by Adam Tervort
Adventures in the land of singing garbage trucks
by Adam Tervort
http://adamtervort.com
Copyright 2011 Adam Tervort
Smashwords Edition
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is dedicated to my wife Mei-yun. Thank you for being so patient and encouraging me to tell my story.
Special thanks to my mother and father, Bill and Terri Tervort, as well as Trever McKay and Jeanie Witcraft for their help in reading early drafts of this book and making excellent suggestions. I couldn’t have done it without all of you!
Taiwan
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 - How I ruined my parents' love life by being born
Chapter 2 – Goin’ to Kansas City
Chapter 3 – The Call
Chapter 4 – Yes, I eat my rice with butter
Chapter 5 – Creepy crawlies of all sorts
Chapter 6 – Paradise and pineapples
Chapter 7 – So this is what healthcare is supposed to be like!
Chapter 8 – But it's not all roses
Chapter 9 – Those pesky singing garbage trucks
Chapter 10 – Farewell, and thanks for all the chicken feet
Chapter 11 – How will I survive without chicken feet?
Chapter 12 – No dad, those clouds shouldn't be green
Chapter 13 – So this is real life, huh?
Chapter 14 – Rethinking the American Dream
Chapter 15 – Penguins and eggplant, what a combination
Chapter 16 – Invictus (Unconquerable)
Epilogue
Introduction
Riding a bike in a typhoon is not really fun anytime, but coming home from a day of typhoon biking and finding the world's largest eight legged guest in your front room makes a bad day worse. Imagine coming in, soaked to the skin, just wanting to eat a hot lunch, and seeing a giant spider lounging in the middle of the floor. Thick, hairy legs, and a bad attitude. It looks like a tarantula, but dull green and aggressive. I hate spiders, especially ones that look like they can tear my legs off. Thoughts move at the speed of light when one contemplates an early death, and I had visions of festering bites and gangrene in the split second before anyone spoke.
"Do you want to kill it, or should I?"
"I don't think I can move. I hate spiders. You kill it," I said.
As human advances, arachnid comes to life and begins to dash right towards him. Spiders are supposed to be afraid of people, aren't they? This one never got the memo, I suppose. It ran right for him, kamikaze-like, with a look that to me said "conquer or die." His foot came up to step, came down, missed, and then he started to fall. We were all going to die, he as the main course and I as the after-dinner snack. The foot came up again, and this time it came down on the leaping spider. The foot came up, and the spider kept moving. A news flash shot before my eyes, "Americans killed by immortal spider." After three more stomps the spider was just twitching, but still not dead. I couldn't believe it. At least I hadn't wet myself.
"Alright, it should be dead now. I killed it, you clean it up."
"No way, man, it's not dead yet. It's still moving. You clean it up," I said.
"If you want to get over your fear of spiders you should clean it up with your bare hands."
"Not on your life." It only took ten minutes of watching the monster slowly stop twitching and half a roll of toilet paper to bolster my courage enough to get me to trash its crumpled body. In years since I have heard stories of people in similar situations, killing a monster spider, and they send a leg in a letter to prove it was real. I wish I would have thought of it, but I didn't.
This was in my first month it Taiwan. I was sure I wouldn't survive the trip. The trip is into its eighth year now, and I haven't seen another monster spider yet. It's a good thing-- if I ever see another one I'm out of here.
~~~
Everyone has a defining experience in their life. For some it comes in a moment and changes the rest of their life. Mine started as two years on the wrong side of the world and has continued through most of my adult life.
I don't know why I ended up in Taiwan. It wasn't really a choice, just fate. I was supposed to come here, and everything worthwhile in my life has been the result. Spiders, snakes, typhoons, earthquakes, and taxes are serious hazards here, as are happiness, contentment, and fulfillment. I want to tell you about my life in Taiwan, because in my story maybe you will see some of yourself. It doesn't matter where you live, there is a purpose for your life, and when you find it you will discover that all of the things you have gone through were for a reason, and you are the way you are today because your situation prepared you to be this way.
Come with me; let me show you the fast life, the slow life, the natural and the concrete life, and everything else I've experienced here. I will never be the same again, and I hope my changes will be useful for you as well.
Chapter 1 - How I ruined my parents' love life by being born
I come from a normal family, or an abnormal one, depending on your perspective. My mother and father grew up across the street from each other in northern Utah, a picture of Anywhere, USA. My father, Bill, and my mother, Terri, didn't get much of a chance to enjoy being married before I came along just 10 months after they said "I do." I suppose it must have been an unpleasant surprise to have a honeymoon baby, but if it was they never let on.
My father is a teacher who works for the LDS Church. Being Mormon is not really a popular thing in America, however mainstream the existence of the LDS Church has become in recent years. Growing up in Utah I never really got a feel for how strange it is to be a Mormon because everyone around me was Mormon, from my teachers and classmates to the kids I played with. There were a few people I knew that weren't members of the LDS Church, but they were a small minority. As a child it didn't seem special that my dad got home around the same time that I did, had the same days off for vacation that I did, and was home with us for all of winter and summer vacation. It didn't seem strange that his job was to teach religion classes to high school kids, and that he was able to do this kind of job despite the fact that the Mormon Church has no paid clergy. He isn't a minister, just a teacher.
It also didn't seem strange growing up with a mother who was the consummate housewife. Not only does my mother cook extremely well, she also cut our hair (I had my first barbershop haircut in high school and wasn't very happy with the job they did), made clothing for us (I never had a store-bought Halloween costume), and seemed to be able to learn anything we wanted to learn well enough to teach it to us. I was reading at four and was done with children's books at seven or eight.
My four brothers came along at irregular intervals during my childhood. Greg was born when I was three, Danny when I was eleven, Chris when I was 14, and Ben when I was 19. I had a good childhood filled with brothers to play with, books to read, good schools to attend, and most other things that a middle-class American child gets. Normal in nearly every respect.
Religion always played a big role in our family. My earliest memory is of standing up to share my testimony in church when I was three years old. "Bearing a testimony" is kind of a unique Mor
mon thing, the first Sunday of every month the whole congregation is invited to share their feelings from the pulpit during the 70 minute worship service. As you can imagine, some crazy things happen when the pulpit is turned loose like this. I don’t remember exactly what I said, just the experience and the feeling of facing a congregation at three years old.
The other big part of my young life was sports. Living in Utah means only one sport is important: Utah Jazz basketball. OK, there are those who follow college football and college basketball, alumni of BYU and the U of U, but neither of my parents attended those universities so we didn't really have a passion for their teams, but we loved the Jazz.
Those were the days of Karl Malone and John Stockton, when basketball was still a team sport and a team in a small market could still have a chance of making the playoffs every year. Every day after school the kids in the neighborhood gathered to play basketball until it was too dark to see, and then I'd head inside to read basketball books and watch games. In our extended family I was semi-famous for knowing stats for most of the players in the western conference. (My grandpa thought this was great and really encouraged me, others in our family thought I was the most annoying kid in the western conference.) Our family once saw Karl Malone at the state fair, he gave me an autograph and told me to work hard. Pretty generic advice, but it was heady stuff for a basketball nut.
~~~
Not everyone can be a rainbow, and I'm not sure I would want to be if I could do it again.
Elementary school was pretty normal for me up until fourth grade. In third grade I had a particularly excellent teacher whose face I can still see but whose name I have forgotten. She did a lot for our whole class, but she did something extra for me that was both a blessing and a curse; she recommended me for a spot in the school district's gifted and talented program. One Saturday our family went to an elementary school in another town and I spent the day taking a standardized test. A few weeks later we got the answer: I was accepted into the program, so for fourth grade I would be changing schools and studying in the "Rainbow" program.
This was hard in many ways. No kid wants to leave his friends behind, even if it means that the world knows he's "gifted." My original school was within walking distance of my house; my new school was a 20 minute car ride away. I didn't know anyone else in the class or in the school.
Summer orientation for the program was pretty fun, mostly games to get us relaxed and help us meet some classmates. Because enrolling in the program was voluntary, anyone could leave and return to their original school at any time. Even before the school year started kids were bailing out, earning these "dropouts" the eternal animosity of the kids that stayed in.
I don't remember much about my fourth grade class in the Rainbow program, just that we were the weird kids. There were three classes of normal students in fourth grade as well, and they refused to play with us at recess, and since many of the kids in our class were nerds and geeks it was hard to find people to play ball with. We had some brilliant kids in our class, one who knew the names of every president, vice president, and governor of Utah, one who could already write computer programs, one who had written a lot of really bad piano compositions, and a few that spoke two or three languages. I was just good at reading and playing basketball.
Our teacher that year was an older lady, close to retirement, whose sons had been students of my father. He did not have fond memories of her boys and I knew that, so perhaps we were doomed to fail. I lasted two quarters and about two weeks, and then my parents pulled me out of the class and sent me back to the local school; it was one of the biggest reliefs of my life. All of the sudden I was normal again, in a normal class with normal kids, and lots of kids to play ball with at recess. What could be better, right? The honeymoon lasted two months until the teacher told my folks that I should retest and go back into the rainbow program for fifth grade. No one had ever left and then come back, but I did. Not only was I an outcast from the normal kids because I was in the special class, I was an outcast from the special class because I had dropped out the year before. I couldn't wait for junior high school to start.
Sixth grade was a bit better because we had a big influx of new students, and because we could finally start in the school orchestra. My father had been a pretty dedicated violinist in high school (before he discovered that he was a really good long distance runner and dropped orchestra to pursue that) and I, like most kids, wanted to be like my dad. I was one of many beginning violinists in a strings class that sounded as if we were either slaughtering cats with dull knives (on the slow pieces) or pureeing them in unbalanced blenders (on the fast pieces.) It wasn't the teacher's fault, she was quite good; this is just the nature of beginning strings classes.
It was in this strings class that I began to get a hint of something different with Asians. In our class were two children of recent immigrants: Glen, whose parents had come from Korea, and Rose, whose parents were from Japan. They had both studied strings for a few years before the rest of us started, and they shined like gold in a dung heap. (Although I'm sure none of our parents could actually hear the two of them amidst the foul cacophony of the rest of us.) While I was busy memorizing John Stockton's career assist average, Glen and Rose were practicing their violins. At the time this struck me as amazing. Why would a kid volunteer to do something so unpleasant?
Seventh grade was rushing towards us at the pace of frozen molasses. I was sure it would never actually come. But of course it did, and I looked forward to returning to being a normal student in a normal school. Because I had gone to elementary school in a different town, most of my classmates wouldn't be attending the same junior high as me, which was a letdown and a relief. At least the kids who'd picked on us rainbow class kids wouldn't be following me to seventh grade!
I went to a school called North Davis Junior High in Clearfield, Utah. It was not a nice place. There were lots of fights, and lots of knifings. Because we had learned algebra in 6th grade, I was in math class with 8th and 9th graders, and I was shocked that they didn't seem to be much more capable at math than I was. I quickly fell deeply in crush with a buxom 8th grader who copied my homework almost every day. I was sure this feat of valor would win her heart, and I was crushed one day to see her smooching a 9th grader in the hallway. I was mortified to see a condom fall out of her bag a few days later, it was the end of the love affair as far as I was concerned.
The other strange situation I was in came in French class. In the rainbow program we had to learn a second language, and as my father had served a mission for the LDS Church in France as a young man, he was asked to teach us French. I had two years of French in elementary school, and when the junior high school discovered this I was placed in the 9th grade French class. I was amazed to discover how many naked people 9th grade French class exposed me to, mostly in the form of pictures in old copies of National Geographic and Playboy magazines that the kid next to me would steal from his father and bring to school.
This perfectly normal childhood of a Mormon boy in northern Utah came to a screeching halt in the middle of third quarter when my father came to us with big news. He had been transferred to Kansas City, Missouri. We would be moving there in a few weeks. I tried to discover where Missouri was on the map, (the middle of nowhere), found that it didn't have an NBA basketball team, and most daunting of all, it was in a place called the "Bible Belt" where there were few Mormons. Life was about to change in a big way.
Chapter 2 - Goin' to Kansas City
Discovering that you can reinvent yourself is one of life's most liberating surprises. By moving to a new state, starting in a new school, I was suddenly not compelled to be the person I was before. The rainbow baggage was gone, there wasn't a "gifted" program in my new school. No more classes with the 9th graders, because I was suddenly in middle school instead of junior high. The highest math class was a year behind what I'd already had, so I was back in the "normal" class. The only thing that made me different was that I played v
iolin, and the strings department in the school district was just getting started.
~~~
Liberty, Missouri is a nice town, a twenty minute drive north of Kansas City, filled with gas stations and banks, standard suburbia. When my father got his job transfer he first took a weekend trip with my mother to look for a house, but when they couldn't find one my father flew out alone to start working while the rest of the family began preparing for the move. Dad found a house that he sent pictures of, and because the pictures looked OK mom told him to buy it. When we finally arrived mom decided she didn't like it after all, that it needed serious work. As the movers were still getting boxes moved in dad was already on his way to the paint store to get paint for the master bedroom, the first in a long line of house improvements he would undertake in the nine years before mom finally got the house she wanted. (She found that one by herself.)
The biggest first impression we all had was how green everything was. Utah is a mountain state, as well as being a desert. If you go there today you see green, but all of it is not native. Things don't grow well there, and if you want grass and trees you'd better plant it yourself, the only things that comes in on their own are weeds. As we drove farther east on our way to Missouri we were amazed at how green everything got. First the median strips on the highway started to fill out with grass and then the fields next to the highway turned greener and greener, even the fields lying fallow. As we crossed from Nebraska into Missouri we started to see woods all over. In Utah you see pine trees on the mountains, but precious few hardwood trees. Not so in Missouri, there were trees everywhere, and the grass seemed to never end. Cows grazed in real fields, people didn't have to water their lawns-- it was a green miracle to us.
