fish of the day

Bill Bryson (my "coach" see here)
with his fish-shaped plaque for a podium finish in the Hualien Triathlon
(i finished too!, but only just -- i went too fast on the bike and had nothing left for the run, utterly utterly awful)

life on the edge of tormorrow

China Post editorial:

Is life in Taipei really as intolerable as they say?

Taipei might be the nation's political, economic and cultural capital, and have hundreds of kilometers of riverside bicycle paths and a highly popular mass-transportation system. It might have historical sites, museums, hot springs, world-class shops, and restaurants offering cuisines from around Taiwan, as well as from every region of China and every continent on the planet. But last week it was voted the second-worst place to live in Taiwan, only beating out Keelung, long portrayed as being damp, dreary and deprived.

The same public opinion survey, carried out on the behest of a national Chinese-language newspaper, found Hualien and Yilan counties, followed by Taichung City, to be the most popular choices.

Over the next few days, despite the knowledge that opinion polls can accidentally or intentionally be worded to produce all manner of results, and the fact that this survey simply asked about desire and not intent or reason, not to mention that similar recent surveys have placed Taipei at the top, rather than the bottom, of such rankings (and international surveys have selected Taipei as one of the top places to live in Asia), other media outlets spent much of the week wheeling out academic* “expert” witnesses to speculate about Taipei's shortcomings.

Their collective wisdom focused largely on the issue of housing costs. Also at center stage was the perception that the“simple life”led on Taiwan's east coast was“like a perpetual holiday”compared to the drudgery experienced by most of Taipei's office workers who often work from dawn-to-long-after-dusk.

This is a revealing interpretation, because Hualien and Yilan, both conveniently accessible from Taipei following the construction of the Syueshan Tunnel, top the ratings, whereas Taitung, further down the same coast and equally, if not more, idyllic but less accessible, does not score so highly.

So what this survey really showed was that people are dissatisfied with their lifestyles, not with their location. Compared to certain authoritarian states, where people do not have the right to live wherever they want, Taiwan is a free society, and the government does not restrict people's right to make their home anywhere. There is no need to conduct a poll asking people where they would like to live, therefore, since this can simply be ascertained from official population statistics. Thus 2.6 million people choose to live in Taipei City. Combined with the further 3.8 million of Taipei County, this represents more than one quarter of all Taiwan's citizens expressing and acting upon the desire to live in the greater Taipei area.

In comparison, just 340,000 live in Hualien County, despite it being almost 20 times the size of Taipei City, and 460,000 in Yilan County, despite its much lower house prices and 40-minute commute to Taipei. Add on the 230,000 who live in Taitung County, and the whole of Taiwan's east coast, with its clean air and simple lifestyle, still attracts less than 5 percent of the nation's population.

And while each year some professionals who are able to do their jobs online relocate to the countryside, and a few others give up their jobs, turning their backs on urban noise and pollution, and head off to Dulan or some other east-coast Shangri-La, they are far outnumbered by the droves of ambitious youths heading in the opposite direction as soon as they receive their high-school diplomas. Even after retirement, when many elderly (or not so elderly) people are in a position to cash in on the huge increase in the values of their properties, then buy something cheaper in a pleasant location and live comfortably off the chunk of change generated, most still opt to stay in the cities where they have spent their working lives.

So was last week's newspaper survey simply an attempt to generate a sensational headline, or a well-intentioned attempt to understand present-day society that merely asked the wrong question, or does it tell us something useful about people's changing priorities and their wishes for a better life?

The last two decades have already seen a significant shift from a drive to make money above all else, to a healthier work-play balance, which has witnessed a blossoming of hobbies, increased concern for the environment, and an explosion of domestic and overseas travel.

It is perhaps against this background, therefore, that the survey's results should be viewed. Taipei's citizens would like the same clear skies and pollution-free air they experience on weekend trips to the coast, they'd like to drive freely down the road not sit idling their time at traffic lights, they'd like to go to work at nine and leave at six so they can spend time with their families or on their hobbies, and they'd love to experience those cheap property prices.

In short, Taipei's citizens do not really want to move to Hualien (otherwise they would), but they would like to move a little bit of Hualien into Taipei.

*The original text read: "... associate professor expert witnesses ...", and the first draft actually said: "... associate professor expert witnesses who supplement their earnings and attempt to garner their reputations by speculating on such issues ..." (or something like that)

-- I have nothing against associate professors, but i do have something against media organisations that over-rely on their limited (sometimes non-existent) expertise on issues, meanwhile misleading readers--their main purpose--into believing these commentators' opinions are trustworthy, presumably on the strength of the word "professor".

fish of the day

Taipei Times: photo story

An oarfish, also known as an “earthquake fish,” lies on the ground after it was caught in waters off Hualien County yesterday. Locals say that the increasing appearance of oarfish suggests an earthquake.PHOTO: CNA

if she can ...

last image on leaving Hualien

"Our earth is in the hands of these hero[es]"

[painted on the wall near the Hualien fire station]

fish of the day

Fish (? or woman, or, The Shad suggests, a castrated male) outside the Hualien Stone Sculpturing Museum (石雕博物館)

Aborigines, whirling water but definitely not flowers

A great many explanations are given for the origin of the name Hualien (花蓮, "flower lotus"), including wishful thinking, such that the nearbycliffs where covered by joined(連) flowers.

Most reliable seems to be that it was called HuaLen (洄瀾,“whirling waves”) by Hoklo-speaking settlers. This is said to be a description of the swirling back of water in the Hualien River (花蓮溪) as it met the ocean.

There is also another early name of GeeLai (奇萊, and variants, QiLai in Mdn.), which Abe (安倍明義) says derived from the Amis Aboriginal name for the area, "Q Kirai" .

Some people claim 奇萊 was changed to "Hualien" during the period of Japanese rule (1895-1945) because the Japanese pronunciation sounds the same as a word for "detest".

But it seems that the change in names from 洄瀾 to the similar sounding (in Hoklo) 花蓮 dates from two decades before the Japanese, when Shen Bao-zhen (沈葆楨) petitioned the Qing court to make the change. Shen is closely tied to much of Hualien's early history because it was being explored and cleared for cultivation by Han Chinese during his stint in charge of Taiwan.

new towns, old towns

The northern suburbs of Hualien, many of which have nice, broad, tree-lined streets, belong it seems to XinCheng (新城, "new town") Township rather than Hualien (花蓮) City itself.

Xincheng dates from the 1870s when the top Qing official in Taiwan, Shen Bao-zhen (沈葆楨), had three roads constructed to connect the underdeveloped Hualien County to the rest of the island as part of Chinese attempts to civilize (subdue) Aborigines in the wake of the Mudan Incident (牡丹社事件).

Xincheng, near the north of the county, was the first "new town" to be developed.

In contrast, nearby Guangfu (光復, "Retrocession") was an Aboriginal township with a long history.

Since every household grew beans, the area was known as the hometown of bean growing, “Fataan” in the language of the Amis. This was transliterated into Hoklo Chinese as “馬太鞍”, and appeared in Qing dynasty texts under this and other Chinese names.

When the ROC administrators rolled into Hualien in 1945, they decided to upgrade the community to the level of township. As the first new township following the end of Japanese rule and the "retrocession" of Taiwan to Chinese rule, it was given the honor of being called "Retrocession”.

This was supposed to be a fish-of-the-day post, but was sidetracked to place-name history (another VftH obsession). Anyway, here's the same sign from Xincheng, but more "artistic" because VftH's chief photographer forgot to set the flash.