Own the center line. That bus’ll run suicide across three lanes of traffic to make that left-turn light. Any cab could squeal backwards a hundred meters in reverse to beat out the other man coming up fast for that fare you’re passing. Keep the left-lane open, so you can knock your speed up to a sprint when the coolie truck’s clutch problem threatens to box you in or some Lexus can’t make up whether or not to turn right a block ahead. Snow hare, you’ve got to be quick.

I had a dream shortly after buying my scooter that I was back home again, lost, riding past fresh green lawns on a sun-soaked afternoon. I couldn’t make sense of what I was doing, trying hard to straddle the middle of the narrow city block, dodging around cars that weren’t there, racing the same Taipei shuffle on Milwaukee lanes. I was certain that the police would soon be on me, but I couldn’t stop and I couldn’t slow down. The wheel was wobbling - and I feared if I slowed up it’d come clean off.

If you haven’t seen it, it might be a tough thing to imagine, the number of scooters in Taipei city. In rush hour, they easily outnumber cars ten-to-one. It’s an institution, the puttering steed of the salary-man masses, like their riders worn long with heavy use, worked for every ounce of oomph they’ve got, packed in with just enough space to breathe. Despite the similarities, like owners who resemble their pets, it’d be foolish to try and draw some soul of a people message from the scooter’s total dominance of the city. For most people, driving one was a last resort.

A scooter’s hard to love. Heavy and unweildy, even a nice new Vespa looks crummy ankle-deep in the four-stroke haze of a thousand Yamahas. They’ve tiny wheels, pudgy black donuts, and you ride them with your knees together, like you have to take a leak. I always splayed my feet out, let them slide into the scooter’s nose in a slacker stretch, but even that couldn’t make this look cool. None of the power, speed, or excitement of a motorcycle, and all of the danger.

The rain’s the most miserable part. That rumbling, caustic mob of scooters sitting at the top of the red light’s like a drain clog, their massive raingear slick with road spatter, secretaries’ bare feet idling on the asphalt while their high-heels dangle at one side. That’s what makes Taipei ‘Scooter City’ in a real way, and not in some quaint, “did-you-know-they-wear-wooden-shoes-here” sort of way: that their tiny 3-stroke engines grind the air around you to shreds, and that it never stops, even in the all too frequent land-squalls. Rain or shine, the scooter parade never takes off. I’ve ridden mine in at least a half-dozen typhoons.

I could write an Ode to the Scooter, but like everything in Taipei, that would really just be an Ode to Convenience and Cost-Effectiveness, hardly subjects to rouse and stir. The scooter can’t be admired. Not even the split-eared charms of the street dogs whose heads I daily pat can be gifted to the lowly scooter. Instead, like workhorses the world over, they could perhaps twist pity into something nearing respect.

So, here’s how it works: into the same sort of congested traffic you’ll find in any densely-populated city, empty a hundred thousand swarming hornets and let them find their way down every crack and between every open space, trailing one another like water through weakening dams. In a city where no one gives each other that “personal bubble” I remember diagrammed in baby blue on my driver’s ed. bulletin board, this frantic addition tips the traffic scale from ‘manageable’ to ‘crazytime.’

The alternative, however, of all these people driving cars, would be a gridlocked city. Since Taipei’s actual square-mileage leaves little room for more traffic, zipping from one end to the other on something we see as a toy Stateside not only makes sense, it keeps the place from turning into what I saw in Bangkok and Tianjin - honking queues of cars jumbled together like fallen dominoes.

Back when I was among the throng, before an accident killed my scooter (which was then stolen), my students all told me I was crazy. At last I had a big one, an all-too-close accident which every rider is either on one side of the other, some tried to make me eat humble pie. Nodding knowledgeably to me in my sling, they went on as though their months of cliched warnings had been prescient and not just conventional wisdom.

Those students are still wrong, scar or no. I wasn’t crazy; the whole city is nuts - frayed from nose to tail from thousands of scooters let loose like figurative marbles in a sick man’s head. And why be sane in a town gone mad?

I never turn down a cab because of its shabby appearance, but I know people who do. I figure natural selection got us this far, and I don’t really want to wind up riding to my morning teaching gig on a peacock. This morning, though, the first one to reach me cuts across three lanes of traffic and rumbles to a stop. There’s tape on the handle, the car’s boxy, with the sort of silver trim popular twenty years ago. I think about a story my friend likes to tell, about arriving at the airport dizzy and half-asleep after spending more than an hour in a backseat with a carbon dioxide leak. I get in anyways. The fact is, a cab ride is a cab ride, and this is more true for me in Asia than anywhere else. It’s hard to give a damn about the sheen on seats or how worn the steering wheel, when no matter what, I’m still going to end up getting there in the same amount of time, and having the same conversation en route. Today, like most days, my driver is curious about my Chinese, and he’s caught me without headphones.

It’s been long enough, I’ve got some statistics for you:

At twenty-five, it’s alright that I’m not yet married, but 70% say thirty is pushing it. Only 50% ask about dating Taiwanese women, and 0% get an honest answer. 100% complain about the number of scooters, which (along with cabs) get the blame for making traffic in this town what it is. About 10% are so upset about the glut of taxis on the road that it’s clear that competition has stretched them to the breaking point. Every driver I’ve talked to has said they drive in twelve or fourteen-hour shifts. Roughly 80% would run down their own mother to get a fare, but less admit it. None have discussed the possibility of finding other employment. Most know someone who immigrated to America, and over 70% volunteer the opinion that America is a much better place than Taiwan. I’ve never heard a specific reason why.

This same general sequence repeats itself nearly everyday I’ve been here, often enough going forward basically without my participation. Lately, though, the conversation has changed. For the past two to three months, most of my cab drivers start by asking about Barack Obama.

The first question is always why I supported him, as opposed not to John McCain, but Hillary Clinton. McCain never seemed to be much of a blip on the radar in Taiwan, though cab drivers all know his name (for now). I expect this stemmed from the Republican Party’s signature marshaling of myopia to run a campaign, things that, even when they work in America, are too petty to register at such a distance. To whit, a Taiwanese person (from any walk of life) is as unaware of a Christian fundamentalist as fundies are of Taiwan (or, it would seem, continents).

When inevitably they ask why I like Barack Obama, my Chinese begins to stall. Who has the vocabulary for health-care and education debates, or to explain the doctrine of deregulation? I’ve got no real way to talk about leadership, either, and so I settle for saying that “I believe in him.”

There is always silence at this. Racial gears are certainly spinning away in their air-conditioned skulls, and who knows what else. After a moment, when the driver speaks, the statistics finally begin to break down, and the conversation becomes distinct, an actual exchange. I’ve had many times to argue race, but this is like debating the virtues of coconut milk with a penguin (expect to see more on this in the future). Other times, my driver will mention Chen Shui-bian.

As of yesterday, Mr. Chen has entered prison. Nine years ago, he was the most popular man on the island, and his fall (first from glory to irrelevance, then crushing disgrace) is the kind of political narrative common enough in Asia, except it shouldn’t have been. Chen was no junta leader, or hot-shot executive turned politico. In 1985, he was political dissident and prisoner. As a lawyer, Chen represented the defendants of the Gaoxiong Incident, one of Taiwan’s most significant events in terms of human rights and political freedom. A native son of Taiwan, he represented the half of the island that was here when the defeated nationalist army (KMT) landed in retreat, local Taiwanese who instantly (and for the second time in one generation) found themselves repressed and pushed to the margins.

Chen’s story could have been that of triumphant democracy as the eventual destiny of all people, which was indeed the message when in 2000 he rode a great wave of optimism to the highest office in the land. Free at last to really choose their own leadership, many Taiwanese people chose choice, and to re-imagine themselves not as a population in exile, but a citizenry. More powerfully, many average people chose also to dare to dream of total freedom, of Taiwanese nationhood. I wasn’t here, but in the wistfulness of many Taiwanese I meet, the word was hope.

That hope was not to be rewarded.

It seems Chen is a man destined to be remembered for the photo of him entering jail, handcuffed arms in the air leaving him looking like a hung duck and erasing the image of monumental accomplishment his election in 2000 had been. Even with the arrival of Chen Yunlin, a mainland official working towards reunification under China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, and the reinvigorated sense of national identity that accompanied current President Ma’s concessions in these meetings, when the last measure to keep him from the jail cell failed yesterday, there was a deep sense of vindication and relief. The near-universal underpinning of such feelings, even among his former supporters, is crushing bitterness. The promise Chen offered has been matched only by the scale of his inaction and alleged crimes.

This morning, my cab driver went tense when I asked about Chen as a president. “Eight years, millions of dollars, and for what? He changed the name of the airport (to revoke the namesake honor from the island’s former generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek)! That’s it!” He’d voted for Chen. Twice.

Could Obama be another Chen Shui-bian? I must admit the possibility, because both Mr. Chen’s corruption and the meanness of his nationalist initiatives (the airport being a prime example) were parts of a single overarching mistake. Not unlike George W. Bush, Chen failed to separate his sense of individual destiny from that of his nation. After running on a platform of change and a new day, when he got into office, Chen didn’t seem to realize he could no longer get away with business as usual. Before his time, like most of Asia, political corruption and favoritism were the standard in Taiwan, and small-minded politics (like fighting over an airport name), as well as personal enrichment, could be placed ahead of the public good. His election had been a turning point, even if his administration failed to live up to the expectation of something other than business as usual.

Chen made the mistake of thinking an old-style politician could survive in the new era he helped usher in. This ability to re-imagine will be Obama’s real test, not to live up to the hype of his campaign, but to operate under a different set of assumptions from previous presidents. Moreover, he will have to wrangle this paradigm shift from an old-fashioned, partisan Democratic party famous in recent years for its divisiveness within and lack of direction without. Unless Obama can deliver something other than business as usual, he is sure to fail.

Most times, the cab stops before I can muddle through this notion in butchered Mandarin, but sometimes I get a chance to tell them that if Obama does not bring with him a new standard of conduct and politicking, then he, like Chen, might end up history’s roast duck.

The measure of a marksman does not lie in piercing the leather target, because the strength of the archer varies. This is the way of the ancients. - 3.16 The Analects

I find it hard to neatly close out my crash-course in Korea. The quiet of that Gyeongju suited me, though - its castle walls utterly gone, its pleasure boats sunken, and only a miles-wide parkland endless with wildflowers while only a grave marker here or there remained below dwarf, red maples. What’s there to write, though? It’s been hard to come away with much. I came as a tourist, and took away tourist snapshots.

I saw many good things, and will tell people about them over dinner or on a plane, but not try and make of them great writing. It might not be doable. The entire point of tourist sites is to create an experience that can be replicated, to insure visitors have and see more or less what millions of others had and saw and liked.

This is no criticism: I’m stoked that the world is revealing more of her lovely sides the easier, and the places were all well worth the visit. It was once the job of writers to weave stories of far-flung places that their readers could never see, but these were no substitutes for original experience, which at least in my own life is the teacher of all things. The days of writing adventures of distant places with the simple confidence that having been there counts as something has ended - down the paved road from the lost grotto are espressos and internet cafes, and the blogroll marches on. This makes writing such as thing much more difficult, but then again, it’s wandering lost on a busy street or arguing in a full train car that you’ll find experiences worth taking the time to commit to genuine prose. While the trajectory of men like me will always be towards the physically lost or isolated, there will be ever less lost space. Then, of course, there’s the question of what you find when you do chance upon them:

Aug. 28, 2008
A brickwall, shifting with age and repainted yellow over the gaps is overgrown with trees and bushes. It’s just like the wall that runs outside the window of my room in the southern district of Gyeongju, along the network of 19th century city homesteads that still cluster south of the burial grounds at Daereungwon Tomb Park. It could be someone’s house, there’s only a well-used 90’s model Hyundai and steel light-pole in this gravel lot, and the one gate I see, with the same red and blue taichi that’s printed on chop-stick wrappers and temple bells alike, is bolted and seems to lead to someplace else. The cabbie was pretty confident this was the seowon, but the only open door is just wide enough for my shoulders to pass through. Inside, a pair of dogs look up from their bowls at me, and I’m certain this is some farmer’s home I’ve taken a bus for an hour, then a cab for twenty more minutes, to reach.

This was, it would turn out, the servant’s quarters of the old seowon at Jade Mountain, the seat of higher Confucian learning, fittingly built on a foundation of natural bedrock. Instead of entering through the main gates, which face a river hidden from the dirt road by a stand of trees, I navigated the servant’s narrow back passages, skipped down ledges and crept behind the dormitory backs, the ways so tight I fell into an automatic stoop.

While the UNESCO sites were practically glossy with polish, at Oksan I found disrepair:

The yellow walls of the buildings are flaking and etched with Korean tags and English curses. The open courtyard has two dormitories on either side, a lecture hall to the North and a matching hall on stilts facing it to the South. To enter the seowon in its day would have been to find oneself emerging from the dark stairs under the raised hall into sudden light, the courtyard faced by people at all sides, after a path first through wilderness, then vague shadow beyond the gates and under the lecture hall. The passage from nature to culture, from darkness to the nucleus of the group; it’s dramatic in Confucian fashion, which is to say, unsubtle about putting you in you place.

I’d not expected anything except for empty buildings, but the disrepair shocked me. Crannies in the buildings’ bases were crammed with pieces of broken stonework and plaster, and newer garbage, too, like soda cans. Touching a red beam of the main gates left dusty stains on my hands, and the tanchong on the gables was waterlogged to threads. The twin halls had no doors, so the parts of the wood floors that the roofs didn’t cover were battered rough from rain, and dirty. Some cells of the dorms had modern padlocks on them, the same kind that my landlord in Gyeongju had handed me the night I checked in. On the inside rim of the gathering hall’s ceiling, placards of weathered wooden classics were still tacked. I was disappointed, and though the old seowon was far off in the mountains, and no one else was there with, the neglect was intrusive.

I’d brought the Analects on this trip in the hopes that when put together, the book and Korea, they would resonate like sounding stones, and I’d receive some curious, harmonic understanding. At Oksan, I didn’t want to really even read it, though, or particularly stay. Without the money that comes with UNESCO status, or the devotion of thousands of Buddhist laypeople, it was just a crummy old building.

The universal reaction, apart from the enigmatic Sunchaul, to my reading the Analects has been near-horror. As children, everyone in Asia has had the book’s dense sayings forced down their throats, to then be regurgitated on difficult tests where you must fill-in the missing word or complete the saying’s second half from memory. So, despite having authored the greatest unbroken tradition of any non-mystic in the entire world, and that even on subway cars in Asia you can see his long-dead hand at work, no one wants to look him in the eye.

I am certain other seowon somewhere are taken care of, and that there are tour buses and gift shops to match. I’m not saying filing past costume classrooms with conspicuously laid-out student desks would have taught me any more than what I saw at Oksan, but it would have felt better. It’s a grand illusion, the endurance of things against time that gives historic cities their sense of calm and depth; a well-paid grounds crew and five-yearly fresh foundations. That is the romance - continuity. So it seems that Oksan has taught me something about the Analects after-all: persisting in the dusty periphery might be the only true immortality around. As I writer, I’m not sure how I should feel about that.

He’d piped up with some question, some qualified, gutless question, a man of about forty who sat in the back in a chair so as to spare his weak knee, and Wang’s sluggish cat eyes fell on him as though before that instant the man hadn’t occupied any space in the world, that his relevance would have to be channeled, and that Wang was once again back at work managing this.

I don’t recall the question, or if he got an answer, just that then Wang asked his own question and set the man to nervously rubbing the side of his short beard. He gestured towards one of his Taiwanese followers sitting near him, in her early thirties and lovely, a woman who was always at the Tea House, but never engaged in the furious martial and meditative exercises of the others. She mostly attended the Master, brought him tea or ran errands, although often enough, as tonight, she acted as the translator for the crowd of foreigners lining the walls of his audience chamber.

“You are attracted to her, aren’t you? Would you like to date her?” Wang spoke through her, and the distinctly masculine directness of the questions found strange value in her voice as she remained as flat as ever, confronting the man as to his affections in front of some thirty people through another person’s words.

I got the feeling that there was a real backstory as she went on speaking about herself in the third person, the man shifting back and forth between hers and Wang’s doubly steady gazes. He stammered and Wang laughed airily, high-pitched, and totally alone. The entire room sat with stuffed breath transfixed by a private scene forced suddenly on them. The woman, placid, sat as ever - waiting for words from either men to translate. At length, Wang’s cold eyes unflinching, the man lowered his own and nodded that Wang was right about his affections. He clearly wasn’t certain what to do, like all of us, caught in a strange scene he didn’t want to be in, already having made the decision to follow the Master’s lead while in his house, unclear where this would go.

“Well, you should ask her out, then.”

And like that, Wang broke away from the man his terrible steady look, unpinned him and released him from the focus of the entire room.

He had been enjoying the man’s discomfort, I could tell. Throughout the exchange, he wore the supercilious grin that sometimes overcame him on festival days, when he obliged us all to ignore the five precepts and drink glass after glass of rough gaoliang sorghum liquor cut with juice, while he as a monk abstained, watching us all get drunk as monkeys and caper around his small audience room. In Chinese cultures, this is the height of generosity, and any man would rightly relish being a host of enough abundance to leave scores of foreigners stupid with wine.

There was some of this satisfaction traced on his face as the bearded man wriggled, and I wondered if Wang wasn’t being possessive of the woman. These girls that attended him, I thought silently as the next question was raised and Wang continued his brief Chinese lessons, does he fuck them? I only wondered because, after months of coming to the Tea House, I was certain they would if directed. No, it not unimaginable - he;s got a wife somewhere, and children, so celibacy’s not a concern for the Master unlike other monks, for whatever reason (who would dare ask?). For her part, she held in check throughout the encounter a sly amusement, and in her total lack of discomfort at suddenly speaking Wang’s words about herself, she’d seemed as distant as would any paramour at the suggestion another man stood a chance of having her. It amused me to think of, but more than that, it would explain the strangeness that hung so often in the air, the weirdness of their connections.

As Wang again resumed his slow gaze of roving disinterest, I considered an alternative. The bearded man, like many men in many places, almost certainly been trying to use the group’s common bond to wheedle and work at her affections. He was no serious practitioner, and wouldn’t be able to become one as long as he let himself be distracted and tempted. He’d gone long past the trial period all newcomers were given, when anyone’s presence was tolerated unconditionally as slowly they were given chances to show their dedication and worth. Masters do not teach uncommitted students, and so at the Tea House, Wang was doing something fairly revolutionary and opening wide his doors to all that would come. There wasn’t an endless welcome, however, and eventually it would be worn out. Wang’s confrontation was a standard passive-aggressive technique nearly universal in Asia (I’ve had the dubious honor of riding several such rails), so perhaps Wang wasn’t really being vindictive.

I don’t think I ever saw the bearded man again, but if so, it was only once or twice more. Wang had driven him out - either putting the lesser man in his place as he overreached at Wang’s table, or discouraging an unfit student from remaining at his school. In truth, I suspect it was both. Or rather, for Wang, the two are one in the same.