Notes From the Suao Road
by
Randy Johnson
Originally published in Orientations, February, 1977
Leaving Taipei is an unexpected relief. Just a few minutes out of town, cool green mountains, far and near, slide into view and the lush countryside is measured only by the swaying of banana leaves. Gone are the noise and soot, gone also the turmoil of the city, replaced by the sloppy mud of rice padis and the quiet squalor of rural villages.
Taipei is a City, like all cities. In the crawling summer heat, a towering forest of concrete buildings melt into the pool of asphalt that permeates its daily life. It shouts its 'citiness' down neon thoroughfares and forges its inhabitants into city people -- hustling, clever, calculating -- appreciative of city things: glamour, noise, lights, and money.
Yet each city has its own personality, its peculiar temperament which city-watchers relish as its uniqueness. Taipei has the appearance of an overgrown South American provincial center -- only with less grandeur -- not the capital of the true Republic of China. This, for me, is its saving grace. For all of its pettiness, its lack of cultural amenities, in the midst of its impending citiness, Taipei cannot completely shake the sod from its pants cuffs, nor the mud from between its toes. It is a country boy learning to survive in the streets -- with a vengeance.
If I could stand to live here for a year, I might come to feel close to this city, at least, feel that it has a heart -- of what kind, I cannot judge, but of some kind perhaps. Yet Taipei is undeniably a city, and striking out into the countryside reminds me that Life speaks to me through mountains, not cities, through people, not crowds.
We gathered early on the platform at Taipei Station to get seats on the 9:58 Limited Express. Trains came and went but the 9:58 dallied until 10:45, a good omen for an escape from timetables. The train ride east out of Taipei is refreshing. Just past the shanties on the perimeter of town spread miles of lush grasses and trees, villages in red brick and cement, and people in the fields, threshing rice by hand.
On my second glass of tea, my eyes follow a mud path through the rice fields, and I try to imagine what it is like to walk that path, many times each day. I see myself, walking that trail -- suddenly transformed from the rootless wanderer to a settler in the lush rice valleys of Taiwan -- not just now, but every day. It is my trail and I know every step and branch like an old friend; this is my field, my padi where I toil every day, crouched in the mud all day; where I sweat the dried mud down into my mouth, and my eyes are closed by the sting of the salt-mud. But I cut the rice by the feel in my hands in the rich brown ooze of my land every day.
Of course, this is all rubbish. I am not a Chinese rice farmer, and never will be. I have farmed, I have worked in the ground all day, I have known paths similar to these. But not the same as these, not the same as this life. For always I have had a past and a future different from farming. I have done things, led lives different from this. And the thinking, even the doing, is not Being -- not knowing a lifetime of peonage.
Even in the thinking, I know that my fantasy is rubbish. But it is an enthralling concept, and fantasizing helps me believe in it. Yet it is an attempt -- as close, perhaps, as one might come in ideas, to the reality of seeing Life behind the haze of one's own existence. On the train I scribble:
How does it feel
To spend your life dreaming
Because you dare not awake?
To live your life striving,
struggling, losing,
Because you cannot be content?
Do you know, farmer?
Do you know, digger of fields,
Sculptor in dark mud of daily meals,
Author of endless lines
Scribbled in dust for eternity?
Do you know my fate?
Can I know yours?
And I think, "This is my land." Why not? Certainly as much as any other land. Have I not always been here? Shall I not remain forever upon my land, this planet, which man carves up for his private use? I am at home in this China. It is alive, it is real, it is here. I don't know the people well, nor can I in any short time. But here among these mountains, fielded valleys, and broad sky, certainly I am no stranger.
The Limited Express pulls into Suao, on the east coast, sometime between the scheduled hour of 12:30, and 1:30, when the south-bound bus leaves for Hualien. Suao Station is still a bit small for the train from Taipei, and we had to scramble down and walk up the gravel road bed to reach the platform. Suao is a small, dusty port town, just awakening to the call of a developing Taiwan, but destined to grow into a major trading center -- someday. Outside the drowsy bus depot, we wait for the caravan to arrive.
The journey on the Suao-Hualien Road is a real hair-raising experience -- four and a half hours aboard a dilapidated jack-hammer piloted by a maniac over grueling washboard road. The bus careens around endless curves, hugging the cliffs perched 800 feet above the sea. Since the tortuous road is only one lane at most -- carved from sheer granite cliffs -- traffic passes only in scheduled caravans, mostly buses. But the caravan is far from a plodding file of lumbering buses. Each driver is a seasoned veteran, pushing his vehicle to the limits of control, charging around tight corners only to face even tighter ones.
Somehow, I was fated (once again!) to draw the seat next to the outside window in the very rear of the bus. At each swing to the right, I was treated to a spectacular view 800 feet straight down, as my head was flung out the window by the force of the turn. The sea appears as a distant dark blue fog hugging the cliffs. In the faint blue mist it blends in with the vast rugged mountainside and the clouded horizon, the shore occasionally distinguished only as a fierce white strip far below.
It must be quite an occupation to drive this road every day. The drivers are old enough to have plenty of driving experience, yet young enough not to have lost their nerve, gained their senses, or taken one too many curves on two wheels. It was no great comfort to learn that buses only "rarely" fall off the cliff.
Yet through four and a half hours you become accustomed to the peril and it is somehow invigorating to recall your own mortality -- to realize that you are vulnerable flesh and bones, that you can perish, and will indeed if the driver makes one error, if a tire blows out on a tight curve (there are no guard rails). Then there awaits only a straight drop, and nothing to do but relax into the acceptance of immanent death. (Of course the danger is more apparent than real, and hundreds of others make the same trip, not all of whom share my feelings of impending doom.)
The tortuous, cliff-hanging dirt track is broken along the way by occasional low points, where streams have cut and deposited flat delta lands at the foot of vertical mountains. After a few minutes of vertiginous descent, the bus charges out of a blind tunnel and careens around a dizzying promontory as a lowland delta falls into view, trickling from a vast chasm splitting the mountainside. No sooner is it seen than it disappears again into the solid walls of stone straight ahead. Then again it materializes, dwarfed by lofty peaks -- mountains seen massively beneath the clouds, and again, magically rising above them so high that you must crane your neck to descry the towering summit.
There are four such lowland deltas between Suao and Hualien, each with a small village clustered by the stream bank. Five ups and five downs, churning around precipices and rumbling through tunnels revealing yet more magnificent grandeur. The bus tackles this rugged road like a horseman breaking a wild stallion: kicking it in the sides and then hanging on for dear life.
At each low point we stopped for a breather, or to allow another caravan to pass. But this respite was far from the relief it may seem. The sudden halt is a tremendous shock to a body accustomed to incessant bone-rattling agitation. The bus would lurch to a dust-choked halt, but my insides kept right on bumping and grinding up the aisle and right on down the road, leaving my hollow frame still reeling in the back seat. My entire body shuddered as I wobbled off the bus on shaky legs, poorly led by eyes still reverberating in their sockets.
Here in the tiny villages, all but pressed into the sea by domineering escarpments, small shops materialized to dispense soft drinks and fresh fruit to stuporous travelers and nonchalant drivers alike. But beyond the road stood only a few scattered huts, almost consumed by the dense mountain foliage. Small streams irrigate terraced slopes and precious mounds of grain are winnowed by hand as caravans of buses charge into town, unseen beyond thick groves of trees, and heard only as they gather courage for the next leg toward Suao or Hualien.
Hualien is just a mediocre town, a feeble conglomeration of modern hustle and old China bustle. It is not much to describe -- or to visit -- being neither odious nor charming. But it is an excellent place to have a town. At the terminus of the grueling Suao Road, in the middle of nowhere, humble Hualien looms as a dream, the fulfillment of a forgotten promise: the end of the journey. For today.
