Sorting Out the Trash

For the Kinmen Daily Newspaper

            At my home in Massachusetts, recyclables are housed in an enormous green barrel with a heavy lid and large black wheels that we keep in the garage.

            I am used to throwing out trash and recyclables in this barrel. It was my chore to take the barrel out to the street every Wednesday night.

            The music the trash truck plays here in Kinmen was interesting to me when I arrived because in America trash trucks are silent. I wonder how often they change the song here. The driver must get bored.

            You also do not have to meet the trash trucks by the roadside. In America you can just leave your trash and recyclables on the curb and the trash collectors pick them up and empty the barrels.

            They leave the barrels along the curb, and you can bring them back to your house when you return home from work or school.

            Because trash pick-up is done quite differently here than in America, I confess I do not totally understand how it works. The importance of recycling in Taiwan, though, was told to me as soon as I arrived.

             I was shown the recycling logo on all recyclable containers, and it was explained that I must be careful not to throw recyclables into the trash.

            I wish it were that way in America, but unfortunately, much less can be recycled there than here in Taiwan.

            The problem I had in the beginning was that I did not understand when or where to throw out trash and recyclables, so they all stayed in my apartment.

            Last Tuesday, I left a small apple core on my desk before going to work, and to my surprise, a plump, black and red cockroach rested beside it when I returned.

            The cockroach gave me a look like, "What do you want?" It scurried off the table and headed for the door. I grabbed a large hiking boot and crushed it.

             I lifted the shoe up and saw its small wings twitch on top of some apricot marmalade goo.

            The next day, I looked at all the piles of trash and recyclables and thought, "There must be a better way to deal with this."

So I tried to throw out the trash and recyclables at my school where I work, but the security guard turned me away.

             Next, I tried to hide a few bags of recyclables in the public recycling bins at the center of town. An elderly man told me with a wave of his cane that I could not do that either. "No, no, no!" he said. 

            As he said this, I heard the music from the trash truck and set off running with bags of trash and recyclables at my waist.

            I turned down an alley and sprinted past a row of bicycles and red lanterns stacked in a pile. My feet splashed through puddles gathering from where a woman washed and chopped cabbage.

            The sound of the truck grew louder with each turn I made. I shouted, "Wait, wait!" and the truck slowed. I caught up to it and wiped the sweat from my face.

            The trash collector that night was a slender woman wearing a pink tutu with yellow gloves on her hands. I was so relieved, thinking that I had finally figured out how the trash system worked in Kinmen.

            I handed her my bags of trash and she threw them into the truck. "And you take these, too, right?" I said, referring to the three bags of recyclables.

            "No, no you have it wrong," she said. "Tomorrow. Come back tomorrow."

The Landing: Week One on Cold War Island

I

The six of us stood in darkness single file behind Jimmy, breathing heavily and thinking this was the closest thing to a casket we had ever been inside. The concrete walls shined with moisture that seeped out and ribboned downward, collecting in puddles on the floor. The ceiling was so low that we occasionally scraped the button at the crown of our yellow hard hats against its rough surface. Gray PVC pipes secured against the concrete walls with metal fasteners lined the meandering tunnel and bulged out scraping our elbows when we turned corners. The tunnel became hotter and Jimmy mentioned to us that the tunnel was rising gradually closer to the blacktop and the Jin Cheng rush hour traffic on Main Street, now surprisingly close to our heads.

The Taiwanese military built the Zhong Gong Tunnel in the 1960’s along with a dozen others on the island of Kinmen, formerly called Quemoy, to move large battalions of troops safely from the commercial center of Jin Cheng closer to the Western Coast. The troops were moved to battle the relentless bombing by Communist China from the nearby capitol of Xiamen, Fujian just six kilometers westward. The tunnels were opened in the 1990’s as a principle feature of the military history that made the island a famous symbol of Cold War tension.

Jimmy Chen is the first ever Fulbright Coordinator for the first year of English Teaching Assistants on Kinmen. He is tall and well built for a Taiwanese and he is the fastest eater I have ever met. He can show up to a meal late, having been busy shutting off lights or folding up a map, and before the rest of us have eaten our chicken, he is already scraping the final grain of rice out of the corner of his plastic take out container with his chopsticks. His skills are so extraordinary to us that Wayne began keeping a timer on his iPhone so we could place wagers.

“Do you have a big family or something, Jimmy?” Wayne asked him at lunch.

“No,” Jimmy replied, “I just have a very large appetite.”

 Jimmy craned his large head over his shoulder while keeping his flashlight pointed at the dark dripping tunnel that preceded us. “Is everyone doing okay?” I remembered that Mike who was in file behind Wayne had complained earlier in the day that he suffered from claustrophobia.

“Doing okay.” Mike said from the middle. We continued into the darkness for a few steps.

“Just imagine how many people died in here.” Jimmy said.

“What do you mean, Jimmy?” I asked. “I thought you said this was just to transport troops from downtown to the coast without getting bombed?”

“Well, in the beginning, but then after they got there the medics would carry everyone who was injured on the beaches back to the hospital through the exit of the tunnel at the bus station.” We passed underneath a dingy yellow light covered in spider webs; a cloth gurney shredded from use leaned against it. A map of the tunnel, illuminated by the light, showed our present location with a red star— we were nowhere near the end. My foot splashed in a puddle and the echo was eerie enough to conjure up apparitions of KMT medics hustling through the tunnels with a wounded soldier laying between them, moaning in pain, his leg missing and a tourniquet tied above the wound. “Yeah,” Jimmy whispered, “It is so scary down here.”

We came across a boisterous group of Taiwanese men strolling through the tunnel and singing military songs while clapping their hands above their heads. They shook their flashlights strobing the light in the tunnel. One made a gah gah gah  sound like machine gun ammunition exploding out of a chamber. Jimmy, who, like all Taiwanese men, had done his compulsory year of military service, could have sung along. Instead he hummed pensively to himself and slowed down the pace of our group to keep some distance.

“You have got to teach us some of these songs.” I said, feigning courage.

“Okay,” he replied, “I will teach some of them to you.”

II

Since arriving at our mostly unfurnished apartment, I’ve been making every attempt to create a comfortable environment for living. Part of this process involves buying essentials cheap enough to legitimize purchasing for just one year but also sturdy enough to last till June. The perfect shop is just down the street. It has three floors of household products that are stacked one on top of another, twelve feet on both sides and avalanche downward. A slim path of floor snakes through just wide enough for footsteps. We call it the C-Store, standing for claustrophobia. I loaded my arms up with 3M hooks, an extension cord and a shoe rack, then mounted the stairs in search of a floor mat. The proprietor was on her way down so I halted my ascent.

“No, no!” she called out in Chinese before turning about face and clambering up to the landing. “You can come up.”

I wore a backpack and worried that she suspected I might be a thief. “I could,” I think to myself, “she would never ask.”

On my third trip back to the store (this time for coat hangers, roach spray and a desk organizer) she asked me, “So, you’re not a tourist? Huh? Are you here to teach?”

“Yeah,” I said, “there’s six of us here to teach English at Jinhu Elementary. They just built a new English Village.”

“Oh,” she said, “half year?”

“No,” I said, “full year.”

“Oh, she said, “are you American?”

“We are all American.”

“And you live around here?”

“We live right around the corner.”

“Oh, very close,” she said, “very close.” She handed me one bag over the counter and continued bagging the rest, tabulating the prices on her calculator, wiping sweat off her brow with a small kitchen rag. “What program are you with?”

“Fulbright.” I said.

“Oh,” she said, “Never heard of it.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll be seeing us around,” I said.

“It’s a small island,” she said turning the calculator to face me — three hundred-thirty New Taiwanese dollars. “Just three hundred, okay?” she said in English. My wallet was cupped in my right hand and I took out the three bills and handed them to her.

“Xie xie,” I said, “xie xie.”

III

The six of us were exhausted from travelling as we stepped out of the Mandarin Airliner and onto the tarmac at the Kinmen airport. The island’s humidity was palpable and the blacktop was dotted with drops of precipitation. Our group had grown piecemeal as we arrived in Taipei from different airports: Mike, Katherine and I from San Francisco, Wayne, Tom and Liz from Los Angeles. Jimmy was waiting for us by two vans he had rented and parked outside baggage claim. He had a large grin on his face and his back was spotted with dark patches of sweat seeping between his shoulder blades. He offered each of us a clammy handshake and beckoned us toward a light up wall display advertising Kinmen. The image was a traditional rooftop silhouetted in front of a sherbet orange sky. I vaguely recall one serious photo followed by what Taiwanese call a Shuai Ge (handsome dude) pose in which everyone tilts their heads to the side and outlines their jaw with an extended thumb and forefinger.

We piled into the vans with our luggage and swung by our school, Jinhu Elementary. The gate had a unique mosaic of children at play; it reminded me of what childhood felt like way back when. The children were joyful--each was depicted with distinct characteristics: some had three squares of white tile for teeth, some just had one. Some children had overbites. They rode on bicycles and swung from swing sets. Some children stuck their clunky feet out into the robin-egg sky. There were lemon children, chocolate children, ecru children.

Jimmy unlocked the door to the classroom and as we entered our mouths dropped. We had entered a fuselage.

“What is this?” Tom said, and I put my bag down on an airline seat and folded out the tray table from the armrest.

“So, now do you finally understand what we meant by English Village?” Jimmy asked.

“This is incredible,” Liz said, flicking the fasten seat belt sign on and off. I slid the plastic windows up and down on the wall.

“We can insert pictures of Paris from the sky!” I exclaimed while Wayne opened up the overhead compartments. On the rear wall was an eight-foot wallpaper list of relevant airplane vocabulary in large print, Chinese and English, with an accompanying clipart picture to match.

“It is designed to simulate a real life experience,” Jimmy said. “Next, I will take you to the harbor, there is a blue ball pit in there where the kids can pretend to swim in the ocean, you can teach them the word flounder. Come on, I need to shut off the lights.”

IV

The second morning in Kinmen, I set off on an early run, intending to see the nearby ocean, but with the threat of unchained dogs and unmarked landmines looming in my thoughts, I had more trouble than I expected. After losing my way once or twice, I asked directions from a woman in the Xinhu Fishing Village. She pointed me down a steep hill to the left. The descent was so rapid that once I got going, I thought either my legs would break off or I would begin to fly. My feet pounded the pavement and the wind rushed over my body, chilling my skin. My eardrums thumped with the rhythm of my feet. The ocean’s blue floor rose up in the horizon and the hill petered out to reveal two long wharfs extending into the sea. In the middle of the wharfs was a harbor where small barnacle crusted boats rocked silently.

The right wharf was covered in yellow bristle grass with a dirt path that ran to the fishing boats moored along its edge. Broad Taiwanese men with rolled up pant legs and shirts pulled up to their navels to relieve the heat carried in their catch in green nylon nets or dirty white Styrofoam coolers. One had a pile of jagged oysters, a Kinmen speciality.

 I jogged through the grass to the end of the dirt path. My fingers glided across the knobbly surfaces of boulders that were arranged together with little inaccuracy by some kind of master mason. A small metal lighthouse was erected at the end of the wharf with a bottle green light that gyrated and sent a soft light pulsing into the mist. Several fishing tankers were visible in the distance, huddled together in the large gray sea like black ducks on a pond. From the end of this wharf, I was very close to the end of the left wharf, but a deep fissure at the mouth of the harbor parted the two points. The water, rough outside of the harbor, calmed once it flowed inside the wharfs. On the left wharf, a castle-like fortification stood at the end and was painted in camouflaged blotches of red, green and black.

My curiosity got to me, so I jogged back to the inner harbor and began my approach out to the fortification. A red sign with white characters was posted: “No swimming on this side of the harbor!” it read in Chinese. This wharf was paved and fortified with huge concrete tetrapods like jax the size of elephants. Giant white concrete limbs stuck up into the sky and fit together like tessellations, descending under the crashing ocean.

“How were they moved here?” I wondered. A small blue crab scuttled across a concrete appendage. I drew closer to the castle passing a hundred more rows of tetrapods like a battalion at the ready. The door was swung open. The dirty concrete floor was littered with crumpled newspaper. The plaster walls cracked on the outside and chipped off to the ground creating coin-sized white holes between the green, black, and red paint. Silverfish darted by the hundreds over the railings and steps that lead to the turret post on the second floor: their legs beat rapidly like flowing water.

I stood at the apex of the wharf and gazed eastward at the sea. The seamless transition between water and air fused the texture of the living sea together with the haze of moisture particles in the sky. The light of the world sizzled through my corneas and glazed my retinas. The tankers remained still as freckles on a cheek. Somewhere out in the distance was Formosa, the beautiful island of Taiwan. It is the island where Chiang Kai Shek and the KMT party fled following their defeat by the Communists in the Chinese Civil War in 1949. In their hasty exodus, they began fortifying Kinmen, this little bowtie-shaped island, as a physical and symbolic barrier against the persistent attacks from China. Through his propaganda, Chiang vowed that Kinmen would be the launching point from where he would invade and retake the mainland from Mao and the Communists.

I turned to my left and saw the beaches scattered with antitank spikes, five-foot steel barbs planted in concrete beds in the sand, as numerous as thorns on a cactus. Concrete bunkers below the tree line were indistinguishable from the rocks save for a shoebox-sized shadow from which a machine gun barrel would stick out. I turned to my right and gazed beyond the grass wharf and the lighthouse to Cheng Gong Beach. Cheng Gong literally means success in Chinese. Small white waves flowed tranquilly against the shore. Up higher, a large white canopy stretched between three poles and sheltered a collection of picnic tables. A wooden playground ship was nestled in the sand. I walked back through the force of tetrapods towards the harbor. For the first time, I noticed an enormous blue and red national flag waving above the shore. The star was whiter than the sky.

V

The director of the Fulbright program in Taiwan, Dr. William Vocke, came to the airplane cabin on Monday and gave a lecture about rules and regulations.  He is an experienced man with a head of youthful brown hair and a strong handshake. He knew our names before we introduced ourselves and moved between topics seamlessly in a way that made everything and everyone relevant.

“You are lucky,” he said, “Kinmen might not have all the amenities like Yilan or Gao Xiong, like fast food or movie theaters, but if I were an ETA in Taiwan, I’d want to be placed here.” He sat up higher on the table. “When I was a boy, I watched the Kennedy Nixon debates and I saw the two men go head-to-head,” he tapped his fists together.

“The debate was over whether or not they would defend Quemoy and Matsu against Red China, against Communist China as they called it at the time. And Nixon said he would, and Kennedy said he wouldn’t, but later on Kennedy changed his mind. I take it you’ve been to the tunnels already, seen the tanks lined up on the beaches. In a way, the presence of Americans here just two years after they opened the island to foreigners, the presence of Fulbrights here for the first time, the presence of you here,” he pointed at us, ”is like a dot in a long history of violence, a long history of Cold War conflict. Just look around this room.” We saw the windows, the tray tables, and the drink cart. “Look how much energy and resources were invested. It is a symbol that maybe all of that is behind us. It is a sign that perhaps, finally, we can start to build a better future.”

“Sir,” Wayne called out. “Not to be too blunt, but was there a reason you selected us, specifically, to be placed at this site?”

“There was,” he said looking first at Wayne and then panning around the group. “In some way, we felt like this group could handle the challenges and hitches that inevitably accompany any new program.” He paused. His eyes momentarily popped upward toward the ceiling. “There was another reason, too, but I’m not going to tell you.”

Check out audio version @ http://bagpipesinhand.squarespace.com/audio/articles-audio/?SSScrollPosition=0 

DISCLAIMER

Bagpipes in Hand is not an official Department of State website or blog. The views expressed and information presented are personal and do not represent the Fulbright Program or the U.S. Department of State.

On Open Hearts

So much of being a good photographer, for me, is in the boundaries between empathy and sympathy. Having an awareness of where people are at, and meeting them at their level, allows me to glance momentarily into their lives­— to see as they see. It is my job to capture that instant, that spark of insight or unique feeling, in the hopes of sharing it with the world.  The difficulty in this field is the challenge of not becoming emotionally invested in the subject. When I begin to sympathize with them and to share their emotions, which is only human, it becomes impossible to do my work affectively. I start missing opportunities, I get sloppy, I get tired.

Almost immediately upon entering the hospital on day one, I dove right into the deep end. Within minutes I was tying on cloth booties, suiting up into a wardrobe of baggy green scrubs and stepping into a minor operating room for the first time. It was like being back in junior high— I was self-conscious and uncomfortable. I clicked the shutter on my camera with an awkward hesitation. With the big black Canon strung around my neck I stood like a wallflower: separated and detached from the Honduran nurses who were bustling around to prepare the room. Normally by this point, I would have had and idea for a shot. But, this time was different; there was a little girl lying on the table. Her pink socks stuck out from beneath a sheet that was draped over her body. The anesthesiologist stroked the back of her head a couple of times, softly. “Su nombre es Diana,” one of the nurses mentioned to me, and explained that this was not heart operation, in fact, but a minor catheterization. I didn’t know the difference.

 This new world I was engulfed in was completely sterile. “Please, just don’t touch anything,” I thought. I felt more insignificant as the minutes passed. My breath puffed up through the mask I had strapped on my face, and fogged the view-finder on the camera. So, I blindly took shot after shot, wondering why anything I was doing was important at all. Each movement the doctor made was calculated and necessary, while I seemed to tip-toe clumsily alongside shiny machines and over tackle boxes full of medicine. The doctor called to the nurse, and a shiny instrument was immediately placed in his hand. He was vital, life saving, and I just kept bumping into stuff— click, click, clicking like a tourist. The whole cath-lab was buzzing with activity and I kept telling myself that it was job to capture that movement.

            Over the next week Diana’s health deteriorated. What I could gather from listening to the doctors talk was that she developed an infection since a surgery she had undergone in the summer time, and it became septic; which means it spread through her entire body. Her parents had waited faithfully in the hallway outside the unit for seven days, and walking past them to the Operating Room was both inevitable and impossible. Everyone on the team tried so hard to keep the muscles flexed into a smile on their faces but for me optimism felt like a lie. Even if I could have spoken their language, I wouldn’t have known what to say. It was just easier to be a coward and look straight ahead when I walked through. On the final day of my trip, Diana was doing worse than ever. Around 5 PM the team spoke and decided that immediate surgery was necessary for her survival. “It’s risky,” I heard someone say, “but it’s the only shot we have left.”

It seems like the sun set quickly that night, because the next instant it was dark and quiet in the hospital as the ICHF team wheeled Diana down the long tiled corridor to the Operating Room. While so many moments during my week in the hospital affected me profoundly, there is one instance that I treasure above the rest in my memory. After the team had turned the corner and exited from view, I closed my eyes and leaned against the wall because my body was too heavy with emotion. The dark silence was broken by a gentle song. Diana’s father cupped his wife’s hand in his own and the two slowly rocked together, back and forth, humming. The quiet melody carried itself to my ears and I began to cry with them. I imagined the sounds sweeping down the hall and past the woman mopping. Taking the corner, they fluttered into the sterile operating room where Diana slept, and filled the space with beautiful colors. In my mind, her parent’s song ribboned through all the shiny instruments and big machines. It danced around the good doctors in their green clothes and white gloves. The voices funneled into her little ear canals: into her body, through her veins and finally rested in her weak heart moments before it was opened and exposed to the light.

The world is not fair, and that may be due to many reasons. It isn’t fair that some people have a lot, while others don’t have enough. It isn’t fair that one out of a hundred kids is born with a congenital heart defect. I mean, we all have problems; though, how many of our flaws could actually end our lives. Spending time with Diana, and with many kids like her makes one think about God’s plan. If He loves us all equally, why give some only a few short years fighting for every breath, while others live healthy and pain-free? I’m not sure I know His ways, but maybe He is less autocratic than I had thought. Perhaps He lives, breaths and works through us— ordinary people, from ordinary places— who every now and then are given the opportunity to participate in something extraordinary. I got here on the 27^th of December with the intention of putting myself into another world. I had a vague understanding of what the heart mission was, but I did not realize the kind of impact Helping For Honduras has on the lives of so many children, who can live and breath and smile now, because of this organization, and the continual helping hands of its kind benefactors.   

On Service (Mandeville, Jamaica)

            Economic and social discrepancies exist in the world and are apparent to anyone who has been to a food pantry, seen a beggar, or driven into a poor neighborhood of a city. The United States is a prosperous enough nation where the poor and the marginalized are a minority of the population and tend to exist in immigrant groups, among children and the elderly, mainly the vulnerable. In foreign nations, however, economic poverty can be the norm for the majority, and the way the civic systems and economic structures of the nations have been formed and exist currently precipitate an ongoing lack of education and continual economic poverty.

            The injustice of poverty is something that many good people throughout history have devoted their lives to understanding. Often, these people are motivated to action by religious tradition or moral zeal, or perhaps a desire to do good as they see it. The people who fight injustice of this kind are all doing service.

            In my faith journey, I have been continually drawn to service through people I have met at Elms College where the mission of the Sisters of Saint Joseph, That All May Be One, is a guiding principle. My studies of history and literature and my experiences during service trips on the local, national, and international level have deepened my commitment to social justice. Through personal relationships formed with children at Homework House, I learned something about the immigrant experience in America, an understanding that influenced my decision to be a minority living among other minorities in Yunnan, China last year. While working in elementary schools in Appalachia, Jamaica, and Honduras, I developed the realization of the importance of literacy in a child’s educational development and the overall human experience.

            Service to me, now, is more than simply doing good for the less fortunate, or trying to alleviate suffering caused by social injustice. Service is about building relationships with other human beings through the giving of one’s time and sweat. These personal connections form a lens with which one views every new human one meets. This lens transforms the heart of the viewer with compassion allowing her or him to recognize the true value of the other person in ways that were previously impossible. When one sees through the lens of compassion, the playing field is leveled between oneself and the other person so that the incredibly complex social hierarchy that exists between individuals in the world melts away and the sameness between oneself and another is apparent so much so that a common humanity is recognized.

            I have been confronted with profound visions of my own weaknesses and shortcomings while in doing service. And while one might think of what I was doing was charity, or giving to someone in need, my weaknesses contradicted that definition in ways that the “poor” I was working with far exceeded my abilities at a given task. Recognizing and contemplating my inabilities and weaknesses challenges the traditional notion of service as “giving back. “ I have left these experiences filled with more than I brought to them and this discrepancy is paradoxical. It is an example of the deep joy that one receives not merely from “doing good” but from a deeper awareness of God. It means to me that God’s love acts in the world by transcending traditional logic.

            When the guiding principle, That All May Be One, seems overwhelming in my estimation, and I am disillusioned by hardships and the immensity of the challenge, I try and put things in the perspective with which Oscar Romero wrote. We may not see the end results, but that is for the master builder to see, not us. He writes that we are the workers, not the master builder. Prophets of a future, not our own.

On Weddings: Guests of Honor

The main tension westerners often face while playing guest in China is that they feel like a commodity. To put it bluntly, all that appears to matter is their race and the illusion of affluence attached to having white skin. It's not about hospitality: white skin is seen here to add social prestige to a gathering.  A friend, 李倩, invited me to attend the wedding of her cousin in her hometown near the Yunnan/Burmese border. The village was named Teng Chong, or eruption, because it was settled in the midst of about one hundred dormant volcanoes. Three days before the wedding, the group consisting of 李倩, two of our British friends, Nancy and her boyfriend Laurie, and myself left Kunming on a 10-hour overnight sleeper bus.

The early morning we arrived in Teng Chong, 李倩's aunt brought us up to the newly remodeled bridal suite, which is also the couple's past and future bedroom. They had purchased all new furniture, most of which was still in plastic, and everything was washed bright white. Except for the couch, which was red velveteen, the bookshelves, the walls, and the coffee table, everything was pearl like the inside of a spaceship. There were enlarged prints of the couple in matching outfits put up on tripods beside the bed. One was taken in Mickey & Minnie costumes on a country dirt road. Another was taken with the couple leaning up against the post of a barded wire fence. They wore big puffy primary colored headphones and stared dramatically into the sky. The house was built in the traditional fashion with the center courtyard open to the morning and evening frost. Nancy, Laurie, and myself were freezing.  So, we sat down on the velveteen with our mittens and overcoats peeling mandarin oranges and cracking peanuts from a big mixing bowl.

Over the next two afternoons, guests would come up to see the room and conveniently us, too. We shook hands and had our pictures taken as they told us how beautiful or handsome we were. They expressed how grateful they were that we came. When there were no guests at the house, the bride and groom made continuous runs back and forth from the kitchen downstairs to bring us refreshments. It was apparent they quickly resented doing it, though, some code of Chinese tradition/torture required them to behave this way. I found it difficult to express gratitude, though our every need was taken care of, because I was uncomfortable with the situation. We must have flipped through their plasticized pre-wedding photo book a thousand times before I bummed a cigarette off Laurie and climbed up to the roof to vent.  Nancy was particularly calm. She had been through this kind of treatment before and knew that the best thing was just to play along.

"Expect that they are there to serve you," she suggested, "and don't feel bad for them. They do it to themselves."  She sipped a bit of tea and set it down on the coffee table, returning to the garish photo book. "God, look how ridiculous they are,” she chuckled.  Nancy had a disinterest in Chinese traditions that reminded me of a colonial era. 李倩 stayed in the kitchen with the rest of her family and every now and then distant roars of laughter penetrated our bridal cell.

On the day of the wedding, we were invited to eat breakfast with the family. The bride and groom were absent at this point, but soon enough they made their entrance in an unforgettable way. A custom in Chinese weddings is that the groom first has to be received into the bride's home. To do this, he must pay off the bridesmaids who bar the door. The groomsmen fill a great many red envelopes, or hong bao, with different amounts of cash and stuff them through the bars of the gate. As the groomsmen approach the house, they set off tremendous fireworks in the streets signaling their arrival. The groom shoves the door like a mountain goat. He screams for them to let him in and they giggle with excitement demanding the hong bao.  The bridesmaids play games; they ask the groom ridiculous questions because it is only upon their allowance that he can get in. "What sound does an ant make?" 李倩 demands of the groom as he tries to squeeze his head through the bars.  Once the bridesmaids have stuffed their pockets full of enough hong bao, they retreat to the next barricade and let the groom through. From there it starts all over again.

The groom rushes into the bride's bedroom where she lounges barefoot in a western bridal gown, which covers most of the bed. She is excited to see him but shoots him a look as if to say, what took so long? The groom loosens his tie, wipes his brow and begins to search feverishly for her shoes which the family has hidden somewhere in the room. He dives under the bed, checks the draws, and pauses, stupefied and shaking his head. Then, one of the guests shouts out,

"The cabinet above the door way!" He jumps up on a chair and begins tearing out sheets and towels. He pulls out a shoebox, hops down and grabs the his fiancé’s feet. He props her right foot up on his knee and carefully pulls the nylon stocking up her leg, he wipes his sweaty forehead again, then carefully fits on a jeweled white shoe.

When all the humorous rituals are finished, the couple moves out into the more comfortable living room. The guests shuffle around. The couple kneels down in front of the bride's parents. They are serious as stone. The youth speak quiet pledges. The bride's parents nod in reply and then the newly weds pour out two cups of tea and serve them. This ritual is then repeated when the whole wedding party drives to the groom's home and the bride and groom kneel down in front of the groom's parents.

Lunch that day in Teng Chong was served in a reception hall near the center of town. As we entered the hall, the father of the bride sat at a wooden desk with a ledger book and a lamp. Several guests were waiting in line to hand him one of those hong bao, or red envelopes with money inside. I wasn't aware of this custom, and when I asked, Laurie told me of an experience they had while teaching English in the Anhui province last year.

"I had this student," he began, "who came up to me and asked to borrow 500 kuai（roughly 75 US dollars). And I was like, 'What do you need that much money for?' and she said that she was invited to a wedding and she had to give at least that much to the bride and groom or it would be a big shame on her and her family. And so I reminded her, 'You're very poor, you come to school in dirty clothes, you barely have enough to eat, there's no way you can afford to give that much.' And she kept pleading with me. But the irony is that Nancy and I have been invited a ton of other weddings and we've never been asked to give a dime." We both chuckled uncomfortably as one of 李倩's cousins put his arm over our shoulders and escorted us past the hong bao table to our seats.

After lunch and more handshakes, it was as if the wedding flipped inside out. I followed the crowd to a beautiful meadow unlike any that I've seen in Yunnan. There was long green grass with clover. A white canopy was erected by the shores of a small green pond. White chairs were set up and a carpeted aisle was laid down for the perfect white wedding. 李倩 picked seats for us near the front. The couple had asked me to play bagpipes for the service, so I set them down against a bushy palm tree by the water. When the ceremony was about to begin, a large man in a tux with a purple bow-tie walked up to the canopy with a mic. He welcomed everybody to the services and made a proper introduction. Suddenly, the quiet little meadow began thumping an underground dance club beat— BOOMP BOOMP BOOMP—the man in the purple bow-tie threw his voice into the microphone. The groom ran down the center of the isle clapping his hands over his head.

"Are we on a game show?" I asked Nancy. The guests threw flower pedals into the air. He hopped onto the platform under the canopy and like a boxer jabbed a few one-two one-twos at the audience. After he had his moment, the music cut abruptly to Celine Dion's, My Heart Will Go On. The guests turned their heads to the back as the father of the bride led his daughter elegantly toward the platform under the white canopy.

The man in the purple bow-tie signaled with his hand to turn the music down and he said the Chinese version of, "do you take this man… in sickness and health… by the power vested in me…" They put their rings on, and just as they kissed each other, the music began again—BUMP BUMP BUMP. The couple walked over to one of the two tables beside the canopy. It contained a 5-tiered Champagne glass tower. They popped the corks and let the Champagne pour. It trickled down the glasses and stained the tablecloth crimson. Once they passed out the Champagne, they walked to the opposite side of the canopy to cut the cake. The whole service couldn't have lasted five minutes. 

 When the cake was about all eaten the man in the purple bow-tie got back up onto the platform and introduced the groom again who came up and sang an American love song. His voice was strained but the expression on his face was unmistakable; he was having the time of his life. He was a rock star now and when he finished everyone clapped. He swiftly bowed his torso down low to the ground in an extravagant gesture.

The man in the purple bow-tie returned back to the mic, I knew what was coming. My bagpipe was like a cat about to jump off my lap and my moist hand held to the base drone. My stomach had butterflies.

 "Ladies and Gentlemen, the bride and groom have asked me to introduce a very important guest of theirs, Da Wei. He is going to perform his instrument. Please come up, Da Wei." 李倩 nudged me and I walked up to the canopy and began filling the bag with air. Curiosity changed the expressions in the crowd. I knew what they thought of me during the vigorous handshakes and shots we drank: I was nothing more than a western face. I could not talk to them the way I wanted, so I had no way to show that I am not just like someone from the movies. Often, the frustration that creates in me becomes bitterness, but this time, the bagpipe was my liberator. I enjoyed myself for the short while I played real music.  As bizarre and obtrusive as the bagpipe was to them, it was thoroughly satisfying to be strange.