I’m pleased to share with readers of Terrain.org, who may have caught my blog posts about my travels through East Asia last year, that two versions of my profile of Chinese writer and people’s historian Liao Yiwu have been published this month, in the print edition of The Progressive (also featuring contributions from David Sedaris, Jim Hightower and Dave Zirin), and in expanded online form on Counterpunch, here.
Liao is an incredibly important figure. His first book to be translated into English, The Corpse Walker, was a collection of 27 startlingly raw and unexpected literary interviews with mostly older people on the margins of Chinese society, who were directly impacted by the horrors of life under Mao Zedong. Several of his other books, including Earthquake Insane Asylum, chronicling the invisible and uncounted following the disastrous 2008 Sichuan earthquake, have been published in Taiwan and Hong Kong, though pressures from China are having an impact there as well; the Taiwanese publisher of Liao’s books is politically aligned with the KMT in Taiwan, a party broadly in favor of closer ties with mainland China, and has discontinued the publication of Liao’s inflammatory work in the country.
He was due to visit the U.S. for the first time this year, but as the Chinese government has responded to fears of insurrection like that unfolding in the Middle East, it has arrested numerous prominent Chinese activists, artist and writers, including Ai Weiwei, Ran Yunfei, and Tan Zuoren. In this wave of repression Liao has not been arrested, but his permission to leave the country was revoked on April 1st, at the last possible moment.
Please do check out my expanded profile of Liao, and, if you’re able, please do let potentially interested people know, as Liao’s opportunity to come to the U.S. and speak to people and share his stories in person has been denied.
“The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.”
Young girl in interesting alleyway, Chengdu, Sichuan, China, 2010.
Here is a girl, standing at the end of an alleyway in Chengdu, in the Sichuan province in southwestern China, in the early days of the Gregorian year 2010. The longer I look at these photos the more love I feel for her.
What will she become, and what will life in the place and time she was born into allow her?
When we first made eye contact, she made a grim face, turned abruptly, and marched with purpose the other way. Then she stopped, executed a surprisingly martial turn, and stood surveying me for a pregnant moment. I waved, and she seemed not to respond at all; just stood there stone-faced, or so I thought at the time. After a moment of standing there like an absurd soldier, she vanished into the doorway of what I assume was her home.
In this moment, so many things went through my mind: My god the Chinese are rigid: even this little girl in pink and turquoise walks like an expressionless soldier! What a dirty alleyway; aren’t they loathe to hang their clothes outside in this grime after they just washed them? What is she thinking about me?
When I got the chance to look at these pictures in more detail, I saw that there was a glimmer of a smile on her face, mostly around her eyes. I have very poor vision, and my camera, with its optical zoom, sees far better than I do.
Yes, the Chinese are, for the most part, quite rigid. But you would be too if you lived in an authoritarian state (it’s not communism; never was) where creativity and dissent are often punished, and you knew almost from the start that you were going to have to compete against billions of other people if you hope for any control over the terms of your life. Authoritarianism and a crushing of people’s ability to dream and define the terms of their own lives is mutilation and psychic murder. The Chinese people make the best of the lives their government allows them, and this little girl is a great example of why it’s important to oppose governments and corporations, not peoples. The Chinese people are not to be feared or damned for the vehicle they’ve been shoved into. Their spirit in trying to advance and overcome is to be respected and admired.
This little girl’s alleyway holds several things of interest and relevance. To touch on the simplest one first, the grime is a byproduct of industry and sheer population density, and industry is, in our globally metastasized consumer culture, how people raise their standards of living. And maybe the U.S. didn’t invent it, but we sure did refine it, give it some steroids, and begin exporting it to the world on a massive scale. There are great and obvious distinctions to be made between the U.S. And China of course, but perhaps the largest and most important, as cartoonist, author, and occasional New York Times essayist Timothy Kreider observed recently, is that in China, the government owns its corporations, while American corporations own our government.
Second among the things that interest me in this alley is the red and gold tracksuit, probably an older brother or cousin’s national team uniform. It takes passion and determination and focus to excel in the athletic arena. That’s why governments and businesses spend so much money and time on their sports teams. It creates a strong emotional bond between the athletes and those who admire them. It’s an entirely natural thing, the same way one might admire a swift or elegant bird. Then those natural human feelings are appropriated and welded to artificial jingoism. This little girl’s likely older brother or cousin (the one-child policy, while powerful, is not as rigid as is commonly reported) probably takes order and discipline very seriously, and if he’s on a national team, it means he’s achieved some level of recognition for his efforts in a highly competitive society. Even before politics and ideology, this little girl is surely absorbing these things like a sponge: How does one make sense of the world, how does one find one’s way through it? You learn from what’s closest to you. You don’t have to understand ideology to be shaped by it.
As a counterpoint, consider the blue jeans. What do blue jeans mean to the Chinese? Although it’s a glib generalization to talk about “the Chinese,” in much the same way talking about “Americans” is somewhat foolish, asking what blue jeans means is not a silly question to ask in an age of mass-produced culture and mediated conceptions of identity. We live, after all, in an age when people see nothing weird or immediately sad about expressing aspects of themselves through the choice of which mass-produced item they selected for purchase.
And “America,” among many other things, is a brand, embedded with all manner of code that is exported aggressively to the world. “Freedom,” “happiness,” and “opportunity” are its dominant brand values. Consider how identified with “America” blue jeans are, and then further consider that the Chinese word for America is meiguo or “beautiful country.” I have been called meiguoren (literally, “beautiful country person”) probably several dozen times in my short time here, and it always makes me feel a stab of pain that’s related to the pain I feel when I look around at the ubiquitous Western beauty ideals on display here. Really?, I think, a 5000-year old culture of several billion people with a staggering amount of cultural achievements and its own beautiful people and land can’t think of anything better to aspire to now than material wealth and the trappings of hyper consumer culture? They want to be like…. us?
Why aren't there more affordable, non-polluting electric bikes in the U.S.? Also: note this woman's Team USA track jacket.
The Chinese also enjoy being lazy sometimes.
Even a cursory study of China makes it obvious how much yearning and rage course through the people, much like an underground waterway. One of my all-time favorite songs, “Once in a Lifetime,” by the Talking Heads, has a line about there being “water under the water, carrying the water,” and I think it describes the humanity and dogged spirit of the people laboring under the yoke of Chinese government and now-ascendant commerce quite well. They yearn, they long, and, when it boils over, they can exhibit shocking rage. The surface is not the reality.
To tie this all back, looking at the picture of the little Chinese girl at the top of this post, caught between repulsion and friendliness at the sight of me, I think: Love is both dangerous and beautiful, and sometimes you have to zoom in and pay attention before you can see it looking back at you.
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Brian Awehali, a former editor at Britannica.com, founded and edited the North American magazine, LiP: Informed Revolt (anthology: Tipping the Sacred Cow, AK Press). In 2010, he will be traveling through Taiwan, China, and Mongolia, writing diffusely about culture, sustainable development, and emerging “green” technologies. He curates LOUDCANARY: One interconnected journey through everything and nothing. He is a half-Irish member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.
High tree line, Nantou County, Taiwan. Everything just grows here.
By Brian Awehali
I was taken on a lovely tour of the fog-wreathed high mountain tea country in Nantou County, in the central and only landlocked part of Taiwan. Here, especially in the east, near the Hualien coastline, it’s easy to see why the Portuguese dubbed this place “formosa,” which means “beautiful island.” Butterflies and lush vegetation abound.
One must dwell in beauty when contemplating strategies for military conquest and brutal political suppression.
Among the many interesting natural sites, I also saw the “bamboo house” that Nationalist (KMT) leader Lord Chiang would retreat to in the years after he lost his struggle against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and was forced to flee mainland China. I’m not sure if he went here before or after he contracted the gonorrhea that would eventually sterilize him and leave him with only one biological son, but it was definitely before he imprisoned or executed upwards of 140,000 people for opposing the KMT in Taiwan.
After the tour, I was invited to visit a local tea aficionado to learn more about the history, process, art, and etiquette of Taiwan’s second-most-acclaimed product (the first being the creation and modern defense of a functioning democratic Chinese society and government).
We entered and began the tasting: Spring and Winter varieties of Rose Oolong, Jasmine and Black teas were in the offing, and it was surprising just how distinct the flavor of each season’s tea was. I learned that the best tea is grown at the highest altitudes, where it takes the longest to mature. Winter tea is the most prized, and most expensive, though I personally favor the spring tea for its greener, and more precisely chlorophyllic aroma and color.
Chushan tea master, pouring
I am a mostly unapologetic hedonist, and I often have as much trouble limiting my enjoyment of something pleasurable or delicious as I do stopping an interesting conversation, or leaving a beautiful place. So I kept accepting one cup of fine tea after another as my host offered them. I was at this tasting with my partner F. and her parents, and courtesy dictated that if I accepted more, more would be served. I was having a grand and fabulously caffeinated time, completely engrossed in asking as many questions as came to mind while everyone translated for me. What was the difference between black tea, green tea and oolong? (They’re all from the Camellia Senesis plant, but black tea is fully fermented/oxidized, oolong to a lesser extent, and green tea not at all). Why was the first short steeping of the tea always discarded? (To “wake” the tea and to wash away any residue on the leaves before drinking). Why were there so many steeps of each tea, and why such tiny cups? (We were performing a ceremonial method called gongfucha, and the exacting chemistry and temperature of the ceremony dictates smaller cups with hotter water). Would a person get fat from eating so many of these delicious biscuits, peanuts, and cookies between each serving of tea? (“Not as long as they’re consumed with tea!,” chirped my comfortably stout host.)
"You cannot get fat, no matter how much you eat, as long as it's while you're drinking tea!"
I also learned just how intensive the human labor of tea (especially oolong) is. The vast majority of it is picked by hand, a pound of tea requires tens to hundreds of thousands of leaves, and pay is generally very low. Taking this into consideration, the slower and more deliberate consumption of tea makes perfect sense.
It was not until many hours and maybe 50 cups of tea (small ones, but really: 50) that I realized just how very much tea had been consumed. When we finally tore ourselves away, my obviously great love of tea led our host to offer me a very fine traveling tea set and some lovely spring tea from the high mountains of Nantou to take with me on my travels. Score!
The first ten cups make you smile, the second twenty make you talk. The twenty after that may give you tachycardia.
That night, I worked merrily through the night while F. and her parents complained bitterly the next morning about insomnia and bad sleep.
It is not simply national chauvinism when the Taiwanese tell you, as they often do, that the very best tea is from Taiwan. The choicest tea they produce is bought up by men doing business in mainland China, who use it to bribe Chinese officials and thereby grease the wheels of commerce. This is so common, I was told by a merchant for one of Taiwan’s largest tea producers, that it’s very hard for the average Taiwanese to get any of their prized winter tea. I noticed that the Wikipedia entry on oolong tea does not mention this fact. Then again, as great as Wikipedia is, you can’t be too trusting of anything you read online…
NEXT: Ten days working on a WWOOF-affiliated “organic” farm in Chunan, on the northwest coast of Taiwan. ABC’s of Japanese-style organic fertilizer! The genius of birds relative to that of insects! How to cut and harvest bamboo without getting eaten alive by vicious little bugs! (That is, vicious little bugs other than the Taiwanese vampire mosquito.)
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Brian Awehali, a former editor at Britannica.com, founded and edited the North American magazine, LiP: Informed Revolt (anthology: Tipping the Sacred Cow, AK Press). In 2010, he will be traveling through Taiwan, China, and Mongolia, writing diffusely about culture, sustainable development, and emerging “green” technologies. He curates LOUDCANARY: One interconnected journey through everything and nothing. He is a half-Irish member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.
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
Chushan (lowlands) tea farm and traffic safety mirror
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.
Temple and tree together in Chushan as the Year of the Tiger begins
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!)
"Ghost money" offered to the river god on bridges at New Year's
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.
Roadside spring in Chushan
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.
One of Chushan's several earth god temples. This one, like many other temples in the area, has recently been renovated and expanded.
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!)
Cars, scooters and pedestrians vying for space in downtown Chushan, Nantou, Taiwan
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.
Translation: "No regrets for reducing energy consumption, let's join together to reduce carbon emissions, we love the earth and so will reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions, everyone should get together to fight warming" The Sioulin Elementary School, built in 1954, serves pupils who live along Dinglin Road which goes up into the mountains to the east of Chushan. (photo D. Cowhig)
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.
F. and common roadside garden in downtown Chushan
Downtown Chushan riverside garden
Later in the day, we took a walk up a beautiful path behind the family place, through bamboo forests and banana mangroves, and past several striated hills that used to be used for growing tea, but are now abandoned and brown. When I first met F.’s mother, she was most animated when showing me the proper preparation of tea. When she explained to me that it was to be steeped for absolutely no more than 25 seconds, she spoke as if personally aggrieved by the ongoing widespread murder of tea by ignorant fools. So: Steep for 25 seconds, using only half a teaspoon of tea, then pour out the water so that you may re-use the leaves and enjoy several more (small) cups! If you do not follow these directions, if you let the leaves linger in sitting water or steep for too long, they will lose their essence and you will have ruined a potentially exquisite experience.
Next post: My day learning tea history, technique, ecology and etiquette from a local tea enthusiast.
Formosa Betrayed (“New Movie Ties Taiwan’s Messy Politics to Bay Area Murder”)
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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.
Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments explores the nexus between the built and natural environments through two theme-based issues per year. Online since 1997, we publish editorials, poetry, essays, fiction, articles, reviews, interviews, the ARTerrain gallery, the UnSprawl case study, and the new To Know a Place multimedia feature.
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I’m pleased to share with readers of Terrain.org, who may have caught my blog posts about my travels through East Asia last year, that two versions of my profile of Chinese writer and people’s historian Liao Yiwu have been published this month, in the print edition of The Progressive (also featuring contributions from David Sedaris, Jim Hightower and Dave Zirin), and in expanded online form on Counterpunch, here.
Themocracy