(If there is no surf, invoke sea work in the following manner

arise, arise you great surfs from Kahiki)

~Ancient Hawaiian Surf Prayer

Few indeed are the recreational activities with which our adopted homeland is not blessed. Name a sport, and chances are good to absolute that someone somewhere in China is doing it right now. Some of these passions, however, require a trip to the Middle Kingdom’s more far flung corners. One of these is surfing. Traversing the great curve of China’s east coast from Korea to Vietnam will bring you to beach after beach suitable for sunbathing, swimming, and ogling of all sorts, but none (to our knowledge – if anyone knows different, please contact the editor at editor@cityweekend.com) are renowned for great surf.

Hainan Island, that lush amber teardrop often called “the Hawaii of China” lives up to this moniker in most ways, with great seafood, a laid back populace, swaying palms and sandy beaches a-plenty. Vacationers report great scuba diving, snorkeling and even windsurfing (the sport which true surfers regard as kind of a spastic cousin). But alas, Hainan is not often visited by the massive waves required for truly excellent surf.

Thankfully, there is one little known but truly excellent spot left. While “To Surf!” is not a choice listed on the “reason for visit” section of the disembarkation card handed out on flights bound for the island, Taiwan has a burgeoning surf bum scene all its own. From the black sands of Honeymoon Bay in the north to the island’s southernmost tip in Kenting (where surfers can bask in the glow of one of the island’s main nuclear power plants), Taiwan east coast presents a number of places where those in the know can catch waves ranging from the acceptable to the truly bodacious.  Yet only a handful of people even know the island has a surf scene.  And Taiwan’s small, dedicated, and thoroughly amped surfing community would have it no other way.

Like most sports which need the cooperation of mother nature, good surfing requires a high degree of being in the right place at the right time. Right places are few and far between; sweet spots that have the waves without the crowds are even rarer. Nothing kills a good beach faster than overcrowding. Because of it’s proximity to Taipei (90 minutes by train), the area around Honeymoon Bay is one of the areas considered “decent, but usually too crowded” by local surfers.

While Pete, my guide into the world of surf was happy to lead me into tubular illumination, he asked that I not reveal the whereabouts of their beach. So readers will have to forgive my vagueness when I identify the beach where most of this story takes place as “in the boondocks, somewhere between Hualien and Taitung.”   Those familiar with they myriad mysteries of the surf will understand completely the need for discretion, leaving those determined enough to seek the place out.

I met up with Pete at a pub in a city not far from his home. Pete lives a few miles away from a small, coastal city (renowned for its good weather and aboriginal beauty, and this is the last major clue you’ll get from me) in a small town on he picked out specifically for its proximity to what he calls “some of the best surf in Taiwan.”  Our plan is to have supper in town and head home to hit the sack early and wake up at dawn to scope the conditions, but he decides to race home for some dusk surfing. Of course, I think he’s crazy already, as the sun is already almost down, but I’m just along for the ride. “You’ve gotta catch the waves when you can,” Pete tells me, jumping onto his motorcycle (specially designed with a side-mounted surfboard rack, naturally), and I follow him back to his house on my rented scooter.

We get back, and Pete grabs a long board and runs towards the beach.  I follow along, leaving my camera at his house, already being too dark for outdoor photography.  The beach we’re on is not white sand, as I’d expected would be ideal for surfing; rather, it is a rocky, curving stretch of seashore, difficult and uncomfortable to walk along. Pete disappears into the gray, churning mass that stretches out endlessly, and I sit listening to a sound quite unlike any I’ve ever heard, that of the undertow pulling millions of small stones into the sea, while the tide pushes millions more back against the shore. The endless crackling and popping makes me feel as if I’m sitting on the edge of an enormous bowl of giant-sized rice krispies.

Eventually, Pete comes back. “Once it gets too dark to see the waves its pretty much impossible to keep surfing,” he tells me.  We head off to a local dumpling shop, where over a plate of dumplings and stinky, I grill Pete over what makes for good surfing.  It turns out to be more complicated than I thought.

“There are lots of factors involved” he tells me” average wind direction, what the conditions under the waterline are. One of the reasons that the beach I surf is so good is the rockiness of the area. Another factor is the shape of the shoreline itself.” Before the sun went down, I’d noticed that the spot where Pete spent his time was just off of a graceful outward-extending arch of coastline. The curve, I’m told, forms a beach break under the water, a place where the waves will break fairly regularly and predictably.

“That’s the spot where we spend most of our time.” Pete tells me.

Gorged on dumplings, we head back to his place and listen to music. The operative plan is to wake up at dawn and see what the surf looks like, so we try to get to sleep early. Two other surfers show up at the house at around 4 AM, fresh off of their night jobs tending bar in a nearby city. “The waves look pitiful,” one mumbles before crawling into their sleeping bags, and everybody agrees to sleep late and wait for the tide to go out in the afternoon. At this time of year – late spring – this is prime time for surfing.

As the seasons change, so do the prime surfing times. According to Pete, Taiwan is good for surfing year round, but a wetsuit is a good idea until mid-spring.  Pete had also clued me into the fact that the best season for surfing in Taiwan is also the most dangerous.

“Late summer / early autumn…” he’d said “especially right before a typhoon, when the waves are really high and the surf conditions are truly gnarly! But I don’t advise surfing before a typhoon, except for the truly psychotic!”

Predictably, everyone is still crashed out at seven, so I take my motorcycle up the coast to get some tea. It’s a brilliant day, and the sea is nearly flat, no swell at all. At nine, the ocean is showing some motion, with a few bumps forming here and there. Ignorant to the ways of surf though I am, I know that this isn’t enough to wake the sleeping surfers over.

Sometime in the early afternoon, the story has changed. Small and medium sized waves are crashing down regularly on the shore, and after a quick look, the assembled crew decides to go for it.  My first surfing lesson is about to begin. Pete hands me a short board, and I follow the rest of the surfers down to the water’s edge.

Just getting there is a chore. While the rockiness may make for good surfing, it definitely hinders getting in and out of the water. Forget about the full sprints into the waves that you see on “Baywatch”, this is more like treading over a minefield. Once I’m in, the ocean itself seems not to want me, pushing me back a step for every two I manage to take forward. Finally, I get to a point  where I can lie down on the board and begin paddling. Its incredibly taxing work, and long unused muscles protest almost immediately. The crew is way ahead of me within minutes,  and while they’re relaxing on the higher seas, I’m scratching, desperately trying to paddle fast enough to get myself out of the zone, the place where the waves come crashing down.  Nose pressed against the board, I keep paddling, hoping to get past the dump zone. My technique is all wrong. Maybe I should try…

WHUMP! I’m wrapped around the board, tumbling around inside the crashing water like a sock in the spin cycle. I wind up under the board, pushed back to the point where I my feet are touching rock. Before I have time to contemplate this

WHUMP! Another wave crashes down over me, pushing me even further back and ripping the board out of my hands. Thankfully, the Velcro leash strapped around my ankle holds, and I’m able to pull the board in and paddle back out.  The rest of the surfers are already way ahead, looking out for incoming waves. The two that had just pummeled me weren’t big enough for them to even bother riding.

I had thought the toughest thing about surfing would be standing up on the board. Theoretically, that might be correct, but at the rate I was going, I wasn’t going to get the chance to find out.  Eventually, I manage to paddle out past the break zone, and find myself prone on the board, not too far off from the take off point, the place where the other surfers are getting ready to ride the approaching waves. Now I’m ready to hang ten.

Not Quite. Possibly the most famous of surfer slang, “hang ten”  means to keep all ten toes on the nose of the board (possible only with a long board). What I do is more like “hang onto the board for about ten seconds before getting pitched off.” This, in itself, feels like an achievement.

After about a half an hour, I’ve managed to body surf on a few of the smaller waves, but the amount of work I’d had to do to get to the waves has left me exhausted, and the inevitable pummeling at the end of the wave has drained me. That, and the fact that I’ve swallowed what feels like a small harbor’s worth of salt water leads me to the discoing that I’d best bail out while I still have the energy to crawl up the rocks, leaving the surfing to those who know how to handle it.  I spend the rest of the afternoon sitting on the beach watching the crew surf away the afternoon. Surfing, I conclude, is hard work, and best left to those dedicated the sport.  In the future, I think I’d best stick to watching Baywatch reruns.

Josambro

It was cold, even for November in Beijing. No sun shining through the gunmetal gray skies, it would be another three weeks until the central planning committee would turn the great knob that would bring heat into homes throughout the city. And I had gout again.

For three days I’d been unable to walk. Malicious imps jammed white-hot knitting needles into the big knuckle of my right foot at repeated intervals. The pain was worst just before dawn, when the uric acid in my blood – the byproduct of a weekend of ill-advised feasting on crab and Beijing duck – having crystallized while I slept, caused me to wake in sudden dark agony.  Like shards of glass, the crystals settled in the furthest extremity of my circulatory system.  With clenched teeth, I’d grind up a few Fenbid, a slow release Chinese brand ibuprofen, and curl up under the duvet, pinching the swollen joint between thumb and forefinger to slow the throbbing to a tolerable level.

Inevitably, I’d nod out and release my grip,  and the pain would be on me like a freight train, shooting back into my foot as sure as if I’d hopped off a high curb and landed on a rusty spike. This could go on two, three times before the drugs kicked in, blessing me with a few more hours of oblivion.

That morning I’d given in and gone to the hospital.  In a Chinese hospital, one is a piece of flotsam in a stagnant pond filled with viral hosts. Each patient pushes from line to line, first to get to a counter to fill out the forms necessary to wait in a second line for a few hours, at the end of which waits a bored government doctor who will poke and prod for ten seconds before pronouncing the subject fit enough to wait on a third line for whatever pharmaceuticals – real or counterfeit –  might be available.

Dutifully I waited, and after my initial filing and prodding, was prescribed a bottle of Colchicine, an anti-gout agent. The pharmacist then directed me to the station of a bored looking middle-aged nurse, who told me to drop my pants and bend over. She gave me a shot of a long-acting anti-inflammatory, saying “you should feel less pain by this evening” before sending me on my way.

I popped two pills in the cab back home to my cut-rate Beijing tenement building, where I felt numb enough to pass out.

I woke up sometime before dusk, noting cheerlessly that the pain had lessened, from full-on throb to a dull ache.   I felt well enough to get some writing done, and limped into the kitchen for a cup of tea.  Standing by the stove, waiting for the kettle to boil, I felt suddenly dizzy, and grabbed onto an unsteady shelving unit for balance. But gravity is a cruel bitch mistress, especially to the infirmed or week.

There was a industrial sized glass bottle of condiment grade soy sauce on the top shelf, and my unsteady hand set things in motion.  Though it took mere seconds for the bottle to make its final voyage as an integral unit, it seemed to happen so slowly that I felt like I could reach out at any point and stop it as it fell. But I might well have been screaming at a movie screen, trying to warn the characters in some b-grade slasher flick for all the good my heightened awareness was.  The bottle hit the cold tile floor in slow motion, shattering into razor-sharp pieces of varying size in a near-perfect radius at my feet,  bleeding thick and dark like a skyscraper suicide.  A viscous black pool oozed across the blue tile floor pushing translucent teeth in its wake.

For a long moment I stared without blinking into the mucky, shard-filled minefield of my kitchen floor.  I gazed into the abyss, and the abyss gazed back upon me – neither of us liked what we saw. My blood pressure doubled in the space of seconds, and as it did, the pain returned with a vengeance.

I am not proud of what I did next, screaming and flinging curses at the household gods.  Then I flung a bowl – one of two I owned –  against the wall, yelling  “What the fuck do you want from me?”  at whatever supernatural spirits might have been responsible.  By the time I’d regained a semblance of control, porcelain debris and shards from two more shattered glasses mingled with the black muck on the cold floor.

But the madness had been replaced by an eerie calm, like the eye of a hurricane.  Taking a deep breath, I slipped on a pair of plastic flip flops and set to mopping the treacherous mess into a bucket.  By the time it was half filled, my hands were covered in tiny cuts and spots of blood mixed with swaths of filthy marinade on the blue tile floor.

I hobbled down the cement hallway to the elevator, dragging a blue mop bucket filled with scum and shards behind me.  The usually chatty old ayi whose job it was to press the elevator buttons took one look at me and went back to her knitting. She said nothing to me on the slow descent from the tenth floor.

I remember thinking that the day was almost over, and things could get no worse. And I remember regretting the thought as soon as it formed – the words “it can get no worse” should never be thought, lest even this small streak of bleak optimism leave the thinker unprepared.

So it went that I failed to turn back in time, and instead wandered blithely past the pack of uniformed guards from the Public Safety Bureau who were huddling for warmth in my building’s doorway.

Of course, they noticed me right off the bat, a disheveled, dazed white man wearing flip flops on a cold day, blood dripping from numerous gashes, dragging a bucket filled with scum, blood and glass.  To public safety professionals such as these, it might have seen like something ominous was going on.

I realized then that I might be facing the prospect of interrogation by the Beijing PSB, and not for the first time. I flashed back that horrible day, three years ago, when, the PSB had paid me an early-morning visit. It was just before the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the PRC, and one of the last holdovers of the day when Chairman Mao told the world that China had stood up and thrown off the shackles of imperialism was that foreigners were not permitted to live in common housing. We were expected to live in the new hi-rises with price tags listed in dollars, not Renminbi. Those of us not on the cushy expatriate package nipple had to live surreptitiously in regular housing, surrounded by Chinese neighbors who all knew that we were living on borrowed time.  The PSB had me  – and the entire expat slacker community of North-east Beijing’s Maidzedien neighborhood  – dead to rights that morning. They’d served me my walking papers. But it was summer then, and I could walk.  Now it was cold, and I was barely ambulatory.

But that was three years ago, and three years in Beijing might as well be a century.  Along with the sea of bicycles that once stretched from curb to curb, the days of “foreigner approved housing” were gone.  I had no idea why Beijing Public Safety was congregating in the lobby of my building. Did they want to check the gas meter? Would they understand that I was home with a bad case of the gout, a sick man on the edge, better left alone?

The oldest of the three was a hunchbacked woman. Her puke green uniform did not well fit her gnarled figure. It was she who spoke first, barking

“Ni Gan Shemma?!”

This is a particularly worrisome phrase, because while it’s often used to mean “What’s going on?”, it translates literally into “You dare what?”

In times of stress my Mandarin deserts me, reducing me to pidgin linguistics.

“The blood is mine!” I said, holding my palms out to the trio, who stared at me wide-eyed.

I realized that this was not a good situation. My brain had frozen up, and I was in no position to express myself with any degree of eloquence. Even if I could, how could I explain the trail of soy sauce flip-flop prints I was leaving?  I hurled the contents of the bucket into the dumpster and tried to slink back into the building.

“Wait.” Said the hunchback “We have questions!”

“Can’t speak now.” I answered “Very bad day”

“Where do you live?” She asked

“Floor ten, apartment two” I shouted. “I have gout!”

I backed up the concrete stairs and into the dirty lobby, dragging my empty bucket, still dripping blood and condiment.

“We’ll come for you!” She said as the elevator doors slid shut.

I limped back into my apartment and awaited the inevitable.  I hadn’t even had my tea.  I contemplated climbing out the window. Then I remembered that this was “the new Beijing”. I was a legal resident of this building, with the paper to prove it. I looked in my little red Chinese dictionary for the words to explain my dishevelment. I wanted to claim epilepsy, but I couldn’t find the translation. Finally, I found two suitable phrases:

“Soy sauce bottle plummeted” and “I had a fit”

After a few moments, there was a knock on the door, and I opened it, and saw two of the Public Safety Officers standing in my hallway, a man and a woman, the hunchback, mercifully, had gone elsewhere.

I started jabbering

“How strange it must look. But really, very simple. A soy sauce bottle broke…”

I pointed to my swollen, enflamed foot with a bloody index finger,  as if this might somehow clarify everything.  While they showed no outward signs of sympathy, I could sense that my precarious mental state had registered.

“It doesn’t matter. We’re here to take the yearly census for the building.”

Said the male half of the duo, his thick Beijing twang made nigh-impenetrable by some sort of speech impediment.

I showed them my hukou, the household registration card that is invaluable to any Beijing dweller. While they copied down the particulars, they rattled off a series of questions. “How long have you lived here” and “What is the surname of your landlord?” and  “How much rent are you paying?”

“Half a year”  I answered, “Mrs. Chang. 2100 RMB a month.”

“Thank you for your cooperation.”

The pair then closed their clipboard and turned to leave. But I felt the need for closure

“Am I in any trouble?”

“You are in no violation of the law.” The woman replied. “Your landlady is. She has been cheating on her taxes, overcharging you while claiming her nephew lives here rent free.”

“Do you have any advice?”  I asked.

“Avoid duck meat.” Said the man.  “It inflames gout.”

As I closed the door, a wave of tranquility suddenly washed over me. The pulsating in my extremities abated.   After years in China I had achieved a semblance of equality.  The bureaucratic machine was no longer after me. It had held me squarely in its claws before putting me down to go after my rent-gouging landlady. In the eyes of the law, I was now just another citizen; a simpleton who allowed himself to be cheated, perhaps, but a law-abiding simpleton.   Dazed and unwashed, I collapsed onto my bed,  warm in the knowledge that nothing –  not the cold, nor the gout, nor the cuts on my hands – could keep tomorrow from being a better day.

(Blood and Condiment originally Published in Hong Kong’s Dim Sum Literary Journal, 2004)

Many years later, the first wave of settlers came from the Chinese mainland. These immigrants, called the Hakka because of their annoying habit of clearing their throats before speaking, soon settled in the western lowlands, forcing the more polite natives into the Eastern mountains to escape the rudeness.

Shortly after, settlers from Fukkien province mistakenly landed on Taiwan due to a poorly drawn map sold to them by an unscrupulous American businessman offering cheap beachfront property in Hawaii.  Refusing to admit their mistake, the Fukkinese rounded up Hakka people by the dozens and forced them to perform crude Hula dances and throw flowered leis everywhere. This incident has been a source of tension between the two groups ever since, and mentioning the name ‘Don Ho’ is often enough to provoke a severe beating in some neighborhoods.

Taiwan saw many major upheavals in the late nineteenth century, when the island was ceded to Norway after an all night gambling session between the last Dowager Empress of the Ming dynasty and a Norwegian con-man known only as “Count Olaf.”  As part of this tragic bargain, all Taiwanese were forced to adopt Norwegian as their native language, drink heavily, eat lutefisk, and become suicidal during the long, dark winter months.

The terror lasted until 1945, when the cowed inhabitants discovered that Norway had not been a major world power since the mid tenth century, and had no means whatsoever of enforcing its edicts.

In 1949, a radio broadcast of HG Wells immortal classic ‘War of the Worlds’ caused widespread panic on the Chinese mainland, causing a rapid exodus of over a million mainlanders to the Island of Taiwan.  The result was that the population of Taiwan swelled to unprecedented numbers, forcing landlords throughout the Islands to redesign their buildings to include stairways to allow access to all floors.

Since then, The Economy of Taiwan has swelled by over 1 billion percent, propelling Taiwan into the ranks of one of four ‘Asian Lemmings’. Taiwan boasts both breathtaking scenery and cosmopolitan cities, and plans are underway to build a road linking the two in the near future.

The Artist at Home

His work has been described as erotic, powerful, surreal and even profane. He is enamored – some might say obsessed – with the female form. But Kunming-based sculptor Luo Xu has no regrets. This self-professed “free imperialist” and “leader and overlord of myself,” is successful beyond the dreams of most artists. Not only has his work been displayed in galleries throughout China, Europe and North America, he also has his own gallery. More than this, Luo Xu has what few dare to dream of: a womb with a view.

Walking through the front gate of Luo Xu’s sprawling estate, located 15 KM south of Kunming, in Southern China, the first face I see is that of a dour porcelain god, arms outstretched, holding what looks to be two rounded hammers (or perhaps they’re Tibetan prayer wheels) in welcome. Except for the artist himself, this is one of the few masculine figures I am to encounter on my visit. Behind the god-totem is the metal torso of a woman lying on her back in a pool of water. The woman is sans arms and head, and her vaginal lips run from navel to neck. This theme – female anatomy – runs through much of Luo Xu’s work.

In the courtyard stands a two story high tower made of extended female legs, a veritable vertical chorus line; only this line exists from the waist down only, and is frozen forever in mid-kick. “The Ninety-ninth wave,” perhaps the artist’s most controversial work, depicts a score of headless female torsos with exaggerated enflamed sexes, prostrate and crawling towards an alter upon which a milk white body lies giving birth to a grasping outstretched ebony forearm.

I can only imagine how my mother, a psychologist whose bookshelf is filled with the works of such old-school feminist writers as Betty Friedan and Simone De Beauvoir, might analyze the creator of a series of sculptures that portray women only as an endless procession of legs and vaginas. She might call the work perverse, even misogynistic.

I bring this up to Luo Xu, who nods thoughtfully. He has clearly heard this analysis before.

“My images are not meant to convey any sense of misogyny. Indeed, my feelings are quite the opposite. I am infatuated with the female form, not only because I am a man of sound mind and body, but because I see the female form as the beginning of all things.”

Born in Yunnan province sometime in 1956 (he does not know the exact date), a brief glance at Luo Xu’s early resume gives little indication of the career or body of work that would eventually follow. His earliest ambition was to be an architect, a dream he abandoned. “I had no mind for calculus,” he says. At 23, Luo Xu began studying painting, but his early attempts to get into art school ended in a string of rejections. Seeking a career change, he left the porcelain factory he’d been working in and went into business for himself, breeding longhaired rabbits. This vocation, too, was short lived. “All the rabbits died,” he says. Throughout, he continued painting and dabbling in sculpture.

In 1988, the fledgling artist’s work caught the attention of respected sculptor Qian Shaowu (whose famous ten meter high sculpture of Dr. Sun Yat Sen sits in Shenzhen’s Zhongshan park). Luo Xu decided to move to Shanghai to study at the master’s feet, and it was under his tutelage that he learned to sculpt the contours and nuances of the human body.

In 1992, Luo Xu completed his studies, and, bucking the artistic gravity of Shanghai and Beijing, returned to Yunnan province to continue his work. In 1996, armed with a bamboo pole and a bank loan, Luo Xu began construction of the sprawling artistic estate just outside of Kunming. The estate would eventually become known as “the Aboriginal Nest”.It is here that Luo Xu lives and works among his creations. Even his home is a work of art, an embodiment of the artist’s professed wish to return to the womb. From the outside, the building resembles a pair of vertical stone breasts, complete with red brick window frames. From the inside, with it’s gently curving stone walls that end in a hollow, Plexiglas covered tube that stretches skyward, the effect is indeed womblike.

The estate, which encompasses his workspace and numerous galleries, draws visitors from the art communities of Beijing, Shanghai and beyond. Beijing based curator and noted art critic Carol Lu calls Luo Xu’s work “full of the kind of mystery typical of witchcraft.”

“It’s not obscene at all.” She says, “It’s very unique to China. We need more artists like him.”

Luo Xu contends that the idea that his work could ever be considered obscene is ridiculous. “How can this be obscene?” States the artist “Woman is the gate from which all life emerges. You, me, even the Buddha…we are all borne of woman.”

Last month’s exhibition of Ming-era painting “The Autumn Banquet” raised hackles from Stranraer to the Shetlands.  Depicting two Chinese nobleman hitting the links in the Middle kingdom, the painting is being touted by China as proof that golf’s origins lie in Chinese, not Scottish, soil.

“The great game o’ golf invented by the Chinese?” Cried indignant Scottish golfers. “Away an bile yer heid!”

But if the ramifications of Autumn Banquet were a sting Scotland’s collective pride, further golf-related discoveries coming out of the Middle Kingdom are likely to be felt as a hard slap to the haggis.

“Autumn Banquet is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Hou Lin-wan, head of China’s newly established Golfing Research Ministry.  “The more we research the subject, the farther back in Chinese history we are able to place the development of the game of Chiuwan…or, as westerners call it, golf.”

According to Hou, golf was developed far earlier than initially thought, and that new discoveries push the origins of the game as far back as 1500 years, when it was a popular pastime with legendary figures who lived during China’s Spring and Autumn Period.

“We suspect that when he wasn’t winning battles for the King of Wu or writing treatises that would one day pilfered by western motivational speakers, Sun Tzu must have played a lot of golf.”

According to Hou, the famed General’s most oft-quoted line – all warfare is based on deception – was, in its original form, meant as advice to golfers looking to cheat during tournaments.

“We checked out a really early version of Art of War, and found that the line originally read ‘when kicking one’s own ball out of a rough spot, look straight ahead and squint.  If your opponent catches you looking down, pretend you’ve dropped something.’ We figure one of the later translators wasn’t a golfer and changed it.”

China’s claim to be the birthplace of golf, according to Hou, is given further credence by the recent unearthing of a manuscript said to have been penned by China’s most famous thinker.  If it is genuine, the recently discovered Congzi chuiwan zibao (Golf Diary of Confucius) suggests that the young Confucius traveled from state to state offering not merely advice on morality and statecraft to local regents (as is commonly accepted) but also golfing tips.  This advice was not always welcome, as demonstrated from this typical entry:

Late Spring and Autumn Period, June: Advised Prince of Chou he’d get less backspin if he tightens his arc; Advice ill received, must leave Chou at once!

This and similarly-themed fragments lends fresh meaning to that most well known piece of advice given the young Confucius by his famous contemporary, philosopher and elder statesmen Lao Tzu:

“A man who is well learned often endangers himself by revealing the flaws of others. Don’t do this.”

By the time of the Jin dynasty (A.D. 1115-1234), according to Professor Hou, golf’s popularity had spread beyond the Middle Kingdom’s borders, often with unforeseen consequences as barbarians to the north altered the game to suit their own restive nature.

“A nomadic people, the Mongols needed increasingly large golf courses to suit their roaming style of play.” Says Hou “As much of their own lands was basically a massive sand trap, it was only natural that Mongol eyes would turn southward.”

Early translations of a key part of one document left by emperor Qin Shiwang (under whose edict construction of the Great Wall of China began) is usually rendered as ‘Without this fortification, nothing can stop the Northern barbarians from going through China!’ However this translation may not be entirely accurate.

“Knowing what we now know, it is likely that Qin built the Great Wall to keep barbarian golfers from playing through,” says Hou.

In a side note, the building of the Great Wall may inadvertently be responsible for another of golf history’s great ironies, miniature golf.

“The wall did not stop the barbarians in their fanatical quest for greener courses, but it did slow them down.” Says Hou. “Apparently  some of the barbarians found it enjoyable to knock small holes into the base of the wall, often at odd angles, through which they’d take turns making their shots.”

According to Hou, the majority of Mongol golfers probably considered this a cheapening of the sport, though they might have played it from time to time to with their children to keep their wives from nagging them about spending so much time away from home golfing with the horde.

Back in Scotland, meanwhile, these latest claims are being met with tempered skepticism.

“Playing through holes knocked through the great wall of China?!” Says Angus Macdougal, President of Golfing Glaswegians Associated. “That’s the most radge thing I’ve ever heard. Besides, everyone knows  we Scots were already doing tha’ through Hadrian’s Wall,  way back when there was nowt but bloody Romans on the other side!”

“Golfing through the Dynasties” originally published @ Slice Magazine, Shanghai, China. 2005

We arrive at the Bison club at 9:50, with ten minutes to try to weasel our way in without paying. My photographer does the talking, telling the bouncer to let us in for free.

“We’re journalists.” He says, “We can help bring many white people here”

The bouncer is having none of this. I sense that the situation might well turn ugly.

“Shut up, you fool” I hiss in English, “These people don’t care for foreign trade.” I quickly press some bills in the direction of the ticket lady. We’ll write off the money, put it on a tab somewhere and shovel it along with a thousand other receipts onto the accountants desk in the morning, when we’re sober and less vulnerable. The admission price entitles us each to a beer, and I figure why not? Iggy Pop said it best — “You buys your ticket, you takes your chances”

The Bison is a two-story club with balcony seats on either side of a medium sized boxing ring that sits in between two bars. Would be your typical gin joint too, if not for the bloodsport, floorshow and seven to one girl/boy ratio. We get to the front bar just in time for the first fight, two local boys who’s names I don’t catch. We call them “red” and “black” in honor of their shorts. They come out and, after a polite bow, make a slow, two man slam-dance circles in the ring. Red launches two powerful rapid fire kicks towards black’s head. Black counters with a powerful uppercut to Red’s ribcage. I can hear the sound of shifting meat and bone, even over my photographer’s drunken shouts of “Sha! Sha!” – the battle cry of other Chinese Boxers, the ones who killed maimed and otherwise made life unpleasant for Beijing expatriates during the last bought of pre-millennial tension to hit Beijing.

There are several ladies lethargically hanging around the ring. They are wearing tight black skirts, tube tops, and “fuck me” pumps. My photographer is attempting to elicit wagers on the ongoing fight with them, but his Chinese is slurring badly and his offer to gamble is being misinterpreted as something ugly.

“Who are these women” I find myself wondering “What are they doing at a boxing match?”

Short Piston Strokes… Soft Core Titillation… Discount Beer

Red, the smaller of the two fighters, is putting up a spirited fight. But Black has size on his side and keeps forcing him against the ropes, getting in short piston blows into his ribs, which seem to move with a life of their own after the first blow. Red uses his smaller size well, ducking out from between Black and the ropes, getting in two swift kicks to the side of Black’s head as he does. He seems not to be aiming for the face, and I’m wondering if this is from some sense of honor, or just to avoid pissing off his larger, stronger opponent.
Red manages a few more boot stings, but seems to lack the power to deal Black any decisive damage. Black presses forward, forcing Red against the ropes with his body while simultaneously dealing several more of those deadly piston jabs into his stomach and ribs. Finally, in what can only be considered an act of mercy, Black lashes out with a roundhouse kick to Red’s temple. Red crumples to the floor. After the bell rings, and the winner declared, Black helps Red up with unabashed tenderness. They walk together out of the ring and into the back room.

My photographer and I are the only lao wai in the bar, and the owner and his wife come out to chat with us. The owner asks us what we think about their club. I tell them that I’m quite impressed. He tells me that the bar has been in business four years, that his is the first boxing bar in Beijing, and that the whole thing was his idea and his alone. He is strangely adamant on this last point, and I sense that there has been an unhappy partnership somewhere along the line. Best not to mention it, I think.

“One day, this will all be my son’s,” He says with a sweeping motion that encompasses the bar, the employees, the fighters, the liquor and hookers. His son is at the bar with him, chatting up my photographer.

“Next time you come, let me know” the boy pipes up in a kiddy gangster drawl “I’ll get you in for free and make them give you the discount beer.”

He is a precocious boy, and I imagine he has a great future ahead of him in the “New China”.

The owner introduces us to his wife. She tells us that she’s a dance instructor who, at one time, worked with a government-sponsored troupe. Now she teaches dance here, and arranges an after-fight fashion show, which the ladies will be performing after the second fight.
The next fight begins, lasting about as long as the first. Different fighters, same shorts. This fight also goes to Black. Perhaps it is a coincidence; perhaps it is lingering backlash against the cultural revolution. The owner takes me into the back room, which has bench presses, dumb-bells and a punching bag. “It’s OK for customers to use the facilities, but they’ll have to pay a membership fee if they really want to make a regular habit of it.” He tells me.

After the second fight ends, a bartender removes the springy ropes and the boxing ring is transformed into a stage. The pageant itself is nothing special, soft-core titillation with a mandopop beat. The participants are the same disinterested women who had been milling about the bar during the fight. Now they’re on stage, humping the air lethargically like some kind of Bizarro Chinese Cyndi Lauper clones.

Floor Show From Here On In

My photographer and I have a few 40-yuan beers, red lagers imported from some Nordic country. We soon switch to the local brand, Tsingtao, which is only 20 yuan. The fashion show gives way to a mediocre singer, crooning Mandopop over a recorded synthesizer. It is clear that the main entertainment has ended, and it will be a brothel floorshow from here on in. My photographer is chatting the bartenders up, and is getting dangerously close to hitting a nerve.

“Do many party members come here? You can trust me. I used to be a communist myself…”

His Mandarin is Jerky, like a Uigher pimp’s, and slurred by alcohol. He’s still coherent enough to get us both in trouble, and I find myself intervening.

“He doesn’t really care about politics” I explain, pulling him away “He just needs to work off some of his manic energy” We retire into the back room, smoke some Xinjiang hashish and do some bench presses. We’d already gotten the information that we’d come for, my notebook was filled with meaningless scrawls to be interpreted in the morning. It was almost time for us to leave. When we return to the main bar, the crooner has left the stage, replaced by a longhaired guitarists playing moody Taiwanese folk songs. He’s playing a song I actually recognize.

Your Shadow is gone,
Now only mine remains,
Dance or Fly, Laugh or Cry,
It’s the off ramp of our love

The few people left, otherwise embroiled, don’t applaud. But I did.  It was one of the few Chinese rock songs I can sing along with.

Joshua Samuel Brown
Aug 1999

Originally written for Beijing Scene, not published.

The ruthless wind, though largely absent in the summer months, is Penghu’s most prominent off-season feature, giving trees on the island their pronounced southward tilt. The implications of a half year in a wind tunnel dawned on us before winter had even begun. A constant howl raged outside the windows of our ninth story apartment,  a whining that ranged in pitch, tenor and severity without ever going away. Every waking moment seemed to have a weird tinge, and I found myself thinking more and more of switching from travel to horror writing.  My fiancé took to blasting loud punk rock music at all hours to counter the horrible droning.  In heavy rain, the wind drove the water horizontally into the glass of the windows with a deafening thud, as if someone was aiming a fire hose at them.

On sunny days we made the best of it, going out for long bicycle rides on Penghu’s wide and largely traffic-free roads. On good days our rides were fairly evenly split between agonizingly slow pedal-mashing headwind slogs and screamingly fast tailwind sprints. On bad days, the winds just pushed our bikes sideways.

By early spring, a deep sense of isolation had set in. All of the ROC’s outer islands have a remote feel, but in Penghu the isolation is especially pronounced. From Kinmen and Matsu you can see a large body of land on the horizon (even if you can’t legally get to it), and Green Island and Lanyu feel somewhat connected to Taitung.  Geographically and culturally, Penghu feels alone in a vast blue sea.  Perhaps more so than the wind, this is the reason only a handful of westerners call Penghu home for long. There are a few; one of our friends is an Australian surfer (of some renown back home) who came to Penghu specifically for surf and isolation. A few foreign windsurfers have also settled on Penghu, arguable one of the best spots for the sport on the globe. But for the most part, western faces on the island are few and far between.

Amy had mentioned in passing that on Penghu we’d feel like rock stars. Being naive, I assumed she meant we’d be offered access to cheap drugs and easy sex; alas, this did not turn out to be the case. What she really meant was that Penghu people have a tendency that most Taiwanese have thankfully outgrown – the compulsion to stare at foreigners. Penghu people are not shy when it comes to staring. Or pointing. Or calling their friends over to look for themselves before staring some more, as if they were confronted with beings completely alien, curious, or mildly distasteful.  Had Amy substituted the words “burn victim” for “rock star” she’d have been closer to the mark.

It was this combination of local fascination and boredom that turned our wedding into a small media circus. When Laurie and I finally made it official at the Magong courthouse (allowing me to refer to her as my wife both for the remainder of this story and quite probably my life,) someone – perhaps an employee inside the oddly Soviet-looking building itself – took the liberty of informing the local press that two westerners were about to tie the knot.  Before we’d even gotten to the walking-down-the-aisle part of what we assumed would be a quick and mostly private ceremony, a television news crew had showed up with a couple of print journalists in tow. After editing, the most important day of our lives had been transformed into a seven-minute human interest segment aired that night on Penghu TV.

Finding ourselves as unexpected local news celebrities wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. At last, we were able to convince ourselves (sometimes) that people were staring at us because they’d seen us on television, and not just because we happened to sport a mildly different shade of melanin. Perhaps it was because the incident happened in the summer, when the winds had finally died down, or maybe it was because the wedding happened well past the midway point in our year contract, but as the summer progressed we began to feel a bit more integrated into the local tapestry.  Local friends began opening up to us on a variety of local issues, like ongoing-yet-unsettled plans to open up the island to casino gambling, which most regular people seem unhappy about but resigned to (“it will bring bad people to Penghu,” our friend who runs a coffee cart told us) and opening Penghu up to mainland tourists (“more lucrative than gambling and probably not as detrimental,” opined another friend).

As our year-contract winds to a close we find ourselves alternating between champing at the bit to leave and reflecting on the fact that, by and large, Penghu has been fairly good to us.  Too windy for all but the most determined to put down roots, the archipelago has instead proven itself a reasonable perch from which to contemplate future plans. The world is filled with spots that fit well under the heading A great place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there; after nearly a year here, we think Penghu fits that bill to a T. And if such places aren’t worth writing about, where else is?

Though marginally under the control of the Ming Dynasty during the period when that court held sway throughout China, in 1622, the Dutch became the first westerners to attempt permanent settlements on Penghu. Before long, however, the Dutch were convinced to leave Penghu for Taiwan by the still-powerful Ming imperial court.  As the Ming fell, Penghu was a crucial way-station for Ming loyalist Koxinga, who, after deforesting the island of Kinmen, stopped in Penghu on his way to Taiwan.

Integrated into the Qing empire in 1683, Penghu spent the next few centuries being visited for various lengths of time by a motley collection of foreign forces; except for the Dutch, who tended to build in stone, little in the way of foreign footprints from this period remain. What does remain from Penghu’s distant past are numerous ancient villages, most notably the beautifully preserved – and well worth visiting – Erkan village on the westernmost island of Hsiyu; houses in this town / living museum are centuries old, and most villagers trace their ancestry back to the original brothers Chen who came from Kinmen following Koxinga’s disastrous experiment in forest management.

In 1895 the Japanese empire colonized Penghu along with the rest of Taiwan, building a plethora of buildings around Magong city in that peculiar Asian / Western hybrid style which the Japanese fancied back then (many of these are still there).  Not ones to step lightly, the Japanese also knocked down the wall ringing the old city, leaving only Shuncheng Gate standing for future shutterbugs.

No article on Penghu would be complete without mention of the archipelago’s abundance  of temples. No mere small roadside prayer-shacks these: We’re talking full blown three-and-five story Buddhist and Taoist maxi-malls, replete with statues, carved granite columns, alters to Matsu and more, not to mention some of the most ornate temple artwork you’re likely to find on either side of the strait. These ostentatious places of worship are clustered in sets of one, two and three in small hamlets all over the islands. In between these towns (most of which boast the population of a Hsinchu cram school on a Wednesday afternoon) there is little else. The effect of coming across one of these enormous multi-layered complexes after ten minutes of riding through empty scrubland offers a striking juxtaposition.  It’s weird, like seeing Taipei 101 jutting from the side of Jade Mountain, or coming across the Core Pacific Mall…well, anywhere, actually.

Naturally, there’s a reason behind Penghu’s tremendous cultural wealth, though it has more to do with the economics of brain drain than spirituality.  Stopping at a temple to chat with locals – mostly elderly – we heard different versions of pretty much the same story.

“Who built this temple?”

“Ah, this temple was built by Mr. Chen. He was born and raised here, but moved to Taiwan, started a successful company and got rich. He built this temple in his hometown as a way of honoring his ancestors!”

“Sounds like a devoted man. Does he ever come back?”

“Every lunar new year. At least he used to. But he’s missed the last few years…”

Reading between the lines tells a more complete story:

• Local boy leaves a town offering little opportunity outside of the dried-fish trade, promising to return once he’s made it big and share his largess with the village that nurtured him.
• Local boy strikes it rich in Taiwan or Mainland China, along the way getting used to creature comforts like restaurants that stay open past nine and supermarkets with imported-food sections, perhaps even acquiring a city-born wife who nixes the idea of spending her golden years (or any years, for that matter) discussing methods of sea-urchin preparation with windswept neighbors.
• Local boy – now a worldly man torn between duty and pragmatism – comes up with a culturally acceptable solution:  Build the largest and most ostentatious temple he can afford in the tiny hamlet in which he was raised (but has long outgrown).

Penghu is replete with stories like these, brought to life by these audaciously crafted wood and granite temples, lying largely empty on the side of the road.

I know what you’re thinking: If this is a travel article, we’re off to a bad start. Travel articles are supposed to make readers want to visit the place being written about, and here I am confessing to wanting nothing more than to see Penghu shrink into a singularity from the window of a Taipei-bound airplane. But the reader will hopefully forgive a writer’s indulgence, with the promise that this article will elucidate as it complains.

Love at first sight is great inspiration for song lyrics; picking a spot in which to live on said impulse may not, however, be the brightest idea. Hence, that we fell in love with Penghu when we first saw it might well have given us pause. We’d come to Penghu to research the archipelago’s tourist-lure factor for a chapter in the soon to be released seventh edition of Lonely Planet:Taiwan. But in the back of my mind – and that of my fiancé – was a vague idea that if Penghu had enough on the ball to lure tourists, it might have enough to keep us there for a year or so as I finished writing the guide and began whatever future projects might come up the pike. When we first saw the archipelago, a sandy string-of-pearls floating on a sapphire-blue sea, we knew we’d found a contender. The shape of the main land mass – a somewhat mangled horse-shoe, thicker on one side, surrounding a clear blue bay – promised endless beaches to explore and long roads for bicycling. We were nearly sold before we’d even landed at Magong airport.

Early explorations did nothing to diminish our enthusiasm. The beaches – long strips of white sand butting up against ocean – were as tropically idyllic up close as they’d been from the air, and even in late October, the water was still fine for swimming. Beaches aside, we were struck by how culture-steeped the place seemed; every hamlet we passed seemed to have at least one temple, if not two. And importantly, Magong – Penghu’s only city – appeared to boast a strong enough local economy (based on a combination of fishing and tourism) to support numerous restaurants, a movie theatre, and a few English schools where my wife-to-be might find employment as I got down into the nitty-gritty of chopping up months of notes into the 80,000 words that would become my half of the Taiwan guide.

So we both said why not? to a year on these islands promising beaches, culture, and seemingly excellent weather. Landing a teaching job was easy enough for my fiancée, though it was the outgoing teacher who provided the first hint that our new island home might not be the paradise it seemed at first.

“Penghu is nice,” she told us as she packed her suitcase, perhaps a bit too eagerly. “But you’ll get tired of fish, noodles and wind before too long. Trust me.”

But before going past the halcyon early days of our year in Penghu and into the long months of near constant typhoon-speed winds, endless stares and culinary boredom, a reasonable condensation of the archipelago’s long and storied history – just enough to justify its being run in this magazine’s ‘travel and culture’ section – is in order.

(to be continued)