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.