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!

 

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.

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 

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10206900410573930.1073741830.1387569224&type=1&l=d0e74b4d5f

why fish don't exist (3)

Upon learning that Jane Stanford's death would likely be ruled a poisoning, David set sail for Hawaii.

Though he told the New York Times his visit had “nothing whatever to do with the investigation which the police of San Francisco and Honolulu are conducting,” that he was there only to escort Jane’s body home, records show he hired a new doctor and paid him the hefty sum of $350—about $10,000 today—to reexamine the case.

The man David selected, Ernest Waterhouse, had only been practicing medicine for a couple of years. Without examining the body or any of the evidence, and after a skim of a book on poisoning, conversations with a couple of the witnesses, and a series of meetings with David, in his hands the explanation of Jane’s death took an acrobatic turn.

In a typed memo to David (which David had instructed he prepare for him), Dr. Waterhouse declared that he was “decidedly not” convinced that Jane Stanford had been poisoned. Though concerned by the amount of strychnine found in her belly and bottle, he wasn’t sure it was enough to have killed her. So how to explain the violent convulsions, the lockjaw, the whole rapid death thing? Gingerbread!

Now Bertha — Jane's personal assistant — said that the gingerbread prepared by the hotel for Jane's picnic had not been freshly cooked, as she had originally testified to the police (and the hotel continued to claim), but under-cooked. And not only did Jane inhaled gob after gob of the sloppy, eggy dough, she also sucked down eight sandwiches, filled with thick slabs of beef tongue and Swiss cheese, multiple cups of cold coffee, and over a dozen French candies.

So, as David informed the New York Times, that he was “wholly convinced” that Jane's death was due to heart failure triggered by a combination of overexertion (from a leisurely picnic outing?) and consuming “a surfeit of unsuitable food.”

When the statement went public, the Hawaii doctors were horrified. They banded together and immediately released a counter-statement, which read:

"She did not die of angina pectoris because neither the symptoms of the attack nor the condition of the heart confirms that diagnosis. It is imbecile to think that a woman of Mrs. Stanford’s age and known mental characteristics might have died of an hysterical seizure in half an hour.… No Board of Health in existence could allow a certificate based on such a cause of death to go unchallenged."

David retorted by calling the key medical witness, Dr. Humphris, “a man without professional or personal standing.” When the Hawaii doctors rushed to Humphris’ defense, David accused them all of colluding in a conspiracy—fabricating the diagnosis of murder as a way of getting money to perform the autopsy and coroner’s inquest.

A ludicrous accusation. No matter. Because of David's prestige, his power, and probably a nation's disregard for its outlier islands (Hawaii was not yet a state at that time), the Hawaii doctors’ account of what happened never really took hold on the mainland.

Until almost a hundred years later.

Robert Cutler, a Stanford neurologist, stumbled across an old newspaper article about an investigation into the poisoning of Jane Stanford while researching another project. Robert was shocked. He was a history buff and a proud Stanford man. Why had he never heard that the founding mother had potentially been poisoned? So he began digging.

With the help of his wife, Maggie, and a flock of archivists from Honolulu to San Francisco to Washington, DC, he gathered the coroner’s report, the eyewitness testimonies, the court transcripts... all the evidence, laid out as clearly as possible, with long quotations from the primary sources themselves. Then he published the book "The Mysterious Death of Jane Stanford" in 2003 before he died.

In his book, Robert Cutler, a medical doctor for more than three decades, is clear: given Jane’s symptoms and the discovery of strychnine in both her belly and medicine bottle, he believes she was poisoned. And after tracing David’s actions in the wake of her death, he believes it’s hard not to conclude that David was trying to cover up the poisoning. Why? Perhaps to protect the university from scandal. Perhaps for other reasons. Robert Cutler won’t wager a guess.

Other scholars go further. Bliss Carnochan, a Stanford English professor who studied the letters between Jane and her spy, thought the timing of the murder was fishy. He wrote that David, as a means of protecting his presidency, “had the motive.”

Richard White, a Stanford historian, began teaching a class called "Who Killed Jane Stanford?" to try to uncover more clues. Each semester, he unleashes a dozen students or so on the archives to find new information. White’s current guess is that Bertha did it (for the will money), but he remarks that the timing of Jane’s death was remarkably “lucky” for David. He feels increasingly confident that, no matter who did it, David covered up the poisoning.

In one of David's fish-collecting manuals, "A Guide to the Study of Fishes," that advises readers how to find fish anywhere in the world, under the section called “How to Secure Fishes,” he divulges a secret to his readers, his favorite trick for catching the peskiest of fish, the ones that evade capture by darting into the cracks of tide pools? Poison. And the particular variety he recommends? A dangerous and powerful substance, one he once described as “the bitterest thing in the world.” Strychnine.

transition

How did one leave a place he's been living for over 25 years and move on to the next?

Just drove off for a weekend house hunting, turned a corner, and bumped into a dream house he and his wife couldn't resist.

That's basically what happened last November when we made a purchase of a brand new home in San Juan Capistrano, located on a hill top between San Clemente and Dana Point, two beautiful coastal cities in the very south of south Orange County.

Then what should we do with the home sweet home of ours of more than 25 years? To sell or not to sell, that was the question. The economically correct answer should the the latter: rent it out and ride out the worst housing slump in years while collecting rental money that should be more than adequate to make payments for a new mortgage whose interest rate is at historical low. 

But call us debt-abhorrent or loath-to-be-landlord chickens, in the end we decided we'd rather be mortgage free and nobody's landlord, and sold the house outright, to a beautiful family who really loved our old house and made a moderately-above-market offer for it.

Backtracking a little, it's not that easy to let go of a place you've been living for over 25 years, emotionally. It's our first home we owned, after our first jobs, our marriage, in this country. I started my own business in it--at one time I had my business card with the fictitious business name "Wong Laboratories" taped on the door of my study room, and 24 digital phone lines installed in my garage. Friends and families had visited and gathered in and around the house through the years. Both my parents and my wife's parents had visited here ("It's so darn quiet," my father said to me after we toured the neighborhood together for the first time), and now all of them except my mother-in-law have passed away. More recently, my men's group had been meeting in the backyard most other weekends and had annual omelette cookouts on the barbeque island for 4 consecutive years, practically since we redid our living room and side yard some 5 years ago. And heck, even the bathtub of our master bedroom has some special meaning to it--we got baptized in it some 20 years or so ago.

And there were the neighbors: Scott and his wife and 2 kids who just moved in a couple years ago, replacing the suddenly disappearing Clampitt family whose house (now Scott's) got foreclosed upon, that we seemed to be getting to know each other better and better every time we chatted on the curbway; Kathy and her family across street who are like us the very original owners of their house for 25+ years, and the quiet but gentle school principal couple to the other side of the house, Mr. and Mrs. Joel and Paula Rawlings. Both families we had just invited for a get-to-know-you-better party a little more than a couple years ago after the shock of the disappearing Clampitts.

So we decided, to close our lives here with a sound note--to bid farewell to our dear old neighbors and to welcome the lovely new family to the neighborhood--that we hold a backyard barbecue party for the last time for everybody.

All except Paula--who got down with a cold--appeared, including Kathy's 2 grown boys and one precocious girl who did not show up last time we invited them. Henrik Eriksen and his family were the new people here, and this was my first face to face encounter with him at length since our real estate transaction began. He is a taut, healthy looking man who's turning 50 this year, and an immigrant--from Denmark--to this country too, while his wife Patti a native San Diegan whom he met and married here, with two teen age boys (one had just gone to college) and one girl. 

Henrik came here in his early 20's after serving the military in his native country, just like myself. "Why did you decide to come to America, Denmark being such a well-known affluent, welfare society?" I asked him, with curiosity. "Well, somebody has to pay for it," he smiled and said, meaning he's the kind who prefers to make things happen and take care of them himself. He's been in business of his own for years, and was one of the first to take on the e-commerce trend and started an online furniture store back in 1996 that's so successful some people offered millions to buy it, until a few years ago when this great recession hit and his aggressiveness got the better of him and he had to close shop and started working for a major international Danish furniture company as consulting executive traveling between here and New York. 1996 was the year I came up with my first online business VoIP project too, I told him. "We must be long lost brothers, one from the West, the other from the East," he joked.   

It must be a rarity, but both escrows--one for the sale of our old home, and the other for the purchase of the new--closed on the exact dates we set months ago, with a 10 day gap between them that we purposely planned, so we had exactly one workweek for our flooring contractor to get in after we got keys to the new house to install the hardwood on the first floor and upgraded carpeting on the second. Magically, these jobs got done on time as well, right one day before our scheduled move-in to the new house.

Came the moving day, a crew of 4 and a truck 28 feet long arrived on time in the morning and got right down to it: hauling the bulky tables, sofa, chairs and cabinets, and miscellaneous boxes of things we had pre-packed ourselves the previous week, with swift deft hands. So did Kathy and her husband and kids, who came to disassemble and move the office furniture I gave away to them, piece by piece, into their home across the street. In less than two hours, our little big house was reduced to an empty hull like no one had ever lived there before. The truck then reappeared at our new home's front curb shortly after lunch. The downloading was even faster than the uploading, with me and my wife busy directing what items go where. By mid afternoon, the operation was complete and the crew gone, leaving a slew of furniture and boxes scattering around in yet another hulky big little house in a brand new community. 

It's been almost a month since then, and we are yet to figure out all the light switches in the house--which one is for the hallway, or the stairways; which one is for the dimmer, or the straight on/off; my supposed new home office is still standing empty with boxes strewn around; the same is true for the dining nook by the kitchen, since we had given away our dining table set to Kathy as well. The garage door still opens and closes with grinding noise that the builder had promised to fix, as well as little touch up for the walls and doors, here and there. 

But overall we are happy with the grand and spacious rooms of the new house and the quality material they use to build them, the wonderful mountain and ocean views we can see right from our master bedroom and balcony on the second floor, the easy access to the freeway, the fiber-to-the-curb high-speed network that equips each room with an Ethernet plug-in, and the natural, open beauty of the blue Pacific that we can enjoy every time we drive up and down the hill in and out of the community. All the sentiments of leaving the old home are gone, at least for now, replaced by the excitement and many things to do for the new home.

Who knows, next time I check, maybe we'll be living here for another 25 years already.

* For those interested, here's a stream of pictures I collected that shows "how a house was born," and our transition from the old home to the new:

https://picasaweb.google.com/106815509376349700576/Transition?authuser=0&authkey=Gv1sRgCNuvjdqtsOHA2QE&feat=directlink

two months in taiwan

For the past 5 years or so, my wife and I have been traveling to Taiwan near the end of year and coming back early next, staying usually for two, three, and once even for four months, to spend time with family and friends there.

Our long stay this time, once we got there in early December, started with a family outing--with my mother-in-law, brothers-in-law, nephews, nieces--to a hot spring resort in southeastern Taiwan, followed by a field trip to some orange/strawberry farms in mid-central Taiwan with a group organized by a college friend of mine, then a day visit to the beautiful Mediterranean-blue coast of northeastern Taiwan, taking advantage of an unusual sunny weather break in January.

​

​Unlike the 9-day round-the-island bicycle tour I took around this time of the year last year, I went conservative this time and took only a couple leisure rides close by: one in metro Taipei alongside a river embankment that I found surprisingly serene and scenic, the other on the northeastern coast where--instead of fighting rain, wind and cold like I did last year--I rode with ease and segued into the winding country roads to visit a historical old farmhouse sitting on the rice paddy fields, each time with a relatively new acquaintance whose companionship I enjoyed.

​ ​

Eating good food and dining out with good company are the run-of-the-mill activities you do in Taipei. Among the many feasts we had with family, friends, relatives, alums, etc., the one with my aunt and cousins and two Japanese born nephews who were all grown-up now should count as one of the more special, for the simple fact that we've been missing seeing them for years and will continue to miss if they had not happened to come to visit here on a rare vacation/holiday break from their work in Japan. As for fine dining, we found a gourmet Italian restaurant at an up-scale hotel that we thought gave us the best foreign cuisine experience we ever had in Taipei, exceeding even those Michelin rated ones we'd been to in the city.​ We took a photo with the Italian chef for the record.

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Continuing on my accidental intrigue into philosophical studies that started last May when I was here, I went to a couple of open seminars that same university philosophy department offered: one on Buddhism logic (present by a Japanese professor from Kyoto University), the other on a main Confucian philosophical derivative (朱熹理學) hosted by the same German professor whose seminar on Mysticism I attended last time.

​

Also continuing on my general interest in keeping in touch with what the next generation people here are thinking and doing, I went to a couple of open interviews with some young entrepreneurs and their startup stories. The first one was a near-30 young man who started a social enterprise business that helped homeless and disenfranchised people some 4 years ago. As he explained why and how he started and operated his business, I was touched not only by his ideals but his realistic take on the societal, psychological issues that came from years of spending time with these socially marginalized people and his determination to have his business stay sustainable and build ever expanding community networks for society as a whole. The second interview was with a successful internet security product developer who started in Taiwan and made it in the Silicon Valley, who talked about the blockchain technology--the latest talk in town in the island, its security issues, opportunities, etc. Again I was impressed not only by his technical knowhow but more importantly his deep and all-around take on the technical-economical-social eco systems around the world, for now and in the future. Proud of these fine young men this tiny island country has produced and hope will continue to produce in the future!

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I was pretty ignorant about painting art, but there was a special exhibit at the National Palace Museum (故宮博物院) where the famous Pushkin Museum from Moscow had loaned a series of precious French paintings for such an event, and we knew a friend of ours was a volunteer docent there who would do a personal guided tour for us, so off we went.

Boy did we get the best museum tour experience ever! Our friend, Tiffany, a painter herself, not only knew the theories and singularities of all these different schools of paintings, she articulated the minute and obscure, the thoughts and sentiments, the stories in front and behind the paintings and their painters, and how they evolved from the realistic to the abstract to the surreal to the post modern in the span of 250 years. I felt like having taken a dose of fine art manna and my knowledge of painting just went up 10 points!

​ ​

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"New York Cat English Workshop" was a meetup group I signed up after arriving here and finding it online. "Kat", the organizer of the group, was a Taiwanese American girl raised in Michigan and later became a writer and certified ESL teacher based in New York who taught in community colleges in the US and schools in China and Taiwan, before/while traveling and hosting such mixer events around Asia and other parts of the world. I was amazed not only by her prolific meetup topics that ran the gamut from philosophical (e.g., Stoicism) to contemporary (e.g., pros and cons of social media) to book studies (e.g., "1984", Chinese martial art novels) and writing practices, but also her ingenious ways of using little games to enable all in the group to dialogue with one another. The most energetic and enthusiastic meetup host I'd ever seen, as I commended and gave her top thumbs-up rating every time after I attended the event!

Due to its international nature (events were conducted entirely in English only), besides the locals, I met and talked with people who originated from Taiwan but later emigrated to Australia, Germany, Canada, US, etc. and now came back for visit or from break of work. To my great surprise I also met an American born Korean kid who lived in Aliso Viejo, and a Caucasian girl who came from San Clemente, both cities just miles away from where I live in Southern California. What a small world we do have today!

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Finally, I learned international standard dancing from my high school English teacher during this stay. Huh?! Let me explain:

We reunioned last year with our junior high school English teacher, who, besides being a great English teacher we all loved and respected, we learned later, had been a great ball room dancer also, with some international standard dancing championship title to his name! So before I went back to Taiwan this time, I chatted with him online and jestfully asked him to teach us how to dance right, just like he used to teach us how to speak and write English right, if he would.

And he complied, set up the date and place for those who were interested to come and learn from him. Three of us showed up, and immediately we found out to dance well is hard work, no fun job as we might have imagined it to be. After a couple weeks of practice, I was the only one left going.

Teacher Chang is indeed a great dancer--even though he said he stopped dancing since his wife (best partner ever, he said) died some 21 years ago, and a great teacher too, as we'd all known since our junior high years. He explained things well and spotted the wrong moves instantly and gave instructions clearly, with me being the sole beneficiary of such one-to-one, hands-on teaching. Because of that and because I was the one who initiated it, I hung in there for a full month, went practicing once or twice a week, 2 hours per session, and finally "graduated" with a passable grade of dancing all 18 steps of basic Waltz in one procession without any retake, as the following video can attest: https://youtu.be/ONrpxj_YCG4

And here are his hand written notes of those 18 steps:

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Great many thanks, Sir!

maryknoll sisters

Had a darn good outing Sunday.

The plan was simple, out to a Chinese delicacy restaurant in LA for brunch with two couples, a stroll in Huntington Library, then a visit to and dinner with some Catholic nuns who had spent their lifetime in Taiwan and recently retired to Monrovia, a little town in the foothills of San Gabriel Valley.

That Chinese delicacy restaurant is an offshoot of a famous noodle-and-dumpling place from Taiwan, 鼎泰豐 (Din Tai Fung Dumpling House). I remember being there once when it first opened shop here in Arcadia 10-15 years ago, and now it has added another site right next to it, and is doing great business apparently--it opens at 10:30, and scores of people were waiting around the front door already when we arrived there around 10:20.

The food was actually pretty good--better than what we remember it was 10-15 years ago. The dumplings were tiny but finely made and tasted delicious, whether it's pork, shrimp, or veggie inside; the chicken soup and hot oil wonton were wonderful too; and the sweet dumplings with red bean or taro pastry inside served as great dessert substitute at the end. The service was exceptional as well (the son of the 鼎泰豐 founder comes in daily and manages this site himself, they say), and the setting and decoration was bright and shiny, unlike some Chinese restaurants that may serve great food but in a dim and dingy environment.

Huntington Library is another place we had visited yet the last time we were there was some 10-15 years ago. It's the same old grand mansions and beautiful gardens as before--like the fine art collections inside, good, valuable things don't grow old, they just grow more gracious with time, like our wives. I felt a bit sentimental when I reminisced one time my parents were here with me, and now they are both gone. We strolled through the gardens, then went inside the mansions and galleries to see all the fine things Mr. Huntington left us. One thing new I found is they now provide audio ear pieces for exhibit guides. I took advantage of that and learned the stories and details behind the paintings, furniture, and artifacts in a more efficient and enjoyable way than the many times I had been here before.

We also visited the new Chinese garden for the first time. Not too impressed, though. The bricks looked so new and tidy; the poles and gazebo too faux; and the overall scenery just seemed barren and without charm. When leaving it and returning to the main campus, I couldn't help but had a surreal feeling that we were leaving a wild New World (China) and entering an elegant Old World (America). Call it ironic, or maybe symbolic of the new economic powerhouse China coming to upstage old guard capitalist America nowadays. 

After a layback chat at the court yard outside the gallery hall under the mellow late afternoon sun, we headed out for the final and main destination of the day: the Maryknoll Sisters' retirement compound in Monrovia.

Briefly, Maryknoll Sisters (http://www.mklsisters.org/) is a Catholic missionary organization founded about 100 years ago in New York State. They are the first US based Catholic nuns group devoted to serving overseas. The 3 sisters we were visiting, Pauline, Andree, and Maureen, now in their late 70s and 80s, all spent the majority of their lives living and serving in Taiwan, and speak fluent Hakka, Taiwanese, and Mandarin. Shining, the girl who arranged this meeting for us, knew them since she was a little girl in south Taiwan when her mom, a devoted Catholic, acquainted them through the work they did together. She had visited them a few times here since she came to the US and knew their whereabout, but this is the first time for us. 

We met them at the parking lot of the retirement compound. After a jolly, open hearted welcome greeting from both sides, we took them to a nearby Taiwanese cuisine restaurant for dinner. Pauline, 87, the oldest of them all, was from North Dakota. Her ancestors were German farmers on Russian land when they were evicted out of there and came settling in America a couple generations ago. She was born Catholic and committed herself to the Maryknoll Sisters congregation when 18. She came to China when she was 23, got jailed by the communist party and kicked out of the country 3 years later. She then came to Taiwan and spent 53 years there, until she retired a couple of years ago.  

Maureen is 79, the youngest one, and was from Georgia State, a Catholic family of 7 children, with a bit French ancestry on her mother's side and a bit Irish from her father's. Like Pauline, she committed herself to the congregation at a young age, and was assigned to Taiwan in 1964, and had since lived and worked there until retiring a couple years ago. I asked what she remembers most about her life in Taiwan, she said during the early 70's, when many young people worked away from home in factories nearby Hsin-Chu where she was stationed, she helped organize a support group for them, along with some Catholic priest, providing living quarters and giving life guidance to them, etc., for over 10 years.

Talking to these old, sweet sisters, you don't hear any boastful things or tall tales from them, though I am sure they have lots of great stories to tell for their life long services in Taiwan. All you get is a sense of peace and contentment, the loving smiles and gentle voices. They are truly humble and happy with what they do for the Lord, I must conclude.  

And, as I commented to them, though I am from Taiwan, 53 years old (probably born a couple years after Sister Pauline first came to Taiwan), I spent my past 29 years in the US, meaning I had only lived in Taiwan for 24 full years, way less than the 40 and 50 plus years these sisters have lived among and done for the Taiwanese people. "You are more Taiwanese than I," I said to them, only half jokingly.

God bless these dear sweet lady angels,

* To read Sister Pauline reflecting on her life long services in Taiwan:

http://www.maryknollsisters.org/catholic-mission/index.php/community/missioners/192-Sister%20Pauline%20Sticka

why fish don't exist (1)

David Starr Jordan was born on an apple orchard in upstate New York in 1851. As a boy he was fascinated by the stars and curious about the name and significance of the celestial bodies. When he was about eight, he got an atlas of astronomical charts and began comparing what he saw on the page to what he saw above his head. In five years he got his curiosity satisfied.

He then turned to the terrestrial. In between the chores his parents assigned him to do, and with the help of his big brother Rufus, he drew maps of his family's orchard, his walk to school, then copied charts of distant townships, states, countries, continents, all the way to every corner of the globe his hungry little fingers could crawl over.

Such eagerness worried his mother. One day she threw away piles of his son's creased, sweat stained maps and told him to find something “more relevant” to do with his time.

He obeyed and stopped making maps, but picked up the habit of picking wild flowers and plants he saw in his countryside surroundings to learn their names and locations in the biological map.

After graduating from Cornell University with both a Bachelor's degree in Science and a Master's in Botany in three years, he landed a job in Illinois teaching science at a small Christian university. But after attending a summer camp in Penikese Island, Massachusetts, organized by then famous naturalist Louis Agassiz to train young scholars for explorative collection of marine and botanical life, he decided to set his sights on the water. “The literature of Ichthyology (study of fishes) was inexact and incomplete,” he wrote, “with few comparative studies, so that the field seemed wide open, as indeed it was.”

As he jumped from teaching job to teaching job at schools all over the Midwest, he set himself the goal of discovering every freshwater fish in North America, while taking a job from the US Census Bureau in 1880 to catalog the fish species that lived along the Pacific coast.

He then journeyed back to Bloomington, Indiana, where he had finally secured a permanent job as a professor of science at Indiana University. Six years later, when he was 34, the board of trustees asked him to become president of the institution. He accepted, making him the youngest university president in the entire country.

He now led a crew of burly, bespectacled taxonomists discovering fish faster than they could name them. They were preserving them in jars of ethanol and stacking them on shelves inside David’s secluded lab on the top floor of the science building. Thousands of mysterious creatures being piled higher and higher, awaiting their sacred naming ceremony.

Late one night in July of 1883, the lab caught fire. Jars exploded, fish vaporized, every last specimen was destroyed, and more: a secret document that David had been working for years, that mapped the connections of never-before-seen branches of tree of life, completely torched. “The flames of an hour had near undone his life work,” a reporter wrote on the local newspaper.

But David refused to be stalled by the catastrophe. He dusted up the ashes, and headed right back out to the nation’s bodies of water to retrieve what he had lost. He claimed to have learned only one lesson from the whole ordeal: “To publish at once,” he wrote.

Just two years later, another disaster struck. His wife, Susan, came down with a cough. Days later, she was dead. Killed, as their daughter Edith explains, by a bout of pneumonia the “rural town doctors were unable to cure.”

Again, David moved quickly. He held a simple but ceremonial funeral and then, as he had with the fish, headed right back out to the nation’s wilds, to retrieve what he had lost. Less than two years after Susan’s death, he had caught himself a new wife. A college sophomore named Jessie Knight, who's youthful, energetic, and enjoy traveling with him.

In time, a wealthy California couple heard about David—this cheerful, swashbuckling giant with hundreds of notches of scientific discovery on his belt. Their names were Leland and Jane Stanford, and one day in 1890, they traveled all the way to Bloomington to ask if he would become the first president of their little academic experiment in the farmlands of Palo Alto.

In 1891, he was sworn in as the founding president of Stanford University. He had just turned forty years old.

He immediately built a shiny new marine research facility on the tip of the Monterey Peninsula, the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory, modeled after Agassiz’s summer camp on Penikese Island.

Unhindered by financial constraints, at Stanford David commissioned fish-collecting expeditions to the places he had only been able to dream of, and map, as a boy. To Samoa he went, and to Russia, Cuba, Hawaii, Albania, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Switzerland, Greece, and beyond. Overall they collected and gave names to around one thousand new fish species, and many more piling higher and higher inside the lab at Stanford.

And then at 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, the San Francisco earthquake struck. In just forty-seven seconds, decades of David's work got eliminated. Eels severed by shelves. Blowfish popped by shards of glass. For many of those specimens left intact, hundreds of them, nearly a thousand, their holy name tags had scattered all over the laboratory floor, his meticulously named fish had become an amorphous unknown again.

So what did David do?

To prevent the piles of fish from decaying, he had his crew water-hose them day and night before the ethanol he ordered arrived.

Then he sorted out the fish he could recognize, and sewed their name tag directly to their body. To its throat. To its tail. To its eyeball. So they would never get separated again.

David served Stanford as president until 1913 and then chancellor until his retirement in 1916. He died at his home on the Stanford campus after suffering a series of strokes over two years on September 19, 1931.