Fetid Dog Love

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened around May, 1958. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

My last two months in Taipei were tinted with fear, as I heard more and more rumors of Mainland China's plan to either invade or bomb Taiwan. I've written about this already, out of sequence, in A Cacophonous Nudge. It was right about the same time as the solar eclipse in mid-April that my father told my Mother and I that we wouldn't be staying with him for much longer. The Army was shipping out large numbers of dependents to get them out of harm's way.

Our departure was set for the middle of May. I would miss the last couple of weeks of school. Ordinarily I wouldn't have minded, but the next thing I knew our class was having a spelling bee as part of a school-wide contest, and I won, and the teacher said I did so well I might easily win the whole contest. The 1st prize would be a pair of binoculars. Oh, man, I wanted those binoculars. Stupid Army Brat life, I thought. Every time something good comes along, you have to move away, I thought.

My Mother and I were booked on a great-circle flight to Seattle by way of Anchorage.

Up to this time in my life I was lukewarm toward the dog, Koko. He didn't particularly care one way or another about me either. But a funny thing happened when they said we couldn't afford to take him back to the States with us. All of the sudden I couldn't take it. It wasn't like they were going to put him down or sell him for meat. They arranged for the the magician and his wife to keep him. But I broke down into tears in front of them and hugged the dog and told my parents they were horrible, and I couldn't stand to lose him.

I didn't know at the time what came over me. Now I get it. Enough other over-reactions of that sort have happened since. I had experienced too much neglect and emotional abandonment from my parents. Their plan to abandon Koko recalled it all.

My Father made it up to me by buying me a pair of binoculars. He figured, better buy them in Taiwan at the low prices there, than pay two or three times as much back home.

The flight seemed to take days. The stop at the Anchorage airport was notable only in the fact that it was snowing in May.

My Mother and I wound up back in Seattle living in the garage behind my Grandmother's house again. We were there maybe one week at most when we got word that Koko would be arriving by freight plane at Boeing field in a couple of days. Having seen my emotional outburst over losing Koko, the magician and his wife decided to spend their own money to reunite us.

We were driven to the airport by one of my cousins. Koko was delivered in a box with holes for breathing. One whiff, and I began to regret I'd made such a scene back in Taipei. He reeked of his own feces and urine, not having been let out of the box for the whole trip. We took him home and did all the things people will recommend, baths with shampoo, baths of milk, baths of tomato juice. We shaved him completely, and tried it all over again. Nothing worked. That was one stinky dog. He lived more than 8 years after that and we never got rid of the smell.

Still, I thought of him more as a brother from then on. My parents hadn't succeeded in getting rid of him either.

Doing It, Religiously

More On How I Do Religion

Let's talk about morality and religion!

When I was a kid the assumed connection between morality and religion among Christians was often expressed through the use of the term "Good Christian." "So-and-so is a Good Christian" meant he was moral. If you were mean you were not a Good Christian. No one checked whether So-and-so was even Christian, or not, to begin with. There was no comparable term for non-Christians of any type that paid respect to the religion. If a good person was Buddhist, Jewish, Islamic, or Atheist, you would not say they were a Good Buddhist, or Good Jew, or Good Muslim, or Good Atheist, respectively. The only way to acknowledge that they were not Christian and nevertheless good people was to say they were LIKE a Good Christian. "If So-and-so found Jesus he would be a Good Christian."

In respect to Christianity, it was deemed essential to at least appear good in public to give credit to Christianity. "Ye shall know them by their fruits." But if a non-Christian behaved morally, no one would admit that they gave credit to their non-Christian religion.

When we went to Taiwan my Mother warned me to watch out for myself because so few of the people would be Christians. But I found good kind generous people wherever I went, in a country that at that time was more than 95% non-Christian.

So I got thinking about that. What I concluded, over time, was that "Ye shall know them by their fruits" is right, and that the rampant bigotry and defiance of that valid precept of Jesus and other good teachers, in denying its application to non-Christians, regularly gives discredit to Christianity.

A good religion makes a person who does it good. If your version of Christianity leads you to deny the goodness of others, then it has led you to meanness. Therefore that version of yours is not a good religion (for you! It might not have such a poor effect on someone else.)

There are of course, truly Good Christians. But there are also Good Buddhists, Good Jews, Good Muslims, Good Atheists, Good Hindus, Good Wiccans, etc.

The issue for me became this: what ways of doing religion lead to a morally good life?

And when you put it that way you can see that to some extent it may be a matter of fit. A way of doing religion that leads one man to become moral may have the opposite effect on another.

The way that I use is a way of becoming aware of rights and wrongs through observation and consciously evoked empathy and imagination. I want to do right by knowing right. I can't be the best judge of how it works, but I'm quite sure the other ways that people have hashed out and promoted won't work for me.

In the course of studying and perceiving rights and wrongs, I came to a realization that there is very little absolute wrong in the world. What we have, mostly, are competing rights.

Therefore discernment of goods is essential. And therefore it is presumptive, and premature, in my view, to speak of an existing highest good that integrates all good. It presupposes that the work of integrating is a fait accompli.

This observation lies at the core of my polytheism, which is not a belief, but an attitude that guides and informs the imagination in the work of discernment of values and enables me to visualize the active balancing and negotiating of values that can bring a higher good out of them.

What I'm Talking About

Video Find of the Day

To get a sense of what my trip to the Mountain in early 1958 was like, imagine this video played in reverse.

Cycling across Taiwan

The USO Show, Part I

My Father came back to Taipei to take us to the Mountain for a USO show. Early in the morning on a Saturday or Sunday we set off. My Mother and I rode in the back seat of an Army staff car, while Dad rode in front with the driver.

It was my first trip outside of the city and the first hour or so was wonderful. I'd never seen anything like the Taiwan countryside. I still see images of it in my dreams. It wasn't only beautiful, it was strangely beautiful. One of the scenes that had a huge impact on me was the sight of a cliff, not far from Taipei, in which there were built homes. All you saw of the homes were massive doors reinforced crossing iron bars and barred windows. I was impressed by the adaption to the terrain.

It wasn't all cliffs and hills and mountains. We traveled for some time from town to town through a plain. The towns were generally dusty, impoverished, and bleak, but they seemed to me to be places that the people living there must care about.

As we reached hills the driver pulled the car over, and my Mother and I were blindfolded. We remained blindfolded for what seemed like an hour. The idea was that we wouldn't be able to tell the spies who captured us how to get to the Mountain base.

Finally we were allowed to see again. By then we were into mountains. There were miles and miles of winding roads past of terraced rice paddies. Then the roads snaked higher into rocky cliffs and the occasional temple or isolated dwelling that looked carved out of rock.

After those scenes the actual mountain base that my Father worked at was a let-down. When we got there we were on the top of a mountain alright, but it was an undramatic rounded mountain, so rounded that the top was almost flat. Flat enough that it had a small airfield. I had imagined pinnacles, or at least precipitous drops from an edge. There was just a gentle slope falling away from the top.

We got there early enough that we had a few hours to kill before the show. My Father took me to the quonset hut where he worked at a desk and introduced me to his staff.

There was a bookshelf near the entrance to his office that was filled from top to bottom with Ace Doubles. It was the science-fiction stash of one of Dad's subordinates. I had not been introduced to written science fiction up to this time. I poured over the covers oohing and ahhing over bug-eyed monsters abducting leggy women while being zapped by guys in sleek spacesuits. Even after I was told that there were never half naked women in the stories, I was still sure I wanted to check them out. It was another way science hooked me.

Dictatorship & Thievery

The Republic of China took over Taiwan after the half-century Japanese occupation ended with the end of WW II. In 1949, the ROC was driven from the mainland to Taiwan in the Chinese Civil War. The capital of the ROC thus passed from Nanjing to Taipei under Chiang Kai-shek's rule. There was one political party, the Kuomintang, and the country developed under the martial law that already had existed earlier in the civil war, under the "Temporary Provisions Effective During the Period of Communist Rebellion." Martial law was in effect legally until 1987.

Today all that sounds that ancient history, but I was there in 1957, only 8 years later, when it wasn't ancient at all. There were a few ways that the political reality made itself felt. There were pictures of Chiang Kai-shek everywhere. One of the buildings at the start of our dirt road housed businesses and had hole-in-the-wall hovels in back where poor people lived. They cooked their meals and ate in the road, squatting around the fire. (I tried to learn that trick. Imagine not needing chairs, ever.) Behind and above them, always, the windowless wall of the building they lived in was wall-papered with dozens of identical posters of Chiang Kai-shek.

Military police directed traffic at all the busiest intersections. They all carried automatic rifles. My Mother and I were instructed to always be deferential to the Chinese, whether in uniform or not. There was a sense that the Kuomintang was insecure. They were trapped on an island and not sure they could even hold that. So there was a great deal of propaganda. In addition to posters there were speeches broadcast by loudspeakers around the city.

There were rumors of war. My Father confirmed nothing, but other children talked about military activities going on, such as shellings of off-shore islands. Some activities were evident but impossible to interpret, like the long convoys that would snake through the city, sometimes ROC convoys, sometimes US Army convoys.

The rumors of shelling may have just been out of date stories circulating about the First Taiwan Strait Crisis (1954-1955).

The US Army was expanding its role on the island, and that meant there needed to be good mess halls and servicemen's clubs. Over the Christmas break I was taken to such a club. My parents enjoyed a party while I and about a hundred other dependents were herded into a large ballroom to watch an American Western. Off to our right were windows maybe 6 feet high, for the length of the room, that had to be curtained during the movie. Before the curtains were drawn we had a view of a hole within which contractors were working to put a swimming pool.

Just before my Father left for the Mountain I found out that the swimming pool was what was keeping him at work late. He had discovered (surprise!) that graft was involved in its construction. The contractors were overcharging and my Father believed that Army officers who were supposed to monitor the contractors were taking bribes to look the other way. There were irregularities in accounting that appeared deliberate, and so forth. Dad was trying to get at who was responsible. There was fierce resistance and he was stressing out and drinking more, including after-work trips to bars with confidants.

My Father left for the Mountain right around Christmas. My Mother and I thought at the time that we wouldn't see him for the full six weeks, but just a week or 10 days later he was back in Taipei with a staff car to take us to the Mountain for a day, to see a USO show there.

Soot and Codes

The house we moved into in Taipei was a rental that passed from one US military family to the next. I know because along the outside of the house there was a pile of garbage that had been left by previous occupants that contained old American magazines going back a couple of years.

The house was very Chinese, I think. It was two stories, not counting the basement, which only held the coal furnace. The first floor had picture windows that looked out into a small yard. the yard was enclosed by a wall topped with broken glass embedded into the concrete, to discourage thieves. The entrance through the wall was through a gate at a corner.

The flooring throughout the house was cement. There was a drain in every room. This turned out to make a lot of sense. The coal we got to supply our furnace was bituminous, and the operation of the furnace filled the house with soot every morning. We'd wake up each day looking like we belonged in a minstrel show. The floors and walls would also be covered with soot.

There was no way my Mother was going to clean a house like that. Fortunately, maids were cheap. We got a Taiwanese maid. She simply threw buckets of water on the walls and floors and swept it down the drains, which dumped the soot and water soup into the river behind the house.

What I thought was so Chinese about the house was the way the upper story rooms were arrayed along a balconied walkway that looked down on the living room. It's a design that I've only seen in Western houses built since WW II created an interest in Asian designs. It meant the living room had about an 17 or 18 foot ceiling, instead of an 8 foot ceiling. You almost felt as if you were still outdoors. If it weren't for the walls and the cement floor, and the missing sky light, and the fact that there are no windows other than the one big one one the side facing the yard.

We'd barely settled in when my Father told us he would be leaving my mother and I alone there for six weeks while he "went to the Mountain." The Mountain was a location we weren't permitted to know anything more about, except that it was on a mountaintop of Taiwan, an island which, aside from the relatively flat area of Taipei, is itself mountain upon mountain, from north to south.

Now, I was trying to patch things up with my Father at this time. I thought the change of place might provide an opportunity. I saw him doing a cryptogram puzzle from a puzzle book and asked him how he did them. He told me how he looked at patterns and the frequency of letters. When he finished he complained that he'd done them all.

So I volunteered to make up new codes for him to crack. I scrambled the alphabet and wrote out a sentence with the new values.

When he would get the answers too fast I had a flash of insight. I could make a completely different kind of code. I invented a code that was essentially a vector code. After the beginning, the substitutions depended on the letters previously encountered in the message.

My Father was stumped, of course. It wasn't fair. A code that diabolical is too hard to decipher from such a small sample. But he was able to get it anyway, by guessing,.

Silly me, the only sentence I ever encoded was, "My Father is going to the Mountain next month."

Taipei

Taipei, Taiwan, was immediately red to me. That was the sense I had of it. Red, red, red, with smatterings of yellow, and only wisps of blue and green, except for the trees.

I loved Taipei from the first. The pier we docked at was a working pier next to warehouses full of cargo waiting to ship out or be trucked off. It was crowded with workers. There was no effort to put on a pretty face for new arrivals.

My Father met us at the gangplank. We had to wait for Koko and his crate to be lowered to the dock. There was some passport checking at a booth out in front of the warehouse. Then we were chauffeured off by Army staff car to our new home.

We passed through downtown Taipei along the way, and, as I said, that was red. Almost every store was decked out in Chinese red, with red banners, and red or yellow awnings, covered with large chinese writing.

Remember, this was the Fifties. Back in the US, beige was the king of colors. Mute was master. People who wore bright colors were shunned and ostracized, if not committed. People who painted their houses in bright colors were sued or evicted by their neighborhood associations. So the contrast to home was enormous. But there was also the fact that red was especially meaningful to me. It was the color of the i'iwi and the sacred color that gave rise to all colors. I felt like I was at the beginning of the rainbow.

The house we arrived at was in a middle class neighborhood at the outskirts of the city. One of the main highways out of the city passed a block away, leading to a hillside cemetery a mile or two beyond. You left the highway onto a side road that was paved for only fifty yards and then swung left parallel to the highway as a dirt road with walled middle-class chinese-style houses on either side for several blocks. After the road turned, our house was the first you encountered on the right side. The house directly across the street from us was, it turned out, the home of a Republic of China (ROC) general.

[Above: I've repeatedly tried and failed to find our house on satellite images. So here it is from memory. The houses were more rectangular than depicted. The stream was probably wider. The railroad is totally out of scale. Our house, in reality, was maybe 25 feet in front by 35 or 40 feet. The dirt road was narrower than shown. I was just trying to show where left and right was.]

If you went the other direction, swerving right when the road swerved left, you had to get out and walk. Rather than roads there were walkways through a warren of shops and shanties. We lived across the street from a poor people's bamboo village.

If you didn't swerve right or left but continued straight past the side of our house you crossed a stream, about 8 yards wide, which fed the main river that emptied into the sea and was also our sewer, and the place that our poorer neighbor-women did their laundry. There was then a little bridge you could drive over the stream. A few yards further and you were crossing a railroad track.

So much in one place! Life, death, commerce and cemeteries, poverty and wealth, dirt roads, steam engines, concrete walled homes alongside bamboo shacks. How can you not love a place that has all that?

Playground-Citizen Wesley

Soon after we moved in to the garage in Seattle my Father came back from a day at Fort Lewis to tell us his orders. He would be sent overseas, to Taiwan, AKA Formosa, Nationalist China, The Republic of China. He would administer some Army program there. He wouldn't say what the program would involve, except to say he didn't expect war to break out at any time, and that probably he would only be gone for 6 to 8 months.

That seemed like a long time to me and the thought of not seeing him for so long stirred anxiety in me without my knowing why. It wasn't until I was in my 40s that I realized that as ineffective as my Father had been at protecting me from my Mother, I persisted in feeling that he was a protector, simply because he was my Father. It was an irrational hope that, once believed, rationally might be lost.

The anxiety amplified my native caution. I became fearful of anything uncertain. I was already religiously skeptical. Now I began to question everything. I questioned gravity, 2 + 2 = 4, the dark of night, and every single word my teacher said.

A milepost in technology occurred. Sputnik was launched into orbit on Oct 4, 1957. We watched what we all were told at the time was the flashing satellite orbiting over Seattle that evening. Recently I read that it was actually the final booster stage. The papers carrying the news dredged up a 1920 New York Times editorial that scoffed at Robert Goddard's dream of sending rockets into space, saying Goddard ""does not know of the relation of action to reaction, and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react." The newspapers had fun with this new and most dramatic proof that the editors of the New York Times had been full of it. The lesson I took from it was, everything has to be tested and proved. Nothing can be taken for granted.

My Father thought my Mother and I would remain in Seattle the whole time he was in Taiwan. But a week or two before he left for the Far East in mid-October he learned that the Army would send us a month later on a slow boat to [Nationalist] China.

I was taken to Fort Lewis and given half a dozen vaccinations for diseases I never heard of.

I don't recall any more than the low level sexual abuse that month, just fondling every few days. Maybe my Mother was too preoccupied with thoughts of the overseas adventure ahead.

While we waited for our turn to cross the ocean, Halloween happened, and I had a Seattle-style trauma.

Seattle was much less uptight in 1957 than it is today, fifty years later. But there were signs of things to come. One of the signs was a city-wide ban on children's masks at Halloween. It had been decided that masks with eye-holes obstructed vision too much. Children could be hit with cars.

OK, so I would not wear my cool Zorro costume on the sidewalks. I would only wear it on the school grounds, WHERE THERE ARE NO CARS, during the MANDATORY (for the sake of our "HEALTHY SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT") school Halloween march.

Well, guess what the teachers said? The LAW is the LAW. No masks. But it's a Zorro costume, there has to be a mask. "No problem, the march isn't for a couple of hours, WE'LL MAKE YOU A COMPLETELY NEW COSTUME THAT WILL BE LEGAL AND YOU'LL LOVE IT."

They made me a slapped-together paper and cloth clown costume. They wouldn't stop at that, they made me submit to grease-paint. "You'll see, it will be great!"

It was horrible. I was transformed against my will into a stupid clown. The other kids made cruel jokes about it throughout. At home it took two hours to wash the grease-paint off. Wherever it had been my skin was red and sore for days. Turned out I was allergic to grease-paint. All to avoid getting hit by non-existent cars. Thank you uptight, we-know-best-what's-good-for-you-Seattle!

And then, a couple of weeks later, my Mother and I were riding a train to San Francisco where we would catch a Merchant Marine ship to the Orient.

Before we left I got a report card with no grades. It was called a "progress report". I was in a fucking grade-free experimental "progressive" program, it so happened. Since I'd only attended 9 weeks of school the only content of the report was the following paragraph:

"Wesley is a conscientious student, does his best at all times. He is a shy child, but is much more willing to participate in games, etc., than he was the first of the year. He reads with the high group, with good understanding of subject matter. His written work is neatly done. Wesley is a fine citizen on the playground, well liked by his classmates. We will all miss him."

Isn't it wonderful that just then, in those two months of 3rd grade I happened to start getting over my shyness?

Every damn school I went to I was "shy" when I got there, and I "started to get over it" after two or three months of brilliant teaching designed to foster good healthy extroversion.

Total crock.

Burial and Unburial

Video Finds of the Day

The first video recalls many funeral processions I saw in Taipei. For 3 months in 1957 we lived in a house that was one block from a highway that led from Taipei to a major cemetery just outside the city. This video was filmed in mainland China near Yangshou, which is in the south. Besides bringing back memories of the funerals, it recalls Chinese mountain landscapes, and tells you that they are not exaggerations.

I like the idea of going out to cheerful music and fireworks. I think these processions are extremely beautiful.

Funeral on countryside.



Here's a short National Geographic documentary clip set in Taiwan showing the unburying of the dead, cleaning the bones, and storing them in urns. Not my utmost preference, but appealing.

Second Burial

Taiwan Aboriginal Dance

Video Find of the Day

I was already against the Vietnam War before it was called a war, in 1962, when I was 13. One of the experiences that informed me and led to my opposition to the war at the stage was having lived as an Army Brat in Taiwan at age 8 and having seen that almost no one in our military, including intelligence officers (who were the people I listened to, since they were the people around my Father), appreciated the fact that Taiwan was not a monolithic culture. The rulers and the middle classes were mostly Chinese, at that time, but much of the lower classes were indigenous Taiwanese.

We weren't at war in Taiwan, but could have been. I couldn't see how you could dare fight a war with that kind of blindness. The level of arrogance! We had officers assigned and paid to inform our generals of circumstances on the island who couldn't even be bothered to learn the players! I only once heard one Major acknowledge the existence of any significant population on the island other than Chinese and Americans.

[Upper right: a map from Wikipedia showing the traditional territories of some identified tribes of Taiwan. Modern migrations have altered the picture. Many have moved to the cities, where they have experienced unemployment levels comparable to that of urban Native Americans.]

Here's a video of Taiwanese aboriginal dancing, filmed in a park in Hualien City, which is a third the way down the eastern coast, where the sun rises from the ocean.

Dancing in the park

A Cacophonous Nudge

I just found out that April is National Military Child Month. It has been so since 2005. That means they started it about 43 years too late for me to enjoy it as an actual military child, but I'll take what I can get. Thank you, Congress. Thank you, American Armed Forces. I can't tell you two how much you mean to me.

I have a ton of memories to share about having been a military child for twelve years, but right now I'd like to share the one that always comes to the front of my mind in Aprils.

In April 1958 I was 8 and 3/4ths, going on 9. I was living in Taipei, Taiwan. My Father was working there and at a mountain-top base he ran far to the south. He was in Army intelligence. The base he ran sent unarmed electronics-laden planes over Red China to spy on them. His people also spied on the Republic of China, on Taiwan. The ROC Army spied back on him. I had learned all this in December when my Father's own ROC Liaison Officer told me. That was after I had been driven up to the mountain base with my Mother, in an Army staff car. We had been blindfolded most of the way so that, if kidnapped, the kidnappers couldn't obtain the exact location of the base from torturing us. That sucked.

All that was behind me in April. All I knew then was that the other kids were saying that the island was being shelled, along the Western coast. Or maybe not the island itself, but some outlying islands. The Red Chinese were getting ready to invade. Before they do, they'll probably shell Taipei. We had a bomb shelter in the back of the house. It was a hole in concrete. I thought I'd be safer standing in the middle of the street with my arms stretched out and my mouth open, waiting for a shell to fall on my tongue, as I would be in that hole to have the surrounding concrete pulverized and bury me.

I also knew that a partial eclipse of the sun was going to happen on Saturday, April 19, 1958. My parents told me it was going to be a great show, because the natives were going to try to drive away the dragon that was coming to devour the sun, ha, ha. Silly ignorant natives.

Someone, I don't remember who, but it might have been one of the American neighbor kids next door, said that there was a good chance the Red Chinese would invade the day of the eclipse. He said that it would be a good time, because everyone would be distracted by the dragon. I tried to ignore that idea.

The day of the eclipse came. I remember it was due to happen early in the afternoon. At the time I knew to the minute when the maximum eclipse would occur. My father gave me a piece of exposed film to use as a filter so I could watch the progress of the eclipse. I was determined to ignore anything else that went on. I wasn't into sociology. I was a scientist.

At first as the moon's disk crept in front of the sun, it was just my parents and I in the middle of the road waiting for darkness to fall. Then as the sky began darkening, strings of firecrackers were draped over every wall in sight, and hundreds of Chinese ran out of the nearby houses. All of them were beating spoons on pots and pans. There was such a huge racket, I couldn't help but take my eyes off the eclipse and look at the people making the noise. When I did I made eye contact with one Chinese man about my Father's age. He grinned widely and winked at me.

I looked back at the sky, and I saw what he saw. I counted down to the second of maximum totality. Birds preparing to roost for the night raised their voices. Skyrockets screamed and arced at the horizon. With a thousand confused birds, hundreds of Chinese beating pans, and the remainder of the firecrackers, the din was awesome. I could have imagined an invasion. Instead I saw the most beautiful dragon, just doing what comes natural to a dragon, and only needing to be gently nudged away, the way you nudge dragons.