NINE - The Poison Month

Special to the Kemptville Advance

July 2003

The fifth month of the lunar calendar is June, and it is known in Taiwan as “Poison Month”. This is because the arrival of summer and its characteristic humidity is highly conducive to the breeding of viruses, and the wandering of all manner of poisonous snakes, insects and other small creatures.

I personally ushered in the month with a nasty case of bed bug bites. No, it isn’t just a little jingle that your mother sings to you before bed. There are bed bugs, they do bite, and they itch like you wouldn’t believe until you get the proper medication.

I only had to suffer for three days, thank goodness. Taking medication is a bit scary here, as the doctors prescribe a cocktail of about four different pills to take orally, but there is no accompanying literature, instructions or warnings in English to let you know exactly what you are ingesting. I must admit, though, it always works, and fast.

June started off with a bang, with the Dragon Boat Festival. This is one of the biggest celebrations in Chinese culture, and it warrants a statutory holiday, which fell on Wednesday June 4 this year.

The story behind the holiday is quite disturbing and sad to some, but so are many of the European fairytales that we in North America have adapted for use in story telling to our own youngsters.

As the legend goes, a mad poet overcome with passionate suicidal urges threw himself into the river many, many years ago. When his daughter discovered what he had done, she threw herself in after her beloved father, in an attempt to save him.

Dragon boats were set upon the water to search for them, but it was too late. The poet and his daughter were found floating lifeless on the surface of the water, wrapped in each other’s arms. Townsfolk were afraid that hungry fish would dishonor the bodies by nibbling on them before they could be retrieved, and so they threw ‘tzongtze’ or rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves into the water.

Today, the love of family and the hope of good luck is celebrated by the giving and receiving of tzongtze on Dragon Boat Festival Day. Teams of twenty men (and some women) practice for weeks in advance of the day, in preparation for colourful and exciting dragon boat races. Unfortunately, as with most large public gatherings this year, most of the events in our area were canceled due to SARS.

At Kimberly, the students worked for hours on huge cardboard dragon boats that they later raced up and down the length of the gymnasium. The children had a great time, and the parents were happy that we had at least introduced the concept of the holiday to their children (minus the suicidal poet part).

The beginning of summer in Taiwan also marks the beginning of typhoon and earthquake season. So far I have not been successful with my typhoon dance, which would bring us a paid day off work. The storms have brought high winds and heavy rain, but they always head back out to sea or towards Japan before hitting us full on.

In the southern part of Taiwan, Kaohsiung had a tornado touch down and do some damage last week. We had some excitement of our own, in the form of two earthquakes measuring 6.4 on the Richter scale.

I was leading my class of three-year-olds in a lively rendition of “5 Fat Sausages Sizzling In A Pan” (an action song) so I missed the first quake. We were happily hopping and sizzling when suddenly my Chinese teacher Penny started grabbing children and shoving them under tables. Thankfully it didn’t last very long.

The next day, I was sitting at my desk in the staff room, across from Greg, the hip-hop aficionado from Los Angeles. He was listening to music online with earphones, and I assumed the jiggling was his leg against the desk. Then Amparo  - a Spanish girl from Toronto - walked in and said, “Hey. Who’s moving the floor?”

That line is a classic that she won’t live down. The second quake went on for about thirty seconds, just long enough to get everyone terrified and panicking. You would think that they would be accustomed to this sort of thing in Taiwan, but apparently the frequency of these occurrences has just made the natives more nervous.

After the quake we all got on our cell phones and called our friends to compare experiences. My friend Kornel who has just arrived from Kelowna B.C. was still flying high on adrenalin when I got him on the line.

“Wow! (expletive) My apartment door flew open! The walls were moving and the patio door almost blew in! I saw it move!” He was quite pleased with the effect of the earthquake from his perspective on the eleventh floor of a luxury apartment building set in the mountains.

Every day for the last two weeks has begun with sunshine and temperatures nearing the 30 degree mark. At 8 in the morning! By noon it begins to get dark, and at the end of the school day the sky is dark as night and the rain comes down in torrents.

It doesn’t rain ‘cats and dogs’ here; it’s more like elephants and hippos. We have officially entered the season of natural disasters and all kinds of horrific weather on our little island in the Pacific Ocean. Of course, we keep hearing the line “you ain’t seen nothing yet folks” (or something like that) and so we wait with anticipation.

And never leave home without an umbrella.

-30-

 I only remember one truly impressive typhoon from my time in Taipei. For up to 48 hours leading up to the typhoon, the sky clears as if all the pollution and clouds have been sucked from it by the churning cyclone that is approaching. A blue sky instead of the usual cloudy orange smog is not always a welcome sight, but an ominous one. “My typhoon” began like a typical electrical storm, but the thunder booms were far louder and more deafening than they are in North America, possibly because they ring out over the open sea in Taiwan instead of over land-locked Canadian Shield. As the typhoon approaches, it releases a primordial howl that sounds almost human. Shop owners pull the metal accordion doors down over glass storefronts and secure them with a lock to the pavement. The grocery stores are packed with women hurrying to gather enough food for a few days as you never know how long the typhoon – or damage from it – will keep you inside. This is a marked departure from their usual habit of shopping for one day at a time; a habit I had not yet learned. Grocery stores don’t typically have parking lots in Taipei. Anyone with a car just double parks with blinkers on, blocking a lane of traffic until the shopper returns, with a glamorous extra bag or two of groceries. The typical culture is to shop fresh on your way home from work, or to venture out early on a weekend morning. Accustomed to shopping for a week or more, I often found myself at the cash, staring at a bewildered clerk as she attempted to smash all of my purchases into the rarely used paper bags at her counter. The shoppers behind me in line, instead of being annoyed with the wait as they would back home, hovered close and peered into my overloaded shopping cart, fascinated with what the white girl was buying. I hired a taxi to bring me and my purchases home, once a week. I was ready for that damn storm. I had water, a gas stove, noodles, soup. Bring it on. According to the Internet, there were seven typhoons during the time I was in Taiwan. Typhoon Soudelor is apparently what the storm was called in June 2003. It had 150kph winds when it hit Taipei, and heavy rain that the city and its weak sewers were totally unprepared for.

Darkness took over in the middle of the day, and then the rain came. Back home, I am excited by a summertime storm. All that pent-up heat and energy let out on the earth in a crackle of electricity and thunder just seems like a whole lot of fun. But in Taiwan, the typhoon storm has another source. It has been building up over the ocean, an incongruent tangle of a number of factors, and when it hits land with great force it inevitably tears up, smashes and flattens unsteady objects in its way. It isn’t a hurricane, or a tornado. In North America, we are sometimes hit by a tropical storm with over 100-kilometre-an-hour winds. As I write this, the deadliest typhoon recorded hit in 2013 in the Philippines, killing 6300 people. Typhoon Haiyan boasted wind speed of 315kph.

It isn’t safe to venture outside during a typhoon. I know this now. Animals take cover before the rain even starts; they know. They have been through it before. This was my first typhoon however. When I heard the howl and saw the palm trees bending outside my apartment window, the journalist in me grabbed my camera and ran to push the window open. 

I stuck my head out my apartment window to try to get a photo, just as a street-meat cart flew by, nearly severing my hand. It had been lifted six stories off the street and its metal shelving acted as a sail to propel it through the air. I stayed inside from then on, heeding the obvious warning.

The next day, women in high heels and pencil skirts picked their way through raw sewage and garbage at the bus stop. Children in sandals waded through knee-high sludge to get to the school bus. I was the only one wearing rubber boots that I had found in the broom closet of my apartment, and people were staring at me.

More memorable than a typhoon for me was the earthquake that managed to lift me a few inches off of my bed, in my sixth floor apartment. In a concrete, reinforced building. That was impressive, Mother Nature. But that will be enough, thank you.