The White Peril 白禍

Since I don't have Larry Craig tendencies, I was startled to use a train station toilet in Taipei for the first time last night and discover that it appeared to be hitting on me:



I beg your pardon! Here? I'm not that kind of man, buddy.

If you know Japanese, Taipei can be a really frustrating city. Reading literature, all the way up to the beginning of the Showa Period, generally requires you to know the traditional forms of kanji--at least at first. But modern pocket additions*, while not otherwise abridged or bowdlerized, frequently use the official Japanese simplified forms, so you get used to not having to recognize the older characters. Taiwan still uses them, though, so even though I can't pronounce them here, I've been using the writing to get my bearings.

It took me several days to remember that 點 is, in fact, 点. (Well, I didn't remember so much as realize that a crawl inside a subway car that said 終點 wasn't likely to mean anything else.) Amritas used to tell me that you didn't really know an Asian language with a Chinese-derived script until you'd started with the traditional stroke-choked characters. He was right, I suppose, at least in terms of transferrable skills.

Something you notice right away traveling around Taipei: it's a very pious city. I'm not referring to the people (though they may be as devout as they come for all I know). I mean the place names. Streets in Japan don't usually have names--don't get me started on the resulting headaches involved in trying to get somewhere for the first time--and blocks, train stations, and intersections are often named for a nearby landmark. Otherwise, they tend to be named for things in nature: Greenleaf, Middle River, Wisteria Mountain, and the like.

In Taipei, several of the major east-west arteries are named for Confucian virtues. My office is on 忠孝路 ("Loyalty and Filial Piety Avenue"). On the way, we pass 仁愛路 ("Humaneness and Love Avenue"). There's a place between my friend's apartment and our office called 明徳 ("limpid moral probity," though as in Japan I guess it may refer to an era or exalted personage or something). I'm not sure I can handle quite that much uplift so early in the day, even after my second cup of coffee.

And I'm pretty certain that having a Catholic mother disqualifies me from working on a street called "Filial Piety."

Taipei is also significantly slower-paced than Tokyo. I was listening to Roisin Murphy the other day on a run. Perfect soundtrack to Tokyo but all wrong here. Taipei isn't brittle and frantic and electronic. It's not a mountain hamlet, either, but even the center of the city doesn't press in on you. I'm not sure how well that suits me; I like my cities to be cities. On the other hand, my friend's apartment (where I'm staying) is in the north of the city on a mountain road, so hiking and hot springs and things are right out the door. That part's not bad at all, and it's helpful given all the bulky Western food I've been hoovering up since I got here. (American food is much better in Taipei than in Tokyo.)

Ack. Time to hie myself to the Straight Path of Loyalty and Filial Piety for the day.


* Nice malapropism, huh? Apparently, I can't write in my native language anymore after two cups of coffee, either. editions/additions...affect/effect...mucus/mucous...okay, I think I'm all right now.

Previous times in Taipei, I haven't really talked to anyone about Taipei 101 much. It's an impressive building--distinctive without being aggressively ugly, which is a balance many super-skyscrapers don't manage. I don't think it looks much like a stalk of bamboo, but it has its own personality.

Unfortunately, that apparently isn't its only distinguishing characteristic. The building's nowhere near capacity with tenants. "Bad timing on the rental market?" I asked. "No, bad feng shui," I was told.

Wang Chung-ping, vice chairman of C.Y. Lee and Partners, which designed Taipei 101, is often asked to accommodate feng shui concerns, but sees little science in it. "To me, it's very much a psychological thing," he says. "We don't encourage building owners to hire feng shui masters, but most seem to."

In many cases, it is the richer building owners who pay more attention to feng shui, and as a result, architects have picked up some feng shui knowledge to avoid problems later in the design process. "We have some very basic knowledge of feng shui: back to a hill; face to an open area; no street running in your face. It's common knowledge in our culture. Usually what we do is OK," Wang says.

Even so, architects trained in western design methods frequently ignore the finer points of feng shui. In design, for example, straight lines are seen as attractive, capable of producing an eye-catching sense of symmetry. Feng shui, however, views straight lines with suspicion, as they transmit chi too quickly. China's first railway, constructed by Europeans, so disturbed those living near it that it was ripped up and thrown into the sea.

Wang ran into the problem of straight lines while designing Taipei 101. An alley ran straight into the side of the building, so he was advised to place a fountain containing a marble ball at that entrance to slow the chi entering the building.

For some feng shui masters, Taipei 101 has many other problems. Zhang Hsu-chu, one of the feng shui masters who worked on the project, acknowledges the site is not that good. He says the building's foundations destroyed one of the dragon lines flowing through Taipei, and the site used to be a place of execution, meaning there are a lot of ghosts in the area. These ghosts, he says, were responsible for the deaths of three men working on the building during an earthquake in 2003. He told the owner that praying to the ghosts would placate them, and there were no further problems. "The chi for this area has been drained," he says, "but it'll return."

Apparently, one of Taiwan's most successful pop stars had an apartment with a view of Taipei 101, and she didn't release an album for years after it went up. Maybe we could convince Mariah to move in?

Hope everyone had a great holiday. I stayed in Tokyo this year, as did more of my friends than usual--a good thing, since I'll be out of town for the next two months.

For eleven years, I've lived in a country vulnerable to earthquakes and typhoons that sits a missile's-throw from a nuke-hungry enemy. What could be more exciting? Hmm...how about a country vulnerable to earthquakes and typhoons that sits a missile's throw from a super-huge country that already has nukes AND regards it as a renegade province? So I accepted an invitation from an old friend who owns the Taiwan branch of my former company to spend a few months in her office as a consultant. I leave at the end of this week, and I'm looking forward to it. To judge from my visits to Taipei, it's not somewhere I'd want to live long-term, but I've always wanted more time to explore the place. Seven or so weeks seems like a good length of time, with some time back when the country shuts down for Chinese New Year.

For the moment, I'm gearing up for the jump and watching the Clinton-Obama numbers in New Hampshire.