zhongli

I am in Zhongli or Neili in Taiwan right now, staying with my parents in my mom's older brother's apartment, which he doesn't live in because he lives in Shanghai. It has been family time here. There are family members here I haven't seen since I was eight. Two nights ago I had dinner with my mom's older brother's ex-wife, their daughter, her husband, their son's wife, her daughter, my 96 year-old grandfather, my mom's older sister's husband, and my parents. All of these people have different terms of address, but sometimes it's more expedient to refer to people in my generation or lower by their name, which means during our ridiculous banquet of - well, I wrote it down - a plate decorated with a lobster shell with the lobster meat scooped out onto lettuce covered with Kewpie mayonaise next to a dozen shrimp in the shell, an enoki-filled clear soup with green globules of something and shredded pork floss, another clear soup heated with sterno cans and filled with seafood, a big white-fleshed fish on a sterno-heated platter, a dish of shiitake mushrooms mixed with cooked lettuce, eighteen raw oysters with lime and hot sauce, more mushrooms (mu er and something else) mixed with chopped up bamboo root, a tempura plate with shrimp, potato, yam, etc., beef steak, giant bright-pink peach-like mantou filled with sweet red bean paste, sour berry drink, and regular old oolong tea - during this ridiculous feast that we did not come close to finishing, I asked and forgot everybody's term of address half a dozen times.

I have these general thoughts about Taiwan versus China: it's easier to negotiate than what I have seen of China simply because there are 1.28 billion fewer people; food here is somehow more delicious than food in China even though it is actually just Chinese food; the crap sold on the street is somehow cuter even though it is all crap made in China; and Cyn, I disagree with your assessment of Taiwan's rate of development, because it sure seems like things are developing here. Ten years ago in Taipei, there was one subway line with about ten stops on it. Now there are six lines, and one of those lines can bring 3/4ths of a Chinese-American family from the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall to Dan Shui for a sunset and a street vendor binge in less than an hour. (What was binged upon: hats, sunglasses, those special Taiwanese face-covering Darth Vader visors, fried squid, ice cream cones, red thread for jade necklaces, oranges. We also sampled many fried things and artificially sweetened things, and some massage implements, without buying.)

On the train from Zhongli to Taipei today, these evenful things happened: a man stood in the aisle next to my mom's seat and released a ten-second fart next to her face; a man getting out at the Bang Qiao stop upended an entire crate of lotus fruit that he wasn't able to fully retrieve before rushing off the train, so after he left, other passengers went to pick up this most delicious of tropical fruit from the floor of the train, and my mom got a bag. Dear god, fruit in the tropics. This particular fruit happens to be red with white meat, bell-shaped, seedless, sort of lightweight and crisp like a starfruit, not too sweet, but very, very heady. They tasted like daydreams about kissing. We ate them while walking to my dad's family's old neighborhood on Tong Shan Street in Taipei, and then we walked to a men's dormitory at Taida University and ate buffet-style, fiber-rich dorm food in order to release the previous night's banquet's death grip on our intestines.

So pass the days, eating and noting family, and eating again. I decided against going to Wenzhou to see my cousin and her baby, because it would mean getting on my 19th and 20th flights in 65 days, and I have four more flights coming up in the next three weeks, and this growing pigmentless patch on my hand a Taiwanese doctor diagnosed yesterday as stress-related-immunodeficiency-caused vitiligo, which stressed me the f-bomb out, so I don't think I'd better cool it if I can.

Traveling with my parents is great, but there are also some vitiligo-catalyzed stormy clouds relating to my realization that I can never fully please them and will only be disappointed and very sad and maybe even a touch humiliated when my attempts to do so are read exactly the wrong way, and that their way of communicating their affection to me will be sweet and pushy until it becomes intolerable, and that's when the skies open. You can read about that on my secret blog, which is published in a dark locker in the sweaty basement of my heart. Now it is nearing midnight and I am in an Internet cafe among sour-smelling young men with video game fevers, and my parents just called to say that there are lots of wild dogs on the walk back to the apartment, so I'll be on my way. More later, from down home Beijing.