Adventures in the Land of Singing Garbage Trucks

by Adam Tervort

  We were living in a nice little split-level duplex, the front room, living room, and kitchen on the first floor, the bedroom on the second. We gave Mei-yun's two sisters the bedroom and her parents the living room and we slept on an air mattress in the front room. It was cozy, but we managed not to get on each other's nerves too much. The great test came the day of the tornado. My father-in-law had started to sit out on the front porch and watch the squirrels, often remarking how cute they were. I hated the little buggers because they liked to sit high on a branch over my car and shell nuts while defecating, but he was quite entranced with seeing squirrels up close. One day he came in from squirrel watching and asked me why the sky was green.

  "Is this the normal color of the sky in America?" he asked, totally sincere.

  "No dad, it means we're in for a tornado, we need to get inside."

  Tornados are terrible because of their randomness. In all of my years in Missouri I had never actually seen one this close. The sky was a terrible puke green color, and you could see the funnel start to form somewhere way up high, but not where it touched down. The weather service was telling, begging, everyone to get into their basements. We didn't have a basement. The next option, if you don't have a basement, is to get into a room with no exterior walls or windows. The closest thing we had to that was the bathroom. When I told my mother- and father-in-law that all six of us would need to stay in the bathroom together until the storm was passed they must have really thought I was crazy. As we sat in the bathroom, two sisters-in-law in the tub, father-in-law on the toilet, mother-in-law, wife, and myself on the floor, they kept saying that this wasn't what you did in a typhoon, why did we have to do this? When I told them this was the safest place, they laughed. When I told them that the outside walls of the house were made of wood, they stopped laughing. "Why isn't it made of concrete?" one of my sisters-in-law asked. Every house in Taiwan is made of concrete. Why? If you have a wooden house you'll lose it in the first typhoon. I decided then and there that if I ever built a house in America it would be made of concrete. At least that way my in-laws would be willing to visit.

  Another priceless moment was when we visited the Precious Moments Chapel on the way to Branson, Missouri. You know the Precious Moments figurines? Angels and biblical characters with huge, watery eyes and sappy expressions? This is an entire complex dedicated to Precious Moments. We stopped there mostly because we needed a bathroom break, but it was pretty funny to see the looks of my relatives’ faces as they looked around. They went from shock to amusement to incredulity that anyone would spend so much money to make a whole complex of those horrific figurines. It was so hard not to laugh as they went, confused by it all, from place to place. Finally we left because I couldn't stand it anymore.

  One thing that was amazing to my relatives was the open spaces. In Taiwan you don't see much of that. Farms in Taiwan are either really small or tourist attractions. When we were taking Elva, Mei-yun's younger sister, with us on our trip to Utah that summer she couldn't believe the mega-ranches in Nebraska. We were going by a particularly huge one and telling the story of how on our honeymoon we had driven by that very place and I had rolled down the window to prove how stinky it was, earning myself an afternoon of nasty looks and a lifetime of rolled eyes whenever the subject is brought up. Elva said "Is it really that bad?" and then rolled down the window. I was glad that I didn't get the laser beams that time, poor Elva didn't even know what hit her, both in terms of smell and sarcastic comments that lasted for 200 miles.

  Because my mother-in-law was sure that we were starving to death in America, she brought a lot of food with her. We had mentioned in a conversation just before they came out that we would like to eat sticky rice dumplings, so my mother-in-law brought 20 lbs of sticky rice, bundles upon bundles of bamboo leaves, dried shrimp and mushrooms, and all of the other things needed to make sticky rice dumplings, including a rice cooker. One of her first days at our house she started to steam them, and we ate rice dumplings from then until two months after she had already gone home. I have never since been able to enjoy rice dumplings unless they were made by mom.

  We arranged a few times when we could take my in-laws to see my parents. They had brought all kinds of Chinese toys for my brothers, giant tops and things, as well as candy galore. The candy was mostly the traditional stuff that my father-in-law makes in his factory, which didn't really sit well with an American palate. Imagine if you will a rice cake made from hard puffed rice with seaweed and peanuts. Sound like your kind of snack? My folks didn't think so either. Maybe if it was just peanuts and rice cake it would have been OK, but most Americans just don't appreciate seaweed. It took me five years before I could enjoy it, so I figured it was a losing battle for my family. My father-in-law was impressed with the size of the house, the backyard, the number of cars and the garage, all things that you don't see often in Taiwan.

  After my in-laws left, we settled down to the next school year, which was hopefully my last. Mei-yun quit the job at the daycare center and took a job as manager at a Chinese restaurant. She was the only one there that could speak English. The restaurant she worked at was called China Gold. There were three owners, all from Fujian province in China. None had come into the country legally. Their stories were pretty exciting to listen to. They flew into Bolivia and bought fake passports, and then once they were on the plane to the US they would flush the passports down the toilet. When they arrived at LAX they went to customs and immigration with absolutely no paperwork, no English, nothing to show where they were from or where they could be sent back to. They flew in from Bolivia but they didn't speak Spanish, and no one on duty could figure out which language they could understand. They would be sent off to an immigration prison and after three months one of their relatives in the US would contact immigration and offer to claim them. Out of prison they would go and straight to an employment agency either in Chicago or New York. Chinese restaurants all over the US are tied into the same networks to find workers, so they wait at the agency for a day or two and then a call comes. They are given a plane ticket which they can't read, go to a city they can't locate on the map, and start working in a Chinese restaurant. Usually all of the workers live together in a big apartment, rent-free, and save their money like crazy. At that time the going salary was about $2500 per month, and they worked six days a week. Not great, but when your expenses are zero you can save a lot. All of them told us they started this way and when they had saved for ten years they would buy a restaurant from another Chinese. As the boss they made a killing and got their workers from the same place they came from. The cycle just went on and on. None of them learned any English to speak of but they spent their money like good Americans, and sent their kids to public schools where they did learn English. The second generation got out as soon as they could, got quite a bit of education and never looked back. It was strange and exciting to watch, but I am so glad my life was never like that.

  As graduation approached we were faced with a conundrum: no insurance, no job prospects, and a baby on the way. What we could afford was two one-way tickets to Taiwan, and so we ran away as fast as the plane could carry us. Two weeks after graduation I was officially an English teacher on the other side of the world.

  Chapter 13 - So this is real life, huh?

  We arrived, very uncomfortable and very pregnant, in early May 2005. Mei-yun was already eight months along. We moved into an extra bedroom in her mother's house and I started to look for work. I couldn't believe how severe my culture shock was. I'd already lived in Taiwan before, why was it so hard to move back again? Part of the reason was that I was bored out of my skull. We had one room in a house that was half living quarters, half factory. There was cable TV with quite a few English channels to watch, but I have never been happy when I watch a lot of TV. I had my guitar which was some comfort, but not much time to play it. What I didn't have were books.

  You never know how important something is to you until you don't have it any more. I h
ave always been a voracious reader, but I never imagined how painful it would be to go without books. I had a good collection at our house in St Joseph, but they all went into our garage sale. We made some good money off them, but now they were gone and I had nothing to read. After watching me wander around our room for two weeks, Mei-yun suggested that we go to a bookstore and pick up a few books for me. Christmas is June.

  The English-language section of any Taiwanese book store is pretty slim so we went to Taipei hoping to find some shops that catered to foreigners. We never did. In one of the smaller shops we went into they had a good sized selection of English books, about two shelves full, and I grabbed the three thickest books I could find. Two of them were by Stephen King, who I had never read before. I had always thought of him as something of a literary boob, but now I was happy that he was popular enough to have paperbacks selling on the far side of the world. They could have been terrible and I still would have eaten it up, but it turned out that I really enjoyed both of the King books. I still read a lot of what he writes now and I haven't been disappointed in many of them.

  One of the ways we were able to get settled in was through church. Mei-yun must have talked to some of the members there, because one of our first Sunday attending I was given a large sack of English paperbacks. The titles all over the field, from the Screwtape Letters to a book on how to be creative but it didn't much matter, I read them all. One of the books I had brought with me to Taiwan was a speed reading course, and while I enjoyed practicing, it didn't help the problem of my book shortage to read 2,000 words per minute. I read the Green Mile four times. When I think back on those early days in Taiwan a lot of events are tied up in the books I was reading at the moment. When my son Emerson was born I finished the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and was so happy at the conclusion that I thought for a moment that Quasimodo wouldn't be a half bad name. Emerson was a better choice, but it wasn't a coincidence as I had finished a book of Ralph Waldow's essays the week before he was born.

  My first friend in Taiwan was an American named Trever. His wife and Mei-yun had been friends for years, attending the same high school, college, and university. They also served missions in southern Taiwan at the same time. Trever, his wife Shu-hua, and Mei-yun had all been teaching at the MTC at roughly the same time as well, so Mei-yun knew Trever even though I didn't. Trever is not your normal American living overseas; he is something of a linguistic anomaly. Right now he is working his way through a PhD in Chinese Literature at the top university in Taiwan, the only non-Chinese student doing that. His knowledge of written Chinese is obscene. I can read the newspaper and novels without too much trouble, but Trever eats 2,000 year old classics for lunch. We started talking after he embarrassed me in church my first Sunday back in Taiwan. He knew that we were moving back and that I spoke Chinese, so he decided to test me and see how much I really knew. I was rusty, really rusty after three years back in the US, and when he asked me to read a portion of the lesson out loud I broke out in a cold sweat. I made it through, but not without some help. After the meeting he complimented me on my Chinese (ha!) and then we got talking about life in Taiwan. He said something that day that I have found very true: the longer you stay in Taiwan the less desire you have to go back to the West. Once I got through the first three months back, the cultural and linguistic speed bumps if you will, it started to feel like home again. It still does now.

  Emerson was born a week past his due date. By the time Mei-yun’s finally contractions started we had tried everything we could think of to get her into labor. We walked the stairs in her mom's house, she ate all kinds of food that should have given her indigestion, we even made a halfhearted attempt at sex after we saw an episode of Friends where Jennifer went into labor that way. None of it worked. We were at the doctor every other day or so, and he told us to be patient. Thanks, Doc, you were a fat lot of help. The day that it finally happened, July 4, 2005, I was swimming at the fitness center across the road from our house. My nephew came across and had me paged and we ran back home as fast as we could. By the time I got up to our room Mei-yun had our bags and we went down to look for a taxi. We waited and waited, but there just weren't any taxis. After Mei-yun had her second contraction by the side of the road, she said maybe we could take the bus. There is a bus stop just down the road from the house so we hopped on the next one that came along. She had one contraction on the bus, not too bad, but she had three on the long, slow walk from the bus stop to the clinic. That night when everything was over and I called my parents to tell them about their first grandson, I was so embarrassed that I took my wife to have a baby by bus. I promised myself that it would never happen again, and it didn't. Our next two got to the hospital on scooter.

  Like any first-time dad-to-be, I was scared out of my wits. What if something went wrong? After a few hours of labor the doctor gave Mei-yun a shot for something or other, and she had an allergic reaction to it. The baby's heartbeat became erratic, and the doctor rushed them into the operating room for an emergency C-section. I think I was close to wearing a hole in the floor from my pacing. I heard the cries when Emerson was born, but when they brought him out he was not looking good. His skin was a bit blue, he had hair all over his body, he looked more like a monkey than a baby. The nurse told me that he was perfectly normal and that everything would be alright. I wonder if they are taught unhelpful platitudes like that in nursing school. But of course she was right, everything did turn out fine.

  We spent a week in the hospital, Mei-yun recovering from the surgery and trying to learn how to breast feed. The day we took Emerson home he started to bawl as soon as we walked in the door. We didn't have a pacifier yet, and my mother-in-law looked me in the eye and told me to hurry up and go buy one, stop standing around doing nothing. I went. I was sure I would continue to be useless, but even I eventually to be a helpful (though not terribly competent) father.

  Newborns don't usually sleep well, and Emerson was no exception. I was so tired at night I couldn't even feel it when Mei-yun would kick me to wake me up. One night she went downstairs to go to the bathroom and the door somehow got locked behind her. When she came back she couldn't open the door and there was no response when she knocked and banged. The baby was crying, she was banging, and I was dead to the world. She ended up getting her brother out of bed to come and crawl through the window over our door to unlock it from the inside. I remember none of it. It didn't matter that I didn't remember, I was still punished for my crimes when I did wake up.

  After having a baby Chinese women have a ritual that they go through for 40 days called the 月子 yuezi, a post-birth recovery month. There are lots of rules that go along with it, some genuinely helpful like getting lots of rest, and some strange and archaic like not drinking any water. In ancient China that probably made a lot of sense but we had clean water, my mother-in-law just wouldn't let Mei-yun drink it. (At least while she was around.) The food my mother-in-law made was some of the worst I have ever had to eat. Usually she is a wonderful cook, but pig liver soup every day for lunch is really not my style. Internal organs have a kind of funny taste, but the texture is what makes them hard for me to swallow. Worse than the liver were the kidneys. Yuck! This food wasn't supposed to be for me anyways, but after the first week Mei-yun had a hard time finishing all the dishes her mother was cooking for her. She couldn't send them back to the kitchen unfinished and I was elected de facto garbage disposal. To this day I can't stand the smell of sesame chicken, a daily dish during that month, or anything made with liver or kidneys. One of the more odoriferous traditions is not washing hair for the 40 days. Mei-yun did OK the first two weeks but then she started to go crazy from the way her head itched. When she told her mom she wanted to bath, her mom cooked up a huge pot of Chinese herbs in water that she could sponge bath with. Mei-yun came back feeling stickier after the bath than she had before it. But the whole process did seem to help her health a lot. Before having the baby her periods were always really uncomfortable and since then th
ey have been much milder. Her allergies are much less severe, and she doesn't seem to get sick very often at all. Maybe the herb water was magic, or maybe there is something to the old traditions. I'm just glad that no one tells me to eat liver soup anymore.

  Riding a scooter became one of my favorite things to do after we bought a new one not long after Emerson was born. When we needed to take a car we usually called for a taxi, but to go to work or to classes I always took the scooter. There are scooters everywhere in Taiwan, and when you drive a car it sometimes feels like driving in a pipe filled with rats. When you are on a scooter, however, it is like the world's best video game. There aren't any gears on these scooters; you just crank the throttle with your right hand and go. They can go pretty fast if you have a clear road, well over 100kph (about 60 mph). You can accelerate much faster than a car, and you never have to wait in a long line for red lights. You just work your way through the line of cars until you get to the front. It's so much fun. Some of the classes I was teaching were in another city, Taoyuan, and I would try to take a new road home each night. Getting lost is fun too, and now I never need a map as long as I am in Taoyuan or Zhongli, our city.

  Langston was born on February 7, 2007, 18 months after Emerson. We were a bit more experienced with things this time, and going through the whole pregnancy in the same country with the same doctor was very helpful. By this time work was stable and our life was pretty steady-- we were ready for another baby (or as ready as you can ever be). Mei-yun had another C-section, this time with no complications. When the nurses brought Langston out for me to see my first thought was that he was all nose and chin. His nose was enormous! In the next few days as his baby fat started to fill in it seemed to get a bit smaller, thank goodness. His dad gets enough guff in Taiwan for having a huge schnoz, I don't want him to get the same treatment!