meaning in the moving design

Every few years, I try to teach myself egolessness. I try to play the humble storyteller. On occasion, my ego will ask me if I'm a good one, and I stumble and fret about that for a while....
And then I try to remember a lesson i learned from a friend a long time ago, probably one of the wisest things I've ever learned- I am ridiculous. We all are. The faster we are able to discern what to take seriously in life and what to be playful about, the happier we'll be. After this, I guffah a bit and feel immensely better about myself. guffah.

So, with the self-conscious bravado of egolessness (and because I was too lazy to re-edit my guy and include this bit), I want to paint the scene for you. And I'll wave it like i just dont care...


The Prologue
I thought that having travelled around Asia a lot, coming to Taiwan would be easier. Not easy, but easier. I was wrong. Despite the long list of countries that I have been to, I think I only experienced my first true bout of culture shock here, during my first week in Taiwan.

I went out to teach at a school Miaoli (aka buttfuck nowhere), and they put me up for 5 days in a house where no one spoke English, and where I was consequently avoided like the plague. I didn't have a car or a scooter (or a key to the house I was living in, for that matter), and had to be driven to and from the school. Neither the school nor the house was in Miaoli city (which was really just a town), and both were about as lively as say, ingersoll, ontario. I didn't speak enough Chinese to know my own address, order my own food, or even tell my roommates not to lock the door because I couldn't get back in. When people realized I couldn't speak Chinese, they initially treated me with annoyance, then pity, and finally avoidance. By looking Chinese but not being able to speak it, I had lost face. Most of them looked embarassed for me, so they decided it was more dignified not to interact with me. I had no one to speak to besides the kids that hated me, and the relatively nice but quiet bosslady.

This feeling of total alienation stayed with me until I came back to Taipei. Things got better, and then got worse again. When I was in Hualien, it was the same kind of reaction from the locals- annoyance, pity, avoidance. It's also a small, somewhat backwards town that tries to pretend it's a city- isolated and isolating, very homogenous culture, very little english. There were maybe 20 foreigners living in Hualien (all white), but I found it hard to break into their clique and hardly ever saw them. Having grown up in a place as diverse as Toronto, I was beginning to go a little stir crazy from the monoculture- everyone looked the same, spoke the same... glared the same. Pont is, this is a town where you'd bat an eye or two if you saw a white boy, and do a double-triple take if you saw a foreigner who wasn't white. And for someone like me, who dressed/spoke/acted like a foreigner but looked like one of them?
... Annoyance, pity, avoidance.

This is when I met Farouk and Cameron, while I was in Hualien. So duh, part of the story is about me too. I really did ask them the assanine question "do you speak English". because besides the new quiet bosslady, and the new kids that hated me, I still didn't have anyone to talk to. I felt like I was in a really small room filled with all these lost conversations, and someone had opened the door and all my words just came spilling out. I was frustrated with Taiwan, frustrated with racism, and looking for people to commiserate with. Oh, and terribly homesick.

That's it. I've said too much. Again.