Homogenisation is for milk
It is half past three in the morning and sleep has again been pushed aside by the incessant internal messaging we call, for lack of a better term, dreaming. The mind processing the forwarded chapters of this book that I read last night, analyzing, digesting, and finally waking me up, telling me to commit words to paper.
Stumbling over realities cast ten to fifteen years in the past is both enjoyable and difficult, particularly when the account is from the trained and steady hand of a most causal observer. Particularly when the observations include me and describe with detailed illumination the flaws and spots, cracks and incriminations, of judgements poorly or well made, of character, personality, self. To remove these elements would not only weaken the story, it would distort the truth, even if there are other tangible views. Essentially the events are not fictional despite seeming unbelievable or perhaps (as Inago might say) inconceivable.
It was, in the truest sense, a wild ride.
Unplanned, reactionary, impulsive. An exercise in Goethe's maxim. Exploring and defining the most cross-cultural of equations. Travelling without roadmap on a path of cultural exchange so fresh it had not worn. East did meet West and despite the confusion, the complications, conflict, and sometime cathartic reluctance of our hosts, we actually liked each other. We mostly got along. We mostly didn't have a clue about what we were doing or the impact it was having.
The coexistence was at times fragile and tenuous. There was no intent on being a vanguard of the West. Logical minds wouldn't choose such a team. But no-one else was doing it (the resident ex pats were all asleep) and so it was kind-of achieved by default, despite ourselves. God knows what the establishment made of us. Certainly they got a new spin on their revered, staid concept of teacher. In hindsight the sher-ying-sher wei-gwo-ren (lit. Western devil teachers) were a disparate mix; some on odyssey's gone wrong, a few genuinely intent on cultural assimilation, all drawn into the madness of pro-western industrialisation called Taipei that even the Chinese knew was off the rails. The nineties poster-boy city of the newly opened Wild East frontier. A jug and two noughts.
We were loved, hated and tolerated in unequal measure. And while the Chinese capacity for tolerance underpins the better part of their society (and at times it felt incredibly egalitarian), the darker side at times impacted on the side of my face.
We were there, part of a developing experiment- getting along- the world's Big Project.
(thats a stretch) Read. Perceive unlikely events and fall-in.
In all fairness, I need to get some sleep.
DP
Feb 4, 2004
codicil
Homogenisation is something you do to milk. It has no place in the editing or re-stylizing of literature (but is evidenced in anthropology).
A strong black is not a skinny decaf even if one is able to make it become so.
Sounds like a Confucian riddle.
notes
just smoothing the odds ..wouldnt even deign to remember the incident...what ugly dimpled chin??? now thats a little unkind, I dont think Hamo would be so shallow
scrupulously never paid rent on time if at all!!!!!
total disregared....self-absorbed...but essentially a nice guy- I'll need a new visa identity after this gets published
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