A weird week with the billionaire buddhists
While the world reels under the sickness of COVID-19, Taiwan remains relatively utopian. A pandemic-free Nirvana.
In late April I took the liberty of hitchhiking from Hehuanshan to Hualien, as part of a yet undetermined period of rest and relaxation. Taking photos of cloud seas rolling and steaming majestically through rocky valleys, a rare car passes and I opportunistically stick my thumb out. To my surprise, it stops: I'm not even wearing a surgical mask.
The stinky backpacker climbs into the pristine white 4x4 containing a tiny elderly couple. I try to drum up conversation, but eventually small talk fizzles. The rest of the winding journey is mostly silence, with me pretending to sleep. The couple seem warm and friendly though, and we exchange contact details, them saying to get in touch if I need anything. They drop me off at my hostel, and I try to offer them some cash for their trouble but they refuse as though offended.
At the hostel, I meet V, a Singaporean girl. We visit Hualien's 東大門 night market, which is ghostly on Mondays. V tells me about her run-in with local police after she tried to camp in the wild. She has blown up on local media, risking a diplomatic tiff between Taiwan and Singapore. We laugh at the overreaction - but it's almost foreboding of events to come.
The elderly lady from before, Chong Fang Ayi (CFA), messages multiple times, calls me on LINE and again on my phone. She asks if I would like to join them for a two-day trip to Taitung the following day. I mention I am with a friend, and she invites her too. V agrees, despite neither of us having a clue what the plans are.
The next morning, the elderly couple pick us up. They are joined by a friend from Taoyuan, Joey, a lady of 50 who, thanks to fillers, looks much younger. With V joining the party, the journey is more animated and conversational than my original hitchhike with Chong Fang Ayi and Wu Baba. We discover that they are vegetarian Tzu Chi buddhists who unironically own a fishing equipment shop in Taoyuan.
Our first stop is 吉安修園, an old Japanese colonial-era courtyard with wooden houses.
A brief stop for selfies at Liyu Lake 鯉魚潭 - it starts to rain.
Then lunch at 芳草古樹花園, a Hakka restaurant that President Tsai Ing-wen ate at in 2018. My first Lei Cha is mindblowing.
We drive through 大農大富 forest park for a pee break. Then we pass 自強外役監獄, ogling prisoners making beautiful floral creations. Road 193 is one of the most beautiful in Taiwan, but Wu Baba gets stopped for speeding. He laughs nervously. Another driver is stopped too, and I see him also laughing nervously. I picture British drivers getting stopped for speeding and laughing nervously.
We get to our destination which turns out not to be Taitung but an excessively fancy hotel outside Taitung. It's called Papago International Resort or something. Our jaws drop - they can't be serious. Are we actually staying here??
V and I laugh nervously, in shock.
Wu Baba and Chong Fang Ayi pay for a double room for themselves and a quadruple for Me, V and Joey. I feel like My Fair Lady. I haven't felt this much like a peasant since my au-pairing days in Chengdu.
For dinner they order us pricey hotpot, at 900 NT (30 USD) a head. I check the room rates online - 6,000 NTD (about 201 USD) per night. V and I play some ping pong and hit the gym to shift some gut. That evening, she shares some personal history with me and Joey and we all get emotional and more involved in each other's lives.
The following morning we pack our bellies at the breakfast buffet. I inhale a sesame-doused salad, hotpot, sesame bread, two 米漿s (peanut rice milk), Italian spiced pumpkin, seeds, fried turnip cake, and a fuckton of watermelon.
We hire out an electric quadricycle which V drives around the rice paddies opposite the hotel. Wu Baba stays behind to nap.
I'm still stuffed from breakfast, but we stop at a famous steamed bun place called 東河包子. I ask what makes these buns so special, but no one can really tell me.
On the way back to Hualien, we stop briefly for a wee by Baxian Caves, snap the Tropic of Cancer from our petrol-guzzler, and drink tea at Joki workshop. Wu Baba convinces me to postpone the rest of my stay at the hostel and stay at theirs, with V, instead. On the way home, V tells me about her work in the Singaporean sex industry as a fetishist. Joey is eavesdropping. We later figure out she speaks English.
It's dark by the time we reach Casa de Wu, but V and I are not too sleepy for our jaws to drop again. The four-floor house and its gardens make up an exquisite villa. The front room has a portrait of Tzu Chi founder Master Cheng Yen, baroque sofas and a humungous concave television. Indigenous gardeners and a Sumatran maid come once a week for the mansion's upkeep.
V and I share a double room with an adjoining bathroom. We feel like charity cases. It's hard to believe these people are buddhists. But they donate millions of NTD to build schools in Mozambique. They say that their generosity stems from a desire to be reincarnated to a better life. So V and I relax a little, happy to be tools for their accumulation of karma points.
The next day we see how this works in action. The five of us head to Tzu Chi for a tour of the grounds. Bald nuns, robed in grey and donning surgical masks, congregate in the courtyard in front of Still Thought Abode at a socially acceptable distance. We are greeted by four or so "commissioner" women wearing long, navy blue qipaos with their hair in buns. They remind me of the Aunts in The Handmaid's Tale.
The commissioners grab the two foreigners by the arms, especially the vegan one. They insist we sign our names on a massive No Meat pledge. This is fine for me (signing under "Forever and Future Generations") but incredibly awkward for V, who blushingly puts her name under Once Per Week.
We are shown the little shed where Master Cheng Yen spent six months in isolation, eating one bowl of rice per day. Finding herself, I guess. Until a typhoon came and destroyed the shed.
The commissioners tell us that that Big Love is the most important thing in life, and that we should do good and help others without expecting anything in return. I am tempted to ask whether this goes against human nature, but I just nod instead.
Wu Baba and Ayi insist on purchasing us extortionate stainless steel chopsticks at the Tzu Chi gift shop. And little booklets with teachings of the Dharma. Later when I get home, I google Tzu Chi, hoping to uncover some Mormon-style dirt, but find nothing.
We eventually leaved the hushed cultishness of the grounds and go to 七星潭. It's V's graduation day today - by chance we come across a young couple in grad robes taking photos by the sea. V asks them if she can borrow their robes, and she gets her grad pictures. I lie on the pebbles and feel their roundness.
We are supposed to eat at 蝸牛 vegetarian buffet, but it's out of business because of the virus. So instead we go to 妙蟬味 and I inhale three loaded plates of plant-based insanity.
The following day we visit a country woman's farm, and she gifts us some elongated lemons. We then follow this bumpkin-y lady to her stone carving workshop to look at her husband's intricate mostly tea ceremony slabs.
For lunch, we go to 禾田野, a Japanese-era structure that serves Italian cuisine, but I'm still full from last night's gastronomic excess, so I have a radioactively sweet fruit tea.
Next on the packed itinerary is a trip to the 讚炭 bamboo charcoal workshop, which burns bamboo at the highest temperature in Taiwan (1100C). Joey buys me and V some bamboo charcoal socks because she's seen the holes in mine, and "these ones don't smell". She also buys us some bamboo charcoal mosquito repellent that smells like shit, but is very effective.
Finally (or so we think) is 林田山 Forestry Culture Park where the Japanese used to rampantly cut down trees. I learn that Chinese Yew grows very slowly and is thus incredibly valuable, and that Joey and Chong Fang Ayi believe it cures cancer "in some people". I say that it's not a cure if it hasn't undergone scientific testing to prove it so. This frustrates them.
We stop by yet another stone-carving workshop where Wu Baba attempts to buy us special-stone necklaces but I flatly refuse. I don't want that shit. V half-heartedly refuses too.
V lets slip that evening about her yeast infection, and suddenly Joey and CFA start bustling around to get her to the clinic as soon as buddhistly possible (maybe they should have tied her to a Chinese Yew). Another family have just arrived at the house, and the dad drives me, Joey and V to the gynae clinic. Joey insists on being in the gynaecologist's room with V. I later hear that when the doctor asked V if she had ever had sex before, Joey immediately responded "no". V had to agonisingly correct her, while Joey gazed over the doctor's shoulder directly at her sore vulva.
Yet another day with the wacky buddhists starts sleepily. I feel suffocated in the house, unable to leave without risking interrogation. I sit in the garden and draw it as a gift for my hosts while fire ants crawl into my shorts.
During lunch, Joey and CFA open up about their petty Tzu Chi drama with a former friend. The friend spread rumours that Wu Baba is gay (a thought that had crossed my mind), bringing irredeemable shame to Ayi. V, who is a psychology student, tries to give them some rational advice. Both elegant matriarchs end up crying about their buddhist infighting, while the dirty backpackers try to console them.
In the afternoon we finally leave the house as it begins to rain. We pay a visit to 蓮城 lotus pond farm, which is followed by a walk around the nearby allotments, among which we get lost.
In the evening we eat stinky tofu, fried turnip cake, tofu skin and sweet potato fries at 老店家臭豆腐.
The next day looks dangerously static so I announce I am going to hike a nearby mountain in order to cure the cabin fever. I take last night's red tea out of the fridge and CFA throws a fit about my drinking it cold, but I ignore her. I leave at 7.30am and accidentally end up 初音山 at 9.30am, higher than I intended. Even more accidentally, since I have no GPS, I descend to Liyu Lake, meaning a 6 or 7 km walk back to the house. I get back by lunchtime, sweaty, parched and starving. I didn't miss anything that morning.
The rest of the day is mostly spent horizontal and bored. Termites swarm our room but I'm too depleted to care.
On the sixth day V and I are released back into the wild. I don't know whether to rejoice about my recovered independence or cry at the thought of basic hostel life and a belly not constantly on the verge of explosion. Wu Baba and Chong Fang Ayi will be back next week though - and who knows what that might mean.
In late April I took the liberty of hitchhiking from Hehuanshan to Hualien, as part of a yet undetermined period of rest and relaxation. Taking photos of cloud seas rolling and steaming majestically through rocky valleys, a rare car passes and I opportunistically stick my thumb out. To my surprise, it stops: I'm not even wearing a surgical mask.
At the hostel, I meet V, a Singaporean girl. We visit Hualien's 東大門 night market, which is ghostly on Mondays. V tells me about her run-in with local police after she tried to camp in the wild. She has blown up on local media, risking a diplomatic tiff between Taiwan and Singapore. We laugh at the overreaction - but it's almost foreboding of events to come.
The elderly lady from before, Chong Fang Ayi (CFA), messages multiple times, calls me on LINE and again on my phone. She asks if I would like to join them for a two-day trip to Taitung the following day. I mention I am with a friend, and she invites her too. V agrees, despite neither of us having a clue what the plans are.
The next morning, the elderly couple pick us up. They are joined by a friend from Taoyuan, Joey, a lady of 50 who, thanks to fillers, looks much younger. With V joining the party, the journey is more animated and conversational than my original hitchhike with Chong Fang Ayi and Wu Baba. We discover that they are vegetarian Tzu Chi buddhists who unironically own a fishing equipment shop in Taoyuan.
Our first stop is 吉安修園, an old Japanese colonial-era courtyard with wooden houses.
A brief stop for selfies at Liyu Lake 鯉魚潭 - it starts to rain.
Then lunch at 芳草古樹花園, a Hakka restaurant that President Tsai Ing-wen ate at in 2018. My first Lei Cha is mindblowing.
We drive through 大農大富 forest park for a pee break. Then we pass 自強外役監獄, ogling prisoners making beautiful floral creations. Road 193 is one of the most beautiful in Taiwan, but Wu Baba gets stopped for speeding. He laughs nervously. Another driver is stopped too, and I see him also laughing nervously. I picture British drivers getting stopped for speeding and laughing nervously.
We get to our destination which turns out not to be Taitung but an excessively fancy hotel outside Taitung. It's called Papago International Resort or something. Our jaws drop - they can't be serious. Are we actually staying here??
V and I laugh nervously, in shock.
Wu Baba and Chong Fang Ayi pay for a double room for themselves and a quadruple for Me, V and Joey. I feel like My Fair Lady. I haven't felt this much like a peasant since my au-pairing days in Chengdu.
For dinner they order us pricey hotpot, at 900 NT (30 USD) a head. I check the room rates online - 6,000 NTD (about 201 USD) per night. V and I play some ping pong and hit the gym to shift some gut. That evening, she shares some personal history with me and Joey and we all get emotional and more involved in each other's lives.
The following morning we pack our bellies at the breakfast buffet. I inhale a sesame-doused salad, hotpot, sesame bread, two 米漿s (peanut rice milk), Italian spiced pumpkin, seeds, fried turnip cake, and a fuckton of watermelon.
We hire out an electric quadricycle which V drives around the rice paddies opposite the hotel. Wu Baba stays behind to nap.
I'm still stuffed from breakfast, but we stop at a famous steamed bun place called 東河包子. I ask what makes these buns so special, but no one can really tell me.
On the way back to Hualien, we stop briefly for a wee by Baxian Caves, snap the Tropic of Cancer from our petrol-guzzler, and drink tea at Joki workshop. Wu Baba convinces me to postpone the rest of my stay at the hostel and stay at theirs, with V, instead. On the way home, V tells me about her work in the Singaporean sex industry as a fetishist. Joey is eavesdropping. We later figure out she speaks English.
It's dark by the time we reach Casa de Wu, but V and I are not too sleepy for our jaws to drop again. The four-floor house and its gardens make up an exquisite villa. The front room has a portrait of Tzu Chi founder Master Cheng Yen, baroque sofas and a humungous concave television. Indigenous gardeners and a Sumatran maid come once a week for the mansion's upkeep.
V and I share a double room with an adjoining bathroom. We feel like charity cases. It's hard to believe these people are buddhists. But they donate millions of NTD to build schools in Mozambique. They say that their generosity stems from a desire to be reincarnated to a better life. So V and I relax a little, happy to be tools for their accumulation of karma points.
The next day we see how this works in action. The five of us head to Tzu Chi for a tour of the grounds. Bald nuns, robed in grey and donning surgical masks, congregate in the courtyard in front of Still Thought Abode at a socially acceptable distance. We are greeted by four or so "commissioner" women wearing long, navy blue qipaos with their hair in buns. They remind me of the Aunts in The Handmaid's Tale.
The commissioners grab the two foreigners by the arms, especially the vegan one. They insist we sign our names on a massive No Meat pledge. This is fine for me (signing under "Forever and Future Generations") but incredibly awkward for V, who blushingly puts her name under Once Per Week.
We are shown the little shed where Master Cheng Yen spent six months in isolation, eating one bowl of rice per day. Finding herself, I guess. Until a typhoon came and destroyed the shed.
The commissioners tell us that that Big Love is the most important thing in life, and that we should do good and help others without expecting anything in return. I am tempted to ask whether this goes against human nature, but I just nod instead.
Wu Baba and Ayi insist on purchasing us extortionate stainless steel chopsticks at the Tzu Chi gift shop. And little booklets with teachings of the Dharma. Later when I get home, I google Tzu Chi, hoping to uncover some Mormon-style dirt, but find nothing.
We eventually leaved the hushed cultishness of the grounds and go to 七星潭. It's V's graduation day today - by chance we come across a young couple in grad robes taking photos by the sea. V asks them if she can borrow their robes, and she gets her grad pictures. I lie on the pebbles and feel their roundness.
We are supposed to eat at 蝸牛 vegetarian buffet, but it's out of business because of the virus. So instead we go to 妙蟬味 and I inhale three loaded plates of plant-based insanity.
The following day we visit a country woman's farm, and she gifts us some elongated lemons. We then follow this bumpkin-y lady to her stone carving workshop to look at her husband's intricate mostly tea ceremony slabs.
For lunch, we go to 禾田野, a Japanese-era structure that serves Italian cuisine, but I'm still full from last night's gastronomic excess, so I have a radioactively sweet fruit tea.
Next on the packed itinerary is a trip to the 讚炭 bamboo charcoal workshop, which burns bamboo at the highest temperature in Taiwan (1100C). Joey buys me and V some bamboo charcoal socks because she's seen the holes in mine, and "these ones don't smell". She also buys us some bamboo charcoal mosquito repellent that smells like shit, but is very effective.
Finally (or so we think) is 林田山 Forestry Culture Park where the Japanese used to rampantly cut down trees. I learn that Chinese Yew grows very slowly and is thus incredibly valuable, and that Joey and Chong Fang Ayi believe it cures cancer "in some people". I say that it's not a cure if it hasn't undergone scientific testing to prove it so. This frustrates them.
We stop by yet another stone-carving workshop where Wu Baba attempts to buy us special-stone necklaces but I flatly refuse. I don't want that shit. V half-heartedly refuses too.
V lets slip that evening about her yeast infection, and suddenly Joey and CFA start bustling around to get her to the clinic as soon as buddhistly possible (maybe they should have tied her to a Chinese Yew). Another family have just arrived at the house, and the dad drives me, Joey and V to the gynae clinic. Joey insists on being in the gynaecologist's room with V. I later hear that when the doctor asked V if she had ever had sex before, Joey immediately responded "no". V had to agonisingly correct her, while Joey gazed over the doctor's shoulder directly at her sore vulva.
Yet another day with the wacky buddhists starts sleepily. I feel suffocated in the house, unable to leave without risking interrogation. I sit in the garden and draw it as a gift for my hosts while fire ants crawl into my shorts.
During lunch, Joey and CFA open up about their petty Tzu Chi drama with a former friend. The friend spread rumours that Wu Baba is gay (a thought that had crossed my mind), bringing irredeemable shame to Ayi. V, who is a psychology student, tries to give them some rational advice. Both elegant matriarchs end up crying about their buddhist infighting, while the dirty backpackers try to console them.
In the afternoon we finally leave the house as it begins to rain. We pay a visit to 蓮城 lotus pond farm, which is followed by a walk around the nearby allotments, among which we get lost.
In the evening we eat stinky tofu, fried turnip cake, tofu skin and sweet potato fries at 老店家臭豆腐.
The next day looks dangerously static so I announce I am going to hike a nearby mountain in order to cure the cabin fever. I take last night's red tea out of the fridge and CFA throws a fit about my drinking it cold, but I ignore her. I leave at 7.30am and accidentally end up 初音山 at 9.30am, higher than I intended. Even more accidentally, since I have no GPS, I descend to Liyu Lake, meaning a 6 or 7 km walk back to the house. I get back by lunchtime, sweaty, parched and starving. I didn't miss anything that morning.
The rest of the day is mostly spent horizontal and bored. Termites swarm our room but I'm too depleted to care.
On the sixth day V and I are released back into the wild. I don't know whether to rejoice about my recovered independence or cry at the thought of basic hostel life and a belly not constantly on the verge of explosion. Wu Baba and Chong Fang Ayi will be back next week though - and who knows what that might mean.
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