More Random Shots from HsingKang…

While I was in Hsingkang, I stayed with my dad’s cousin and wow, they are morning people!  They were all up around 4 AM, and I tried to be vaguely awake at 4:30 or 5, but after nearly falling asleep on the table, decided to go back to bed.  It was charming to see my Aunt in the morning, trimming her hedge, while my cousin (or is it second-cousin-once-removed??)  chatted with her while flapping a towel to keep the mosquitos away.  Oh, and they introduced me to the magical blue men’s shampoo that made my head all pleasantly cool and tingly.  Seriously awesome stuff!

Anyway, we got up early (for me anyway) to take the bus to Chiayi and then a train to Tainan.  Walking through the streets, the lovely thing about Hsingkang is that it’s really quiet, without that buzz that is so common here in Taipei.  The night I spent in Hsingkang, I could hear the cicadas (or was it crickets?) chirping in the yard.  They were truly kind and marvelous hosts and I wouldn’t have been able to get such a good look at Hsingkang without them.

Here are some early morning shots taken while we rushed to the bus stop:

At first sight of this balloon floating high above the village, I thought it was a lingering moon.

This cat is inspecting the durability of this old clay tile roof.

Hollyhocks in the morning sunlight.

Someone else’s old house.

This is a poster at the bus stop for the Chaiyi Performing Arts Centre, which my uncle kindly took me to a while ago, when Cloud Gate 2 was performing.  It’s a really lovely space that I wish I could have seen in the daylight.  All the same, the lotus were still beautifully glimmering with rain the night we went.  The dance Cloud Gate 2 performed, Oculus was indeed free-spirited and wildly beautiful.

And one more random shot from the temple– apparently all these guardian (I think this is a lion, but I’ m not sure…) lions have a ball in their mouths.  I have no idea why.  Oh, and does anyone know of a resource that tells the stories behind the gods here?  I’m thinking there should be something somewhere I could read to find out those stories…

More flowers– aren’t they pretty!  These were actually at the bus stop when we arrived in Chiayi from Taipei.

My Father’s Old House…

There is a certain wistful nostalgia that we have when we think of our childhood homes. My father is certainly not immune to this. He was downright grumpy with me upon my first visit to his house because my appreciation was considerably dampened by the mosquitos feasting on me and the lack of a flushing toilet… However, upon a quick visit, I realized what my father loved about his home. He told stories about the Japanese coming to my grandmother during the war and asking for the steel embedded in the window frames. On the last trip we went on when she was still alive, she was quite happily content, sitting on the front porch.

Here are some photos of the front yard with the flora and fauna.

Interesting long-rooted vine.

This is a water plant of some kind.

Within each of these buds, a red tongued blossom is waiting…

Doesn’t this look soft?!

Down in the depths of the old well, the ferns grow. No worries, I didn’t lose my balance to get this shot!

Visiting the temple

Proxy pilgrims are the dummies inside the cart– they are sent by people who can’t come themselves to tour the country and visit gods in different temples. They are wearing the shadows of the lanterns leading to the temple.

The market outside the temple.

Chatting in front of the temple by the fireworks cage.

Once we got inside, and asked if it was okay for me to be a shutterbug inside the temple, I kind of went a little nuts…

On the wayside

The flower shop by my father’s old home. Any idea what these interesting cup flowers are?

Our shadows on the crumbling wall of my relative’s grandmother’s home (I think…)

Decorated by the local elementary school, I believe my relative said this is actually a private residence.

The street behind the temple where my relatives have their little everything shop.

On the way back at twilight– I liked the way this stoplight was broken just enough for the light within to gleam like a wannabe sunset.

The open gutter by the side of the road in Hsingkang. I love how impatiens are wildflowers in Taiwan– they bloom by the roadsides. It’s interesting being here– I understand my mother’s garden choices more, when I see flowers that are familiar, as if I’m not really quite so far away from home in the comfortable company of roses or begonias or impatiens.

Performing Arts High School in Shingkang

My father and my uncle by marriage on my mom’s side both come from the quiet town of Hsingkang or Shingkang.  It’s a tiny town that is accessible by a tiny crowded bus from Chiayi.  My dad’s cousin’s daughter who became an English teacher was very kind to let me join her.  Her family rescued us from a stay in my father’s old house (which is picturesque but lacks modern plumbing and air conditioning, while hosting a number of happy mosquitos) long long ago.

I walked back with her and her mother to their home and we passed through the newly-built arts high school.  Apparently it displaced some rice fields in the process of its creation.

Lucky kids– it looks really state of the art, and I love walkways of windows.  I think this one is headed to the dorms.

Wax or Rose Apple Tree

This tree had a combination of bud, blossoms, and fruit.  Liem boo or Lien Woo was one of my first delighted discoveries in Taiwan.

The flowers remind me of sea anemone with their outstretched stamens.

Not quite red enough yet to be fully sweet.

The whole tree sits next to a basketball court where people were playing in their bare feet.

Peach Picking this past weekend

Green tea growing on the mountain. They were going to be picked the next morning. Only the newest and tender leaves are picked in the moist mountain mist. Then they’re dried for tea. They harvest once per season with the spring season being the best.

Peaches wrapped and ready for sale. Each is individually wrapped by hand, the point pointing upwards, resting on their sides. I know, because I tried to help by wrapping a box, felt incredibly proud until they smiled and redid them all to make them look prettier. Boxes supposedly sell for about 800NT (over $20 US) in Taipei. The farmer gets 250NT per box.

Cutting the paper bags off of the peaches. They use the bags to keep insects away and then after taking the peaches out of them, will use the emptied bags as stuffing to cushion each box.

One of the few unbagged peaches ripening on the tree.

A thistle.

Bamboo in the sun.

So my room smells of peaches ripening in a cardboard box, thanks to the generosity of my aunt, her sister, her sister’s friend, and her sister’s friend’s cousin who owns a peach farm on a mountain called the “sound of jade” or something like that in translation.

The peaches we picked were small, blushing through their white paper bags, even if they weren’t all completely ripe yet. There were also large ones that solidly fit in the palm. They told me those weren’t as sweet, but they were sweet indeed.

Peaches in Chinese are tao tze and my mother’s familiar with the green crispy kind that I buy off the side of the street soaked in saltwater which somehow brings their sweetness into relief. The sort we picked, warm from the sun, some of them so soft that a touch would bruise them or leave their skin peeling, were more like the kind I am used to from the US. People here tend to eat them with the skin peeled. I didn’t.

I love picking fruit.

We also picked long chu tsai, dragon’s beard vegetables which grow like a vine along the ground, shoots curling. Those require much more bending over, while the peaches were more of a stretch. The vegetables were very good at my aunt’s mother’s dinner where their clan of six families bought out the main area of a karaoke restaurant and worked the over-echoing speakers enthusiastically. When the echo is turned up that substantially, it is… shall we say, rather unforgiving.

In order to get to the farm, we drove past groves of mangoes still green but blushing, and blue plastic bagged banana bunches hanging from the trees. We also did a quick stop in at a religious Christian sect’s “Mount Zion” which sells organic beauty care and jewelry.

I had fun with my cousin, fighting over the comforters, pillow fighting, and teaching her the tradition of gargling “The Star Spangled Banner” which my other cousin and I used to do in our PJs when she still wore braces, and I still had bangs.

Passing through Matzu’s birthday festivities

Matzu is the goddess of the sea and she’s a major goddess here in Taiwan, since she’s said to have watched over many a boat through the Taiwan Strait.

When we were driving around Chiayi, we passed through major festivities for her birthday– streets covered with the red firecracker wrappers, swept into piles taller than people.

Trucks playing shrill wind instruments with gongs and drums sounding through the streets.  People dressed up in costumes of the gods that rise above their heads with flags sprouting out of their back.  Organized groups of people in the same color T-shirts marching or dancing together down the street.

Apparently people from all over Taiwan go to bai bai on that special day in that area’s famous temple.

Kids holding boxes of firecrackers that leap into the air with shrieking whistles and no boom.

Marching the dragon down the street.

Processing

I’ve been so busy lately that I feel like I’ve been hurled through the past week instead of actually living it. I’m not sure exactly what I did that kept me so busy, but somehow I never got to finish writing about my last excursion before going on my next one. I’m probably going to give myself a PJ day this weekend.

Anyway, the brief version of the madcap driving about with my uncle and aunt around Chiayi:

Taichung– lunch, old building where there used to be exams, and huge tomb.

Then went to the great-grandfather’s house, grandfather’s house, and then the swanky hotel for my uncle and aunt and their friend, then to the Chiayi Performing Arts Center where we saw Cloud Gate 2‘s Oculus (I was rather surprised at the bit where everyone’s dancing in pretty just their underpants and violently pretending to scratch themselves all over the place. The bit where they danced with balloons was fun though.) I sat next to my first grade cousinlet who was hopping up and down a bit on the huge kid-friendly seat cushion which should be de riguer for every short person trapped behind a tall person in an auditorium (yes, I was envious, I admit it, though there was no way it was comfortable on his legs, since they naturally had no way of ever reaching the floor). His commentary was pretty funny too. (Disclosure: one of our cousins works with Cloud Gate.) I would have liked to peer around the Performing Arts Center grounds and dance in the rain afterwards, but there wasn’t really time.

Anyway, then headed off to my cousin’s place to be plied with fruit and spin tops with the cousinlet. (I now feel rather deprived that I didn’t have a cool top collection when I was a kid).

The next day we were up at 8 again to go peer at another tomb site nestled in the fields.

Then we were off to a really amazing photo exhibition about the history of Shinkang– there were photos of beautiful, wrinkled, cheery farmers, old women with bound feet, suited men in a band during the Japanese occupation, a group of men dressed for sumo wrestling, school photographs of children, just slices of life from before that reached to the present. I would have liked to poke around more, but my uncle was honking the horn for us to pop into the car and head off to this non-profit organization where there was a library (He got quite grumbly thanks to a woman who was calmly reading amongst the children. She was wearing a hot pink top that exposed a significant portion of her lacy green bra… Perhaps her book was so engrossing she just didn’t notice the neckline slipped.), classrooms, etc.

Then we popped off to check out a public school in the area as part of the historian’s quest. We ended up going back to the old house where we met yet another friend and my dad’s cousins. I attempted a Chinese/Taiwanese conversation and discovered that the distant relative that I used to be penpals with is actually in Taipei.

We ended up going to visit the pineapple field of my uncle’s friend, and he walked barefoot through the rows, lopping off a pineapple every few feet with his curved knife. Later he showed us his bare arms scratched by the leaves.

I had no idea pineapples grew on sort of spiky bushes as high as my waist.

A new pineapple plant is grown from an outgrowth like this. Pineapples in Taiwan are really sweet, and the centers are not as tough as the ones we used to pick up in the US which were too chewy to really eat. The area we were in (I forget the name of it) was really famous for their pineapples.

I slept through most of the car rides. My aunt and I did chat about a visit she made to the US that I don’t remember. Apparently I was quite resentful that she was going to be sleeping in my room and was a difficult child about it. I honestly have no memory of her ever coming to visit, but I know I was a pain as a kid (though my dear mother would protest… to a degree). That’s the weird thing about family that you’ve barely seen. The times you’ve seen them are the way they remember or think of you, naturally. In my life, my family are the most consistent in terms of people that have seen me as a child and as a… whatever I am now (probably not an adult per se in the grown-up sense of the word, though I vote).

However, a chunk of our interactions (especially those that are hampered by the language barrier) are often somewhat superficial– an introduction at a huge family dinner every blue moon. As a child, it was smile and nod time, getting my face picked apart– depending on the relative my eyes are my mother’s or my aunt’s or I look more like my father or more like my mother. A generous meal, which my brother often eyed with suspicion, would be served. Then while the grown-ups chatted, my brother and I would play slap-dilly-o-so or have thumb wars.

Part of the reason I’m in Taiwan is that I want to get to know my family better– those here and those back in the US through the shared history. However, sometimes I feel kind of awkward in family settings– I’m with kind strangers who just happen to have similar blood and have seen my baby pictures.

The Old House

Family shrine inside the living room.

My father’s house was made of wood, built during the Japanese occupation, and has a lovely overgrown garden bordered by a wall. It’s honestly a bit creepy. Some of the rooms still have the tatami down (I remember sleeping in one of them long ago, itchy from the mosquitos, and hot from the lack of A/C.), and while many are stuffed with boxes , the place wears an air of overgrown desolation. Old awards granted my uncles are on top of old furniture.

I think I may have been about to start high school when we visited long ago. My grandmother was still alive. My father was rather upset because I wouldn’t bai bai to the ancestors, bow with incense in hand and talk to them in my head. Going to church and Sunday school as a child, my knees were a bit stiff to be bowing to any “graven image” and telling my dead relatives hello. We had never had any incense or anything like that around. My grandmother was actually Catholic. I learned that her conversion was made possible because it was okay for her to revere her ancestors which would not have been accepted in Protestant-type systems.

Back door of the main house.

I popped into a couple of the outer buildings this time, and found that the spoons are still carefully nested against each other in the kitchen cupboard, with pots and pans still neatly piled away. I made a rapid retreat from one of the dusty bedrooms when I heard a skittering sound I was too chicken to investigate. The garden has a lovely overgrown aspect to it, though I did walk face-first into a cobweb.

One of the three wells.

Back door of the garden.

The mosquitos I remembered were still there, and I was once more popular with them.

At one point, I noticed five on my left hand. Aiming at my wrist, I slapped it dead as it was filling up on my blood. Unfortunately, my camera was also in my left hand at that point, and made a rapid descent to the concrete floor where it bounced, and the batteries fell out. After a moment of horrified silence (my family must have thought I was crazy and had just tossed my camera to the ground until I showed them the dead mosquito on my wrist), I picked it up, popped the batteries back in, and the top back down (I think there’s a crack curving around my shutter button now), and it worked!

I may be in the market for a new camera if anyone would like to advise me, though. It still works, but every now and then the LCD does a little wavy flicker dance. My Canon A75 has seen me through Korea and a chunk of New York and Taiwan and I’ll be sad when it’s finally time for it to retire. I’m debating on whether to go big, heavy, and powerful with an SLR or itsy bitsy with a ultra-compact or something-in-between like what I carry about daily now. Of course, I don’t think Fisher Price makes digital cameras– one able to withstand my dropsy would be good.