A very long Wednesday

It’s Wednesday morning and it is going to be a long day of prayer and different activities. They have taken down the original tent and set up another that is even bigger and blocks the entire road. A large portrait of my grandfather hangs on the far end of the tent with an extraordinary display of flowers. As we quickly eat a breakfast of “man tou” and soymilk, several relatives arrive from out of town. Family by family, each of them arrives.

I see my Aunt Two and her family. I have very fond memories of visiting her in her house in the big city of Tai Chung. Her family owned and still operates a Fuji Film shop, printing photos all day. The front of the store would be the shop and the back and upper floors (there were 4 or 5 floors if I remember) would be their house. This was a very typical set up in Taiwan. She would let me operate the printing machine, brightening different photos and correcting others for different customers. My brother and I would constantly run next door to the supermarket and buy this orange/carrot carbonated juice or across the street to the dominos pizza to get a pizza for dinner.

The neighborhood is alive with activity with a lot of the neighbors helping out. Everyone helps cut vegetables and meats as they prepare lunch. The smell of delicious foods permeates the air. Neighbors cook the food together in very large woks outside in the courtyard across the street. Back inside my grandfather’s house, the family starts to prepare all of the traditional dresses for everyone. Each family member is given a white outfit, essentially made up of white exercise pants, white shoes, and a white polo. It’s actually pretty comfortable. Along with this, we are given different pieces of clothing and headgear depending on who we are in the family. As the eldest son of my grandfather’s eldest son (my dad), I wear a vest made of woven twine, and white headband with some more of the woven twine and a yellow piece of cloth. Everyone quickly changes their clothes and tries to get some rest before all of the activities begin.

I go upstairs and my dad and I Skype with my mom and brother (and our cat Olive) back home in Milpitas, California. Since I was in high school, my mom has had end-stage renal failure, which is essentially completely failure of the function of both kidneys. For about eight years, she had to go to the dialysis center, connecting tubes into her body to perform the function of her kidneys and clean out her blood. This process would take about 3 hours every other day. We waited for a very long time on the organ donation waitlist at UCSF because of her rare O blood type. Because of this, she needed to stay nearby at all times in case a match came up. This meant no travel and indeed, my mom has not been away from the San Francisco Bay Area for any more than two days at a time for the last decade. Last year, we suddenly got a call saying that there was a kidney available and that she needed to come in immediately for the transplant operation. It was a very exciting development for my family and the operation went very successfully. She no longer had to go to dialysis and she looks a lot healthier. However, she is not allowed to travel for a year after the surgery and therefore she was unable to come to the funeral in Taiwan. My brother also stayed behind to keep her company. Luckily, though, it will be more than a year since the surgery and she will be able to come to my graduation in May in New York. It will be her first trip anywhere in a very long time.

As my dad and I say goodbye to my mom, we suddenly hear a very loud cry and intense crying downstairs. My dad and I look at each other and he immediately knows that Aunt One had arrived. Her family has five children, including four sons (Tony, Peter, Willy, and Jack) and one daughter (Eno). Each of the kids has grown up in Vancouver and Tony and Peter have a business in Irvine, Eno lives in Seattle, Willy goes to UC Santa Barbara (where both of my parents went to graduate school actually), and Jack is still in high school in Vancouver. Tony had come by a few days ago to pay his respects, but had to back to Irvine to take care of some business. At noon, we all get together at different tables in the tent and eat lunch together. Its sort of amazing see all of my family members together at the same spot, all sharing the same grandfather and grandmother.

After lunch, the ceremonies begin. In the local Dao/Buddhist religion, there are many hours of praying together and different things that must be done to ensure my grandfather’s wellbeing in the afterlife. A local group has come to perform the different services and lead up through the prayer. I won’t get into the details here, but it is a very long process. The prayers last from 1 PM in the afternoon all of the way until around 11 PM at night. We proceed in different sessions, following along with the performance and prayer. Because I am the eldest son of the eldest son, my uncle and I are given some special paper money to burn outside of the tent so that my grandfather can use it in the afterlife. Each session is intense and incredibly tiring. Between each one, we have about a fifteen-minute break to run into the house and get some rest before the next. The breaks after a nice chance to catch up with family with light-hearted conversation before being serious again with the next prayer session. In all, there are four afternoon prayer sessions, lasting until about 6 PM. I am not going to get into the details of much of the prayers as I either don’t really remember, did not understand (the whole thing was in Taiwanese and I could not understand), or I was out back by myself burning the paper money and did not see.

After the end of the first day of ceremonies, my family retired into the house and sat around talking to each other. The lighthearted talk and joking around stood in contrast to the sad and emotional ceremonies that had taken place. It is too bad that everyone was brought together by such unfortunate circumstances. Everyone looks forward to a happy event to get together again. There is joking around about who is going to get married next and how they should hurry up so that we can get together again at their wedding.

For me though, the night is not over. The immediate family: my dad, my uncle, my five aunts, and I gather in the living room to place my grandfather’s body from the refrigerated box to a large orange, wooden casket. As the eldest son of my dad, I am regarded as a member of the immediate family for the purposes of all of the funeral ceremonies. There is some prayer and a lot of emotion as my grandfather laid on a metal platform on the floor next to the casket. My father cleans off my grandfather’s face with a towel and then we lift him into the casket carefully. I hold his feet as we put him in the casket. I feel a mixed feeling of sadness and closure as his body lies in the casket. My aunts fix his clothing and the funeral directors fill the empty spaces of the casket with the special paper money. We then cover his body with a cloth and rip off the ends of the cloth for our own safekeeping and memory. We say goodbye to my grandfather one more time and the casket is then nailed shut. It is nearly midnight and we hurry to get to sleep. There is a long morning ahead of us tomorrow.



Post-edit: For anyone who is interested in learning more about Taiwanese funeral traditions, I would recommend this article that I found online!

Basketball, Ehr-Ling part two and more

I woke up at around 4:30 AM this morning due to the jet lag and it seemed like everyone else in the town was already up and busy. There were several old folks walking around the streets for exercise with their arms swinging vigorously. My aunt, Mason, and I decided to bike to the nearby shop that sells fresh soy milk every morning. We get there and it is absolutely cracking. Everyone was there to get their warm soy milk fix and various things to eat. We bike back through the darkness and start to chow down. Damn it is delicious. Accompanying it is a glutinous rice thing wrapped around a Chinese donut and shredded dried pork.  

Later that morning we decide to go play basketball in some playground behind some church somewhere. The "hoop" is nailed to the top of a hallway and there is a tree that is partially in the way of any shot besides a baseline jumper. Despite the conditions, it's fun to play basketball with my little cousins and feeling like Mutombo with every massive block on four foot tall Mason.

My dad coaches little kids basketball in the Bay Area. He started many years ago when I was little coaching for the Fremont Chinese School after class program. He started renting the local gym in Fremont to coach kids on the Sundays and eventually the program got so big that they have incorporated into the Fremont Youth Basketball Club (FYBC), with several teams ranging from as young as 4th grade through high school. Through all of these years, I still find my dad sometimes watching some kind of instructional basketball coaching video in the middle of the night as if to find the holy grail of basketball coaching in order to bring his teams to glory. I tell my dad that that secret code of coaching is held secret in a blood pact between Gregg Popovich, Pat Riley, and Phil Jackson and that they would never tell him. Still, he pushes on.

After basketball, we head back to Ehr-Ling because the kids want McDonalds. On the way there though, we stop for some Lu Rou Fan, essentially a Taiwanese braised pork belly over rice with some pickled mustard greens. I haven't been posting photos because it's been such a pain in the ass to transfer between three devices and then uploading it, but you all need to see this. Now.

This is absolutely delicious. You just order it and they put it right in a bowl and you just chow down on some table on the side of the street. And it costs less than 2 US dollars.

We head to McDonalds so that the kids can grab some chicken nuggets and french fries. The fries taste oddly like potatoes in a way that fries back in the US do not. I order a weird corn soup that is not sold in US McDonalds and it tastes alright. It is strange to think about how McDonalds has expanded throughout the world. Going from that Lu Rou Fan stand then to the McDonalds is not as big of a cultural jump as I had anticipated. In a way, McDonalds here is not so much of an American novelty as it is just delicious food that kids in Taiwan love. 

When we return, people have come by and taken the tent outside down and have replaced it with an even bigger one that essentially blocks off the entire street for the next three days. It is something special when you know all of the people in the neighborhood well enough that they are just cool with you just being in the street for a few days. This would never fly in New York. Inside the tent there is a massive portrait of my grandfather on top a very elaborate altar. 

Seeing the portrait made me think of him. I first heard that he was unwell a little more than a week ago now. I was just at my apartment in New York when my father called my phone from California. His voice had a bid of worry as he told me that my grandfather had problems using his lungs and that the doctor had said he did not have long left. My dad told me to call a phone number so that I could speak with my grandfather. When I called, one of my aunts picked up the phone and gave the phone to my grandfather. I told him that it was "wei wei" (my nickname among the family) and I heard him mumble some things through an oxygen mask. I did not know what to say and just repeat again that it was me and said "a gong hao" (hello grandpa). He mumbled some more things I could not really hear. After that I just tried to listen to him and hear what he was saying. There was no more, but I could just hear him breathing slowly for a while before simply hanging up. My mother called after me and said that my aunt said he was very happy after I had called. He told my mother to take care of me and even remembered that I had been going to Columbia Law School. My dad took a flight to Taiwan that night, but unfortunately my grandfather passed away while my dad was on the way there.

The altar and the decorations are absolutely incredible. Tonight many more relatives will show up and stay with us here at the home. Tomorrow (Wednesday) will be very busy with a long ceremony for the family and for friends to come by and pay their respects. Although it will be an emotional moment for many, it is supposed to be great celebration of my grandfather's life and a chance for family and friends to come back and be together. Thursday will be the day of the burial and we will take my grandfather across town to a plot of land and lay him to rest. 

On language, clothing, and tradition

Through most of this trip I have been meeting many people who knew my grandfather from around the town and people that knew my dad from when he was young. Almost all of these conversations have been very difficult as I can't speak the local language here, Taiwanese. For many of the oldest people here, that's the only language they know. Not Mandarin and definitely no English. This includes my grandmother. My whole life when my grandmother has spoken to me I could not understand what is saying and vice versa. What complicates it even more is that everyone around here speaks a very coastal rural dialect of Taiwanese.

As we eat lunch on the first day, just a simple rice vegetables and a bit of fish (which for some reason has an incredible amount of bones in it), the whole family sits around the table together. Aunts 2, 4, and 5; my uncle and his wife, my dad, some various cousins, and of course my grandmother. She continually points at my dad and me and cracks jokes that I don't understand but apparently everyone thinks are hilarious. My aunts translates one of them. Apparently my dad wanted to build a house of my plot of farmland (more on that later), but my grandmother said that it was a stupid idea because it is so windy and floods so often that everyone in town would ridicule her as having an "empty-headed son."

When I was younger, my grandparents had come to visit me in California and they were watching me do my Chinese school homework one day in 6th grade or something. My grandmother noted how my handwriting was "so beautiful" and that I was doing a good job. If you know me then you know my handwriting is terrible - imagine what the Chinese characters would look like. At the time I thought that she was making fun if me, but later on I had realized that she had never attended school at any level, never learning really how to read or write. In fact, none of my aunts had either except for Aunt Five. Because she was the youngest, the family sacrificed and pulled money together to send her to school. She is now the head dietician at a hospital in San Leandro.

After lunch we realize that we will need to take a trip to the neighboring city in order to buy me some clothes. One of the traditions for the funeral is for me to symbolically change into an entirely, never-worn outfit at the end of the burial ceremony and lead the family back home in a new beginning as the eldest son in the line of eldest sons. There apparently were talks of obtaining a big white horse for me to ride home, but it was determined that I don't know anything about how to ride horses on my own, so we decided a white car was close enough. Anyways this involved buying an entirely new outfit, the majority of which I had bought at Uniqlo in New York, but I had forgotten to buy a jacket. 

Me and four of my aunts cram into a car and head to Ehr-Lin, a small city to the East about 5 minutes away by car. There I quickly by a jacket from a shop called Hang Ten?, which is basically a super bootleg Taiwanese Pac Sun. Apparent this is how they imagine people in California dress and I suppose they are not far off. My aunts go and buy everyone a pair of the finests sweatpants off some rack in the street, haggling to the max with the dude selling it. We even get one for me to bring back to New York for Ivy. We see my uncle and my little cousins running through traffic looking for a basketball to buy. My cousin Mason in California is eight years old and apparently can't go more than a few days without playing basketball. Does that sound familiar to anyone? 

We grab a quick meal at another cart on the street. It's a Taiwanese dish called a Va-Wan, which is this shell of glutinous rice dough with meat and bamboo inside, deep fried, with peanut sauce in top. We also get a bowl of soups with pieces of congealed pork blood cakes inside. We pay the guy and my aunts comment loudly about how the guy's brother selling the same thing down the street is far superior. 

When we get back, my dad and his brother takes me and my cousins on a walk out to the actual farmland along the coast, a short 5 minute walk. We get to the plot of land that is held in my name. Nothing is currently growing on it, but it somehow feels special to me because my grandfather had given it me years ago. In the later months they will plant sugarcane and some vegetables. My uncle tells me that the government is talking about building a freeway along the coast that will pass through my land. The environmental lawyer instinct in me kicks in and I am thinking of ways of bringing a lawsuit. In the end however, it is probably okay. Farming in this part of Taiwan is a dying lifestyle. All of the young people in the town leave to pursue other things and the farms and oyster harvesting is only carried on with the old folks. Still, I stand there in this soil that has been with my family for more than 100 years and has been passed to me as eldest son and think about what will happen next.

The First Morning

After a very long two-hour drive cramped in a van with my dad, his brother, another uncle from California, and my two very talkative cousins, we finally arrive in my grandfather’s town of Fangyuan. The town is located on the outskirts of Changhwa City, located in the central part of the western coast of Taiwan. My grandfather spent his entire life on the same street, a story similar to many of the other residents in town. The town is right along the coast and the smell of oysters is immediately apparent. My dad tells me that the use of oxen carts that I remember during my visits when I was little has gone away, with only the occasional token display to entertain tourists from the cities and from abroad. The streets are busy with loud cars trucking oysters from the ocean, people on mopeds riding here and there, and the occasional advertisement truck, blaring out some speech of some local politician running for some office or another.

As we arrive to the house, I see a large colorful tent with many flower displays and decorations set up in the front of the house, right into the street. Many people in this part of rural Taiwan, including my family, follow a mix of Buddhist and Daoist religious traditions that involve a long funeral period. I will refer to these traditions throughout this blog and make no attempt to explain or even list all of them. I ask my dad about them and not even he really knows them either, telling me in his typical fatherly advice, “just act like you know what you are doing and do what people say to do.” As I arrive, I am immediately greeted the neighbor’s dog and my youngest cousin (my dad’s younger brother’s son). I am not sure which of the two is more excited to see us arrive. I see Aunt Five as well, an aunt that I had grown up in the same household for my childhood in California.

My grandfather had two sons (my dad and his younger brother) and five daughters, which I will refer to as Aunt One (being the oldest) to Aunt Five (the youngest). Aunt Five immigrated some years after my father to California in the 1980s and lived with me for a number of years. She attended CSU Long Beach and had the cool experience of being a DJ on the side in the 1990s, playing so much soft rock and R&B that you wouldn’t believe it. One of my favorite memories of all time is jamming out to La Bamba with her for the first time ever in her 1980-something White Toyota Camry. Her kids, Alison and Mason accompany me as we arrive to the house.

I enter the large tent and immediately the traditions begin. The tent is essential a non-stop vigil, with someone present all hours of the day since my grandfather passed away. An altar has been set up with my grandfather’s portrait and some incense candles. As customary, Alison, Mason and I literally crawl to the altar and offer our prayers with the incense. Although my grandfather had past away for more than a week now, the tradition in this part of Taiwan is to preserve the body through a number of ceremonies created to ensure his wellbeing in the next life before the actual funeral on Thursday. My aunt takes us behind the altar into the living room of the house, which has been cleared out. There, my grandfather lies in a small tent within which is essentially a refrigerated box. Fighting back some emotion, I enter the tent, wipe away some of the condensation on the glass and look in. I see his face and how peaceful he looks there in that moment gives me some solace and takes a lot of the emotions away.

As I go back outside to the tent, there are several relatives sitting outside drinking tea and folding paper decorations, including my grandmother. She seems to be doing well and is the same as I remember her years ago. Everyone is in good spirits and is happy to see me. After a while catching up with family and meeting others, we enter the house and eat breakfast. Beef noodle soup with freshly made noodles. It really does not get better than this. I know it’s like 8:30 in the morning, but my cousins and I are eating like it’s dinner and I would not have it any other way.

Later on, my cousin Jack, Aunt One’s youngest son (out of five kids), who lives in Vancouver, takes Mason, my youngest cousin, and I on a bicycle ride to 7-11. For those of you that don’t know, 7-11 in Taiwan is basically the most awesome thing ever. We weave through traffic like a crazy bicycle gang, riding basically in the middle of a semi-busy street against traffic. The bicycle I am riding is literally still in the packaging for the upper half so I basically look ridiculous. Jack has Mason holding onto him for dear life on a bicycle whose brakes are not just non- functional – they are now non-existent.

When I visited Taiwan in the fourth grade, my grandpa and I once took a moped ride down the street to see the ocean. Less than one block away we got hit by a slow moving pick-up truck and got knocked off the moped. No helmets or anything. Landed on hard concrete. Luckily neither of us were hurt. My grandpa just picked the moped up like nothing had happened and we just kept riding. Didn’t even say anything to the driver of the truck who got out to check on us. In retrospect, it is kind of absurd how he did not even flinch and I am pretty sure I was crying like a little bitch the whole time. 

Anyways, back to 7-11. We go in, everyone grabs a bottle of milk tea and the kids go crazy with some potato chips and candy. Another dangerous weave through some back alleyways (I am pretty sure we rode through someone’s actual house) and we were back home. The milk tea comes in a bottle like a soda bottle and tastes like the nectar of the heavens. All in all, it was an eventful morning. 

Landing in Taipei

Just landed in Taipei. What a flight. I had been planning to get some work done for a very long essay that I had to write for school. But instead, I watched Frozen, slept for a few hours, then watch Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings and then half of the second movie as well. 

The waiting area outside of the security area is just as I remembered it a number of years ago. I see my dad and his brother there to pick me up. I recognize him immediately because he is wearing this Fremont Youth Basketball Club (FYBC) hat that he always wears. So I am sitting here now waiting for my cousins to arrive from California.

One of the first things I see is a vending machine for Hey Song. If you haven't heard of it, it's this sarsaparilla drink that is very popular here and I always seem to have a few cans of it (and Taiwan Beer) in my refrigerator at home. I drink an ill-advised can of it really quickly (it's about 6 in the morning here and people are giving me weird looks) and I'm off.

Flying out

My trip begins at JFK airport in New York City. As typical of my style, I arrive paranoid of being late and way too early. I haven’t flown out of the United States since high school, a trip to Japan with my family. So here I am, waiting for a 16+ hour direct flight to Taipei, Taiwan. From there, it is roughly a 2.5 hour drive to my grandfather’s home in Fangyuan Township, outside of one of the major cities in central Taiwan, Changhwa.

The last time that I had gone to Taiwan was the summer before I started high school. That trip was for the colloquially termed “Love Boat” trip that almost every Taiwanese teenager goes on. If you haven’t heard of it, Love Boat is a 3-week trip, typically for high school kids of Taiwanese-American descent, that takes you down and up the island of Taiwan. You start in Taipei and take a bus south through the major sites of the island with other kids your age. During the 3 weeks you make a lot of friends and do a lot of dumb and memorable things. I don’t know what the actual name of the program is, but everyone knows it as “Love Boat” because a lot of people fall in love during the trip and end up as far as marrying each other.

It’s kind of funny, but in retrospect it seems like a huge Taiwanese propaganda effort to make you feel like Taiwan is the best country ever. If you know me pretty well, you know that this has obviously worked on me (because Taiwan is the greatest country ever, duh). I am still friends on Facebook with one my closest friends from that trip, Steven, and remember a vague story of putting trash cans in an elevator in some hotel somewhere with him, the details of which I do not remember now. But I know that at the time I thought it was hilarious and there were propane torches and butterfly knives involved.

Anyways, back to the here and now. You’ll probably notice through the course of this blog, I am going to do a lot of reminiscing and Taiwanese propagandizing. Sorry I am not sorry. The terminal at JFK is full of people traveling all over the world: Seoul, Rome, Istanbul, Jamaica, Paris, and, of course, Taipei, Taiwan. I know I am at the correct gate because both of the people sitting next to me in the waiting area are wearing “SARS” masks and yelling at their children in Mandarin to put on their jackets or risk dying of cold.

I am not sure what to expect from this trip. I already know that there will be cousins there that I had never met or even known about. My dad tells me that several local traditions revolve around the importance of the eldest son of my grandfather’s eldest son, leading the family to a new beginning. Coincidentally, I am that grandson.