So Far Adrift

迢遞三巴路， 羈危萬里身。 

亂山殘雪夜， 孤獨異鄉春。 

漸與骨肉遠， 轉於僮僕親。 

那堪正飄泊， 明日歲華新。


Farther and farther from the three Ba Roads, 
I have come three thousand miles, anxious and watchful, 
Through pale snow-patches in the jagged nightmountains -- 
A stranger with a lonely lantern shaken in the wind. 
...Separation from my kin 
Binds me closer to my servants -- 
Yet how I dread, so far adrift, 
New Year's Day, tomorrow morning!

I've written before about how I tend to get a bit brooding and maudlin around the holidays - especially leading up to Christmas. I do consider this a good thing, or a sign of a good thing: I wouldn't feel this way if holidays with family were not not happy memories for me. I don't feel this as strongly around Chinese New Year, because it's not my holiday, but there is something to be said for being in a country celebrating  a major family holiday, when everything is closed, and you don't have many ways to celebrate (although I try to find a few). I have my husband, who is my most immediate family now, and my sister also lives in Taiwan. She's younger, though, and has her own friends and while we hang out often,  she's definitely in a younger expat contingent than her fuddy-duddy boring old married sister. This doesn't bother me: it's normal. I was that age, too. Once. Years ago! I don't have a big family dinner to attend. As I said, this doesn't bother me as much as it does on Christmas, but it does cause me to brood a bit.


Here's the thing. I've written about how the common misconception that expats move abroad because they can't make it back home is not true. People often believe that there's something wrong with folks that run off to Asia or wherever, there's something about those people that makes it hard for them to fit in back home, that they're too weird for their own countries. This is not true for me: I have a lot of close friends back home and I make an effort to see them at last once a year. One has visited me (two if you count Brendan, who subsequently moved here and became my husband) and two others have indicated their intention to. We keep in fairly close touch even as our lives take different paths. I left an active and happy social life. I left a crap job that nevertheless had the potential to be an, ahem, "real" career (whatever that means). I left a large, loving family and a brilliant townhouse rental in a pretty cool city. I left dating prospects, all to be abroad just because I wanted to study Chinese and I wanted an adventure. I'd never intended to stay, or to get married and continue staying, abroad - but stay I did.


Well. All of that is still true. And yet, while I can say that I did fit in well enough back home, that I never quite fit in - but then who among us has not felt that way at some point, especially the more adventurous, intellectual or creative types?


Despite having a large and diverse group of friends, and making new friends fairly easily and quickly wherever I am, I've always felt as though I exist in a liminal space. I was not quite of mainstream life back home and I am clearly not quite of mainstream life in Taiwan - as evidenced by the fact that I'm not celebrating Chinese New Year the way most people do here. I recently said on Facebook that I have this loneliness: I never felt that I fully fit into American culture -  I'm not interested in living a life that requires car ownership or extensive driving, for one, but there are other things, too. I don't fully fit into Taiwanese or expat culture either, so who am I?  Then I attended a company year-end banquet at the invitation of a student and as I was watching the craziness go down, I thought to myself: I have my friends, I have my family, and I may not really be able to settle into any group or culture but I'm me and that's OK.


I'm not sure which came first - did I start to feel like I existed on edges and thresholds before I started living abroad, all the way back in 2000 when I went to India for a semester, or  did I start living abroad because I fundamentally feel this way? I have to admit it is a lot easier to give leeway to this part of myself while abroad, because people generally expect that you won't quite fit in. It's easy to "not fit in" when you're not living in your native culture or ethnicity (and are not married into it, either). It's very different indeed to "not fit in" when you live where you came from.


These two ideas might seem to be contradictory, but I don't think they are. Neil Stephenson said something in The Diamond Age (brilliant book right up until the end, when it got all "what the hell" and had a thoroughly unsatisfying and  not-thought-through ending) that resonated with me. In my own words to summarize Stephenson: there are some people who will fully embrace a system and refuse to see fault in it, who will rationalize away contradictions and problems. There are those who will see the faults inherent in a system - any given system, including a cultural structure in which they are born or raised - and use those to tear down the entire thing, rebel, run away, renounce everything about that system. Finally, there are those who will see shades of color in a monochrome, who can accept seeming contradictions, who can understand how one thing and its opposite can both be true, who can accept subtlety and and complexity.  These are truly intelligent people.


I don't want to go off and be all "haha, I am one of the intelligent people!" because that's not my point.


My point is that this issue, for me, falls into the last category. Having a great social and family life back home and fitting in insofar as living well, loving and being loved by many can co-exist with a feeling of liminality, a feeling of not quite "matching" what's around you, a feeling of constant weirdness or eccentricity. One can feel comfortable and settled in a new country, have friends, participate in events, sometimes stumble and sometimes swim like a sleek fish in that context - and still feel like they live life on the sidelines of that culture. One can have and be both.


Never is this contradiction more clear to me than around the holidays.

雲母屏風燭影深， 長河漸落曉星沈。 

嫦娥應悔偷靈藥， 碧海青天夜夜心。

Now that a candle-shadow stands on the screen of carven marble 
And the River of Heaven slants and the morning stars are low, 
Are you sorry for having stolen the potion that has set you 
Over purple seas and blue skies, to brood through the long nights?

This poem is supposed to be about regret at doing something one was not supposed to do -  such as Chang-yi, who was left to be lonely after stealing an immortality potion not meant for her and subsequently floating up to the moon and ending up trapped there for eternity.

To me, it reads as what happens to a person when they live for a period abroad, especially if they like and allow themselves to be affected by their new surroundings (to be true, plenty of expats, especially the corporate types, are sent abroad, preserve as much of life at home as they can, and return happily unaffected). As a friend of mine once said, once you live abroad, you can't really say you belong to any one place. You don't feel the same way about where you came from and probably never will again, because you've changed. You've become bigger and you no longer fit the mold you were raised in. And yet, you don't really feel totally at home in any new place. You feel like just you - the way I felt during that annual party - and a little bit apart from wherever you are, even if you are home. 

It's just as though you, like Chang-yi, were handed a potion when you got on that plane. You drank it, and now you have floated off to some other place and can't go back again. You're left to brood. You, to steal a cliched Matrix analogy, swallowed the red pill. I will not go so far as to say that you ate the forbidden apple, but you get the point. 

Expat Women: Confessions deals with this feeling, answering a question from an adult who had a childhood that included moves to foreign countries. The question  poser asks where and how to live - she doesn't feel at home in her "native country", the country of her passport, but neither is she fully of any other country. The book wisely dubs this the "international citizen" condition, and people who feel this way often feel most at home among others like them - other long-term expats or adults with a lot of life experience abroad - no matter what country they find themselves in. Find other "international citizens" and you'll be most at home.

And yes, I did drink the potion. I'm left to brood beyond purple seas and blue skies. I can go home but I'm still off somewhere - I can't really go home ever again. I also can't really be Taiwanese or be of any other country where I choose to live. I am most at home among others like me, and let other aspects of my personality out through local friends or friends back home. Home is where Brendan and I live, wherever that might be, and that's really true for us because it can't be any other way. I can form attachments but I can't be of any given place. Not anymore.

I am still working my way through this realization, but I think it's OK. The poem says that Chang-yi must regret her choice, but do I regret mine? If I had known that this would happen, would I have done what I have done with my life? Would I have drunk that potion?

Yes.

I would have.

I never felt quite 'in place' anyway, so why not? I'm me, and that's OK.

I'll Not Be Home For Christmas

...in which I admit I'm a total sucker for the holidays. Including the cheesy music and glittery decorations.

I love Taiwan, but it can get a little depressing around here between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when the weather is almost uniformly crap and the only places that decorate or really do anything for the holidays are the department stores, Starbucks and IKEA - and the Holiday Inn Shenkeng, as I've recently discovered. I've been known to peruse IKEA just for the holiday music and goods, and go to Starbucks even though I don't particularly like their coffee, just to get an infusion of holiday spirit.

Yes, of course, it's clear that Christmas is not a local holiday and I can't expect it to really be celebrated in Taiwan, but well-decked halls are a part of not only my culture but also my life, since childhood. It's hard to go without them. It's hard to watch the streets go by from a bus window, with overcast skies - no snow, of course - and no decorations in sight. Going out into Taipei City at this time of year is like preparing for a sad little Holiday of One (now Two).

Joseph, Becca and Alex at Thanksgiving

I'm all about the cheesy music, plastic garlands and shiny ornaments and lights hanging from everything in sight. I don't even mind that half the time it's done in an attempt to get you in the spirit to buy more stuff - maybe it's the result of being totally in love with Christmas but having a very secular moral code. To me, Christmas is about family - which includes shopping carefully to find them gifts that will bring them joy* (or spending time making them, which I have also done). It also involves baking cookies with my mom and sister, going out to the fire department's Christmas Tree sale in a shopping center parking lot to pick out a tree, always a real tree, the livingroom redolent of evergreen as the cats sized it up as a climbing post, visiting Grandma and burning wrapping paper in the fireplace, watching the flames catch the dye and change color.

In Taiwan I don't have the chance to do any of this. No real tree, no fireplace, and this year is the first one in which baking cookies is a real option. Sometimes I feel like I drink Toffee Nut Lattes - which I'm not even all that fond of, if I'm going to drink a gussied up holiday beverage I'd go for gingerbread latte or peppermint mocha or good ol' egg nog, but those aren't things you can get in Taipei - just to pretend it's good enough to make up for what I don't have.

And that's just it - most of the time, living abroad is great, but this is the one time of year when it's not quite so great. Christmas in Taipei is not the same as Christmas in a city that actually celebrates, and definitely not the same as going home for Christmas. All of the traditions Brendan and I have adopted for Christmas are great, and I love that we have our own little family unit with our own way of doing things on the holidays, but my childhood always included larger family gatherings on Christmas and Thanksgiving and it's hard not to have that every year. The party is great, but it doesn't quite adequately substitute what the holidays are back home: in part because it's not family, in part because the weather is all wrong, in part because the run-up to the holiday is so devoid of holiday cheer everywhere except in my own apartment and at Starbucks.

There is something really missing in that lack of a feeling of communal celebration. Something about the holidays is made richer by knowing that your friends, neighbors and extended acquaintances are celebrating too. I guess I have an inkling now of how it might feel to celebrate Channukah in a community that isn't very Jewish, or Chinese New Year in a community where you might be the only Chinese (or Taiwanese, or Singaporean) family celebrating. It's true for both Christmas and Thanksgiving.

Of course, we do have some holiday traditions that we've built up in Taipei. It's not a complete wash. We put up a plastic tabletop tree - pretending, again, that it's good enough - and put gifts for each other under it. We stuff stockings because - why not? I play Christmas music on iTunes and buy foods that remind me of the holidays at City Super and IKEA (Glogg!). This year I'll invite people over to bake cookies. Every year we throw a Christmas party on Christmas Day for other expats at loose ends - some years big, some years smaller. I never take pictures because I'm generally enjoying myself too much to remember my camera, and anyway, what happens at the Christmas Party stays at the Christmas Party.

Thanksgiving Beijing Duck with Cathy and Alex

I love that Brendan and I have our own way of celebrating Christmas now that we're a family unit. I love that this year we get to celebrate in our new apartment, which I'm hoping to have painted and decorated by the time the holiday comes around. It's not quite the same, though, as being near family - everything I associate Christmas with includes family gatherings, big or small (more often than not "big").

Which, you know, is how expats have been doing it ever since the dawn of expats. I'm not the first to feel like I'm celebrating alone, to spend the day with friends rather than family. I'm not the first to get a little misty-eyed when I'll Be Home For Christmas plays, not the first to throw a big party in a land far, far away in lieu of a family gathering at home, and definitely not the first to put up a plastic tree and proclaim it "good enough".

On Thanksgiving we get whatever size group we can together, not always on Thanksgiving, though, and go out for Beijing Duck. This is actually great, because duck is clearly the superior bird to tasteless turkey. It may not include Grandma L teetering around with a Manhattan in hand, green bean casserole, pumpkin and cherry pies, uncles passed out on the couch, or cousins arguing over which Thanksgiving special to watch on TV, but it's got a big dinner, a group of friends and a convivial atmosphere.

In all the ways Christmas comes up short in Taipei, Thanksgiving has the potential to be just as good - if not, in some ways, better. This year I think it lived up to that, although everyone was a bit tired (I have bronchitis, too, so there's that). I've written about previous Thanksgivings in Taipei in 2009 and talked briefly about it in 2008. This year we went to Tian Chu (天廚) near MRT Zhongshan. Better service, we got two ducks instead of Song Chu's paltry one (I still call that place 北宋廚 - which utilizes some slightly rude Taiwanese slang), and really good duck.

Next year, for Christmas, I think we're going to try to go home. No idea which family we'll spend the holiday with, but it's high time we had a real American Christmas, with family and shopping malls and tinsel and all that fun stuff.

*before y'all judge me for being all about the shopping and the gift-giving and less about the religion, I just want to say this. Last year my mother was coughing terribly at our wedding. The family ganged up on her to see another doctor. She did, and by Thanksgiving was diagnosed with lung cancer. Serious lung cancer. By Christmas she was starting chemo. I bought her an iPad to watch movies or whatever else she wanted while she recovered from the chemo sessions as a Christmas gift. I couldn't be there in person - we were still recovering financially from the wedding - which was totally worth the cost, I might add. She'd already started losing her hair when we did our annual Christmas Skype session. She got through chemo and despite being given a prognosis of "you've got two years at most", she's made a full recovery since. Complete remission! Her words: "I spent days on the couch after the chemo sessions, especially the later ones. That iPad got me through it. Thank you." So I don't want to hear any "you're so materialistic!" BS in the comments, 'k?

Vaguely Pagan Christmas Punch

Feel like your guests might be wallflowers (a common problem in Taiwan)? Want to get them a little more animated? Try this! It really works! Author tested!

It's also got a nice flavor - lemon juice tempers the harshness of all the alcohol (like any good punch), and the herbal elements lend it a vaguely pagan, Solstice-y undertone. The caffeine in the black tea keeps people awake - plus tea was an ingredient in historic punches so it's totally legit. While the alcohol de-wallflowers them. The ginger and cranberry give it a nice Christmassy feel. Enjoy!

Jenna's Vaguely Pagan Christmas Punch

full pot of black tea (5-6 bags of Taj Mahal black tea boiled in a pot is good too)

at least 7-10 ginger "coins", or chopped ginger

a few handfuls of lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves (to taste)

a ton of sugar (a few cups should do) - brown or white depending on taste

a liter of cranberry juice

a large bottle of lemon juice

2 cans ginger ale

a bottle of brandy (500ML is OK) (doesn't have to be fancy)

3/4 bottle of rum (can be cheap but not too cheap)

3/4 bottle of bourbon (can be expensive or just Jim Beam)

1/2 bottle lemongrass liqueur (Marie Brizard is fine)

a tray of ice

a dash of Cointreau or Grand Marnier if you feel like it

a crushed nutmeg if you feel like it

Instructions:

Boil a pot of tea with tea bags, ginger rounds, and lemongrass/kaffir lime leaf to taste, and all the sugar until it dissolves and makes a sweet, strong herbal black tea. Throw in the tray of ice to cool it down.

Once cool, sift out the tea bags and spices and pour into a large punch-making bowl or bucket. Add the cranberry juice, lemon juice and all the alcohol. Stop and taste, add ginger ale, mix and taste again. Adjust for flavor/perosnal taste.

Serve in a punch bowl with a large hunk of ice (ice frozen in a bowl will do well), garnished with ginger if you like.

I'll Be Home For Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone!

We spent our first Christmas as a married couple drinking coffee, opening gifts and listening to the construction outside. Fun! I got a new camera (yay!) - the PowerShot A3100IS which should suit my hobbyist's needs along with other wonderful assorted gifts from my husband and in-laws (my parents are sending gifts with some clothes I ordered for myself so will get here late).

I took the photo above on my iPod Touch, NOT my new camera!

This is what Christmas really means to me - no, not Maker's Mark! - spending time with family. With the roots of most of our Christmas traditions originating from pagans (both of the German and Roman variety) - from solstice celebrations and Saturnalia/Kalends, I tend to take the "this is a cold, dark time of the year so you may as well drink up and spend it with those you love" tactic.

It's great to spend our first married Christmas together opening gifts, but I do kind of wish that we were home (I have mentioned before that there is a family illness issue, so that makes it a lot harder. Usually I just make merry and throw a party. We are throwing a party but it's harder to reconcile not being home).

Which, not to be to taciturn on Christmas or anything, but does raise some interesting issues as an expat of where "home" is. We've lived in Taiwan for four years, going on five. We've lived in this apartment for three. We're married and have our own traditions. And yet, is this home, or is the USA our home? Am I "home for Christmas" or would that require several thousand dollars and a 12-hour flight?

Also interesting is that I've noticed that while female expats don't necessarily feel any more attached to home, homesick or obligated to visit home for the holidays, they do so more often - in part due to family expectation and the way that family life is still very much mother- (and woman-)centered, even today.

Well anyway.

Merry Christmas! Happy Solstice! A Joyous Saturnalia to you!

More on Xmas

Now that Xmas (again, I do mean ex-mas, like in that Futurama episode) is over, I'm already sad it's gone.

After the giant gift grab (my boyfriend scored a new camera for traveling and a microfiber blanket, among other things, I scored a silver bracelet from said wonderful boyfriend and a new MP3 player, among other things. My sister got a Chinese-style shirt in cinnabar, natural fiber with hand-embroidered flowers and a jade pendant) we hung out for awhile, then began preparations for the Christmas bash.

I made an Iranian salad and my sister and I rolled the truffles from the batter I'd made last night. Then we all went to Geant for some last minute supplies - drinks, Pringles and a few extra plastic chairs and began chopping fruit and setting out other dishes (hummus, babaghanoush and Ethiopian fusion satay among them).

I'm afraid I have no photos - the party was so much fun that I truly forgot to take them.

It began with a few early-comers - our friends Sasha and Cara and one of Cara's friends. They helped us chop the bread and set out other food - and by 9pm had a party going of about fifteen - half expats and half locals. By ten we were at more than twenty, and numbers didn't start to dwindle until approximately 1am (those left at midnight figured they'd be taking taxis anyway, and a few people crashed on our floor). I made hot wine at 1am and the last of us chatted as we drank. By 2:30 the apartment was reasonably clean, with our friend Joseph helping out with the clean-up, and we collapsed into bed at 3.

All in all, it was a pretty classy affair - no wanton drunkenness or untoward behavior, but lots of merriment. We got one call from the landlady's niece about the noise, but any good apartment party gets one of those. Only one person collapsed in our bed, but it was someone we know well. We only found one stray pair of glasses this morning.

I noticed the manifestation of a true cultural divide - our Taiwanese friends left at about midnight ("I have work tomorrow") to get at least a snippet of sleep, whereas the expats stayed on until the wee hours ("Doesn't matter at this point anyhow") and just slogged through work exhausted and possibly hungover. Brendan and I were fortunate not to have class today and spent Boxing Day eating leftover hummus and Gouda's Gilde Siroopwafelen (caramel wafers available at Jason's) and generally schlubbing around the apartment.

All in all, a great party. Every expat should have one of these to go to. I've been lucky and had good Christmases every year I've been abroad (in China, I visited friends in Guangzhou for a family Christmas. In 2006 I went to Lishan with Cara and last year Brendan and I had a quiet day together and went to Red House Pub in the evening).

A Taiwan Xmas

Xmas - pronounced ex-mas - finds its true home in Taiwan.

Basically, this woman got it right: No Reason for the Season - I'm not an atheist, more of an agnostic who doesn't try to answer questions she can't answer and prefers a secular basis for morality and goodness, but I see where the writer is coming from.

You see, I really think it's time all we secular folk accept Christmas for what it is...an awesome mid-winter pissup whose true meaning is family, friends, presents and candy. (Hey, I said "friends and family" first, and I mean giving gifts as well as receiving them).

Taiwan is especially good at this because most Taiwanese are not Christian, and yet they really, really seem to like Christmas, especially at kindergartens and in the Xinyi shopping area. I work at two different buildings in Xinyi so I'm there a lot, and let me tell you they've gone so Christmas-crazy with the LED lights, the fake trees, the advertising-decked Christmas trees (I especially like the Tiffany tree outside 101 mall), the giant Christmas cake (?) that the whole place looks like something out of a freakish holiday Star Trek. Bling bling!

The true meaning of Christmas rests here. Both are in great abundance, while almost nobody goes to church or celebrates for religious reasons. Other important parts of Christmas - santa hats, cheesy Christmas carols and things made out of tinsel - are also right at home in Taiwan.

Our own Christmas morning is proving to be great fun - I'm blogging this as my sister runs to Cosmed and my boyfriend heads out to teach his one class for the day - lots of gifts, sugary cereal and those caramel wafers from Holland. Woohoo!

Later tonight we'll hold a big party - about 20 people - in our smallish apartment with loads of food, drink, cheesy music and fun. Ahh, Xmas.

Life is Quiet

There's not much going on in life right now; haven't been to any good protests, have been out to a few good restaurants and will write about those later - although at least one is famous, so what's the point? - and generally been either working or sick in bed with a cold.

After a week of working my butt off (including on Sunday, in Taoyuan of all places), having Monday off really brightens things up. I'm finally not sick anymore, either!

While in convalescence, we put up the Christmas tree. We have a little fake one from Canada that a coworker gave us, and ornaments from IKEA. As you can see, the cat likes it too. Very homey. We even put on holiday music and had some millet wine afterwards, enjoying our 'fireplace' (a space heater). We're "doing" Christmas this year; having about 25 friends over for food, drink and talk, so I'm happy we've got the tree.