Influences: Punk rock

There's a video doing the rounds titled "how to write a hardcore punk riff" (see below). I never learned much music theory, other than what my high school bass teacher imparted to me regarding basic major and minor scales and the structure of blues-rock. So the video was interesting, as 12tone breaks down some of the patterns behind hardcore punk-rock. 

But I think he missed a few things, too. I say this as someone who used to write this type of music in the 80s and 90s in bands like Mr. O, Uckfay, and Feiwu. 

Let's start with something 12tone nailed: "It's really easy to make boring punk music." So true! It was easy to identify the greats back in the 1980s, some of whom the narrator cites - Bad Brains, Minor Threat, and the Dead Kennedys. We found out about these bands through word of mouth, live shows, fanzines, listening to records at friends' places, or college radio. 

But boy, was it hard to write songs as good as them. I realize why. It's not just a question of getting the theory wrong. In our zeal to reject everything about "classic rock," and the 80s electronic influences that were taking over the pop charts, we were listening to too much punk and hardcore. It wasn't until Feiwu (1997-1999) that I really began to consider other influences, including Taiwanese nakashi music.

It's very clear that the most creative and impactful musicians and artists are usually the ones who are doing things differently, not blindly adhering to the "rules" for whatever came before.

All of those seminal hardcore bands not only had fantastically skilled musicians (including vocals), but also they were coming from a much different place than we assumed, something I didn't find out until later. It's a mistake to think of them as amateurs who only knew the Sex Pistols and Ramones before they picked up their instruments. 

Bad Brains started out as a jazz/pop band. Greg Ginn of Black Flag also had a jazz backgroud. I read somewhere that one of Black Flag's favorite albums in the tour van in the early 80s was ZZ Top's Eliminator - Texas blues rock meets synth drums. 

Flea, who played bass in Fear before cofounding RHCP, was a high-level trumpet and French Horn player in high school, and grew up listening to his stepfather's jazz influences. East Bay Ray of the DKs - surf and jazz. D Boon of the Minutemen studied flamenco guitar at one point, which you can hear on Double Nickels on the Dime.

There's a great book by Michael Azzerad (Our Band Could Be Your Life) which gets into the influences of many 80s/early 90s bands including Minor Threat, who late in their existence were veering off into U2 influenced rock.

Chinese Summer Camp Review (2018)

In the summer of 2018, our son returned to National Taiwan Normal University to attend the NTNU Mandarin Training Center summer program for children and teens. We liked the Chinese summer camp in Taiwan experience the first time around when both of our kids attended.

This time, we wanted to help our son's Mandarin improve while having a special cultural experience in Taiwan. This is a review of his 2018 Chinese Summer Camp experience at NTNU. I will also talk a little about other things to do in Taipei and Taiwan while you are on the island, and how we handled living arrangements via AirBnB.

The 2018 Chinese summer camp experience

My son was in the "Little 1" group four years previously; this time he was in the "Big 3" group as his Chinese had improved in the interim, thanks to classes in his American middle school.

One issue I noticed this time is the program has many students can actually speak Mandarin quite well (thanks to exposure at home) but cannot write. As a result, at the "big" levels for older kids, many students are bunched up at the big 2 and big 3 level, but they don't have enough kids to attend the higher level classes (4 and 5). As a result, they encourage kids from the middle levels to attend the higher-level classes.

On the one hand, this really challenges the kids to improve rapidly on their spoken and written Chinese. On the other hand, it may be too much for some. My son was placed in the level 4 class, but it was just too hard -- his written Chinese was better than many, but his spoken Mandarin was not as good and he couldn't understand the level 4 vocabulary. The program is very good about moving kids up or down in the first week, so he dropped down to level 3 which was just right.

My advice to anyone attending the Chinese summer camp program in 2019 or beyond is to really pay attention to what the kids are saying (too easy, too hard) in the first few days. Also ask for feedback from the teachers and assistants. If it doesn't seem like a good fit, let the teachers know in the first week and they can reassign your child.

Not many things changed in terms of the structure or approach to education. Mandarin is spoken almost all of the time at the middle and higher levels. The quality of the instruction was identical, and a very high level. But some of the learning materials did change -- I actually preferred the older Chinese textbooks for the beginner levels as the printing was better quality and they had side-by-side simplified and traditional versions of each lesson. My son was able to learn a lot regardless -- in fact his aunt and uncle were honestly quite impressed at the improvement over one month.

Even better: The 2018 summer experience at NTNU in Taiwan supercharged his Chinese writing and speaking ability for his middle school Chinese class in the Boston area. It made a huge difference. He was average in his 7th grade Chinese class at school before he went to Taiwan, when he came back in the fall for 8th grade he was advanced. He surged ahead and qualified for honors-level Chinese for 9th grade, when he starts high school. I asked him how/why he thinks he was able to do so well in 8th grade Chinese, and his answer was "Chinese summer camp."

Taiwan summer camp: side trips

One other thing about this trip that is worth mentioning: I made a point of doing a lot of extra stuff with him over the four-week period. Almost every night we went somewhere to eat, and two or three nights per week we did special excursions to night markets or other attractions. He was older, and our apartment (an Airbnb about 15 minutes' walk from National Taiwan Normal University) was far more convenient for getting on the MRT subway system and getting to the Taipei Main Train Station. Sometimes we went with relatives, but most of the time we were on our own using public transport or sometimes a rented car. Our 2018 excursions included:

• Ximending markets and arcade at night (twice - so much fun for teens)
• Shilin night market
• CKS Memorial, Taipei
• Jilong night market
• Tamsui night market
• National Palace Museum 
• L'Amigo Monkeys professional baseball game in Taoyuan (bought tickets at convenience store, took high speed train to and from Taoyuan)
• Many restaurants all over Taipei
• Three-day excursion to Taroko Gorge, Taitung County (rift valley and coast), and South Cross-Island highway. 

For the last side trip, I pulled him out of the summer camp on a Friday (it was field trip that day, not classes) and took a train to Hualian, where I rented a car from Avis and did all of the driving. It was a lot of driving that weekend, but it was utterly spectacular mountain and country scenery and an amazing experience for us both. You can also take tour busses to Taroko directly from Hualian, too. It's amazing and worth a side trip!

There are many more opportunities for trips near Taipei or further afield: Shopping, Taipei 101, fishing in cement pools, travel to the beach, travel to other cities and towns ... there are too many things to list! 

During the day while he was in camp, I usually worked at a coworking center in Taipei (I have my own publishing and consulting business) but I also made a point to do a hike in the nearby hills on my own or with friends once per week. How many other chances will I get in my life to do something like this?

A few photos from our summer in Taiwan are below:

Jilong night market

Northern style Chinese restaurant in Taipei

Our Airbnb

Taiwan professional baseball game in Taoyuan

Doing homework on the balcony of our Airbnb

Taroko gorge

Taroko gorge

Tea harvest, Taidong county

Chinese summer camp homework project

Cliffside temple, Xindian, New Taipei City

Hiking markers near Maokong station, Taipei

Puppet show on the last day of the Chinese summer program

Tang Dynasty sculpture at National Palace Museum

Notes: I was not paid money to write this post, and we don't have any affiliation with NTNU other than sending our kids to camp there in the summer of 2014 and again in 2018. I just wanted to share my experience, after finding it so difficult to locate real reviews about the program!

However, since posting this review, I have added affiliate links for Amazon and Airbnb on this page. I get a small commission or travel credit if you click on them and spend money on those sites. If you don't want to use the links, here are the plain old links: Amazon/Airbnb. I also use advertising on the page, which you can turn off by switching to reader view in Firefox or Safari, or by using an ad blocker. 

One week in Taiwan in autumn: Where to go

A friend who lives in Singapore recently wrote me, asking about places to visit in Taiwan to see fall foliage and good beaches.

The question about foliage was interesting. I lived in Taiwan for 6 years and don't recall autumn scenes, other than some yellowing leaves on a few types of trees in the parks and hillsides near Taipei. Most of the island remains green throughout the winter, at least at the lower altitudes.

I did a little Internet research and found that there are a few places on Taiwan to see autumn foliage. Can it compare with what I'm used to, here in New England? Probably not. But where Taiwan excels in natural scenery is in the mountains, which cover 50% of the island.

Over the summer, I took my son to Taroko Gorge (太魯閣) in eastern Taiwan and the first 25 kilometers of the South Cross Island highway in the southeast, which follows another massive gorge deep into Taiwan's interior. They are quite amazing -- possibly two of the most spectacular roads outside of the Himalayas or southwest China. Here's a brief clip from our drive through Taroko:



Another area which is spectacular and has lots of hiking areas is Alishan National Scenic Area in Chiayi County. I used to like to go up to Hehuanshan (合歡山), too, for hiking and scenery, which includes the "sea of clouds" phenomenon. The advantage of going to these areas in the fall is there are fewer tourists, the air is drier, and there are probably opportunities to see some foliage, especially at the higher altitudes.

As for beaches, unfortunately the once-sleepy beach town of Kenting in the southwest has been totally overrun by commercial development in the past 20 years, including hotels somehow cordoning off sections of the beach for private use, even though it's within the grounds of a national seashore. However, this summer when I drove down to the southeast there were many beaches between the industrial city of Hualian (you can rent a car right outside the train station) and Taitung in the southeast, about a three hour drive along route 11. The ones close to Taitung are rocky, but the small towns and cities on the coast further north from Taitung are sandy and look deserted for the most part ... which is good if you like deserted beaches but not so good in terms of a lack of lodging and infrastructure for tourists (there might be some B&Bs, though).

There are alternatives to beaches which I think would make a fun fall vacation in Taiwan. B&Bs in the countryside around Ilan County are easy to get to from Taipei and are quite striking. I stayed in one about ten years ago right in the middle of the rice fields, and you can do things like rent bikes, go to local town markets, etc. There are also similar B&Bs in the rift valley north of Taitung. The scenery there is really beautiful with many Taiwanese and Aboriginal farming communities and mountains on either side. It's possible to rent bikes and travel these roads and lanes, and I think in the fall it would be really nice as the temps are moderate and the air is dry. Here's a clip of the tea harvest in early August in the rift valley:



Bottom line: If you only have a week in Taiwan in the fall, I would recommend going to Hualien, renting a car, driving to Taroko Gorge where there are some hiking opps of varying difficulty and you can stay in Tianhsiang (or Tianxiang) about 25km up the gorge. After a few days, drive back down the gorge and head south on Route 11 in the direction of Taitung, finding some B&B to stay at near the beach, and exploring around by car or bike. You can also do the return trip to Hualian via the rift valley mentioned earlier. Taroko is one of the natural and man-made wonders of the world -- there's nothing quite like it that I am aware of outside of remote parts of China or India or Nepal, and it's something adventurous travelers should try to see once in their lives.

Chinese as a world language?

There's an interesting article in LitHub by Tom Mullaney titled TO ABOLISH THE CHINESE LANGUAGE: ON A CENTURY OF REFORMIST RHETORIC. A couple of thoughts to share, as someone who studied Mandarin in Taiwan the 1990s, encouraged his kids to learn Mandarin here and in Taiwan, and still loves to study 4-character colloquialisms:

• "Chinese is a world script" - The author notes the rising popularity of Chinese classes in schools all over the world. I love the challenge of learning this beautifully complex system of communication, but I think Chinese script is actually holding back Mandarin (and other Chinese dialects) from becoming more widely spoken. It's difficult to write properly, and adds another layer of complexity to remembering vocabulary. I think it's much easier for people to learn a language that has an alphabet-based script, and it's possible to go further with such a language in a given period of time. For students in the West, the prospect of gaining a little proficiency in Spanish in two or three years' time -- not to mention being able to read and write a fair amount of Spanish -- seems very appealing. I don't think that's possible with Chinese, unless the student makes a significant effort and/or endeavors to do an immersion program in Taiwan or China. (One interesting exception: Japanese students have very little trouble with written Chinese, thanks to their own use of kanji, a set of 1,000 or so Chinese characters used for place and personal names and certain vocabulary).
•  The rise of software to write Chinese characters has really made it much easier to write. I say this as someone who learned in the dark ages before such software was widely available. If I had to write a sentence in Chinese using a pen and paper it would be painful for both myself and the reader ... but on my phone or using a laptop or desktop computer I can manage social media, email, and other lightweight uses thanks to easy pinyin input systems. It's improved my reading ability, too, because now I am interacting in Chinese on my devices using written language that's more like spoken Mandarin, whereas 20 years ago most of the printed materials I encountered tended to be written in more formal style.
• Mandarin as a world language. The increasing importance of the Chinese economy is becoming a big driver for spoken Mandarin in other parts of the world. I've encountered Thais and Vietnamese who can speak it quite well (but not write) in order to do business or interact with Chinese tourists. A friend who recently visited Italy saw the same thing in high-end shops with young Italians behind the counters being able to speak proficient Mandarin.
• I disagree with the idea that the lack of spaces between words are a problem. Chinese grammar is very straightforward, and once you have sentence structure and a large enough vocabulary it's not hard to figure where words start and end (even if you don't know a specific term).
• There are interesting examples in Vietnam and Korea of societies that abandoned Chinese characters in favor of their own alphabets. It's true that cultures lose the connection with ancient literature and older historical documents ... but not their history, thanks to the spread of literacy and public education combined with a strong interest in history and famous people from centuries past.