Independence Day!

Rollin'

 

What we tend to think of as “grilling” is virtually nonexistent here, but there is a form of Taiwanese grilling that’s done on small Hibachi grills. The general idea is the same, but instead of hamburgers and hotdogs, they grill shrimp, squid and thinly sliced pieces of beef and pork, which are brushed with soy sauce and other spices. Instead of pasta salad they have noodles. Instead of beer and whiskey they have Taiwan beer and Kaoliang.

 

As usual, my good pal Grant wanted to go big for America. This fourth of July he opted for the more American form of grilling and rented a proper gas grill to host a barbecue at his pad. I had to work eight hours on the 4th, but I powered through and headed over to his place around five o’clock.

 

My roommate, Trevor, and I split a bottle of Absolut, some Sprite and some cranberry juice for mixers. Grant had also rented Top Gun and Independence Day to play in the background of the party to set a certain rhythm to the whole event; a special ambience is required for this holiday when you’re far from the shores of your home.

 

***

 

Sometime later I saw my Taiwanese friend, Melvin, in the living room watching Independence Day.

 

“Have you ever seen this, Mel?” I asked. He said that he hadn’t. “It’s a great movie. It’s actually the story of the American Revolution,” I drunkenly explained. “It’s an allegory, you see? The aliens are the British.”

 

He just nodded and looked at me like I was crazy.

 

“Bill Pullman is like George Washington,” I went on.

 

“Who’s Paul Revere?” A kid whose name I can’t recall asked. I looked at him incredulously.

 

“Hell yeah, we have Pullman here,” I answered, looking around for Grant— Bill Pullman just so happens to be Grant’s second cousin. “It’s the fourth of July!” I said. “Of course we’ve got a Pullman!” I didn’t see Grant anywhere. “Ah… he’s around here somewhere,” I explained, genuinely concerned that I couldn’t find our Pullman.

 

“No, I said: Who is Paul Revere,” he clarified.

 

“Oh,” I laughed. “I thought you asked, ‘Is there a Pullman here?’ Well, Revere has got to be Jeff Goldblum then,” I explained. “Think about it, he’s driving like hell from New York to D.C. to tell everyone about the alien invasion. The aliens are coming! The aliens are coming! Bill Pullman is Washington,” I told him.

 

“No way,” he said, “Pullman is Jefferson. Will Smith is Washington.” I thought about what he said for a moment.

 

“You know, you’re right!” I agreed. “He’s out there flying jets and spaceships, crossing the Delaware and taking the surprise attack to the aliens on their own mothership. Will Smith is definitely Washington.”

 

I looked back to Melvin. I could see he didn’t truly understand the weight of this revelation, but it didn’t matter. The important bit was coming up. Like some kind of strange social-magnetism, the twenty plus people at the party gravitated towards the living room just as Bill Pullman began his epic predawn speech at the climax of the film:

 

 

“Today, we celebrate our Independence Day!”

 

The crowd raised their glasses and cheered at that moment. I didn’t quite catch the reaction of the various German, Taiwanese and Canadian people that might’ve been at the party, but really, it didn’t matter. After all, this was our day.

 

When the movie ended, we trickled outside to light sparklers in the park. I was anxious and took the lead, lighting mine with some difficulty, then using it as the catalyst for others. Before long, the park was illuminated by the twinkling wands of white light. I thought of my friends back home and what I’d be doing had I been there. I thought of the fourths that have passed, drinking and eating with good friends; finding someone sober enough to haul a van full of us down to the University football field to watch the fireworks; laying on my back in the grass as the incandescent bursts lit the sky, sending an artificial thunder across my small town. I missed those days.

 

But celebrating America’s independence as a weary expatriate, in a country that has various factions struggling for its own freedom from China, was a unique experience. Then, of course, there was the inevitable meditation on what freedom really means— true freedom— a thought that came to me as I strolled down the street with a beer in my hand, hopped into a cab with an open container, and set off down the road, heading for the bar. But that’s a meditation for another day.

 

Today, in this year of two-thousand and nine, I was proud to be an American.

The Sha Tin Racecourse

“She put nine-hundred dollars on the fifth horse in the sixth race, I think his name was Chips Ahoy! Came in six lengths ahead, we spent the whole next week getting high.” – The Hold Steady, Chips Ahoy!

 

The Sha Tin Racecourse

 

Somewhere near the base of the massive Mid-Levels escalator system on Hong Kong island, is a restaurant called Ivan The Kozak where they serve Russian and Ukrainian food. Across from The Kozak is a tiny cigar shop. It was there that we decided to buy something to smoke at the races. It only seemed appropriate to pick up a few Cuban cigars before heading out to the race track. It was, after all, a celebration of sorts. So we bought three Romeo Y Julietas and some proper cigar-lighting matches– long wooden things that wouldn’t corrupt the flavor, or so we were told. Lighting a Cuban cigar with a cheap lighter is akin to ripping a bowl with a Zippo— it’s just not proper etiquette and it tastes horrendous.

 

***

 

The Sha Tin Racecourse is a fine and modern thing. It possesses all the grandeur, spectacle and promise that one would expect from a place where a horse can change a man’s fortune in the span of a single lap. Situated out in the New Territories, Sha Tin lacks the prime, central location that Hong Kong’s Happy Valley Racecourse enjoys. But it is no less exciting when the horses charge out of the gate and the people begin to cheer with a thirst for victory that only potentially massive payouts can evoke. 

 

Wandering inside, I began to wonder: who were these people? These hardened faces– their intense, stony eyes fixed on charts and TV screens that displayed esoteric odds that I would never understand. They were faces that conveyed the angst that comes before every capricious affair with Lady Luck. These where the men who courted her; men who believed in their hearts that with a great enough comprehension of these numbers, and a little grace from the gods, they could charm The Lady into their beds, for just long enough.

 

The natives huddled beneath these monitors, consulting their betting slips as the numbers changed; they appeared to be in a state of almost constant flux, and how these people maintained a grasp on the situation, I did not know. I must’ve been the only one not looking at the screens, and this worried me because I desperately needed a handle on this scene. And I wanted to be a part of it; I wanted to understand what it took to bet on the ponies and win– to triple a meager month’s paycheck on the back of a thoroughbred.

 

My good friend, Nick, is a Kentucky-boy and therefore imbued with an innate knowledge of pony-gambling. He attends The Derby annually. This is his turf. These are his people (albeit Chinese) and he moves in their midst comfortably.

 

The Sha Tin Racecourse lacks the decadence and depravity of The Derby, but I was sure it was just as easy to lose a fortune, especially if you didn’t know what you were doing, which I didn’t. However, with Nick’s help I marked some betting slips, taking a moment to consider the horses’ names and ages, their placements and the standings of their jockeys. This was information I could wrap my head around, but I suspected it wouldn’t be of much help in the long run. Then I went to the counter to place the bets.

 

Act cool, act natural, I told myself. Like all gambling institutions, I knew these sharks could smell a sucker. I wasn’t sure how this would work, but I felt it was important to place these bets with full confidence, so I ambled up to the window and gave the surly Chinese woman behind the glass a big grin— all teeth.

 

                “Hi there, ma’am,” I blurted out. “I’d like to place a bet.” My twisted grin said I wasn’t simply gambling, I somehow knew the score. I was sure she’d seen that look before. Many times. She took my betting slips, scanned them into a computer, took my colorful Hong Kong money and gave me the slip back.

 

It was easy, of course. Any fool with a fistful of Hong Kong Dollars can place a bet on a pony, but with names like “Blessed Brethren” and “Solar Energy,” I felt that my horses could not lose. Our bets were placed, so my friends and I went outside to wait for the start. The crowd was tense and huddled beneath awnings and umbrellas as it drizzled slightly. We climbed the bleachers and hopped a hand-rail that divided the lower, uncovered seats from the higher seats beneath the large canopy.

 

With the race set to begin, we took the cigars out of the small canisters and lit them up with some difficulty from the wind. At last, the cigars were lit and the horses were off. I clutched my bets in one hand and the Cuban in the other, cheering and yelling, “Make me rich, dammit!”

 

Alas, I’m just a simple teacher and had placed bets just large enough to make it interesting. I wouldn’t get to come home to Taipei and quit my day job this time.

Notes From The Eastern Capital Of The Western Empire

“La, La, La-la, wait ’til I get my money right…” – Kanye West, Can’t Tell Me Nothing

 

 

I guess it all began with opium. 

 

Not for us, of course, but for Hong Kong. In the late 1830’s, the Chinese demand for silver was high and they began to buy it all up. This forced Britain to purchase the precious metal from continental Europe to meet the rising demand, resulting in a massive trade deficit. As their silver stocks plummeted, The Empire began to devise new commodities to export into China… but they needed something as irresistible as silver. 

 

The Brits sailed into Hong Kong harbor with a boatload of opium produced in their Indian colonies, peddling smack like desperate pushers. The Chinese government caught on late and by the time they tried to put an end to the British drug-trafficking, there were something like 2 million Chinese already addicted. Britain’s rational for war was simple economics– if the public demands opium, what governing body should stand in their way? Certainly not the Qing Dynasty. 

 

Supply & Demand. 

 

Crushed beneath the might of The Empire, the Qing Dynasty ceded control of Hong Kong and the outlying territories to the British, thus opening China to the free trade of almost anything, including a heinous amount of opium. For the next 160 years The Empire ruled Hong Kong as a “Crown Colony,” installing a powdered-wig-toting governor to rule for Queen, for God and for country. 

 

It wasn’t until nineteen-hundred and ninety-seven that the United Kingdom’s lease on Hong Kong, Kowloon and the surrounding territories was finally up, and they reluctantly handed it all back to the Chinese. If the sun had finally set on the British Empire, then it had most certainly risen in The East. 

 

What began as an integral port for The British Empire’s nefarious ambitions in The Far East ended up becoming a monster-metropolis in the same vein as New York and London. 

 

Twelve years after the United Kingdom handed the city back to the Chinese, my friends and I sat in the seventh-floor suite of an apartment building in Taipei, sipping French-press coffee and taking rips off the chillum at six in the morning while we waited for the taxi to pick us up. Then it was straight out to the Taoyuan International Airport where a plane waited to take us to Hong Kong, The Eastern Capital of the Western Empire, to see it with our own eyes. 

 

*** 

 

Hong Kong stands beside cities like London and New York in my mind; they are places where I have felt that I was at the center of a powerful and dangerous current. Strange, tense vibrations flow through these places, like a herd on the verge of stampede– and I’ve never fully trusted massive cities because of this. That is the only way to describe what it’s like standing at the epicenter, when you finally find it; that place where everything suddenly comes into sharp focus and you feel the giddy, nervous excitement of exploring a new place, and the inevitable sense of liberation and the unknown. 

 

Because of the simple fact that it’s an island, Hong Kong has had to build up instead of out, making it the world’s most vertical city. Sequestered by skyscrapers and stone-drunk on good beer, I felt a nauseating mix of awe and vertigo, staring up at these mammoth, illuminated structures. And it was in this maze of concrete and glass, I felt, that I was beginning to get a handle on this trip. Somewhere on a plaza in the middle of the financial district of Hong Kong island, at sometime around three in the morning, I was sure we’d found it: the heart of the thing– the legacy of The Crown, if you will.  

 

 

It wasn’t something as purely rotten as a colonial legacy. It was more of an acute sense of time and place, and the realization that this world is the way it is because of very archaic reasons. Since that day the British sailed into Hong Kong harbor with their ships loaded with opium, the course of history in this region was forever changed.

 

The influences are everywhere, like a brand on the hide of the city– double-decker buses, treacherous drivers on the left-side of the road, names like “Victoria’s Peak” and “Queen’s Rd.”– the unmistakable mark of The Crown is etched on every surface. But it’s clearer nowhere than this plaza out in the financial district. 

 

When the sun sets and there is no light obscured by the smog to play tricks on the eyes, and you’ve had just the right amount of drink, you can look up at the skyscrapers from any business plaza on Hong Kong island and make out that faint banner blowing in the wind. Squint your eyes and look west and you’ll be able to read the words on it:

 

Globalization.

 

It should’ve been obvious during the day as the businessmen bustled around these cavernous office buildings and desolate plazas– Hell, I swilled Starbucks beside them– but for whatever reason, I hadn’t seen it, or chose not to, until I was laying flat on my back in the center of the plaza, ripped on shots of tequila and heavy, micro-brewed beer. Who were these figures? These well-dressed gears that made the whole thing spin? They were Chinese and foreigners, alike, I was sure of that– the businessmen and their cosmopolitan ilk united beneath the almighty dollar sign, and who could blame them? I felt the crinkled, paper HKD in my pocket– that colorful monopoly-money and the heavy, serrated coins that weighed my pockets down, and I realized that, politics aside, making money is the shared ideology of The East & West— that common ground that we currently find ourselves tip-toeing across.  

 

Hong Kong, like New York, is another marvelous testament to the guiding principles of Western society: Colonialism, Capitalism & Consumerism. In more or less that order. 

 

It should be stated, for the record, that in Hong Kong high-end counterfeit designer goods like Rolex, Prada and Coach are readily available on the black market. In addition to being openly accosted myself, I’ve heard first-hand stories from friends and colleagues, whose names I won’t mention, being lured into shady alley-apartments to take their pick from almost immaculately reproduced counterfeit designer goods. But it begs the question: is it really that important to have a fake Coach hand-bag if you can’t afford the real thing? And if so, why?

 

But it would be hypocritical of me to pen some kind of screed against Capitalist values or Globalization. Hell, it’s all good if you’re one of the players, which I am, in some vague sense of the word— I had come to Asia to exploit the niche market of teaching English, and I had carved out some kind of existence with it. I certainly wasn’t getting rich like some of these suits that crossed these massive plazas, checking their watches as they went, but I wasn’t starving either. And I felt that “getting by” and having enough money to travel here and there was an end that justified the means, however wretched a means they would turn out to be.

  

This is the legacy of The Empire and the very reason that New York and Hong Kong will always be a kind of bastard half-sisters. It is also the reason that it is not difficult to have a great time in either of these cities, provided you can afford it.

 

 

In the morning the sun crept sullenly from the Western skyline, making its way up through the lingering layer of pollution, revealing Hong Kong in a sickening light. The smog hung over the harbor in a thick mist. My pockets were light from gambling on ponies and I coughed up the taste of Cuban cigars and booze as we boarded the Star Ferry. Water sloshed against the hull when the boat left Kowloon and the deck lurched from side-to-side. Convinced I was going to lose it, I slid on my cheap, knock-off Ray-Ban Wayfarers  and tried to fix my bleary eyes on something steady: there, maybe three rows down, was an older Asian gentleman wearing a denim Hogwarts jacket.

The Sun Rises In The East

“Sun is shining, the weather is sweet, make you want to move, your dancing feet.” – Bob Marley, Sun Is Shining

 

I had forgotten a pillow and the track-jacket stuffed with t-shirts, socks and boxers wasn’t working too well; I found myself waking up every-so-often with a terrible zipper imprint across my face, like a set of gruesome stitches. When the sun finally began to rise, I decided to do the same.

Our Campsite

It’s rare that Nick and I get a Saturday off, so my friends and I wanted to make the best of a full weekend. We rented a car Saturday morning and set out on a road trip to Hualien to go camping. With no real plan aside from finding a place to camp, we packed in all the provisions we needed and took off. We were winging it, but we had high-spirits and all the momentum we needed to carry us across the winding roads of Taiwan’s Eastern coast.

 

After much deliberation at an aboriginal village, putting Grant’s nacent Chinese skills to the test, a helpful native pointed us in the right direction. When we arrived at the campsite he suggested, we found the grounds deserted, just as I had hoped; part of the purpose of the trip was to flee the kinetic streets of Taipei.

 

We spent the day exploring the mouth of the Sanjan river, which meanders through a place dubbed, “Little Taroko.” This neighbor to the famous Taroko Gorge doesn’t have a road inside, so it has to be explored on foot. Only the intrepid “river-tracers,” equipped with special water boots, helmets, wetsuits and life jackets passed us while we lounged around one of the clear, blue lagoons on the river. Lean, tanned, aboriginal river-kids flipped off the rocks at a deep lagoon down stream from us. Yearning to escape my job in the capital city and become a river-kid myself, I followed their example, scaling the rocks and leaping from cliffs into the cool, pure lagoons, letting out battle-cries in mid-air.

Blue Lagoon

When the sun began to get low and the heat died down, we returned to our camp by the ocean and set up the tents. Grant and I collected drift wood for the fire while Nick and Emma handled dinner duty, or as Grant put it, the Italians & women in the kitchen while the Irish guys do the manual labor.

 

Emma is picky with her hotdogs, so I bought Hebrew Nationals from the foreigner market in Tien Mu. We cooked up “the Heebs,” along with canned-corn and some sweet potatoes we bought at a road-side stand in Hualien. Then we had some beers around the campfire and watched the fishermen out by the water. I used to joke about “night fishing” with my friends back in Massachusetts, but these Taiwanese fishermen went out at dusk with blue lights at the ends of their fishing poles and took it seriously.

 

I played a few songs on the guitar while we drank, then wandered down to the water and played Chicken with the breakers for a while. We poked at a thoroughly cooked sweet potato and ate it off pieces of driftwood for dessert, then got sleepy. After a long day on the river and a few six packs of Kirin, we retired to the tents and passed out.

 

The Sunrises In The East

I quietly crawled out of my tent with a zipper imprint across my face, rubbed my eyes and looked at the rising sun. I found my flip-flops, slipped them on and wandered down to the beach to watch the sun come up over the Pacific. The waves were calm and the fishermen were already beginning the day’s work. I sat on a rock by the cooling campfire and took it all in.

 

I sat facing West, greeting the sun as it rose; China was not out there beyond the horizon, the sun had set somewhere over L.A. hours before I awoke. Looking out at the wide expanse of the Pacific, watching the sun rise from the water, I figured I was probably one of the first people to see the dawn, and no one else would ever see that particular sunrise again. In some way it was special, sitting there on that quiet beach, feeling the warmth on my face as the sun got higher. Before that moment, I had always held the belief that seeing a sunrise was wrong: it meant I was up too early or had stayed up too late. But this wasn’t the dirty, shameful feeling that comes with stumbling out of a club at dawn and seeing that judgmental sun peeking out from behind the skyline; this was Sunday, this was somehow holy, or at the very least, natural. It felt right.

 

After a while, I wandered back to the tent and laid down again, waiting for my friends to wake up. We made coffee with Grant’s beloved French Press, packed up camp and then set out, heading into Taroko Gorge. We decided to drive straight across the mountain range that runs down the East coast of Taiwan, making for a long and winding journey across the geographical-backbone of the island. In our Ford Escape, we traversed the vertebrae of those mountains, exiting somewhere near Yilan. Then it was a simply a straight-shot down the express-way aorta, back into frantic, pumping heart that is Taipei.

Hemingway ♥’s To Fly

“I wish the world was flat like the old days, then I could travel just by folding a map, no more airplanes or speed trains or freeways, there’d be no distance that could hold us back.” – Death Cab For Cutie, The New Year

 

A result of being an avid traveler is my morbid fascination with aircraft disasters. On Monday, an Air France Airbus 330 went down somewhere over that lonely stretch of Atlantic between Rio de Janeiro and Paris. As the flawed machine and the poor, doomed souls that inhabited it plunged towards that great ocean, I was thinking of a home thousands of miles across another expanse of water and the trip I will take to cross it in two month’s time. With a thirteen-hour transpacific flight and another six-hour domestic flight in my near future, I find my thoughts lingering on this grim topic, as they often do before an epic journey.

 

It is inevitable. Whenever I find myself sitting there beside some polite stranger, the lot of us packed in like sardines, once again bound for distant horizons, I can’t help but think of the different ways to go out and the one very specific way that’s waiting for me somewhere out there. I don’t dwell on it, but it has a tendency of popping up when I least expect it, like a red light on the dashboard console. I’m willing to acknowledge that man’s faith in his machines might be akin to hubris. Of course, I know the odds are in my favor, but I’ve never had a mind for numbers. And whenever those jet engines fire and my head touches the back of the seat, my imagination can’t help but soar. It’s not fear per se, just a sweaty-palmed consideration of the marvel that is modern aviation.

 

I had touched on this topic back in October 2007, when I wrote about being stoned on a flight from Amsterdam to Switzerland in the summer of ‘06.

 

                “Ascending into the clear blue sky, I felt every jolt from that terribly marvelous flying machine in the pit of my stomach. But I wasn’t scared. I had the indomitable resolve of a travelling man: if my fate was to crash, at least it would be on the go. At that moment, I feared only a stationary death. There was an unseen force, like a strong trade wind in my sails, urging me in a new direction. And I had to go. I put all my faith in that flying machine and its sexy blonde crew and its funny Dutch pilots, and it was exhilarating, like rounding the first big dive of a massive, rickety rollercoaster. We were off…”

 

Three years later, I still feel the same way. Before I left for Asia, I told my mother that if anything happened to me, it was alright because I was doing what I wanted to do with my life. They were lofty words that helped mask my own apprehensions about starting a new life abroad, but adventure was calling and safety was not certain. I felt defiant, like I was meeting The Fates head-on, riding toward them at full-gallop, swinging my pen. As fatalistic as a samurai, I told myself that I wouldn’t be hindered by fear of the unknown and that if I was to perish in transit, so be it. A little Hemingway-esque bravado in the face of the unknown never hurt. My one true fear was becoming what Hunter Thompson called a “failed seeker,” and if I didn’t search I would fail by default, so I had to go at all costs.

 

Speaking of Hemingway, he survived two seperate plane crashes in Africa; not commercial airlines mind you, but crashes nonetheless. I found this old New York Times article detailing the incidents and the trademark Hemingway bravado. In it, the reporter writes:

 

                “His head was swathed in bandages and his arm was injured, but the novelist, who is 55 years old, quipped: “My luck, she is running very good.”

                  He was carrying a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin. With him was his wife, the former Mary Welsh. She had two cracked ribs and was limping as Mr. Hemingway helped her from an automobile that brought them here from Butiaba, 170 miles away.

                  Although he declined an offer to fly out of the jungle after his second crash yesterday, Mr. Hemingway said with a grin that he would fly again as soon as he had found another plane.”

 

He was carrying a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin.

 

How great is that?