Generalissimo

 “I couldn’t believe they did that!” Sister says. “And only fined $75!”

    We are in the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial, and she is telling me about the 2018 incident when students threw eggshells filled with red paint at the giant statue of the Kuomintang Generalissimo. It was one among many defacements of the hundreds of such statues dotted around the island, fueled by rage against the 38 years of martial law when Chiang and his son ruled, killing and imprisoning more than a hundred thousand Taiwanese. They had already endured centuries of Dutch, Spanish, Chinese and, for 50 years, of Japanese rule. After Japan’s surrender following WWII, the island was again ceded to China.

   Chiang had removed to Taiwan in stages, with war-hardened soldiers and all the gold and art he could manage to take from the mainland. Apparently also intellectual capital. Sister’s father, as assistant professor of literature at the university in Beijing, was asked by the Minister of Education whether he was interested in moving to Taiwan. He agreed to go and check it out, leaving his wife and young son on the mainland. He sent for them in 1948, when it looked like Mao was winning and China was becoming dangerous for the upper classes. Sister’s mother arrived with only a suitcase, without the family valuables. By the time Sister was born in 1949 and it was clear Chiang was never going to prevail, they had received word: “Don’t come back.”

    Family members were later sent to the fields for backbreaking labor and “reeducation.”

    Sister bows in front of the massive statue. An honor guard marches past us, heels clicking on the marble floor, as we leave the hall. Perhaps in warning to future protestors.

     By the time I first arrived in 1971 (on the wrong day, due to crossing the International Date Line), Henry Kissinger, under President Nixon, was quietly trying to hammer out the Two-China policy, and Chiang, still claiming to be the ruler of all China, was trying to prevent Communist China being given a seat at the United Nations.

    I was often asked to sign petitions: “Strongly Oppose the Chinese Bandits Entering UN.” To which I recited my, “I don’t know anything about politics” mantra. It was true, but I couldn’t understand why a nation of 843 million people (while Taiwan had a population of 14 million people) was unrepresented in the world body.

   Repressive military rule was new to me. A man could be taken to the police station to have his hair cut if it was too long. Kissing on the street was forbidden. I myself had had experience of the Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalist party spies. And a medical student friend confided that one day the cadaver he was supposed to dissect was the body of a friend who had been in the Taiwanese independence movement. The man had been in prison for more than a year and his body bore evidence of repeated torture.

    And as we left the Chiang Kai-Shek memorial the other day, it occurred to me that one of China’s first moves after taking over Taiwan would be the erasure of the effigy of their enemy.

    “That statue will be gone if China takes over,” I told Sister. “They will remove it.”

    “They wouldn’t,” she said.

 

Spy Story

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 With Sister and her mom at their old house in 1971.  I don't have many pictures from that time.  

 

The last time I saw Sister in Taipei was in 1998. She was living in Taipei with her husband and two boys and her mother. After that I saw her in the Boston area, where she moved with her two boys following her divorce.

     On that last visit, I was on my way back from spending more than a month in China, traveling down the Yangtze from Chongqing to Shanghai for a Life magazine story on the building of the Three Gorges Dam and to Suzhou for a story about American couples adopting unwanted Chinese girls. My problem with the authorities likely began with my name on the magazine’s masthead. And then the damage was compounded by my heading directly towards a sensitive area near the border in the Golden Triangle area. That’s where the photographer working with me and I were questioned by the police for the first time and had our passports taken away.

     We were actually in that neck of the woods—um rice paddies—to shoot a story about the women of one family for a National Geographic book. But clearly they feared I was doing a story about the drug trade. That or I was a CIA spy.

     I hadn’t focused on the history of Time Inc in China. The company was started by Henry Luce, a missionary’s son raised in China, who had connections with the CIA and close ties with Chiang Kai-Shek, leader of the Kuomintang Nationalist party in the Chinese Civil War. A war he lost to Communist Party leader Mao Zedong. Chiang and much of his army and many of his supporters, including Sister’s father, fled to Taiwan to regroup.

    So not only was the company I worked for suspicious, but the company I kept: I had studied in Taiwan and spoke a little Chinese, suspicious in itself. I was later to discover that Chinese who spoke good English then were mostly engaged in surveillance. And the better the English the higher the position in the Ministry of Public Security, also called the Foreign Affairs Police. They needed to keep an eye on me. And they did.

Sister and I in front of the modern apartment building where her house used to be.
 

 

   

Good morning, Taiwan

                                               Sister picks me up at the airport in Taipei

I woke up this morning in Taipei. It was evening in New York, and apparently he who will not be named had spent the day doing things I disapproved of in Ukraine and Gaza, erasing the T from the LGBTQ designation for the Stonewall Memorial in NYC (predictably leading to protests there), and mandating plastic rather than paper straws. To cap it all, he said he was planning to visit China for talks. Tariffs maybe? Hoo boy. Sister said he is completely crazy, so we agreed to call him Fengzi, or lunatic.

    She has no fears that the Chinese will invade Taiwan. “If they want it, they will take it in five days,” she says. She doesn’t believe they will harm anyone. “I am Chinese!” she says.   

   What about surveillance? Closed circuit TV following you everywhere? Replacing the government, making Taiwan subject to repressive internet control? Jailing people with independent views? Look what happened in Hong Kong.

    “I have a friend in Hong Kong,” she says. “She says nothing has changed. I’m not interested in politics.”

    “Well,” I said, “I hope the mainland doesn’t take over because if it does, I won’t be able to come here again. I am not welcome in China.”

    “I know,” she said. “You must be on the blacklist.”

    

Younger Brother

 

Younger Brother gets out of an ice cold shower. He is done with his morning calisthenics and is about ready to eat the oddest breakfast I have ever witnessed. Also huge. He’s been on a health kick lately, between trips to photograph the conflict in Ukraine. As a Taiwanese, he feels solidarity with Ukraine as it fights a mighty neighboring power trying to consume it.

   “So you think the Chinese won’t invade Taiwan soon?” I ask. I have been wondering how risky a trip there is right now, with our own government in such disarray, bestowing tariffs on China while supplying Taiwan with arms.

    “The Chinese have their own problems right now,” he says. “But if there is a threat, I am on the next plane home.” He lives in Austria, but Taiwan, where his mother and family are, is home. “I don’t know if I’ll shoot with a camera or a gun,” he says.  “Maybe I’ll mount a gun on my camera.”

    He has already invested in armored tactical gear to work near the front lines in Ukraine.  Indeed, he has bought more while in New York. He is staying with me while printing huge photographs for an upcoming show.

    Younger Brother and I met through a war correspondent friend from Life magazine some 25 years ago. We became friends partly because I had at least been to Taiwan, and we have become even closer as we watched our dear friend ail and die. Younger Brother and I have done stories and books together. I have written critiques and captions and intros. And he has taken me along to Taiwan and Singapore and Vietnam. Neither one of us is welcome in China any longer. Younger brother is one of my two close friends from Taiwan. And that is a conundrum.

 Taiwan, like the U.S. and so many other countries these days, is divided into camps, those who favor reunification with China, and those who favor, and fight for, an independent Taiwan. My friends are on opposite sides. Older Sister and Younger Brother.

Back to Taiwan

         Me and Changping, 1971
 

It was seven o’clock in the morning, and a girl I’d never seen before had awakened me in my bedroom. She was asking me questions in a language I didn’t perfectly understand.

     “What are you doing here?”

      “How do you feel about the President Nixon?” (She pronounced it Nee Ke Sun)

     “Do you think the Communist bandits should be allowed into UN?”

    

     In the doorway behind the questioner, as she bent over my bed, the mother of the family I was living with was pantomiming not to talk to her, not to tell her anything.

    “I don’t know anything about Nixon,” I said in broken Mandarin. “I know nothing about politics. I am a student. I study art, calligraphy, Chinese language.”

 

That was true. My political activism had gone as far as campus protests against college investments in Dow Chemical (napalm) and anti-Vietnam-war peace marches on Washington. Fifty years ago, I knew nothing about geopolitics. But when most of my Seven Sisters sisters headed to Europe for a finishing-school type junior year abroad, I went to Asia. I was a Chinese major after all.  A blond Chinese major. And you couldn’t go to mainland China then.

 

My family in Taipei, Taiwan, had a daughter just a year older than I.  She became Jiejie, Older Sister, to me. That evening, when she got back from work as an English language secretary, she explained the girl in my room.

     “She lives in this alley and she is a member of the Nationalist youth. It is her job to report every stranger in the neighborhood to find out if they are Communist sympathizers.”

    

Those six months in Taiwan rerouted my path, though not in the way I expected. My Mandarin certainly improved, but it would never be adequate to teach or translate. I got my first real job at Time Inc as a copy clerk, because, my boss said, “I figured if you could speak Chinese, you could write English.” I wound up traveling all over the world as a writer for Life magazine—including to China, where, once again, it was assumed that I was a spy.

 

I’m going back to Taiwan, now, to spend a few weeks with Older Sister. She still has an apartment in the same place, though the old building with its outdoor kitchen and open sewers has long been razed for a new one. Taipei itself has become a modern city that yet retains the charm of the night markets and temples and art and food—oh, the food!

    But I know a lot more about politics now. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has led to rising tension on both sides of the hundred-mile Taiwan Strait. Years ago I saw camouflaged gun emplacements above the rice fields. Now China’s sabre rattling includes fighter jets, bomber patrols, warships and subs, while Taiwan, which produces the bulk of the world’s semiconductor chips, gets ever more armaments from the U.S.  And although Taiwan has become a successful democracy, it’s scarier there now than when I first went there under Chiang Kai-shek’s martial law. And with the inauguration of a wild-card president in the U.S.,

I can’t help worrying that China will take advantage of our distraction.

 

 I’m going anyway. My problem, though is the same as it was a half century ago: Keeping my mouth shut.

woodstock

I was in there somewhere, 55 years ago. I wouldn't meet the Life magazine crew covering the event (including John Dominus, who took these photos)  until years later. And 20 years later, I would write the following reminiscence for the magazine. My memory is even blurrier today than the reproduction of this photo, so I figured might as well reprint it. And oddly, before I was even awake this morning, John Sebastian's "Darling Be Home Soon" was playing in my head. I heard it there and then.

         It’s raining—again—and the meadow in Bethel, N.Y., is empty except for what looks like a gravestone marked with the names of the fated (Janis and Jimi), the famous and the forgotten. From the tape deck in our rented Lincoln booms the soundtrack of Woodstock. “The brown acid is not too good, “ echoes Chip Monck’s voice. I heard him say that 20 years ago right here. But the grass has grown up now, and so have I.

         Remembrances of things past are as tricky as our President was in that year, 1969. Revisionism about Woodstock is rampant—and not only by all the people who claim to have been there and weren’t. Robin Williams suggested a bumper sticker: “If u can remember Woodstock than u weren’t there.” I called up a college friend to ask if he had been there. He said, “What do you mean was I there—I was with you!” Well, he wasn’t. I drove up in a Corvair with some high school friends. I have the reality check: An interview I gave my hometown paper dated Monday, August 18, 1969. But I was already editing my recollection. I didn’t tell the reporter (or my mother) about the guy, high on horse tranquilizers, who held out a handful of pills and said, “I feel really bad, man. Should I take one of the yellow ones?”

         Most Woodstock alumni mention unity, love and mud. You are not the only one to still treasure your ticket. And I am not the only one to have a lasting distaste for crowds. But there were maybe half a million tales in that naked-to-the-elements city, and there is unanimity about only one fact: It did rain.

        Down where the stage was, the trees have drawn closer round the waterfall. When I watched the video, I could hear Richie Havens much more clearly than I could when he sat on that stage. As he sang, “Look there’s handsome Johnny with a gun in his hand marchin’ to the Vietnam war,” I found myself crying. I know now how it came out: How we blew our minds and died in Vietnam. How we wed, found success and grew away from our green years. I look at the photographs of those kids—us—and we look so young and joyful, with fringes flying free. But if I learned one thing back then, it was, as Baba Ram Dass says, Be Here Now.

 

redesign at walmart

 

my totality is longer than yours

Getting set up here  for the big event at 1:54 pm tomorrow. That's when the 4 minute plus totality begins. 

We're basically right before the M in OMG.  Which is why motel rooms are sold out here. And I have the correct beer for the occasion.

 

once again

The more I look at this picture, the more I like it. It was made in Providence. I hope when I get there Monday it won't be snow city. Anyway, I'm posting this same stupid story again.

https://claudiassurfcity.blogspot.com/2018/03/same-old-same-old.html

 

natural enemies?

I have birds. 

Hannah has cats.

Lot of cat lovers in this world. Camilla, 13, is one. (That's Echo; Ember is above.) The artist Ryan, 10 (?),  is one (as is his mama Fanny and granny Donna). (I presume the pic is of Puccini and Houdini.)

But hey.I don't have to feed and take to the vet's. And if they litter I don't have litter!

And BTW, Bill, this post is for you, as the loudest complainer that I'm not posting on my blog. In my own defense, I must say that part of that is I see much better on my phone than computer. Maybe that will change when I get my new glasses and I will reform. 

   And BTW, Bill, those ovoid objects above would be called chicks in Alabama. Here we call them eggs.

new year's eve, y2k

Some 23 years ago, I was interviewing a conspiracy theorist in the Ozarks who was firmly convinced that Y2K would be used as an excuse by the UN to take over the country.

   “Not gonna happen” I told him.

    “The power grid will go down, all the computers will fail, and they’ll close the roads, and the codes on phone poles will direct the UN forces to take over,” he said.

    “It won’t happen,” I said. “I’m going to come out here and spend New Year’s Eve with you, and you’ll see.”

    He talked his mom and dad into moving from Ohio to the Ozark wilderness, where it was safer, and his brother and sister-in-law arrived in advance of Y2K. I did too.

   I had a chateaubriand dinner prepared by a judge friend, and then headed out into the woods to join the family. They were snacking on a cheese ball. I can give you a recipe if you’re too young to remember Velveeta.

     My subject sat on the sofa, his automatic rifle propped next to his leg, as his parents watched TV. As the night wore on, he kept running to the land line or his ham radio to call his contacts.

   “Has the power gone off yet?” he asked. “Highways closed?”

   Nope, nope, nope.

   I had a mobile phone. As the ball dropped in Times Square, it was still 11 o’clock in Missouri. My friends Ed Barnes and Chien-Chi Chang were covering the event for Time magazine. Just after midnight they rang.

   “Anything going on there?” I asked them. Just the usual: crowds, tourists, drunks. They didn’t know why they were even in Times Square, waiting for action.

    When midnight came and went in the Ozarks, it was time to pack it in.

    To the guy’s credit, he claimed to be happy nothing disastrous had gone down.

    To my credit, I didn’t say I told you so. 

 

 

Great American Eating Ceremony 2023

Roll call: fifteen of the regulars. A lot of entertainments have been going on, and the blog couldn't keep up. Will try to do better. But so many pix and so hard to edit! Communications have suffered. Donna took so many good pictures, but which to choose? Will try. . .