These pages contain my thoughts on life in East Asia — Taiwan above all — on the people I meet here and the things I experience. I was always a closet Orientalist. I want exotic countries to be exotic. After all, what else is the point of them? Since I’ve read Edward Said, however, I’ve learned to be ashamed of this approach to the world. So, I promise, I’ll hold off on the exotica. In particular, there won’t be many references to mangoes. Too many mangoes are a sure sign of travel writing gone wrong.
But there will also be observations on other themes — my family, Europe, Sweden and the UK. Life in academia, politics, and reports on things that I’m writing and thinking.
On July 18th, 2008, I was diagnosed with cancer of the lymph node. The story is ongoing, but my prospects are far, far better than I initially thought. My diary of what happened next is here.
Today is the deadline for Diane’s dissertation. She’s been at it for 10 years. Almost as long as we’ve known each other. And the kids have never had a mother who isn’t typing away at what in our house is known as the blahonga (from the expression “blahonga, blahonga, blahonga,” frequently used during sermons by the village preacher in the Swedish cult cartoon series Assar).
Much of my advice to prospective PhD students — “don’t do it! don’t do it!” — comes from observing what Diane’s been going through. She’s worn out three supervisors in the process — one very lecherous, one half-dead and then completely dead, one friendly enough but also a total coward.
So far this summer, the kids have been sitting at home watching their mother type. But we’re going on a mini-vacation tomorrow (to eastern and southern Taiwan) and Diane is not allowed to bring the computer.
The US isn’t, it turns out, the best country in the world. It’s only at 12th place (and 42nd in terms of life expectancy). This according to a “human development index” devised by Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen. And what country is number 1? Well, Sweden of course. Where else?
In one of the lectures I give on political economy, I develop a similar point. With welfare and health care and education and support for families and children, Sweden is indeed Paradise on Earth. The only thing about paradise, however, is that it’s so damn boring. You get fed up playing harp all day long. Who wants to live there?
Btw, isn’t it fishy that the Swedes gave Amartya Sen a Nobel Prize for discovering that Sweden is the best country in the world?
I’m going back to the doctor again. I have a strange lump on my neck, a swollen lymph node. I look like a snake with a half-digested mouse half-way down the gullet. The symptoms appeared right after my pneumonia in the spring and it’s most likely the result of an over-worked immune system. Friday last week the doctor put a needle in my throat and took out three small samples that he’s been cultivating. Yes, they are testing it for cancer too. “Malignant tumors” and all that. Of course I’m worried.
I had a lot of health issues this past half-year: a heart scare, pneumonia, and now this. It wouldn’t be so bad if I felt more robust, stronger. Maybe it’s living abroad in a strange, far-away, country that makes me feel so vulnerable. Every slip of the feet feels like a fall; every little thing that goes wrong is a premonition of doom.
Yes, I’m being dramatic. It runs in the family. Swedes are more dramatic than people think. I’ll keep you updated.
This blog just passed the landmark of 20,00 visitors (since I started counting properly in November last year). I’m amazed and humbled by your continued custom. Even on a slow day there are some 75 readers and on busy days there are over 150. I obviously can’t promise anything regarding the quality of future posts, but I’ll try to keep the quantity flowing. It’s still great fun to write.
I just read this interview with Robert Reich in the NY Times. What a great guy he is! And what a shame he wasn’t made Director of the LSE instead of that stupid businessman Howard Davies.
I read somewhere that you and Hillary dated when she was still at Wellesley. To call it a date is an exaggeration. She and I went out to see Antonioni’s “Blow-Up.” The only thing I remember is that she wanted what seemed to me to be an extraordinary amount of butter on her popcorn.
We are back in Taiwan again after a great trip. Despite my affection for this island, I can’t help the feeling that I’m returning to a Chinese backwater. The mainland is where the real action is; where the creative people are creating, the smart people thinking and the rich people making ever more money. Taiwan, by contrast, is a provincial place.
It wasn’t always thus. For decades the people in Taiwan were the lucky ones, the ones who escaped the horrors of Communism. In the 1980s they would go back to the mainland as representatives of success and modernity. They would bring expensive gifts to impress hard-on-their-luck relatives. Slow to catch up on the flip-flopped relationship, Taiwanese are still bringing the same presents, but now they can easily be bought in any Beijing shopping-mall.
There is a particular kind of cultural excitement that comes from living in a happening place. This is why people in London or New York are cool in a way people in Leicester or Hoboken never can be. Yes Beijing, not to mention Shanghai, is a far cooler place than Taipei and far, far cooler than little Xinzhu.
I feel the attraction of the mainland very strongly, but for now anyway there are more important things in life than cultural excitement (such as a steady job with a decent salary, and a good place for our daughters to go to school).
Reading my guidebook more carefully I realized the Buddha statue we visited in Chengde was the “biggest wooden Buddha statue in the world.” It even features in The Guinness Book of Records. What’s this thing about big Buddhas?
The Buddha statue I once went to in Kamakura, Japan, was “the biggest outdoor Buddha in the world.” The Buddha we saw on Langtau Island in Hong Kong last year was the “world’s biggest Buddha on a mountain top.” The sleeping Buddhas in Vat Po in Bangkok is the “largest reclining Buddha.” Meanwhile I thought the Bamyan Buddhas really were the biggest (before the Taliban got to them in 2001).
Why do all Buddhas have to be so big? What about the world’s smallest Buddha? Or the world’s most middle-sized one? After all, isn’t Buddhism supposed to be “the path of moderation”?
The main thing I did in Beijing was to eat. Friends and friends of friends invited me to a constant stream of banquets. A Chinese banquet consists of a large round, 10 person, table where assorted dishes are spinning around on a revolving plate. Ever so often you stop the revolving and pick something up with your chopsticks: a piece of Sichuan chicken, a duck breast from Beijing, a helping of Shanghainese carrot salad or strange, salted, eggs. Yes, it’s all very good and very overwhelming.
Yet the purpose of a Chinese banquet is not nutritional but social. Banquets are there to cement friendships. The way to get invited to one is to make sure that you first invite people to dine at your expense. If you are mutual dining partners, you are mutual friends. Your friendship is based on eating together rather than on personal affinity. As long as you enjoy the food, you don’t even have to enjoy each other’s personal qualities (and often the conversation around the table can be pretty bland).
Compare this with a dinner I had in Beijing with a professor at U of Chicago, James Hevia. The round, spinning, table looked similar enough but the social logic was totally different. Eating with a Westerner is all a matter of making yourself enjoyable, of coming across as pleasant and interesting. The food is just an excuse for self-presentation. Your friendship, if it takes off, is not based on mutual obligations, but on personal compatability. Hevia is a very nice person but he has no plans to visit Taiwan and I don’t have any plans to visit Chicago.
BEIJING, Sunday. I’ve managed to squeeze in three visits to the Yuanmingyuan while I’ve been in Beijing. The Yuanmingyuan was the garden complex where the Chinese emperor spent most of his time. It was a sort of amusement park filled with temples, pagodas, palaces, libraries, lakes, labyrinths, trees, flowers and rockeries. It was also the place where the emperor stored the precious gifts he received as tributes from visiting foreigners. The Yuanmingyuan was “the garden of gardens,” it was a vision of paradise, the best of what Chinese culture could produce. In 1860, French and English troops first looted the place and then burned it all down. I want to understand why.
There are fairly straight-forward answers to this question but also more subtle ones. Most generally put, the question becomes why Europeans ended up behaving like barbarians when their stated aim was to “civilize” the Chinese. There is a close parallel here to the recent Iraq War — and a lot of other wars fought by Europeans and their North American cousins. The Europeans want to save the poor from themselves. Too bad they first have to kill them.
The basic outline of the Yuanmingyuan is still there — the lakes, the canals and the paths — but there are next to no traces of the Chinese buildings. They only ruins are from the Versaille-style palace built for the Emperor by three Jesuit priests in the 18th century. Befittingly, the remains of the European-style building still reminds all visitors of what happened in this place some 150 years ago.
Despite this sad history, the Yuanmingyuan is a delightful place. Chinese people come here in droves to sit on blankets, eat lunch boxes and look at the lotuses that bloom in every lake. It is actually easy to imagine what it must have been like to wander around the garden at the time of its glory.
Greetings from Beijing! I should have written sooner but we’ve kept up a pretty hectic schedule of visits to assorted tourist attractions. The new bird’s nest Olympic stadium is indeed gorgeous, and Chengde, the Xanadu of Kublai Khan fame, is full of Orientalist wonders, including a 1:2 copy of Dalai Lama’s tempel in Llasa. At the Great Wall we were accompanied by no fewer than two high-school marching bands from Ohio, U.S.A., complete with cheer-leaders doing splits and waving pompoms. All very bizarre.
Travelling with Taiwanese people — two of whom born on the mainland — gives the trip a distinct flavor. Every conversation with locals soon turns to topics of cross-straight relations. Everyone wants to know what salaries people make in Taiwan and what’s happening with the new KMT government. We met old relatives lost for 60 years — an occasion for mixing tears, laughter, and plenty of the local fiery brew. The present Chinese leader, Hu Jintao, is OK we all agree, but Mao Zedong was a disaster.
Yes, China is developing and things look very different even from when I last visited four years ago. Prices are now not that different from Taiwan and there are cars everywhere. So far we’ve spent just as much time in traffic jams as in tourist spots. This country better watch it: with only a fraction of the population owning cars there is already a next to total gridlock. Things aren’t helped by the constant police checks — on every highway they are looking for Olympic related bombs.
It seems a certain Olympic fatigue already has set in. The people I talk to — cab drivers mainly — all agree that the Olympics are over-hyped. But no doubt that sentiment will change to euphoria once the Chinese volleyball girls start winning their games.
I’m off to Hong Kong and Beijing today for 10 days. I’m going with my daughter Yrsa and Zhiben, my NCTU colleague, and his daughter and parents. We all want to see the Olympic buildings and eat roasted duck. Trips to Tianjin and Chengde have been planned, as well as some (light) research for my Yuanmingyuan book. I’ll be back with updates (god willing and internet connections permitting).
It turns out we’ll be arriving in HK at the same time as the typhoon which recently killed 800 people in the Phillipines. I’ve been looking at flight information all night hoping for a cancellation. I don’t like it when I’m tossed around by the forces of nature.
I have the most wonderful language teacher — Chen laoshi. We meet for two 90 minute sessions a week. Just me and her in the coffee shop at the NCTU library. While most Chinese people tend to shake their heads and walk away whenever I speak Mandarin, she understands every single word. She never laughs at me. She always encourages me to try again. Man, man shuo — take your time! I understand why so many foreigners end up falling in love with their language teachers. Often they are your only connection to the strange culture that surrounds you.
When I was a teenager in Japan, I relied heavily on ikijibiki, “living dictionaries,” to teach me the language. “Yes,” I would say to this kimono clad female, “I will indeed make love to you again, but first you have to explain this intricate grammatical pattern.” Not surprisingly, my Japanese — what little I remember of it — is still very feminine. Shoganai-yone!
I really don’t miss that teenage lifestyle, but I do miss the opportunity for intimate language exchange. But alas that learning strategy won’t work anymore. I’m a married man. However, I’ve come up with a functional equivalent. The Chinese of my two youngest daughters — Yrsa and Rima — is now pretty good. I talk to them in Mandarin as often as I can, and I’m learning all kinds of great things, although, yes, my Chinese as a result is becoming quite infantilized. Laohu de weiba, Rima tells me, means “the tiger’s tail,” and wo bu gei gen ni hao means “I’m not your friend anymore.” I should try that on a colleague, just to watch their reaction. “NCTU President, sir, wo bu gei gen ni hao.”
Some Republicans are trying to present Barack Obama as having “connections to terrorists.” The real life reference of this fantasy is that Obama for a while served on the board of the same Chicago charity as Bill Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground.
The Weather Underground were university kids who in the 1970s decided to declare war on the American government. They blew up bombs in the Pentagon, in police offices and military installations. They never killed anyone, except two of their own members. Their bombs were pedagogical. They wanted to “bring the war home,” and show Americans what kinds of crimes that were committed in their name. “To live a regular, American, middle-class life, while your country is murdering millions of people,” says Ayers in a documentary I show students every semester, “is itself a kind of violence.”
I don’t like bombs. Nasty people — the IRA, Muslim extremists, nail bombers — were constantly trying to blow us up in London and I didn’t like it one bit. Still it always surprises me why people are so ready to accept government sponsored bombings without any questions. Although I reject the methods, I fully sympathize with the moral outrage which guided Ayers in 1970. I also think his crimes were, and are, lesser than the crimes of the American government. Bush has more blood on his hands.
It’s interesting what happened to the Weather Underground. Half of them are still in prison; the other half are university professors — demonstrating that prisons and universities are the two places where societies keep their misfits. As for Bill Ayers, he is today a professor of Education at the University of illinois (and actually a very respected, and respectable, member of the community).
Yrsa, my 7 year old, and her naughty friends, did a Google picture search for “big, sexy, mama,” and the result, says Yrsa, was “oh my God!”
I’m very upset about this. Back in my days there was no Google and consequently my initiation into the world of grown-ups took a lot longer. I looked for information (and excitement) in my father’s 34 volume Swedish Encyclopedia. It was dry reading. Very dry reading. Kids these days have it so much easier. It’s just not fair! I could have saved years.
It is surely important how you are introduced to sex. I mean, if your first real knowledge is provided by a picture like the one above, surely that will for ever color — ruin — your understanding of the topic. For all the faults of a Google picture search, Yrsa is getting a much better introduction.
Surely the age difference alone will determine the outcome of the American election. Obama is 46, McCain is 71. Americans like to think of themselves as young and forward-looking. How can they ever elect a man who so obviously can’t look forward to anything much?
It is sometimes said that older people, especially women, prefer McCain. That can’t be true. They take a look at their own husbands and ask themselves whether they’d like them to be in charge of the fortunes of the world. Of course not! Not that drooling dotard! They’d much rather vote for their sons.
Actually there should be a constitutional provision which says that no one can be president of the US who doesn’t have at least 10 years reasonable life expectancy after their tenure. Presidents must be around to see the fruits of what they’ve sowed. McCain will be tempted to engage in too much après moi le déluge policies (like bombing Iran). Scary!
I’m very pleased everyone agrees Obama is so young. He will be the first American president who is younger than me. But only by nine months! Actually, being a president and being a professor is quite similar in this respect. You are young until you’re 50, middle aged until 70, and only old after that. Much better than being a fashion model or a figure skater. (Not that I ever really considered those careers …)
Who is this “linreigu” dude who writes things on my blog? Well, it’s me. It’s my Chinese name. Every foreigner who settles in China is given a Chinese name. All Chinese last names consist of one character. The choices for “Ringmar” were “Lin” or “Ma.” We picked the former. “Lin,” or 林, means “small forest” and it’s a picture of two trees. It’s one of the most common last names in China. Yes, that’s right, the last name always comes first.
Finding an equivalent of “Erik” took a bit longer. I was first given “Aiku,” 艾克, which is the standard way in which “Erik” is transliterated. The problem with this name, my colleague pointed out, is that it sounds too much like the name of a foreigner. He suggested 瑞谷, reigu, instead. 瑞 means “auspicious” and it features in 瑞典, which is the Chinese name for “Sweden.” Neat, no? The second character, 谷, or gu, means “valley” and it goes well with 林, my new last name. Sweden, after all, has a lot of forests and valleys. Gu also has a philosophical connotation of scholarly withdrawal and contemplation. Very befitting.
The proper romanization for 瑞谷 is actually “ruigu,” not “reigu.” Still, I use “reigu” since the spelling is closer to “Erik.” Romanization is such a mess here in Taiwan anyway. This explains my email: linreigu@ringmar.net.
I still don’t automatically turn my head when someone calls out for “Professor Lin!” — but I’m working on it.
NCTU, my university, monitors all downloads via Bittorrent and peer-2-peer networks. All illicit student activity is saved in a big log file which the administration can go through if they care to. They also monitor internet searches for what they suspect is illegal material. The more internet-savvy students don’t use Bittorrent but ftp transfers, but it’s slower and there is less fun material available. They also search in Chinese, rather than English, since it’s more difficult to trace.
And the punishment? Well, people who are caught downloading illegal material are called in for a one-day course on “property rights on the internet.” All of my students seem to have been to the course at least once. “It’s OK,” they say, “you get to bring a friend with you, and they give you a 便當, a lunchbox.” In Taiwan even re-education camp comes with a free lunch.
I, as always, make sure to follow the law. However, that lunchbox sounds tempting.
Today is 端午節, duanwujie, or the Dragon Boat Festival, all over China. We went up to Taipei expecting a major cultural extravaganza. It was fun, but more like an ordinary sports competition, with lots of very sweaty team members. (Much to my surprise I found my two older daughters lingering over where the male paddlers showered their naked upper bodies after the competition …)
There were lots of foreigners present, lured there, no doubt, by their guide books. But most Taiwanese stayed away, preferring instead to celebrate the holiday in accordance with tradition — shopping at Costco’s. Eventually we too gave in to tradition and went off to buy muffins (the guys had put their shirts back on by then …).
The traditional food for the Dragon Boat Festival is 粽子, zongzi, or balls of sticky rice stuffed with different fillings and steamed in bamboo leaves. They are pretty good. Still, it’s mainly something old grandmothers make and give away to their grand children. The grand children, who much rather eat pizza, quickly look for a foreigner to give the zongzi too. Of course it’s very impolite to say no. With all the muffins and the zongzi, we are stuffed.
I’m really, really pleased that Barack Obama got the nomination for the Democratic Party. Do we now dare to start hoping ….??? Imagine, an American president you can respect and look up to. Someone you listen to when he comes on the TV instead of shouting back at like we’ve done for so many years now.
I think everyone in the world should have a vote in American elections. After all, it’s a basic principle of democracy that the people who are affected by a political decision should have the right to elect the person who makes that decision. We are all affected by the decisions American presidents make. We should all have a vote (except the people in Iraq who should have two).
How do you think the world would vote in a show-down between McCain and Obama? My guess is that Obama would win by 96% to 4%. Doesn’t that tell you something important? Surely that Obama would be far, far better at restoring the position of the US in the world.
June 8 update: Simon Jenkins makes almost identitical points to me in today’s Huffington Post, although he suspects Obama might win 99-1. He might be right.
I got this email from the Swedish Trade Mission in Taipei (the people who would be the Swedish Embassy if there were official diplomatic relations between Sweden and Taiwan):
We’d like to invite you to the reception for the Swedish National Day on June 6th. Please send us your reply to taiwan@swedishtrade.sebefore June 02.Please note that children age under 14 will not be admitted to this formal event.Best regards, Swedish Trade Council in Taipei
Now this is insulting and discriminatory. How can Sweden’s official representatives invite Swedes to the celebration of the Swedish National Day and exclude citizens under 14? Imagine a similar invitation that excluded people over 65? How are Swedish traditions to be maintained in the expat community if parents aren’t allowed to bring their children to such events? Besides, what are these activities in which children under 14 can’t participate? Group sex probably (see above).
Of course I’d never go to this kind of an event anyway, and I’d never actually bring my kids to it. Nationalist celebrations make me sick. I could never understand why we should wave flags, drink toasts and congratulate ourselves for not being born Norwegian, Russian or Japanese.
When I was a kid we didn’t have a National Day on June 6th, only a “Swedish flag day.” It was nice to belong to a country that didn’t have an official day of chest-beating and self-glorification. About 15 years ago they instituted this change. Talk about invented traditions! This year I’m going to salute the flag of the Republic of China instead and force my childern to eat fried dumplings!
Here, btw, is a clip of a Swedish diplomatic representative in action (yes, they really do speak like this …):
I’m filing my taxes today. I made 1,162,000 New Taiwan dollars last year. That’s equivalent to 38,000 dollars US, 19,262 pounds or 229,000 Swedish krona. That’s about 40% of the salary I made in London.
Still we are far, far better off economically in Taiwan than we were in England. In part since Diane is working two days a week but above all since price levels are a lot lower here. (I just had the most delicious lunch for 50 NT — some $1.60).
But it does explain why we can’t afford to go on intercontinental travels much any more. Our money goes far in East Asia but not very far at all elsewhere. We’re kinda stuck here — a very nice place to be stuck.
Cambridge University Press just confirmed that my book from 1996, Identity, Interest & Action, long available only in hard-back and ridiculously priced at some $130 US, now is out in paperback. It took 12 long years! But the price is much better — a mere $27.30 (although that’s still far too much).
This was my PhD. I got the CUP contract for the book the same week I got the job at LSE, and the same week I met Diane. All in all that was a pretty good week for me.
A neat thing about the paperback is that Charles Tilly took time out from his fatal illness to write a blurb for the back cover. Alessandro Pizzorno, my beloved teacher from EUI in Florence, wrote another blurb. I’m much obliged.
The Eurovision Song Contest just took place in Belgrade. Some 45 countries are competing — it’s all about hair, heels, muscles, dresses, and yes, songs. The competition is watched by hundreds of millions of people across Europe, but gay men and pre-teen girls are the only ones who admit to actually loving it. I have 4 pre-teen girls. In our house we love the Eurovision Song Contest.
Britain came last again, and Brits are very upset. Their theory is that various European countries help each other out with points. The Poles vote for the Russians, the Russians for the Rumanians, the Rumanians for the Poles, etc. There are two British misconceptions here: 1) that European countries are “friends” and all support each other; 2) that they all try to gang up on the British. The Brits miss the obvious interpretation: their song was crap.
If you ask most Brits, they invented pop music in the 1960s. Brit pop is real pop and everyone else’s pop is an inferior version of the real thing. It’s just like football. The Brits invented football too and although other countries pretend to kick balls around they can’t quite do it the British way. According to this mind-set, victories in the Eurovision Song Contest, and victories in the Football World Cup, rightly belong to Britain and if someone else wins it must always be by foul means.
British football glory, like British pop glory, belongs to the 1960s. It’s starting to be quite a long time ago.
I had a nightmare. I dreamed I was sitting talking to two Americans in a bar in Shanghai. I didn’t know them before, but they seemed like typical stupid foreigners in Asia: sent by their companies, big beer bellies, little cute girlfriends, uninterested in the culture, the history and the language …
Then suddenly one of the guy’s mobile phone rang. He picked it up and answered in very rapid Chinese. I didn’t understand a word. What really got me though was that the other guy, listening to the phone conversation, nodded repeatedly and shouted his agreements in what also sounded like perfectly fluent Chinese.
I want to be alone with my adventure. I don’t want other foreigners to butt in. I don’t want anyone to speak better Mandarin than me. This is my Oriental fantasy, OK?
With KMT and the new president, Ma Yingjiu, in place, we are all looking forward to more cordial relations between Taiwan and the mainland. One of the exciting opportunities is for more student exchanges. We need mainland students very badly. There are some 350,000 university places in Taiwan but only 200,000 children were born last year. Where is the short-fall going to come from? The mainland of course!
I have a super idea for a Master’s degree: let’s set up a program called “Democratization in China.”* It would teach mainland students everything they need to know about democracy, liberalism, and, of course, China’s history under the Communists. We would, for example, teach a course about the Cultural Revolution. Or what about a course on “national self-determination” with Tibet as an interesting case study? I could even dust off my old course on “The Politics of Resistance” which I taught at the LSE for a number of years.
Democratization in China is a long slog, but this would be my contribution.
* My friend from the mainland suggests that a better title might be “Political Development in a Comparative Perspective.” He is no doubt right.
Hilary Clinton may have a majority of the votes of the over 65’s, but Barrack Obama has a majority of the votes of the under 1’s. If you search for “Obama baby” on YouTube you get 1,120 hits; a search for “Hilary Clinton baby” only gives 447 hits. The verdict is clear: American babies prefer Obama.
The reason, of course, has to do with phonetics. It’s just so much easier to say “Obama” than “Hilary.” It is not a coincidence after all that “ba” and “ma” almost universally are the names babies give to their parents. Even the Chinese say baba and mama for heaven’s sake.
Thinking about it this way, maybe “Obama” does resonate with voters on a subliminal, next-to pre-linguistic, level. Is it reassuring, or scary, to have your ba and ma run the United States?
(I wonder if our new president, Ma, could have benefitted from the same phonetic advantage as Obama in the recent election. “Ma,” after all, is a much more basic sound than “Xie,” the name of the DPP candidate).
There are two kinds of boredom, writes Lars Svendsen in A Philosphy of Boredom. There is the kind of boredom you feel when sitting through a presentation at work which goes on for ever, without pause and without direction. But there is also the more fundamental boredom which comes from the fact that few of us know how to live meaningful lives. This is an existential boredom, unique to modern society.
We are all terrified of being bored. Running away from boredom, we are always on the look-out for new thrills. We invent extreme sports and extreme perversions, we do drugs and exotic religions; we think nothing of killing, in computer games or in real life. If nothing else, we watch a lot of TV and have extra-marital affairs. But before we know it we are bored again. The next dose of the drug must be stronger and the kick it gives us must be harder. Thus the restlessness of modern society; its transgressions; its cult of the new; its obsession with fashion; its superficiality and attention deficit disorder.
Orientalism fits here too. The Oriental was another straw the Europeans grasped at. The exotic was going to save us from ourselves, from rationality and ennui.
I used to be terribly bored in the little industrial town on the Botnic Gulf where I grew up. As a teenager I promised myself that I would get out of there and never come back. I ran and ran and ran and I didn’t stop until I got to Taiwan. Now I’m never bored. Learning Chinese and raising four kids, there is no time for boredom. I guess I’ve come as far away from myself as I could manage.
We have a new president in Taiwan. At 9 this morning Ma Yingjiu was inaugurated. Yes, he spoke a lot about improving relations with the mainland, about agreeing to disagree with Beijing, and about demilitarizing the whole cross-straights issue. And — this is great news — there will be direct flights to the mainland as early as in July!
A thought struck me: I wonder if this man one day will be president of all of China. Surely, the day when there are competitive elections on the mainland, the KMT will do pretty well. They have name recognition after all, and mainlanders are reportedly pretty excited about Ma. Still, the guy is 57. Real democracy in China might take another 20 years …
