A Crippled Dog in Taiwan

Aren't these the cutest? These are little piglets that I saw when I was on my way to Kaoshiung, Taiwan. But I'm not going to talk about pigs......

........but dogs. In some countries they still eat dogs. Like China. I also saw dogs in Vietnam being carved up and splayed out on market tables for sale to the locals.

In Taiwan, I don't believe they're still eating doggy sandwiches before bedtime, but it was whispered in some quarters that you might want to check out the meat whilst dining out. But whether or not they are chowing down on our four-legged friends or not, the treatment of animals in Taiwan was truly appalling, with many dogs left all day in tiny cages where they're not able to stand, or left in cages that are filthy and cold. One of my neighbors tied up his dog outside in the burning heat for two days, leaving him without any food or water or protection from the sun. In front of all the neighbors who could have helped, the dog died. By the time I saw what had happened and went to the police station about it, they shrugged. Hey, it's a dog.

One day I drove over to a spectacular home in Tainan City with a friend; it was karaoke and tea day. My friend visited this woman once a week because her friend was 'lonely.' Her husband was a workaholic who slept in his office and forgot he was married and her children were off at college in America. After parking in front of an enormous house, a tiny woman with a waist the size of a ballpoint pen and a lacquered bouffant straight out of The Bride of Frankenstein opened the garage door and walked out to greet us. Walking behind her, I was awestruck by the size of her garage and, an oddity for Taiwan, how empty of useless crap it was. A retractable-gear Musketeer with a thirty-two foot wingspan could have fit in the enormous space.

As we continued through the empty garage, I saw a medium-sized, black-haired dog lying in a large steel cage in a corner. He was all alone in the cage that would have been more appropriate for restraining a grizzly bear with rabies than this defenseless lump of fur. The steel bars were three inches round and the bottom had a poopee drop-down zone where his business fell through the floor and was whisked away through a drainage pipe linked to the sewer. There was nothing in the cage, not even a chew-able toy. 

I reached in to pet him and he never stirred, nor wagged his tail. Only his sad, brown eyes followed me, peering out from under his bushy eyebrows. He lethargically stood up and stretched and yawned when he realized I wasn't leaving right away, but I could see that any hope he had of ever being released from his life sentence had been extinguished long ago.

It was the son's dog, the one who was now in America going to school and who would only return on holidays. I stooped and pet the dog through the bars, scratched his ears and asked if we could bring him into the house with us, but the two women chuckled and waved away my request with rolled eyes  and ushered me into the house. 'Come. Come. Let's sing songs.'

I didn't say anything, nor did I protest, because the Taiwanese mind is as thick as Swartzenegger's dick at a New York City summer swimsuit show when it comes to the dog issue. They don't understand what all the fuss is about when it comes to the torture of animals, they're only animals. But while I was picking out tunes to sing and as my ears shrank listening to my pals screech at ear-shattering decibels into the microphone, my mind kept wandering back to that poor lump of fur left alone all that day and every other day, in his cage.

After tea and two hours of torture listening to bad Chinese pop music sung very badly, I wanted to leave, but the bouffant wanted to give us a tour of her house before we left. We got in the elevator and headed up.

It was impressive. Each room was artfully designed and furnished with expensive rugs, lamps and antiques, and enough booze bottles filled the ceiling-to-floor cabinets in the living room to open a liquor store in three districts. The kitchen was filled with brand new appliances which were still wrapped in plastic, while her bedroom was fitted with a clothes closet bigger than a concentration camp changing room, and with just as many shoes, hats, dresses and empty suitcases.

After we stepped off the elevator and back into the garage where the dog lay as if dead in his cage, she begged us to stay longer, upon which my friend clucked and reiterated in my ear how lonely she was wandering around the house by herself and craving company during the day. She didn't know what to do with herself.

'Tell her to take the dog for a walk,' I said.

Medical Care Taiwan Style

I had a scooter accident when I was living in Taiwan. It was partially my fault, so I didn’t take a strip out of the guy who swerved in front of me before jamming on his brakes to turn left. I shouldn’t have been accelerating down the double white lines passing another car. In the midst of his left turn, I ploughed into the side of him, a t-bone crash. My head bounced off the pavement as I hit the ground, but luckily no one ran over me, his bike wasn't scratched and thank God for good helmets. I stood up and quickly brushed myself off while somebody else picked up my bike. I thanked him and jumped on it straight away to make sure that everything was still working. Lights! Tires! Action! Time to go before the police arrive! I had a nasty scrape on my ankle but I was in a jolly good mood when I got home because – I survived!

Five days later I knew the cut on my ankle was infested because it was oozing yellow pus and my ankle was sore to walk on. I went to the emergency room at the University Hospital in Tainan City where I was greeted at the door by two nurses wearing blue uniforms. Within minutes I was getting my blood pressure taken by one nurse while the other was writing down my medical information. They told me to hop on a gurney. Hey, I can walk! Nevermind, get on the gurney. And they wheeled me into emergency.

I was rolled into a large room with all the latest mechanical hardware which is required for hospital emergencies, where I gave a nurse my health card. Another nurse swabbed off my cut and cleaned it up. She stuck a needle in my arm and took two blood samples, then stuck another needle in my hand and hung a saline solution and an antibiotic drip by my head. I was then wheeled into the x-ray room, zap, zap, my ankle was bandaged, and then to the recovery ward, where families were pow-wowsing with their ailing relatives, or waiting to take them home.


Within half an hour a nurse was back to tell me I didn’t have a blood infection in my foot and the x-ray showed no broken bones. I had been worried that I had flesh-eating disease because, for some reason, I don’t worry about choking to death or heart attacks, I worry about flesh-eating disease. She said I could leave once the drip was finished, which was right about then.

At the emergency desk on the way out, they gave me a duffle bag of medicine to take home because nobody ever leaves a Taiwanese hospital without one, whether sick or not. I went home, ate a few pills, put my foot up and drank beer. It was an incredible hour and a half of efficiency and care, and all for just $25.00 American.

One seldom thinks of Taiwan as a place to come to receive medical care, but even without medical insurance the price of an operation would be cheaper than any American or Canadian hospital and probably of better value for one’s money. The doctors are all highly trained professionals who have lived and studied abroad. The hospitals are expertly maintained and the supporting staff is brisk and efficient. The waiting period for an operation would also be half the time. Within one hour of my arrival at the hospital I received a blood test, an x-ray, a saline drip, antibiotics, and a nicely bandaged ankle. In Canada, I probably would have sat for hours in a waiting room, waited weeks for the results of the x-rays and blood tests, and then told to come back in a week if my foot was still hurting, by which time I probably would have developed flesh-eating disease.

Koashiung

Koashiung is the big southern city in Taiwan. It's only half an hour's drive from Tainan but it's huge, the industrial port. It has the most beautiful airport I've ever seen anywhere, almost luxurious. It has fabulous temples and tons of things to do, but as for living, I'd pick Tainan over Kaoshiung.








______________________________________________







_______________________________________________


SOUNDBITES

News is sensationalistic in Taiwan. Reporters get in everybody's face, even storming into hospitals for close-ups of people dying in their beds, ignoring a victim's pain and suffering for a good closeup of the death throes, and the longer the better. It's unbelievable for a westerner to see how even more intrusive the media is over here. One time, a famous Taiwanese actor's son was having a mental breakdown and they filmed the actor moaning and weeping and nodding over his lethargic, spaced-out son lying in his hospital bed. It was surreal. Dude! Go home!

Another tragic news item in Taiwan which created a lot of scandal was about a drunken father who dashed the head of his 4-year-old daughter into a wall outside a 7/11 when he was drunk. It was one o'clock in the morning. (Men usually get custody of their children here.) She wanted to go home and he got angry and threw her into the wall, resulting in serious injury to the child. A stranger called 9/11.

The police arrested the father at the scene and the little girl was brought by ambulance to the hospital. However, a neurosurgeon at one hospital had just gone to sleep and refused to see her, and no other hospital in Taipei would admit her, evidently because the father was poor and had no medical insurance. She was then taken by ambulance to Taichung, another city six hours away, but by then the delay was fatal and the little girl fell into an irreversible coma.

The country was outraged by the actions of the hospitals, politicians and their reputations were at stake, two doctors in a Taipei hospital lied about having treated her and reports were faked, and now the little girl was on the brink of death. The father was sent to jail for an indeterminate amount of time, two doctors went to jail for five years, and the Mayor fired the Health Director for Taipei. She was taken off the respirator after she was declared brain dead and her kidneys and liver were donated by her mother.

The sad thing about this saga, besides the event itself, was that during the reporting and coverage of the story, the hospital staff couldn’t bring the little girl from one room of the hospital to another without facing an explosion of flashbulbs from the cameras and tripods set up all throughout the hospital. Reporters were shouting and screaming as they scrambled around the bed carrying the girl. It was a madhouse.

___________________________________________


A car accident occurred somewhere around Taichung, a big city north of Tainan. A young man of 19 was driving and hit another car. In the other car were a woman and a maid, who was holding a baby. The baby died because it was thrown against the dashboard and crushed. It was not in a restraint. It also turned out the woman driving had been drinking.

The father of the baby (who was evidently in the Taiwanese mafia) went to the hospital with a few of his thug friends and beat the stuffing out of the 19-year-old kid while he was lying in his hospital bed recovering from his injuries. His mother was there and she spurred them on, saying that he needed a good thrashing for what he’d done.

Unfortunately, the young man died of his injuries from the beating and the police went on a search for the killers. They all went missing. Everyone was outraged that he died in such a way in a hospital, and that his mother would actually encourage their actions. In the end, the mother got blamed for the death of her son.

___________________________________________


Accidents are a murky affair, best to be avoided. And be careful walking down the street.

If a pedestrian is hit by a scooter and the scooter races off, no other individuals will touch the victim lying on the ground because the victim could raise his head, look at you, and say "that's the guy that hit me." You're screwed and everyone will blame you for the accident. It has happened.

Truck drivers on the highway sometimes run back over somebody they've hit in order to kill them. Better dead than in the hospital because dead people can't talk or demand money. People make private money deals here when involved in accidents. A man in one of my classes told me he had to pay $450,000 NT dollars to a family because his son-in-law had a scooter accident with an old man and the old man died two weeks later. The relatives of the dead man said he died as a result of the accident, but the old fart had high blood pressure to begin with. Nevertheless, my student would be paying and paying for a long time to come.

Lunatic Neighbors

I loved Taiwan, but the hocking, spitting, nose-picking, jack-hammering, shoe-dragging, door-slamming, and shrieking is something I was glad to leave behind.

Yet today, I miss it. I miss the friends I made and the outdoor restaurants where I used to meet them. I miss the monsoon season with its electrical storms and terrifying thunder and downpours. I miss my scooter and having the ability to go anywhere day or night to buy just about anything. I even miss the ridiculous neighbors I had.

Early morning parties, blood-curdling screams, spousal abuse, child abuse, insanely loud music, mental retardation - I experienced it all. An ESL student told me the story of how he and his family of 45 relatives (all living together) had lived beside a man who constantly beat his wife and kids; 'it was horrible, horrible,' he said, shaking his head. I asked him if he had called the police and he replied, 'Negative. We wouldn't call police. Nobody call police in Taiwan because somebody might come to pay back telephone call to police.' In Taiwan, it's all about retribution and the repercussions of what can be viewed as squealing.

Kitty corner to my first apartment in Tainan was another apartment building, and on the ground floor of that building there lived a lunatic that scratched and cursed at all hours of the night as he crept around the hidey-hole that he shared with an elderly couple that lived upstairs. He camped out behind two large garage doors lined with small windows which opened out on to the lane, an area that he had appropriated for himself and that he protected with more vigilantism than a combat veteran. Bed frames, sewing machines, tools, mattresses, stuffing, picture frames and sofas were all piled up to the ceiling in his rooms. It had been a bedding shop at one point and they never got rid of everything when they closed up shop. A baseball bat, with which he used to terrorize the neighborhood, was usually at hand leaning against his plastic lounge chair, where he sat at night smoking cigarettes and keeping guard on his appropriated piece of real estate.

He was a wiry old bastard of about 70 years old and he slept during the day and rustled about at night, sorting and stacking and creeping between the stacks of junk like some kind of obsessive rat, arranging and re-arranging, stacking and re-stacking the goods. If anyone had the temerity to park in front of his garage doors, even if only to let somebody out of their car or wait for a friend, or stop to talk for a few minutes, he would get up off his lounge chair and glare at the person behind the wheel and walk around their car, and if they didn't move fast enough from his space, he'd yell and scream and wave his fist like an escapee - threatening and cursing until whomever was parked there drove away in terror. I got so sick of hearing him shout that I kept a full bucket of water on my balcony, and sometimes when he was downstairs lounging on his chair and just for the hell of it, I'd sneak on to my balcony and from the fourth floor I'd throw the bucket of water over and across the lane way towards him, and quickly duck inside again, but he was always too late to see me by the time he looked up. I really got a kick out of that, but I'm sure he knew it was me because I had yelled down at him to 'shut the f*** up' on more than one occasion.



Just before midnight on a quiet summer's night, a woman parked in front of his garage door with her car idling and waited for her friend, who lived in my building, to come down. I was lying in bed reading when I heard him yelling. Sensing that trouble of some sort was about to happen, I opened my balcony door and peered down into the lane to see what was going on. There he was, Mr. Personality. Screaming at this poor cringing woman, who had made no effort to move her car and didn't know what the heck was going on, and with the bat in his hands, the old fart took to the front end of her car as if he were gearing up for the 9th inning in the 7th game of the World Series, and smashed out the headlights of what looked to be a fairly new car. He didn't waste any time getting started this time and I was shocked to see what he was doing. However, in spite of all the damage he had rendered, he still wasn't finished as he lifted the bat over his head and smashed it down into the center of the hood, leaving a huge dent in the hapless woman's car. She honked the horn then tried to drive away, but her friend suddenly appeared out of my building. They shrieked at each other in Chinese so I didn't understand the words, but the meaning was very clear. Angry Chinese somehow has a far nastier undertone than angry English. The woman finally got in the car and they drove off without running him over, and everyone who had been standing on their balconies scratching their heads as they watched the show returned to their apartments and locked their doors.

A few weeks later, at two in the morning, I awoke to a terrible banging. Wood was splintering and glass was breaking! I leaped out of bed and on to my balcony to see what was going on, and luckily just in time to see the violence that was being done to my neighbor's garage doors. Teen-aged boys with baseball bats were smashing the crap out of his storefront, kicking and booting the door until it fell off its hinges and was left clinging to the frame by its rusty nails. Shards of glass glittered on the pavement and gaping holes were all that was left of the windows. They kicked at the garage door til it was done but no one, not even the raving lunatic himself, arrived at the scene to protest. Finished, they ran down the lane and disappeared and nothing was heard about it again. The cleanup kept him busy for a while.

A month later, I woke up to loud voices downstairs and looked over to the old man's place. He was seriously arguing with someone and again, the violence in the Chinese language when spoken with hostility struck me. They carried on for a while until the man he was arguing with ran down the alley and got into his car and sped off. Finally, silence. I sighed and went back to bed, but within the hour I heard the siren of an ambulance as it came up the lane and stopped. The guys cut the siren, took out the stretcher and went inside the cramped space where the old man slept. Two security guards from my building were also in there and everyone was talking and walking back and forth. They were there for a while and I could only see the bottom half of their bodies as they moved around; then I saw the old man's legs as they strapped him on the stretcher and rolled him out. He was uncovered and moaning and babbling, and I was shocked to see that his legs, his white t-shirt and his face were covered in blood. They lifted him into the ambulance, closed the back doors and drove off. The next day I asked the security guard in our building what had happened. He laughed and shook his head and said the old bastard had gotten into an argument with somebody and had been stabbed. 'Do they know who did it?' I asked. 'No, nobody knows anything about it.' And that was the last that was seen of him.

____________________________________________




I moved from this apartment complex to another which housed just as many crazies, albeit different from the above-mentioned crazy. I was happy with my new apartment and I had a friend living downstairs, who I had met at my school. A few weeks after moving in, I was hanging some pictures when all of a sudden I heard one blood-curdling shriek after another. It was something you would have heard while walking in the jungle, as if something were being skinned alive, or scalped. After all the screaming there was a tremendous crash of something heavy falling and the the breaking of glass.

My knees trembled as I wondered what kind of raging gorilla was downstairs and if he'd set fire to the place. Ever since hearing the story of a man who had burnt down an apartment building in Taipei to spite his wife, and had killed fifteen people in the process, it'd been on my mind. I debated whether I should bolt the door and lock myself in, or run over to my friend's apartment and stay with him, or go outside until whatever was in the building was psycho-tropically restrained. But it was quiet after the crash, nothing more happened, and in the next few minutes my curiosity overcame my fear and I crept down the stairwell to find out what was going on.

I could hear voices on the second floor and I surmised that that's where all the crashing had come from. I stole quietly around the corner and saw a door to an apartment was open, so I peeped in. It was empty except for a large prayer mantel lying face down on the tiled floor, and obviously the heavy object that I'd heard crashing to the floor. Vases, flowers, incense holders and water were shattered and strewn about the floor. A small girl of about five crouched in the corner crying and quivering, and a sobbing boy of about eleven came out from a bedroom and looked at me.

I shook my head and asked the boy what had happened and he said 'my brother,' but that's all he could muster through his sobs. Suddenly, the boy's mother and father arrived and behind them strode the lumbering gorilla I'd heard shrieking. They took a look at the mantel and their sobbing children and I crept away again to leave them to it. I shrugged and they sighed and I felt sorry for them with their retarded son who was obviously - difficult. Their one last precious possession was in ruins at their feet. Although he was 22, his mother told me later, he had the mental capacity of a five-year-old. The pain of living with their son had obviously taken its toll.

After that night, I could hear his blood-curdling screams and when I finally left that apartment I gave them my couch, so they could at least have something unbreakable to sit on in their living room.

____________________________________________

More Pics of Tainan City, Taiwan



____________________________________________________________________________________

Specialty tea shops in Tainan City.


____________________________________________________________________________________

Jade Market

Tainan City's Jade Market is a shopping experience. It's not as large as Taipei's jade market, but it's definitely worth seeing.

Jade isn't the only thing for sale; vendors are selling antiques, paintings, pottery, woodwork, and jewelry, which isn’t made of jade. You can find old perfume bottles, ornate wooden boxes, hand-painted ceramics, antique incense burners, as well as many other treasures. In addition to antiques, there are some new and interesting crafts for sale.

Taiwan Lantern Festival

The Shang Yuan Festival (or Lantern Festival) is celebrated on the fifteenth day of the first moon. The major cities in Taiwan rotate in hosting the event. I first saw the Lantern Festival when it was held in Tainan City, the oldest and most traditional city in Taiwan.

Decorative lanterns displayed on large stages depict birds, animals, astrological symbols, historical figures and events and any number of different themes. They're constructed throughout the country in schools and universities and by local businesses, with competitions being held for best lanterns in numerous categories. Lantern-making is a serious art form in Taiwan.

I went the first night to the Lantern Festival with my friend Ilona, but I was so blown away by the fantastic lanterns I had to go back again to run around like a mental case taking pictures, but when I look at them now, I'm glad I did.
____________________________________________



____________________________________________


____________________________________________


____________________________________________