Ed and I were a young couple with a two-year-old daughter, and it was the first time we went to Taiwan. It was also the first time that my daughter rode a plane. At that time I didn't realize that my husband was wrestling with anxiety and that he was fearful of riding planes. Still, he embraced the flight and waited with anticipation to see how our daughter Kat would respond to it. The plane rose so smoothly that Kat didn't know that she was flying on air, and she was perfectly well with the whole experience.
We rode on Eva Airways which was, then, a new airline in the Philippines. It had a great reputation that it lived up to when we rode it. It was a family trip -- Sami, mom, Ed, me, and Kat. It was the smoothest ride I'd ever had on a plane. And it was special because we were all together and we were going to live in Alice's house in Yangmingshan.
Today, if you mention Yangmingshan it is largely known for its beautiful park and the experience of trekking. It's so popular that you need to get a three-day advance pass to go in there. This made it hard for the dwellers there and now foreigners live in Tienmu. When we were in Taiwan in 1994, Tien Mu was a place where you could buy cheap clothes. Now, it's a swanky neighborhood.
But when we were in Yangmingshan it was a lovely, upscale neighborhood with many houses. The wind softly embraced me, and it was genuinely cold. I prefer cold to hot weather at any time. Although, I wouldn't like to be too cold. For example, I loved the snow in Boston, but when strong winds accompanied the snow, my ears would freeze regardless of the tam I wore to cover them.
My sister drove a small, smart sports car to pick us up. My husband, being the biggest among us, had the front seat with her. Sami. Mom, Kat, and I had the back seat. It was a rather crowded ride and I recall hoping that it wouldn't be a long ride to get to her home. When we arrived Mom told us "Look I want all of you to see something". So we all stayed obediently in place while she got up to get off the car. "That is what I sat on," she said. It was a very tiny space that could probably support a little less than one butt cheek. I couldn't help it, I had to laugh because, throughout the whole ride, mom had kept stoically quiet. But mom understood my humor and she wasn't offended. Now that we were finally at Alice's home, she laughed too. Maybe she felt very proud of herself for managing to ride so long in that horribly uncomfortable way.
We gathered our luggage and entered Alice's beautiful home. It was a four-bedroom house and Alice said she had asked the Embassy to prepare extra beds for all of us. Alice lived in an enclave that was shared with other US diplomats. All the houses were alike, but they were spaced well apart to permit privacy.
As newlyweds, Ed and I were still trying to find the right mesh that could carry us well into the future in a happy way. He was raised in a Filipino-Spanish home in posh San Lorenzo Village in Makati, with five maids and 14 dogs. When we weren't married yet, I would call him on the phone to talk to him. The maid usually answered the phone and when I'd ask for Ed she would say, "Senorito Ed?" He wasn't raised to do work around the house, and neither was I, since I lived in a house in Greenhills also with five maids.
So when we were in Taiwan I learned to clean Kat's pee if it leaked from her diapers and to take care of her without a Yaya. The good part was that our entire family loved Kat, so I wasn't short of help. Kara would take out her Mickey Mouse doll and play with it in front of Kat, who brought her own Baby Mickey all the way from the Philippines. When Kat waited for me on the floor while I ate on the dining table, she fell asleep so mom gave her some pillows and a blanket. Alice always laughed because Kat was scared of Tito Ted, Alice's husband. Kat was so scared that whenever he took pictures of us her face was turned away from the camera. Even one month after we returned from Taiwan, every morning Kat would wake up and say "I don't like Tito Ted." Her Yaya asked her why, and Kat would jut her chin forward and make her eyes very big, which was a pretty close resemblance to Ted's face. When I told this to Alice in a letter, she laughed very hard. Sami always doted on Kat. Sami used to work in Makati and in her free time, she would get Kat from San Lorenzo and take her to the mall. So Kat was surrounded by love in Taiwan.
There's such a great sense of romance that I feel when I see Chinese architecture well done. When I lived in Hong Kong I loved the pagodas and the buildings that always curved upwards at the ends like a graceful mustache. I loved the bridges that would curve upwards then down, forming a perfect circle that you crossed a lake with. Everything was beautiful.
My clearest memory was visiting the tomb of Sun Yat Sen, which resembles the Lincoln memorial in Washington DC. Sen was the founding father of the Republic of China on the mainland. He died in 1925, and mainland China became the People's Republic of China. Sun was succeeded by Chiang Kai Shek whose Kuomintang forces brought the ROC to Taiwan in 1949, at the end of a civil war with Mao Zedong. Chiang Kai Shek died in 1975.
Stillness is not something that I ordinarily associate with myself. But looking back, I remember the mountains I loved to climb in Hongkong, which always had lovely surprises such as lakes with tadpoles, charming pagodas, sandy pathways, and lovely boulders suitable to sit on and just imbibe the stillness all around you. And when I think again of the beautiful park outside the tomb of Shang Kai Shek, I recall a natural stillness. I could talk to everyone around me, but in the center of myself, I felt still. This is something I realized only now while writing this. I'd always felt you had to meditate to be still, and I never really felt fully still. But now I know that natural stillness can occur just by being around the very lovely, curvature parks of Hongkong and Taiwan, where surprisingly, a Scottish proverb comes to mind, "Better bend than break". It happens like magic.
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