Money to Burn

I got together with my friend Jacky today for the first time since we were rear-ended together. He seems to be doing fine. The creep who assaulted him hasn't been found by the police yet, but he's found a job in Taipei and will try to move up there shortly.

After a quick bite of lunch, Jacky and I went to visit his twin brother, sister-in-law, and nephew. As near as I can tell, they live clear on the other side of town from where my school is--though my sense of direction and where things are in Taoyuan has never really developed.

Jacky's sister was very kind, though she kept apologizing profusely that her English is so bad. Her son is all of 13 months old and seems to be about as rambunctious as you would expect for that age. She told me she intended to start him on English as soon as he said his first words in Chinese. They had a few English-language storybooks and CDs around already. To me, this is a tad obsessive, but given the way American parents of certain social classes play Mozart in utero and do flashcards with two-year-olds, who am I to comment?

When we had been there about an hour, Jacky's sister mentioned that she wanted to go to temple for reasons I did not quite catch. And so it was that I got my first experience in a Chinese temple.

Normally, Jacky tells me, each temple is dedicated to only one god, but this one served for ten because it is so large. Though he didn't name all of the deities to me, he pointed out the deity for wealth and career, the deity for longevity, and the supreme deity who is apparently above all the others. One literally ascends to commune with this deity; his center of worship is on a level above that of the other deities, and one must climb two flights of stairs to get there.

Jacky made clear that one must commune with the deities in a spirit of sincerity, which did not surprise me. It did seem, however, that petition for what one wants is the main form of worship of the deity. I found little in the way of offering thanksgiving in what Jacky described of the practices in the temple, but this may just not have been the time or venue for that. I cannot believe that the Chinese do not offer up prayers of thanksgiving as well as of petition.

Upon praying to each deity, one places a stick of incense in front of its shrine or urn. I had known that Chinese people, and many other Asian people, use sticks of incense in their worship. In fact, I was warned before I came to Taiwan not to leave my chopsticks pointing straight up in rice, because this resembles the incense burned at funerals and is therefore seen as a bad omen. But I had never actually seen the incense so used, and the experience was definitely interesting.

I also got to see the burning of paper money to the gods. This is not real money but pieces of paper that are designed to look like money. Jacky seemed a bit puzzled when I asked what protecting gods do with money. He supposes they pay their water bills and buy nicer cars, just like us down below, or at least that was what I gleaned from what he told me.