The Irrawaddy and Hsipaw in Photos

After leaving Bagan, our first stop after landing in Rangoon on Friday night, our next destination was Hsipaw, via Mandalay. Hsipaw is east of Bagan by a fair distance, and there are no direct connections that we know of. The Rangoon-Bagan bus wasn't so bad, except that:

...it left at 7pm and arrived at 4am, as many buses in Burma do (almost all buses are night buses - apparently the locals prefer it. I hate it). 4am is not a good time to be at a bus stop 7 kilometers from your hotel, shivering (yes, it gets cold in northern Burma at night) and negotiating with avaricious taxi drivers.

...it means once you get there, you won't be able to check into a hotel unless you've paid for one for that night, which means no shower either. With very little sleep, this translates to feeling like crap for the rest of the day. Your choices are to walk or bike around before dawn when nothing's open, or sit in the lobby and try to sleep in a chair. Wheeee!

...the air conditioning is turned way up on these buses so even if you are the sort of person who can fall asleep on one (sometimes I am, if I'm tired enough, sometimes I'm not - and I do get motion sickness), your teeth will probably be chattering too much to nod off.

...these buses tend to play movies, TV serials and music for much of the night at ear-splitting volumes, and when they stop for breaks, everyone has to get off. That's fine if the break is at 9pm, but sometimes it's at 3am.

In short, I am not a fan of night buses.

Much better to get out of bed at a preposterously early hour (4am) and clamor into a boat slipping softly down the pre-dawn Ayeyarwadi (Irrawaddy) River to Mandalay. So what if it takes twice as long? It's not a goddamn night bus and boat trips can be fun!

We grabbed wicker lounge seats on the deck and didn't bother to move from them all day. There were blankets on board (which is good, because it's freezing) and you get a free breakfast that you can eat whenever you want (coffee and a box with a boiled egg, two packaged pastry things and a banana) and we had the hotel's packed breakfast as back-up snacks. I slept briefly in the pre-dawn hours, nestled in a deep nest of blankets while my nose turned cold and red from the outside air, and then woke up to see the sun rise:



A pretty banal photo, I know, but compare that to a night bus and you get magic.

After the sun was well and truly up, the air warmed up quickly and I cast off blankets, one after the other, as I stretched out like a cat in the warm sunlight and napped until about 10am. I bought more coffee - well, three-in-one - which is free with breakfast but not after - and spent the day looking at the view, waving to passing boats, snapping photos and reading my book (Lonely Planet Publications' A House Somewhere).



People - well, at least I did - imagine Burma as a land of endless jungle: overhanging palms, mangroves, deep grass, colorful birds, huge flowers, monkeys and tigers and elephants, oh my! (we didn't see even one monkey on our trip. Or one tiger, but the lack of monkeys was more surprising).

But...well...no. The fact that we traveled in dry season probably had something to do with this, but it was more of an alternating flat farmland and nearly desert-like landscape, with the Irrawaddy as a big wet gash running along an often scabby shore, with few trees visible at all.



In short, I was picturing something of the wet palmy jungle of Sri Lanka, but Burma - as might be expected - was more of a pancake-flat Bangladesh or ruddy northern India. Geographically this makes sense, but it's a shock to have one's pre-imagined geography rudely shaken awake and pushed out of the layers and blankets of the mind.

We hit Mandalay just before sunset - it takes longer to go upstream after all - and stayed at the perfectly serviceable hotel that our hotel manager in Bagan booked for us. Hotels in Burma are surprisingly expensive, with a shortage of rooms and an influx of tourists ever since the government liberalized the tourism industry (you no longer have to pay lots of money to the military junta for the pleasure of going) causing demand to outstrip supply and prices to skyrocket. What was an $8 hotel room a few years ago is now a $25 hotel room. What was a $30 hotel room is now a $75 hotel room, and so on. I'm not complaining - locals deserve to prosper from tourism - but just so you know. Don't go expecting a budget vacation.

We didn't spend long in Mandalay - rather than see the concrete chock-a-block city's few charms we wanted to head straight for Hsipaw. But we enjoyed the Indian street food at the teahouse across from our hotel, the easy-to-find pharmacy for ibuprofen to treat my blossoming headache (all the crazy sleeping and wake-up times were wreaking havoc on my poor brain-box), and the fast, reliable Internet. Internet in Bagan - whether computer or wifi - was so bad that we, for all intents and purposes, did not check e-mail or social media for 3 days.

Getting to Hsipaw was almost a dream. Brendan got sick in Mandalay and puked once at the hotel and once on the way, but we were able to take advantage of a local taxi service to get there cheaply and efficiently. For about $18 US dollars, a nice fellow - I suspect he was Shan from his cabalistic arm tattoos - picked us up at our hotel in Mandalay, drove us for 5 hours through the gorgeous countryside, and deposited us at our homestay at the other end. We stopped in Pyin Oo Lwin for lunch.

I thought this was a very low price for Burma, considering what it costs to avail oneself of other tourist infrastructure, but he also stopped at his own house on the way, not far from Hsipaw. I gathered that he made the trip frequently for other reasons, and the taxi service was like an extra income he could sign up for.

Hsipaw is in an area that may even be more culturally diverse than the rest of Burma (which is extremely diverse - Burmese, Chinese, Indian, Thai, other tribal and ethnic minorities), where the majority of people are of Shan descent but there are also Padaung and other groups. You may know the Padaung as the "long-necked tribe", but in actuality most Padaung don't do that - those who do may have once done it for their own cultural reasons, but now they mostly put rings on the necks of young girls so that tourists can gawk at them and open their wallets. Ick. And the Shan are more closely related to the Thai people (according to our guidebook, "Shan" is an old word related to "Siam", and the Shan call themselves "Thai"). The language is similar to Thai and Lao.



Also Burma has a lot of cats - mostly street cats, but mostly well-fed - and Hsipaw is no exception.

On our first day, with Brendan feeling a bit off, we walked the easy mile to the home of Donald and Fern. Donald is the son of the older brother of the last Shan Sky Lord (rulers who ruled over one part of Shan territory, Hsipaw being the seat of one of these territories). The last Hsipaw Sky Lord himself was killed by the government in the 1960s (although they have never admitted this), and was married to an Austrian woman he met at university in the United States. After fleeing Burma with their two children, she described the tale in her book, Twilight Over Burma: My Life as a Shan Princess.

Well, he died, she left, and his older brother - who had been chosen to represent the Shan people in the national assembly, took over care of the family properties. When he died - not that long ago, of very old age - his son, Donald, took on that and other roles along with his wife, Fern (the daughter of a Sky Lord from another area of Shan State).

You can still walk up to the old English manor built by the last Sky Lord's father, who was educated at Oxford and came back with a Westernized attitude (he didn't want to live in the old "Oriental" palace, but would use it, and his various regalia, for ceremonial functions. The "Oriental" palace was destroyed by the British, bombing out the Japanese, around World War II). It used to be that you could meet Donald and he'd show you family photos and tell you the story. Then the government decided to crack down on tribals and accused him of being a "tour guide without a license" (not true) and told him to basically never talk to foreigners again. It's not clear if that restriction has now been lifted, but what's clear is that he's not in Hsipaw.

Now, he's off taking care of other family business. However, you will receive a warm welcome and hear interesting stories from Fern, who remains in town.

The next day, we set off on an easy morning hike through a string of Shan villages outside of town. It was hot and dry, but also nice and flat. We weren't the first tourists to ramble through, but people were friendly and welcoming, and it wasn't a road overrun with foreigners (we saw one other).



As long as you're friendly and ask nicely, it's fine to take photos of locals. People do enjoy it when you show them the pictures you've snapped.







One thing that nagged at me was when we saw local construction projects - fixing a stupa, as shown here, or repairing a road or bridge. On one hand, it made sense to do these things. On the other, modern Burma has a history of forced labor, with the government insisting that people "donated" their time and tools to "work together" to "develop the country". In actuality it's unpaid - basically, slave labor. So when I saw such projects going on, I wondered - is this just something the community is doing or are these people being forced to work for no pay? Are they compensated, willing workers, or are they slaves?

I don't know the answer.










After our hike, we had a nice, relaxing cup of coffee at Black House, an old teakwood warehouse converted into a coffeeshop down by the river. Then we wandered over to the local Hindu temple, which was basically like a game of religious scattergories:



Check out the Chinese Fat Buddha and Guanyin along with a Hindu Hanuman idol with Indian and Southeast Asian-style altar decoration.

The next day we did a punishing 5-hour hike up the nearby mountains - not as high as the ones we drove through between Mandalay and Hsipaw, but definitely with some awesome views back over the plateau:









We signed up for the hike the day before, and thought we were getting our own guide. That was not the case. Although I liked our hiking companions - seemed like nice people and we'd all lived in the same area of the USA - I was kind of hoping we'd be hiking on our own. I don't like slowing other people down, but let's face facts: I am a slooooow hiker. I always get to the top. I always make it as far as I say I will make it. I always reap the rewards of the hike. But it takes me awhile, and I don't like being dead weight. That's why I prefer to hike with Brendan or a few close friends who understand this - not with people I've just met who are wondering what's taking me so long.

Oh well. We got there. In the scheduled 5 hours no less (although they could have gotten there faster without me).

The destination was Pankam village, a small mountain village that does quite good business as a hiking destination for foreign visitors. It was a Padaung village, but there were no neck rings or long-necked women to be seen. Just normal people living normal lives. I would much rather meet and spend time with people just being their normal selves than gawk at something done up for the benefit of tourists.





On the final day before our dreaded night bus to Nyaungshwe (on which I got sick - not motion sick but genuinely sick) we walked up to some old monasteries and ruined stupas and enjoyed cool tamarind tea at a cafe nearby.










Note how the tree is growing right out of the stupa, cracking it in the process.

This area is not unknown to tourists and guidebooks, but we only saw one other small group of walkers.











Next up: Nyaungshwe and Inle Lake (tourism central, but still worth it).

Bagan in Photos

Bagan was our second stop on our Burmese vacation after Rangoon - it was once a long-standing capital, pockmarked with hundreds of temples, before (as all Burmese capitals seem to do) being abandoned and falling into disrepair, with only the temples still standing to mark the plain. Wherever the houses, public buildings, markets etc. once were, they're now gone, or at least effectively vanished from anyone who isn't an archaeologist.



We arrived in Bagan at 4am on the night bus (almost all buses are night buses in Burma - the locals seem to prefer it as it "saves time" but I hate it, simply because I can't fall asleep! I often get insomnia even in my own warm bed!) and promptly began shivering - it's cold on the plain - and arguing with taxi drivers who wanted to charge us a small fortune to go from the bus stop in Nyaung-U to our hotel in Old Bagan (in the archaeological zone). We finally agreed on a preposterous $7 US dollars for a ride of a few kilometers. It was just a bit too far to walk with our backpacks.



Because it was 4am, we were able to put our bags down, check in (but not get a room) and then rent cycles to go see the sunrise over the plain. It's also popular to take a balloon ride - shown here - but so expensive that we didn't bother. Sunrise in Bagan is a touristy affair, but thoroughly worth it.







On the first day we explored on our own - our feet got thoroughly caked in grime, as you have to remove your shoes to enter any temple, even one that is basically an archaeological site.















We enjoyed some great local food at Golden Myanmar - where you can get an assortment of curries and side dishes (the curries are usually meat, mildly spiced, a bit sour and very oily, and the side dishes are usually vegetables, fried chili flakes and chili-fish paste, with fresh greens and vegetables you can dip in a paste of chili and fermented beans).



You can enter some temples, but not others (and some you can enter, but they're so overgrown that you wouldn't want to with bare feet). Overall I expected a tropical jungle climate - you know, huge flowers, giant ferns and palms, I dunno, tigers or something - but during the dry season at least, Bagan is more like northern India - dry, dun-colored, dusty.







Applying gold leaf to Buddha images is popular with locals and tourists alike, After awhile the gilded Buddhas get a bit lumpy - and at some point they turn into golden lumpen snowmen. These guys are pretty early on in the process.





This post is full of temples&Buddhas&more temples, but every temple and Buddha looks slightly different - and some look a bit tipsy.















One thing I did appreciate was how knowledgeable and informed people were about the state of their country and government - with the opening up of the government and the influx of tourists, locals are more open to talking about their true beliefs and ideas (this used to be punishable by imprisonment or even death).

Usually in China, although most people are aware of the problems with their government - it's basically a plutocracy - you can still find some meatheads and brainwashed types happy to defend the Communist Party or the state of affairs in China. You can still find people who toe the party line, and some of them are even sincere about it!

You won't find that in Burma: either you're in the government, or you hate the government. The few people not in government who felt otherwise instead pointed to recent reforms and were of the opinion that they hoped things would continue to improve, pointedly not saying they were already satisfactory.

While in Burma we both read Emma Larkin's Finding George Orwell in Burma (which I traded to a Burmese kid for a copy of Cryptonomicon after I'd finished it so I'd have something new to read) and it painted a very different picture from what we found: nobody laughed and pretended to not hear political comments (not that we made many) or openly avoided the topic: if anything, our horse cart driver in Bagan and the hotel "boy" (the owner's son, we think) among others were very open about what they thought of the state of their nation.

Kicked to the Curb: Moving House in Taipei When You Don't Want To

One ordinary Monday night, I came home from work, turned the key, opened the door and thought the same thing I think every night: I'm happy to be home. I love my home. My husband and I are so lucky to be able to live here! I may just be renting, but wow. What real estate heaven is this? Downtown Taipei! A tatami tea nook! An elevator in a city full of walk-ups! We were allowed to paint our walls! Natural light! Friendly neighbors - great for practicing Chinese! Three bedrooms - we had an office and a guest room! When I walked in the door I'd sometimes let out an audible "aaah" - this is home.

In all my previous apartments - even the nicer ones - I'd never quite felt that way. In those places I'd always known I'd be moving on, and I hadn't had the money to decorate the way I really wanted to (think rural Taiwan meets vintage Japan meets cool minimalist Turkish Mediterranean meets colorful India). With this apartment, I could afford to do what I wanted - my tastes are not expensive, but they are specific.

The next day I came home, turned the key, opened the door and my heart sank.

I had gotten a phone call from our landlady - a Buddhist nun who lives in a monastery in southern Taiwan - earlier that evening. A pit had formed in my stomach as she told me that we would have to find a new place to live. Her sister wanted to move into our place. I didn't ask for details because I already understood: apartments in Taiwan may be in one person's name, but they're often not really considered to be owned by that person alone. They're family-owned in spirit, and who lives there is often a family decision. That apartment was as much her sister's as hers. I wanted to yell and cry - let her know that I felt like she'd just sucker-punched me. But one does not yell and cry at a nun who hasn't done anything wrong. I couldn't make my problem her problem. I couldn't even be angry with her - her voice cracked, too, when she told me. She said she was so sorry, and she wanted us to find an apartment we'd really be happy with so we could take two, three months if necessary.

But it didn't make me feel better.

I had to get back to work, but I managed to croak out the bad news to Brendan and somehow face down the last hour and a half before I could go home. He looked like he was going to cry; this was really something, he rarely displays emotions as openly as I do.

My heart cracked. A knot formed in my gut. My eyes smarted and my head swam. I describe it in physical terms because that's how bad it hit me: it physically hurt.

So I looked around at our custom blue ombre curtains, our aqua blue wall, our high-quality faux-wood floor (restaurant grade, very durable), our antique milk glass pendant lamp that perfectly fit the tatami-floored nook it was hanging in. Some children were still playing, at that late hour, in the little courtyard that our window overlooked. Oh yes - no traffic noise. And I thought - I'm going to have to give all of this up. I don't want to! No! I refuse! I'd planned to spend several years, or more, in this apartment! I...I won't! I...have to. It's not my decision.

I'd given up fantastic apartments before - the one with the full view from my bedroom picture window over the Potomac River and National Mall in Washington, DC. The sweet little townhouse with wood floors and generous kitchen. But I'd chosen to give them up - I wasn't pushed. I'd regretted leaving them behind but I was moving on to other things - to other countries. This was different.

Then, as we began the search for a new place - still ongoing - I started beating myself up over my feelings. There were refugees fleeing their homes in other parts of the world with the clothes on their back and not much else, in the direst of circumstances. Through history people have been taken from their homes against their will, to be kicked out of the country, beaten and interrogated, imprisoned or killed. Millions, if not billions, of people around the world live in sub-par conditions, many in slums that would turn your stomach. What a First World Problem! I have no right to be feeling this way! I got a slice of real estate heaven and now I was being made to trade it in for what would probably be a not-so-tasty slice of real estate mediocrity. Boo fuckin' hoo. Wah wah wah, poor little white girl can't keep her dream apartment because she doesn't own it. I felt like crud and I didn't even have sympathy for myself.

Some folks told me to be optimistic - maybe we'd find a place that was even better, minimizing the flaws of the old place. Not likely - it had so few flaws. Maybe we'd find a place with other great features that would make up for the features we might have to compromise on. Hah - except I'm not willing to compromise on features like natural light and floors that aren't hideous, not to mention not freezing in the winter and having the apartment be hotter than the outside in summer (a major problem with one apartment we'd had). I was told point blank that I had better "find my gratitude" that I got to live in a great place at all, even if I had to move on.

None of that advice was bad, but it didn't work.

Considering the situations of those far less fortunate than myself did put things into perspective and was a reminder not to get too dramatic about the whole thing, but it didn't spackle over the hole in my gut. I still felt like crap. "Find your gratitude", while it came from the right body of advice, sounded more condescending than helpful. "You'll find something as good or better" - but I don't want an unknown quantity of 'as good or better', I want what I already have.

For the next two days I walked around with my stomach in a knot and my head a ball of fuzz. Occasionally - over reminders even tangentially related to how much I loved my apartment - an incorporeal spear would fly out of the ether and run me through, right in the belly. I would get into a taxi and think of how easy it was to catch a cab right outside my front door - schwam! I'd see sunlight through a window and think of how great the natural light is in our living room - stab! I'd look at a teal blue pen and think of the brilliant color we were able to paint one livingroom wall - fwoosh!

So I started really thinking about it - why did I feel this way? Over an apartment? Why was I so crushed over what was the very definition of a First World Problem? Why couldn't I "find my gratitude" or at least be optimistic about things? Why did I want to be so dramatic when the situation really didn't call for it?

Then it hit me like another knife in the gut: this is exactly how I've felt during bad breakups. This lint-brained, disemboweled, harpooned-by-the-universe, even-the-sunshine-makes-me-sad feeling is identical in every way to heartbreak. I was going through a breakup: I'd been dumped by my apartment! In the world of real estate, my true love! I'd been hoping for a proposal (I was working out a strategy for saving up the necessary deposit to buy the place - the equivalent of looking at wedding magazines before you're engaged!) and instead I got told 'it's over'. I was mooning over an apartment the way I might moon over an ex with whom I hadn't wanted things to end!

At least when you break up with a boyfriend or girlfriend, you have the option of being single for awhile as you heal, not looking for anyone else as you get over those "I don't want anyone else, not even anyone better, I want him/her!" feelings. You can become open to a relationship on your own time. This felt like being dumped, and then pushed into a new relationship you weren't ready for, while you were still thinking "but I don't want anyone else!" We looked at other places but none excited us - even ones that would have been fine before we found our dream apartment were not satisfactory after we'd been to paradise. "Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all"? No, we'd have been much better off if we'd never fallen in love with that apartment, never found a place that we could truly turn into a 'home' without owning it.

Over the next few days details emerged: we offered to pay more rent (sometimes landlords in Taiwan, rather than raising your rent, will ask you to move out on false pretenses so they can charge more to another renter - I don't get the logic of this at all, as much as I try to be culturally openminded) but that had not been her intention. Her sister visited us and explained things - nearly in tears herself. She was losing her own home, which she'd owned and lived in for decades, through what I feel was no fault of her own. I won't tell her story here - those details belong to her narrative and aren't for me to blast all over the Internet - but the reason for her sudden need to live in what I thought of as our apartment (it wasn't ours, but I thought of it that way) became clear. She said not to worry about the painted walls - she wouldn't make us return them to their original white, and reiterated that we could have all the time we needed - six months, ten, whatever, more than the original two or three - to find a place we were really happy with. We offered to find her a place and pay the rent deducted from our own as the sister would lose that income stream anyway, but she didn't want to deal with a landlord (something she had never done before in her life). What could we say? Her anxiety about landlords was odd - at least she could speak to them in her native language, I had to do so in a language I'd learned with little formal instruction! - but it was her right. This was a very generous offer and quite fair.

I'm only now starting to feel better - just realizing that what I was going through was a breakup, a hellacious "this is nobody's fault, I still love you but we have to end it" dumping, helped me get a grip on things. It led me to these ideas, which lifted me out of the gutter more effectively than the advice I'd been given.

1.) It's okay to feel this way. It seems silly, but breakup heartache seems unjustified to those not going through it, too. You have a right to feel this way. Just feel it for awhile. Like with a breakup, it'll help.

2.) Everybody bounces back from breakups. It takes time, but you do eventually feel better, even if in the beginning all you can do is remind yourself that at some unknown point in the future you will be okay. You will bounce back from this. Just let it happen.

3.) It's okay to not want to "find your gratitude" or be optimistic when you don't really feel that way. You can have a different mindset: looking for diamonds in the turd sandwich may help some, but it's also perfectly acceptable to be a pessimist and call a turd sandwich a turd sandwich because it is one. You do not need to announce that it is actually a very stinky diamond mine. If it helps you more to say "My, this appears to be a big pile of bullshit" when a big pile of bullshit lands on your head, then go with it. Worked for me!

4.) Just remember - the sister who is moving in has lost basically everything. You have not. It's the more personal version of "remember that so many people have it a lot worse than you do", and fulfills a similar purpose. You don't have to automatically feel better upon considering the issues facing others (it really is OK to feel your honest feelings about your own situation while at the same time being aware of how your situation compares to that of others), but it can put your own issues into perspective.

5.) Don't regret making your rented space your "home". It's probably "easier" to not home-ify your rental, so if you ever have to leave you can do so without too much heartache, but you live here and now, and not at some probably-undefinable point in the future when you own your own place and can home-ify it as much as you want. Don't spend these years living in a house that's not a home. 'Tis better to have loved and lost...yadda yadda yadda.

6.) Remember your priorities: of all the bad things that could have happened in life - including the dangers that might befall my husband, my cat, my parents, sister and in-laws, my closest friends, my life abroad, my freelance career, a health crisis, an accident or worse, this is really the least "bad" thing of all the bad things. I have my husband and my kitty: together we three will be okay. If I had to choose another thing that is important to me to sacrifice so I could keep my apartment, I can't imagine what I'd choose. I'd probably say "okay, evil god, then go ahead and take the apartment".

We still haven't found a new place yet - although we trawl the online rental listings daily - and have the luxury of time. I still don't feel fully better, and I'm still not sure I have fully accepted the situation: my head has accepted that my home (effectively my "ex") won't be available for a "getting back together", but my heart still has this vacuum-like sucking feeling at the center. But, like moving on from an ex, I know eventually it will be okay.

MY BIG RANT

Everybody should go read this right now:

It's titled "Mearsheimer, Taiwan and the Future" but I think the provisional title of "Taiwan's problem isn't China, it's America's foreign policy commentariat" is more accurate.

I have a lot to say on this - not only because I agree with Michael but because my degree is in International Affairs with a focus on Asian Studies (fat lot of good that did me), so I'm used to hearing this sophomoric garbage. I spent four years immersed in it. Spent four years in the George Washington University Elliott School of Talking About Foreign Affairs Only Insofar As They Can Be Manipulated to The US's Advantage. Probably came out a little stinky myself. Four years in DC around these people was enough to put me off a career in the foreign service forever (plus I don't think I could be sent on a tour of service and be able to "support" American foreign policy in that country - almost doesn't matter which country)!

It lays out exactly what I - and many others - think of a lot of the "educated" views on "foreign affairs" that I hear spewed about Taiwan. Even people I've met who otherwise seem intelligent and well-studied pull this crap: not long ago, after meeting someone once, my main reaction was "don't dislike him, seems like an okay guy, but in terms of foreign affairs he's wrong about everything".

What's worse is that they apply the same logic to a lot of crap that goes on in Taiwan and China - they adopt KMT word-puke about how they're a "reformed" party (who still works to inhibit press freedom, curtail the will of the people, hoard wealth and work to get their sons elected), or how 228 and the White Terror are best "forgiven and forgotten" because they are "not relevant" to politics today (yeah, tell that to the families who still don't know for sure what happened to their relatives who disappeared, and the memories of the deceased found in mass graves still being discovered), or how the KMT has "changed" so it doesn't matter that they do not fully acknowledge their part in the genocide.

They apply it to the failure of ECFA: "Ma Ying-jiu played his hand the best he could, although it's not perfect it's been better for Taiwan than if it had not been implemented" - horseshit! China has such a boner for Taiwan's skilled labor force and high-tech R&D/industrial capacity that they'd have struck a much better deal if the Ma administration had bothered to fight for one - the deal that came out was an obvious plan for economic integration, not the best interests of the majority of middle-income Taiwanese. It's so clearly a two-pronged plan to enrich the wealthy and keep the stock market up (so supporters can say "it worked! Look at the stock market! That's proof!" while ignoring the stagnation across the rest of Taiwan) and to pull down Taiwan's economy such that the people will be pushed closer to believing that the only way out is further integration that I can't believe how few people see it.

They apply it to "the Taiwanese people support keeping the status quo, not independence" - technically true but also kind of horseshit: they support the status quo because they have to, not because they want to, and it is ridiculous and misleading to imply that they'd choose their current ambiguous political status vis-a-vis China if they could determine the future of Taiwan without threat or fear from China.

They apply it to history - actually believing that "the Asian view of what it means to be a nation" matters (no, what the Taiwanese want for their country matters, and they don't, just going by the data, generally support your 'Asian view of being a nation' crap), or "Taiwan was a part of China in antiquity" (no, it wasn't - do I really need to get into this?), or "the Taiwanese still view themselves as Chinese" (only sort of - and I still view myself as "Armenian, British, Swiss and Polish", so I should draw and quarter myself and have the four pieces of me sent to those countries? Yeah, no) or "Taiwan was ceded to China/the KMT when the Japanese left" (patently not true and provably so).

They apply it to domestic politics: "more and more Taiwanese are adopting ROC (meaning KMT, really) symbols as their own (which implies that the KMT, currently in power, has the moral authority to speak for the people). Yep, no, not when the government's approval rating is so low - 9.2% last I checked - that people who still support them are actually called "9-point-2-ers" in Chinese!

While sometimes valid points are made, and sometimes ideas - even if I disagree with them, are intelligently formed or have merit - the vast majority of stuff I hear along these lines is pure, unadulterated, Blue Sky horseshit.

I haven't been able, so far, to articulate my thoughts on this crap commetary as well as Michael's post (he managed to say his piece without once using the term 'horseshit', and I am genetically unable to), which is a shame because I've run into more than a few of those bumbling "the only thing worth putting your money on is realpolitik" foreigners who have adopted Beijing thought-vomit into their own commentary, and then acted like they're impartial, objective observers of the situation.

Turton calls out the "ruddy-faced foreigners" who regurgitate this crap in expat bars - and he's right. There's a reason I don't spend a lot of time talking to these folks - you can't debate with them, you can't argue with them, and yes, I do feel they can be horribly condescending at times to a young-looking woman who disagrees with them (yes, I'm calling sexism, and yes, I'll probably be eviscerated for that, but I don't care) - and a reason why you don't often meet people with more nuanced views in expat bars: those of us who are on the same side as Turton in this debate tend not to go to expat bars! We just can't take the reek of the bullshit! But there are more of us on the "annexation is not inevitable, spouting unfounded 'realpolitik' as a stand-in for actual views is preposterous" side than you think: we just tend to keep to ourselves.

And it kind of horrifies me that while Beijing is decidedly losing the charm offensive, the soft-power push, to win over the Taiwanese people (which honestly is simply not going to happen, now or ever), they seem to be winning the push to brainwash expat and "foreign policy expert" bloviators.

A final note after my little rant - for years I've tried to encourage people to stop using the phrase "reunification" and instead use the more accurate "unification" - "re-" implies something torn asunder that is being repaired, or something being returned to a previous state. That is simply not the case with China and Taiwan. I wonder what would happen if I went whole-hog and encouraged the use of "annexation" over any verb that implies "unity"? Probably a lot of annoyed expats who think they know better would talk down to me. Yet another reason not to circulate too much in those circles.

Next up: more happy pictures of Bagan, Myanmar. Stay tuned.