Should all ideas be critically examined? Are there ideas –thoughts that pop into your head – that should be abandoned as soon as they’re formed in fear and panic that someone might see in your eyes what you were thinking?
FRIDAY, 29 MARCH 2019
11:31
As an adult, you are responsible for your own self-esteem. As an adult, you are responsible for how you think about yourself. There are exceptions, such as people with severe mental disabilities, but the majority of the population does not fall under these exceptions. This leads to a preliminary conclusion that people are responsible for their own attitudes and thought patterns. Which is all fair and well if attitudes and thought patterns didn’t have much of an impact on the quality of your life experience.
Academic research (see Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, and Shawn Achor’s The Happiness Advantage; Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers also have interesting examples) indicates that how you think about yourself, how you think about your place in the world, how you think about the potential impact you can make in the world, how you think about your value in the environments where you spend your life, how you think about yourself in relationships with other people, how you think about your talents and abilities all have a radical effect on your behaviour, on what you do, on how you live, on your relationships, and ultimately, on the results of your actions and behaviour.
So, question one: Does it matter how you think about yourself?
Question two: Can you as an adult be held responsible for how you think about yourself?
Question three: If it matters how you think about yourself, and you as an adult can be held responsible for how you think about yourself, to what extent are you responsible for your own position in society?
Question four: If it matters how people think of themselves, and adults can be held responsible for how they think of themselves, and they are therefore to a large extent responsible for their own positions in society, to what extent are adults responsible for their own oppression by the state?
And question five: Do these thoughts resulting from free thinking relatively unrestricted by rules about what I may say and think and write mean that I am now on the side of the oppressor? Do these questions mean that I now believe the bully has a right to rule – because he is stronger than the one under his foot, or under his fist? Are these not reasonable questions? May one not ask reasonable questions if the answers are politically uncomfortable?
Seeing that I can’t expect anyone to take it upon themselves to answer my questions, I will have to do it myself. The fact that I will be accused of being X, Y or Z does not really mean much in the world we live in by the end of the second decade of the 21st century. I hope, however, that I will find honest answers, and for once be able to put this nagging discomfort to rest.
14:38
For the record, the idea of supremacy of any ethnic, racial, or cultural group is absurd. Why would it be better if people of a certain race, language or cultural group ruled? Any being from outer space who spends more than two minutes on this planet will know that in any race, language, and culture group there are people with different outlooks on life, different ideas about themselves, different ideas about other people, and different ideas on how the world should be governed – some better and more effective than others. To claim that the members of one race, language or culture group should rule in spite of all these, and other differences is really quite unintelligent … to say the least.
My focus is on people’s views of themselves, how they fit into their environments, their relationships with other people, and what they should do to lead happy and fruitful lives. If certain ideas turn out to be good after careful consideration, if certain views prove more likely to produce results most people can benefit from, whereby the greatest number of people can find happiness, it makes sense to seriously consider these views, does it not? And if ten people, or a hundred people, or ten thousand people, or twenty million people agree with these ideas, it can lead to environments and circumstances within which a large percentage of the population can live their lives in peace and a reasonable degree of well-being and happiness, can it not?
YOU are both the agent who decides dozens of times a day between two or more options, and the result of your decisions, or choices. These choices may be relatively unimportant, such as deciding what colour T-shirt to buy. Other times you have to decide if you are a Democrat or Republican (in America), or Conservative or Labour (in Britain), or African National Congress or Democratic Alliance (in South Africa). Sometimes you also have to decide if you are someone who allows something to happen to you, or if you are someone who stands up for yourself and does not allow it to happen. Do you allow yourself to be intimidated by something, or do you decide that you will no longer be intimidated by it? Do you still allow something that someone did or said to you a long time ago, or the fact that someone convinced you to believe certain things, to have an effect on your point of view and on your actions and behaviour, or do you decide to go in a different direction, and believe other things about yourself? Are you someone who believes you are a victim of what was given to you at birth and in the first years of your life until you developed the ability to think and decide for yourself (nationality, culture, socio-economic status, religious beliefs), or do you believe that you are a creative agent who can to a large extent create your own identity and your own life as it pleases you?
* * *
Developmental biologist and self-improvement guru Bruce Lipton talks about programming in your psyche that is like a recording that plays back every time an incident, or a thought, or something someone says, presses the button. He also believes that we are able to change our programming – to replace a recording with one that is more supportive of who and what you want to be.
The author of You Are a Badass at Making Money, Jen Sincero, writes that you have to do things to challenge this old programming, especially if it doesn’t support what you are currently trying to do in your life – to in effect force the old programming to crawl out of its hiding place and expose itself.
And the author of Trading in the Zone, Mark Douglas, writes about beliefs that they are forms of structured energy. (Must be, he argues, because beliefs, like dreams and memories and other thoughts, do not consist of atoms and molecules.) He further believes that we do not change beliefs as much as we transfer energy from one concept to another – one that we will find more valuable in the process of fulfilling our desires and goals.
So it happened that I was thinking of things I spent money on this morning – a piece of clothing, and some items for breakfast that weren’t absolutely essential. I also enjoyed a light lunch in IKEA’s cafeteria. On the way home, I thought about the unusual quality of my Friday morning, and that I don’t usually spend that much money if I didn’t explicitly plan to do it.
I could almost hear my internal cassette player turning on. A decades-old recording started to roll – about someone who considers himself inherently poor and who believes it must be so.
That’s when I thought of Bruce Lipton, Jen Sincero, and Mark Douglas, and what they say about how one thinks and acts. I can confront such a negative thought, or I can replace the recording with something more useful.
Mark Douglas is very specific on this. That type of thought will most likely always get stuck somewhere in the hallways of my brain, and every now and then it will make an effort to be heard. What I can and should do is to formulate a more positive, more useful belief; deactivate, or undermine, the old belief, and then to energize the new belief. When I occasionally again hear the old recording, it doesn’t have to provoke much reaction: It will be like the barking of an old teethless dog.
* * *
Seeing that many readers are probably unfamiliar with Mark Douglas, a short quote from a section of Trading in the Zone, entitled, “The Primary Characteristics Of A Belief”:
“Beliefs seem to be composed of a type of energy or force that naturally resists any other force that would cause them to exist in any form other than their present form. Does this mean that they can’t be altered? Absolutely not! It just means that we have to understand how to work with them. Beliefs can be altered, but not in the way that most people may think. I believe that once a belief has been formed, it cannot be destroyed. In other words, there is nothing we can do that would cause one or more of our beliefs to cease to exist or to evaporate as if they never existed at all. This assertion is founded in a basic law of physics. According to Albert Einstein and others in the scientific community, energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only be transformed.
If beliefs are energy – structured, conscious energy that is aware of its existence – then this same principle of physics can be applied to beliefs, meaning, if we try to eradicate them, it’s not going to work. If you knew someone or something was trying to destroy you, how would you respond? You would defend yourself, fight back, and possibly become even stronger than you were before you knew of the threat. Each individual belief is a component of what we consider to be our identity.
Isn’t it reasonable to expect that, if threatened, each individual belief would respond in a way that was consistent with how all the parts respond collectively? The same principle holds true if we try to act as if a particularly troublesome belief doesn’t exist. If you woke up one morning and everyone you knew ignored you and acted as if you didn’t exist, how would you respond? It probably wouldn’t be long before you grabbed someone and got right in their face to try to force them to acknowledge you. Again, if purposely ignored, each individual belief will act in the very same way. It will find a way to force its presence into our conscious thought process or behavior. The easiest and most effective way to work with our beliefs is to gently render them inactive or nonfunctional by drawing the energy out of them. I call this process de-activation. After de-activation, the original structure of the belief remains intact, so technically it hasn’t changed. The difference is that the belief no longer has any energy. Without energy, it doesn’t have the potential to act as a force on our perception of information or on our behavior.” [my italics]
Douglas then provides an example of past beliefs in Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy that are now inactive, non-functional beliefs. These beliefs, he explains, still exist in his brain as concepts without energy. (According to him, beliefs are a combination of sensory experience and words that form an energetic concept.) Without energy, the concept no longer has the potential to put pressure on the perception of information or on the person’s behaviour. So if someone now tells the adult that Father Christmas is at the front door, he or she will dismiss it as a joke. Say it to a five-year-old child, and the words will immediately connect the child to a reservoir of positively-charged energy that would force him or her to jump up and run to the door, with no obstacle too great to overcome.
As an adult, therefore, the person has two conflicting beliefs about the world in his head: One is that Father Christmas exists, and the other is that Father Christmas does not exist. The difference between the two beliefs is that the first one has virtually no energy, while the second belief is charged with energy. There is therefore no functional conflict or contradiction.
Douglas believes that if one belief can be deactivated, any belief can be deactivated. The secret to successful belief change is the notion that you are not really changing your beliefs, but only transferring energy from one concept to another that is more valuable in your efforts to fulfil your desires or achieve your goals.
Active beliefs are therefore positively charged with sufficient energy to be able to put pressure on your perception of information, on your behaviour, and on how you express yourself.
I’ve been making money since I was fifteen years old – and by making money I mean earning something other than pocket money because I mowed the lawn. I started by delivering newspapers in downtown Pretoria for National Press; the next year I recruited subscribers for the same company. In my second year at university I worked in a men’s gift shop, and two years later as an assistant at the Religious Studies Department. The year before I graduated I delivered food for local restaurants, and about eighteen months after graduation I started teaching English.
All this work can be sorted under the category of someone asked me if I can do something; I agreed; I did the task, and they paid me.
I have also made a small amount of money over the years by selling items – mostly stuff that had filled up space in my apartment that I advertised, but also books that I wrote and self-published, and materials that people could use to improve their language skills, or that could help them to help other people do so.
And then I have also had mixed success with “playing around” with money; buying something at price X and selling it later at price Y.
Seeing that I have been making money for over thirty years, and have made money in various ways, what exactly do I mean when I write that I have – or had – a historical problem with making money? Is it the manner of making money – okay if someone tells me/asks me to do something, not okay if I have to take the initiative? Is the problem with risking money to make money? Do I have a problem identifying a market and coming up with a product or service to meet a specific need?
Long story short, I don’t think any of this is a problem, although it will probably be easier to make X amount of money with one method rather than another.
(End of introduction)
SATURDAY, 19 JANUARY 2019
I can have nice clothes, nice shoes, nice sunglasses, a good quality cap, good quality digital devices and earphones. I can have a debit card with money in the bank. I also have no problem imagining myself riding around on a good quality bicycle. I can enjoy a good meal at a nice restaurant, and even give money to someone else if the opportunity presents itself. With all this, I experience no resistance from problematic programming.
Where programming still throws rocks in the road, is with me doing things and receiving a lot of money as a result. Or rather, I can do things and receive money – as long as it’s just enough to keep me alive.
And yet, I don’t have a problem having money. I know I can manage money well. When I have money, I know how to deal with it – to enjoy it, but not to waste it.
The problem is to make myself receptive to receiving ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times more money than what I need to buy food, pay rent, and generally live a simple life. That I could be the recipient of a million dollars … that I could do things and then receive thousands, or tens of thousands of dollars – that’s where I’m still missing a few planks in the bridge I have to cross to get to the other side.
Monday, 15 April 2019
One does wonder: Why make more money than you need to live a simple life? One reason is that things can change quickly – you can lose your job, get sick, a war can break out in the country where you’ve made yourself at home. So I don’t want money to live lavishly. I just want more certainty than we currently enjoy. And to be able to do and enjoy some things we can’t afford to do at the moment.
MONDAY, 18 MARCH 2019
Whilst taking a shower I thought of two domain names I own, and how I finally decided that I would never be able to sell them. I thought of making money in general, and of financial markets. I think about how I have deactivated barriers in my programming. I thought about how fast it happens/How fast does it happen? Thought of religion, and about how I was programmed for twenty-plus years in a particular religious tradition and associated mythology, and how it was critically deactivated in a matter of no more than two years. Also thought that it wasn’t just the academic course I had been studying; that other people sat with me in the same classes and studied the same material, and their religious affiliation came out more or less unscathed. Thought again about the research I’m currently doing on the stock indices, and how at the end it doesn’t seem too hard to make money, but not too easy either. “What’s difficult, and what’s easy?” I wondered. Thought again about what I still considered to be my bad/flawed programming, or programming that I had picked up, because surely my parents didn’t mean to program me in a way that would make it harder for me to survive and find happiness in the world. Thought again that the flawed programming was that I thought it must be hard to make money: It must be a struggle. “Do I still struggle?” I wondered. Not really, I thought. Trading is a little more difficult than I thought it would be, or it’s taking a bit longer to work through all the options, but I’ve already made a lot of progress, even in terms of profit and loss. “But what’s easy, and what’s difficult?” came the question again. I knew it was important to answer because for decades I believed it must be hard to make money, to be successful, to make your dreams come true. It must be a struggle. But how difficult? When has one struggled enough?
“The answer you’re looking for even though you haven’t asked the right question,” emerged the thought from the part of my brain that hadn’t actively been talking out loud in the shower, “is that you’ll never make it. That was your actual programming. The struggle part is just because you have to do something. You have to try. Otherwise, what are you doing with your life?”
In fact, the sum total of the lessons I observed in my parents’ lives, and of the lessons from the church, and of Radio Pulpit, and of Job’s struggles that had ceased after seven lean years but my parents’ struggles were never-ending – though there were times of hope when one could almost have believed the struggle was over – was that it was never going to happen.
Is that why I have also come close several times … only to retreat every time, for reasons I could never fully explain to myself? Is it because there was a deep conviction not only that I should struggle, but that it would never happen for me? That I will never be successful. That I will never be financially comfortable. That I will always struggle – because it had been written that way long before I knew what was going on around me and inside my mind.
It goes without saying that this is a superficial worldview. It goes without saying that this is merely the result of a child observing the world of adults and making assumptions about how life works, and these assumptions becoming entrenched in his mind. Because it doesn’t have to be that way. But once the seed has been planted in your brain that it is so, and should be so, and you fail to pull the poisonous plant out early enough in your adult life, it will always continue to grow, eventually becoming the dominant plant in the Garden of your Thoughts, which determines how you think about things, how you speak, how you act, how you dream, how you make plans, how you make money, and how you spend money in the hope that you’ll make more money, and how you spend your time hoping you will do better – someday.
“Is it easy to make money?” is the wrong question. “Is it difficult to make money?” is also the wrong question. “Should one struggle?” is not so much the wrong question as it is a stupid question.
The canvas is clean. The paint cans are full of rich shades from my past, and from my imagination, and from what other people will gladly teach you when you open yourself up to it. Will financial independence ever happen for me? The fact is, it started happening for me years ago – I just kept myself blind to it every time, and turned away from it. And made it in other ways, and in other areas that had nothing to do with money.
If anyone sincerely asks my advice about “making” money, I will agree, on a few conditions. One is they must understand that this is a package deal: You’re not just going to “make” more money; you are going to transform your life. You have to be ready for it. You need to understand where you are coming from with the whole business of “making” money and spending money. You need to understand that before you knew what was going on, you were programmed about money, and about many other things. Weeks, or even months before we get to the technical aspects of how to start a business, or how to set up a website, or how to trade, you will need to read books like T. Harv Eker’s Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin’s book, Your Money or Your Life (preferably the older version), Wallace D. Wattles’ 1910 classic, The Science of Getting Rich, and even Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and Jen Sincero’s You Are a Badass at Making Money. Books like Scott Adams’s How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, and Bruce Lipton’s Biology of Belief are strictly speaking further away from the subject of money, but can make a big difference. And if you want to learn to trade, we won’t even talk about the difference between the Euro and Brent Crude until you’ve read Mark Douglas.
MONDAY, 11 MARCH 2019
“What is important? What are you supposed to do?” the thought comes to me for the umpteenth time as I leave the house to go buy dinner, after which I will return home to continue my work. (Contrary to my approach, I think of other expat English teachers who go out for 7-8 hours a day to teach 4-6 hours at NT$600-$700 an hour.)
Three options (as usual I will not succeed in disguising my preference):
1. Teach as many hours a day as possible at a set rate, hoping that the rug won’t suddenly be pulled from under you, and that the money will keep you alive for longer than logic suggests.
2. Get a so-called permanent position and hope the rug is not pulled from under you without warning – and if so, that you will soon obtain a similar position, and that the money you earn will be enough to keep you alive for a few years.
3. Live simply, and limit your expenses. Do enough part-time work, or freelance work, to cover your expenses. Spend a good percentage of the rest of your waking hours each day developing skills in more than one area – may be related, but need not be, and expand your knowledge on a variety of topics. Use this knowledge and skills to develop more than one source of income; sources of income that are more sustainable, and more reliable in the long run than any of the part-time or full-time positions you may hope to hold on to.
TUESDAY, 12 MARCH 2019
Question, again: To whom would I offer this advice? Certainly to myself ten, fifteen, even twenty years ago. And certainly to other expats who support themselves with English teaching in countries like Taiwan, China, Korea and Japan.
Does this also apply to other people who do part-time work, or freelance work? To some extent. However, there are people who are risking their future and their greatest hope for a good life in a more traditional profession, where they will increasingly earn more money, and will increasingly occupy better positions. I can see how this guerrilla approach – staying mobile; travelling lightly; keeping things simple; taking what you can get and holding out for as long as possible – won’t apply to them.
The money in your bank account is only a subatomic particle of the amount of money that already exists; money that has no feeling or opinion about flowing your way. If money could “know”, it would know anyway that it wouldn’t stay with you, not in the way a piece of clothing would remain hanging in your closet for years after you acquired it. You spend money. Then other money comes in. You deposit money in your bank account, which in any case means you don’t even own that money anymore – you lend it to the bank, for which the bank pays you interest, and if you want it back, they will give you different money than the money you gave them.
Still, money – which already exists and is in circulation – has no feeling or opinion about spending time in your possession. You’re not special in that sense of the word. If you open yourself up to it and take the right steps to receive it, it will flow to you.
Tuesday evening I was waiting at a busy intersection in the city. As people rushed past me on their scooters and motorcycles, I thought how each and every one of these people had a story – something you could find out if you spent a minute or two with them.
Little did I know how I would have the opportunity the next evening to find out just how true that was.
11:24
So it came that my wife and I walked from the restaurant last night where we had dinner, to an ENT specialist in our neighbourhood where my wife wanted to go for her flu symptoms. As we walked past a series of businesses on the walkway, I saw from the corner of my eye a woman stepping out from a psychiatrist’s consulting room. (I noticed her because she looked for a moment like someone who was in a class of mine for a while.)
A few businesses further, we came to the doctor’s. I said goodbye to my wife, and continued on the same walkway.
Not thirty seconds later, I heard a voice calling out, “Hey!” Seeing that little English is heard in the streets of Taiwan, I immediately suspected that I was the target of the call. Looking back, I saw a woman approaching, who looked very much like the woman who had exited the psychiatrist’s practice.
“Where are you from?” she immediately demanded.
Here I have to explain that after twenty years in Taiwan, I have a policy about this question. If you approach me politely, and say, “Excuse me, may I ask, where are you from?” I will respond. If you shout at me from a distance, and then without any introduction demand information from me, I’m not going to answer you. Or, I’m not going to proceed the way the person might have assumed. “Where are you from?” I asked her back.
No answer, just a repetition of her question.
“Why do you want to know?” I asked her with a hint of a smile on my face. “Are you from the police?”
The next hour and a half would make it clear that this was the wrong question.
She then became aggressive. “Why you don’t want to talk to me?” And then, a few seconds later, a more bizarre question: “Why you and you wife so poor?” This mention of my wife confirmed that she had seen us together before she approached me; most likely, as I suspected, when we had walked past her at the psychiatrist’s. I ignored her, and as I rounded the corner of the building, I quickened my pace, now just about a minute away from our apartment.
At this point she had moved away from me, but continued to scream in my direction from the other side of the street. “Why you look down on me?” (Interesting twist, I thought: First we were “poor”, and now she felt I looked down on her.) A series of words I couldn’t make out followed the English.
Ten meters further, I heard her running towards me.
What does a man do when he is in public, he is aggressively confronted by a woman he does not know – whom he happened to have seen at a psychiatrist’s office, and the woman shortly afterwards charges at him? Not only did I not want to be attacked, I didn’t want to be in a position where I would have had to defend myself with possible force.
The by now well-known advice, “Run, Forest, run!” had been floating in my subconscious the past few days. And so I started running, in my plastic sandals, with the woman following in furious pursuit. In the haze of the moment I also heard something like a plastic bottle being thrown in my direction. For some reason I didn’t go straight up the street to our alley, but down the street behind our apartment building. I heard her scream, “I’m going to call the police!” As I ran, my mind translated her further utterances in Chinese: Stop him! Stop him! He …
Almost at the other side of the street I noticed a man observing the whole affair. He first looked at her, then at me, and then he grabbed my arm. I pulled away, and told him in English, “She’s crazy! Call the police!” He seemed to be unsure of what to do, and I took the opportunity to run past the woman in the direction from where I came, around the corner, past another few shops, around another corner, into our alley; unlocked the door to our apartment building, rushed up four sets of stairs, and called my wife as I arrived at our apartment door.
Out of breath I told her: “There’s a crazy woman who just attacked me in the street! I think she may be on her way to you!” My wife was naturally unsure of what was going on, but I could hear the woman screaming in the background. “She’s already there!” I said.
In the apartment I put my wife’s soup and dumplings and her bottle of Coke on the coffee table (“Forest” even had to run with a plastic bag with food in his hand), got myself some socks and put on my sneakers – to be better able to run away, and called the police as I was leaving the apartment to go and save my wife. I gave the officer on the other end our address, and told him about the unstable one who had attacked me. I also informed him of my concern that my wife might be her next target.
Not more than a minute later, I was back in the walkway to the doctor’s office. As I had expected, the woman who chased me was standing outside, now surrounded by four police officers. “That’s him! That’s him!” she shouted in Chinese, with a fierce finger pointing in my direction. I calmly walked past the police, into the consulting room, and told my wife: That’s the woman I was talking about.
For the next few minutes, I explained to the police – one had already taken hold of my arm – my side of the story. Seeing that my liberty – in the truest sense possible – was at stake, I reckoned it was pertinent to inform them that her narrative, wrong as I knew it to be, may not have been a malicious lie, but the figment of a mind that may not be one hundred percent healthy. I prompted them to follow me. We proceeded down the walkway in the direction of the psychiatrist’s consulting room. There, I told them, in somewhat incorrect Chinese, that I was 99 percent sure I had seen her leave the room no more than one minute before she had confronted me.
Certainly essential to mention at this point that I fully understand that there are people with mental disorders, and people suffering from chemical imbalances. I don’t look down on people with health problems – physically or otherwise. The fact that I referred to her as crazy was not a medical diagnosis, but a simple remark based on her bizarre behaviour at my expense in public. I also don’t hold it against anyone if they want to or need to see a psychiatrist. Why would I? Do I look down on my wife who wants to see a doctor for her cough and sore throat? However, if a person acts aggressively towards me in public, and threatens my wife’s well-being, and calls the police and fabricates a story that I attacked her or something (it later came out that I had supposedly stolen money from her while she was speaking to me, which explains the “Why are you so poor?” comment), I am definitely not going to keep it to myself that I reckon she might be capable of believing figments of her imagination, based on the fact that I had seen her at a psychiatrist.
The police officers – three of them had accompanied me, probably in case I decided to start running again, then asked the receptionist at the psychiatrist if there had been a woman with them a few minutes ago. The receptionist came out on the walkway, looked down in the direction where the loud one was still waiting with the other officer, and slowly nodded her head.
I could see how the officers’ attitude towards me changed. I again explained in Chinese (for which I would at least have gotten a C+) what had happened, how she had tried to talk to me, how she had been rude and that I didn’t want to talk to her, how she had shouted at me from the other side of the road and threw a bottle at me, how she had charged at me and I how I felt compelled to run-Forest-run!, how a man grabbed me in the street (did she grab you, the officer enquired in Chinese), and how I first called my wife at home and then the police. The one officer pointed to the CCTV cameras in the area, with the implication that it would surely confirm whose version of events were accurate.
We then went back to the other doctor’s office. The other patients who were waiting with my wife in the small room looked more sympathetically at us, gesturing that we should calm down and sit – that everything would be all right.
Because I had also called the police, they wanted me to go with them to their station to make a statement. Because my wife would remain to see the doctor, I wanted assurance that the Chinese woman would not be in the area. They assured us that she had already left with a female officer.
I climbed in the back of the police car and drove the kilometre or so to their station. After arriving there, one lead me to what was clearly the back of the building, through a door into what looked like a basement, past a barking dog in a cage, and into a long, narrow office with padded walls, a few desks, and a TV high on a shelf with a blue screen and two Chinese characters gliding across the screen. The one officer then explained that everything was okay and I just had to make a statement. I gave him my Taiwan ID card, and he asked me to relate the whole story again. Which I proceeded to do, in my best Chinese. After a few more questions, he read back what he had written, with me asking for clarification here and there.
Along with my ID card, I also saw the woman’s ID card, and I surmised why I was in the basement: The woman was also in the building and they probably didn’t want her to flare up again.
A policeman in civilian clothes had since brought my wife, and after I shook hands with the officer who had taken my statement, we walked the few blocks home.
All in all, the incident probably ended not too badly. Four things counted in my favour, and I think the woman didn’t expect one of them. I was back at the scene within a few minutes, despite the presence of the police, and in spite of the fact that she was pointing at me as the person who had done X, Y or Z; I had called the police myself and told them I was concerned about my wife’s safety because of this person’s behaviour; I could tell my side of the story in Chinese; I could share with them that I suspected she had a health problem that could have influenced her narrative.
One somewhat unpleasant consequence is that quite a few people in the neighbourhood where we have been living for almost five years saw me bolting down the street with a bag of food in my hand, with a woman following anxiously behind me, all the while screaming that she was going to call the police and that I had done something to her. I have to face the other residents in this neighbourhood again, walk down the same streets and alleys, and walk past the same businesses where I had climbed into the back of a police car.
One should probably just have a thick skin, I encouraged myself, and keep your head high. What other choice do you have after all?
Oh yes, and I may have to think twice before talking to strangers in the street again.
The walkway where we were walking down
The street where the woman charged at me
The street behind our apartment building where I imagined I was in a 1990s movie
The by now well-known advice, “Run, Forest, run!” had been floating in my subconscious the past few days. And so I started running, in my plastic sandals, with the woman following in furious pursuit. In the haze of the moment I also heard something like a plastic bottle being thrown in my direction. For some reason I didn’t go straight up the street to our alley, but down the street behind our apartment building. I heard her scream, “I’m going to call the police!” As I ran, my mind translated her further utterances in Chinese: Stop him! Stop him! He …
