The Moon Festival, Two Anniverseries, and a Super Typhoon

This weekend, all Taiwan stops to celebrate a legend that dates back to the year 2150 B.C.   As a culture that preserves China's ancient cultural traditions-and in this case a tradition that goes back to ancient times, I find myself as a  historian just gasping in awe when contemplating the persistence of human memory here.  Celebrations in Taiwan  have roots that are so old,  that literally every small occasion is layered like an onion with custom and ritual.  The Moon Festival chronicles the story of an ancient Queen,  Chang-er, who drank the elixir of immortality rather than see her cruel husband, who was a tyrant, take the potion and live forever.  She took the elixir, and found her body growing very light.  She floated up to the moon, and now lives there, watching over humanity.  The Moon Festival also celebrates the rebellion of the Chinese people against the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty in the 12th century.  The Chinese rebels made special cakes which signalled the beginning of their uprising, and signalled the recovery of the Chinese Ming Dynasty-the government that  took power from the Yuan or Mongol Dynasty-the regime of Ghengis Khan.  So people here eat moon cakes on this weekend as well, to celebrate the recovery of Chinese sovereignty at that time.

Since both the 60th anniversery of the establishment of the Chinese Communist regime,  and the anniversery of the Tiananmen Square student uprising in 1989 took place last week and this week, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, populations with a history of being outside the Communist regime, have staged protests and memorials for the victims of the Communist regime.  Taiwan and Hong Kong are also places where in a sense the "losers" in the Chinese civil war of 1949-1950 have established an alternative version of modern Chinese society.  My home in Hsinchu is a center for democratic protest and mainland China watching-watching with an eye to maintaining Taiwan's sovereignty, democratic freedoms, and freedom of public expression.  Last weekend my friend and I came upon a huge protest parade in downtown Hsinchu.  It was a consortium of protesters:  the Falun Gong-a group of meditators who are banned on the mainland, workers who worry that the new Taiwanese/Chinese trade agreements over free trade across the Strait will affect their job security,  and human rights activists commemorating the Tiananmen Square anniversery.  To the beat of drums, whole familes paraded down the main street of Hsinchu, draped with  slogan-bearing placards.  It was peaceful, huge, and awe-inspiring.

This weekend all of Taiwan is also watching a pair of big typhoons make their way across the Pacific.  Typhoon Melor is going to hit Saipan and Tinian in the Marianas Island chain, hit the Northern Philippines which is already reeling from another horrific tropical storm that has claimed hundreds of victims in Manila last week,  and then slam into to the southern Chinese coast.  The other typoon in the area is Typhoon Parma, which is set to turn into a supertyphoon and hit southern Taiwan early next week, in the very area still recovering from a prior tropical storm:  Morokot, which devasted the region last August.  The Pacific is a storm factory-and here in Taiwan, each storm as for all the peoples of the Pacific, can in one day change one's life forever.  This reality contributes to the atmosphere of timelessness here-the constant sense that what is important is the present moment.  This is a Buddhist belief, a Taoist belief, and is at its most basic an outlook ground into the spirit here-where people face the terror of the Pacific, the uncertainty of earthquakes, and in terms of the politics, the uncertainty of being in the middle of a never solved civil war-a conflict that has divided Chinese and Taiwanese families here for generations.

When I was reading the Taipei Times this week  I came upon a story which illustrates how this deep past, and this living in a Buddhist, moment oriented present can weave itself into daily life.  I read a story of a man who lost his mother  to a hit and run car accident seventeen years ago, who prays to the Goddess Matsu (a Goddess nearly as old as Chang er-the lady on the Moon) that he will find the person who hit his mother.  He sets up a shrine to her on  the anniversery of her death, and also tries to live in the present-meditating everyday to help himself live with his grief.  Pragmatically Chinese, he uses a combination of traditions to address his pain.  It is this varied mosaic of traditions, politics, history, and geography that come together in Taiwan, making it a fascinating place to live.