Letters from Taiwan
After my father died in 1993 I started thumbing through a trunk full of old letters and documents that he had been storing in his office closet. I came across a folder containing letters that he had written (typed) from Taiwan while stationed there as a military advisor for a short time between the Korean War and the War in Vietnam. He was writing to his own father back in Connecticut, himself a decorated WWI and WWII veteran. I took the folder home and planned on reading the letters when I was in a quiet space without distractions. I was 32, engaged to be married, and life was busy. The other day, 33 years later, now retired, I found that quiet space and I read them.
I wasn’t expecting tales of bravery and heroics because he wasn’t that guy, and the letters were written in peacetime. I was mostly looking for anecdotes about the social or political situation there. During what I’ll call my college years I had developed more than a casual interest in eastern philosophies and the Far East, and was particularly fascinated with the Domino Theory and its’ effect on world history. So in 1993 when I took the folder home I thought these letters might offer some interesting snippets. And after all these years, I’ve been rewarded.
I had a heated argument with my father when I was around 22. He was an enthusiast of Ayn Rand, novelist and philosopher. I’d read her works and admittedly been influenced by her, but a sojourn had led to my discovery of the Buddha and eastern philosophies, which transformed my opinion of her works and philosophy. I was certain that Rand had a fundamental misunderstanding of mysticism. The argument with my father was memorable because it was rare, and because it centered around Ayn Rand and, you guessed it, mysticism. In all the years he was alive I never heard him discussing Buddhism or Taoism, the Yin and Yang, or any such thing. At the time of our argument he was focused in his business and I remember him saying that he wasn’t as current on the issues as perhaps I was, but he nevertheless defended Ayn Rand with a passion. The argument came out of nowhere, and we never discussed the topic again, but it has haunted me because he didn’t seem to want to understand. So my biggest reward came when reading these letters and in one he describes Taoism to his father. I was taken aback. There are other interesting snippets. In several letters he comments that the Chinese people in general were very backward, practically incapable of operating machinery, lost to world progress because of their 3,000 years of working on the land, and closing themselves to the world. This may have been the prevailing opinion, with some truth, but it’s very interesting in light of where China and Taiwan are today vis a vis their ability to operate machinery, among other things…. Other comments he makes are very prescient, and worth several reads, since the conflict in Vietnam had not yet happened, and Taiwan remains politically separated from mainland China, and protected by the USA. I’ve dropped one of the letters here for your enjoyment and placed the folder back into a trunk to be rediscovered and thumbed through by someone else, in a quiet space at some point in time.
The Winter of our Wiscontent
I made this after I returned from seeing some friends and I add it here for fill. What more can I say.
At least we had a bus
Sometime around 2017 I tried to help a friend sell a schoolbus he’d acquired. I didn’t succeed, but I suggested to him that if he ever wanted to part with the bus would he please offer me the first right to refuse.
In 2019 the friend called and offered the somewhat retrofitted schoolbus in trade for a season of lawncuts on his property. This would be a great trade and indeed an offer that I didn’t refuse. We placed the bus on the side of our house, mostly out of view of our neighbors. We had no designs on traveling with the bus, becoming “skoolies” but we knew it could play into our plans somehow down the road.
In early 2021 after our house sold very quickly we were suddenly facing an odd sort of homelessness. Without already having another property, we occupied the home of our closest and very gracious relative out of state while we continued our search. Our goal was to put our equity toward the purchase of a smaller home, and have no mortgage. We searched extensively and when we found nothing within our budget, and a very small inventory of homes, we decided to expand our search to just land. Even land was scarce but we found and purchased a property we loved, 21 acres on a mountain plateau, with springs. We hired a contractor to build a new road onto the property and then transported the bus there. We then brought ourselves and our stuff and began nesting onto the mountain, at first in a tent. Our belongings were strewn all over. We purchased a shipping container to do just that, contain, as we were also maintaining storage in two other locations. At this point we were out of money, and without a source of income. We both found jobs nearby, and began the painstakingly slow and often painful process of reinvention.
From the moment we made the trade, Liz and I joked that we’d never be homeless because at least we had a bus. It makes me reflect on other trades I’ve made that have changed the trajectory of my life, and what I’ve been willing to trade for the things I’ve wanted the most.
jw
