The Liaos are our cross-street neighbors who moved into their brand new house like we did twelve years ago. Compared to us, theirs is a "big" family, consisting of the couple Joe and Merielle, their newborn daughter (and a boy add-on later), and Joe's mom Leah and dad Bill, a three generation ensemble.
Through curbside conversations, occasional meetups at community events, and some lunches together, we got to know each other better: Leah and Bill were first generation immigrants from Taiwan like us, though 10 and 18 years our senior, respectively, Joe, their second son, along with another son and a daughter, were born and raised in the States.
Bill came from a reputable family in central Taiwan. His father went to Japan to study medicine before World War II, when Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule. After the war, he came back to Taiwan and started practicing medicine in his rural hometown 雲林西螺, instituting a first of its kind, "universal healthcare" system where for a fixed low monthly fee, everyone in town got comprehensive quality health care from him.
Then came the atrocious "228 event" (happened on 2/28, 1947, hence the name), when Taiwanese rebelled against the corrupt and inept administration of Chiang Kai-Shek's dispatch from China after Taiwan was reverted to China at the end of WWII, and the subsequent brutal crackdown by Chiang's troops on Taiwanese elites.
Bill's father was accused of harboring some riot leader, and disseminating "Socialist ideas" by setting up a community based healthcare system such as he had done. He was arrested and sentenced to prison for 12 years.
The whole family was on the government's black list, Bill couldn't find steady good jobs and was under constant surveillance by government informants. It was only through his marriage to Leah and some serendipitous incident, along with some personal connection to some higher-up in the government that he made it out of Taiwan, emigrating to the US in the 1970's.
From their new foothold in Northern California, Bill and Leah built out their new life in America: worked hard, ran their own businesses, raised three kids, sent them to colleges, before retiring and settling down in Southern California.
Now Joe, the son they live with, is a VP at Goldman Sachs, Joanne, their daughter, married with two kids, also a corporate lawyer at Goldman Sachs, and Tim, the other son, runs a coffee shop of his own. All are either within the same household or five to ten minutes away from their mom and dad. "You are the luckiest parents I know in America," I must have told Bill and Leah a couple times or more.
Bill was healthy looking yet didn't seem to do any workout. What's his secret? "Drink red wine every day," he'd say. Indeed once when we were at their house for a chat he poured out glasses of red wine from a five-liter wine box. "One glass a day, keeps disease away all these years," he said. It was the same kind of box wine he used when he was running a restaurant business in Northern California that he'd been drinking since.
He also kept up a sharp mind and good memories, name-dropping some old time high officials in Taiwan that were either his relatives or schoolmates or friends' friends, etc. He'd been back to Taiwan a few times since the old white terror days were long gone, and kept abreast of what's happening there through YouTube and the internet. And though he probably would never forget the tragic events the old regime did to his family (he still slept every night on an old, classy, family heirloom bed he took from their old home in central Taiwan), he didn't seem to let them cloud his assessment of political reality today. When I asked him, jokingly, "who do you want me to vote for the presidency this time" before I left for my recent trip to Taiwan, "the third party," he replied, like many young people in Taiwan had in mind.
Red wine drinking notwithstanding, his health started declining in recent years. First the bladder, then the liver, and finally the lungs, cancers and old age gradually took their toll on his body.
He passed away last month, just a couple weeks before his 84th birthday.
Just last year, the Liao's extended family, both in Taiwan and abroad, finished rehabilitation of their old estate in central Taiwan, setting up a memorial hall at the site in honor of Bill's father Dr. Liao Man-Tu (廖萬督). I know Bill would have wanted to visit that place had he been well. I think I will visit it and pay tribute for my sweet old friend to his family next time I am in Taiwan.
t.o.t.
thoughts, observations, things i do
Thursday, March 21, 2024
bill liao
Thursday, February 22, 2024
gym, cafe, and tamsui
Having been staying in Taipei for well over three months, by default or by design, I have become a habitual visitor to a few places that weave the fabric of my life as an "expatriate" in a city I was born and grew up in decades ago.
There are commercial gyms and community sports centers pretty much everywhere in the city, but too crummy and crowded for my liking, so I decided to check on some "VIP Health Club" hosted by some five-star hotels offering their fitness facility to due paying members outside their hotel guests. There is one such hotel nearby where I live, about 10 minutes walk away, presumably perfect for regular visits. So I bought a one-day pass to check it out.It has everything: workout floor, steam room, sauna, spa, and an outdoor swimming pool, nice and dandy. The show stopper, however, is the pool is on the 20+th floor of the hotel while the rest of the facility is on the basement floor. Imagine going half naked in between these places... Not for me.
Then I checked out this other hotel that we stayed during those pandemic quarantine times whose room and services we were quite happy with. It's got the same whole nine yards: spa, sauna, steam room, exercise equipment, and a two-lane outdoor swimming pool, at a smaller scale than the other one, but more ergonomically laid out and all on one same floor, with a nice service crew. I signed up with them right away.
I have since been going to the place averaging three or four days a week. My routine starts at the workout room, going through seven or eight different machines, morphing into the steam room for a sweaty detox, going to the outdoor pool for lap swimming, heading back in for hot spa, cold dip, hot spa, cold dip, then a long sit in the sauna room, before taking a shower and heading home, for a total of roughly two-hour run.
For its tiny footprint, one thing I was concerned about was it might be easily crowded out, especially for the two-lane-only swimming pool. To my pleasant surprise, that never happens. For all these times I've been using the facility, I have rarely met another swimmer at the pool, nor other users at the steam room or sauna cabin, and no more than two or three people at the same time exercising in the workout room or sitting in the spa. As I splay still in the cold water well, body heat reaching perfect equilibrium with the surrounding chill, all quiet and all alone, I feel more like being in a private meditative chamber than in a public sweathouse!
As for the commute, it's only two subway stations away from where I live. But I can—and prefer to—take the bus too, which comes almost every two minutes and allows open street views that the subway can't. Or on sunny days I'll take the city-run rental bicycle that gets me to the club about the same time as the subway or the bus—kudos to the excellent public transportation systems in Taipei!
There is literally one coffee shop at every street corner in Taipei. One day I strolled into one of these in my neighborhood and saw/heard a young musician playing viola at the corner of the store. I grabbed a table right next to him and started enjoying the music. They were a mixture of classic, folk, and pop scores, and all of a sudden I heard one that sounded mysteriously familiar, then I realized it was one of the songs that my chorus group in SoCal had been practicing for a while. So I chatted with him afterwards, and he said he—along with the City Orchestra—had actually worked with a chorus group from LA recently... He then played that song again just for me so I could record it...
He is actually one member of a string orchestra team the coffee house (a chain of three coffee houses plus one ice cream parlor) had recently organized. Consisting of about a dozen young male musicians, they take turn playing at each of these coffee houses, sometimes single, most of the time twosome or threesome in concerto, in the afternoon or in the evening, usually free (as long as you spend the minimum required consumption at the store), at times charging admission fees.
I took my wife to one of those evening paid performances and she loved it. It was a piano and cello concerto by two young men in their early 20's. The house was packed. We chatted with a middle aged woman who sat across our table, she said she'd been a fanatic follower of this particular cello player for quite some time. A younger couple sitting next to us said they were recent converts to such cafe concerts for its easy atmosphere and flexible hours that provide for an enjoyable evening at the end of a busy work day.
We have since been to all three of these coffee houses for their coffee/cake/meals with concerts, and got to know almost all the team members. They are in general recent graduates from musical schools, each with numerous performance and award records under their belt, and all very handsome (and cute)! Maybe that's why many of their fans are middle aged women and my wife always leaves generous tips to them at the end of their performances, with the excuse of "helping out these starving young musicians"!
It's where the river meets the sea, the old British consulate residence and the Spanish fort standing on the hill, overlooking the harbor where Dr. George Leslie Mackay, a Canadian Presbyterian missionary landed and established the first Presbyterian church in northern Taiwan some 150 years ago, and where local militia fought off an invading French naval fleet some 140 years ago.
I have visited the place quite a few times through the years: Strolling along the riverside boardwalks and the old-town district, crossing the harbor on boat and on bridge, visiting the old fort and the consulate residence and Dr. Mackay's dormitory turned modern day art gallery, besides bicycling all the way from Taipei to and around its coasts.
This time around, a friend who lives in the area took me on his sports car for a ride, to scenes I've never seen before: a couple of bucolic country roads hidden between major arteries, a fallowed rice paddy turned scenic pond, and some palace like structures that I wouldn't know are for cremation ashes storage had he not told me so.
We also went across town to have lunch at a beef noodle place whose chef-owner is an erstwhile general who used to run a big chain of beef noodle shops across the strait in mainland China until the pandemic hit and he decided to call it quits, retire and settle down here for good.
Another, contemporary legendary story going on in Tamsui, I suppose.
Sunday, January 21, 2024
septology – a novel
The plot—if there is one—is simple: An ordinary, if somewhat rebellious and gifted boy named Asle grew up in a little seaside village in Norway, dropped out from high school for art school, met and married the love of his life, a devout but free spirited Catholic, became a successful painter, lost his wife, lives a secluded life in the countryside except for a good faithful friend Asleik who watches out for him and keeps inviting him to his sister's house for Christmas every year...
You've got some surreal feel already, don't you? But more, for the story is told through Asle's "stream of consciousness" narration that weaves his hallucinating memories, artistic musings, spiritual wonderings, and mundane activities in one day in one long sentence, one chapter, for seven consecutive days, seven chapters, that make up this 650+ page volume.
Through his own inner dialogue, Asle reveals his thoughts and ruminations on
God
"God put limits on himself by giving human beings free will,"
"God is not all-powerful, he is powerful in his powerlessness,"
"the greater the despair and suffering is, the closer God is,"
liturgy, symbolism
"when the people there, five or six or seven of us, stood up to take communion there was a wonderful sense of atonement,"
"both prayer and mass, and most of all the eucharist, can lead us closer to God, closer to eternity and nothingness, closer to the shining darkness inside us, because I experience that every time I go to mass or see the halo around the host, or the glimmer coming from it, the light, in the transfiguration happening, in the consecration,"
"the words are simple, they’re words everyone can understand, and that’s why the meaning too of these words is something for everyone, but if you get hung up on the literal meaning, to the extent you can, then the words become meaningless,"
art
"a good picture is a gift, and a kind of prayer, it’s both a gift and a prayer of gratitude, I think and I never could have painted a good picture through force of will, because art just happens, art occurs, that’s how it is,"
"my inner pictures in their own picture are always pointing towards something beyond themselves, there is a kind of longing for afar in all the pictures, and at the same time what the pictures are yearning for is always in them already,"
good and evil
"it's from God's darkness that the light comes,"
"even if good and evil, beauty and ugliness are in conflict, the good is always there and the evil is just trying to be there, sort of,"
silence
"a painting is a silent voice that speaks, and the voice says that there is a silence that at the same time brings something close,"
"God’s language speaks silently from everything that exists, and this silence was first broken when The Word came into the world,"
"mother Judit could kind of just fall into herself and become silent,"
mysticism
"isn’t God just something that is, not something you can say anything about?"
"it’s when you understand that you can’t understand God that you understand him,"
"The Bible has to be interpreted, has to be read metaphorically, yes, like it’s not the real thing but a picture, like a painting, with its own truth, because The Bible is literature, and when it comes right down to it literature and visual art are the same thing,"
It does no justice to the book to group thoughts and ruminations the way I just did, for 1) thoughts and ruminations are in truth interrelated and cannot be bounded by abstract topical grouping as such, and 2) the book does an excellent job capturing the random, spontaneous and free flowing nature of the inner working of human mind by faithfully recording the protagonist's ever wandering, overlapping, reappearing "I-think"s as they arise, in simple but rhythmic proses, that is smooth, tranquil, incantational telling of a solipsistic tale.
And a mesmerizing read for me.
For the book:
https://www.amazon.com/Septology-Jon-Fosse/dp/1945492759/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8
Wednesday, November 22, 2023
kinmen
Kinmen (金門) is a group of small islands off the southeastern coast of China. Far away (116 miles) from Taiwan but within view of mainland China, it had been a fierce fighting ground between Communist China and Taiwan from late 1940's through the Cold War era and remained under Taiwanese military administration until the early 1990's, when the tension between China and Taiwan eased.
Saturday, November 11, 2023
emptiness 空
Went to a seminar at a Catholic university in Taipei on one Buddhism school's interpretation on Emptiness.
"The world is one big illusion, nothing has its real own-being, all things are cause-effect related" are some fundamental assertions of Buddhism, as you may well know, but here's some simple, interesting logic this particular Buddhism school (Madhyamaka) uses to explain them:
Similarly, the concept of cause requires and cannot occur without the concept of effect, and the concept of effect requires and cannot occur without the concept of cause. When "x is the cause of y," it implies that the requirement for y is built into the nature of x.
Since the truly existing own-being of a thing has to exist autonomously, independent of the aid or influence of anything else, this built-in need for an external condition will preclude real own-being. Therefore the world is not real, but one big illusion.
This doesn't mean the "worldly" things we experience daily do not have their effects on us, or the seeds won't sprout, or a person's actions cannot achieve their intended effects. Like objects experienced in dreams, reflections seen in a mirror, echoes, and like illusory creations conjured up by a skilled magician, they all seem so real and fancy changing.
But the real real behind all these has always been in a state of calm. "One need not seek deliverance from things that have never existed but must merely awaken to the true state of affairs," as concluded by Dr. Anne MacDonald, the speaker from Austrian Academy of Sciences of Vienna.
Saturday, October 14, 2023
language
You are in a fog of mind, and I ask "tell me what you think," out comes from your mouth a string of words that make sense to both you and me... Ah, the twin magic of language: it organizes our thought, and communicates it to others.
Compared to the ephemeral exchanges among a number of people limited by how far the sound waves can travel and remain audible that is spoken language, written language has the advantage of presenting our thought and idea in clear, structured form in plain view that allows easy review and revision, and more importantly, when kept on formidable material, transition and distribution of what's recorded on it.
Without a centralized writing system, there would not have been a Chinese civilization over its diverse ethnic and geographical compositions through thousands of years, just as the Western civilization would not be what it is today had it not carried the Greek-Latin languages through the medieval times. The written language is so powerful it could even revive its spoken counterpart: see how the ancient Hebrew language was brought back from the dead to become the day-to-day, verbal and literal lingua franca of Israel today!
While on the subject of audio (spoken language) vs visual (written language): The alphabetical language, due to its phonetic nature, molds the sequential, logical thinking of the Western mind, while a hieroglyphic language such as Chinese that has both audio and visual components built-in in its semantical characters (形聲字=形思惟+音思惟) induces the more holistic (logical + emotional) thinking of the Eastern mind, or so say some oriental cultural nativists.
In my own theory of language, human consciousness is like one big, fluid dark hole that, once a bit part of it gets perturbed by a thing or emotion, consents to use a word or expression for that thing or emotion that it thinks triggers the same perturbation experienced by other conscious beings.
And that assumption always has some margin of error, thus a word or expression will mean differently between people of different cognitive dispositions or cultural upbringing, sometimes subtly, sometimes disastrously.
The dark hole is so huge that our existing language can only cover a tiny bit of our conscious cosmos, that's why we are constantly creating new words, twisting old words with new meanings, using metaphors and analogies to explain things, etc.
There is a form of literature, poem, that uses minimalistic words and obscure expressions on purpose, so as to leave room for readers to "fill in the blank" from the grab bag of their seemingly bottomless conscious mind.
All can speak, but not all can write,
What things can you tell me that words cannot describe?
Be bothered not by a stirred mind,
All shall subside into a good night!
Saturday, September 23, 2023
south america
Following our previous trip to Ecuador and Peru, we continued to learn the ABC's (Argentina, Brazil, Chile) of the South American continent: Specifically, we visited three major cities (Rio de Janeiro of Brazil, Buenos Aires of Argentina, Santiago of Chile) and one natural attraction—the Iguazu Falls on the border of Brazil and Argentina, on our 13-day tour to South America in August.
Ryan and Molly were a young couple in their early 30's from Texas. Molly was born in Palestine but grew up in LA and still had a father living in Lebanon. Ryan was a Walmart project manager who carried a GoPro stick that automatically recorded 360-degree high quality videos as a drone would wherever he went, from whom I asked and got a couple of great clips of the Iguazu Falls scenes for my own records!
Aline was a true-life coal miner's daughter from West Virginia, who joined the Navy to escape poverty when she was young. Now in her 70's, she still walked big, steady strides that oftentimes left us youngsters behind. Unfortunately she got struck down by Covid during the last couple days of the tour and we missed our chance to say goodbye to her at the farewell dinner.
There were two multi-generation families in our group: Margaret was a quiet African American old lady who had worked all her life in a Queens' school district in New York, her daughter a school counselor, and the granddaughter a sweet, disciplined, athletic teen-ager who jogged every morning throughout the tour.
Rosie was an energetic, passionate Latina who loved her job at Southern California Edison helping vendors do business with SCE. She brought her two aging parents who at times needed wheelchair assistance for sightseeing. Her father came to the States as a dirt poor immigrant and through hard work and a bit of luck had become owner of a tire store that he now delegated to his two sons to manage. He and his wife were quiet and probably didn't speak much English but had the bright smiles of happy, contented parents who had worked hard all their lives and were now being taken good care of by their loving offspring.
Well, I cannot give you definite answers on whether Phonecians had arrived in South America long before Columbus did since I am no archaeologist nor geologist, but as for the toilet water swirling down thing, I can tell you something about it since I had done some experiments of my own at various locations of the Southern Hemisphere continent I just visited.