My Brother's in Taiwan

From Kerry (10/23/07):

Dear friends and family,

Greetings from Taiwan! Since all of you may not be in the loop, I will review the major events of the last month or so.

First, in early September I turned in the revised version of my dissertation to my committee. I hope to hear from them in the next couple of months, although if it takes them any where near as long to read it as it took for me to write it, it will be a few years. Still, it¡¦s a major relief to have the ball in their court.

Second, I have started my new, one-year position as Associate Director of Comparative Religion and Culture with the Global College, Long Island University. I have eleven students, an assistant, and local coordinating staff for our eight-month journey through Taiwan, Thailand, India, and Turkey.

So what¡¦s new? Well, we just survived Typhoon Krosa, a category 4 that hit us directly (we were in the eye on Saturday). We are all alright, although some leaky windows meant that my room, my assistant¡¦s room, and one of our student¡¦s rooms got flooded. I use the term ¡§we¡¨ in a loose sense because, actually, I wasn¡¦t there. I had flown back to New York for a conference and the typhoon hit while I was gone. My poor assistant (a 5 foot nothing wonder(-ful) woman) had to get up in the middle of the night, move her stuff away from the windows, lay down towels, break into my room, take care of my stuff, and calm our pack of 19/20 year-olds who were either inappropriately excited (¡§let¡¦s go out there!¡¨) or simply terrified. All I did was get the email saying everyone was fine.

And me, I¡¦m quite fine. The program is very intense, but it¡¦s great having such deep contact with the students. I have time to sit down with each one for an hour every two weeks, and we can go over their writing in great detail. Of course, being in a place with just twelve people you know, with eleven of them being basically teenagers, is trying. I think I¡¦m handling it pretty well, but my assistant is taking it pretty hard. She does all the logistical work: scheduling, transportation, budgeting, etc., so all she gets from students is complaints with little of the substantive contact that I get. And surprise, surprise, sometimes teenagers aren¡¦t fully appreciative of all that¡¦s being done for them.

But hey, I¡¦m in Taiwan. We went to a temple the other day ¡V my first time in a Chinese temple ¡V and it was a different world. Taiwan itself, in some ways, is a different world, but inside the temple it¡¦s a different one altogether. And it¡¦s very challenging figuring out what¡¦s going on. But it¡¦s a wonderful problem to have. How can I complain?

Alright, enough chit chat. Below you will find a journal entry that I wrote as an example for my students. They write these kinds of things to start, and then we move into more analytic, informed stuff (at least that¡¦s the idea ¡V many of us are somewhat overwhelmed at our continuing ignorance). I miss you all and look forward to seeing you sooner rather than later.

Love,

Kerry

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Arrival at Fu Jen Catholic University:

So much to notice: the trees with the finger-like roots and the hanging vines, the students wearing shorts and looking very much like Americans, the buildings looking like the capitalist equivalent of Stalinist architecture: large boxlike shapes meant to speak modernity, one would think, but they don¡¦t age well. There are stains on everything here. Not blotches, but tints and hues of dirt. You can smell the pollution in the air. Outside the university I saw several people wearing masks.

We walked up onto the elevated crosswalk and watched the swarms of scooters flowing through traffic. Megan mentions how this is the greatest danger we will face: traffic (We saw Matt later on: a side-view mirror had struck his arm and you could still see flecks of paint). Crossing the stream of traffic was difficult: the scooters were hard to judge. After awhile we decided to get away from the traffic and we headed down a side street. At first I thought this would quickly become a quiet and dead little street: residences all closed up as everyone is gone to work for the day. But no, it was just before nine and we found out that the street-level of all these buildings were businesses. Not retail stores, not service economy, but workshops. What were they doing? So hard to tell sometimes. We saw some kind of scooter/automotive repair. We saw one shop with parts strewn along the floor that looked like they might have come from washer/dryers. Another had a row of spools twirling something that looked like thread, but there was no clothing to be seen. We even saw one shop with automated manufacturing. The machines were ancient, by such standards ¡V maybe 70s era. But in a shop hardly bigger than the average American garage robotic arms swung and plunged and tilted and spat, swung and plunged and tilted and spat ¡V plastic. Plastic what? The pieces looked very small and flimsy, maybe t-shaped, but short on the vertical part. The arm was dropping them into a big cardboard box lined with a plastic garbage bag.

It was an OSHA nightmare. No safety controls, no apparent concern for pollution, nothing to keep kids from wandering in off the street and sticking their hands in the machinery. The plastic shop gave me a headache and the slightest buzz ¡V quite unwelcome given the source. Nobody paid much attention to us, but we didn¡¦t take offense. The whole place reeked of an absolute lack of concern for presentation. Every shop ¡V every shop ¡V exposed itself as carelessly as a teenager¡¦s messy room. Cardboard boxes strewn about, stuff overflowing onto floors and leaning against shelves. You looked right into the innards of capitalism and it said¡K nothing. It wasn¡¦t speaking, it was all about doing, making ¡V not showing. American capitalism, at least as I know it, is all about image. It¡¦s becoming clearer to me now how I don¡¦t know capitalism at all ¡V because I only know the consumer end. All the times I saw ¡§made in Taiwan¡¨ I envisioned massive factories with people sitting in orderly rows. Now I see the twisting streets and alleys of Hsinchuang, multitudes of garages, everyone working in the mess and clutter of a casual six-to-ten person workshop ¡V just getting it done, manufacturing pieces for some vast, complicated puzzle of a product that will leave the outbox of these chaotic little offices and eventually make it into the slick advertisements and clean, inviting display cases of the world market.