My Life as Adoga

I am enjoying another East Coast Driving Holiday with Joe. Yesterday we drove from Hualien to Taitung between the mountain ranges. Today we will drive the Coastal road until reaching highway 30 that goes West through the mountains and meets up again with the valley highway back to Hualien. Tomorrow morning we have an early morning train back to Taipei. The scenery is beautiful, but the highway has been re-designed so that the emergency lanes are now motorcycle lanes, and stopping to take photos is discouraged. And though Joe promised not to gripe when I want to stop or explore someplace, he still managed to slip in a passive aggressive complaint: "I don't like to take too many photos, myself," or "The way back to the highway is if you turn right here." That's OK. If I was allowed to explore as much as I liked, we'd be heading West instead of South, and end up on the West Coast! But I do miss being in the mountains. This trip has forced me to accept...

With that ever-present goal of achieving productivity over the summer break, I spent some time this afternoon on the HSR to Kaohsiung composing an essay I want to send to the Taipei Times. Joe further encouraged me to organize a forum of important business leaders to speak about the relationship between reading fiction and success in business & life.  But where to begin. Joe says I should start with David's wife, whose boss is a major public advocate for the arts. This sounds very doable. How to begin?

One of the curses of university life here seems to be that you can never just focus on your teaching more research. There always has to be some sort of contest or competition  which requires tons of paperwork, or there's a report to be written and documentation to be gathered. Careers seem to be built upon publication, called "research." True success in this requires time, lots of time, for reading. But even basic responsibility of class preparation makes it difficult or impossible to find enough time to read as much as you need for a truly successful research endeavor. Those who succeed seem to do so on the backs of their teaching assistants. I wonder who suffers in this case. The teaching assistants who are forced into so much extra work, or the students who must do without an experienced and highly motivated professor?

Even after two decades I can't get used to the Hello Harrassment that still happens, albeit less frequently. J can't understand my anger, and probably never will. "They're just saying 'hello.'" No, they are not. A greeting is an extension of one's private self to at least momentarily encompass another. Delivered by a gang of hoodlum teens or construction workers on the roof of a far off building site, or even a truck driver passing at high speed, it is an assault of sorts. It is a hello thrown out for the entertainment of others, a hoot hoot aimed at a caged monkey with the added attraction of knowing this monkey understands. There is no desire to share the world, only the distracting pleasure of making a noise at a person who you do not view as an equal. It is a noise that says "outsider" and "freak," that reminds all listening that this passerby is not one of us.

While visiting Taipei's "Bird Street" this weekend I came across this very young Macaw, a bird badly in need of some affection. Such a beautiful creature, but I can neither afford to own a parrot nor would I want to have a pet that would outlive me by so many years.

The Pingpu aborigines keep running up against hard brick walls in their attempts at becoming an officially recognized tribe. But hats off to them as they keep trying anyway. The first official snub came in June 2009, when the Council of Indigenous Peoples (CIP) rejected their application. Currently, the Taiwan government-level council only recognizes 14 "indigenous groups," or tribes. The council said that the Pingpu do not meet the criteria to be officially recognized as Aborigines according to the Aboriginal Identity Act (原住民身分法), and that the then-Provincial Government of Taiwan did not make any mistakes in its call for Aborigines to register their identity in the 1950s and 1960s, “so, the Pingpu cannot legally be granted Aboriginal status.” The Pingpu claim they never heard about the registration at the time; they had either failed to be notified by mail, or did not understand that the call for registration applied to them because the government at the time use...

Professor Lei Li-fen wrote an opinion piece worth reading. His essay arises from the recent scandal in Miaoli County, where the local nationalist government is dispossessing farmers so more land can be given to industrial expansion. People have short memories of the food shortages that hit many parts of Asia a couple of years ago. Read Lei's essay: " Agriculture Deserves More Support ." ( Taipei Times , July 24, 2010, pg. 8.)