Monday, October 26, 2015

Let them eat cake


Fall foliage in Falls Church. Apparently only the privileged few get to see colors like these

Many Western residents of Taiwan don't appear to have gotten out much before they traveled to Formosa and carved out new lives for themselves. How else to explain the numerous Facebook posts hailing Taiwan as the greatest place on Earth and the Taiwanese people as its greatest citizens because someone returned the poster's lost wallet with contents intact? It makes me envious that I didn't get to experience that side of Taiwan much while I was living there, what with having expensive items of clothing stolen from my motorbike, or being the victim of an attempted shakedown by a woman who tried to take me to court after SHE ran a red light at an intersection and collided with me, or having to live next door to a violent gangster on a street filled with shoddy tenements (mine included) in semi-rural Shengang. Probably a lot had to to do with the fact that Taiwan wasn't my first East Asian country to call home. I'm also the first to admit my skin could be thicker; what many Westerners characterize as "amazing kindness" shown by the Taiwanese to foreigners, I've always taken as a not-too-subtle reminder that I was always going to be an outsider in Taiwanese society, the perpetual guest who could never possibly understand the nuances of the culture despite marrying a local and starting a family there. In other words, I was already a jaded curmudgeon by the time circumstances derailed my train and had me come to rest in Taiwan, which is why I find the "Golly, gee whiz, Taiwan sure is the greatest place on earth" observations to be amusingly ridiculous at best, annoyingly irritating at worst. 

My daughter previews her Halloween costume during Chinese class this afternoon. Halloween, of course, is the domain of the privileged.

Today there was a naively cute post in my Facebook feed. Someone put up a video of a snake slithering across a road and wrote that Taiwan was a "paradise" because they could see "...snakes, praying mantises, lizards, eagles, huge spiders..." I didn't grow up in the middle of a large city, but at the same time, I wasn't raised out in the boondocks either. I have seen snakes, praying mantises, lizards, eagles and huge spiders, not to mention various other critters. True, I have come across snakes out in the forests and in fields, but I have also seen them slithering across roads in a city as densely populated as Tōkyō 東京. And even the most urban of city dwellers must have seen a few praying mantises or spiders in their lives prior to moving to the paradise that is Taiwan. And so I briefly remarked on how I found the post to be ridiculous, without naming any names or providing a link to the original video. I suppose I should take a friend's advice and stop being so cynical, but it's too late for that.

Amber shows off her patented "Hello Kitty" move during yesterday's Pumpkin Classic Go tournament. Go, of course, is a game of the privileged class.

And that was that, I thought, until this evening, when I learned I was a child of privilege, who doesn't understand that many of those from Western lands who have found happiness in Taiwan come from "lower to lower middle class backgrounds". Apparently, praying mantises and spiders are unknown in the gritty inner cities of the West, and their existence is a revelation to some, proving that paradise on Earth exists in the form of the island of Taiwan. I should have found this line of reasoning to be amusing, but instead I replied with a few choice profanities. An over-reaction, of course, but a not unreasonable one. What irked me was the presumption made of my social class and background by someone who has only known me since after I moved to Fengyuan back in...a few years back. I don't recall ever regaling this person with stories of my life growing up in opulence affluence...somewhere, let alone the economic situation of my family. So when said people take it upon themselves to assume things they don't know anything about, it gets to be more than a little irksome.

Winning a pumpkin at the tournament was a privilege.

The other factor that set me off was that in all the years I spent overseas in both Japan and Taiwan, I never met a fellow Westerner who appeared to be anything other than a child of the middle class (and many whose backgrounds made me look like a trailer park kid in comparison, which is even more the case in my present occupation). It takes money to move overseas and start a new life, and it takes a university education to secure the proper working visas for doing so. To paint my jaded observations of the naive young and enthusiastic as being unfairly dismissive is to an extent justified (though I have my reasons). To do so with accusations of the privileged passing judgment on the lower classes is not only ridiculous, but extremely presumptuous and more than a little bit offensive, especially when the accuser knows so little about me. And, I suspect, more than a little hypocritical.

Red leaves. Being privileged, I feel threatened by the socialist color

As long as my Facebook feed is filled with inane observations of what it is like to live in Taiwan (or in Japan, or China or anywhere else where I've had some experience), I will continue to respond per how I feel. Having worked my ass off for too long at too many dead-end kindergarten jobs while trying to support a family living in the less-than-fashionable area that was (and still is) Shengang, I've earned the right to be a little snarky now and then. I've paid my dues...

UPDATE: It's been a few days now, and I've long since calmed down. Now that I have the advantage of hindsight, I realize that I overreacted and regret the choice of some of my words in my exchange with the provocateur on Facebook. However, it still upsets me that someone best described as a casual acquaintance whom I've only met in person on a few occasions was not only presumptuous enough to assume something about my background (I've never posted anything on my life before Asia, but plenty on what it was like trying to get by while living in the Fengyuan/Shengang area), but that they were either arrogant enough to insist they knew more about myself than I did or too dense to realize that their poor choice of words had crossed a line and therefore should've been retracted. As in quickly making a sincere apology as soon as you realize that you've made a mistake, which is what I would've done in such a situation. I'm leaning toward the latter (i.e. "clueless") interpretation. I'm also still waiting for an apology, but I won't be holding my breath. What is pathetic in this case is that the person could've easily made their point about foreign residents who had grown up in urban areas experiencing wildlife for the first time in Taiwan (and getting giddy about it) without the ridiculous and unsupported connection to their financial backgrounds and social classes (plenty of well-to-do people never leave their urban comfort zones, while the great outdoors is populated by many who struggle to get by financially). After all, working class heroes generally do not have the financial means to first earn a four-year university degree in their home countries, then fly halfway around the world in order to set up themselves up to live and work as English teachers in East Asia. Kudos to those who have, but I've yet to encounter any in my travels, and at the risk of being presumptuous, that includes the above-mentioned person who was so sure they had me figured out.

Monday, October 19, 2015

Fall in the air and (another) spring in my step

A dental clinic that has closed shop, probably because potential patients had second thoughts when they saw the sign.

With impeccable timing, we recently purchased a set of bicycles for the family (used ones for my daughter and myself, a new bike for my wife), just in time for the weather to turn chilly. Actually, last weekend was still warm enough for us to break in the new (or not so new) wheels on the local section of the Washington & Old Dominion Trail:


This weekend, however, autumn made its presence felt, with temperatures in the low-Fifties Fahrenheit. Too cool for cycling, but still sunny enough to spend time outdoors communing with nature, or at least what passes for the Great Outdoors in the suburbs of northern Virginia. And so yesterday we made our second visit to the Meadowlark Botanical Gardens in Vienna. Our first time to the 95-acre (38 hectares) park was in April 2013, when cherry blossoms were blooming and I was hobbling around on crutches in the aftermath of knee surgery. This time I was able to see much more of what the gardens have to offer:


Amber strikes a pose in the small herb garden:


The leaves in our area are beginning to show their fall colors:


The park's geese are in no hurry to head anywhere south of here:


The remains of an 18th-century spring house, a sort of colonial-era refrigerator:


This cabin is all that remains of the home belonging to the husband-and-wife team of economist Gardiner Means and social historian Caroline Ware. The couple bought the farmland in 1935 and had a house built that incorporated the cabin as a living room. They donated the property in the 1960's to the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority, leading to the creation of the Meadowlark Botanical Gardens:


Though most of the park's walkways consist of paved asphalt, there are some more natural paths, like the Fred Packard Grove Nature Trail:


Striking a pose:


What may appear to the non-discerning eye (like mine) as an ordinary grove is actually a collection of rare trees native to Virginia:


In the Korean Bell Garden:



The park grounds contain three small lakes and numerous gazebos:



The Potomac Valley Native Plant Collection has examples of 16 kinds of shrubs and trees native to the local area:


In addition to serving as a botanical garden, the park is also a popular spot for having professional photographs taken, which must be set up by appointment (there are no restrictions on amateurs like myself, though if my camerawork is any indication, there probably should be). Starting from mid-November and lasting until just after New Year's, the gardens will be lit up at night, so we might make yet another visit there. As for our cycling ambitions, that all depends on how much tolerance we can build up in order to ride outside in a northern Virginia fall and winter. This being an El Nino year, it could be another "Snowmageddon" in the Washington, D.C. area. Then again, it could be another mild winter like the one the last time we were in Falls Church. Stay tuned as the seasons change...




Sunday, October 11, 2015

Food and guns - yelp!

If you read Yelp reviews, you may have noticed the frequent use of the adjective “authentic” when people are reviewing “ethnic” restaurants. But how exactly does one determine an establishment’s “authenticity”? I assume it means the food tastes the same in Falls Church, Virginia as it would at a similar restaurant in Taichung, Taiwan - I was pondering this weighty question after my wife and I had dinner last weekend at a Taiwanese café in Rockville, Maryland, an area known as “Little Taipei” for its large Formosan expat community. But is that actually possible? Based on my past experiences eating non-American cuisine in the U.S. and dining on Western-style food overseas, it’s almost always the case that the taste of the dishes has been altered, even in very subtle ways, to suit the local palate (“Can I have the low-sodium soy sauce?”). Supposedly the fact that the cook is from the mother country means the food he or she whips up is the “real deal”. But the worst Japanese food I ever had was at a Japanese restaurant in Taichung operated by a Japanese man who did all the cooking. My wife has eaten at Chinese restaurants here in the States run by Taiwanese compatriots, chatting amicably with the owners about the “old country”, only to tell me afterward that the she didn’t like the dishes they served and therefore didn’t want to eat there again. It’s apparent many of the foodies passing judgement on Yelp and other websites haven’t spent much time in the countries of origin of the food they’re praising online as being “authentic”; for others, the fact that their ancestors came from the same countries as the cooks somehow qualifies them to determine that all-important “authenticity” criterion.

Which brings me to another point: in some of the Yelp reviews, the presence of Asian diners somehow lent an establishment more of that much-desired “authenticity”, as in “The large number of Asians when I was there was a good sign”. But why would that be such an auspicious omen? In the case of the Taiwanese restaurant in Rockville, reviewers obviously assumed said diners were all Chinese/Taiwanese. But were they? How many of them were Americans of Asian descent? How many were from other Asian countries? Were they there because the food was good? Or were they there because they were friends or relations of the owners? When I was living in Taiwan, I would sometimes eat at Western-style restaurants not for the “authentic” dishes (which they weren’t), but because they provided a comforting degree of familiarity in a strange land. Might not some of the “Asian” diners in the Taiwanese Rockville establishment be doing the same? Some of them could have been foreign students, or expat businesspeople, or tourists, or green card holders; strangers in an unfamiliar country seeking out something understandable, even if the food could never taste as good as it is back home.  

Which brings me back to the question of “authenticity”: does the presence of, say, a Korean national in a Taiwanese restaurant mean the food is better, much more akin to what you would find in Taipei than you would in a Washington, D.C. suburb? Does seeing a Taiwanese-American eating an oyster omelet in the same establishment make everything more “authentic”, even though I’ve probably spent a lot more time (and eaten out) in the land of their ancestors than they ever have? Does it really matter if a lot of an Asian restaurant’s customers are of a similar ethnic persuasion? In the end, the only considerations should be whether or not the food is tasty, and is providing good value in relation to the prices being charged. Forget about “authenticity”. If it’s “the real deal” a foodie is after, the foodie should travel to the mother country and go restaurant-hopping there – and it may be the case that too much authenticity might be more than they could handle. And forget about the ethnic make-up of fellow diners – they’re not necessarily in a better position to judge the quality of the food on offer. 

You can just ask me and my wife – we found the food in the Rockville café to be “authentically” mediocre, just like it was at many restaurants back in Fengyuan.

Speaking of food, tonight we had dinner at all-American diner where all the employees were from Latin America. It came at the end of a day spent outdoors, our first as a family since our return to the Washington, D.C. area from the west coast. The northern Virginia/southern Maryland area is blessed with an abundance of parks offering walking trails - for today's outing, we drove to the McKee-Beshers Wildlife Management Area in Poolesville, Maryland. Driving on Maryland 190 and passing some huge mansions along the way (some looking like Southern plantations), we soon arrived at the parking lot:


The trail down to the Potomac River alternated between crop fields and woods. The sounds of hunters' guns in the distance kept my wife, not used to these things, on edge:


A solitary cherry tree maintains a vigil at the edge of a corn field:


The trail eventually came to the Potomac:


We walked along the elevated walkway that once served as the towpath trail for the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal. To the left of us in the photo below is the depression that remains from the C&O canal bed; the river is on the right:


We walked on for a while until we came to a group of people all wearing orange vests, not a good sign in area where hunting is allowed without need of permits. The people we saw were conducting field tests with their dogs, using blanks; on the other side of the road were hunters with live ammo. Not wanting to walk in dark clothing through woods crawling with armed men and women, we decided to backtrack, and returned to the Potomac:


Walking back and passing fields of soybeans:


The girls on the way back to the car, talking about weighty matters:


I'm receiving mixed signals here:


After 3 or so hours of walking, we returned to the car and drove to the nearby Kunzang Palyul Choling Buddhist temple:


Tibetan prayer flags:


The main temple building is housed in a charming old home, far removed from any Buddhist temple ever seen in Taiwan:


Inside is a prayer room and a small library:


Across River Road is the temple-owned Peace Park, containing another stupa:


Offerings included an Incredible Hulk Pez dispenser. The road to Nirvana takes many forms:


Down the road from the temple and heading back toward Washington is the historic 19th-century Seneca Schoolhouse. It serves as a "living history" field trip for visiting school kids. Unfortunately for us it's only open on Sundays and for private parties, meaning we could only look at the building from the front gate:


The Saints Peter and Paul Antiochian Orthodox Christian Church is further down River Road from the one-room schoolhouse. The church and the Romanian Food Festival going on nearby were an indication of the diverse makeup of this part of Maryland:


Back in Falls Church, and after dinner Amber tries her first pinball machine: