West Meets East: A Year of Traveling East Asia

Editor’s Note: Over the next year or so, Brian Awehali, cross-posting at www.BrianAwehali.com, will share his adventures as he investigates green planning and sustainable development efforts in Taiwan and China, pausing along the way for as many marvelous things as possible. A writer, designer, and editor of LOUDCANARY, Brian will check in periodically from Taiwan (where he posts his first report, below), Chengdu, Dongguan, and, luck holding, his yurt-to-yurt horseback travels in Mongolia. We hope you enjoy, and look forward to, these posts as much as Terrain.org does.

Part 1: Unamerican Activities

By Brian Awehali

We arrived in Hong Kong early in the morning, en route to Taipei to visit my partner F.’s family for Chinese New Year, and to work on a WWOOF-affiliated farm for two weeks. After that: mainland China for 6+ months, where I hope to learn (and write) as much as I can about the realities and propaganda of green development in the world’s most populous country.

Our landing was stomach-vanishingly rough. During the worst of it, I looked over and saw a stone-faced woman next to me with a jade pendant necklace that was hovering straight out from her body instead of resting on her neck. I suppose flight is for the birds and insects, and that most of us take it far too much for granted, rather than as the miraculous (if ecologically catastrophic) thing it really is.

After touching down in Taipei we took a bus and high speed bullet train to Chushan (or Zhushan; the Romanization varies), a farming town of about 30,000 in Nantou, central Taiwan. We’re staying at my partner’s mother’s family home, the center of what used to be a large farm, but is now just seven or eight homes arranged around a courtyard.

I didn’t sleep on the flight, so when we finally arrived, I was dead on my feet, and went to bed almost immediately, smelling fire under simmering bamboo soup, and many other things I couldn’t identify, and that my nose may well never have experienced before.

It’s worth mentioning that since taking a (highly recommended) perfuming workshop in San Francisco several weeks ago, my sense of smell has been in hyperdrive. On the plane, every foot, every lotion, and every other less-appetizing thing there was to smell crawled up into my sinuses and made a home. In the Chushan countryside, the smells are better. From my bed, I smelled well-seasoned Taiwanese sausages (rice wine, garlic, Chinese cinnamon powder, and soy sauce paste) curing in the next room, along with glutinous rice and daikon cakes that are fed to the gods at New Year’s, but then eaten by mortals once the gods have had their fill. It was explained to me that the gods eat only the cake’s essence, which works out well for everyone, I suppose.

During New Year’s celebrations and worship, a ubiquitous ritual involves burning “joss paper,” or “ghost money,” so that it may reach ancestors and the gods in the afterlife. It was explained to me by an uncle that some Taiwanese environmentalists are opposed to this practice because it creates so much air pollution and because it contributes to deforestation. Apparently some people have started to burn virtual money for their ancestors, setting a computer up near the family shrine and extending the reach of computers into the spirit world. (I hope the IT professionals in the afterlife have more effective ways of combating identity theft!)

After sleeping for 14 hours, I awoke to an eager rooster crowing well before dawn, and decided to walk into town, about 20 minutes away. I took a shoulder-less road flanked on one side by an open mountain spring-fed culvert, sniffing at the freshly-disturbed earth from various gardens, and drawing in moist air infused with about four parts plant life to one part exhaust. It’s more pleasant than it sounds. Then again, I also used to really love the smell of gasoline.

As I walked I saw several trucks with water barrels and long-nosed suction pumps pull over along the road, drivers climbing directly from cab to bed to extract some of this water, and was later told that people travel from other places for this mountain spring water, because it makes the best tea. (All drinking water is first boiled here, though the water quality is quite good, and I should note that the water for tea is extracted a bit closer to its source than the picture above might lead y0u to believe; the people I saw were farmers, getting water for their crops). Lush vegetation rioted happily in family gardens on all sides: banana trees, corn, plots of sweet potatoes, and more lettuce than I expected, given the seeming lack of lettuce in the Taiwanese diet.

I do not speak Chinese–yet, so my chances of communicating with anyone in a smaller town like Chushan are quite poor. F.’s grandmother and grandfather speak only Taiwanese, and everyone else in the family speaks both Chinese and Taiwanese. I keep making all manner of small mistakes relating to my cultural ignorance, then struggle to understand what I’m being told. For example: my first meal with the family, I put my chopsticks down in my bowl to rest, so that they were pointing upward. This is a no-no; chopsticks are to lay flat when not in use, and are only placed downward in a bowl when offering food to the gods, as if one is making it easier for them to eat. I felt stupid and sad to have made a disrespectful blunder, but, of course, I had no way of knowing about this custom. As an American, I marvel somewhat at the complexity and reverence displayed for the gods here. I have come to believe increasingly in an animistic world, where everything is alive and interconnected. Not only does this jibe with my knowledge of nature and quantum physics, but I also have this sense that the forces of materialism, monotheism and scientific ascendency have diminished meaning and magic from a great number of important and vital things.

But it’s one thing to believe such a thing in an abstract intellectual way, and quite another to experience a culture where none of this is an abstraction, and where there are gods for everything, who must be respected and paid attention to. Offerings are made to the earth god, and it was explained to me that every region has its own earth god. The temple for the earth god of Chushan is just several hundred yards down the road, and the patriarch of the family, now over 90 years old and mostly deaf, walks down to pay his respects every morning.

Several miles into my early morning walk, the foggy countryside gave way abruptly to cityscape. There’s very little separation between the natural and man-made landscape in Taiwan. At 7am, the streets of the city were an organized bedlam, with pedestrians and people on scooters navigating what seemed to me, especially at first, like impossibly limited space. Many, if not most people in Chushan ride scooters — not just adults or boys. Grandmothers, fathers with daughters, mothers with three kids, mothers with two kids and large potentially explosive propane tanks nestled between their legs — everyone. (F’s nonagenarian hard-of-hearing grandfather rides his into town several times a week!)

About half of those on scooters wear what appear to be surgical face masks. I say appear because that’s what I thought they were at first. Such masks were ubiquitous at the Hong Kong and Taipei airports, covering the mouths and noses of all food service workers and most administrative staff.

We were even given a “flu kit” as we left the secured area of Taipei Airport. It was surprisingly elegant: a bright red package containing a well-constructed face mask with cloth strings, some pleasant-smelling soap, and a packet of disinfectant tissues. F.’s was plaid and relatively tasteful. Mine had a tesselated pattern of hearts and American flags. Someone later explained to me that the people on scooters wear these not for flu-prevention, but in order not to breathe the noxious levels of exhaust they’re exposed to, and my brief walk through town convinced me of the wisdom of this. My sense of smell may be peculiarly heightened right now, but the haze in the air and sooty grime on any available surface corroborated what my nose was telling me.

Rapid industrialization and the attendant ills of air pollution are a significant problem for Taiwan. The tea grown here, expensive and prized as among the best in the world, must be grown at increasingly higher elevations in part because the air quality is too poor at lower elevations, and ruins the tea’s flavor.

I confess, with some shame, that I had a momentary impulse to judge the Taiwanese for ruining the air of their beautiful island, but then quickly reminded myself that my flight here, on its own, probably contributed more air pollution and carbon than any one of these scooterists could possibly produce in a year, and that the average American contributes far more to pollution and global warming than does the average person in Taiwan. Additionally, Taiwan has made great (and typically rapid) strides to address its pollution and emissions problems.

The soot and exhaust are offset, at least in part, by gardens and vegetation in almost every available patch, growing right up to the edge of the road, nestled next to busy intersections, in narrow alleyways, in planters on rooftops, and in tiny front yards. Such gardens are commonplace here in Chushan, and they make me wonder why more people, especially in the fertile climate of Northern California, my adopted home for the past seven years, are not doing the same.

Brian Awehali, a former editor at Britannica.com, founded and edited the North American magazine, LiP: Informed Revolt, as well as an anthology of its collected best, Tipping the Sacred Cow (AK Press). In 2010, he will be traveling through Taiwan, China, Mongolia and Guatemala. In China, he will be writing mostly about sustainable development and emerging “green” technologies. He is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, and is most committed to the advance of The Marvelous. When not blogging for Terrain.org, he curates LOUDCANARY: One interconnected journey through everything and nothing.