Then Monday evening I walked to the train station in Tainan, got on a local train for the 22-minute ride out to Tainan's high speed train station, and then caught the 6:49 train heading up to Taipei. Jose met me on the train when we stopped at the Taichung station, and we rode together the rest of the way into Taipei, arriving at about 8:30. Once there we took a taxi to our hotel, which is affiliated with National Taiwan University, where I was going to give a talk the next day. After getting settled into the hotel, we decided to go out for drinks, so we made our way to a bar we had been to before on one of my previous trips to Taiwan, the kind of place that draws as many gringos/ex-pats as it does local folks, with prices that reflect that clientele. We each had a couple pints of Boddington's, along with a plate of calamari and a plate of nachos (tortilla chips are definitely one of the things I miss when I am out of the US for awhile), and the tab was nearly $50. Not terrible, equivalent to some places in LA I'm sure, but definitely more expensive than lots of other options available here. It was pretty quiet since it was a Monday night, maybe only about 10 other folks in the place, but it was nice to have some good beer and the food and just kick back and relax for a bit.
In the morning we got up and had a light breakfast at the Starbucks right outside the hotel, and then walked over to the university, which wasn't too far away but it was a cold windy morning so probably seemed a little longer. In addition to his faculty position at Tunghai University, Jose is also a director of the Taiwan Public Governance Research Center at National Taiwan U., and he teaches an undergraduate class there as well, so he had asked me awhile back to give a lecture to that class. I gave essentially the same lecture as I had for Yungnane's class -- in fact I had prepared the lecture for Jose's class before Yungnane asked me to lecture for his class, so it was easy enough to agree to Yungnane's request even though it came just a day before the class met. Jose had also invited some public officials to come to the class, so there were about five or so of them present as well. I again did the lecture without any translation, as the students are supposed to be sufficiently fluent in English to understand. I have no idea how much they were actually able to follow, whether they got most of the details, but if nothing else the powerpoint slides give them a chance to at least read the basic points I was covering.
Here's a picture of Jose on campus:
After class we walked over to a cute little pizza place for some lunch, where they cooked us three small pizzas in a wood-burning brick oven in about five minutes, one a mushroom pesto, another a "ginger Superman" (with shredded ginger, some salty egg, and a third ingredient I can't remember now, probably onion), and then a banana-almond pizza that we thought of as dessert. There are some all-you-can-eat pizza places in Rio that also serve an array of dessert pizzas, which the students in the Lab last year thought were really great, but I don't think I've seen that in the States yet -- maybe I'm just not paying attention, or don't get out enough! Anyway, all three were tasty, and I washed mine down with a so-so, non-alcoholic malt beverage from Germany that I decided to try.
We left the exhibit in time to pick up my suitcase at the hotel and taxi across town to the National Cheng Chi University campus, check in to a different hotel over there, and then walk to a nearby restaurant where we were to meet a number of USC alums who were gathering for dinner at 6:30. The group included Min-Hsiu Chiang and his wife Mei, both of whom are on faculty at NCCU. Min-Hsiu actually graduated right before I joined the faculty, and his Center for the Third Sector at the university had sponsored my six-week visit here in 2006. Also present was Jen-Hui Hsu, who was in one of our doctoral cohorts very early in my time at USC and is now Dean of the College of Management at Shih Hsin University, a private university in Taipei. I'm pretty sure Jen-Hui has served a stint as a university-level administrator there too, and in that sense I guess that, of the many USC alumni from my School now on faculty in Taiwan somewhere, he has risen to the highest level in the university. Min-Hsiu also just served a 3-year stint as Dean at another local university, but now he is back on faculty at NCCU aiming to start another research center exploring the role of non-government organizations in Taiwan and China.
Jamie Shao and his wife Hsiao-Yun Yu were there, both of whom are on faculty at Chinese Culture University, with their nice campus up in the hills north of Taipei. I was chair for Jamie's dissertation exploring the one-child policy used in mainland China a number of years ago to slow down their population growth. Jamie is actually from the mainland, but Hsiao-Yun is Taiwanese, and he has been living here since leaving USC. Finally, there was Ching-Ping Tang, who is on faculty at NCCU as well, and from what I gather has probably been the most successful at getting his research published. When I told him that I had heard he had been fortunate enough to avoid having to take on any administrative roles yet, he announced to the table that he had just been elected by his colleagues as the head of his department and would be starting a three-year term in that position in August. Jen-Hui had brought along some special 90-proof "wine" made on Taiwan's Kinmen Island, which we drank out of tiny little shot glasses, so Ching-Ping's announcement prompted a collective "bottoms up" as we toasted his success. I also gave him my condolences!
Dinner ended around 9 PM, and I was happy that we were all calling it a night so I had a chance to get a little down-time at the NCCU-affiliated hotel Min-Hsiu was putting me up in for the night, before giving a lecture to his class the next day. This was a class of both graduate and undergraduate students, and I was not giving the same talk as I had for Yungnane and Jose, but instead was giving a presentation that I had actually worked way too many hours the previous week preparing. I was using a new presentation software for the first time, a tool called prezi, which is cooler than powerpoint but which took much longer to prepare since I was still way down on the learning curve. In the morning I walked around and found a little bakery store to buy a morning roll, and walked a little further and found the anticipated Starbucks, so had some coffee with my roll and read a little of my book. At 10:30 two undergrad students who work for Min-Hsiu came to get me and take me to the restaurant on campus where we were having lunch prior to the presentation at 12:30. We were joined for lunch by Jenn-hwan Wang, a sociologist who graduated from UCLA and who Min-Hsiu indicated may be the next president of NCCU.
View from my hotel room:
The talk went well enough -- I hadn't rehearsed or anything, and I had a 90-minute slot and figured the talk would probably be shorter than that, and even though I didn't really monitor the time as I went, I ended with about 10 minutes left which gave time for a couple questions from the class. The focus of the talk was one variant of the message I try to give most of my students in one form or another, that the world is changing and they have the opportunity to be part of that, to help make it happen. I think at least a few of them were interested in the main thrust of the story, but it's always hard to tell how most people are reacting to the fairly novel message I'm throwing at them, whether they get it, or even care very much. But I can't control their reactions, my job is just to plant the seeds...!
After the talk, a group of us headed up into the hills behind campus to go to one of the many tea houses that are operating up there. We'd had a nice sunny morning, but by mid-afternoon it was fairly cloudy and hazy so the view wasn't as great as it could be, but at its best it can be a pretty spectacular view. Most places you go in Taipei you can get your bearings because you can almost always see the remarkable 101 Building, which not too many years ago was the tallest building in the world, now second or third according to Jose. It towers so high above everything else in the vicinity, and even though you have to go through a tunnel underneath some hills to get out to the part of town where the NCCU campus is, when you head up to the teahouses you can see the 101 beyond those hills, jutting so far into the sky above the hills that it almost seems a bit other-worldly. I drove up to the teahouse with Min-Hsiu and Mei, along with a couple of the students who had helped out in the morning and at the presentation, and then a little later we were joined by Kevin Yeh and another man, probably one of his colleagues, but I never really learned who he was. Kevin is on faculty with Jen-Hui at Shih Hsin University, and he's someone I got to know a little better than most of the others when he and I traveled around Taiwan for a number of days on one of my previous trips here. Kevin is 50, his wife is 43, and they just had a baby girl a year ago -- he said it's a lot harder now that it was when their son was born nearly a decade earlier! I can imagine...
After tea and snacks, we drove back down the hill, where we met Jamie and Hsiao-Yun at the entrance to the NCCU campus, who were then going to take me out for dinner and then to the train station. We went to a very popular dumpling restaurant -- this is the third of their branches I've been too and it's always a pretty hoppin' place. We had a 15-minute wait, but it was probably double or triple that by the time we were done. Dumplings, chicken soup, fried rice, and a green vegetable made our meal, simple but tasty. We then stopped in at the Starbucks located in the same mall as the restaurant for a cappuccino, before heading over to the train station. I got on the train at 8:30, back to the Tainan station by about 10:15, then the local train ride back into town and a walk home from there, arriving back in the dorm after 11 some time. I was definitely pretty exhausted, not just from the traveling and speaking, but I'm not all that used to days were I spend 10 hours straight talking with or to other people. When I teach about personality types, one of the points I make about the difference between introverts and extraverts is that the latter are energized by interacting with people whereas the former are drained by that and need to re-charge by being alone. After two pretty full days of talking to people up in Taipei, this introvert was kinda drained, and happy to be back home all alone in my quiet little dorm room.
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