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.

The bus is rolling like a ship. I have my tunes turned up high and I am happy to stare out at my window-sized world, blissfully lobotomized. Neko Case is crooning in my ear, the sexiest song ever made, and you'll be in my arms tonight, there's no need to cry...

I'm on the East Coast highway. The road snakes up, down and sometimes through the mountains in dizzying hairpin turns before flattening out to hug the ocean. Beyond the guardrail, the earth just falls away, and I find myself staring down into the crevice of two massive cliffs, hundreds of meters high.

All along the coast, there are B&Bs and boutique hotels. and remnants of once-weres. scraped out cement towers, abandoned to the elements. a squatter's paradise. The zoning laws here are either non-existent or meant to ridicule the rich. Large, 3-storey mansions and industrial factories practically sit side by side, plumes of smoke kiss the sunlit balconies a throaty good morning.

Construction materials line the coast- blocks of cement cut out in strange shapes, abandoned on the shoreline. They're not ugly, just a little curious-looking. some look like push pins, some like letters spelling out a secret message. The ocean's Golden Voyager...

I scan the internet for a couch and I find one. I meet a South African man from Capetown. We share a 7-11 beer over talk about apartheid, rebellion, armed revolution, Castro, Palestine, Tibet. And I think to myself, yeah, this must be why we're all here. So we can sit around and talk about home in a way we can't when we're there. So we can hear all about the exotic corners of the world, with the familiarity, love and longing etched into the voice of the storyteller. so we can shake out all the gold in our lives as we marvel at someone else's stash, and collectively give thanks.

I'm back where I started. I've written this before. many years ago.