Tuesday was a Weird and Lonely Day

My son and daughter.

Tuesday was a very strange day.

On Tuesday I saw my children off at the airport, sending them to the US for five weeks to visit family and go sightseeing with my parents. They say parting is such sweet sorrow, but it is not, it is an agonizing rent in the heart, and nothing can fill it up. There's my son, taller than me -- when did that happen? And my sweet, soft spoken daughter. And they're leaving me.....

The new terminal at Taoyuan Airport.

It was a stunning day, clean and clear as a well-constructed syllogism, and the airport was crowded with early morning travelers.

My wife and my daughter relax before the Big Parting.

The airline came to collect my kids at 7 AM for the 7:45 flight. They were extremely kind, but a little ditsy -- the person in charge of my kids put their luggage on the local transfer trolley when they got to Detroit, and it was nearly lost. I guess it isn't really a Northwest flight unless the luggage goes astray.

Surprisingly, nobody cried until we were out of the airport.

They also had trouble at security, of course. I guess it isn't really an entry into the US unless you have hassles with security.

The beautiful interior of the new terminal.

But Tuesday had more in store. I had to run down to Tainan to pick up some test papers and attend class the next day. I boarded the train in Taichung, and sat down next to a Buddhist nun. She began talking to me in English, rusty but serviceable, and gently chided me for playing a computer game instead of doing something productive. "Isn't that a waste of time?" I bit my tongue to stop a tart remark about the uselessness of religious orders, but she soldiered on. It turned out that her job was telemarketing, selling Buddhism to the masses, by cold calls to random strangers inviting them to attend Buddhist meetings and activities. When she found out I could speak Chinese she switched to that, and then began to proselytize for her religion.

I'd never been the subject of a Buddhist conversion attempt before, but instead of finding it an amusing novelty, it make me uncomfortable and increasingly, angry. I have no trouble fending off Christians, since it is unlikely that any of the missionaries I encounter here knows more about the Bible than I do, and more often than not, I can turn the tables on them. Further, I always enjoy a good bout of wrangling about religion. But there I was, getting a lecture on past lives and the soul, and it peeved me that I couldn't get her to stop no matter how I hinted. I felt like she had violated some unspoken agreement between us (I didn't hit you up with a lecture about metaphysical naturalism, did I?).

A bright day, Taiwan's mountains clear in the distance.

But Tuesday had not yet exhausted its store of weirdnesses. When I arrived in Tainan a fellow student at the university drew me aside:

"Michael, do you know Dr. X?"
"Who?"
"Dr X. [description]"
"Nope, never met her. Why?"
"Well, she asked in the meeting last week why that American who stays in the fifth floor PHD office didn't smile at her when he saw her. Listen, you gotta be sure to smile at the teachers. It's really important."

Yup. Wrong-footed with someone important in the department, and without me even knowing it! Who knows what I was doing when she saw me.....Taiwanese university instructors, especially older ones, tend to think it really important that students should smile at them and greet them. Any Taiwanese in their 40s can tell you about how this was drilled into them in their childhood. At my own university the failure of students to do this has led to long discussions at meetings. Readers will have to divine for themselves what this desire to be greeted means....

My son and daughter.

I went to a friend's bar, had a few beers, and graded papers in my TA role, then stumbled home. And it was Tuesday night. My wife was in Taichung, and I was in Tainan, and my kids were on an airplane somewhere over Canada.

And I was lonely.

[Taiwan]