Sleeping Asian Hidden Danger

I’m continually amazed that Asians appear to be able to sleep anywhere.   I mean anywhere and it is largely all Asians. I have witnessed people sleeping on public transportation, in restaurants, public parks, libraries, their work place and much more.  It appears to be widespread throughout Asia, and I see it in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan.

I’m sure there is a cultural aspect to this behavior, but there must also be a level of genetic ability to sleep on public transportation with some level of dignity.  Other than a long distance plane trip, I never sleep other than at my designated bedtime.  If I slept in public, especially while sitting, I would be head bobbing, head banging, leaning on my neighbor, drooling non-stop and maybe worse.

When I get on a bus or train, as much as 90% of the travelers will be sleeping.  How do they sleep so well and still wake up at their designated stop?  My theory is that Asians must be superior.   

One time I took a trip to Germany with my Plant Manager and he drank too much beer at the Hofbrauhaus in Munich.   While traveling on the train back to our hotel, he unexpectedly bolted out of his seat, exited the train and watched me as the train left, while he was on the deck outside.  Long story short, he boarded the next train, fell asleep and ended up 60 miles from our hotel when he awoke, only to find out the train had stopped running for the night.  This is not the end of the story, but it is over for purposes of this blog.  The relevance is that Caucasians can fall asleep on public transportation if alcohol is involved.

Asians don’t need alcohol and will typically have their eyes closed within 30 seconds of sitting.  How do they not hurt themselves and how do they awake in time for their stops?  Actually they are not necessarily as good of public sleepers as I had originally thought.  My wife and I witnessed one woman sleeping on a bus, only to have her head slammed hard against the window, when the bus turned abruptly.  It had to hurt and everyone was surprised there was no blood on the window or head.  Another time I watched a woman wake up thinking she missed her stop.  The panic on her face, followed by the relief when she found out she hadn’t passed her stop was fun to watch.  Both the woman and I laughed.  My teenage stepdaughter is often late coming home, for suspicious reasons I won’t discuss.  One of her excuses is that she fell asleep on the bus and missed her stop.  Actually that is probably true.

Asians sleep easily and don’t mind sleeping in public.  Caucasians are more self-conscience and will typically avoid sleeping if they can.  Nobody sleeps well in public and it has become one of my favorite forms of entertainment.  I went to the internet to borrow some pictures of sleeping Asians.  I was amazed to find hundreds of “sleeping Asian” websites created by Caucasians. 

Nan-ao Trail

We joined the Mountain Climbing Club of my wife’s employer and hiked the first three kilometer portion of the 27 kilometer Nan-ao Trail.  The trail is located in the north east coast region of Taiwan near the town of Yilan.  The group traveled the entire portion of the recently restored trail and then returned, for a total of six kilometers.   The trail is easy to slightly moderate in difficulty and follows the South Nan-ao River.   The overall elevation change is about 400 meters and the trail provides some great views of the river gorge and mountains, including a great diversity of vegetation. 

The area has been inhabited by the Atayal indigenous people for hundreds of years and the trail was a primary route for the movement of salt from the plains along the east coast.  During the Japanese occupation (1895-1945), the trails were enhanced for purposes of controlling the Atayal.   Original Japanese markers can be found along the trail. After the KMT replaced the Japanese, the Atayal people were relocated and the Nan-ao trail fell into disuse. The forest bureau has improved the trail significantly, including the addition of two suspension bridges, and recently opened the section the club hiked.

The most difficult part of the hike is the travel along several very narrow trail sections with steep cliffs falling to the river below.  The Nan-ao trail is best known for the true story of a 17 year old Atayal girl name Sayon, who fell and drowned in 1938, while carrying the luggage of a Japanese officer she loved.  The story has been captivating to both the Japanese and Taiwanese, and the subject of books and movies.  Last year, Taishin Financial Holdings President Lin Keh-hsiao fell to his death hiking a nearby portion of the trail.  Ironically, reports suggest that Lin was intrigued by the story of Sayon since childhood and hiked the trail numerous times as a result.

The trail guide was very knowledgeable of the vegetation and insects found along the trail and provided the group with instructional information.  A picture of a Bird’s Nest Fern is included below. An original suspension bridge constructed by the Japanese about 100 years ago is still visible, but unusable.

After completion of the hike, the group rest at the river basin and then traveled to a nearby restaurant for a dinner of favorite local cuisine, which everyone appeared to enjoy.  Strangely, the highlight of the trip appeared to be a shopping trip to a small tourist town with a famous bakery.  The entire group joined a crowd of hundreds of other people, eager to buy breads and cakes made with local green tea.  I enjoyed the bakery and free tea samples, but it wasn’t a highlight for me.

Movin' On Up

“Well we're movin’ on up, to the east side, to a deluxe apartment in the sky.”   The lyrics are from the theme song of a television show The Jeffersons, which was a spin-off of one of the most popular shows of all time, All in the Family.  The Jeffersons debuted in 1975 and lasted 11 seasons, which oddly, was longer than All in the Family. The show was about a black family that moved from a working class NY neighborhood to a luxury Manhattan apartment.

In 1978 my friend and I moved from the upper Midwest to the Northern California East Bay area.  We were offered jobs with a newly formed distributor of our previous employer.  My friend moved there several months before me; I had to finish a semester of school and complete my Best Man obligations for a very good friend.  In retrospect, I think my friend would have preferred I didn’t fulfill my obligations.

The friend that I moved to California with, was a very frugal man.  He rented an apartment for us in the lowest cost part of a very low cost city.  The day I arrived after a 44 hour drive, a drunk neighbor lady smashed into my car and drove off, a man broke into our apartment at 2:00 a.m. (he claims it was just an honest mistake) and I woke up in my sleeping bag next to a pile of vomit left by the previous tenant.   I was unable to recover damages from the drunk neighbor, though I compensated myself with entertainment that included repeatedly lighting firecrackers in her apartment, and standing on top of her boyfriend and pouring water on his head, as he tried to crawl from his car to their apartment, in either a very drunk or incredibly stealth move.  We had a drug crazed neighbor smash the front picture window and his girlfriend entered our apartment with a rifle in her hands and blood dripping off her body, as she attempted to escape him.  We lived in the slums.

My friend is a good person and he now lives in a very nice home in the suburbs, so I’m not sure why he chose to rent where he did.  I attempted to get him to move to a nicer location, though he could never commit to the higher rent required.  I ultimately returned to the Midwest, and he also did later.

Recently, my wife and I decided to rent an apartment in Taipei, which is 100 km north of our beautiful home in a gated community. The apartment was necessary because our daughters attend school in Taipei.  My wife selected the apartment when I was in the U.S. and based on her Chinese frugality, it is low cost.  Besides the usual downside of living in a very low end neighborhood, we have other issues to contend with.  The landlord asked that we not use the only bathtub in the only bathroom, because it was about to break.  She asked that we stand over the toilet and spray water as a shower.  We have refused to do that and have showered in the tub, which is now cracked. 

We have a hoarder lady living below us that participates in the lucrative recycling trade (more about this in the future), however her apartment stinks and she yells loudly at any time of the day.  The old couple across the hall screams loudly at each other often.  The man supposedly has dementia and his wife cannot control him, but I think it may be the other way around.  She locks him out of the 4^th floor apartment, trapping him on the balcony.  He yells to us to please release him.  When we don’t release him he calls us heartless.  They prefer to scream at night and early morning, though they are extremely versatile and can scream at all hours. The upstairs neighbor doesn’t scream ever, but she enjoys vacuuming her hard surface flooring above our bedroom at 3:00 a.m.  We live in the slums.

My wife regrets the choice and we have a new upscale apartment being prepped for us in a nice neighborhood.  The new building represents typical luxury Taipei real estate.  The Chinese would prefer to own real estate over any other asset type. Mainland China restricts the number of properties you can own, so a great deal of money flows to Taiwan.  The ratio of sell prices to rent is by far the highest in the world, with Monaco a distant second.  Even though Chinese own many multi-million dollar apartments, they don’t necessarily choose to rent them out, and often prefer to leave them vacant.  It is hard to rent an apartment in Taipei and it is even harder to justify buying one, when the price/rent ratio is crazily upside down.  Leases are typically for 3 years and require significant prepayments.

Living in the slums hasn’t been all bad.  I appreciate watching how the people live and the simple joys they seek.  One neighbor has a bird with the most beautiful song I have heard.  Most neighbors grow wonderful houseplants; there is no shortage of flowers in the area.  Crime is low and I actually don’t have too many complaints.

I look forward to moving into our new 19^th floor apartment, which includes the use of an indoor swimming pool, gym and underground parking.  I also look forward to nice bathrooms and a big kitchen.  “Well we're movin’ on up, to the east side, to a deluxe apartment in the sky.”   

April 7-new update on the screaming neighbors.  The man with dimentia decided he could no longer deal with the hoarder lady and her stinking apartment, so he broke into her apartment to confront her, which led to a large screaming episode.  The neighbors across the alley couldn't stand the screaming so they began screaming that they were trying to sleep.  I want to scream too...

I have attached a picture of our neighborhood and a lady involved in the lucrative recycling trade, which will be featured in a future blog.

Comix

Asians love comics, cartoons and animation of any type.  I noticed over the last couple of years that people spell comics as comix, so at some point, the English language changed on me and I wasn’t consulted.  I have begun looking for a literary agent for a book I wrote, and the agencies list their specialties and genres. Comix are a favorite of agents.  I also notice that a small industry has been created to support “make your own” comics.  Who would have guessed?  As a child I didn’t care for cartoons and read only one or two comic strips.  As an adult, I read Dilbert and watch the Simpsons.  That is the extent of my love for comics and cartoons. Enough about the name change and what I don’t like, and back to Asians love comics, cartoons and animation.

I have always been accustom to small children having cartoon characters on their clothing, toys, back pack, etc. This seems normal to me.  Seeing adults in Asia passionate about cartoons and comics does not seem normal to me.  I guess it is just a cultural difference. A man wearing a Hello Kitty hat looks ridiculous.

Cartoons and animations are used frequently in everyday media.  Advertisements often include cartoon characters.  Business websites love cartoon characters.  Please note a screen print taken from the Fubon Financial Holdings company website.  This is a well-respected financial services company.  To me nothing looks more unprofessional than a business website full of cartoons.  However, I am willing to accept I might be wrong and need to look at it differently. If my U.S. bank website used duck and pig icons to help me transfer money, and maybe threw in a horse laugh sound when I pressed confirm, I might look forward to banking more often.

The Japanese are notorious comic readers and lovers of everything cartoon.  Japanese men read comic book pornography (so I am told) and visit virtual brothels, which feature cartoon women that remove their clothing at your request.  I read this in the Wall Street Journal-really!  I took the picture below in a Japanese book store that featured comic books.  These are not the U.S. style 20 page comic books full of color, but hard bound thick comic books. The store was filled with only men, so I can imagine what was printed.  When I took the flash picture, I received looks as if I caught them doing something wrong.  Nobody ran for the exits, but rather moved on to the next book.

As I try to accept Asian culture and look at things through the eyes of change, I have altered my view on many things.  I have become a huge fan of public transportation, stinky tofu and the musical garbage trucks.  I have not been able to gain an appreciation of comics and cartoons.

Mandarin

I have been working hard and keeping myself busy by taking Mandarin lessons at the local university.  The course is described by the university as intensive and is typically taken by someone that intends to earn a degree at a Chinese language university.  A student would study the intense Mandarin classes for one or two years, and then enroll in National Taiwan University’s chemical engineering program, as an example.  The students enrolled are driven and here for a purpose.  The class is three+ hours per day, five days per week.  Study is four or more hours each day outside of class and more on weekends.

There are 11 students in my class and all of them are from a different country and multi-lingual.  They are multi-lingual and not bi-lingual, except me. Most already speak four languages or more.  One student is in his 30s and the rest, other than me, are in their teens or early 20s.  The countries represented other than the U.S. include Israel, Russia, Spain, Guatemala, Germany, Belgium, Canada, Netherlands, Indonesia and Korea.  Everyone sounds different speaking Mandarin and each person has their own sounds that are problematic for their mouths to form.  The Indonesia guy struggles with a number of sounds, despite the similarities of his language and Mandarin.  For the first week, the teacher would continually scold him and say “No L, No L”. After hearing this for a number of days, I was about to defend him and tell the teacher he is not saying “L”, when I realized she was saying “No Air” meaning that he should say the word without having air leave his mouth.  The teacher’s English is poor, which creates some problems.   One day she kept trying to explain the “Freezes” that we are creating.  It made no sense and we had her write it down and discovered we were creating “Phrases”.

 The Chinese speak hundreds of different regional dialects.  The primary differences are the tones used, however a person speaking Cantonese cannot communicate with a person speaking Taiwanese.  Mandarin is the Beijing dialect and considered standard Chinese.  Mandarin is taught in all of China and Taiwan, and only the very old or very poor/uneducated do not understand Mandarin.  Despite the standardization, a number of regional differences exist.

Tonality is important in Mandarin.  There are five tones: voice drops from beginning to end, voice rises, voice remains constant, voice drops and then rises and the fifth tone is neutral, which is very short and no variation.  When you learn each character, the tone is critically important.  As an example, the word ma using a constant tone is mother.  Ma using a rising tone is hemp.  Ma using a falling and then rising tone is horse, and using a falling tone is a scolding word like no, and with the neutral tone, it is used as a question particle.  You don’t want to call your mother-in-law a horse, so it is important.  Many words have exactly the same tone and sound, yet have different meanings; they have different written characters though.  When words are used in succession, like most words are when you build sentences, the tone rules can change, especially for words that using the falling then rising tonality.  Mandarin is difficult.

Written Chinese is even more difficult than spoken Mandarin.  There are approximately 80,000 characters, however if you know 2,500 of the right ones, you cover about 98% of the language needs.   Unlike students in western education systems, the Chinese will continue learning how to write through high school and leave for the university with the ability to correctly write over 10,000 characters.  In the west, we typically know our alphabet and diacritics for certain vowels by the time we are seven years old.  The stroke order for making a character is highly important to the Chinese.  I still don’t fully understand why, but it is not a logic based rule.  It is just a rule that you create the character in the correct order of strokes and marks.  After the war, Mao Zedong was faced with educating a large peasant population.  He ordered that written Chinese be simplified.  Simplified Chinese is taught in China with almost 3,000 characters modified from the traditional version.  Traditional Chinese is taught in Taiwan and that is what I am learning, and is more difficult.  Some characters have more than 25 individual strokes. 

There are several methods to teach Mandarin with Latin language derivatives, including Pin-Yin, the Taiwan Tongyong Romanization System, the Yale Romanization, etc.  We temporarily use Pin-Yin, but in the end, you need to learn the characters and abandon Pin-Yin.

Learning the language is hard-very hard.  For westerners, we have nothing familiar to hold on to.  There is no alphabet, the rules are totally different, and nothing makes sense.  I have never felt more vulnerable and inadequate in my life.  I took Spanish as a young child, German in high school and Japanese as an adult.  German and Spanish are incredibly simple compared to Chinese, though I can’t say I speak those languages very well either.  I tease my German classmate that Chinese has some similarities to German, though we don’t get to spit when we speak.  The 11 classmates get along very well.  For those that watch the tv show Community, I play the Chevy Chase character.

Every week we learn about 50 new words and we need to be able to correctly write at least 25 characters.  Everyone in the class except me, has either lived in Taiwan or China for some time and knew some Chinese or had previously taken Mandarin lessons.  I started the class with a previous knowledge of 10 words.  I have always been embarrassed that I speak only one language and it is never too late to change.  I can now recognize a number of Chinese characters as I travel throughout Taipei, and read some signs, or have a very basic conversation.  I am trying very hard to learn Mandarin, though it has been humbling every day.

Beat the Dog

We visited the southern Taiwan city of Kaohsiung for several days.  Traveling Taiwan via high speed train is easy and comfortable, so we decided to drive.  Taiwanese, for reasons I can’t understand, refuse to drive the speed limit.  They will block all lanes driving 15 kilometers per hour below the already conservative limit.  It is much worse than driving in Iowa.  The weather was slightly wet, but nice.  High temperatures were 80°F or 27°C.  The southern part of Taiwan sits below the Tropic of Cancer, so the climate is considered tropical.

Kaohsiung is the second largest city in Taiwan, but at only 3 million inhabitants, it is much smaller than Taipei.  It was interesting to see how wide the streets were, with no crowds anywhere.  The rapid transit system of the city is great, though simple and very few riders.  The stations have wonderful artwork-see the glass art at one station.  Apparently I have become accustom to congested Taipei, when I think that a city of 3 million people is like a small suburb.

The city has a large port and small outer islands.  We took a ferry to one of the islands for a seafood lunch, which I believe made me sick.  At one time, a significant rail system moved the freight to and from the port.  The rail is gone and trucks do the work.  The remaining warehouses that once stored sugar cane and pineapple are now homes to art studios.  The alleys have edgy street art.  The former rails are now gardens.  I watched steel coils being loaded on a ship bound for some metal stamping house. Within an hour, over 70 trucks unloaded their steel.  The port has artwork-see the shipping container sculpture.

The Dutch established the city in the 1600s but were expelled by the Ming dynasty in 1662. The original Chinese name for the city was translatable to “Beat the Dog”.   After the Japanese took over Taiwan in 1895, they renamed the city “High Hero” or Takao.  When Taiwan was awarded to China following the Japanese defeat in 1945, they renamed it Kao-hsiung, based on the romanization language translation of Takao.  

There are numerous shrines and temples in the city and parks.  At one shrine, we watched people pay 10 NTD to an automatic fortune teller machine.  The little robot delivers a fortune, which is very popular.  I’ve said it before, the Chinese are very superstitious.  After reading his fortune, one man began walking backwards.  I hope his fortune comes true.   Another temple is guarded by two animal heads.  You make a wish and walk into the dragonhead entrance and exit the tiger’s mouth.  I made a wish and walked through the heads, but my bad diarrhea didn’t stop, so I’m not a big believer of this temple and won’t return.

We had a nice time in Kaohsiung.  I enjoyed walking around the accessible port and watching the activities.  The art was free for viewing and everywhere.  If I were writing the travel guide for the city, I recommend you skip the dragon/tiger temple, but definitely spend some money on the automated fortune teller, and enjoy the nice tropical city of Beat the Dog.

7-Eleven

7-Eleven began in Texas in 1927.  Before the days of refrigeration, ice blocks were sold for iceboxes to keep perishables cold.  People kept fewer perishable foods and had to shop frequently.  The convenience store was born when the founder Jefferson Green began selling milk and eggs from his icehouse and then realized that staying open during the evening and Sundays, when grocery stores were closed, was a strategic advantage.  Southland Corp. eventually owned the convenience store chain and began the franchising.  In business school more than 30 years ago, we had a case study on Southland, and learned how they screwed up a good thing.  The lesson I learned from the case study is that business people are incredibly smart when they apply hindsight.

In the U.S. I barely paid attention to 7-Eleven.  I don’t smoke cigarettes, drink soda and have no desire to overpay for a gallon of milk or 6-pack of beer.  So I had little reason to go there, or know what a Big Gulp or Slurpee was.  Some 7-Eleven stores have gas pumps, but I would pay at the pump by credit card, eliminating the need for me to go inside and see what I had been missing.

When I moved to Taiwan, I discovered the importance of 7-Eleven to the well-being of Taiwanese society.  7-Eleven has 44,000 stores around the world, with a significant number of them located in Asia.  Japan has almost 14,000 stores and little Taiwan has almost 5,000.  I haven’t done the per capita density calculations, but I would bet Taiwan is densely packed with these stores.  And there is competition from the OK Mart, Family Mart, Mr. Brown Coffee and others.

Much of the population of Taiwan is packed into several large cities.  It is not uncommon in these cities to have two or three 7-Eleven stores on one city block.  Why?  Because 7-Eleven rules Taiwan.  At 7-Eleven you not only buy convenience foods, newspapers and coffee, but you use them to pay your traffic tickets, renew/refill many types of prepaid devices, mail letters, pay your bills, conduct minor banking, reserve taxis, ship and pickup packages, purchase concert tickets, pay school tuition and obtain stitches for minor cuts (6 stitch limit) and so much more.  There is almost nothing you can’t do at 7-Eleven, except buy betelnuts.

 7-Eleven already rules Taiwan, and much of Japan. I predict they will rule the world within the next half century.  I hope some business school reads this blog 50 years from now and realizes that I did not use hindsight to make this prediction.