On the flip side it’s been breathtaking getting out and realizing that I’ve been taking nature for granted. It’s a gift to have your mind wander. It’s a gift to roam over mossy earth. I ran out over the Oakland hills this morning to see a blanket of clouds glowing through the sunlight and pouring out over the hills into the Bay. I both wished I had my camera with me and was glad I didn’t.

He met my grandmother (ah ma, or 外媽 — but we’ve grown up calling her puo puo) while they both worked as schoolteachers at the same elementary school.

“Your ah gong was a handsome man” my grandmother says with a chuckle and a glimmer in her eye. She is dignified, ladylike, and precise. She bears eyes with depth, holding her teacup with deliberate old-world delicacy. My early memories are sprinkled with her constant presence in our house, making fantastic food and reading me chinese fables for bedtime stories.

They met in the years in between the world wars, when the world was changing. My grandma was native Taiwanese, telling me about the world she grew up in, hearing American bombers fly overhead, when alarms would sound and they would have to head to the mountains to hide in the hills. Taiwan was different then, they were raised to believe they were Japanese.

They fell in love, but they don’t speak much about it nowadays. I wonder how it was back then. She was trained as a schoolteacher, and he must have been good with the kids given his gregarious charm. It’s not hard to imagine why they fell in love, but how? I wonder if they can still remember.

These days, they live in Taipei in a modern apartment, paneled in marble and dark wood. His hands tremble when they reach for the dishes on the table. She reaches for the dish and steadies it for him. After each meal he silently shuffles to the couch and picks his teeth with a toothpick and looks out the window at the glassy beams of the Taipei 101 tower.

Her family would have nothing to do with him. He was an outsider, one of the KMT occupiers. Stories ran rampant about KMT men looking for Taiwanese wives while keeping a wife back in China. What did my great-grandfather think of him? Did they ever meet? Or did he forbid their love from the outside?

So they eloped.

Annie asks if puo-puo gets tired of cooking for us. My dad laughs. “I bet she loves it that we’re here. She loves to cook.”

The spread is enormous. Taro fish ball soup, fresh steamed fish from the market, boiled chicken, dumplings, radish salad, an array of steamed vegetables and guavas and wax apples for dessert. We lay there after each meal, stunned and deliriously happy.

My mom would tell me about how in the years down the road after their marriage, gong-gong would eventually win over my grandmother’s family with his kindness, generosity, and charm and twinkle in his eye. I wonder what it was like, a slow, gradual warming, a reconciliation that may have taken years to mend.

My uncle calls us when we’re there, asking if they want to come with them on their upcoming vacation to Japan. Puo-puo hesitates, smiling a bit, thinking. When she is thinking, she knits her brow and blinks slowly. It’s her reserved nature that defines her elegance, I decide. But she is like a wall, difficult to read. I want to ask her about her young love.

“No,” she finally says, “I should stay here. It’s cold in Japan. And I need to be with your dad.”

Later as we sit around the living room sharing our hopes for the new year (my dad puts us through these things) gong-gong makes an innocent face and tells us that his hope is that “your puo-puo should visit Japan and get out of the house and not have to take care of me.” She smiles.

Gong-gong is always dressed well: suede jackets, pressed wool, a sleek Kangol cap and shiny loafers. These days, he’s still dapper but much less mobile. His walk is reduced to a shuffle.

He’s shrunk over the years, but his charm is still there, shrouded by ailing health. As we leave, he grabs my arm and tells me he’d like to attend my wedding soon and leaves me a kiss on the neck.

On some odd days, I can vaguely remember the approach to the precipice of old love, woolen, worn & monumental. We knew we were on the verge of crossing, but never sure how to look over to the other side. Young love is easy, I realize, but old love is not.

Old love is familiar yet ill-fitting, like bumping shoulders with strangers in elevators. You never notice it arriving, and when it has, it’s morphed. The taste changes in your mouth; the notes go all blue and glassy like black piano keys.

I tried to hold her loneliness once, balancing it between both palms and guessing at its secrets. Like most notebooks go, it was silent and weighty and important. We bound it back up quickly, leaving crinkles in the seams. Sometimes I still wonder if I could have borne its weight.

Looking back, it was my embarrassment that caught me off guard. Nobody told me about it, a bottled-up outside-in feeling, a silly and shameful confusion. I felt childlike, at a loss of answers, wanting to hide. This I’ve learnt, too: I must run quickly to the father, before my armor thickens.

Yahweh is my father I heard someone once cry, and I will do the same. He has gifted us a hundred sadnesses for our good, and we will soon (soon) sing songs in firelight and know again the barely-floating sensations of joy. He is the one who has ordained for us the seasons. I will yield to his grip and submit to his kiln. Stay low to the ground I heard once, and felt it True.

slurp slurp slurp he goes, maneuvering his chopsticks to take in the noodles one by one. They are oily, and slide pleasantly off his chopsticks. I’m across from him, waiting for my bowl and writing in this journal, wondering if he notices that I write in English, no way can I write in Chinese anymore, wondering if he picks out the broken Mandarin I offer the waiter (炸酱面 (zha jiang mian)? I offer wiltingly) (it slips out of my mouth and flops onto the floor).

He is methodical, I can see him in the same light in his lecture (Physics? Artificial Intelligence? Geology? Rennaisance Lit?), perhaps pausing thoughtfully after a student’s question (looking up at the flourescent bulbs, absentmindedly twirling the query around his chalk piece as it hovers over the board. So much hesitation: the students wait with bated breath). Then he writes something with bold forceful strokes, saying nothing, but it is profound! I can’t see the board, but it is brilliant and the classroom gasps (but not too loudly, for a Confucian respect of teachers). If you look closely, a wry grin tugs at the corner of his mouth.

Five minutes pass, ten, fifteen. He just keeps his eyes down and soon the eggplant on his plate is gone, the soup lays placid, the red chili oil pools on the plate. I reconsider: he looks uncomfortable, maybe even lonely.

He never looks up to acknowledge my presence, but perhaps that’s because that’s the custom here when strangers are seated at the same table. It was bound to happen (I walked in alone this afternoon; there was no way they would give me my own table at this crowded noodle shop).

That would never fly in the good ol’ USA (God bless the USA). We believe in personal space, as in spacious skies and as in amber waves of grain! God bless the USA where we have six-lane main streets and cowboys and hipsters and Wal-Mart™ and Cafe Gratitude (the Berkeley cafe where the cheesecake there is called “Beautiful”, and to order it you have to force yourself to tell the waiter I am… uh… Beautiful). God bless the USA where everything is Occupied and people are angry and proud and scared at the same time. I too am proud of being American, see my Reeboks™ and crisp English and my silent, snobby mental critiques and my Moleskine™ full of English letters, aye be cee dee yee whoops—a flick of a stray noodle stains a page with sesame oil.

Slurp slurp slurp, the Senior Gentleman in front of me takes it all in stride, which is to say he never notices me. Does he want to leave? I half hope so, because the foreign, American me is feeling awkward sitting across from this stranger. He rummages in his bag, composed as ever, smacking his lips. Standing, he takes an awfully long time to put on his windbreaker, buttoning from the top to the bottom, pop, pop, pop, shuffling as he walks out to pay the bill.

But no, I decide he carries an air of simplicity, not in a shortsighted or fumbling way, but in a sagely manner that quiets me and piques my interest. The way a laoshi should teach. I let that image float for a bit, then get up to pay my bill.

It’s been generally drizzly here for the past week or so, which is a blessing and a curse. I’ve felt self-conscious since arriving, noticing that nobody here runs, and I wonder if I’m being too aggressive, pushing too fast when I dodge the passersbys. I’ve decided there is no better feeling than running with the rain slipping off your skin, hot breath hovering between your chest and your shirt while dodging cars and scooters and disapproving old ladies. It’s a powerful feeling, and a very living thing to be doing.

—

Everything’s concrete here, and my knees are feeling it. It’s not like it used to be, when my dad would run barefoot on the banks of the Xindian River in his boyhood hometown. Nowadays the whole deal is paved over with asphalt and tile and basketball courts, a veritable concrete jungle.

“Let’s go see the river” my Dad announces one day. On the day we are to go, preceding events yawn and billow and suddenly we can’t work the visit in.

One morning I decide to visit anyways and head out early, stepping out into brilliant sunlight (it’s been raining the whole week). I’m taking the roads, out behind fuzhoushan park, down keelung road, past treasure hill and on out to the bike paths by the river. It’s exhausting, and an hour later I’m there. The river is muddled, uninspiring; it cuts a wide swath and lies flat and unperturbed (lifeless, I decide). Cars and city noise roar over bridges, expressways. Concrete frames the landscape, creeping into the banks of the river and damming its tributaries.

I try to imagine my dad as a kid again, playing barefoot in glassy waters and catching fish in a carefree Huckleberry Finn–esque existence. Maybe I’m in the wrong place. Maybe he lived in an alternate space, time, and riverbank where the factories and skyscrapers haven’t yet grown and his toes sink into moist earth. Whatever it is, the sun is in my eyes and I want to go home.

grandpa at the window

牛肉麵 (Beef noodle soup). I aim to eat this at least once a day. So far, doing pretty well.

At the Grand Hotel Taipei.

Bakery <3. Like something outta a dream.

My cousin Audrey being her spunky self.

Related posts

1. Photos of Interns in Places They Should(n’t) Be On a lighter note, let’s start a series called “Photos of Interns In Places They...

I feel different this time around (I was eighteen the last time I visited). Older, but not necessarily in that way. Like I have the wits about me to wrap around people and feel their bumps and bruises. I feel like I can understand him more through the lens of my dad. His faults, and his irrefutable spirit are at play in my dad, and most likely in me. Maybe I’m more alert to the forces at play in his life, my father’s life and mine: the legacy of the Revolution, his time spent in the KMT military, and my father’s childhood spent along the banks of the river.

I want to know the source of yie yie’s joy

Show me what a life lived in grace looks like: unfettered, joyous, rampant.

I told someone once that I wanted to have the guts to laugh at myself and loosen up a bit. I think I was born melancholy (and I protested as much when I tested so in a personality test–this much is true about my artist tendencies–but I hated the word. It made me sound depressed). Mainly what I saw and disliked in myself were my perfectionistic tendencies, because it’s easier to deal with knowns and facts and details and my capabilities than to face the chaos of messy-and-human.

Show me how to hold onto life loosely.

Perhaps what C.S. Lewis says is true, that having a grasp of our mortality does us a lot of good. I want to understand that our good moments don’t last forever, and that to savor them slowly is a gift in itself. And maybe the guts I wanted are the insides that I want filled with thick, hearty gratitude, shared and spilled over in the company of friends (I’m using soup imagery because Eric made a frickin good stew the other night. And it’s cold in here.).

Hearty, joyous, wise and gracious. I think that describes the man I’d like to grow into.

There was some sort of relief, I decided, in having set foot in the Occupy camp and finding it quiet. Wednesday, Oakland was paraded across the global consciousness as national news media displayed scenes of urban warfare, with ghostly images of terror-stricken faces sent helter-skelter across the airwaves. Zach showed me the frontpage of the BBC website (Occupy Oakland protestors disrupt city) and made a cutting remark about how the protestors were making fools of themselves on global media and how Oakland was going to suffer. The next morning we all got worried emails and well-intentioned text messages from friends and family: hey, you doing okay? to which we’d respond with sheepish grace that no, we weren’t part of the protests and no, Oakland hadn’t burnt to the ground. Yet.

That Saturday we walked the downtown Oakland area and stood among the protestors in Frank Ogawa Plaza and I tried taking it in, inhaling the hot, musty mess, sidling up to the sleeping giant. I’m not quite sure what I had expected: chaos, rowdier citizens, widespread aggression and disquiet? Instead we found sleepy-eyed campers, dreadlocked ponytails, and hand-drawn raggedy signs. You could smell the weed from blocks away. Nate confirmed the portable toilets were overflowing and rancid.

Self-conscious, I realized later, is how I feel, not knowing how to identify with this spectacle. My sentiments about the whole thing are less of explosive outrage than subtle helplessness. Here I was, middle-class and Asian-American, walking through the tent city of the dispossessed, and I felt both a repulsion to the sideshow and an isolating sense of guilt knowing that I was a stranger to racial and economic injustice.

We bumped into Bonnie on the way over, a homeless friend of ours who makes appearances often at the church. “You should have been there, they had us cornered” she exclaimed with wide eyes, giggling in her two-toned accent. “Pohh-leece got us trapped up on both sides. I got some of that gas stuff in me, and it make you tear up real bad.”

Bonnie had stayed with the protestors for a couple of days. “It was like a war, let me tell you, and the sad thing”–her voice dropped to a whisper–“is nobody can help you.”

I wondered what Bonnie must have felt; my mind replayed scenes from a Free Speech Movement documentary I once watched at Cal. Observe: an aerial shot from what must have been a tall building or a helicopter, riot police on either ends of the block, smoke rising from the street in lazy, elegant arcs. Notice: a couple of figures limp for cover, fumbling to cover their eyes. See: grainy film, shot black and white, viva free speech & the cause of justice, fin.

So I was relieved to find Frank Ogawa Plaza rather pleasant. A tent city had risen, built on fresh-laid straw, with hypnotic Native American drumming drifting through camp. Smiling stoners sat cross-legged in a corner beneath a tarp and gazed intently into the distance. A mini-rally proceeded in another, where a megaphone-toting Latina woman was organizing that afternoon’s march on Wells Fargo. In other words, it was amusingly like college. We opened our burritos and ate on the steps of the City Hall amphitheater and watched the tent city pulse as it awoke.

The Tuesday night that things got bad, I was running the lake under the assured hum of news helicopters, but I couldn’t tell you if things were out of the ordinary. It was strange, I suppose because I had imagined that should my city go down in flames, everybody should know about it and share in the panic and outrage. Women pushed murmuring babies by in fancy strollers. The wind whispered through the grove of trees around the lake’s finger-bend. Runners grunted to each other, pushing gravel through the ground. Starlight & Lake Merritt’s necklace, swan, geese, & ghetto birds all there to witness war, but somebody had forgotten to remind me.

Saturday, Kylan and Betty and I walked up Telegraph and prayed for Occupy Oakland and I felt rather foolish for not knowing what exactly to pray for. I remembered Silvia’s weight of sadness, when she showed up and wound up feeling lost and helpless and hurt for the brokenness of the world she lived in and the chaos unfolding around her and the need for Jesus to show up right there and occupy…

Proverbs 29 was a comfort, the words breathing and expanding in my thoughts:

When the righteous increase, the people rejoice but when the wicked rule, people groan

and,

The poor and the oppressor meet together, the LORD gives light to them both

Earlier that morning I dreamt we were evacuating our city in long single-file strands. We wound through our neighborhood, and I remember standing in our living room arguing with Justin whether we should load this or that couch into the U-Haul. People shuffled by outside in colorless clothing, feeling here and gone at the same time. Children whispered to each other in shy, hushed tones. The helicopters were there again, whirling lazily, watching overhead. In that moment I knew (though a dream) the question had become not how we would leave, but whether we would stay.

I woke far too early, thirsty, trying to recall how the air felt against my cheeks: thwup thwup thwup thwup thwup.