about my life, and I spent six months there and six months in Japan. Japan was alright but it was Taiwan that really got to me.
The Taiwanese are good people. Maybe it’s patrician and colonial, but you feel sort of protective. They have all the nice-ness of the Japanese, but more relaxed, more friendly, and without the vague doubt that their ancestors might have tortured your ancestors in POW camps (or, to be fair, that your ancestors dropped bombs on theirs).
In Taiwan, when you want to call someone over, you hold your hand out palm-down and waggle your fingers. That took some getting used to. Also, when you’re a guest, after you and the host have put away some of that strong Chinese liquor, it’s polite for him to sing a song for you, and vice versa. That was my favorite part. I got a kick out of listening to Taiwanese businessmen mangle the words of Beatles songs—which they assumed were what I liked as an American. I think a lot of people in Asia assume the Beatles are American. But my principal host, Mr. Lueng—a fellow journalist I’d met on assignment in Nepal—taught me a traditional ditty that goes something like this:
When someone punches me,
I fall down;
When someone spits at me,
I turn my head;
When someone yells at me,
I don’t get angry;
It’s less trouble for me
And less trouble for them.
That is a very—I don’t want to say Asian sentiment unilaterally, but it fits a number of countries, not just Taiwan. Whereas it’s not a very American sentiment.
I often find it going through my head when some nine-thousand-pound lady is hogging all the dryers at the Laundromat.
For years my life got quiet. I brought in a paycheck; I went out for drinks with old friends; I started seeing a woman, although it didn’t work out. In ’98 for Vanity Fair I landed a big interview with Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. I think they were right to send me and not Chris Hitchens. They liked the piece, and people—mostly religious people—wrote in to say my treatment of him and my questions were respectful. So for a short while I got a reputation as a religion guy, and in 2000 they sent me to do a piece in Taiwan on Fo Guang Shan.
Now, Fo Guang Shan means “Buddha’s Light Mountain”; it was founded back in the ’40s by a refugee who’d come over from the mainland. To hear them tell it, he’d built it with his bare hands out of nothing, and now it was the largest Buddhist organization in Taiwan with branch temples worldwide. It was in the Chan lineage, but as far as I can tell, all those places are like Protestant churches—more or less the same.
The order’s founder was still alive but in Singapore, so I toured the main temple, spoke a little with the current abbot and a few of the venerables and some of the students at their college. It was a whole compound with an elementary and a high school. I say compound but I don’t mean to make it sound cult-like. Everyone there was nice, and if there’s one thing about Buddhism I’ve observed: stated positively, you don’t have to believe anything you don’t want to. Stated negatively, you can’t believe anything at all—if you’re a foreigner they tell you what they think you want to hear, and I imagine it’s the same for initiates. If you believe in God they’ll call the Buddha-nature God. If you believe in science they won’t mention rebirth, hungry ghosts, or the hells. There’s a doctrine—uppaya in Sanskrit, hoben in Japanese—that’s translated “skillful means,” which says that truth can be expressed in any number of ways and has to be expressed in different ways to different people, and in Japan they have a saying: uso mo hoben, meaning a lie is skillful means, too.
That’s kind of a pussy tactic, if you ask me, but at the same time you have to admire the balls on a theological doctrine that essentially says it’s okay to lie. And maybe after all that’s not such a bad thing when standing by your principles means strapping a bomb to yourself and blowing up the other guy.
I came there to report on the temple. I did the piece, and I turned it in, and I’ll see if it gets used. I ended up reporting on something very different.
But first, something happened there that seems important now.
The temple didn’t have a reception desk, only a big gaudy fountain-statue of Quan Yin Bodhisattva taming a dragon, and the venerable who was supposed to meet us had gotten his wires crossed, so—because it was a nice day and a beautiful temple—we started wandering. I was there with my cameraman, a young guy from California named Pickett, shaved head and a couple of bracelets on both arms. I had never worked with him before and I could tell he thought I was old-fashioned. Pickett fancied himself a Buddhist and had a mandala tattooed up his back that you could see on his neck.
Pickett was appalled by those giant Technicolor statues: “It’s fucking Taiwanese Disneyland.” I guess he expected they’d all be living in abject holy poverty, and I could have explained to him that that sort of thing doesn’t bring in the acolytes. Was this skillful means, these statues, or was it skillful means to package Buddhism to Americans as some pragmatic philosophy? Did anyone know? Maybe the founder, but he wasn’t telling.
“If the Buddha could see this shit he would cry,” said Pickett.
Just to get him mad, I bought about fifty good-luck charms at the gift shop and hung them on my neck and my wrist, and I tried to hang them on his camera. He just looked away and muttered something about superstitious fucking bullshit.
The venerable we were looking for was a teacher at the college, so eventually—after a few bubble-teas at their café—we consulted a map and headed in that direction. The temple wasn’t that large but as stupid Americans we got lost immediately. Instead we ended up inside the girls’ high school.
The two girls we bumped into weren’t shocked or shy at all; in fact, they thought we were teachers, and it took work—pointing at Pickett’s camera—to get across that we were journalists. My Mandarin is frankly lousy, and Pickett’s was nonexistent—we were counting on them to provide us with a translator—and while most Taiwanese take something like seven years of English, these girls were only so far along in their education. Next we managed to hash out the word “college,” upon which they immediately and cheerfully agreed to take us there.
I wondered if they just wanted to cut class.
To be honest, I don’t recall much what they looked like. But I think all Asian girls below a certain age are cute. Call me what you like, a racist or a pervert, but it’s like I said: you feel sort of protective. I do remember one of them wore a white T-shirt that, when she turned her back to us, I saw read, Drive away with me. Lot’s run away together.
Goddamn, I thought. But isn’t that a beautiful sentiment?
As we walked past the athletic grounds, they waved to their friends on the basketball court and yelled something.
“‘Do you like American men?’” Pickett whispered to me in spurious translation.
They took us by the back door of the college and one of them went inside, leaving the other alone with us, looking slightly nervous. We were standing next to a pool with big carp in it. Pointing at them, Pickett said, “Fish?”
The
