When schools in China push children today to learn English with no self-evident reason except to pass tests because we said you had to pass, the students tune out, a break from the more study-hard, ask-no-questions past. In a mid-October e-mail, a Chinese national who teaches at an elite school in Fujian province described her workload and her impact on the student exam scores:
"What hell are the kids now doing? What are they interested in nowadays? They showed more talents while they were still babies. Why do they become this stupid when it comes to English learning?
"It's a big task for me. My other colleagues may call me 'insane' if I carry this on. Nobody is gonna pay for the extra time working, hah. Look at my schedule each day: 6:30, getting up----7:00, going to work without breakfast----7:15, starting work after a small breakfast----1:15, off work----14:00, starting afternoon work----16:30, off work again----18:00, starting evening work----20:40, off work the last time. Then, showering, checking homework, preparing the next day's lessons (sometimes I still need to do some (score) calculation work, 'thanks to' the damn evaluation system in our school. The students are given 100 points each term, and we add or minus points according to their performances every day-----it's killing to meet with those numbers each time. I usually go to bed at 12:00 a.m. or later.
"The average mark in our grade (eighth) is about 20 points lower, comparing with those in the past. Our school leaders, huhu, have talked to us many times, trying to find problems and the solution. However, things are getting worse. The problem we are now running into is a big one, a tough one. We are working hard, toward the right direction, we are not pushing them too hard----we are trying to put ourselves into their shoes every now and then, but things are not getting better----they can love their English teachers, but this contributes nothing to their English learning----they still score low next time.

Guess where the photo was taken.
Is or isn't it true, an ever-curious Chinese friend asked me in Beijing last week, that people from this country look at ultra-Communist North Korea the way foreigners in democratic countries look at Communist-Lite China?
Probably true. She said Chinese scoff at the gawky rigidity of North Korean mass political events where thousands of enthusiastic puppet-like people throng around Kim Jong-Il, the master of all things worth a shit since the Big Bang. Meanwhile North Koreans are starving and ignorant, we're told. When Westerners look at China's Oct. 1 parade celerbating 60 years of rule by the Communist Party, do they also titter while thinking hah what a quaint Cold War throwback country? The costumed dancers came. Then the weapons, rolled out on carts or whatever like the spear-wielding hordes you see in movies that depict battles hundreds of years ago. The president waving from the top of a car. And the fireworks. Meanwhile, hundreds of millions still live on a buck a day, sharing outhouses and dying young.
Looked like old-school nationalist hokum to me. But only in China, I suspect, did video from the event got into the hands of illegal DVD makers. How modern is that.

Traffic moves on one side of the road, up from no side of the road, while the construction project (right) was there last year, as opposed to a new start, at Dawanglu where I lived for three years.
On Oct. 17, the logo for Beijing Capital International Airport featured a smiling sky. The Terminal 2 cop in charge of a 10-person immigration line also smiled. Security checkers said "sir" when giving instructions to passengers such as me.
Were these signs of mirth and courtesy, which I found elsewhere in Beijing as well, the lingering effects of a mood-altering double holiday the first week of October, the patriotic feel-good 60th Anniversary National Day and Autumn Festival, all cushioned into seven days off? Or was it me, caring less now than before about marauding China minutiae such as spitting and bill haggling because I'm on a holiday from largely hassle-free Taipei? Answer unknown.
Three years ago, nae less, nothing about the airport smiled. Immigration lines ran into the hundreds of passengers. Cops barely looked at any of us. Security checkers would yap "turn 'round" to those of us who beeped under the scanner. As I recall, the airport logo was just the acronym BCIA. I suspect that the opening of a Disneyland-scale third terminal eased crowds while management has trained workers in courtesy.
In town, massive construction orders that would once take out a tract of older buildings every month or so had slowed to where I saw no pending projects that I hadn't seen last year. No one in service attempted English with me, a stark change from years past, and few made the customary condescending comment about how a guy of my skin color could speak Chinese.
The foreign ministry has even let reporters from overseas media travel more often for sensitive news stories, such as the July riots in Xinjiang, without arresting anyone for "illegal interviews", my scribe friends said. And nowhere in my eight days of unfettered drinking did I hear nationalistic comments from the people most likely in the past to have uttered them.
My venerable friend Josh, who has made it nine years in Beijing, argues that it's not just the holidays or my Taipei-addled imagination. Beijing has mellowed since the 2008 Olympics, he said, due to less domestic in-migration, stronger city regulations (i.e. logical and enforceable), more public confidence in civil society and a fading paranoia about what expats are up to.
Too early to call it progress?
At least my return flight took off an hour late, per custom. Comfort food from the past.

After hearing years of rumors that China has blocked access to Livejournal, I came to a dark, smoky (is there any other kind?) Internet cafe in Beijing to test it.
This post is being written in that cafe.
What was I going to say? A friend last night read me a mass circulated mobile phone text message that showcases China's dark (is there any other kind?) sense of humor. It cites an outraged formal complaint to the traffic police about a car headed the wrong way on Chang'an Avenue in central Beijing. The date, Oct. 1. The car, a black sedan that went down one side of the street and up the other. In it, President Hu Jintao saluting troops for National Day.

As I ready for a Beijing vacation (oxymoron noted) from Oct. 10-17, meaning no access to the blog or much else online, I recall an night out in 2005 that reminds me of why Taiwan is suddenly so keen on its arch-enemy China.
Sure, Taiwan doesn't want to get hit by a Chinese mis-guided missile. It wants a piece of China's new fortune. And the two sides are separated by only 160 km of water. All good reasons to seek peace.
That night, moreover, a news colleague took me to a dinner with about 10 Taiwan businessmen, approximate ages 40 through 60. The men, married I suppose, sat around a huge roundtable alternating boy-girl with cheap, easy and not bad-looking 20-some girlfriends, women from Anhui province being paid by the night, week, month or whatever for their company. The men got drunk without a single sideways glance that might indicate anything amiss: We can score on both sides of the Strait and fucking love it.

The guy in the stroller oversees major repairs.
Tsai You-ming, owner of the Taipei shop where I bought my $180 Giant Boulder in mid-2006, looked with his customary nonplussed silence at my front derailleur, which won't shift between gears 2-3 without profanity loud enough to knock the bike over. Then he turned a screw that day in September and said problem solved, which it wasn't. I had mentioned the issue to him two or three other times over the past year, always seeing him because in Taiwan your seller is expected to offer life-long service, charging only for parts. Clean it out, he said first. Or add oil. Or something else simple. So I took the bike to another shop, which told me the derailleur would never work right again due to wear over three years of rain, grit and shifting. It would cost $30 to replace, he said, or just shift slowly at low speeds to make it engage, some or most of the time.
A brake cable on the same bike would pop out of its housing above the front wheel every week or so, randomly, for a spell over the summer. I asked Tsai, the other shop guy and two more about the brake-downs. Each reset the cable manually without saying why it keeps coming out. Finally I spotted the problem: The metal housing was twisted partly open, allowing the cable to snap out when jerked by a simple braking motion. On my next shop trip, a near weekly ritual since June, I asked the guy to find some tool to squeeze it back shut.
Recently the front wheel has started shaking violently when brakes are applied at even moderate speeds. A bike shop I happened to see at the bottom of one wobbly hill stuck a tool into the brakes, turned something and pronounced the craft seaworthy. Days later, Tsai turned a screw and suggested I replace the wheel to make sure the rim was even. I got a second opinion, and another screw turn, from the guy who told the truth about my derailleur and had him replace the wheel. Today the bike with a $33 new front wheel and three brake adjustments bounced down 800 vertical meters worth of road like a runaway rocking horse. No amount of profanity helped.
To keep up with the bike industry, Sampo's Taipei stereo fix-it people checked out our CD player that skips around and said ten days later, after I called a-querying, that they found no problem. The local Acer shop that examined our laptop's sudden loss of processing speed over the summer offered the classic I-really-don't-care, go-profanity-yourself tech support advice: "Reinstall Windows."
Moral of the story: Taipei's quick fixers kind of outnumber problem solvers.

Tao member and default cop
We Tao people are so close that we can police our own crimes, an 82-year-old member of the Taiwan aboriginal group told me during an interview about the disappearance of his race, pop. 3,100.
If someone steals or starts a fight, he said, anyone with a certain level of community respect can find the aggressor and make him pay up, pay back, maybe get his ass kicked into the ocean. Criminals know this code.
Only a murder would be referred to the police, the 82-year-old said.
His words sounded like a baton-wielding brag. But they weren't. Much larger ethnic Chinese Taiwan proper and the ominously larger China have long practiced cop-free self-policing. This phenomenon that could put the donut industry out of business probably runs through much of the Old World, the Third World and the small-town world, where serious police departments have come into existence only recently, if at all.
In a town outside Redding, California, with probably a couple thousand people, it was OK to leave a house door unlocked as some veteran homeowners fancied in the 1990s they could catch any local hoodlum. They knew who was who well enough to figure out who had dun-it while the cops were busy munching dun-nuts.
In racially homogenous Taiwan, police-free crime resolution works on a larger scale but in different, more insidious ways. Most crimes are still settled without police. Victims of scams, noise violations or minor accidents usually figure they've simply been had. They don't call police. Cops in Taipei don't patrol for these crimes either. They check individual complaints, often pro forma only, or follow sweeping orders from the police chief. They even see criminals, such as this foreigner I know who brazenly J-bicycles through intersections, but don't blow a whistle.
Victims of all manners of crime in third-worldly, mono-racial China say fuck-the-police. Chinese don't trust cops, imagine that the cops conspire with criminals (i.e. ARE criminals) or fear that by reporting a crime they'd be treated as suspects. Police in China, as in Taiwan, seldom patrol for crime or investigate complaints unless ordered by higher-ups, who would summon the ranks only to help protect the ruling Communist Party, keep a cop-run brothel out of trouble or pimp money through any number of scams. So crime scenes in China are often settled in private ways, from street-corner arguments to the use of vengeance-seeking thugs.

A friend who returned to China after studying in India said this about the welcome home:
"Two of my cousins came to live at my parents' home now, and I had some talks with them and came to know that the whole China has one mind, seems everyone thinks the same and doing the same, and go for the same thing, house, car, all material stuff, and I am quite annoyed by it although I never say anything to go aganist them because I know I can never change their way of thinking. I think a nation without religion, without any spirit is horrible. Maybe the life in India changed me a lot mentally."

President caused this mess in south Taiwan.
He might as well have.
When Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou tried to sway an almost universally pissed-off public by deflecting blame for his island's latest typhoon to the weather, the allegation just didn't stick.
The typhoon, randomly codenamed Morakot, which is now a household word for 23 million people, dumped two meters of rain and set off mudslides that killed 758.
When Ma's Nationalist Party faulted opposition local officials in the disaster area, no one listened.
A wire service that competes with mine pointed to the overplanting of high-value tea, which grows too shallow to hold down steep mountain soil during heavy rains.
Private sources of mine took aim at decades of permissive agriculture or forestry policies. How this works is, vote-seeking leaders let cash-hungry villagers plant whatever they want on steep soil, ignoring the mudslide risk. Freedom-to-plant policies uproot free-growing trees such as banyan and camphor that stabilize the soil. Betel, mangoes and tea, valuable or not, replace them.
None of those theories mattered worth a shit stuck to a broken bridge piling.
Ma, like many under him, should have ordered a quick overview of safety and evacuation potential the rainiest areas on rather than after Aug. 8-9, when the storm hit.
But that's not the point. Ma is the emperor, who in Chinese culture is responsible for everything shitty. Try blaming mangoes.

The white letters on green identify a tea shop in Taipei.
I usually pack off into the wilderness when in the states on summer breaks. Last year, on account of forest fires, I went instead to a camping supply store in Redding, Calif., to get a chest strap got my external frame pack, ask about bear canisters (didn't buy one) and find a vial of biodegradable camp suds. The store clerks and I had never met, but you wouldn't have known. When anyone but a clueless boor buys camping gear at a locally owned store in California, it's never just grab the goods, pay and leave. Customers discuss the merits of tents, packs, straps, even soap, which leads to questions about recent trips, which gets everyone talking about the best camping spots or the latest wilderness regulations or the rash of trailhead car break-ins or in my case the forest fires.
When in old Taipei, I usually pedal straight through it. I don't use dried soup flavorings. I prefer pain killers to root-based medicine. I don't look good in pawned necklaces. There's no need to fix the scooter I don't have. But once every few months I stop to buy a sack of tealeaves, which occur on every block or two in old town as well as much of newer Taipei. No one but a clueless boor in an owner-operated Taipei teashop would just say "I'll take the oolong, how much?" A customer asks what's in season and where it's from. A dedicated shopkeeper explains, making suggestions. The customer should get to try a pot of something. Seated around a finished wood-slab table on tree-trunk stools, they talk about tea experiences in Taiwan or across Asia, comparing price, flavor, packaging, or more often the fine points of brewology: optimum amount of leaf per pot, perfect water temperatures and ideal number of refills. Tea, like camping gear, brings strangers together as if they've been in the same club for years yet never met before.

When I covered SARS from the frontline Chinese city of Taiyuan in 2003, I got most of my interviews just by asking for them. No one arrested me. Staff members at the government-run SARS hospital even considered letting me and a photographer, also a white guy, in for a look. This kind of response in China is as rare as catching the plague.
Earlier this month in Kaohsiung County, an area of Taiwan hit by deadly mudslides brought on by a typhoon, people again gave me interviews without flinching. Some asked me questions in Chinese as if I were just another stray volunteer waiting to resettle survivors or handing out free boxed lunches. A dude in the street asked me for directions. He even believed my answer.
Why was Taiyuan easy? Why was I taken seriously in Kaohsiung? Why different from most encounters in Taiwan when no one talks to me voluntarily except in English, or in China when as a foreigner I'd normally get stopped for seeking information on a squirelly topic?
If you think the difference lies in the gravity of the news, SARS or the mudslides, you're wrong. On both forays I wore a black baseball cap, a trick I learned from the photographer. A black hat hides the hair, which from a distance of two or three meters is the most obvious sign I'm not Asian. Seriously. People must peer harder, beneath the brim, to confirm someone's race. Since foreigners don't make up much of a demographic in Taiwan or China, without giveaway signs we're presumed Asian until proven Western.

I saw it at this rescue center (see photo) for victims of the typhoon that swamped southern Taiwan last week, but I seldom saw it in local media or heard it in conversation. My editors had no interest in it at all. That is, most of the people killed, hurt, stranded or rescued in the hardest hit areas were aboriginals rather than ethnic Chinese people. Aboriginals, two percent of Taiwan's 23 million form an underclass that already lives mainly in hard-to-reach mountain villages neglected or mismanaged by successive rounds of Chinese policymakers. Aboriginals have negligible voting power or economic clout. A lot of them just farm betel nut. The stick palms from which betel grows don't go deep enough to hold the soil in place. As we can see, some soil fell out of place last week.
AUG. 18 ADDENDUM: The race issue came up at a news conference with the president today. A reporter with a TV station for aboriginals said 93 percent of typhoon victims were her target viewers. President Ma Ying-jeou said the dangerous communities should be moved.
THE TRUTH? My tea seller, who's from those mountains, told me last night that ambitious politicians seeking votes in the 1990s let those aboriginals plant whatever they wanted despite normal rules against destabilizing the mountain soil.