These past two weeks I have been in Taiwan at a conference for Fulbright, getting a chance to meet up my fellow Fulbrighters from Taiwan as well as see what the island had to offer in terms of culture and scenery.
While the latter was breathtaking—Taroko Gorge, in particular, might be the most beautiful place I’ve ever been to—the culture of Taiwan left a deep impression on me as well. It was more about what people didn’t do, rather than did: people didn’t spit in the streets, they didn’t cut in line at the subway, they didn’t shout loudly while on tourist trips… and they didn’t seem to be overcome by the same rat-race mentality that abounds in Beijing. There was free wi-fi and gender-free nursing rooms in the subway as well… and large-scale democratic demonstrations for and against the building of a nuclear power plant. All of these things would be unheard of in mainland China.
Just as I was preparing to leave this (paradise?) island and head back to the crazy bizarro-land that is mainland China, a friend reminded me why I could never live in Taiwan. While we ate Thai curry chicken and caught up on life since we’d last seen each other, my friend Sophia asked if I’d heard about the pigs.
“Pigs?” I asked. “What pigs?”
“A wave of three thousand dead pigs is flowing into Shanghai,” she said. “Nobody knows how they got there. But it’s not the first time it’s happened either.”
Dead pigs in a river—I can see that happening. Who doesn’t occasionally deal with a rotting pork tsunami crashing down on their shores? China is a large country and generally a madhouse when it comes to environmental regulation. Recently a local environmental advocate promised to pay the local Environmental Bureau Chief 200,000 Yuan to swim in a river that “passed” safety regulations but was clearly still noxious and polluted.
But dead pigs in Shanghai? The crown jewel of the new Chinese financial machine? The capitalistic capitol of the nation? A city where there is no lack of rich people wishing to keep their rivers pig-free? I was shocked; I was sure that the government would have at least found a way to stop the dead pig-wave before it got to Shanghai.
I realized that so much of my comedy comes from observing absurdity that if I were to move away from such absurdity, it would be a serious strain on my ability to collect material. Yes, Beijing is a crazy industrializing city—but it’s my crazy industrializing city, and there is a freedom in knowing that a world where a porcine zombie invasion can overcome the richest city in the land, anything must be possible. And, if comedy is setting up expectations and then inverting them, where better to live than a place where things begin inverted and all I need to do is absorb them?
All joking aside, Taiwan was beautiful, the people excellent, and the government incredibly supportive of bringing students to the island to study. I am eager to look at some of the scholarship opportunities, and maybe I will find my way back to Taipei in the hazy future.
But for now, I can’t wait to get back to Beijing, and to a country where I can be a standup comedian by reading the news headlines in the morning.
3/12/13
PS: I saw this joke online about the pig wave, thought I would share it!