Matsu's Birthday

Matsu, the god of war or the sea, depending on who you ask, has a birthday around this time of year. He's the favorite god of many in Taiwan, and there's a huge parade that travels across many towns, including Fong Yuan. By huge I mean it lasts several hours. Last year, it happened while I was teaching.

This year, his birthday fell on Saturday, and the parade fell at exactly the time I was driving my scooter to meet a friend. The parade cut across my path. I went down another street. I ran into the parade again. I drove down another street. I stopped at a stoplight, but usually these long parades follow the lights so I figured I could go soon. Except the light was set to stay continuously green for the parade.

I decided to be patient. I got a couple of pictures (on my camera phone, into the sun, so not of the highest quality):




One of guys on stilts, one of a kind of float that plays loud atonal disco music. Yeah.
I couldn't call the person I was supposed to meet because it was so noisy. After waiting for five minutes I decided to try to turn around and back-track, but traffic had me totally blocked in. At that point a small marching band came by, with horns and majorettes in short skirts. They started to walk around in a circle in front of me- like, march in a circle in the intersection they were blocking, right in front of me. I just started to laugh. It was like, "Ha ha ha, you can't go anywhere!"

Eventually I managed to go right and get around the parade. The person I was meeting said, "I figured you'd be late, because it's Matsu's birthday!" About 10 other people told me it was Matsu's birthday that day. Couldn't they have told me the day before?

Edit: Here's a blog post of a similar parade but with my better pictures. Most parades have some floats though.

We don't have that in Chinese

After my last post, I realized you can't really say "Get out of my way" in Chinese. I asked around, and of course you can express the idea, but it's just not a concept that's part of the Chinese way of thinking. There's no "my way" to be in- we're all just kind of sharing the road, and if you want to part your bike diagonally across the bike path, I'll just have to go around you.

Chinese of course has a few things we don't really express in English- namely comfort and convenience. For example, one sister whose husband has been MIA for a few weeks says, "He's still uncomfortable." But it doesn't quite mean the same thing as it does in English. People aren't super into comfort like we Americans are- witness scooters, couches made of wood, and hiking in plastic slippers. But it's totally acceptable to say you're uncomfortable as an excuse not to do something. I guess it's kind of a euphemism for being sick or taking a "mental health" day.

It's also totally acceptable to say that something's not convenient- like I can say, "I can't meet you for lunch, it's not convenient." Or, "I can't bring my Visa paperwork for you today- it's not convenient." I guess in the US we'd have to make some big excuse- like I've got a million things to do, and I have an appointment at 1, so I really can't come to lunch- but here there's no need. At first it was a little weird being on the receiving end of things- what do you mean, I have to sub a class for you because you're uncomfortable?- but now I'm used to it.

Putting the fun in funeral

Sorry, sorry.

As we know, death and ghosts are a big part of the culture here.  And funerals are a big deal that I don't fully understand.  They involve waiting for the next auspicious day after a person dies, filling up the front of your house with pictures of the deceased and chairs for people to sit in and stare at the pictures, hiring some chanters to drone for a long time, and provide meals and white towels for all the people who stop by to mourn.  (By mourning I mean, eat and wear a white towel.)

The front of your house, you say.  But what if your house is too small to accommodate all the people who will come for the free white towel?  What if you live in an apartment?

Well, then you put up a huge blue tent in the middle of the street.  If it's a main street, that's OK, just put it to the side so one car can possibly squeeze by.  If it's a side street then feel free to shut down the street.  Shut it down for a few days!  These things take a few days, you know.

No, they don't have funeral homes.  A home for funerals?  Why bother when there's all these streets available

!

Shuttlecock

How many times had I said this word in my whole lifetime before Taiwan?  0-2, I'd estimate.  How many times after?  Mmm, it's in the hundreds, for sure.

Why?  Taiwan has a national obsession with shuttlecock.  Every level I teach includes that word somewhere.  All the time in class, it's shuttlecock shuttlecock shuttlecock.

Again, why?   Because they love to play something that resembles badminton.  This doesn't involve a net, but does involve 2 people standing (in front of my building, in front of their classroom at school [not buxiban]), in a park, on the street, batting a shuttlecock back and forth with their badminton rackets.  Anytime you've got 5 spare minutes- bat around the old shuttlecock!

Also, the same word in Chinese means badminton and shuttlecock, so they always call it shuttlecock.  As in, "Yesterday, I played shuttlecock."

No, they don't call them birdies.  How I wish they did.

Funny stuff

Lots of times in Chinese, you call each other by titles- so like someone will call their little brother "didi" instead of his name. I am called Teacher by my students, Aunty (ai-i? I can't figure out the pinyinization), or Big Sister (jiejie) by random kids I see on the street. And I call them Little Sister and Little Brother. Usually I call adults by their names (last name or first name, depending on our relationship) but out in service if I don't really know someone I will call them aunt or uncle or ocassionally grandma or grandpa.

But today in service a little kid called me "a-ma"- Grandma! I cracked up. The sister I was with thought I'd be offended and said, "No! She is jie-jie! I'm Aunty!" And the kid said, to the sister, "But you are tall, and she is very tall!" Like I had to be older.

Later, we go to a door and through the screen the kid says, "Ai-i, ni shi shei?" (Aunty, who are you?) I say I'm Miss Han and he says, "I can't open the door! I don't know you. You're a bad person!" (This word in Chinese, huai-ren, literally means bad person but it applies to any kind of thief, anyone really who does bad things.) I was like, OK- sometimes people don't want to talk to Christians because they think the Taoist ghosts will get them, and it is Ghost Month when all the ghosts roam freely.

Then we left and it the sister explained that probably the kid was home by himself and didn't want to open the door to stranger. OK, I can handle that!

Only in Taiwan part 37

I know I've mentioned Taiwan's obsession with white skin before. It's one of those weird things- they seem to accept black westerners but there's for sure sometimes (for some people) some prejudice at work against Asians with dark(er) skin (ie aboriginal Taiwanese and guest workers from other Asian countries).

The thing that makes it trickier is that the words black and white in Chinese encompass a lot more than they do in English- they kind of mean darkness and lightness, so that you can say "White days are getting shorter" when you mean the daylight is less, and when I start to get a little tan people exclaim about how black (hei-heide) I'm getting. It's not so much being born black or white, as wasting your naturally white skin, that they don't like.

So today I was grading homework where the kids had to make a sentence with one of their new words, skin. There was plenty of randomness ("He has no skin, so he is dead") but a few gems like these:

"My sister is beautiful because her skin is very white."

"My mom says to my dad, 'Your skin is black! It's too bad!"

another weird culture thing

So one thing is, if I ask someone how to do something, and they don't think I can do it, they just won't tell me. Like a few times I have asked people how you get to a certain scenic spot, and it comes out that I want to ride my bike (bicycle) there, and they'll say, "You can't ride a bicycle to there." And I'll say, OK, but if someone did, what route would they take. And they'll say no, you can't. Even though a few weeks later I do.

The same thing happened when my bag fell off my scooter- everyone just thought it was impossible that I could drive my scooter to get it, so no one would tell me where it was. I still don't know.

The thing that makes this frustrating is that many things that people here consider impossible- like riding a bike more than 5 km (although there are always serious bikers on the road, but I never can talk to them) or making your own arrangements for travel instead of using a travel agent- are not at all impossible.

Another thing is that if you ask someone to do something they don't want to do, they'll just pretend you didn't say it. Like maybe I'll be talking to a CT about a Performance Day for one of our classes, and I will suggest something I think is great, and they'll ignore it completely. Later I'll ask, "What do you think about....?" and they'll just look around like there's a fly buzzing or something.

This happens pretty regularly in all aspects of life- I suggest we get tea, I talk about a vacation idea- and it could just be a funny cultural thing, except I'm either saying something in possibly imperfect Chinese, or saying something in English that may not be understood because I'm talking to a non-native speaker of English. So it's frustrating- do you not understand, or do you not agree? But no way to get that across.

I went to DongShi again this weekend. Saturday was a pretty long day- I observed a class in Taichung in the morning, then had to walk very quickly to the bus stop to make it to Fong Yuan in time to teach my afternoon class, then had a Performance Day where the kids' parents come to see them perform.

After that I went with Jasmine to DongShi where they were having a barbeque... no, it is not like a barbeque in the US. It was at a Filipino sister's house- she is happy to speak English! Her husband is Chinese & not a Jehovah's Witness. When I got there we walked through an orchard to the barbeque area- they kind of had a campfire going with some wire things over it (more like the baking racks you put sheets of cookies on to cool than actually a grill) with whole fishes on them.
The funny thing was, the orchard had all of these wires to hold the trees up and they were just tall enough that the Chinese people could walk under them but I had to duck, and if I wanted to stand to talk to someone I had to find a place where my head would fit through the wires. The orchards are incredibly labor-intensive- they hand-graft branches onto the trees, then go through and prune off the other branches, then tie a bag around each piece of fruit to keep the insects away.
So we sat around the campfirish thing and whenever a fish was done, everyone would just dig in with the chopsticks and grab chunks. Sometimes people would get a nice chunk with their chopsticks and give it to me... yes, that's considered very polite. It was really tasty.
People kept explaining the rest of the barbeque to me in English & Chinese and I didn't fully understand it in either language: here they took a couple of chickens and wrapped them in tinfoil, then buried them in a mound of dirt which they'd somehow made warm (I still don't understand that part). Apparently it was a big challenge because it had been raining for a few days. So later in the evening they had all these pots of soup and dumplings, and then they come out with the chickens. Everyone crowded around it and exclaimed over them- then someone took an enormous knife and just started hacking away at them. It was great entertainment for everyone. People were taking pictures. It did taste good.
One thing that is funny about Chinese culture is that they're not big on lingering around after a meal. Like there, people were cooking for hours and kids were playing, people were shooting the breeze, and even the eating took a long time. But when the eating was over, everyone just up & went home.

Guanxi & other things I don't understand

During training they were always telling us about "guanxi", the guiding factor in Chinese culture. It basically means relationships and it's pretty hard to explain. One of the most interesting things is that I guess sociologists have figured out that, in the West, rules or laws kind of trump everything- so that if you break the law, you will be put in jail, and that's pretty normal, and any time you weren't punished that would be an anomaly. But here relationships trump everything- so that if you break a law but have a good relationship with the police, you'll be fine. Also there are lots of laws that are kind of meant to be broken- for example, they said that the building codes for Hess schools involve a certain number of toilets per kid (say 10 toilets all together) but the water code only allows for enough water to supply 8. So it comes down to your guanxi with the building inspector people.
In a way I guess it's like a network of trust & helpfulness. For example they said that if one foreigner goes to a scooter shop, and is nice to the owner, and brings his friends there to get their scooters fixed, then everyone gets better guanxi. This doesn't sound too different from how things go in the US- usually you will help people who need your help, and they will help you if you need it- but here it's much more pervasive and kind of more formalized. For instance, I was out in service and we stopped at a tea stand, and I said I'd treat and the sister said, "No, I will, I want to build up guanxi." And then what I truly wanted was green tea with 50% sugar, but that's the cheapest thing on the menu so she wound up buying me bubble tea, because it's more expensive, even though I can barely drink the stuff.
The thing I don't understand is whether guanxi is just a kind of building up of general good-will, or if I'm accumulating massive guanxi debts to a lot of people. Like in the US, if there was someone who needed a lot of help and didn't have anything they could do to help me, that would be OK, I would be happy to help them if I liked them and they appreciated it. But it's possible that here people have little guanxi calculators in their heads. That is extra-hard because I just can't do things like go buy tea for someone or go up to the counter in the restaurant to pay for meals because I don't know how. And should I if I could, or would people be mad at me for depleting their guanxi account? I have no idea.
The guiding principle is pretty much, live my life and smile and try to be polite. It's impossible to tell, at work for example, if all the Chinese teachers think I'm an idiot and can barely tolerate me, or if they think I'm average, or the greatest thing going. I guess this is true at many jobs but it's especially true here. So what can ya do. I just do as well as I can in my classes, and I try to build up some guanxi by being like, "Do you have any advice for teaching this page?" or "What do you think the kids will have trouble with?" But that doesn't seem to do it for them. No guanxi for me! :)