Adventures in the Land of Singing Garbage Trucks

by Adam Tervort

  Adriana was a big surprise for us, but a good one. After two kids in two years we thought we'd be taking a break for a while. Although logic tells me that there was nothing very miraculous about her conception, we still can't figure out exactly when Mei-yun could have gotten pregnant. She was born on July 12, 2008, just after Emerson's third birthday. She wasn't hairy and she didn't have a big schnoz, she was just a beautiful little girl, and she gets more beautiful every day.

  ~~~

  In April 2007 we broke my mother-in-law's heart when we decided to move out. This may be a bit difficult to understand if you are American, but Chinese parents want their kids to stay at home. It is normal for a man to live with his parents for most of his adult life, the Taiwanese pop singer Jay Chou is a good example of this. He did an interview on CNN once and told the interviewer he was always going to live with his mom. She laughed at him and asked if he was joking. He replied that this was just part of filial piety, Chinese sons stay with their moms to take care of them. The interviewer asked him what he would do when he got married. He said that they would still live with his mom, it was just tradition. Our situation was a bit different from his because not many women live with their family after marriage, they live with their husband's family, but of course my family was back in Missouri so it was expected that we'd live with Mei-yun's folks. We were able to save an awful lot of money there, but when Langston came the one room we had was just too small. We looked around for a few weeks and found a four bedroom apartment about 10 minutes’ drive from their house for $400 US per month. It was a bit on the high side, but we really liked the location and the space, so we signed our contract and moved in.

  We began by discovering Ikea, and started our race to fill that apartment with stuff. Now that we had our own space (and so much of it!) we wanted to get all of the things we hadn't been able to before. One of my students was moving to Shanghai and gave us a lot of their old furniture for a great price. We eventually had a toy room, office, storage room, bedroom, kitchen, and two patios filled with all of our things. We opened an English class in our home so we needed tables and chairs for the kids in the class to use. Pretty soon we were out of normal storage spaces and we started leveling, stacking things higher and higher. We had a small earthquake one day and I was almost impaled by a board game that hurtled off the top of the bookcase. We bought storage shelves so that we could fit more appliances in the kitchen, and then more appliances because we had room for them. This was the American dream, Taiwan-style.

  One of the great discoveries I made around this time was the beauty of going digital. English books here are really overpriced, and one day I discovered that the Gutenberg Project had a lot of great books I could put onto my old PDA. One of our friends got a new PDA and gave me his old Window's Mobile PDA, and I started getting eBooks from all over the Internet. I could install the Adobe PDF reader, which meant I could check out books from the local library in Missouri and read them on my PDA in Taiwan. How cool is that? I also got really into digital movies when another friend gave us a free copy of his company's product, a media player that connected to our TV. It was really a little computer but it looked like a little blue magic box. You would plug your USB hard drive in and turn on your TV, then you could watch anything on the hard drive right there on your TV. Magic! No more kids’ DVDs getting scratched up, just rip them and put them on the hard drive. When my students offered copies of movies (for research purposes only, of course,) we could watch them on the TV instead of on the computer. All of the CDs I had brought from the US were ripped and put on the hard drive, and I could browse my whole collection from one central spot. It was digital heaven. Since then technology has only improved (and so the number of hard drives we had to buy increased). Now we have one just for the kids' stuff, movies and music, one for our movies, one for backup, and on and on.

  I was pretty smug about the whole setup until someone broke into my apartment and stole one of the hard drives. Last year we started looking for a cheaper apartment and one afternoon when we went out we left one of the windows unlocked. It was a beautiful, sunny day, mid-afternoon, and we were only gone for 45 minutes. When we came home I went into the office to check my email and couldn't find my computer. Or my bag. Or my hard drive. We called the security guard who called the police. Soon the office was like a scene from CSI with crime scene techs dusting for prints and taking statements from us. I know that that is supposed to be the way things happen when there is a crime, but to see it actually happen is pretty exciting. The police were great. They found fingerprints of our cat burglar outside the window we had left unlocked and in the office, but they turned out to not be on file. I was out one computer and with all of the peripheral stuff that went along with it, as well as one of those hard drives I was so proud of. All of my jazz collection, gone in one fell swoop. I hope that he listened to it and got some culture out of the deal. We never found out who did it. It was pretty easy to make the decision to move after that, though. We found an apartment in the same neighborhood for $300 US per month and started to get all of our mountains of stuff together for the move.

  Chapter 14 - Rethinking the American Dream

  In the last six years in Taiwan there have been three big changes in my life which I don't think could have come to pass if I hadn't been living here. Yes, I made plenty of positive changes in my life while in the United States, but the situation was just right for these things to happen while living in Taiwan. I'll talk about two of them in the next chapter, this chapter is about what happened around the time of our move to a smaller apartment.

  Why the move anyways? (You mean besides getting robbed?) We could save $100 per month if we moved, and we thought we could make our four rooms fit into three without too much pain. This wasn't just saving money for fun, though, it had a bigger purpose. It was a step towards a dream. Anthony Glise, my guitar maestro of yore, had dropped a bomb on me one day. He had a new position at the University of Missouri putting together their classical guitar program and he wanted to know if I was interested in joining. I had to sit down after reading the email, I felt weak and clammy. Did I want to go back? More than anything. Should we go back? Definitely not. Our life was good, getting better all the time. Why screw it up so that I could play guitar all day and never make money again? About the time this train of thought was rolling through my head Langston came into the room. Did I explain why he is named Langston? My senior year of high school I took a literature class that covered the Harlem Renaissance and I loved what we studied. I took another African-American lit class in university. In both classes my favorite poet was the father of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes. The poem that I loved the most?

  A Dream Deferred

  (by Langston Hughes)

  What happens to a dream deferred?

  Does it dry up

  like a raisin in the sun?

  Or fester like a sore--

  And then run?

  Does it stink like rotten meat?

  Or crust and sugar over--

  like a syrupy sweet?

  Maybe it just sags

  like a heavy load.

  Or does it explode?

  How could I not carpe diem? It all sounds so cheesy, but I knew this would be my last shot, the last chance I would have in life to really live the dream of music. I waited two days to even show the email to Mei-yun. When I did, all she said was "Do you want to go? If you do we'll go."

  We started to plan how we could make it work. Anthony got together with me on Skype a few times to talk about it and was encouraging and understanding. We finally decided we needed to have a way to make money that was location independent and it had to be running smoothly before we could go back. This way we could move and not lose our income. The kids would still have what they needed and our family wouldn't have to go through too much torture just so I could "live my dream." It sounded good on paper, so I started to try and find a way to make it work.

  I began to read more seriously about
blogging and started a blog a few weeks later called FREEbird English. I thought that since I was already an English teacher this would be a good place to start. Blogging was hard and fun at the same time. I had never been uncomfortable around the computer but making websites was something that I had no experience with at all. I enjoyed the challenge of writing and teaching online, using social media to get more readers, and learning how to make products. This was not like the old me, the old university me would never have thought learning about marketing could be fun, but the new me knew this was all leading back to the dream.

  Not long after that I came across the book "The 4-hour Workweek" by Tim Ferriss. Here was someone teaching a sermon I wanted to hear, someone who said that a location independent lifestyle was possible. I've read through his book four times now, and the more I read it the more exciting the idea is. (But like all good things, it is still hard to implement.) There was one immediate benefit though. In the section of the book discussing mobility Tim talks about clothes. How many shirts do you really wear? Maybe five consistently, and the others stick around in the closet waiting for the special occasion that may or may not come. The more stuff you have the less able you are to be location independent. Looking around the towers o' stuff in our apartment mobility felt a long ways off.

  As part of the same effort I wanted to learn about increasing productivity, and I ran across the Get Things Done system. Not knowing much about it I Googled “GTD review,” and the link I clicked was a review of the GTD method by a guy with no hair and a crazy last name, Leo Babauta. He talked about the benefits of GTD and then introduced his own spinoff system, Zen To Done. (His blog is called Zen Habits.) I got ahold of his book ZTD and read through it, but it didn't do much for me. I did like his writing style so I started to follow his blog. It turns out that Leo isn't so much about productivity these days as simplicity and minimalism. I read another of his books, The Simple Guide to a Minimalist Life, and all of the sudden the lights came on upstairs and things started to click. This was the real way to get to my dream.

  What is minimalism?

  A rejection of mainstream consumerism. No one was ever happy because of their stuff. When we build our life around having more things we are setting ourselves up for disappointment. People and experiences bring happiness, not things. Buy less, use the things you have now and you will not only save money but be happier.

  An embrace of simplicity. A house that is crammed to the gills with stuff isn't a place where you live; it is a place where you try to survive. Getting rid of clutter, keeping things in their place, making sure flat surfaces stay clear, and minimalizing what you have gives you a living space that you can live in again. Cleaning all day isn't the answer either, reducing what you need to clean is.

  Debt never leads to happiness. We were in debt for a number of years after a bad investment, and now that we are clear of that and have some savings in the bank our stress level has fallen in a big way. The path to debt is Income - Spending = Savings. The path to independence is Income - Savings = Spending. We don't need stuff to make us happy, right? Then there's no reason to go into debt to buy stuff.

  The future will take care of itself. So much of my clutter was there in preparation for a rainy day, but the rainy days just weren't coming. I don't need to hold onto clothes that don't fit in anticipation of the day they will, things that might be useful someday, or mementos that remind me of good times. If it’s a memory, take a picture or scan it. The memory still smells as sweet on the screen as it does in your hand. If you can't use it in the next six months, out with it. This winter has been great, I've used four pairs of pants and four sweaters, and not only did I not die the cruel death of a fashion misfit, I got complements. Not many, but with my looks I'll take what I can get.

  I decided that if I was ever going to be able to achieve my dream, it would have to come as a result of reduced wants rather than increased means. The original plan is still going and I think it will work, but there is no doubt our family will be able to move now. We know how much we need to live and be happy, and it is a fraction of what we used to live on.

  When we were packing up our old apartment I threw out all my old clothes that I hadn't worn recently, all of the computer equipment that was in storage, toys that weren’t being played with, shoes that were old, and anything else we had that wasn't being used. We still had to move a lot of stuff, but as we unpacked we got rid of more and more. I asked my wife if I could set up the different rooms in the house, and did so with an eye on what looked simple and plain, was easy to keep clean, and would not get cluttered again. It took a while to get everything the way we wanted, but for the first time in years we have a consistently clean house. There isn't much in it and we tell that to people when they come to visit, but it looks nice. My productivity has gone through the roof because there are far fewer distractions. The places where I work look like they can be worked in now, rather than crowded with visual noise. Keeping a house in this state is a process and we are still making adjustments here and there, but the war has been won, now we are just governing the conquered territory.

  A pleasant surprise for me (and a godsend for Mei-yun) was the discovery that cleaning is a lot more fun when I think of the end result as a house in harmony. I enjoy doing chores now, they only take a few minutes and the results are almost instant. I can clean up the whole house in 15 minutes before bed, and when I get up early in the morning everything is in its place. If you want to be productive or inspired in the morning, wake up to a clean house, it does wonders.

  We also started to try to do more on our own, like growing food so we wouldn't have to buy it. This is just an apartment so we don't have tons of room, but I can grow enough wheat grass, mint, and lavender to keep myself in drinks, and Mei-yun has become an expert at bean sprouts. Meals are simple here, most take less than 20 minutes to prepare and use simple, whole foods. It's healthy and tastes good. (Not that I really help cook, you understand, this magic comes from my wife.) The things we can't grow we have tried to learn how to make. With 30 minutes of preparation in the morning I am able to make enough organic soy milk for the whole family and we save money by not buying soy milk from the grocers or breakfast shops.

  The point of all this is not to say that we are somehow better than people who buy things, but that we have found a lifestyle that lets us do the things we want while staying well within our means. We have even been able to cut back on the amount of work we do because we need less money. Having two meals at home every day is a miracle I never thought I'd see until retirement.

  Who needs retirement? We are going to live life so that we can retire once a year for the rest of our lives.

  Chapter 15 - Penguins and eggplant, what a combination

  When Mei-yun found a lump in her breast in late summer 2009, we were worried but not terrified. Anyone would feel basically the same unless they had some reason to suspect that the lump was cancerous, and we didn't. The biopsy came back positive for first stage cancer and we transferred to the Kuo Cancer Hospital, the top hospital in Taiwan for cancer treatment. We read furiously, trying to learn as much as we could about breast cancer, traditional treatments and alternative treatments. In the weeks leading up to this, I had started to take an interest in vegetarianism, and as we researched we saw both studies and anecdotal evidence that a vegetarian or vegan diet was helpful in cancer treatment. I had already made some moves towards this, and after her diagnosis Mei-yun joined me. We have been vegetarians ever since.

  Here is an article that I wrote about this lifestyle change and how it has affected us.

  What you eat and how you eat it are probably two of the most personal choices you have to make in life. It seems strange that something as elementary as what to eat should be a topic that people need to discuss, but it is. Your food choices have far-reaching consequences, impact much more than just your health or your pocketbook, and can make a hugely positive or hugely negative impact on your life. I want to share some of the things
I have learned in the past few years about eating and the food system, and leave you with some suggestions to ponder as possibilities to adopt in your life.

  The catalyst: Cancer

  In the summer of 2009 I was fortunate to run across an excellent video called simply “Eating,” a documentary about the effects of both the traditional American diet and how changing that diet can help combat cancer. I was so impressed by the content of the video that I started to slowly transition to a vegan lifestyle. One month later my wife, who had just finished a year of nursing our third child, found a lump in her breast. We weren’t terribly concerned because she did not fit any of the basic profiles for breast cancer: no women in her immediate or extended family of five sisters and countless other relatives had ever been diagnosed with breast cancer, she had never taken birth control pills, and she had breastfed three children, which some say statistically lowers a woman’s chances of breast cancer. After outpatient surgery to remove the lump the results came back: stage one breast cancer. We transferred to a cancer treatment center, and the good doctors and staff there helped us through the very difficult times that ultimately led to a mastectomy, but luckily did not include chemotherapy. Today my wife is completely cancer free, which I thank God for. While this was a “happy ending,” it drastically changed our views on life. The first area that changed was the way we eat, and this has had a huge impact on our family.

  Our cancer-free diet