On the rare occasion that I'm awake at 07:30, it's usually because I've been up all night. This was an exception. Lzyk said she couldn't go because women are ritually forbidden, but I didn't believe her. Our crew met up with the extended family near a large cement canal, about 50m across and 10m deep. The canal is so fouled with garbage and water plants that the water flows through more like a swamp than a river. Amazingly, thousands of large fish thrash around in the septic quagmire, and I've seen people trudging through it barefoot, carrying funny little nets and coolers. "Phillipine people," I was reassured. "Taiwan people will not eat these fish from the trash." I didn't ask if Taiwanese people might sell these fish from the trash. Tilapia are amazingly hardy. The trash canal is lined with the brilliant pink eggs of the African land snail. In their infinite wisdom, the old government had imported and released them, imagining that they would be edible. Instead, they carry too many parasites and outcompeted the local snails. Now everyone has less food and more disease. I've been warned against handling them. If you hit one on a skateboard, it's like hitting a meat grenade.
We got our gear together. There was a normal pair of clippers, but the other two tools I had to choose from were very foreign. One was a slender, hooked hatchet sort of thing. I learned later that it's used for chopping bamboo. The other was a delicate little hand saw, the blade being no bigger than a TV remote. It's used for cutting the thick clumps of grass that grow so fast here.
We started up a steep single lane asphalt road. Within a few dozen meters, the air was thick with the smell of rotting garbage. The road was lined on both sides with knee high burms of trash that some filthy fuckers had systematically thrown out down the length of the entrance to the cemetery. Noone else batted an eye, but the stench was so powerful that I was gasping for breath by the time we had climbed above this section.
Cemeteries here are strange places. From a distance, they look like cities, but the old kind of cities, all higgeldy piggeldly and disorganized in such a compete way that they start to look like naturally self-organizing structures in nature, like crystals or mud as it splits and cracks and dries in the sun. Up close, the chaos is more visceral. Trash was absolutely everywhere. Smashed bottles, cans, cigarette packets, food refuse, batteries, ... there isn't much point of trying to list what species of garbage had been strewn all across cemetery, as though a Chinese bomber had flown over and dropped bits of every single thing that modern people throw away across the hilltop. I had to assume that their bombers were active this day, because our air force certainly was. For hours, flight after flight of interceptors roared over and out to sea, warding off the enemy. This is what war would sound like, at first.
The first grave we cleaned was someone born in China. According to my translator, he was a pirate. He came to Taiwan around the same time my earliest ancestors first came to America. We chopped, pulled, cut, sawed, and collected all the vegetable life that can grow up in a year in the tropics. Then we put rows of yellow paper slips on the ground, and put little rocks on top of them, to hold them in place. After taht, we put some red paper on the headstone under another rock, and lit inscence. At one corner of the grave site, inside of its randomly drawn little rock wall, was a rock just big enough to be unable to pick up. On it was written the name of the god of the dirt, and we offerered that god some insences and snacks. We also left some for the pirate anscestor, but neither one was hungry, so we gathered up the gifts and went on to the next grave, where we repeated the process.
Some people had "accidentally" caught the grass on fire a few days before, and partially melted plastic bags hung from the trees like flying jellyfish caught on reefs. The fire had been recent enough that we stirred up a good bit of soot and ash as our party proceeded to the next graves. "Pirates' helpers," I was told.
We walked back through the rubbish to the canal and then down the canal past a filthy dairy where cows were locked into a tiny room, standing shoulder to shoulder in a morass of their own shit. Some dogs attacked us, but I had the little hatchet thing, and didn't have to really use it on them.
The last grave was my favorite. It was by itself, on a steep hillside. We had to climb up through a thick bamboo forest, through sickeningly rotten bags of goop soup that someone had been throwing out there for a long time. The motivation fro someone to dump grocery bags of food on the path to a gravesite, high up on the side of a small mountain, completely escapes me. Some bags were old, but others were putrid and fresh. The ground was slippery with bamboo leaves and I developed a healthy fear of slipping and falling into one these horrors. The bamboo is viscious here, and sports inch long razor sharp spines at every junction of its body. We cleared the site and I felt like part of the family. I sat there with lzyk's dad for a while, after everyone left, because he felt weak from the heat, and we enjoyed the wind playing in the bamboo. Eventually, we descended through the haggis-landmines and into the roar of scooters and air pollution and garbage rivers and feral dogs and heaps of trash in random places on the sides of the road.
No wonder every advert here is so cloying. It's consumption as an alternative to taking responsibility for your surroundings.
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