Dwight (Ike) Eisenhower grew up as a farm boy in small town Kansas, with a strict father and a religiously devout but loving mother, alongside 6 brothers.
He was an ill-tempered kid when one Halloween evening he was forbidden to go trick-or-treating with his elder brothers he got into such a rage he went pounding his fists against the trunk of an apple tree in the front yard, scraping the skin off and leaving his hands bloody and torn.
He went to West Point primarily for the free tuition and was academically mediocre and behaviorally defiant and rebellious. He graduated in 1915, lobbying furiously to be sent to the World War I and finally received the order to ship out to France on November 18, 1918, one week after the war ended.
He spent the next 20 years training troops, coaching football, and doing logistics in the US. By his 40's, he was easily the least accomplished of the boys in the Eisenhower family. Nobody expected great things of him.
But he settled in and learned the secrets of thriving within the military organization. He learned to master procedure, process, teamwork, and spot and elevate the right ideas from people: "When I go to a new station I look to see who is the strongest and ablest man on the post. I forget my own ideas and do everything in my power to promote what he says is right."
He was appointed personal assistant to General Douglas MacArthur, a man he disliked for his aristocratic air and above-institution attitude but served him loyally for 8 years, as he did for all other superiors he'd been assigned to.
As the supreme commander of World War II allies, he suppressed his own frustrations in order to keep the international alliance together. As President, he hid his private thoughts, and wore a costume of affability, optimism, and farm-boy charm in public to lead the country.
He once told his grandson that his smile “came not from some sunny feel-good philosophy but from getting knocked down by a boxing coach at West Point. ‘If you can’t smile when you get up from a knockdown,’ the coach said, ‘you’re never going to lick an opponent.’"
To tame his underlying anger, he took the names of the people he hated, wrote them down on slips of papers, and tore them up and threw them in the wastebasket.
He was a master of army expletives, but almost never cursed in front of women and would walk away from a dirty joke; a 4-pack-a-day heavy smoker at the end of WW II but quit it cold turkey one day.
"Freedom," he would say in his 1957 State of the Union speech, "has been defined as the opportunity for self-discipline."
He wrote that "It's all my fault if Normandy invasion failed" note but also a curt and emotionless letter to his war time chauffeur/secretary and rumored lover at her dismissal at the end of the war.
After his death, his vice president, Richard Nixon, recollected, "Ike was a far more complex and devious man than most people realized, and in the best sense of these words. Not shackled to a one-track mind, he always applied two, three, or four lines of reasoning to a single problem... His mind was quick and facile."
"He was honorable but occasionally opaque, outwardly amiable but inwardly seething," added his recent biographer Evan Thomas.
**********************************************************************
"Take a bucket, fill it with water,
Put your hand in — clear up to the wrist.
Now pull it out; the hole that remains
Is a measure of how much you’ll be missed….
The moral of this quaint example:
To do just the best that you can,
Be proud of yourself, but remember,
There is no Indispensable Man!"
-- Anonymous poem carried in Ike's pocket
Monday, June 15, 2015
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
rhine river cruise
We've been thinking about taking a river cruise through Europe for some time, so when a good friend couple suggested we join them for a "Romantic Rhine" river cruise that they had signed up for some months ago we practically jumped on it without much weighing and dawdling like we normally would.
We strolled down from our cozy little hotel nearby Zurich University campus to visit the old town district with canals and bridges, shops and cathedrals, and had our first taste of bratwurst and fries at a popular local eatery we found through the Yelp mobile app.
On the Rhine
To the Lowlands
Back to the New Land
The Memorables
From the Alps
The cruise started at a little town northwest of Zurich, so we took flight from LA to Zurich a couple days early to take time touring the city and the country before the cruise got started.
Zurich is a nice little big town nestled between a lake, two rivers and some wooded hills north of the Alps, wearing the crowns of one of the busiest financial centers and wealthiest cities in the world underneath its calm and classy setting.
We strolled down from our cozy little hotel nearby Zurich University campus to visit the old town district with canals and bridges, shops and cathedrals, and had our first taste of bratwurst and fries at a popular local eatery we found through the Yelp mobile app.
We also took a one-day excursion to another tourist town in central Switzerland, got cabled up to a mountain for a May snow surprise, then an equally surprising scenic lake ride back.
Through the Bourg, Bergs, and Heims
Other than our first stop Strasbourg, which is located on the French side of the German-France border, the rest of our ports of call all lay in German territory.
Besides the usual cathedrals and town centers with lively crowds in each of these little and big towns we walked by, we also got to sit down and sip beers at the sunny romantic Heidelberg; watched how the world's first printing press was set and done at Gutenberg Museum in Mainz; awed by the grandiose monument celebrating German unification some 150 years ago at a majestic hill side park overlooking Rudesheim; and enjoyed a true Black Forest cherry cake and coffee at--where else--the true Black Forest in southwestern Germany.
On the Rhine
A river cruise ship is a miniature ocean cruise liner. Instead of hosting two or three thousand people, it holds only 110 guests in our case, for example.
What it cannot provide--such as casino or lavish stage shows--it tries to make up with fine services and finer entertainment programs. All our meals were of high quality ingredients and exquisite design and all dinners were served with complimentary wines. There was usual light jazz piano music at the lounge at night for dancing and one particular evening a string trio performance by 3 young upwardly mobile East European musicians was so extraordinarily good and touching it counted as one of the high-lights of our trip.
To the Lowlands
Amsterdam is the end point of our cruise. We took a canal tour around the city, then a bike ride in the afternoon that wound through the beautiful, serene country side of Holland, which is literally just one corner turn away from this bike-crazed metropolis.
We spent one extra day finishing up our street tour and visiting a museum that hosts master pieces of Dutch Golden Age maestros such as Vermeer and Rembrandt, and had a nice dinner at a nice little park next to our hotel with great tasting Belgium beer.
Back to the New Land
From the old we flew back to the New Amsterdam (the original name of Manhattan) the next day. Off the plane, I found the skies sunny blue instead of gloomy gray, streets wide and straight where pedestrian right of way reigns, the Statue of Liberty holding her torch on the gleamy harbor... Neil Diamond's "Coming to America" buzzing in my head...
We spent the next two days touring New York City, just like we did with those German towns and Zurich and Amsterdam, strolling through parks, going to restaurants, visiting museums... Big Apple seems to have them all, old and new, glamour and substance... Frank Sinatra's song lyrics "If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere" buzzing in my head...
The Memorables
Besides our good friend couple (Sean & Sophie), Gohan and Jiafen were the other couple we traveled with. We met, ate, toured, and laughed a lot every day. One thing worth noting was Gohan is a recovering lung cancer patient who's still undergoing chemo therapy, yet we didn't see him hampered physically or emotionally in any way, but jolly and energetic all the time.
We shared our faith and "family feud" mostly light-hearted, occasionally serious, but always progressively enlightening and helpful to each other.
Then when in New York, we met Sean & Sophie's daughter Tiffany who was engaging happily with her exciting new job and life here with a loving boy friend beside; and Angie, a dear friend of ours who looked just as chipper and charming as we last saw her some 4 and a half years ago.
These were precious moments we came to enjoy, as much as or even more than the mountains and monuments, lakes and rivers, castles and cathedrals that we saw all through the trip!
* For more photos and details of the trip, please go to
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
hypocrisy
Growing up in Taiwan, I heard some "Chinese Culture Supremacist" jeering that in American culture, calling someone a "liar" is a serious offence because "Americans lie all the time, so they are ultra-sensitive to being called that name."
That's a silly allegation, of course. After living among them for well over 30 years, I find Americans to be more honest and straight-talking than most other peoples in the world I know, if anything.
What I am surprised though--at least initially--is the term "hypocrite" so often used here.
Politicians are often called hypocrites, for pretending to care for issues or people when all they do is their political future or how many votes they are getting in the next election.
Businesses are often called hypocrites because their institutional goals of obtaining maximum profits are often in conflict with the benevolent image they try to maintain in the public.
And of course when celebrity-like church leaders are found involved in sex or monetary scandals they are pinned as the most despicable ones who practice exactly what they preach others not to do.
Maybe Americans are just too honest a people to stand any phony characters or manipulative behavior flitting right in front of their societal eyes. (But then we have the Kardashians... well, that's another story).
That same honesty may also be called naivete or simple-mindedness that causes them to try to provide simple solutions to complicated issues that often times get them involved with troubles in other parts of the world where they are in turn called hypocrites who mess up other people's affairs when they can not take care of their own well in the first place.
It's much easier to subscribe to a lofty idea in its abstract form than when it's broken down into nitty-gritty parts whose implementation may interfere with my personal interests. NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) mentality is one example. Another, more amusing one is like this: When asked by surveyors what they think about illegal immigration, most Americans say it should be banned, no doubt. But then the surveyor asks: "If we do evict all and allow no more illegal immigrants, your yard maintenance cost will increase, your restaurant bills will go up... What's your thought on that?"... Moments of silence... then many would say: "By how much will my bills rise up?"
When I was a boy, I was puzzled by all those funny tales of men so fearful of their wives... What the heck are they so fearful about? Then I grew up and knew, it's probably because men are usually the great pretenders, grand speech makers, abstract idea promoters, while their wives are the nitty-gritty doers, who know all the shallow hollow behind their billow, so they have to kowtow.
I think we are all hypocrites to some extent. One reason for that is we all aspire to be someone or something better than who we are at certain stages of our life. So to the old man who gives the youngsters the wrong mentoring advice of "Do as I say, not as I do" I'll give him credit for wanting his youngsters to model after something he knows he himself hasn't set a good example for. Similarly, to those who call all the people sitting in the church "just a bunch of hypocrites" I'll say yes some may well be, but many are there because they know they have been falling short of the mark but are continually trying nonetheless.
You probably know the word "hypocrite" came from Greek/Latin origin meaning "a person who acts". And as they say, the world is a stage, we all act a part in it. We play the roles we either are born with or seek to be, or both, wearing different hats at different times or at the same time, all the time. Each role has its intrinsic values and expected norms. Play it well, and you get self-satisfaction and the society functions hunky-dory. Nothing wrong with that.
Except we all have something else that goes beyond this acting, that common being some call "true self" or divine presence, that we like to unveil from behind our masks and hope to meet with others who find it too, from time to time, as often as possible.
Take it easy, fellas!
Friday, March 20, 2015
my 4 months in taipei (4)
Good food is aplenty in Taipei, from the street corner soybean milk breakfast shack to fancy hotel food court to gourmet coffee/tea house to indigenous Taiwanese delicacy night market... Just pick one and answer the question: "Where do you want to eat today?"
Or just "Gomaji"!
Gomaji.com is a Groupon-like website that offers deep discount deals at participating restaurants that we happened to get wind of. We just picked those nearby with the kind of food we like, purchased the tickets and made reservations and went. Foods we thus tried included exquisite seafood (http://www.gomaji.com/Taipei_
Other great eateries I recall included a country kitchen with farm-raised chicken (http://www.paine0602.com/
Eating really is just half the fun of feasting, where the people you eat with constitute the other half of the fun. Through these feastings and various other events, I am glad I got to reacquaint myself with my sisters, in-laws, cousins, aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews, friends of old and new, knowing them better each time we got together.
The world is a transient place, even the city I grew up with I have long given up trying to trace back all the places my memories like me to reminisce, because they are recognizable no more, just like the South Orange County I've been living in for the past 29 years having been in transition all these years. What's ever lasting, or we can try to make ever lasting, is relationships and compassion with people, wherever we live, whenever we meet.
With that, I conclude this long log of my long stay in Taiwan. The old saying "a picture is worth a thousand words", and in this new age of Instagram writing text without accompanying photos is borderline criminal, so here is a link to a collection of photos of my 4 months in Taiwan I have put in my Facebook photo album for those of you who may like to view them:
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10206320083586118.1073741829.1387569224&type=1&l=b0de2ea607
Adios!
my 4 months in taipei (3)
One "mission" I set out to do on this trip was to explore and understand the ecosystem of internet startup businesses in Taiwan. I went to events sponsored by government innovation promoting agencies, seminars and "meetups" organized by formal and informal professional groups, such as "Startup Taiwan", "Taipei Entrepreneur Community", "Young Professionals Network - Taipei"... and met an interesting crop of entrepreneurs, professionals, organizers, expatriates (foreigners living in Taipei), etc.:
Jamie is a young man who came back to Taiwan after studying/working in the States and started one of the first internet startup accelerator programs in Taiwan--and I later found out he also hosts one weekly news-magazine show on TV; Ellen is a young woman who also came back from the States after finishing her school in Texas and went to work in the manufacturing and trading businesses in China and is now getting ready to embark on another venture there; Clio also came back from China after working there for years for an international software company and is trying to set up some innovative IT professionals network in Taiwan.
Winston is a local young man who had tried an online business with social cause; Ben is currently working for a niche printer part company but itching to start a business of his own; JP is the co-founder of a cloud-based video monitoring startup which has established some footing in Taiwan and is now looking to expand to world markets; Rebecca is a college English teacher who had published 19 books on English learning and has an app idea to help foreigners learn Chinese in a fun way.
Zack is a young programming wiz kid who's building a software tool that he plans to use in his own future company; Marco is a nice kid just came back from the States to fulfill his military obligation and take care of his ailing mother while in the same time tries to start a business implementing the startup plan he had won prize for in the States before graduation.
Jake is an American from Oklahoma who graduated from the same University of Southern California I went to and did the same technological venture (VoIP) I did during the same period (late 1990's), except he was doing it here in Taiwan while I was doing it there in the US. He's happily married to a Taiwanese woman, with kids, and managing a technical consulting firm he co-owns that has over 30 software engineers in Vietnam; Jim is a guy from UK who came to study MBA here and decided to stay and is now editor of a startup newsletter while working for a law firm whose founder is a (Caucasian) American who became a naturalized Taiwanese citizen whose office building in downtown Taipei is probably one of the first to install roof-top green house in the city that the newly elected mayor of Taipei was invited to visit (and Jim showed me around after our lunch near the office).
Troy is a Canadian from Toronto who had long established passive-revenue generating e-commerce sites before he moved to Taipei 7 years ago to enjoy internet prevalent, foreigner friendly, relatively low cost living here. He has just set up a business book club to meet like-minded people while planning on starting some new online business venture; Karen is an American woman who's been in Taiwan for over 30 years who teaches English, linguistics and phonetics at National Taiwan University and are now exploring the possibility of launching a startup with former students to develop and market English-learning apps.
Sebastian is a German who had a neat language exchange app for which he's looking for funding to monetize the service; Robert is a Swiss who owns an international translation agency while on the side organizes monthly startup meetups at a cafe restaurant whose young owner Donnie is an entrepreneur and the co-organizer of the events.
Bernard is a Hong Konger who gained his hi-tech startup experiences in Boston, Beijing, Singapore, and started some months ago an "entrepreneurial skills" training school here teaching coding and online marketing; Richard is a non-technical Taiwan native whose eclectic life experiences through Australia and Japan convinced him to come back and organize and manage a startup innovation center here sponsored by the city.
And Asics is the energetic owner of a newly founded accelerator company from mainland China who came here to convince young Taiwanese entrepreneurs to move to the city just across the strait to start their businesses there, promising to provide all the "grounding" logistics and a gateway to the biggest internet/mobile markets of the world!
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
my 4 months in taipei (2)
Meeting old friends is a joyful thing to do when returning to the place you came from. There were many reunion parties I went to, from little ones to big ones, rural to metro, public or private, planned or impromptu.
Two major ones were both from my college classmates: One guy invited us to the rolling orange hill estate he purchased a few years ago right off the silicon city of north-central Taiwan. Everybody got a full pack of organically grown, delicious tasting oranges on their way out, after a pleasant afternoon of scenery walk in the farm and happy chattering in an elegant cottage house they built.
The other was held in a newly renovated and converted chic old house Italian restaurant in Taipei city for fine dining. We were each issued a VIP membership card at the end--courtesy of our "honcho" classmate whose company sponsored the renovation and the event--that allowed for a few free gourmet coffees, for example. That I actually took advantage of afterwards because the restaurant was just a few minutes walk away from where I lived.
One little reunion was with a couple elementary schoolmates, at the backyard of a city dwelling, which is kind of unusual, judging from the expensive real estate landscape here. But there we were, 3 couples sitting around the patio table drinking, snacking, sharing stories of old and new in a delightful sunny-blue-skyed Taipei city afternoon for a good time.
Another little get-together was with a few college friends in a residential setting as well. This ingenious college classmate of ours created a chip design ahead of its time and started his own company many years ago that has been doing good and sustainable business ever since. He bought one floor of this nice apartment building for residence and another for office so his daily executive job is to walk downstairs, and up. We had an exotic dinner his wife prepared and then sang Karaoke in his well suited entertainment room, realizing some of my college classmates have many otherworldly talents than just knowing electrons.
And I led a bike-ride reunion with a few campus fellowship alums, to finish one last leg of the great bike routes around the city and its outskirts that I started trekking on some 4 years ago and continued to do so every time I came back.
I also met my usual "street scholar" friend who's been teaching Greek in a seminary school while ministering to street people every weekend at the seedy part of the town, and another guy who's been living and working in North Africa translating Bible to local language in secret for years and just got back to Taiwan a couple years ago.
And here's another campus fellowship alum, a girl who's been doing a ministry called "Telling Tales to Adults" that uses movies or arts or literature as discussion materials to explore the true meaning of love, life, and faith. Going to her events is like going to the movies, which I did a couple of times:
One showing was a Korean movie (http://www.rottentomatoes.
The other was the true-love story between C. S. Lewis--the famous Christian writer--and a divorced American woman (http://www.imdb.com/title/
Yet another one she and her crew was working on that I watched while visiting their work session was about how a campus shooting killer's parent struggles to put his life back together after that tragic event (http://www.imdb.com/title/
Friday, March 13, 2015
my 4 months in taipei (1)
For the past 10-15 years or so, my wife and I go back to Taiwan around the Christmas-New Year time for vacation, usually for 2 or 3 weeks, one month top.
This year--or should I say last--was different. With my wife's early retirement, she decided--and I complied--to try out a long stay there that started early November and lasted over the end of February, for a total of almost 4 months.
The following are a few memorable moments there I thought worth noting down.
My chronically aching feet started acting up again just about a week after I arrived in Taipei. In hind sight, it probably started way early in October, through my trip to Turkey, never got completely healed, before I foolhardily started my aggressive daily morning walk to a neighborhood park here.
So here I was, in the middle of the night, lying in bed with excruciating, bone gnawing pain at my left heel and ankle, trying to find any pain relieving medicine in the kitchen drawer without success. In similar situations back in the States, I either went to the ER which turned out to be no emergency care at all, or having to wait until the morning and drove myself to some local clinic when they were open. Here, I called a 24-hour drug store to ask if they had the anti-inflammation/pain relieving medicine I wanted, they didn't, but suggested I try a pharmacy store across street that might have. I did and they had. Then I called a taxi, which came to my apartment almost the moment I hung up the phone, drove me a few blocks to the pharmacy. I hopped (literally) out of the car, bought the medicine, asked for water and took a couple pills right then and there, hopped back to the street, got another cab and went home.
The next day I went to a neighborhood municipal hospital and saw a bone specialist. He took the x-ray, checked my foot, gave prescriptions, for both medicine and physical therapy for two weeks (and then two more weeks in a follow-up visit, and then another two after that), all in one morning's worth.
Then my wife broke her arm by accident over a weekend visit to a town 50 miles away from Taipei. The local hospital ER took x-ray, re-aligned the dislocated joint, put on the cast, before sending her on an ambulance back to Taipei city for a bone surgery, which took place the next day without a glitch.
The total out-of-the-pocket expenses, including the emergency services at both hospitals, the hired ambulance, the surgery, 2-night stay in the hospital, and the non-insurance-covered high-end artificial joint we opted to use for my wife: around $2600.
And I opted to do my regular colon exam here this time. Again it was just a local municipal gastroenterology specialist, who arranged to have the exam done in another bigger and better facilitated municipal hospital branch, with painless anesthesia-assisted procedure, just like those performed in the States. The nice thing about doing it here is I didn't have to drive, or have someone else drive me there. Just took a subway and walked there, and a taxi back.They did require a second person accompanying through the exam, due to the full-body anesthesia, though.
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