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.
