More Observations About Taiwan

I’ve been witnessing the end game of commitment here in Taiwan – ailing grandpas in various states of incontinence, tended to by their wrinkled wives who have their own back problems, spending the twilight of their years driving each other crazy (the unsexy kind of crazy). You’d think personal growth and learning at their age would have stopped years ago, but there are still domestic disputes, lectures, and lessons to be learned from both sides. It’s depressing or hopeful, depending on how you look at it. In the West, we keep death and old age at bay by ignoring it (or sending your pruning relatives to a nursing home in Florida)… all the way until we are forced to confront it face to face, by staring into a waxen corpse lying in a casket, or through the ceremony of scattering ashes. Or ultimately, as a sudden vacuum that knocks your wind out.

People live in a sort of temporal overlap here – grown men and women live with their parents, who live with their parents. There is wisdom abound, but I cannot tap into the depths of it because of my limited appreciation of Chinese.

Back to my point here – living among the old and infirm has not only been a reminder of my own mortality, but also of what commitment REALLY means. It’s going to the supermarket together to buy dinner ingredients so that you don’t accidently trigger her lactose intolerance again. It’s taking care of your senile husband as he slowly forgets the life he spent with you. Its years and years of trouble and worry mixed in with the triumphs and failures that one can never predict. A unit fails just as much as the individual. It’s beautiful and tragic, and it’s completely natural… yet it is as foreign to me as the string of insults the legless/toothless/flea-ridden homeless man mumbles at me as I am getting off the subway terminal during the silent wee hours of night.

The type of people I pity the most here are those shells of humans who cling to life alone, reluctantly breathing amongst the stench and refuse that even the rain refuses to sweep away. These people have no kin, no connection, and no hope. They even lack the entrepreneul spirit of the American homeless. They are the most desolate beings I have ever encountered – they have even abandoned themselves.

I suppose it’s no coincidence that I have to realize all of this year, finally past the afterglow of my college years, sitting in a small room alone in a foreign country as the rain pitter-patters above. I want to choose life, I want to have options, and I want to have the petty and overbearing care of a family that can help make the inevitable aging process go by with a certain element of grace. Maybe I’m secretly still a sucker for that self-sacrificial, unconditional love that those Chinese dramas keep babbling about incoherently, the kind that involves a lot of tears and a dead hero who didn’t have to actually die.