Push Hands

Intermodal Transit:  The Taipei Railway Station (including high-speed rail to the south) is the hub of center city Taipei; it is flanked on either side by parking lots (though there is not a lot of surface parking here in the center).  Next door is the bus station, actually several, with easy links to the airport.  And, the city’s MRT hub (Metropolitan Rapid Transit) comes together here as well.  A new MRT line is being built to the airport.   Underneath the station and stretching north along the Tamsui line is an underground city of shops and eateries.  I ate at a small curry shop that was right underneath the Caesar Park Hotel.  Everything is easily accessible, and walkable.  Of course, there a too many cars, but the vehicle of preference seems to be the scooter; it’s almost like Rome, though parking here seems to be more orderly.  Wherever someone can squeeze in another cycle, they do it, even if it means shifting the ones that are already parked (they’re light). 

The 228 Peace Park:  I took a walk early this morning in the city center’s civic precinct.  Taipei has lots of parks and this is one of the best.  I will be returning to it periodically for my research project because it serves so many functions.  This rainy Sunday morning, groups of men (and some women) were assembled under whatever shelters they could find playing ‘push hands,’ which apparently is a Chinese martial art that is (or is associated with) Tai Chi.  The men I spoke with looked relaxed; they seemed in it for both balance, coordination, conditioning, and companionship.  It looked like something we all ought to do.

National Taiwan Museum:  When rain threatens, it is time to go to a museum, so I headed for the nearby National Taiwan Museum, which the locals are proud to tell you has been a museum on that very site for over 100 years.  Today, it seems to be devoted to hosting special exhibits.  I was fortunate to see a 100-year perspective on Anthropology in Taiwan, which meant that the native peoples, especially a group called the Paiwan and their slate houses, were prominently featured.  Of course, a hundred years ago, Taiwan was held by the Japanese, a fact which was delicately handled in the exhibits’ explanatory text (nicely done in English as well as Mandarin).  Japanese anthropologists brought the newly established discipline to the island and got right to work on ethnographic studies of all the tribes.  This generation of Taiwanese seems appreciative of their scholarly contributions as individuals and plays down any notion that the contribution was made by “the Japanese.”  What went unsaid, I suspect, is that the Japanese in the first decade of the 20^th century were anxious to prove that ‘Formosa’ was not really Chinese, but rather the land of ‘primitive peoples’ waiting to be civilized.  All imperial powers of the time were willing, even expected, to do the civilizing.  Whatever their motives, the Japanese generation of anthropologists brought new ideas and data gathering techniques to the study of native cultures.  They gave us a record of tribes classified as Austronesian rather than either Japanese or Chinese.  Another exhibit focused on Taiwan’s candidate site for Unesco’s World Heritage List.  I now understand why there is a candidate site for the ‘New Seven Wonders of Nature’ in Taiwan.  Yushan, the highest peak in Taiwan’s mountainous backbone, is one of 28 sites on the list.  If you go to this website, you can vote: http://www.new7wonders.com/.  But you have to do it now; voting closes on 11/11/11, what I have termed the holiday of Perpendicularis Major.  What I want to know is why they are picking 7 wonders and not 11, which seems to be the only logical number to go with a date that won’t be repeated for a thousand years.