Adventures in the Land of Singing Garbage Trucks

by Adam Tervort

  I had lost about 50 pounds in Taiwan. It was probably a combination of only having a bike for transportation my last three months, sweating like a pig every day for two years, and the beautiful discovery I made that vegetables were really good to eat. At the lunch shops in Taiwan I could get almost twice as much food if I got only vegetables instead of meat, and so I ate a lot of vegetables. I was in better shape than I had ever been before, or sadly, since.

  My mother seemed hurt that night when I asked if I could have a salad with the meatloaf she had made. My whole life she had been trying to get us to eat salad and the one night she didn’t prepare one I asked for it. The tiny piece of meatloaf I put away was probably not a great tribute to the wonderful meal she had prepared. She was glad that there was someone else in the family that would eat squash with her, though.

  Life normalized pretty quickly, I got a job doing light construction for the weeks until our family would make the pilgrimage to Utah to visit relatives. I didn't really enjoy the work, but it was work and I did enjoy the feeling of having a bit of money in my pocket. The only big fear that hovered on the horizon was what to do about Ellen.

  Remember a few chapters back when I said I had started my mission with a girlfriend? Well, that was one of the dark patches of my mission that isn't so easy to talk about. Not that having a girlfriend is a bad thing (as long as you aren't married, anyways), but the way I stopped having a girlfriend was not good at all.

  Ellen and I met in the semester before I left for Taiwan. I was doing my best to turn into a chaste philanderer and she must have seen some good in me that I didn't. We started to date, and I was pretty quickly in love. She was not, but eventually her feelings changed as well. She was Catholic, I was Mormon; she didn't want me to go on a mission, I was going anyways. Before I left we worked out a deal. I would write her once a week (just after writing my mother, of course) and together we would count down the 104 weeks until I came back. We never talked specifically of getting married when I returned, but it was heavily implied.

  Off I went into the unusual world of missionary work. One of the stranger aspects of being an LDS missionary is that you try to stay away from girls. If you met a young lady who was interested in the lessons you just gave her information to the sister missionaries and they would meet with her. The only women or girls I taught on my mission were either a part of a family being taught or were in an area where there were no sister missionaries. Missionaries are big on focus, and eventually it became a burden to pull back from that focus in order to write a love letter every week. I wasn't very happy with the situation but wasn't smart enough to see that I could just explain my feelings to Ellen and maybe she would understand.

  See, the pressure was mounting. Back at university Ellen had decided to explore some of why I decided to give up life for two years and began meeting with missionaries herself. She eventually joined the LDS Church which meant that any objections my parents may have had to us being together were pretty much quashed. I was happy for her but not for me. Finally I confided the situation to my companion, Elder He. He commiserated with me, like a good companion should, and then told me his own sad story. He had been involved with a girl when he left, but she "Dear Johned" him a few months later. (Yes, that is Dear John in verb form. Once you start speaking Chinglish then any real English you possess goes swiftly out the window.) She was already married, just over a year after he left. He showed me the letter, we analyzed it, and then a plan began to form.

  The letter ran like this. Page one (front side) was full of praise for Elder He, telling what a great guy he was and how proud she was of him. She knew he was doing good things, becoming a great man, blah, blah, blah. Page two (the back side) started off with a swift sucker punch. I don't think that things are going to work out for us. I've changed, it's not your fault, its mine. I know that you will be OK, you are strong, etc. The final put-down: don't bother writing me back, I won't answer you. You need to focus; everything will be better this way.

  Well, now I had a form letter to copy! We worked on it together and went through at least a couple of drafts before we got it right. I don't think I said not to write back, but page two was pretty cold and heartless. I got a reply in record time asking if I had lost my mind. I replied that I hadn't, I'd just had a change of heart. If she was still interested in waiting around then we would see what developed after I got home, but please don't write again. It was a cowardly thing to do, but I was so full of self-righteousness that I didn't even see what a bastard I was for doing it. I actually felt relieved.

  Without the Pacific Ocean separating the two of us, however, it was a little easier to feel nervous. Maybe I was too harsh? Perhaps she was already deeply involved with someone else by now, and had forgotten me. One could always hope! But a mega-jerk like myself had little room for good expectations.

  (It turned out that Ellen had taken the sound advice of her friends and decided to move on with her life. By the time I got back to Missouri she was seeing someone else and was married just about the same time I was. I wasn't invited to hers, and I don't think I invited her to mine for fear of seeming like a lout. We did end up getting along quite well in our last two years of university and we graduated together in 2005.)

  When the time came to head to Utah I was really excited. Vacation? Great. See family? Wonderful. But most exciting was that I would get to see some Chinese people. When I wasn't spackling walls or wondering when the relationship guillotine would descend, I was pining for Taiwan. The only chance I'd had to talk to a Taiwanese person was when Sister Su from the MTC called to wish me a happy end-of-mission. While we talked she offhandedly invited me to come on a trip with some of the MTC teachers. A whole group of Taiwanese people going out together? Count me in. I was pretty miserable with the one-two punch of not being a missionary and not being in Taiwan, and was not adjusting well. Perhaps a small fix of Taiwan would do the trick and help me get back on the road to normal life.

  We got to Utah and I had wonderful reunions with relatives. The second or third day there Sister Su came and picked me up to take me down to play in Provo (where BYU is) for four days. I would stay with a classmate of hers and go out with the group of MTC teachers as often as we could. BYU was on summer vacation, so a lot of them had free time.

  I loved my four days there. All of the sudden Sister Su wasn't my "honorable teacher" anymore; she called me by my Chinese first name and I called her Mei-yun. When I babbled on and on about missionary stuff she listened. Do you see where this is heading? I was pretty enamored after those four days. When my mom saw me come home the fourth day she saw the stars in my eyes and asked Sister Su to come in for a talk. I felt like I was about to be executed. What saved the day was that Sister Su had absolutely no interest in me. It was a bit of a blow to my ego, but I could work on that. I was a return missionary; I knew how to be persistent.

  We had one more date before my family returned to Missouri, which nearly put my mother over the edge. In hindsight I was screwing up life for everyone around me, but I was so self-focused that I didn't notice or didn't care. Sister Su was now Mei-yun and I kissed her once, big progress from the guy who was afraid to sit next to a girl on the plane ride home. Once again, I had star-eyes and a received a multitude of lectures from Mom, Grandmas, Uncle Paul, and any other family member who could get ahold of me. My vacation was cut short when I was tapped to drive half of the family home early; a big part of which I still think was a plot to get me out of the same state as Sister Su.

  We started talking on the phone all the time. This concerned my mother to no end, but since I left for the university dorms a few days after returning to Missouri she didn't have but a few days to fuel her worries. I've never thought that the big problem was race. The big problem was age. Mei-yun is 11 years older than me, 31 to my 22 at that time. Mei-yun brought this up as well, but I was pretty good at resolving concerns in Chinese by then, if not so good at doing the same in English. Once I was back at school I knew what I wanted
, I wanted to marry her. She took a while to understand how serious I was, and it took quite a few all-night phone conversations to get the message through to her. My persistence wore her down eventually, and she agreed that I could fly out to Utah in early October and we could talk about marriage in person.

  My brother Greg went with me to buy an engagement ring then took me to the airport and picked me up a few days later. Greg was the one person in the family who didn't think I was crazy. When I told my Mom and Dad that we wanted to get married things were not good. All of the reasons why this was not a smart idea came out in short order, as well as a whole boatload of blind dates that I refused to show up for. One night as I was driving back to school after a weekend of dire warnings and predictions of divorce and depression, I called my dad and told him that I wouldn't be coming home again unless everyone there toned the rhetoric down. It was my life, and I knew what I wanted. I was marrying a good Mormon woman, we'd be married in the temple, what more did they want? Dad listened and told me he'd talk to everyone. The next weekend was restrained but civil. I think everyone decided to wait me out and see if we would really go through with it.

  Mei-yun and I flew back to Taiwan in December so that I could meet her family. This nearly broke my mother's heart because it meant for the third Christmas in a row I would be in Taiwan. When Mei-yun called to tell her family, she started with her four sisters, then her brother and her mother. They all seemed wary but supportive, but no one had the guts to tell her dad. Years earlier when he had sent her off at the airport to go to university in America he had warned her that she could, under no circumstances, have a foreign boyfriend. When she called him to tell him she was coming home at the end of the year, he seemed fine with it. When she told him she was bringing a friend home with her, he asked who she was. She said it was a boy, not a girl. He hung up on her. She was shocked and worried, and her father immediately went to find Mei-yun's sister-in-law to ask if Mei-yun would be offended because he hung up on her. Later he would say that he wasn't angry, just surprised. When we arrived they were guarded but welcoming, and after we put in a couple of weeks of free labor in the candy factory (Mei-yun's father's business) I was deemed to be an OK guy. When we were waiting at the airport all four of Mei-yun's sisters threatened me with death if I was not good to their sister. I laughed and hoped they were joking, and told them I would take good care of her.

  In February Mei-yun was to fly out to Missouri and formally meet my family. To this point she had really only met my mom on the day of the "what are your intentions" talk, she'd never seen my dad or my brothers. It was an awkward weekend, but afterwards I think my mother decided to give up and make the best of what she considered a bad situation. Since Mei-yun's parents wouldn't be flying to Missouri for the wedding it meant that she would get to plan it for us, something she never imagined she would get to do as the mother of five boys. She took to it with gusto, talking to Mei-yun about colors and decorations, and made a wonderful wedding for us. Mei-yun and her Chinese friends at BYU made our invitations by hand and my mother took care of receptions in Utah at my grandma's house and in Missouri at the church.

  May 10th, 2003 we were married in the Mount Timpanogos Temple in Utah. Because we were poor and there weren't many choices, we ended up at the KFC in what must be the most unromantic post-wedding lunch on record. The afternoon reception at my grandparent's house was wonderful, and after changing out of our clothes we started off back to Provo to begin our honeymoon.

  Things started to go wrong not long after we left. Mei-yun, like most Chinese people, felt that now we were married she should call my mother “mom.” My mom didn't think that was a good idea, she didn't feel comfortable with it, and she asked me to tell Mei-yun that they should use first names instead. I mentioned this to her as we drove towards the freeway and was greeted by the first tears of the day. My dear wife didn't cry at our wedding, she didn't cry at the reception, she didn't cry when I cried, but she opened the faucet when I told her that she should call my mom Terri instead of mom. Way to go, Mr. Cultural Sensitivity. Somehow the fact that Mei-yun expected my mom to be like her mom had escaped my radar, and now my bride was crying her eyes out on the side of the road. We talked, and eventually she got under control. I felt like such a schmuck. I should have done better. What a great start to the honeymoon.

  We were zipping down the freeway towards Provo when suddenly the car just stopped accelerating. No matter what I did I couldn't get it back into gear. We coasted off to the side of the road, put on our emergency flashers, and I called my dad.

  "We're stranded on the side of the freeway, dad. Could you come and help us?"

  "Sorry son, you'll have to take care of this by yourself. You're a married man now; you need to take care of your family, not me." Thanks a lot dad. I wasn't asking for an early inheritance, just a ride. We waited until a highway patrolman came and gave us the number of a tow company, and we called a friend of Mei-yun's to pick us up from the garage and take us to our hotel. The car would be done in a day or two and we would be able to start our trip then.

  What a great start to our new life together.

  Chapter 12 - No dad, those clouds shouldn't be green

  We were poor after we got married. I was still in school, jobless, playing gigs when they came to me but not making much money. We happened to get married in the middle of an economic slump and I spent the first three months of our marriage looking for a job. I sold Cutco knives (with the scars to prove it!), was nearly wrestled into selling Hoovers, but was saved by a job stacking CDs at Wal-Mart. Mei-yun had much better luck, she was swamped with offers to wait tables at Chinese restaurants. The pay was terrible but the tips were OK and the boss loved her because she could actually speak English. We had no insurance and try as she might Mei-yun just couldn't find a real job in St Joseph, Missouri. A degree from BYU just didn't seem to be that helpful in the job hunt. She eventually took a position in a public daycare which gave her insurance and some other benefits. The benefits made me happy but the job nearly killed her. She would come home and rage at me, "Four years working my brains out in the library and now all I do is change diapers all day!" I would say something stupid and promise to graduate as fast as I could so that I could get a real job.

  During that time I found a second love, classical guitar. The first semester of my junior year, the community orchestra which I played in collaborated with a musical celebrity, Anthony Glise. Anthony had been in Europe full-time for many years but after his father died he decided to split his time between the continent and the USA so he could be close to his mother who lived in the same city as my university. He had composed a symphony and we were working together with him to prepare it for the first concert of the season. I didn't do much playing that first rehearsal; I was too astounded by the beauty of his guitar playing. I thought I had a pretty good handle on most of Western music, I had heard classical guitar before, but his playing and artistry floored me. The next day at school I begged him to let me into his studio, and he graciously agreed. I studied with him for three semesters before I graduated, and Anthony became a mentor, role model, link to a new world, and great friend.

  My senior year I won the concerto competition on classical guitar, the first student at our university to do so. It was really a charity case, if truth be told. I wasn't even a music major by this point. I had tried out for the concerto competition a number of times on bass and never been selected. My playing was not tremendous by any means, but the director of the orchestra was a good friend and perhaps intrigued at the possibility of a classical guitar concerto. (Or perhaps she just felt bad for me and wanted to give me one small blaze of glory before graduation.) My performance was mediocre but adequate. My senior recital was the week before that performance, and featured half classical guitar and half jazz bass. It was the first time at Missouri Western that someone had performed a recital in that combination, not surprising considering I was still the only bassist at the university. Music was good to me i
n those two years, and it made our life much more colorful than it would have been otherwise.

  The other big event in our early married years was changing my major. I didn't know what I wanted to be, but musician seemed like a less than desirable choice for a family man. I changed to history. Big help in the job market, history. Well, at least in ancient Greece or Rome I would have had the pick of any job I wanted, but history and philosophy seem to have fallen out of vogue in recent centuries. I loved studying it though.

  In the summer between my junior and senior years, my in-laws decided to come out for a visit. This was a big deal for them and for us. We had been married for a year at that point, were a bit more financially stable, and were excited that Mei-yun's parents were willing to risk the journey to come and see us. There is a huge age difference between my parents and my in-laws. I was the honeymoon baby of a couple who married very young, Mei-yun is the fourth child of a couple who didn't marry particularly young. We were worried that it would be difficult for both sets of parents to have anything to say to each other but that turned out to not really be an issue. The biggest complaint that my father-in-law had with the trip was how long we spent in the car. Taiwan is not really a big place, seven Taiwans could fit in the state of Missouri. Five hours is a full island trip in good traffic. Our home in St Joseph was an hour from anything and the running joke became my father-in-law asking how long we needed to drive this time whenever we got in the car. At first I tried to placate, oh dad, it's only two hours this time. Then it turned into a good way to relieve stress. Sorry dad, we'll be here for five hours this trip (and we arrive 15 minutes later).