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Overview
and his drunken photojournalist partner are the last
to see three Japanese schoolgirls who disappear
into Taroko Gorge, Taiwan’s largest national park.
The journalists—who are themselves suspects—
investigate the disappearance along with the girls’
homeroom teacher, their bickering classmates,
and a seasoned and wary Taiwanese detective.
The conflicts between them—complicated by
the outrageousness of the photographer and the
raging hormones of the young—raise questions of
personal responsibility, truthfulness, and guarded
self-interest.
The world and its dangers—both natural and
interpersonal—are real, changing, and violently
pressing. And the emotions that churn in dark
rooms overnight as the players gather in the park
visitors’ center are as intense as in any closet
drama. There’s enough action and furor here to
keep readers turning the pages, and the cultural
revelations of the story suggest that the human
need for mystery outweighs the desire for answers.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781936071906 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Unbridled Books |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Taroko Gorge
By Jacob Ritari
Unbridled Books
Copyright © 2009 Jacob RitariAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-936071-65-4
Chapter One
Peter Neils
I was fourteen when I stopped believing in God. At the time it wasn't dramatic. I remember lying in the bedroom of that old, drafty house and thinking: If you are there, I hope you'll forgive me if I stop believing in you for a while, because right now I just don't see the reason. When you're fourteen, you don't have much reason to believe one way or the other. Everyone tells you what to do and anything you want is within arm's reach. Then you grow up, and you start disbelieving for other reasons.
But unbelief has its own comforts. You're not in such a hurry to figure every thing out if you're not sure it will make a difference in the end, and you always figure if he does exist, and he's the forgiving guy everyone says he is, you can still make it in under the wire. And hey, the world's a big place, and there's plenty of time to find something you can believe in-maybe on the other side of the world.
Then you go to the other side of the world and maybe you don't find what you were expecting. You find something you'd just as soon not have seen. Then you come back and try to tell people about it, but you can't. When you finally have a story to tell, you can't tell it anymore because the person you were-along with the means you had for relating whatyou knew-is dead.
I should back up, though.
My name is Peter Neils-Nils originally, Scandinavian-I'm forty-six, and I'm a journalist. I've been in Nigeria and Sierra Leone, I got as close to Chechnya as they'd let me, and I was in the Gulf during the war, although by the time I got there most of the fun was over.
But that was when I was younger, still living down a bad marriage (high school sweethearts, seventeen, preggers, the whole nine yards-that's how it gets in Wisconsin), and I was probably hoping half the time I would die. As I got older I cooled off. These days I mostly do short pieces for Vanity Fair and National Geographic-pictures of waterfalls and tree frogs, the sort of thing people like. Nobody wants to see a hole full of severed arms. But for some reason people like to look at pictures of glaciers.
No one is ever frightened by a glacier-although, perhaps, they should be.
I was once profiled in Esquire. The lady interviewer asked me a question I assumed was just conversational, but it later-to my immense chagrin-cropped up in the interview.
"What do you think," she asked me, "should be the UN policy on intervention if the People's Republic of China were to invade Taiwan?"
You see there were no other political questions, so I was thrown for a loop, although it was a hot topic then with the handover of Hong Kong.
"If that were to happen," I told her, "I would personally enlist in the Taiwanese army and fight the Chinese. The UN can do what it likes, but Taiwan is a beautiful country full of lovely people, and I will die before I see those godless communists step one foot on its soil."
I had imbibed some vermouth.
That whole "godless" bit was a joke: I'm still more or less godless myself (although I've flirted with the whole Buddhist thing, and my brother is very Catholic, which I respect). And it was more a sentiment than an expression of fact: if China were to invade I doubt the Taiwanese would be dumb enough to put up a fight, no matter how seriously they take their army. I just liked the idea, and I liked how it sounded, and there it was in print in a little red insert. My fifteen minutes, and I'd come off like an Internet wack job.
Not that I didn't get support. A lot of people felt the same, it turned out, but I'm not a radical by nature-I'm an observer-and besides, this isn't the Spanish Civil War; the days of Hemingway and heroics are over. Hemingway had a line about heroics being over, and how you die like a dog, but at least then you could still fight-even if it didn't mean anything. These days the gap in this world between the helpless and the heartless is wider than ever.
I'd first been in Taiwan-Formosa, the "Island of Treasures"-in '96. That was after the big chill when I got back from Russia and started looking and thinking hard about my life, and I spent six months there and six months in Japan. Japan was alright but it was Taiwan that really got to me.
The Taiwanese are good people. Maybe it's patrician and colonial, but you feel sort of protective. They have all the niceness of the Japanese, but more relaxed, more friendly, and without the vague doubt that their ancestors might have tortured your ancestors in POW camps (or, to be fair, that your ancestors dropped bombs on theirs).
In Taiwan, when you want to call someone over, you hold your hand out palm-down and waggle your fingers. That took some getting used to. Also, when you're a guest, after you and the host have put away some of that strong Chinese liquor, it's polite for him to sing a song for you, and vice versa. That was my favorite part. I got a kick out of listening to Taiwanese businessmen mangle the words of Beatles songs-which they assumed were what I liked as an American. I think a lot of people in Asia assume the Beatles are American. But my principal host, Mr. Lueng-a fellow journalist I'd met on assignment in Nepal-taught me a traditional ditty that goes something like this:
When someone punches me, I fall down; When someone spits at me, I turn my head; When someone yells at me, I don't get angry; It's less trouble for me And less trouble for them.
That is a very-I don't want to say Asian sentiment unilaterally, but it fits a number of countries, not just Taiwan. Whereas it's not a very American sentiment.
I often find it going through my head when some nine-thousand-pound lady is hogging all the dryers at the Laundromat.
For years my life got quiet. I brought in a paycheck; I went out for drinks with old friends; I started seeing a woman, although it didn't work out. In '98 for Vanity Fair I landed a big interview with Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. I think they were right to send me and not Chris Hitchens. They liked the piece, and people-mostly religious people-wrote in to say my treatment of him and my questions were respectful. So for a short while I got a reputation as a religion guy, and in 2000 they sent me to do a piece in Taiwan on Fo Guang Shan.
Now, Fo Guang Shan means "Buddha's Light Mountain"; it was founded back in the '40s by a refugee who'd come over from the mainland. To hear them tell it, he'd built it with his bare hands out of nothing, and now it was the largest Buddhist organization in Taiwan with branch temples worldwide. It was in the Chan lineage, but as far as I can tell, all those places are like Protestant churches-more or less the same.
The order's founder was still alive but in Singapore, so I toured the main temple, spoke a little with the current abbot and a few of the venerables and some of the students at their college. It was a whole compound with an elementary and a high school. I say compound but I don't mean to make it sound cult-like. Everyone there was nice, and if there's one thing about Buddhism I've observed: stated positively, you don't have to believe anything you don't want to. Stated negatively, you can't believe anything at all-if you're a foreigner they tell you what they think you want to hear, and I imagine it's the same for initiates. If you believe in God they'll call the Buddha-nature God. If you believe in science they won't mention rebirth, hungry ghosts, or the hells. There's a doctrine-uppaya in Sanskrit, hoben in Japanese-that's translated "skillful means," which says that truth can be expressed in any number of ways and has to be expressed in different ways to different people, and in Japan they have a saying: uso mo hoben, meaning a lie is skillful means, too.
That's kind of a pussy tactic, if you ask me, but at the same time you have to admire the balls on a theological doctrine that essentially says it's okay to lie. And maybe after all that's not such a bad thing when standing by your principles means strapping a bomb to yourself and blowing up the other guy.
I came there to report on the temple. I did the piece, and I turned it in, and I'll see if it gets used. I ended up reporting on something very different.
But first, something happened there that seems important now.
The temple didn't have a reception desk, only a big gaudy fountain-statue of Quan Yin Bodhisattva taming a dragon, and the venerable who was supposed to meet us had gotten his wires crossed, so-because it was a nice day and a beautiful temple-we started wandering. I was there with my cameraman, a young guy from California named Pickett, shaved head and a couple of bracelets on both arms. I had never worked with him before and I could tell he thought I was old-fashioned. Pickett fancied himself a Buddhist and had a mandala tattooed up his back that you could see on his neck.
Pickett was appalled by those giant Technicolor statues: "It's fucking Taiwanese Disneyland." I guess he expected they'd all be living in abject holy poverty, and I could have explained to him that that sort of thing doesn't bring in the acolytes. Was this skillful means, these statues, or was it skillful means to package Buddhism to Americans as some pragmatic philosophy? Did anyone know? Maybe the founder, but he wasn't telling.
"If the Buddha could see this shit he would cry," said Pickett.
Just to get him mad, I bought about fifty good-luck charms at the gift shop and hung them on my neck and my wrist, and I tried to hang them on his camera. He just looked away and muttered something about superstitious fucking bullshit.
The venerable we were looking for was a teacher at the college, so eventually-after a few bubble-teas at their café-we consulted a map and headed in that direction. The temple wasn't that large but as stupid Americans we got lost immediately. Instead we ended up inside the girls' high school.
The two girls we bumped into weren't shocked or shy at all; in fact, they thought we were teachers, and it took work-pointing at Pickett's camera-to get across that we were journalists. My Mandarin is frankly lousy, and Pickett's was nonexistent-we were counting on them to provide us with a translator-and while most Taiwanese take something like seven years of English, these girls were only so far along in their education. Next we managed to hash out the word "college," upon which they immediately and cheerfully agreed to take us there.
I wondered if they just wanted to cut class.
To be honest, I don't recall much what they looked like. But I think all Asian girls below a certain age are cute. Call me what you like, a racist or a pervert, but it's like I said: you feel sort of protective. I do remember one of them wore a white T-shirt that, when she turned her back to us, I saw read, Drive away with me. Lot's run away together.
Goddamn, I thought. But isn't that a beautiful sentiment?
As we walked past the athletic grounds, they waved to their friends on the basketball court and yelled something.
"'Do you like American men?'" Pickett whispered to me in spurious translation.
They took us by the back door of the college and one of them went inside, leaving the other alone with us, looking slightly nervous. We were standing next to a pool with big carp in it. Pointing at them, Pickett said, "Fish?"
The girl smiled and did a "swimming" thing with both hands.
"Yuu," she said.
Her friend came back with an elderly man who looked like a janitor. He scratched his head as he looked at us, and more slow communication followed. It was about that time our guide found us, running down a slope and waving his arms.
After that it went off without a hitch.
But it was later, sitting in a noodle shop outside the monastery gates with Pickett, that he said I looked "pissy." I hadn't noticed, but I gave it some thought and said, "You know, the more I think about it, the more I find that disturbing."
"Find what?"
"Those girls. How they just went along with us, no questions asked."
"You thought that was weird?"
"All I'm saying is, didn't their parents ever tell them not to go off somewhere with big, strange foreigners? I mean, I know we're both nice guys, but ..."
"I dunno, man. It was like broad daylight."
"Still. In New York even the rich girls have more sense than that."
Pickett shrugged. "I don't really have any interest in fifteen-year-old girls."
For some reason I felt moved to respond quickly, "Well, me neither."
I can't remember what turn the conversation took after that-but we let the subject drop.
We had finished up by late evening and hopped the bus back to Kaohsiung. Taiwan is a small country, but it amazed me that a temple that was technically in Kaohsiung was still an hour's bus ride from the center of downtown. The one thing that has continually impressed me in every part of the world is the sheer number of people in it, the distances in between them.
This is an aside, but my brother Tom, the Catholic missionary, married a Chinese girl, and when her relatives came to visit us in Milwaukee they got out of his car, took a look around at what is by American standards a pretty big city, and remarked-looking quaintly pleased-that it was "just like the provinces" in China.
Kaohsiung is a sprawling commercial city, although nothing compared to cities on the mainland I've seen. There is no discernible rhyme or reason to it, and we walked from our hostel until we found a bar-it took all of two blocks-where we bought cheap, badly filtered Chinese cigarettes and cheap domestic beer. It is highly possible to get nice things in Taiwan, but I think we both wanted a sleazy experience in keeping with the smoggy and crowded Kaohsiung at mo sphere. Every Taiwanese, his sister, and his cat owns a motorcycle. There were six motorcycles parked outside the bar-presumably because there's slightly more room than in China, where the bicycle is preferred.
We had two days to ourselves and we were pondering what to do with them. We'd gotten to like each other well enough that we planned to stick together. The sight of the temple had cured Pickett of his spiritual aspirations vis-à-vis Taiwan and now he wasn't sure about seeing more temples. There were some nice ones in the mountains, I told him. I had once waited for several hours outside a combined liquor store and poultry farm to hitch a ride on a flatbed truck to a mountain temple. He wasn't so sure about that, either, so I asked if he had ever seen Taroko Gorge. Of course he hadn't seen Taroko; it was his first time in Taiwan; but I was drunk. "You have to see Taroko," I said. "It's gorges." I think I stole that pun off a bumper sticker. Taroko Gorge is Taiwan's national park, closer to Taipei at the northern end of the island than to Kaohsiung in the south. It's four hours by bus from Kaohsiung, no longer than from New York to Boston. After we saw it, I told him, we could do the rounds in Taipei; I'd look up friends there and we'd have a grand old time. This struck both of us as a sound plan, although at that point buying two motorcycles and driving them into the sea might have seemed like a sound plan.
After that Pickett struck up an acquaintance with a local girl who may or may not have been a prostitute. Now, I'm no pickup artist, wasn't even when I was young-residual Catholic guilt, I suppose-but it's not like I objected. She looked young (no interest in fifteen-year-old girls?), but let's be honest-who can tell? They went off somewhere, and I made my way unsteadily back to the hostel. I've picked up snatches of poetry in my time, and one of them came back to me then:
There Wealthy Meg, the Sailor's Friend, And Marion, cow-eyed, Opened their arms to me but I Refused to come inside; I was not looking for a cage In which to mope in my old age.
I stayed up, getting sober and smoking off the balcony. I called a friend in New York and told him how the journalism had gone: for him it was almost noon. Pickett came back at past three in the morning looking drawn and confused. Although I was jocular about it, he wouldn't talk about what had happened. He had money the next day, so I figured at least he hadn't been robbed. I guessed it would always remain a mystery.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Taroko Gorge by Jacob Ritari Copyright © 2009 by Jacob Ritari. Excerpted by permission.
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