victorthegrizzlybear

I missed that little 700 square feet dog house in 2250 Monroe Street, Santa Clara, used to just put on pair shorts and a T-shirt after-work, baseball cap worn backwards and a bottle of water, I would jog downstairs from the condo, through the gate, alongside either Los Padres or Scott Street or whatever, sometimes ending at Valley Fair Mall and back, or hitting El Camino Real street through that plaza with the Indian grocery and diving training center then visiting the Barista for a Tall Latte, or just cruising along whatever street that hits my mind.

Haven’t been doing much workout since I got to Orlando, just being generally tired and lazy after-work and I haven’t found a good trail to go onto. The West Orange Trail is supposed pretty good through the Winter Heaven area and it’s got 20 some miles, but it’s also a half hour drive from we are.

Thursday afternoon I decided I better do something about the ever expanding love handle Cindy’s good home-cooking has endowed me, with my good old faithful baseball cap, bottle of water, newly purchased armband radio tuned to NPR, went out through the apartment door, through the parking lot and the big lawn with the swings, and out through the gap of the fence surrounding the apartment complex.

I been running for a while as far as I can remember, been running from my college dorm to that big radio dish in Stanford every time after an exam cram, been running along that little footpath following the Albany to El Cerrito Bart Station, been running up Fremont Mission peak with Jochen til the sun sets over the San Francisco Bay, then we had to follow the moon-lit path back down. Running is therapeutic, much like biking, swimming, or just any kind of solo sport where one just focus one his own mind and body, left foot forward followed by right foot, focusing on controlled breathing and foot rhythm, think about the day, the week, happenings at work, past relationships, jobs, wife, where do I want to be five, ten years down the road ….

I bring my jogging shoes even when I visited Taiwan, one every year or two.  I always stayed in my parents’ house, pretty big house, in the middle of nowhere, away from the hustle and bustle of the cities. As far back as I can remember all we had was just rice paddies and farmers plowing and working the land with mud up to their knees before the break of dawn. People lived in those 三合院,  a simple bricks and tiles architecture surrounding three sides of a central courtyard, onto which various types of grain laid and emitted its fragrance under the sun , laundry are hung on makeshift hangers made from bamboo sticks, kids chasing chickens down the courtyard….

Because of the time difference, for the first few days I would wake up at around 4 or 5 in the morning, put on my jogging shoes, and went for jog.  Jogging trails are hard to find in Taiwan; both roads and land are precious, it’s not unusual to see people trying to drive a bug cement truck through road that would normally be considered as a bike trail in the States.  The air is humid and warm already at this wee morning of the hour, mixed with an occasional whiff of mud and fertilizer from the rice paddies.  Once I was jogging right along side a street lit by couple of failing street lamps, and was trying hard to make out the dark silhouette forming in the foggy darkness ahead.  It was an old lady with a slouching posture taking a stroll in the middle of the night, and she turned around staring at me since I could begin looking at her right back.  Gave her a faint smile but not sure if she could make out my face under the baseball cap.  She probably stood there with her hands intertwined behind her back, continued staring at me til I disappeared into the other end of the street, probably thinking about nothing but just amazed to see something she doesn’t see everyday, a young kid in his early 20’s running down the street at 4 o’clock in the morning, not something one sees everyday.

I still think about that silhouette everytime I went back to Taiwan and do my ritual of morning jogs for the first few days.  Another thing I think about is how different things change. My jogging trail got cut short by a brand new paved thoroughfare, there are a lot more people on the road then before… middle school students riding their bikes to make the 7 o’clock morning study period and the flag raising, people driving on their cars to get to factories and work places.  I once almost got ran over by a trash collecting truck at 5 in the morning trying to compete with me for space on a 7 feet wide road.  The rice paddies are shrinking in size and the 三合院 are replaced by monotonously gray buildings built out of bricks and concrete.  There is a new smell in the air, the smell of industrial byproduct, chemical waste from local factories and smoking stacks relentlessly finishing off the remaining patch of sky we have.  I literally saw and smell heavily contaminated water flowing right from the ditches into the rice paddies, in which the farmers still woke up before the break of dawn, plowing, working, and harvesting.

The effect is especially strong on me as I observe these things in periods of years.

“They are building a major 4 lane highway, the Golden Highway, winding right through our house into Taichung”  said my mom gleefully

“We are going to make a big profit on the house, and move to a condo in Taichung, everything will be good”

All I can think of is the book I am reading, “The River Town” by Peter Hessler,  in which an Oxford educated,  Peace Corps teacher in Fuling, a town on China’s Yangtze river, described the impact of the Three Georges Dam on the people.  1300 villages, countless relics, tombs, artifacts that would normally being considered as A-list museum material else where, will be underwater forever once the project is completed.

I don’t know how much of what I remembered since childhood in Taiwan will remain. It’s actually quite disconcerting that I am already having problems identifying the streets around that old house I lived in for 14 years before coming to the states.  I never really know Taiwan and travelled enough to understand much about it.  Every trip back was nothing but shopping trips, pigging out at fancier and more expensive restaurants, and visiting relatives.  I have never done a trip that was really “my own”, to see the and remember the place that I lived for 14 years, and to appreciate the remaining fragile beauty of the island before industrialization and so called progress eventually finish it off. I am pretty ashamed to call myself Taiwanese since I don’t know anything about it, and I am making it a goal to one day to visit the real Taiwan.

The following is a picture of me sitting on the roof of our house in the city of Chonghua, overlooking the fields.  My parents probably never saw this picture and never knew how I got onto that roof.

Little decoration Cindy put on my freshly shaved head as I am typing this blog