My fond memory of Taiwan/Carlos Pueblo

 My fond memory of Taiwan/Carlos Pueblo

There are two tennis bodies in our group every week have provided new tennis balls when we meet. Tony and Roger of our old Memorial Glen tennis group. I have paid attention to such a small detail of the behavior of a person. Both of them are very generous and considerate. Tony even provides the Taiwanese drinks for our oriental group. Finally, I mention some fond memory of Taiwan, the hospitality of regular people in that island who are so generous to the other. I mention a kind of religious feast in Taiwan which we call it Bye-Bye after a celebration of worship to a local god's birthday. In the orient, the god or the Buddha are people not almighty as the western God. We prepare a better menu to celebrate their birthdays and enjoy the food thereafter.

When I was a freshman at the college, one of our classmate invited us to her house at Taoyuan current day TPE international airport area. She was very sincere and understood her classmates were all from very humble background. We made it to a teachers' university with the help of the government to get a degree and promised to teach at the middle school in return after the graduation. However, our treatment was far behind for those in the military academy. Very often our diet was luck of the protein. Her invitation was very attractive to me at least. At that time, I had had a hard time to gather a round trip tickets to her house. One of our classmates mentioned that to save the cost of tickets could buy a big ball of beef noodle. We didn't go to that feast that weekend. After my first year teaching service, I came up to Taipei to teach and to prepare to study abroad. I ran into her again at a middle school. I mentioned her kind invitation. She was a registrar at that school.

Right after I returned from the frontier in 1973, I taught at a senior high school at my home town Huwei, Taiwan. I was on a training of the folk dancing for the students extracurricular activities. I ran into this pretty young girl from nearby Lumbei. She invited everybody to her house for the Bye-bye feast to celebrate one of the birthday of a local god. I managed to take a local train of transporting the sugar cane to reach to her house and surprised her. I had had a feast and a good time. That was a long time ago almost half a century and I was young and ambitious. I wanted to go abroad to leave that island.

I don't believe that they were rich in any way to measure it; however, they loved guests and liked to treat them at the feast. For me, it is forever to be a fond memory of such custom. I know that I don't like the Nationalist government, yet I do like my fellow Taiwanese. It is a different story to live in the United States, we don't have this kind of exposure to invite friends to our home for dinner because that there is only one God to celebrate his birthday.