Hump day

Yungnane took a trip to the US last week, to attend a conference in Baltimore and then talk to some university officials in the area to get information on the university governance project that he is involved in, and for which he has asked me for some input at various points during my stay here.  It turns out his itinerary had routed him first through the Tokyo airport, where he happened to be when the earthquake struck.  They grounded all flights for awhile, and essentially Yungnane had to spend 24 hours at the airport to take the same flight to the US the next day at the same time.  He commended the airport folks for fairly quickly getting blankets and water to everyone who was stranded there.  His delay then caused him to miss the slot at the conference where he was scheduled to give his talk.  That's how it goes sometimes.

Tuesday afternoon, he and I took the high-speed train up to Taipei, where I was scheduled to give a talk Wednesday morning at the National Academy of Civil Service.  The NASC is involved in the process of training civil servants, and providing other professional development activities such as presentations like the one I gave.  Civil servants from around the country were invited to attend, and about 180 showed up for a day that included my talk in the morning, lunch, and then a talk by a hotel executive in the afternoon. It was a fairly senior crowd.  Their civil service system goes up to grade 14, and folks at that level would be the highest ranking career managers serving under the appointed officials who hold the top ministerial positions in the various government agencies.  The folks who showed up for the talk were grades 9-13, so pretty senior managers in most cases.  I talked to them about "collaborative governance" -- how government agencies can work with businesses, nonprofit organizations, and citizens to better serve the public interest -- and Yungnane was my interpreter.

It is easy enough to get a sense of the importance of an event or occasion here by the amount of formality or ritual that precedes it, and by the people you meet in the process.  Yungnane and I arrived at the NASC building at about 6:30, where we were scheduled to eat dinner at their cafeteria.  We were met by Yvonne and Sue, the two staff members responsible for coordinating our visit.  I had been emailing Yvonne over the past week regarding arrangements, etc., and Sue had had contact with folks from USC when we had a delegation here last year to meet with alumni on the island, and one of my colleagues gave at talk at NASC last May.  Since the building is sort of a conference center, and some students come in for a number of weeks at a time for their training, the building has some guest rooms in which we were to stay for the night, so Yvonne and Sue took us up to drop our bags off before heading to the cafeteria.  We joined a table where the vice-president and chief secretary (Yungnane said he was a chief of staff) were already eating, along with some other folks, and since the rest of the cafeteria was filled with young people eating dinner before either going home or back to work or up to study (I'm not quite sure which), my guess is that the senior guys were there specifically to have dinner with me and Yungnane.  We were done by about 8:00 or so, and after Yungnane and I found a spot where we could use their wi-fi and spend a little time online, I headed up to my room, read a little of Alex Grey's book on The Mission of Art, and called it a night early since we arranged to head to the cafeteria for breakfast at 7:30.

In general I don't like to eat that early, and it's a bigger challenge when the food is stuff I'm not used to putting in my stomach at that time of the day.  When we reached the food line, I saw that they had all the makings for what could have been a pretty good chicken sandwich -- a nice big sesame bun, some sliced tomatoes, onions, and red cabbage, fried eggs, and some little breaded chicken cutlets.  I passed on the bun and the chicken, had an egg and some of the veggies, and a little bowl of sort of a porridge-like rice soup.  At 8:30 we went by the auditorium to make sure I could access my presentation on line, got a cup of coffee while we were doing that, then we had a little downtime in our rooms before heading back to the auditorium at 9:45 before a 10:00 start.  While waiting and having tea in a little room off to the side, we were introduced to a few more of the big-wigs who were there for the event, including the Vice Chairperson of the Civil Service Protection and Training Commission, the agency in which NASC is housed, and then the Minister in charge of that commission, who is also the President of NASC.  It turns out he's a Stanford grad too, getting his PhD from the School of Education there in 1985, and it was he who then introduced me to the audience, which I didn't really anticipate, but thought was kind of cool to have someone that high-ranking introduce me for a talk.

I don't usually get nervous before making a presentation, but as I was starting to get a sense of the magnitude of the event during that time leading up to the start of the show, I have to admit I was feeling a few butterflies in my stomach.  I was also a little worried about the timing of the whole talk -- you never know with a translator how much time it will take to cover material, and I was concerned that I had put more info into the presentation than I would be able to cover in the time allotted.  And I wasn't really sure, if I had to cut back on some material, what would be best to leave out.  But once I got going, I was able to get a sense early on that it would be easy enough to cover everything that I had included and that I would even have time to be able to elaborate in places, to go beyond the translated copy of the notes for my talk that they had all received in a booklet when they arrived.  The "case" I was focusing on as an example to clarify the conceptual points I was making was the pollution problem in Tainan that Yungnane has been studying for years, and that I have been learning about during my time here.  It was good to have him as a translator since he has more familiarity with the case than I did, and he even corrected some misinformation I had provided to Yvonne when he translated my written notes for the printed material that the audience members had received.

All in all, the whole thing went smoothly and quite well, I think.  I was scheduled to stop at 11:40 to allow 20 minutes for Q&A, and actually came to a close at 11:42, so I figured that was pretty good for no rehearsal of any sort and a little uncertainty about how much time it would take.  There were a number of questions from the audience, and more hands were up than we had time to address before the lunch break at noon, which was seen as a good sign that people had found the talk interesting.  I got some nice compliments from the staff, and Yungnane felt it had gone well too, so I guess everyone was happy enough.  At the end, they gave both Yungnane and me a nice framed photograph taken as we were in the middle of the presentation, which I realize isn't all that hard to do with today's technology but still impressed me as a nice touch.  One last kind of amusing data point:  I often get paid a small honorarium when I give a talk here, and Yungnane had told me that would be the case this time as well.  When Yvonne paid me on Tuesday night, I realized that it was a little more than what he had indicated it might be, and more than I have been paid elsewhere, so that was a nice surprise.  Not that it was all that much, but what really made me laugh was when I realized that my fee for that one speech essentially covered the cost of my little dorm room for the entire 15 weeks I'm in Taiwan.  Crazy.

After the talk, we had a quick lunch in the cafeteria, again eating with the highest-ranking officials, and then when the rest of the group moved on to the afternoon session, Yungnane and I had a little more downtime before we needed to head over to the Ministry of Education to meet with a staff member there about the university governance project.  We met with a woman that Yungnane has been working with on this project for awhile, who wanted to get my input about the situation and how to move forward.  The idea is to create a new "board of regents" for NCKU and another university in Taiwan, as sort of a trial run or first step in creating a new governance system that could eventually get implemented throughout the entire public university system in the country.  In essence, the board would take on some oversight responsibilities that currently the central government has responsibility for, but invariably with organizational changes of this type there are corresponding changes in different parties' levels of power, control, and autonomy, and players not happy with those changes tend to resist the governance changes being proposed.  So our conversation focused primarily on where those sources of resistance are likely to be and what kinds of strategies or approaches Yungnane and Flory can utilize to reduce this resistance.  It was a nice, informal, productive conversation, and I was drawing notes on a piece of paper as we went that helped to diagram the issues we were discussing, and I realized how much I prefer that kind of interaction to the more polite, stylized, ritualized conversations that are almost inevitable when high-ranking folks are involved.

When we finished our discussion, Yungnane and I walked over to the high-speed rail station, bought some little boxed dinners to go, and caught the 5:36 train back to Tainan which, after making the local connection back into town, got us back to his car at 8:00.  It was nice to get home relatively early, with the psycho-emotional benefit of knowing that I had made it over the biggest hump in the trajectory of my stay here, as this was the definitely the "main event" of my time here.  It was also the first presentation of the research I am doing with Yungnane, so getting that material organized into presentation form was the first key first step towards writing up a paper to submit to a journal.  The NASC folks are going to send me a DVD with my speech on it, so I'm thinking of starting by getting that transcribed, as that would essentially constitute a first draft of the paper and save me some time writing.

In addition to getting through this presentation, I'm also on the downhill side of the slope in the sense that last Thursday was the halfway point in my stay here.  It's kinda weird that time is simultaneously passing both quickly and slowly.  I suspect that, as the amount of time left decreases, it will feel like it's passing even more quickly.  I realized I better start planning to do the few things I really wanted to do while I was here this time, to make sure they get built into my schedule before it's time to head back to the US.  There are some small islands off the main island that I'm interested in visiting, and as the warm weather arrives I will be more enticed to take the ferry out for a visit.  I guess future updates will clarify if and when I make that happen!