They litter the corners of intersections like giant green boxy roaches; gather in clusters at the exits of subways and massive shopping malls. In Chinese they are joking referred to as “electric donkeys.” They serve as three wheels of cheap convenience. For half the price of a taxi, two people can turn a half hour walk into a five minute ride.
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But, generally only after an iron test of wills.

As a foreigner, one often has the privilege of paying an extra fee for a life lived in the middle kingdom. White skin and a big nose means there are a few extra RMB that may be lifted from the pocket. The usual five kuai fare becomes six or seven to wheel a foreigner to their destination. It is not a lot of money, perhaps 15-30 cents, but like the constant drip of a water torture it has a way of generating an increasingly painful irritation. Like every moment in China, it is a negotiation.

It is not personal; it is the simply the prejudice that foreigners should pay more. These drivers have their own vision of the American dream, which entitles them to a slice of that glorious pie. But, still there are days I’d rather walk than give them that satisfaction.

Fall blue skies with avenues of wind ruffled willows play hide and seek with the grey coal acrid pollution that stomps down like a leather jackboot. Side by side are yesterday’s failed business that leave a vacancy of broken fixtures and ever grey dust and the new businesses that saw and paint their way into existence with a speed we would not recognize in the west. To say that change happens fast in the Middle Kingdom would be an understatement at best.

The Vancouver International Airport is a marvel of art and engineering, waterfalls and environment sounds, soaring curving roofs and glassy mazes that are completely in contrast to American cattle corrider and utilititian squares.

Water sounds and saltwater smells greet the weary traveler as they enter the great hall of immigration. It is soft and inviting, and while there is padded carpeting underfoot and a lack of the ever present orange alert fear, the officers at immigration are flak jacketed and armed. Soft does not mean weak. It is such a wild contrast from American airports that always leave me feeling like I’m walking on just the other side of the wrong side of the tracks.

Somewhere on the road between Wuyi Shan and Jiuhua Shan there was a town that involved in a bus change. It was the summer of 2005. Anwei Province Chinese summer hot, with a roasting heat that vied with the humidity and gritty air. Restrooms in Chinese bus stations are by definition a moment of endurance. But, this one due to the lack of running water was a collection station for buckets of piss. Having already been weeks on the road at this point it did not register as disgust or surprise, more like that initial feeling of something being not quite right, like when your car has been broken into, and your first clue of an ajar door registers simply as “oh, that’s odd.”

Today boarding American Airlines flight 1593 conjured up an image of what a Russian Aeroflot flight in the 80’s might have been like. The seats are ratty and frayed. The cabin is dirty. Obviously a family with small child recently occupied these seats; there are telltale cracker crumbs and a nebula of cookie dust. As we taxi out to the runway the head flight attendant informs us there will be no coffee or tea on this flight, nor water to wash our hands in the bathrooms. This plane is not carrying any water.

It registers as odd, but surprisingly without a feeling a surprise.

Gratitude is the first thing that comes to mind.
The splash of summer flowers spilling out into a sidewalk draped in September blue sky.
The smell of vegetables off gassing fecund fields.
Travelers and locals allowing life, for a moment, to unwind outside the their usually consensual reality.
Seasons of salmon gray rain that warp time with its incessant fall, fall, falling. And storms that blow up from the Sound with an impersonal vendetta.

Three years ago I returned to a Seattle that seemed quieter and more empty than my Asian addled senses remembered it. Pike Place Market was the only part of town that reminded me of the electric vitality that is any street in Asia. I was missing it before I even got on that plane which brought me back here. The experience of Asia has been like the fish sauce of a Malaysian curry. You don’t taste the fish sauce itself, but without it the flavors of curry don’t expand to their full dimension.

Gratitude is what I notice as books that have traveled more borders than most Americans make their way back into boxes. As a younger man, departures called forth fear and hopeful excitement. At this stage of life, it is more like admiring the  texture of a well worn shirt made of quality cloth. Its history worn into the weave. There is sadness, but more there is appreciation. These past three years in Seattle, creating a gem of green quiet in the bustle of Seattle, has been a blessing to me, and hopefully for my community as well.

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Yong Kang Clinic will disappear. We all disappear. Disappear into something else. Water to vapor, wood to fire, heat and back to earth. All things cycle the wheel of being. Yong Kang Clinic at the beginning of Oct will become Ageless Acupuncture.

I will again fly west until it becomes east. Trusting the tide that pulls me back to the middle kingdom.

I remember the sense of audacity when first arriving in Taiwan in the spring of 2001, that they would dare such a tall financial monument in one of the earth’s most seismic activate zones. I chalked it up then to a senseless bravado. That was before I understood the Taiwanese to be the optimistic and hardworking people they are. In the seven years I’ve known Taipei, I’ve watched her go from amazing to incredible. I’ve been privileged to live in and visit a city that mixes modern and traditional living in a way that only a well written science fiction story could tell.

The symposium on the International Globalization of Chinese Medicine was by and large an opportunity for the Taiwanese to continue a trend that emerged in during the Republican Era after the fall of the Qing dynasty. Namely, that Chinese medicine must be verified and rubber stamped by Western science. I sat through a number of lectures that gave us scientific proof of the properties of medicinals that the Chinese of the Han dynasty has already figured out. Like their brothers and sisters on the mainland, they are reluctant to toss out Chinese medicine for not being “scientific”, and at the same want to force Chinese science to fit the mold and form of the West.

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Clinical and laboratory medicine may have a common root, but the world views that support each are like children of a family that grow into people that could not be more different.

While laboratory findings that confirm what practiced clinicians already know are interesting. What stood out most to me in the two days was the lecture on the health insurance of Taiwan.

Taiwan has universal health care. A middle class self employed person such as myself would pay USD$42 a month for my health insurance. That’s full coverage. Everything from acupuncture to open heart surgery, from granulated Chinese herbs to kidney dialysis, from twist ankles to car wrecks. In the USA I pay more than 4x that amount for hit by truck catastrophic care with a deductible that would wipe out my savings.

What is more interesting yet…..
The costs of administering the program are 1.5% of monies taken in. It is efficient, computerized, universally accessible, there are no waiting periods, nor gatekeeping doctors practicing insurance, instead of medicine. Wasteful? Perhaps, certainly that criticism has been leveled at the system. People that don’t need to see a specialist, but decide on their own they want to, and do. They can. They just have to pay a premium out of their pocket.

As in any system, if you have money, you can get what money buys, and that usually translate as more access to whatever you want. But, the amazing strength of the system here in Taiwan is that of basic health care. The kind of health that most of us need most of the time, it is as available here as a Big Mac is in the USA.

I’m a professional acupuncturist, not a politician, but if I were. I’d be looking into how the Taiwanese have managed put together such a stellar system for taking care of their citizens. But then, these are the people that would dare to build the world’s tallest building in an earthquake zone. Perhaps they see the world in a fundamentally different way.

There is something of a cat meow in the way Taiwanese girls say 歡迎光臨, it is as irresistible to the ears as ice cream on a soft breeze summer night. It seeps into the ears like spilled honey, the audio equivalent of the fragrance of lily.

Flocks of scooters that roar a turbulent surf.

The emotional tags of oh’s ah’s and ug’s tacked onto the end of sentences.

The jet engine blast that fires night market woks.

Taiwan’s rich commotion of sound paints aural pictures as deliciously round and thick and rich as a brimming bowl of beef noodle soup.

Down two flights of escalator, a short flight of stairs and into the slipstream of Taipei subway rush hour. You could not crowd this many Americans into one space, let alone have them move with the particular Brownian motion that feels like breathing a school of fish.

The Taiwanese excel at finding the spaces in-between. Joining the flow which sweeps me down to the Danshui line, there is again that distinctly familiar feeling of having returned home.

It is not that time changes things. But, that things change as they flow through time.

Seven years ago about this time of year I boarded an airplane with the destination of Taiwan. Armed only with determination and desire to learn enough language to engage the medicine in Asia. Tonight in the deep beyond midnight I return to the beautiful island. Return by invitation, return to join in a symposium on medicine.

From seven years ago, this moment is unimaginable.

Einstein is credited with saying that imagination is more powerful than knowledge. And the mystery of life itself surpasses both!

Travel can easily be broken into two general categories. The time you are in places and the time you are between them. One is about settling, the other, movement. The Chinese would just say it’s Yin and Yang.
I see it more as Doing, and being Done To.

“Brakes bu ling” 刹車不靈

This is NOT what you want to be hearing from your driver as you are heading down a winding mountain road. I thought the driver was just paying more attention to his cigarette than his steering as we rounded a bend, skittered past a pile of road work gravel and smacked a dent into the back of the big bus in front of us, thus slowing us down and preventing a careen over the edge.

Driver, what the hell are you doing?
“The brakes aren’t very lively.”

They don’t work?
“Don’t worry, it’s not my truck!”

Oh, I feel much better now, that is certainly going to help us get down the mountain in one piece.

“The truck belongs to Xiao Chen.”
Somehow dis-owership is going to save us.

Dissociate, and crank up the electronic Nan Wu Ah Mi Tou Fo box.

Call on Jesus, Buddha, Moses or your favorite saint, as if their dusty bones will make a difference. I suspect that should they really have god status, they’ve got bigger fish to fry.

I notice that the trees are all perfectly summertime green, and hoping that those “ping an“ amulets stashed in my luggage riding in the back with the bags of fish and chickens, are doing their thing.