Taipei Journal

January 5, 1994

 Just came back from dinner with the journalists—nine of us tonight, biggest group in a long time. A very nice evening, with dinner at a Peking restaurant behind the Lai-Lai, and just across the alley from the little gwotye place I’ve written about. I spent most of the evening chatting with Mike O’Connor, an occasional visitor to the circle. He works for a publication here and has put out a good book of poetry, a copy of which I bought a little while back at Caves bookstore on Chungshan Road North. He was gratified that someone had actually bought a copy. We didn’t talk about poetry, however; I’m reticent about admitting I write, since I know my own reaction—“Sure you do.” Told him Steve’s story about inviting Jack Kerouac home and he was delighted—evidently a fan of Kerouac’s.

 Walked home along Chunghsiao from the restaurant—slightly beery—with traffic whizzing past, crowds on the sidewalks, neon flashing, air smelly, construction going full blast even at 9 o’clock at night. Boomtown Taipei. Wonder what you will make of it all—guess I’ll find out soon enough. I told Mike O’Connor that the length of my stay would depend a lot on your reaction, and he said, “Well, if she’s prepared . . . .” I haven’t consciously tried to prepare you for it, but I suppose out of the mess of stuff I’ve sent home you’ve gotten some impressions. It’s not Kansas, Toto, and yet fascinating in a gritty sort of way. I haven’t been bored for a moment.

 I informed Jessica today that I had a sick telephone (“Wode dienhwa shengbing”), and she has located a telephone shop for me nearby. Probably will get the beast into the shop tomorrow—or better yet Friday, since I don’t want to be without an apparat when you call tomorrow night.

 An area on the ground floor of our building has been under remodeling for a few days. Thought at first a store or restaurant was going in, but it’s now become obvious that it’s an apartment—a little jewelbox of one with lots of woodwork stained bright red and a ship’s galley of a kitchen (I can see all this from the outside). Someone will have a lovely place—I picture honeymooners. It doesn’t have our view, though.

 

Worth Watching

Karen, Colin, and I were looking for a replay of the Pacers/Golden State game, but couldn’t find it, so instead spent Saturday afternoon watching an unusual film, Unmistaken Child.

 I’m not sure how it got ordered from Netflix, but it was a gem of cinematography, landscape, and quiet spirit. A documentary, it followed the journey of a Tibetan monk, Tenzin Zopa, as he searched to find the child into whom his master, Lama Konshog, had been reincarnated. Tenzin Zopa speaks English, and describes movingly his fears and hesitations upon being given this assignment.

 The plot line of this hour and 42-minute film by Nati Baratz couldn’t be simpler. Following certain signs and portents from the funeral pyre of Lama Konshog, Tenzin Zopa explores the Himalayan valley where both he and his master spent much of their lives. We visit the lama’s old retreat, in ruins now but still adrift in the flowers he planted. Tenzin Zopa calls on a number of families with one- to two-year-olds, to see if any of the children react to the relics of the deceased lama.

 At length he finds the “unmistaken child,” who must then be tested by monks higher in the chain  and eventually by the Dalai Lama himself, who approves Tensin Zopa’s choice. This is surely one of the few films in which the Dalai Lama plays a cameo role. We tend to think of him as an international figure; it’s fascinating to see him dealing with the questions and concerns of his religion and its followers.

The mountain scenery is breath-taking, the people fascinating and often beautiful. The reincarnated lama is both an ordinary (and delightful) little boy and a preternaturally wise child, who succeeds in persuading the viewer that he could indeed have been a beloved lama in a previous life. The camera catches some amazing things, including the emotions of the child’s mother as she makes the decision to give up her little boy to the priesthood.

 Tenzin Zopa is transfigured, from the hesitant and grieving disciple of the old master to the joyful follower of his reincarnation. Tenzin has one of the most beautiful faces (and the most beautiful eyes) of anyone I’ve seen on film.

 There are strange moments of East and West intermixed. People fly around Nepal in helicopters. The new lama’s father wears a “U.S. Polo Team” T-shirt.

 The whole film is modest and clearly made with love. To take a line from a recent blog, it says something about what it means to be human.

 

A Notable Talk

I went to hear Dr. Charles Rice, chaplain at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania, on Martin Luther King Day, not so much because of the occasion as because David Weatherspoon, the college chaplain, had recommended him warmly. He didn’t disappoint.

This was true although in some ways he was a difficult speaker. It was not always easy to see where he was going, and one had to listen carefully throughout the hour-long talk. But it was a talk well worth following, right from the beginning when he quoted another speaker who attacked King’s “I have a dream” speech as “just rhetoric.” At the time of that speech, Rice said, King had the rhetoric but had not yet developed a program.

 Instead of the dream speech, Rice said, he wanted to talk about “a King of the night side of American history.”

 “America likes its innocence,” he said, describing the current national attitude as “racism without prejudice” and “the inability of a nation to actually face its own shame.” Many believe that racism no longer exists or has become incidental, Rice said. He described conversations with people  who believe in “the bootstrap theory” and who wonder why blacks simply don’t follow the path of other minorities—ignoring or forgetting two and a half centuries of slavery followed by another century of institutionalized racism.

 He told of his difficulty in responding to a letter from his 10-year-old niece in Harlem, who wrote about the problems of her neighborhood. And how he finally wrote back:

 “Do not let your circumstances dictate your behavior or your dreams. You are somebody. You are living where your countrymen and women want you to live. They expect you to fail. You have to fight back.”

 On paper this sounds confrontational, but Rice didn’t come across that way. He backed his comments with examples and statistics about the disparities in income, living conditions, job security, and incarceration between the nation’s black and non-black populations. This is the “night side” of America, which King was beginning to address at the time of his assassination—“the other America,” King called it in a 1968 Chicago speech.

 Rice’s title for his talk was “Meeting Martin Again for the Second Time.” He explained that as a child he did meet him briefly when King visited his church. But the second and transformative “meeting” was reading a book by King on a transatlantic flight, which moved him to leave the military and begin a new career in the ministry and education.

 The program was a long one, with the speaker willing to spend as much time as the audience wanted. In that respect it reminded me of a visit by Ralph Nader to campus many years ago. Rice took a lot of time to answer several audience questions, including one from a student who noted that several campus organizations address multicultural concerns, but that there still seems a divide between the majority and minority populations. How do you bridge that, she wondered?

 “Start small,” Rice advised. Make the individual and small-group contacts that eventually will break down barriers between people.

 He was also asked whether grass-roots or high-profile leadership is most important for the nation’s black population today. Paralleling his answer to the student, he came down solidly on the side of grass-roots activity.

 There was much more, but these were a few high spots. I took fragmentary notes, some of them already unreadable. But a couple of them I’ll continue to think about: “What does it mean to be human?” And do we love people unconditionally or “because they deserve our love?”

 

Back to the Classroom

I taught a Franklin College class for a friend this week—a slightly risky task for an old, out-of-practice teacher. Even after 25 years of teaching, I go into every first day with trepidation.

This was a class in a January short course called “Art & Zen” (not “Art & Sin,” as my son Mike at first thought I’d said). The friend, Kathy Carlson, had asked me to talk about haiku and its relation to Zen.

 Given an hour, I decided to do two things—invite the 20-some students to write haiku themselves, and give them a brief introduction to the Japanese haiku master, Basho.

 I won’t recapitulate the talk in any detail here. We had some discussion of haiku as a poetic form, I read some excerpts from Basho’s masterpiece, Narrow Road to the Interior, and ended with a couple poems of my own that play off Basho. The student haikus ranged from quite good to slapstick—all acceptable and there were no grades. When they were turned in after five minutes, I mixed them up and had other students read them aloud.

 The room itself, an art classroom, was unlike any other in which I’ve ever taught. The students were behind large art tables arranged around the four sides of the room. I ended by getting out into the room—arena-style teaching—and trying to remember not to keep my back to the same students all the time.

 I had come early in hopes of meeting some of the students in advance. I always try to do this as a guest lecturer. It’s as much to allay my own jitters as anything, but presumably it also makes the teacher seem a bit more approachable. The class start-up was slow enough that I managed to identify nearly all the students and even construct a rough seating chart. Thank you, Jennifer, David, Morgan, Emmanuel, Jake, Rachel, Josh, Lauren, Lacey, Kahlie, Courtney, Lauren, Reb, Julie (from St. Louis), Jacie, Andrew, Kassie, Amber, Jack, and Bart.

 One student was absent—“too stressed to come,” a friend reported. I thought about her a lot, and wrote a haiku the next day while Karen was with her occupational therapist:

This absent student,
who is she, and what sorrow
unsettles her mind?

 I sent it to Kathy, who replied that I had “intuited” the situation, and could she show the verse to the student when the time was right? Of course, but also tell her I wasn’t playing poet with her situation—I had some tough times in college, and the word from here is that things get better.

I had fun quoting a couple of Basho’s earthier poems to the class:

Eaten alive by lice and fleas
now the horse
beside my pillow pees.

 Bush warbler:
shits on the rice cakes
on the porch rail.

 Kathy then teased me about wanting to say “shit” in class, and of course I did. And I had to tell about once being the only older student in a class on History of the English Language. Our team—two young women and me—was assigned the task of researching obscenities, from Old English times to the present. The girls did their research but were uncomfortable about the oral report. So I stood up and recited about 50 of the choicest words in English. In the hushed silence that followed, the prof finally said, “Does anyone else want to say something dirty?”

 

True Friends

My aim is to keep this blog going with at least one or two postings a week, even though Karen and I are living a rather retired life these days, and there may not be many “events” to describe.

 I promised a while back to write something about the friends who have helped us during the period of Karen’s stroke and recovery. She’s recovering very well, and that may have as much to do with the psychic as with the physical side of things.

 The help from friends began at almost the instant of the stroke, which happened at Jerry and Sheron Miller’s house, where Karen was wrapping a surprise Christmas present. Sheron and Jerry (Frack and Mr. Frack) have been rocks through everything, though this week they’ve been knocked out a bit with an epizootic of their own. We’re looking forward to having them over for munchies and euchre as soon as everybody’s healthy again.

 Family, of course, has been a sturdy line of defense. The four boys check in regularly to see how Mom and Dad are doing, even though they have a lot going on in their own lives, from surgery to a new puppy. It reminds us that life is always one thing after another—or as some wise person said, “It’s what happens to you while you’re making other plans.” Their concern and that of our wonderful daughters-in-law is the biggest possible help.

 We have a church family, too, who sent cards and soup during the crisis and continue to give encouragement.

And there’s Margie, a onetime classmate of Karen’s who’s been back together with her on e-mail for a while. Margie has medical problems that won’t quit, but stays cheerful and upbeat in spite of everything.

 And finally there are John Paul and Rebecca Mueller in Wisconsin, who have also dealt with several problems including strokes, and have been a welcome source of information, advice, and encouragement.

 We’re blessed.

 

Reading Project

Just a brief note that my son Mike and I have embarked on a joint reading project, The Killing of Crazy Horse, by Thomas Powers.

 Mike had been planning to read it, and it caught my interest because Powers is a crack investigative reporter, who has specialized in digging into the intelligence community, among other things. He has written frequently in the New York Review of Books, and as I recall was the first to get the goods on the collusion between George Bush and Tony Blair over the phony claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. Good man, Powers.

 We’re barely into the book, but Powers’s general plan is already clear, which is to cover the Sioux Wars and then resolve an ancient murder mystery—why Crazy Horse was killed, apparently with little or no provocation, after giving himself up to the Army.

 He has unearthed a Witness—William Garnett, a half-breed interpreter, who seems to have been present at all the significant moments of Powers’s story. Garnett certainly has been known and written about before, but Powers uses him uniquely to focus his story.

 Stayed tuned for further reports.

 

Taipei Journal

January 3, 1994

 Got into my work clothes and was waiting on the corner for Jon. Hopped on the back of his scooter and we took off for south Taipei and the Chinese Materials Center, Bob Irick’s operation. Turned out to be an all-day job, as I had expected. The CMC is an incredible rat’s nest of dust, old papers, old correspondence, years of accounts in cardboard boxes, piles of books. It has not really functioned much for several years (probably since the last secretary quit) and Bob is now closing it out, putting what has to be saved in storage and taking any necessary current records home with him. The room looked like nothing so much as the backshop of an old country newspaper where nobody has cleaned for 50 years. But stacked around are all sorts of treasures of Chinese scholarship, which will no longer be available anywhere once they go into the black hole of storage.

 I should pause here and explain that I misunderstood what Bob did. I thought he was, basically, smuggling information out of the mainland for the use of scholars. Not so—in fact he would have been in a lot of trouble with the ROC government if he had been handling materials about Communism (especially anything favorable). CMC was actually a reprint house for all kinds of out-of-print scholarly materials about Chinese history and culture.

 He set Jon to sorting and arranging Chinese texts by character-stroke count in the titles. (That’s how books are catalogued here. I was put to going through five large boxes of account sheets, to pull out all those who still owe CMC money, or who are owed money back for overpayments or credit accounts. This was simple—just had to pull any sheet that didn’t have a zero in the balance column—but it still took all day. There were several thousand accounts, and these must have covered every Chinese scholar in the world, plus hundreds of libraries and booksellers. It was too big a job to look at much more than the balance column, and the accounts appeared to be in about as much of a muddle as the rest of the office. Every once in a while we would hear a “Damn!” which meant that Bob had found another box with an order that should have been shipped years ago.

 Now and then I’d ask Bob about an especially large bill still owed, and he always knew all about it. A woman in Los Angeles owed $2,500, and Bob expressed his opinion of her colorfully. The biggest debtor was the Library of Congress, which owes him better than $11,000—makes me want to write a congressman and ask why the U.S. government doesn’t pay its bills.

 Jon and I went for lunch to a Cantonese restaurant that was full of students—this is the Harvard Square of Taipei, Jon says. Excellent plate of something called san bau fan, or Three Treasures Rice, for about NT 75. (The treasures are pork, beef, and chicken.)

 I finished the records in an hour or so after lunch, then helped box and move books and papers until about 4:30. By the end of the day we’d made a substantial dent in the mess, and we’ll go back next Saturday afternoon and do some more.

 Jon brought me home on the scooter, through much heavier traffic as Taipei came back after the three-day weekend. As we drove away from the CMC, Jon said, “Where else but in Taipei could you end up doing what we’ve been doing? He’s right—this is the kind of crazy place where unexpected things happen if you’re open to them. I ran across a guy at church who works for a trading company that specializes in eels. He’s going to take me to a really good eel restaurant and show me how they’re eaten. This may not appeal to you (I suspect somehow it won’t), but I’ve never been able to resist an expert, whatever the subject.

 

Bob and Esther

For a while, blog posts are likely to focus on things associated with Karen’s recent stroke and continuing recovery. She’s making good progress, and has her first outpatient therapy this afternoon. We even made it out to a restaurant for dinner last night.

As this was written, she’d already crawled into bed, but we’re communicating between the bedroom and upstairs study via walkie-talkies loaned to us by a good friend, Pip’s Mom (aka Ann McClain). A future blog post will tell about her and other friends who’ve helped in a difficult time.

 But just now I feel like writing briefly about Bob and Esther Aikens Todd, who were my first newspaper employers and who endowed the Todd-Aikens Center in Johnson Memorial Hospital that took such good care of Karen.

 It would be easy for me to joke about Bob and Esther, and I intend to, a little. After all, they were the publishers of the Franklin Evening Star, where I was a cub reporter in the 1950s. Any reporter has an inalienable right to tell stories about the boss—it helps make up a little for low newspaper salaries.

 I can’t complain about the salary the Star paid me, though—I did it to myself. When Mr. Todd, after hemming and hawing for a while, asked how much I would expect to be paid, this exceedingly green 17-year-old exclaimed, “Oh, Mr. Todd, I’ll work cheap!” He beamed and hired me on the spot.

 Mr. Todd was really a banker, not a newspaperman, but he married into the business. Esther Aikens was the daughter of W.W. Aikens, who had founded the paper in post-Civil War days.

 Esther didn’t appear often in the newsroom, but she did once, to castigate me for quoting a retiree from the Suckow Milling Co., who said he had been hired “by old Mr. Suckow.” Esther gave me to understand that I was never, ever to refer to a prominent citizen as “old” even in a quote and even if he had been dead for years.

 Esther may have been the most charming lady in the world, with a delicious sense of humor—but in fact I heard her say only one funny thing during my months on the Star. The moment came as she was inspecting submitted pictures for Johnson County Fair Queen, and came to one  in which the contestant had posed in a low-slung drape. “Hmmph,” hmmphed Esther. “Corn Queen indeed. Looks like she’s been shucked.”

 Bob and Esther have been gone many years, and I bear them no ill will—never did, in fact. After all, they launched me on a fascinating career in journalism that has lasted a lifetime. And I give them all the credit in the world for endowing the center that bears their names, and which provided both Karen and me with exceptionally competent and loving care in a tough time. Bob and Esther, I would happily work for you again—and not be overly particular about the pay either.

 

‘Mindy Lou, How Do You Do?’

As many readers of this blog already know, Karen had a mild (but not negligible) stroke on Monday, Dec. 19. I could write a lot about that and the two weeks that followed—but it’s enough for now to say that she’s recovering well, has her speech mostly back, walks easily with a walker, and is working hard to restore the fine motor skills of her right hand.

 She came home this past Friday, and we’ve been coping pretty well. There have been some funny moments. Yesterday morning the kitchen phone rang as I was showering, and I dripped my way to it, wondering who in the hello was calling at 7 a.m. It was Karen in the bedroom—she’d yelled for me, but couldn’t be heard over the shower.

 What I want to write briefly about is the love and care we received from so many people during a difficult and scary time—from family first, then friends, and then the extraordinary nurses and therapists at the Johnson Memorial Hospital in Franklin and its Todd-Aikens Acute Care Unit. And especially the large, good-humored woman who introduced herself on Karen’s first day in Todd-Aikens as simply “I’m Mindy Lou, How Do You Do?” It was all capital letters, and a smart mnemonic device—I had trouble remembering some other names, but “Mindy Lou, How Do You Do?” is etched indelibly on my brain.

 In the end she stood for a lot of people—therapists like Brian, Laura, and Candy, who had a wonderful story about helping a man regain his speech though he could say only four words, all of them obscenities. “I figured if he could say ‘shit,’ he could learn to say ‘shirt’,” she said.

 There were many others—Linda, a day nurse with a great sense of humor; Ginger, Grace, and Kassie, the night nurses; Emily and Stephanie, physical therapists; April, an occupational therapist who helped Karen work with “theraputty” and other materials; Rebecca, the unit director. What characterized them all was their unfailing patience and kindness. And their common sense—no dramatics, no sympathizing, just good-natured assurance that Karen was doing well and would do better.

And always there was “Mindy Lou, How Do You Do?” ready with a hand for Karen to the bathroom, a wisecrack, or a cup of coffee for a caffeine-deprived spouse. There was nothing put on about it. Karen was in a room occupied several years ago by a friend, and Mindy Lou remembered her. When the friend came to visit Karen, she and Mindy Lou struck up where they had left off years before.

 Karen has been home several days now, and names are beginning to fade. But I’ll never forget “Mindy Lou, How Do You Do?”

 

A Moment in History

The Associated Press reported last week that the Air Force will award the Silver Star, posthumously, to Francis Gary Powers, whose U2 spy plane was shot down in 1960 over the Soviet Union. The citation will pay tribute to Powers’s loyalty, courage, and gallantry despite “cajolery, trickery, insults, and threats of death,” the Air Force said.

 The announcement stirred vivid memories for me, since I was working as a young United Press International reporter in Frankfurt, Germany, on May 1, 1960, when Powers’s spy plane came down over Sverdlovsk.

 The prime memory is of my sidekick, Dick Leonard, running for a map of the Soviet Union and exclaiming in utter disbelief: “It’s impossible! Sverdlovsk is a thousand miles inside the Soviet Union!”

Actually, it was more than that. I got out the map today, for the first time since 1960, and ascertained that Sverdlovsk is about 900 miles east of Moscow on the far side of the Ural Mountains—not a place where anyone outside the CIA would have expected an American plane to be flying. By my measurement it was about 1,550 miles north of the airbase in Peshawar, Pakistan, from which Powers took off on the fateful day.

 The Soviets had known about the clandestine U2 flights since the mid-1950s, but had no weapons then that would reach the spy plane’s cruising height of 70,000 feet. By 1960, such a weapon, the S-75 Drina surface-to-air missile, had been developed, and one of these knocked Powers out of the sky. He parachuted to safety and thus became the prime witness in a show trial that netted him a 10-year sentence for espionage. However, he was released in Berlin on Feb. 10, 1962, in exchange for a Soviet spy, Rudolf Abel.

 After our initial disbelief, the UPI staff in Frankfurt got to know a lot about the incident. During the trial in Moscow, Frankfurt was a main relay point for dispatches coming down through Scandinavia, written by such stalwarts as Henry Shapiro and Aline Mosby.

 We were under orders to keep our desk manned at all times, but one day I needed to run a lunchtime errand. Predictably, this when one of the stars decided to send a high-priority story or message and discovered that Frankfurt was incommunicado. I got an extremely sharp note from the London office, asking where I’d been and demanding a pledge that the desk would never be left unmanned again. I made a full grovel, and from then on was all but handcuffed to the desk.

 It all seems a long time ago. Powers got a lot of criticism upon his return to the U.S., for not destroying his plane and taking his CIA suicide pill. But he had followed orders and was exonerated.

 He died in 1977 when a TV weather helicopter he was piloting in California crashed. He had received several awards for his work with the U2 program, and the Silver Start should spike any lingering doubts about his performance.

UPI had no suicide pill and no rehabilitation program for staffers who deserted the desk, other than allowing me to keep my job.