Spring cleaning. With extreme prejudice

(Taken from this week's Occidental Tourist, first broadcast Saturday 16th May, 2009)

Last week I was complaining about having a cold despite the improvement in the Taipei weather. For that, this week I have been rewarded with tonsillitis. Self-diagnosed, I might add -- I concluded that an inability to swallow without pain coupled with two swollen lumps either side of my windpipe could surely be nothing else. My body has subsequently been so smug about this diagnosis that it is highly reluctant for me to recover quickly. You called this one, it seems to say, bask in the glow of being right! I'd rather be right than healthy, apparently. It's a failing of mine, one which no amount of sickly cough syrup or hot Lemsip can cure.

So aside from the regular radio shifts, I've kept myself mostly cooped up at home this week, nourished by a large batch of chicken and sweetcorn soup that Trish cooked up earlier in the week and of which there still remains several gallons. It occurred to me that this might be a good time for a spot of spring cleaning. Winter has cluttered my room and by extension, my mind. And life in general.

Clutter is pernicious as it instills a sense of apathy and helplessness. An excellent self-defense mechanism, as clutter makes itself the very thing that stops you rousing yourself to get rid of all the clutter. It takes a very vigorous effort then to effect a change. I managed it last year, when I girded my loins and in the words of my former housemate Mary Helen "tore my room a new one." That is to say, I tidied my room. With extreme prejudice.

The despair of clutter is not knowing where to start. To remove clutter from one item of furniture means putting it somewhere else, most often of necessity on another piece of furniture. This then amounts to random clutter displacement. Clutter has been transferred but the balance of clutter remains unaffected. So you get tough, with what my mother always referred to as the "Big Black Bag" approach. As in, "If you don’t tidy your room, I'm going to come with a Big Black Bag and throw everything out." As an adult, I sometimes wonder if life would have been better if she had ever followed through with that threat. I would have kicked up a fuss, sure. But what if I had learned in the process that "stuff" is not important. That actually, losing some stuff might actually de-clutter your life and cause you to refocus on the things that really matter? Would that not have been a superb lesson to learn before the age of ten? One even worth losing your Optimus Prime over?

Well, maybe not Optimus. Starscream, perhaps.

A human life builds clutter whenever it stays in one place for any amount of time. The worst clutter is stuff that "might come in useful." (It won't.) Or things that have a sentimental value even when you know they shouldn’t have. Three years ago, I went to Taipei Flower market one weekend and saw an artist drawing pictures of people. I admired in particular the caricatures he had drawn of various political figures and local celebrities. I asked if he would draw one me one – with myself as the subject. Actually, I didn't know the Chinese word for caricature and still don't. So instead I asked if he would draw me with "exaggerated features." I was proud of knowing the Chinese word for "exaggerated" and believed I had got my meaning across. "So I should draw you with a big nose?" he said. "Yes," I said, "a big nose. Exaggerated features." And he went and drew me with a big nose. Normal in every other regard but with a big nose.

I still have that picture. Why? I didn’t want to hang it up, didn’t even really want to ever look at it again. But I didn’t want to throw it out, having paid money for it. So it's still there, in a plastic tub under my bed, rolled up. Along with the biography of an Indian yogi left to me by Mary Helen. "I think you'd enjoy this as you're a spiritual person," she said, mistaking me for a spiritual person. That's still there as I know she'll ask me one day about it and I am at least spiritual enough to know that lying is bad, especially if you're as bad a liar as I am.

But I digress. And that's the problem with my cleaning generally. I digress. I find an item that interests me and my purpose – feeble enough to begin with – evaporates completely. There are any number of things that can cause me to lay down my duster – actually not a duster, as I tend to use an abandoned pair of boxer shorts disinfected with lemon pledge, it works just as well.

Cleaning is best done in a trance I feel, an altered state where you don’t realize how bored you are. The British sport of cricket puts me in such a state, just one of the reasons I love it. And it's no coincidence that last year's bout of spring-cleaning frenzy coincided with online BBC broadcasts of England's test series against New Zealand. For six hours a day, from around 8am to mid-afternoon, the perfect backdrop to let the Big Black Bag do its work.

Speaking of cricket, I like to see myself as a cricket evangelist of sorts. My methods are much the same as the religious kind. If I know someone to be an admirer of baseball, I will start my discussing the similarities between the two sports – the fact of hitting a ball with a stick and running, for example. Then we might progress to the mutual appreciation of statistics enshrined in both games. Eventually I stand convicted that the individual will ultimately conclude cricket to be much the subtler and more varied of the two sports and be converted. It hasn't happened yet. But I've been sowing seeds, like the parable says.

Last week I had a great chance to actually play a game of cricket with some of my housemates and other friends. A chance to bring the game of cricket to the heathens of the US and Canada. We took my little cricket set to the local park and tried to find a suitable space. You need a nice flat area where the ball can bounce without massive deviation and a reasonable amount of space to hit the ball into. We found such an area and set about putting the stumps in the ground.

Almost immediately we were attracting some attention for this outlandish spectacle – that looked like baseball but was not. "What is going on here!" demanded one middle-aged gent. We thought we might be in trouble but we weren't – he was just, you know, asking. Later on a silver-haired old gentleman approached us with a very dignified humility. "Excuse me," he said, "may I know the name of this game?" I explained it, gave it its Chinese name as well, which translates as something like "flat board ball" and told him the countries in which it was popular: Australia, India, South Africa… "Ah! The territories of the British Empire!" he pronounced, very quickly divining the colonial origins of the sport. They can be sharp, the older people here, make no mistake.

He then asked us if we were religious. You see? A cricket evangelist, like I said. The game has that effect on people...

Beer in Taiwan? Jolly Good

You know, a lot of people say to me, “Charlie.” I say, “Hello!” They say, “Charlie, you’re from Britain.” I say, “How can you tell?” They say, “No, but would you just listen for a minute?” I say, "Okay, sorry.” They say, “Charlie, you’re from Britain. But you live in Taiwan. Is there anything that you miss?”

And upon reflection, in the end I have concluded two things -- two particular items that I do miss from not living in my native land. One is the hard-pastry-encased cholesterol bomb which in my country goes by the name of the pork pie.

And the other? Well, in honesty, it’s the beer. Now I know my countrymen are often accused of only liking beer which is warm and flat -- and it’s a half truth. What we British truly appreciate in our beer is variety. We like rich oaky ales, we like creamy bitters, we like burnt chocolatey stouts. And we like lagers as well – why not?

But unfortunately for us Brits, in Taiwan variety is a little thin on the ground. It’s hard to find beers which don’t fall into the category of yellow and fizzy. The country’s home brew is Taiwan beer, whose best quality is that it’s inexpensive. Then there are the Japanese brands, Asahi and Kirin. The Americans have a presence with Budweiser, Miller and Busch. Singapore chips in with its Tiger beer. And then generic European brands like Heineken and Carlsberg are also widely available. All of them are drinkable. But – and feel free to disagree with me – none of them are special. They’re all pretty similar. And overpriced.

Now I admittedly am no great lover of lagers, but I would wager that a true lager lover would be disappointed to find that a bar’s beer list consisted only of half a dozen of the beers I have just mentioned. So what am I saying? Is Taiwan beer purgatory? Well, not necessarily. Like any wily ex-pat, I’ve found that you just have to know where to look. A pub close to my home is run by an Englishman from my home town. He serves an excellent pint of Abbot Ale – and even better, also shows cricket by satellite.

Moreover I was delighted to discover recently a fairly new bar in Taipei called Jolly. A microbrewery no less, which makes about half a dozen of its own in-house beers, from a pale ale to a wheat beer to a stout. And I was keen to sample all of them.

Charlie: Okay, we’re going to go light to dark. I’m going to start off with Jolly’s very own Pilsner beer, which it describes as having ‘a full and attractive aroma’ – smells clean, certainly – it says ‘its taste is… evident! When you drink it it has a smooth feel with no bitterness.’ Let’s have a go. Trish wants to try it as well. What did you think, Trish? Was its flavour ‘evident?’
Trish: It’s very bitter.
Charlie: No, it says here it’s not bitter.
Trish: Very bitter.
Charlie: Well, I think you’re wrong.
Trish: I don’t think so!
Charlie: Well, that’s what it says here. Okay, well now moving on to the next lightest in the range, which is the Weizen – the wheat beer. And this is described as having a ‘slightly sour, slightly sweet taste. It’s greatly loved by the ladies’ (apparently) ‘and appreciated by those who do not usually drink beer.’ Well since it’s said that, I’m going to pass this over to our lady companions who don’t usually drink beer and get their opinions. Have a taste of that and see what you think.
(Trish pulls a yuck face which you can’t really convey on radio. Nadiyah?)
Nadiyah: No, it definitely made me pull a face (as well). It’s not as smooth as I usually like beer to be.
Charlie: So it seems the Weizen doesn’t get the thumbs up from the ladies after all, well never mind.

My Taiwanese friend Posan lived for a time in Britain – in Newcastle upon Tyne, a city well known for its enjoyment of potent potables. The area is home to some of the country’s best-known breweries – Newcastle, Federation, and the late-lamented Vaux among them. So a voyage of discovery for any young man.

Charlie: So Posan, you quite like your beer, don’t you?
Posan: My bear?
Charlie: No, not your bear, beer!
Posan: Beer.
Charlie: You like to drink beer. I believe.
Posan: Yeah, I like beer. Yep. I like all kinds of beer. I like to try the beer from everywhere.

Charlie: Now of course you studied in the United Kingdom, in my home country and in fact you studied in Newcastle… did you know beforehand that that’s an area well known for its beers?
Posan: Yes, Newcastle Brown I know. You told me it’s like the ticket to the space, yes? Journey into space!

Ah yes, Newcastle Brown Ale, the great export of the Northeast of England. Known locally by its nickname, Journey Into Space – which if you’ve ever tried Newcastle Brown Ale, should be self-explanatory. In truth, I find it’s more like a journey into space on the Apollo 13. It’s not too long into the mission before you’re saying, “Houston, we have a problem.”

Now, while I was bemoaning the preponderance of lagers in the Taiwan market, there’s actually a historical reason for that, as Posan explained.

Posan: Taiwan was the colony of Japan, so we got all the technology from Japan. And Japanese beer is very close to the beer from Germany. They adopted the brewing skills from the German guys.
Charlie: So that would be similar to how it was in China with the Qingdao brewery – the Chinese got their brewing from the Germans as well.
Posan: Yes, the Germans occupied Qingdao before.

So while we can at least thank the Germans that we have beer here at all, it's interesting that in the modern battle for beer in the East it's actually the Belgians mounting the largest offensive. Who'd have thought? Whether fortuitously or by a good marketing campaign, I am not sure, but Belgian beer has found a profitable niche in Taipei in recent years. I can count at least four or five cafes to my knowledge which specialize purely in beers from Belgium. In one I’ve been working through the menu for some time – and I’m only just starting to make inroads. My favorites are the Trappist beers. They’re made by monks for whom brewing beer goes hand in hand with their spiritual vocation. Or maybe it is their spiritual vocation. Either way, their devotion is felt, with each transcendent drop a truly uplifting experience. Chimay Red is simply chocolate in a glass. Back to the beer tasting now. But things were getting a little fuzzy at this point.

Charlie: My powers of description seem to, er, be on the wane the more I drink.. well, near the end of our beer testing. Scotch ale. Hmm. Strong. Quite nice. Smells like… never mind. Finally the stout – chocolate, caramel, sweet flavour. Slightly bitter taste of… roast malt but perflectly balanced. I like stouts. Yes. Nice. Can taste… sweet, bitter at the same time! Delicious! Yes!

So, in conclusion, Taipei too can be a haven for the beer enthusiast. Unpromising on the surface perhaps, but dig a little deeper and it willingly yields up a feast of treasures from the global brewing industry. I’m now off for a pint of Abbot and to watch England lose to India in the cricket. So until next time, I’m a nicely mellow Charlie Storrar, the Occidental Tourist.

The Occidental Tourist originally broadcast on RTI on Sunday 12th August 2007. Hear more programs at english.rti.org.tw

The Haunted Houses of Keelung

Belief in ghosts in widespread in Taiwan. While we in the West have our traditions of campfire stories and haunted castles, not many people really believe in them, do they? I mean, really take them seriously. Put it this way, here in Taiwan you’re much more likely to meet someone who claims they’ve actually seen a ghost themselves, and not just the friend of a friend. I used to tutor a young man who confided in me that he occasionally saw spirits of the departed walking around near his home. How do you know they are ghosts? I asked him. Because, he said, as they walked towards me, from the waist down there was nothing there!

We’re in the middle of Ghost Month here in Taiwan, the seventh month in the lunar calendar, where it is believed ghosts and spirits emerge from the nether world. Especially on Ghost Day, the thirteenth day of the month, which fell on Monday last week. On Tomb Sweeping Day, which occurs in the spring, it is traditional to pay your respects to your deceased ancestors. But on Ghost Day, your ancestors repay the visit. So everywhere you go on Ghost Day, you’ll see the tables that people have set in front of their homes and businesses, laden down with fruits and cookies and various goodies for their ravenous old relatives. It’s common enough in Taiwan to see people burning ghost money at various times of the year. These are printed paper notes for your ancestors to use in the afterlife, and people burn them in metal buckets outside their homes. The act is a spiritual bank transfer if you like with the facsimile cash passing over by means of fire. And I’ve never seen so many people burning ghost money as on Ghost Day itself -or so much of it. In fact, your biggest danger on Ghost Day came not from the spirits, but from the smoke – not to mention the drifting fragments of still burning ash. Many an item of clothing was later reported to have small holes singed in it as a result.

But I wasn’t sure how I could mark Ghost Day Occidental Tourist style. That is, until one of my colleagues suggested I might like to visit one of Taiwan’s four big haunted houses. I was not aware of Taiwan’s four big haunted houses, so I embarked on a quest. It was in this search which took me through many a darkened library store room and cobwebbed archive that I uncovered a curious and ancient parchment. And this, once I had deciphered the runes, did indeed speak of four ghostly locations. Actually that’s not true. I just looked on the Internet. And it did seem to be the case that of all the notable haunted houses around the island, there is a consensus on the big four. Taiwan’s four most spooky dwellings for the visitor brave - or foolish - enough to visit.

Of the so-called big four, one is in Minhsiung, near Chiayi in southern central Taiwan. It’s also the location of RTI’s National Radio Museum. And it’s too far away. So that one was out. The second was in Hsinchu in northern Taiwan. That was closer, but still further than I wanted to go. But numbers three and four on the list were located in the northern port city of Keelung. Perfect. Two of Taiwan’s top haunted houses in one town, only about half an hour out of Taipei.

So it was time to head out for a spot of ghost hunting. And there’s nothing like catching the train at Taipei Main Station to put you in the mood. The underground platforms always feel dismal and enclosed like a waiting room to the underworld. Spectral lights then pierce the gloom as the train screeches into the station like a banshee. Trish has come with me today – I’ll be honest enough to say I didn’t fancy going it alone on this one. And like me she also had various horror movie scenarios going on in her mind.

Trish: What happens if we go in to the haunted house and then we disappear? And then all they find is your recorder.
Me: Oh, you mean like the Blair Witch Project or one of those movies.
Trish: Yeah.
Me: Well I hope they’ll at least do a better job on the editing.

But while we travel, let me tell you about the first place we are going to. One of my guides to the haunted houses is an anonymous blogger who visited all four sites. Here’s what he or she had to say:

The results of my observations were that the Minhsiung ghost house is not as fearsome as you might imagine. And the house in Hsinchu is about as scary as an ornamental garden. But the house in downtown Keelung – there is something truly disturbing about that one. Why is it scary? If it is haunted you can’t tell from the outside. And no-one has come to harm by it. But it scares me because here is a place, right in downtown Keelung – prime real estate – and yet no-one dares to rebuild on it. Is that not strange?

This house – number three on the list – is a three-storey European-style town house, built about seventy years ago by a local merchant. Located on the corner of two of the city’s busiest streets with views over the harbour. The merchant and his family lived there for a time. Then after the war, with US troops stationed in Taiwan, the house became a bar frequented by the GIs. Then at some point the bar closed and the house gradually fell into disrepair. And stories began to circulate about the deserted house, as stories do. Some said a lovelorn girl had hanged herself there. Others said it was the site where a spurned suitor had murdered the object of his desire. But one thing is certain – the building has been empty for at least thirty years, probably longer.

Arriving in Keelung, we took a taxi to the address I’d obtained. Only to find that it was all of three hundred yards away from the station. But it was worth it, as I was able to quiz the taxi driver on what he knew of the house. No one dares live there, he said. And if anyone goes in, they come out again pretty quickly. Some of them have even fallen sick. Yes, I said, but has anyone ever seen anything? He didn’t know.

Me: Well, here I am on site at the first of Keelung’s famous haunted houses. We’re right in place where the center of Keelung meets the harbour. And it is a strange feeling, because Keelung town centre is just right here and it continues either side of what is just a derelict European-style town house on the corner of a street. It’s like a 1930s period gap in the middle of a modern street. What do you think, Trish?
Trish: I think it just looks like a derelict old building… with severe damp problems.
Me: There’s many strange stories about this house. Late at night maybe there would be strange ghostly lights coming from behind the windows upstairs. Or even occasionally a face…
Trish: Maybe there’s squatters inside.
Me: We’re looking up, it’s three storeys tall, it’s actually got trees and shrubs growing up on the roof, it’s been vacant so long. It’s all blackened with neglect, decades of grime and dirt from the streets has accumulated on it. Looking at the windows now, is any face going to-
Trish: Ooh, there’s a ghost!
Me: Don’t do that.

We both felt a little underwhelmed by this one. Admittedly the house does look starkly out of place. But it seems the real reason no one has rebuilt on the site is that the original owner’s children have yet to divide their inheritance. In any case, we decided to move on to Keelung’s second haunted location, or number four on the list. Our mystery blogger was fairly cool about this one however:

The fourth house is not really a haunted house in my view. It’s just that the lay of the land gives it a strong yin factor which creates a certain ‘miasma.’ So the place’s yin can make you feel uncomfortable as you pass by it. But it’s not because it’s haunted.

In other words, any spookiness was an effect of the location’s feng shui, the traditional way of identifying good or bad places based on their location relative to mountains and water. And when we arrived we felt sure we’d come to the wrong place. Haunted house number four looked more like a novelty castle. And worse, it wasn’t even abandoned – it was a bar restaurant.

Me: Hmm, well this doesn’t look right, does it? I mean, this building looks like sort of a gloomy mock castle building, but it’s…
Trish: It seems to be a fully-functioning bar.
Me: Yeah, it’s like a restaurant where they do-
Trish: Karaoke.
Me: They do karaoke and fried prawns. This can’t be right at all. Ghosts don’t like fried prawns, do they? Let’s ask around here somewhere.

But enquiring of a nearby shopkeeper, we were assured that this was indeed the place. The shopkeeper said that when she was small she had also heard the place was haunted.

Me: But it doesn’t really look that scary, does it? I mean, it looks like a place that’s built to look a bit like a spooky castle.
Trish: But it doesn’t.
Me: I mean, if you’re going to say a building is haunted just because it’s got a slightly different design… Well, this is as close as we can get I think, we can’t go through a metal gate… but it all looks in order, doesn’t it? It’s not the cleanest place… but we’re looking here onto a small terrace balcony where there’s some tables out… and it just looks like – well, maybe not the funnest place to come for a meal, but nothing particularly out of the ordinary, is it? Now our mystery blogger said that he or she didn’t consider this a haunted place either but reckoned the qi of the place was just bad. That it had too heavy a yin factor because of the lie of the land, and I guess it’s down at the bottom of a hill and next to the road, so whether that gives it bad feng shui I don’t know, I’m not an expert. But the blogger seemed to reckon this created a misma of qi which would drain your energy and leave you feeling uncomfortable as you walked by. Do you feel uncomfortable?
Trish: No, but it smells kind of funny and I wouldn’t want to eat here.
Me: Ah, well that’ll be the miasma then I guess.
Trish: To be honest, all in all I’m fairly disappointed with these haunted houses.
Me: Yeah, there’s not much really going on, is there? No, er… oh, there was a big black butterfly! Which looked a little bit like a bat… no, even that’s straining it a bit, isn’t it?

Trish then said she wanted to leave as she was being pestered by numerous flies.

Trish: Urgh! The flies keep landing on me!
Me: Infested with flies? Then you mean this could be the dwelling place of Beelzebub, the Lord of the Flies?
Trish: Er, no.

So those were the results of my ghost hunting this week. A little disappointing I’ll admit. And I must confess that I can’t quite make out just how these two locations in Keelung made it into Taiwan’s top four. But on the other hand, would I rather have seen a ghost? Er, on the whole, no. Funny how to see a ghost must be a horrible thing, yet to not see one leaves you feeling disappointed. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t – as the ghosts themselves might say. Til next time, for the Occidental Tourist, I’m Charlie Horror. I mean, Storrar.

The Occidental Tourist originally broadcast on RTI on 2nd September, 2007.