Let no one sleep in Ghost Month

Video clip courtesy of Moonwall

We may not have someone in Taiwan like Paul Potts, a mobile phone shop manager who took away the breath of the scathing judge Simon Cowell at the show Britain's Got Talent by singing Nessun Dorma ( 'let no one sleep') the famous tenor aria from the final act of Giacomo Puccini's opera Turandot, but we have Mr Xu Wenlong (許文龍), an enthusiastic and properly-trained amateur singer, who sang the same aria at a community 'ghost month' social function.

The seventh month in the Chinese calendar is the so-called 'ghost month' (鬼月 guiyue), during which the gate of the netherworld is unbolted and ghosts and spirits are allowed to visit the living and have a month of bacchanals of food and drink. It is customary to placate those 'fella brethren' (好兄弟 hao xiongdi, a euphemism for ghosts who have no living family and thus wander around aimlessly) by offering them sacrifices lest they get into mischief or cause harassment.

A major ritual service is usually held on the 15th day of the ghost month and it is not uncommon to see residents of a community, together with owners of business premises within close proximity, to organise a special joined service and a social function thereafter. While in the past people would deliver performances of glove puppetry, Taiwanese opera or other kinds of entertainment as part of the offerings, nowadays people just make the social function an occasion on which neighbours, employees and proprietors drink, eat and watch whatever performance that amuses them.

It wouldn't be surprising for any Taiwanese to see scantily-clad young ladies singing or pole-dancing on this occasion. If you fancy, sometimes you can even join them, singing a song either to the accompaniment of a combo or a karaoke track. Nevertheless, it is utterly astonishing to have someone belting Nessun Dorma. Did Mr Xu mean it – let no on sleep in Ghost Month? Anyhow, I'm sure Puccini would be glad to stretch himself in his grave and learn that Taiwanese have found a new stage for this aria.

From flying a microwave to driving a piano

This is definitely neither a fresh corpse nor a desiccated mummy, but a discontinued Yamaha PF80 (33.5-kg electronic piano equipped with 88 properly weighted resin keys) carefully wrapped in a bed cover and securely loaded in a tiny Renault Twingo.

This photo reached me this morning. It was taken on the 24th of June, the day after my wedding in Stirling, before my best man Yung-Yao, together with guests Arnaud and Livia, started a long journey back to Cambridge. Actually, what is not seen in the photo is a microwave oven, which had just ended its four-and-half-year sojourn in Stirling and was about to return to Cambridge.

I still remember that on 20 January 2003, how this microwave flew Ryan Air with me all the way from Stansted Airport to take its long stay in Scotland. Rather than an item of checked luggage, it was actually treated as an embodied soul and allowed to occupy a seat.

Both frequent flyers and holiday makers should have noticed that since the 9/11 Incident, airport security procedures have become stricter, and sometimes so annoying and trying that it seems to take longer to pass the security point than to acquire a visa to visit the Moon. In all British airports, each passenger is allowed to take only one item of hand baggage through security control with a maximum size of 56cm x 45cm x 25cm. Thus, I guess, those who attempt to board a plane with a microwave today will be considered either absurdly insensible or harebrained.

However, believe it or not, on 20 January 2003, I was asked to bring a microwave into the cabin on my way back to Stirling from library and archive study in London.

Yung-Yao kindly lent me his spare microwave on condition that I took it by myself back to Stirling. Nevertheless, he helped me to transport this heavy machine by his bicycle to the station so that I managed to catch the train to Stansted.

At the check-in counter, scarcely had I queried whether the ground staff could take care of my microwave when a member of the check-in staff declared that the budget airlines Ryan Air could not take any responsibility should this unusual checked-in item be damaged and advised that I might want to take it to the cabin. Confused about the situation, I still walked to the security point with the microwave embraced in my arms, as well as a small rucksack on my back.

I would never forget the faces of the security staff. They probably couldn't figure out what the point was to take such a clumsy metal box when travelling by plane. However, it was true that I had the bona-fide permission to, and actually was required to, board with this bloody hefty hand baggage. Hesitating if they should let me go through the search point, a member phoned the check-in counter to make sure I wasn't stretching the truth. Finally, blessed with their non-stopping chortles and twitches of facial muscles, after the microwave was scanned, I proceeded to the boarding gate with it.

Stopped again before the plane by a member of the cabin crew, I repeated the story and explained what I was asked to do. Of course, a conversation went through the intercom between the cabin and ground staff and it proved that I was totally sane. However, I still heard not only gleeful giggles from the speaker of the intercom but also intermittent sniggers from those flight attendants wracking the whole aircraft. I was advised not to load this radiation-generating machine up to the overhead luggage compartment but, as the plane was not full, place it on the seat next to myself and fasten the belt for it.

In the end, the microwave successfully flew Ryan Air, travelled across the border, landed in Glasgow Prestwick and started its four-and-half-year term of service in Stirling thereafter.

I'm so glad the microwave has returned to its hometown in Cambridge, unexpectedly with a partner, the Yamaha electronic piano. After all, I gather it's the best way to send it back. I don't think Dr Lin Yung-Yao would run the risk of being regarded as a dumbhead because of an attempt to carry a microwave oven on board a plane.

Cowherd boy and weaver girl reunited last Sunday

Last Sunday was Qixi (七夕, literally 'the seventh night'), or roughly the Chinese version of St. Valentine's Day. This traditional festival falls on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month of the Chinese calendar, which is the 19th of August this year.

Unlike Western St. Valentine's Day, which is arguably associated with two Christian martyrs, both named Valentine and honoured on the 14th of February, or may have its origin in Lupercalia, an ancient Roman fertility festival, behind Qixi is a love story.

The two protagonists are Niulang (牛郎, 'cowherd boy'), an ordinary mortal, and Zhinü (織女, 'weaver girl'), the youngest of the seven fairy sisters from the Heaven. There may be several variations of the story, but the ending is always the same. The fairy weaver was ordained to return to the Heaven and only allowed to reunite with the human cowherd once a year on Qixi. On this special day all magpies will fly into the sky and form the so-called 'bridge of magpies' (鵲橋, queqiao) so that the two lovers can cross and meet over the Milky Way.

Chinese people are reminded in late summer that the cowherd boy and the weaver girl are reunited when they see in the sky both eponymous stars Niulang (Altair, the brightest star in the Western constellation Aquila) and Zhinü (Vega, the brightest in Lyra), together with Tianjin si (天津四, 'Heaven Ford 4', corresponding to Deneb, the brightest in Cygnus) over which the bridge stretches. These three stars conincidentally form the famous summer triangle in Western astonomy.

When working on my PhD thesis in Scotland, I sometimes associated Fanne and myself with the poor Niulang and Zhinü. Except for the first year during which we lived together in Stirling, throughout the course of my doctoral study, we were usually separated by two continents and some waters and spent most of our time apart. Between October 2003, when we returned to Taiwan after she submitted her master dissertation, and July 2007, when she came over for our wedding and my graduation, we had only seen each other for four times, which were:

1. Fanne's visit for her gradation, March 2004
   
2. Fanne's visit for Christmas, December 2004
   
3. My holiday in back Taiwan, August 2005
   
4. My holiday in back Taiwan, December 2006

Anyhow, so far it's not too bad compared with the annual reunion of Niulang and Zhinü. I have no idea where I'll end up and whether I have to leave again for overseas academic employment opportunities, but I'm sure Fanne is definitely not certain fairy, or an alien or so, and will surely never be ordained to return to another planet.

Desperate for a betel nut

I can't really remember when I last had a betel nut (probably the second year at the university) but I really want to go and fetch a pack for myself.

The betel nut (also called as areca nut) is the seed of the betel palm, a kind of palm which grows in Asia, the tropical Pacific and East Africa, and contains mildly intoxicating and slightly addictive alkaloids. It is consumed in different ways from region to region.

For example, whereas in Vietnam a betel nut is ground and chewed along with betel pepper (the leaf of an Asian evergreen climbing plant, which is not botanically related to the betel palm) and lime (the white caustic alkaline substance, not the citrus fruit), in India it is crushed, mixed with tobacco and spices and chewed like a quid of tobacco.

In Taiwan, instead of being ground or crushed, the betel nut is usually consumed whole. There are three major preparations:

• jingzai (菁仔, 'the nut'): the most popular one, a whole raw betel nut cut half way through down the centre filled in with the inflorescence of betel pepper and red paste (made of lime and herbs and spices).


• baoye (包葉, 'leaf-wrapped'): a whole nut wrapped in a betel pepper leaf pasted with lime.


• laoteng (老藤, 'old-stem'): similar to jingzai, but the stem of betel pepper is used rather than the inflorescence and white paste (only lime, without any spices) instead of red.

As chewing betel nut leads to the copious production of blood-red saliva, in Taiwan, a sobriquet, 'the red-lipped' (紅唇族 hongchunzhu), is given to those who have got hooked on chewing betel nut. In the past, when personal hygiene and public health were disregarded, chewers usually spat the debris together with gobs of red saliva on the street. It was said that unprepared tourists were often shocked when seeing a Taiwanese taxi driver, whom they thought to be suffering from his hard work, or, even worse, at the final stage of pulmonary tuberculosis, vomited up 'blood' straight down on the road.

Certainly, I would never spit out the bloody saliva on the street and I know the bloody fact shown by tons of medical research that chewing betel nut could lead to oral cancer and other oral-related diseases, but I'm still desperate for a jingzai.

The Day You Love Me

(Video by courtesy of Lucas Bear)

As promised to Fanne's relatives last December after singing a Spanish song at her sister Cindy's engagement reception, I sang a Spanish song El Día Que Me Quieras ('The day you love me') at my own wedding reception in Taipei.

This song was composed in 1935. The music was written by Carlos Gardel, one of the most prominent figures in the history of tango music, and the lyrics by Alfredo Le Pera, a journalist, dramatist and lyricist who was best known for his short but productive collaboration with Gardel.

El Día Que Me Quieras is a romantic and hopeful litany in which a man imagines how inanimate objects come to life and praise 'the day you love me', such as 'the jealous stars will watch us pass by' and 'the bells will tell the wind our love story.'

I came to know this song in 1996 when I boned up on tango (singing, not dancing, because I don't and never dance at all!). Thrilled to pieces when I heard for the first time Gardel's own interpretation in a historical recording, I learnt it immediately.

As most of our friends and relatives knew that I used to sing or play the Baroque recorder to Fanne's accompaniment on the piano in the past, we were particularly delighted to deliver such a performance together in front of our guests at the wedding reception.

Although according to the sheet music and the historical recording, there are some words recited against the piano solo at one point, I don't think there is any point to deliver a long recitation in Spanish at a reception where no one understands any single word.

El Día Que Me Quieras

Acaricia mi ensueño el suave murmullo de tu suspirar,
¡como ríe la vida si tus ojos negros me quieren mirar!
Y si es mío el amparo de tu risa leve que es como un cantar,
ella aquieta mi herida, ¡todo, todo se olvida..!

El día que me quieras la rosa que engalana
se vestirá de fiesta con su mejor color.
Al viento las campanas dirán que ya eres mía
y locas las fontanas me contarán tu amor.

La noche que me quieras desde el azul del cielo,
las estrellas celosas nos mirarán pasar
y un rayo misterioso hará nido en tu pelo,
luciérnaga curiosa que verá... ¡que eres mi consuelo..!

Shit happens, but not today

The title of this entry has nothing to do with my recent life; it's just about a T-shirt.

It has been two weeks since I married the same bride for the second time, but I'm still moving things and trying to relocate them into more acceptable positions. Last night, I found a T-shirt Inez gave me when she moved to Berlin in winter 2002 for the fieldwork for her doctoral thesis.

It's a black T-shirt with tons of white words on the front, preceded by the title Religions of the World. Although I was warned long time ago that what's on this T-shirt might not be suitable for, probably be offensive to, people who cannot laugh at anything religious, I believe this quasi-joke would at least give all laymen a rough idea of central dogmas of different religions.

Taoism: Shit happens.
Hare Krishna: Shit happens rama rama ding ding.
Hinduism: This shit happened before.
Islam: If shit happens, take a hostage.
Zen: What is the sound of shit happening?
Buddhism: When shit happens, is it really shit?
Confucianism: Confucius say, 'Shit happens.'
7th Day Adventist: Shit happens on Saturdays.
Protestantism: Shit won't happens if I work harder.
Catholicism: If shit happens, I deserve it.
Jehovah's Witness:Knock, knock, 'Shit happens.'
Unitarian: What is this shit?
Mormon: Shit happens again & again & again.
Judaism: Why does this shit always happen to me?
Rastafarianism: Let's smoke this shit.

After patiently copying verbatim those central dogmas onto my blog, I did some googling (I suppose google has become a verb, and therefore it is grammatically correct to do googling. Refer to this article on my blog) and found four more entries:

Pentacostalism: Praise the shit!
New Age: Shit happens and it happens to smell good.
Atheism: There is no shit!
Sunday School student:I gotta go!

Maybe the T-shirt manufacturer would like to add those four entries to the new version in the near future.

Photos from the wedding reception in Taipei

Our photographer sent us two DVDs holding 968 photos three days after the wedding reception in Taipei. While Fanne has been doing her damnedest to choose some, from them to make an album, I don't think this will be done by the end of this year. How could my picky, fastidious wife make up her mind about those shots from the happy moment within six months? No way.

Anyway, here come some photos I chose by myself.


(Our stylish reception venue, view from the top table)


(Fanne's father taking her into the venue)


(Raising our glasses in a toast to our parents and other guests at the top table)


(Retreating from the venue to change. It is the custom in a Taiwanese wedding reception that the bride has three dresses – the first worn when she arrives at the venue, the second changed half way through the reception and the third for seeing off the guests at the door of the hall)


(Walking into the venue again with the bride in a nice dinner dress)


(Singing to Fanne's accompaniment. A Scottish groom is not allowed to talk, let alone to sing, in a Scottish wedding, but today I'm a Taiwanese groom)


(Last-minute rehearsal before the reception)


(A quick shot outside the venue when the guests were being fed)

Setting the nuptial bed before getting married

In addition to the Scottish church one, we had our Taiwanese wedding on the 19th of July and then on the 21st the mega reception for 250 guests at the World Trade Centre Club, a venue on the 33rd floor of a building near Taipei 101, the so-far tallest building in the world.

Fanne and I have been back in Taipei since early July. It took us quite some time to put everything in the correct place before the wedding and reception in order to make sure our parents would be delighted. Among many marriage rituals and customs which we were desired to observe was bridal bed setting.

While there are a range of variants of bed setting ritual in different Chinese communities around the globe, one requirement common to all the variants should be choosing an auspicious date and hour by consulting the Chinese almanac or by engaging a Chinese astrologist to perform certain calculations. At the specified hour of the auspicious date (7.00 am, 16 July in our case), the bed, which has actually been purchased and laid in the nuptial room since a couple of days ago, will be moved into position, again, according to the result of astrological calculations.

In some regions the custom demands that a boy jumps on the newly-set bed to bless the bed with fertility, whereas in others people place additionally a red tray of dried food such as lotus seeds, lichees and longans. We did neither.

In our case, after setting the bed, my mum fitting the bed with sheets, blanket and pillows for me and my dad accompanied me for three consecutive nights. According to the custom in my family, there should have been a boy accompanying me so that this bed would always sleep two and Fanne and I would be an everlasting couple. It is customarily believed that if the groom-to-be sleeps alone in the newly set bed, either himself or his wife will die through misfortune. As we didn't, and couldn't bother to, find a suitable young boy, we just modified the tradition a bit.

Although Fanne would followed any our my parents' and other relatives' instructions, she firmly believed that a couple shouldn't even get married in the first place if they would attribute to disobedience of these rituals any potential marriage problems or failure in the future.

Wooden fortune toad

Toads may not be as attractive as frogs to most people owing to their dry warty skin that can exude poison. However, to those Chinese feng shui practitioners, toads (蟾蜍, chanchu) are auspicious animals which bring wealth and good fortune.

It is not uncommon to see in a shop or at an ordinary home a toad statue holding a Chinese coin (a round one with a square hole in the centre) in its mouth a well as sitting on a pile of thme. People would place the statue near the front door facing inwards in hopes that they can amass a huge fortune.

Last Sunday I went to Dajia (大甲), an urban township in Taichung County, to visit my elderly grandpa and to deliver wedding invitations to some of my father's siblings. On my way back to Taipei, I made a detour to Shenkeng (深坑) and bought an interesting handicraft – a wooden toad.


There aren't any coins, neither in the toad's mouth nor beneath its bum. Instead, there are some sawtooth notches on its back. When scraped with a wooden stick against the notches from its tail to head, the wooden statue produces a rasping sound which resembles a toad croak. I have no idea if this wee toad is meant to be a fortune toad, but to me it seems to be more an instrument than a feng shui device. It really reminds me of the güiro, a kind of Latin percussion instrument.



P.S. I haven't yet got my new MacBook Pro, but after two weeks of rest, my champagne-poured old PowerBook has become alive and kicking. It decided to serve me again and that's why I could produce silly stuff on Principal Wei's Weblog again. Although this wooden toad may not be a feng shui talisman to bring in a bunch of wealth, it indeed inbues my once retired PowerBook with new life and vitality.

Incommunicado

Another quick announcement before I fly.

I shall believe the Chinese saying 'Misfortune comes after reaching the apex of happiness' (le ji sheng bei). Having served me since I came to Scotland for almost five years, my poor Apple PowerBook retired unvolunteeringly due to an accident. My wife and I had some champagne to celebrate my graduation last week and so did my laptop. Fortunately, I've already backed up almost everything in my iPod.

However, I will be sort of incommunicado for a whil until I get my new Apple MacBook Pro.