new york, new york

Michael Lin and I were high school buddies and went to the same university/department in Taiwan then came to the States the same year some 40 years ago. He ended up settling in NoCal while I in SoCal. My wife and I were looking forward to attending the wedding reception in October for his daughter whom we had watched growing up as a little girl when he called and suggested we go to New York City this month where his daughter and her fiance resided for the "real thing"–the official ceremony and celebration with only a few close friends and parents of the bride and the groom–and some touring and time together in the City... A trip of purpose and pleasure, I thought... and, why not! So off we went!

This was my third visit to the Big Apple, the first two being one or two-day stop-by's that merely counted, while this time I spent six days and seven nights

Having a variety of ethnic foods, Chinese (dumplings), Japanese (ramen), French (sandwiches), Italian (veal), Latin (fusion), and world famous New York pizza, all so authentically delicious, at surprisingly reasonable prices.

​​Going to a Broadway show, Lion King, not so much for the storyline or dialogues, but the theatrical fanfare and acrobatic acting and dancing, singing and costuming.

Watching sunset on East River shore, shimmering sunlight on the river, Manhattan skyscrapers silhouetting in the back.

​Lying on the immaculately maintained spongy grass of the city park, at day and at night, blue skies or shiny city lights above.

Witnessing a wedding on a rooftop, watching the city as the city watched back, two fine young man and woman pledged and hailed their new life together.

​And taking the subway to and fro like veteran New Yorkers do every day.

You realized this was indeed a city that never slept when you saw the nightly crowds flooding Times Square, a town where "everything's happening" with scaffoldings everywhere and construction machinery humming and heaving all day long...

Yet when I visited the city library, I was struck by its palace-like decorations and the generous donations it received from many, showing great respect for learning and knowledge. As I looked up from the little but ecologically friendly zoo inside Central Park and saw a giant spider mock-up crawling on a wooden pole against the concrete high rises outside and blue skies above, I chuckled and marveled at this perfect blend of nature and civilization the city was.

​​Lastly, but not least, spending a whole week meeting and bantering and playing ping pong and billiard balls like we used to do as teen-agers with an old friend that went back half a century, watching his lovely daughter holding a rabbit doll she once forgot in our house when she's little, becoming a mature, beautiful, soon-to-be eye-doctor wife of another promising young man, the soul mate of her life... surely these were things worthy of taking a twenty-five hundred mile trip for!

 

vasily grossman

"Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer."
— “Life and Fate”, Vasily Grossman

"Humanity is fundamentally good", that is probably one basic tenet many secular humanists hold. But how does an atheistic world keep this flickering flame of good from going out without help from an almighty God, Existentialist philosophers and do-gooders, besides pointing out the absurdity of human existence and suggesting "do good for goodness' sake", don't seem to have other exciting ideas or survival guides to offer. In contrast, Vasily Grossman, a Russian Jew whose mother was murdered by the Nazis and who himself had endured the tyranny of Stalin Soviets and the horror of siege warfare with the invading Germans during World War II, held this simple belief that "as long as some little act of kindness can be found somewhere in the world, humanity prevails." That's a heartening thought!

Flip the coin to the other side: Even God-believers have many hard times struggling between doing good and doing evil. Just look at these exemplar characters in the Bible: King David, God's beloved, committing heinous crimes such as adultery and murder; St. Paul crying out "What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death!"; and Job, a "righteous man", bickering with God about the many "unfair" treatments he's been dealt... All indicating that spiritual living in a rough-and-tumble world is not one super battle where a victory is claimed and then smooth sailing all the way, but more likely a long and winding journey where God is often heard saying, "I have heard your suffering, now go suffer!"

I am one who believes Truth is not exclusively written in the Bible, but exists all around the world and within human hearts for all to see and feel. That is why when I read that passage by Vasily Grossman–an apparent non-believer–I was elated: Yeah, good triumphs over evil, darkness yields to light, isn't that the simple, universal truth we knew all along since we were kids?!

There is vast unknown in the subconscious/unconscious mind of humans, psychologists/human rationalists agree. Could conscience, or the ultimate good of humanity, be one elusive, precious unknown that deserves and demands persistent pursuit by a humanist, in the same manner a believer goes after the Holy Spirit hidden in him/her, with piety?

"God took seeds from other worlds and saved them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies. Then you become indifferent to life, and even come to hate it."
— "The Brothers Karamazov", Fyodor Dostoevsky

tales from taiwan (2)

g0v
Pronounced "gov zero, 零時政府", it is a grass-root civic tech community that promotes transparency of government information and citizen society through open source information technology that I committed my support to starting last year. Though I missed their annual banquet for donors due to my quarantine restriction, I visited their workgroup meetings and invited them to lunches, collectively and individually, to encourage and appreciate what they did.

An offshoot project from g0v, Cofacts/真的假的, is a fact-checking website and mobile app that I also supported last year. Johnson and Billion, young man and young woman in their early 30's, are cofounder/coder and promoter of the project since its inception five years ago. I went to one of their regular seminars aiming at tutoring and recruiting volunteer fact-checkers for the project and was impressed by how organized and well conducted the session was and how persistent they'd been doing this for years on volunteer basis. I continued my donation to the project and took them to a steakhouse for a treat.

Keep up the good work, doers of the world!

Still rocking
JK Yao was my junior high school buddy who loved rock 'n' roll music since we were kids. He started singing them at restaurant lounges in his early 20's, won top talent prize on TV with his guitar duet, composed and published his own songs, and has been producing and hosting an "oldies but goodies" rock music radio program broadcast every Saturday evening since two years ago, after semi-retiring from his own award winning lighting design company.

He gathered some of his old band members to have a series of public performances at a musical cafe recently. We went to the first show, it was a full house, packed with fans who enjoyed his radio program and old time rock 'n' roll music like I do. Here's his rendition of Don McLean's "American Pie" I recorded at the concert:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/Y8bzn85DR4kyjW8m8

Singing through that 9-minute long classic without missing a beat on the lyric, my hat off to him!

​A girl from Seattle
Doris Brougham (彭蒙惠) decided she wanted to share the Gospel with Chinese people when she heard millions of them had never heard of Jesus at twelve. In 1948, at age 22, she left her hometown Seattle by freighter for China, where she learned Chinese, taught English, and helped with Christian missions. She moved to Taiwan in 1951 in the aftermath of the Chinese Civil War and continued her evangelical work by helping tribal people groups, setting up children's choirs, organizing youth camps, teaching English classes, and hosting an international radio program broadcasting to mainland China. In 1962 she founded Overseas Radio and Television Inc. (ORTV), along with Studio Classroom (空中英語教室), an English language-teaching radio program. She was also involved in producing Taiwan’s first Christian TV program, Heavenly Melodies (天韻歌聲), formed of ORTV staff, which aired in 1963. 

She is 95 years old this year. To celebrate her birthday and commemorate her life-long achievements, a musical was created and performed by ORTV staff and some theatrical professionals from the outside. We were invited to the show by our friends Daniel and Andrea Bastke, a missionary family we acquainted with in Southern California who moved to work for ORTV a couple years ago, who also played parts (Daniel as Doris' dad, Andrea her mom, and their daughter Selah as young Doris) in the show. We were thoroughly entertained and touched by the singing, acting, dancing, and the stories of this extraordinary girl from Seattle!

​​

To fetch a stamp
When receiving a registered mail in Taiwan, one needs to press a personal stamp on some paperwork as a show of ID and proof of reception. So when the postman rang my bell one morning and told me there was a registered mail for me I went downstairs with my personal stamp and gave it to the postman standing at the front door to press it on his paperwork. He then handed it back to me, and–lo and behold–I dropped it...  It hopped on the ground a couple times then fell through the opening of a railed cover right next to the front door steps and landed on the bottom of the drain ditch.

​After a two-second pause in shock, the postman apologized profusely to me (for an accident I thought I was at least half at fault) and started thinking how we could retrieve it. An older gentleman across the street who witnessed the whole thing suggested he had all kinds of tools that we could use, but the hard thing was to open up the railed cover–one side of it was wedged between the ground and the doorstep that the best we could do with a crowbar was a tilted opening that only I, with the smallest arm around, could enter, and even then I needed to hold an extension tool to try to reach that stamp. I grabbed a ladle, a back scratch from my apartment and taped them together and with it I could reach the stamp, but without gripping claws at the end of the ladle it could only move the stamp around, not picking it up. A lady neighbor gave me a long pinch that could grab, but not long enough to reach the stamp... We were in a quandary.

​"How about using a vacuum cleaner?" the postman said. I thought that was a far-fetched idea, with electrical wiring and hoses and suction etc. in an open and raw environment like this. But my sister's studio assistant quickly pulled out their vacuum machine and hooked it all up for me. So I thought why not give it a try and laid myself down on the ground again, pulled the hose through the opening with my arm, located the stamp with the nose of the nuzzle, hooded over it, then turned on the switch... Voila, it got sucked right into the bag in one loud click!

Everyone was elated, and I thanked them, the postman, my sister's assistant, the neighbors whom I barely knew but came out to volunteer their help so generously and passionately, a show of the tenacious "human kindred feel" (人情味) that Taiwanese people are well known for that I personally experienced in this unusual rescue operation right at my front door!  

tales from taiwan (1)

November 1, 2021 – March 4, 2022

Have no car, will travel
Public transportation is so easy, touring programs so abundant, there is no excuse not going places over the island. So we tagged on a bus tour to a southwestern town showcasing an old time sawmill with modern woodcraft, visiting tea farms, a coffee factory, and a natural eco park along the way;​

a self-planned (by a friend couple), self driven (by the friend couple) car trip to the big sky, blue ocean east coast and a deep river, silk stream fall, suspension bridge national park; 

​and a high speed train facilitated expedition to an erstwhile earthquake shaken town that features a "paper church", a Buddhist pyramid, and a village wall gallery right at the geographical center of Taiwan.

​Michelin and A-Cheng

Though restaurant business got hammered hard at the height of the pandemic (many "little eat" stands catering to tourists went out of business), the majority survived and thrived. From Michelin rated gourmet restaurants to corner soybean-milk and beef-noodle shops, to run-of-the-mill indigenous food providers such as Formosa Chang (鬍鬚張) and A-Cheng Geese (阿城鵝肉), crowds were as prevalent as ever, proving good foods and good dining are delights of life, perhaps even more so at hard times.
 

​​​Buggy jiang

She is the 6-year old granddaughter ("Buggy" because her ultrasound photo looked like a little bug in her mom's womb, "jiang" meaning "kiddo" in Japanese) of my sister's, a normal, happy kid of her age. She went to the kindergarten in the morning, got picked up by her mom in the afternoon and sent straight to my sister's piano studio for some very light-hearted, "happy-hour" lessons with her granny. She occasionally came up to our apartment (we lived in the same building as my sister's and my nephew's) with her mom and showed us the dancing and singing she learned at school, or had me print out some pictures for her to draw after. She was a joy to many. And when one weekend we took her to a newly opened playground in a neighborhood park for play, I was somehow struck by the rare scene of the many bubbly, bouncy kids all around, in a country that has been breaking world records for lowest birth rates for years.
 

And they wedded
My wife's favorite niece and her boyfriend had been going steady for years, and after some prompting and hinting, and finally overt incentive (bribe) from my wife, they decided to get married.

The wedding took place at a hotel ballroom. We arrived early to witness the "pre-game shows" of pranks and teases by their friends, and when it came to the part where the bride's parents formally said farewell to the daughter, the mother lost it, bursting out in tears while giving words of advice such as "don't over-sleep" to her daughter that were both touching and funny at the same time, totally unscripted.

The ceremony went smoothly afterwards: the processional, the announcement, the toasting... all on tack. The food was great, the atmosphere joyful, the newlyweds handsome and beautiful. Mission accomplished, I imagined my wife would say.

Will they have children? That would be the next question.

 

Where I have never trekked before

My father, during his time on Earth, took the habit of waking up at 3:30 in the morning and hiked to a nearby mount for over 40 years, until the year he passed. I decided to take the same hike myself, and asked my cousin Chris, whose father also passed away a few years ago and was the closest brother to my father who also went the same hike for some period of time with my father, to join me.

For four consecutive weeks, Chris and I not only went the same hiking route as our fathers did, but also explored adjacent mounts one at a time, all the way to the eastern end of Taipei basin. I was satisfied, not only by the discovery of new hiking routes, but also by the feeling of rekindled kinship with my cousin brother from childhood.

 

the abolition of man

"The Abolition of Man" is a compilation of three lectures delivered by C. S. Lewis (ranked 11th on The Times' list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945" and generally considered one of the greatest Christian apologists of the 20th century) at the University of Durham in 1943. It is short in length but profound and cogent as his writings ever are. The following are the highlights–along with some notes of mine (in blue)–I extract from the book.

Chapter 1: Men without Chests

He starts with his concern for children's education:
For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity.

The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments.

He surmises from Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, Christian, and Oriental alike that there is some universal, objective value (that he calls "Tao"–the way):
It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.

The importance of "trained emotions":
Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism... for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.

A perceptive and then funny remark on "men without chests" (by "chest" he means the ability to feel, sense, and judge right from wrong) :
It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of the chest beneath that makes them seem so. (The "Big Head" syndrome)

Chapter 2: The Way
He points out the self-contradiction and idiocy of a "Tao-less" universe and those who promote it after all values are debunked and the only thing left to drive civilization is human instinct:
It looks very much as if the Innovator (modern educators who want to debunk value-based education) would have to say not that we must obey Instinct, nor that it will satisfy us to do so, but that we ought to obey it.

If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all.

The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour, or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in.

Chapter 3: The Abolition of Man
"Human advancement" is not an equal benefactor to all humans. It in fact gives the stronger more leverage to control the weaker ones:
Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger.

And if we let "science" run amok without value guidance:
The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself.

The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it?

The "base instinct" takes over:
When all that says 'It is good' has been debunked, what says 'I want' remains.

If you will not obey the Tao, or else commit suicide, obedience to impulse (and therefore, in the long run, to mere 'nature') is the only course left open.

At the moment, then, of Man’s victory over Nature, we find the whole human race subjected to some individual men, and those individuals subjected to that in themselves which is purely ‘natural’ — to their irrational impulses. Nature, untrammelled by values, rules the Conditioners (people who eliminate values from civilizations) and, through them, all humanity. Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.

Real scientific minds do not subscribe to reductionism:
It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real...The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost. Touche!

But as soon as we take the final step of reducing our own species to the level of mere Nature, the whole process is stultified, for this time the being who stood to gain and the being who has been sacrificed are one and the same.

Hence:
A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.

A surprising similarity between magic and applied science is revealed when comparing them with ancient wisdom:
For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious—such as digging up and mutilating the dead.

A great reminder, words of wisdom:
The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it... To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.

*****************************************************************

For the whole book, go to

http://www.samizdat.qc.ca/cosmos/philo/AbolitionofMan.pdf 

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else."

— Inscription on C. S. Lewis' memorial floor stone at Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey

puli

Take a high speed train to Taichung, a 50 minute highway drive east, through a few tunnels across a hilly region, you are there.

​A quiet little farming valley surrounded by a university, a Buddhist pyramid, and a Christian church.

​

On September 21, 1999, a 7.7 earthquake epicentered 20 miles from here shook the ground, took 180 lives and shattered hundreds of buildings. A massive community redevelopment project to rebuild and remold the town to a more eco-friendly environment soon started. One fruit of the project is an eco-garden that features a "Frog Museum" and a "Paper Dome" built with cardboard tubes.

​

A Foreign Literature Department professor from the University nearby decided to contribute to the humanity element of the community by opening up a bookstore with bed-and-breakfast services seven years ago. It has since provided a safe hangout for local kids and comfortable accommodation for international travelers/bird-watchers all year round.

Besides lending floors to seminars and speeches, the bookstore organizes art festivals/contests and displays their works along lanes and alleys–the "village walls", morphing arts into the everyday life of the locals.

​It is here where the geographical center of Taiwan is located.

Some say it's the feng-shui (a lotus shaped basin), some say the magnetic fields (spiritual vortexes), the town boasts the highest Buddhist/Taoist temple density in the country and has been the center of the once-every-twelve-years religious festivals for over 120 years. Even the mural at a local restaurant's restroom gives advice on Zen meditation 

​Renowned for its fine water, a wine factory has long been in operation here since early Japanese colonial days. Its Shaoxing Wine (紹興酒), a remake of a name brand rice wine from mainland China, had been festivity favorites for decades before foreign imports took over the markets.

​A former political prisoner turned organic farmer who built a farming enterprise that supplies over 800 stores over the island shared his life stories with us and gave us his freshly written calligraphy as a parting gift for our two-day trip to this unique little town in central Taiwan.

hui-chun hat

It all started when I shared a photo of one of our college classmates celebrating his grand kid's one-year anniversary at our chat group:

​

"Why did you wear a hat," some asked,

"Well, to cover up my graying hair, to be honest," said the new grandpa.

Some others chimed in: "Yeah, I have a similar issue, my head is getting bald, so I wear a hat most of the time..."

An idea clicked in my mind, and after tweaking and twisting some text and graphics I grabbed online, I came up with the following announcement:

"In line with our long held commitment to the upkeep of our fellow classmates' health and good looks, we at Hui-Chun-Yuan* have decided to provide "Hui-Chun Hats" that shall protect and prohibit all you guys' precious heads from age distorted look..."

"The following are two design concepts we have, one American, the other Chinese style, let us know which one you prefer:"

* Hui-Chun-Yuan (回春院, "Spring Again Garden", literally) is a fictitious gentlemen's club invented by some group member that promises to bring youth back to its members. For more stories about the club, check out this blog 

https://cdwong.blogspot.com/search?q=summer+fun 

and this one

https://cdwong.blogspot.com/2017/11/autumn-fun.html

Wisely, most people picked the Chinese version, with the character 春 right underneath a small circle inside a big circle, together forming the phrase 回春, the exact same name as the Hui-Chun ("Spring Again" meaning "Youth Reviving") Club. I concurred and explained:

​

​回春院 =》回春園 =》回春圓，大圓包小圓，圓圓滿滿，源源不斷，淵源久遠，源遠流長 ...

  

I could well keep this Hui-Chun hat fictitious, as a butt of jokes, like what we've been doing with its namesake club. For example, the following "special edition" hat was awarded to people who were supposedly given the wrong "youth reviving pills" (回春藥) by the club as a token of apology and good wishes: 

Or used as a scare tactic tool to urge people to pay the fictitious membership fees when some mentioned there were coyotes rampaging through their neighborhood:

​

But wouldn't it be even more fun if I made the hat a real thing?

So I started looking for some custom hat makers online, and was pleasantly surprised there were quite a few of them right in the US (they get their hats from overseas, then make the embroidering in the US). After some Q&A back and forth, I picked one company in Wisconsin, uploaded my design and placed order for 48 hats and got them in a couple of weeks:

​

*The "NTUEE80" in the back designates our university/departmental names and year of the class

I made the announcement to the group and started distributing the hats. The original idea was to give them away to people who had become grand parents, as congratulation gifts for having accomplished a milestone in life (做人成公), but soon I changed my mind and gave them away to all who came to any reunion party, assuming and encouraging all to become grandparents one day:

​Then I arrived in Taiwan a couple months ago, bringing all the remaining hats I have with me, to give away to classmates in Taiwan. The idea was to distribute them at reunion gatherings like I did in the States, but some local classmates suggested I held some outdoor activities–such as hiking to some urban hills in Taipei–for distribution.

I thought that was a great idea. After all, the real purpose of the fictitious Hui-Chun Club is to encourage guys to do real "youth reviving" activities, and hiking is definitely one of them. So I made an announcement at the group, asking people to meet me at a landmark hill top of the city on two consecutive Saturday mornings to receive the hats:

​My hat and I made it to the hill top on the first Saturday:

​

And the second:

My local classmates' attendance was less than spectacular, though, only two came to meet me at the hill top. Obviously, giving away free hats at feasting parties like we did in the States is much easier than asking people to climb up hill for an hour and a half on wintry days (though the first two Saturdays were of gorgeous weather)!

Undeterred, and for my own pumped-up curiosity to check out the many different trails to this famous landmark hill top of the city, I extended my "Self-Rejuvenating Excursion Series" to a third Saturday:

And a fourth, last Saturday of December, which also fell on the Christmas Day of the year:

It was a fun project all along!

Happy Hui-Chun Days to All!