Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

The 2014 Brazil World Cup is now down to the last few games, but here in Taipei, the sudden soccer fever among the younger residents only seem to grow stronger by the day.  Every night when the game is on, multiple bars advertise showings and multiple social groups and official gatherings emerge to indulge in all-night binge-watching, replete with the usual face-painting of national flags and wearing of soccer jerseys.  This is all happening in a place where the national soccer team has never made it to the World Cup (nor has any chance to in the foreseeable future).

Once upon a time not that long ago, inserting the "social aspect" to the fast-growing industry of online shopping was considered a no-brainer.  Integrate the likes of Facebook and Twitter functions to product pages on ecommerce outlets, and the words of the mouth from one's friends and families, increasingly merging into one biggest online networking presence , will as a collective provide the necessary persuasion to get potential online shoppers to click on those "check-out" buttons.  After all, just as people take friends to go with them on trips to brick-and-mortar retail outlets, they also should for their online counterparts.

It was 1am on a rainy day when the author got into a casually parked cab for a post-drinking ride home.  The cab driver seemed rather tired, prompting a question from the still energetic author to figure out the reason.  "I had like 3 rides from Xizhi to Banqiao just in half a day today."  The driver quipped, nonchalantly exposing the sense of surprise even after completing those 40km, 40min (without traffic), 20 USD (quite a sum for a single ride on a Taiwanese taxi) journeys.  "And all of them were young ladies by themselves...but during the day when the MRT is still operating."  The driver elaborated, referring to Taipei's subway system.

Two years ago today, this blog posted on the meaning of the Tiananmen Incident for the ethnic Chinese populations living around the world, noting that the failure for resolution, reconciliation, and above all, lack of official apology, continue to be a painful patch of darkness in the minds of millions.  Certainly, this point is all the truer today on the Incident's 25th anniversary than it has ever been.  But as that two-year post has also noted, today's China is no longer the China of 1989, a much more complex place where sheer weight of economic development has wrecked havoc on the very social fabric.

It is a disturbing time that people seem to live in nowdays.  The fury of one person is casually unleashed upon the innocent passerby, making them the cannon fodder for social frustration that are not only not caused by them, but not even really related to them in any way.   The bloody mess in a subway carriage in Taipei recently is followed by a drive-by shooting in the UC Santa Barbara campus in California, in both cases instigated by young man whose unique concerns with their own, rather different forms of social disgruntlement were suddenly exposed to a society unprepared to receive them in the way it did.

It has been a few days since one of the most talked about violent crimes in Taiwan's recent history took place.  A 21-year-old student, allegedly neglected by both parents and society at large, stabbed through carriages full of innocent commuters on Taipei's subway, killing four in what people can only dub as a psychopathic assault.  Since the incident, both mass and social media here are filled with speculative reports on the background of the 21-year-old, with discussions ranging from how to detect anti-social behaviors early in a person's life to how to properly punish violent criminals of this sort.

"You know, after going to those kinds of places often enough, you feel that anywhere else you go, the girls are just not pretty enough, and you would not feel any sense of attraction," the young Chinese-Canadian quipped to the author outside the restaurant/bar as the usual crowded Saturday night meetup went on at its rooftop, "It's just, when you know getting girls of even better stature than what's on offer here at this event, it makes you feel like a loser just to put in so much effort for trying to hit it off with them."  The guy, apparently, is just meeting up male friends with whom he can have interesting conversations.

The author has seen drunk people at nightclubs in his various partying experiences in previous years , but never thought that a nightclub's entrance can come to look like entrance to the emergency department of a local hospital.  It is three o'clock in the morning, and the true casualties of the night was starting to appear at the 5th floor mega-club.  It is no longer a steady stream of excited but still conscious and stumbling happy faces streaming out...it was, instead, the fully unconscious, being brought out the establishment, literally, in wheelchairs, assisted by the club's suited, poker-faced, and potentially highly annoyed resident staff.

Someone who lives in an ethnically homogeneous society ( or at least one that claims itself to be ) often requires a visually exaggerated definition of race in order of make sense of distant peoples they often cannot meet in real life.  Oh ok, Italians eat pasta, Japanese eat sushi, Americans eat hamburgers...thats all harmless and well if one never gets to meet an Italian, a Japanese, or an American.  Whatever it takes to help people remember different peoples and their practical differences, then, would prove somewhat valuable for, say, watching TV or going for short tourist visits in foreign countries.

Recently, a massive cruise ship accident off the coast of Korea has become the latest human disaster, quickly overshadowing the still nowhere-to-be-found Malaysian Airlines flight 370 to become the global headline-grabber.  Global attention and sympathies proved easily to obtain in such combination of circumstances: a holiday cruise of young high schoolers enjoying the last vacation before exam studies, a country supposedly leading the world in a technological manufacturing, and a rescue procedure so inept-sounding, incompetent-looking, and punctured with a story line so full of holes that the casual observer can only be shocked.

This author is not a busy man at the moment, in fact a man with very very abundant amount of leisure.  There is no getting around this fact.  It is all the more ironic considering a mere few months ago, he was working six days a week, some twelve hours a day, getting so physically and emotionally sick from the experience that he had to quit his job, leave the country , take a massive pay cut, just to recover from the fiasco.  A part of him is starting to miss the days where he had so little time for himself that savings started accumulating not particularly because he was being financially astute, but simply because there was no time to spend cash.

The author began this lazy Saturday with an afternoon coffee with a Taiwan-based political risk consultant, serving American companies hoping to get established in the local market on the island.  As much as he tried his best to portray some advantages of Taiwan, especially in the technological and cost side of doing business, the key takeaway, ultimately, was how difficult it is to attract clientele for the local office here.  This was especially so when compared to other offices based in China and Southeast Asia, where clients piled in to inquire about services offered.

One of the biggest, most luxurious, and most famous departure stores in Taipei is beyond just a building with expensive brand-name shops.  It is actually a complex of FOUR buildings, each of which 7-8 storied and all of them connected via pedestrian-only bridges on the ground level, and sky bridges on the 4th floor.  From restaurants to food courts, cosmetics to clothing lines, activity halls to nearby movie theaters, the Shin Kong Mitsukoshi seem to contain everything a shopper would ever want in order to while away a lazy weekend.

When it comes to Westerners stereotyping Asians for the way they entertain themselves, a few truisms dominate.  Most notably, speaking of karaoke, an activity popular from the most basic "resorts" in the Philippines to out here in Taiwan, the Westerners do not mask their disdain.  Calling the drunken butchering of so many classics something "less interesting than watching paint dry on the wall," travel guides do not hesitate to place them at an inferior status compared to the glorious emergence of Western-style bars, pubs, and dance clubs in international-oriented major Asian cities.

The ideas of fighting for honor, to modern human beings, seem like obsolete ideas of the past fit for history books but anachronistic in modern societies where rational considerations for individual and collective interests trump what is often perceived an overtly emotional exercise of avenging wrongdoings for vague moral purposes.  And indeed, the last Hollywood blockbuster "47 Ronin," a sci-fi-tinged retelling of a Japanese true story about a group of master-less samurai revenge-killing a rival lord for their dead master, cannot get more medieval in context.

It has been more than a month since one of the largest typhoon swept across Philippines, destroying major towns along the way, and killing tens of thousands, with several times more still unaccounted for in remote, still unreachable villages.  Previously, discussions on the lack of political will to build adequate infrastructure, legitimatized by the democratically elected political dynasties building up local cults of personality among uneducated voters , only served to exacerbate the suffering.  But the intersection of systemic corruption and politics, interestingly enough, is now an Asia-wide issue.

It is the author's solid belief that modern cinematography of the futuristic fiction genre is becoming increasingly a forum of political commentary, as demonstrated previously by the Purge , and now by the newly released second installment of the Hunger Games  trilogy.  In fact, the political commentary associated with this latest film was so obviously presented, so not at all subtly nuanced, and so blatantly naked that as a member of the audience in a rather upscale cinema, the author was feeling cold sweat running down his back thinking just how subversive and seditious its conveyed messages are.

There was a teenage girl, donning a trendy T-shirt, tight-fitting jeans, and high heels in the middle of the night market in a remote corner of Yangon outskirts.  As the people went about its narrow pedestrian-only alleyways buying vegetables and other daily needed goods, her team put up a small boom-box and lighting system in one of the more spacious intersections.  The boom-box started blasting the latest English club hits, the lights turned on to the small space on the streets in front of the boom-box.

"Welcome! 오서오세요!! いらっしゃいませ!!!"  As soon as the author and his friends stepped inside the purposely dark-tinted and heavy metal doors of the karaoke lounges surrounding Malate's Remedios Circle, dozens of girls, dressed in various themed costumes for the night (ranging from schoolgirl to maids) surrounded them, putting on their best smiles in front of the potential customers lazily scanning each girl up and down before deciding to stay or go.  Outside, male representatives of each competing lounge shove pictures of their best girls in front of passersby, hoping to get more customers.

Tucked in a densely forested northeastern corner of Quezon City lies University of Philippines-Silliman, the main (and the largest) campus of the UP system that is the cornerstone of the country’s publicly funded tertiary education system.  Every year, 2000 freshman from all over the country, selected based on scores on a tough and highly competitive entrance exam, enters the campus, receiving a heavily subsidized education courtesy of the Philippine government.