Saturday, March 29, 2014

Picture Yourself On




Odd dream.  I needed to get to the 16th floor.  I would meet someone there.  They would show me the town that was sprawled out below.  This, so I could get back to the car, where people were waiting for me.  You have to get back within a certain amount of time and therein lies the central tension that drives the narrative: you’re running late.  It’s 10:15 and you need to get back by 10:35.  And your mind offers up a picture of a clock, a wrist watch.

I’m in the elevator but the buttons for sixteenth floor won’t light up.  None of these floors light up.  Other people want to get in.  Other people get off.  I will need to go to the 6th floor where the staff will help me get to the 16th floor.  They point me on my way down to the place where a group of Turkish twenty-something’s are about to board a speed boat.  The building and the floors are no longer relevant.  They invite me to join for a ride and I can’t say “no.””  We’re off.



It’s a wonderful ride up the river that is really a boulevard, with traffic just like a highway.  And as soon as we’re off it dawns on me that this was a mistake.  I have no business taking this voyage.  I must ask the driver many people up ahead, if he can turn around.  Though I’m enjoying sitting next to this young Turk, talking about the buildings.  But someone is waiting for me in the car and the clock flashes again.  Then someone on board says we’re going to be read to, as we’re all on vacation and this is the time to make time for reading.  We’re relaxing as the captain cuts, 逆水行舟[1], throttling, turning and I don’t see how I can get back . . .

The morning light is pouring into my bedroom.  A gaggle of birds with different, determined songs are piping up, without any reason, outside.  The dull blow of fireworks shot from a tube into the air, like percussion, thud, thud, thud again, outside.  Is there a holiday?  This is the sound that can only invoke Chinese New Year.  Is someone getting married?  Is someone having fun?  Is there a symbolism, a high Chinese holiday I simply haven’t recalled.  Further out a plane is tearing through its jet fuel, making its ascent upwards and upwards.  How loud that must be to travel here over the birds.  How little heed I pay it when I am sitting beside it on take off. 

Tired early last night.  Slept, what was for me, late this morning.  This is the time when dreams linger about your bed longer than might otherwise happen with a strict, regular rise.  Sleeping late you’d like to imagine the body drinking up the rest.  Taking on a charge for all you put off with coffee and espresso.



Over in Taiwan, students have taken over the legislature.  They are frustrated with the way that Ma Ying-Jeou has fast-tracked free trade legislation with China through the legislature.  There is now an Occupy the Legislature movement and students are releasing a plethora of Youtube videos like this one to explain their position: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2XyhLbWKOw 

I did a quick search for the words “occupy” and “Taiwan” in English on Youku and was prepared to glibly pen that it’s all blocked in China.  So I’m glad I invested the extra five minutes needed to search in Chinese: “反服貿國際聲援影片” It’s all over Youku, as well.  For now, China doesn’t mind showing a restive, ill-governed province, restive and ill-governed.

We have guests over.  Old friends with two young boys, my daughter’s age.  Last night I told them all to pile around the computer and watch. I told them that these kids were brave.  And of course I reminded them, that this protest, in the proud tradition of the May 4th movement that they learned about it school, would have lasted about eight minutes in this town.  It always feels different when it is kids than it does when its taxi drivers or angry workers of, say, the DPP protesting.  Kids feel naïve and pure.

I haven’t been to Taiwan in over a year, and from this view, things have been quiet during Ma Ying-jeou’s reign.  But reading up, I’ve come to learn that his approval rates are down around 9%.  That would appear to be lynch-mob territory.  We’ll have to learn but it sounds like the next election cycle will almost certainly send in a regime less accommodating to Beijing. 

Whoever was having fun, or sweeping their ancestors grave, or revving up for a marriage ceremony is going off in full force now, out there in the distance.  They’re unloading their entire hoard.  It’s enough to make someone want to write “thud” seventeen times.  Perhaps it is Independence Day for some nation?  Cat Power is singing about our “American Flag” from the 1998 release "Moon Pix."  But its too early for American Independence Day and no one out in the distance celebrates that here. 














[1] nìshuǐxíngzhōu:  lit. a boat going against the current (idiom); fig. you must work harder

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