From a work in progress by "Bau Shen-fu," Father Bauer
words by Father Bauer
photo by Autumn Tsai
words by Father Bauer
photo by Autumn Tsai
Hello, Readers of The Next Page --
Your editors have asked me if I'd like to show you some pages of my creative writing.
I am honored and very happy to share a scene from a manuscript I am working on. You'll have to be patient as you enter the story, because the words you are about to read pick up the "action" more or less several pages after the narrative begins.
Your editors have asked me if I'd like to show you some pages of my creative writing.
I am honored and very happy to share a scene from a manuscript I am working on. You'll have to be patient as you enter the story, because the words you are about to read pick up the "action" more or less several pages after the narrative begins.
So much to explain because, like so many stories, this one begins in the middle. Ah so, but isn't that a truth hard to avoid? How difficult it may be, sometimes, to know the difference between a beginning, a middle, and an end.
It is probably safest then to start some place simple, and the simplest place may be the telephone. The location of the telephone, that is.
The telephone in the dining room of the Brothers of the Holy Word at Mother of God Catholic University in Xinchuang sat quietly in an almost forgotten spot at the end of a long window ledge. The dining room was on the top floor of the last building on the right as you left the campus at Mother of God Catholic University. The name of that building, and I apologize for repeating the word, but I can't seem to get away from it, was the Cheng Memorial Building. That name honored the cardinal archbishop of Taipei who had been instrumental years earlier in the founding of the university there in Xinchuang.
Cardinal Cheng had himself been a member of the religious order we find here as the Brothers of the Holy Word. And, as this story begins (in the middle, so sorry), the Brothers who taught at the university were living in the upper floors of this building.
I promise to get back to the telephone in just a moment. Patience is a virtue. Please try to be a little patient.
So, the Metropolitan Rapid Transit (MRT) station for Mother of God Catholic University was on your left as you exited the front entrance of the school. The noisy, bustling city of Taoyuan was to your right, down the road and up and over the mountain side, another 10 kilometers away. Everybody in Taiwan knew Taoyuan because the airport there, the busiest in the entire little country, was about a half hour drive away.
Mother of God was near enough to Taipei for people to imagine it as one of the many universities in Taipei. Actually however, the campus was 10 solid kilometers southwest of the city. Ma Shen-fu, whose western name was Nathaniel J. McBride (some calling him "Father McBride," then, because he was a Catholic priest), liked to say the university was "10 K from the train station."
So American of him to put it that way. By "K," he meant "kilometers." By "train station," he meant "Taipei Main Station." Everybody under the sun in Taiwan knew where Taipei Main Station was. And yes, that is the operative name of the place in local English. People did not normally park a "the" before it. It was just "Taipei Main Station."
We still have that "K."
Well, "K" probably has a slew of meanings, but here it means "kilometer," but in the plural, so "kilometers."
Ma Shen-fu had been an enthusiastic jogger when he was young. There were many things the shen-fu slash professor did not know in life. But he knew his kilometers.
"10 K," he'd smile, "is a good workout."
You bet 10 K was a good workout.
And "was" is the word for it. For that was yesterday's program. Nowadays his workouts were considerably more modest in ambition as well as accomplishment. He thought it a good day if he could walk with gusto for about forty minutes, lie flat on his back and bounce back and forth for a few sit-ups in a back corner of the campus, and then jog very deliberately, very slowly, very happily for seven or eight minutes.
Ah so!
"Shen-fu," by the way, is the Chinese term for "Catholic priest" or "Father." People used it as an honorific, putting the family name of the fellow before the title. For westerners not in the know about Chinese culture, this probably seemed like, ha ha, putting the horse before the cart. There is a joke here, but humor moving from one culture to another often crashes. So sorry.
Father's family name in Chinese being "Ma" (like the former mayor of Taipei who, fortunately or unfortunately, is a whole different story), he was called Ma Shen-fu.
Dull grey in color, the telephone had the look of fragility about it. It was made of plastic, and not a confidence-building, formidable plastic at that. Even its electrical cord, thinly coated with a surprisingly inflexible, anonymous rubber substance, seemed to very much belong to the transient order of things. The cord looked as if it could be accidentally disabled at any minute, torn from the receiver with a careless wrench of a wrist. In its physicality, the telephone, mighty in its potential to deliver important words and messages, stood paradoxically in contrast to the rock-hard, reliable wooden counter upon which it sat.
That niche for the telephone in the dining room for the Brothers of the Holy Word marked the end of a long row of mailboxes beneath the windows there. To the left and beneath the telephone, along a succession that headed back in the opposite direction toward the door of the dining room, were those mailboxes, you see. They were assigned by name to each of the Brothers. The names of the Brothers, these confreres, were embossed on narrow strips of white paper. Their names were embossed in both Chinese and English.
Thanks to the advent of email and other high-tech conveniences, "snail mail" was rare in those days. Thus, these slots for letters and small packages served other needs.
The mailboxes held white cloth napkins for the confreres to use at meals, for example, which the cook changed every Sunday morning before breakfast. In addition, the mail slots were convenient storage places for odd pieces of correspondence, communication, and recordkeeping.
Occasionally taking up temporary residence in the mail box of the Brother who taught in the English Department were essay-like reports optimistically and grandly called "reflective journals." The professors in the English Department at Mother of God may have preferred the reflective part, but the students simply called the documents "journals."
Ma Shen-fu was the Brother among the Brothers of the Holy Word who taught in the English Department at Mother of God Catholic University.
Now, about those journals.
At certain times of the semester, as many as six or seven of these homework assignments, these journals, might be folded and gently stuffed into the cubby hole, the dining room mail box of Ma Shen-fu. His students had left the manuscripts, "late, but in," at the receptionist's window downstairs on the first floor of the Cheng Memorial Building. After the passing of a meal or two in the dining room, or even, given the consequences of procrastination, a day or two up there, the journals would then make their trek en masse to the professor's room on the 4th floor. That is where he read and graded the journals, the pages and words his students so carefully wrote. This was, truly, a labor of love for Ma Shen-fu. He actually enjoyed reading what his young scholars wrote there.
These reports, these "journals," could vary from standard "blah" quality to literary commentary that was actually interesting and fairly well done, considering they were the deliberations of undergraduate students, not sharp-minded, ambitious Ph.D. candidates. None of the authors of these journals, lovable students as they were in the eyes of their shen-fu professor, was a native speaker of English.
It might be just a little mind-blowing for the typical American (if such a creature exists after the election of Donald J. Trump), to pause and consider the significance of this journal situation.
These English majors at this university in Taipei faced obviously challenging expectations when they plopped down to write a journal. Nearly every single student in the English Department at Mother of God was Chinese or of ethnic Chinese ancestry. The native language of these young people was not English. It was Mandarin Chinese, or it was Taiwanese or, in the case of overseas students from Hong Kong or Macau, it was Cantonese. Now, look.
Since Mr. Trump's ascendance, that is how the pundits on YouTube commentary shows from the States always begin.
"Now, look," they say, their facial expressions still aghast.
So, now, look: these students were supposed to read difficult works of literature composed in what for them was a second or a third language. And they were using that new language, not their mother tongue, to do their writing. They were adrift in the ocean of a foreign language, and had been told to, well, just jump in the water and swim the best they could.
This was, as Ma Shen-fu liked to point out, "Nothing to sneeze at."
He often wondered how many American college students who were French majors, for example, would stay in courses in which their professors threw journal homework like this in their face.
"You want us to read the friggin' novel Madame what's her name in French, and then write four friggin' pages in French about it? And then we're supposed to do the whole thing again later in the semester, except with a different friggin' boring book, and that journal also in French? This is after listening to friggin' you drone on like a boring banging broken bell for hour after hour in friggin' French? Two of these sacred journals of yours in one semester, Mr. Professor? What are you, friggin nuts, or what? You think I won't drop this friggin' course and walk out on you?"
Ma Shen-fu could easily picture students in his home country saying that.
But he wasn't living and teaching in his home country. He was at home in the island country of Taiwan, the Republic of China, less than a hundred miles from the coast of Hong Kong.
Students in the English Department at the university tended to use the word "famous" too readily. That, at least, was one of the opinions of Ma Shen-fu. (He was a man with many opinions.) The students were always saying things like "famous university," or "famous restaurant," or "famous doctor," or "famous hospital," all of which the priest found both charming and frustrating. He knew, of course, that no one would ever label him as famous.
But in fact, Ma Shen-fu, otherwise known as Father Nathaniel J. McBride, was famous to a certain very limited degree for some of his words. (The 'f' in "famous" in lower case, naturally.) He was slightly "famous" for words that popped up out of nowhere, it seemed to his astonished young scholars, whenever he opened courses for them at the beginning of given semesters. Since the man was closing in on his 70th birthday, and showed few signs of slowing down, the words had been reaching students' ears for quite some time, as the saying goes.
"The more pages you write for your journal, the better, provided that you know what you are talking about. You may get a higher score if you show me that you qualify as something of a genius. Are you a genius? Well, maybe you are. Always show your professors a ray of . . .."
And here Ma Shen-fu might pause just long enough to remove his eyeglasses and gesture wordlessly with them in the air, before going on. None of his impressionable listeners quite understood how to interpret this particular personality quirk, the removal of his spectacles, the waving of them in the air bit. It did seem a little weird. But he was so sincere about it and, besides, it appeared to happen unconsciously.
The next words came with a plop.
"Your shining light."
Again the pause, this time to reward himself with a deep and relaxing breath.
Then came the repetition, the rote repetition of the entire sentence.
"Always show your professors a ray of your shining light." Another pause, and then, "Do you understand me? Are you okay with this? Do you have any questions?"
Blank faces tended to look back at him. But here and there the hint of a smile, a wry expression from a guy who dressed like a basketball player and sat in the middle of the class, or a widening of the eyes of a mysteriously winsome lass perhaps off to his left, or far back, deep in the room, back center. Father McBride, our Ma Shen-fu, was a man of some resiliency. He could live with the fact that much of his humor flew over the heads of his students like a flock of sparrows over a rice patch. At the same time, he was a man of hope. He was always hoping someone in the room, it did not matter who, just might catch the thread and understand how much he liked them all, how blessed from above he felt to be by their side, to stand sometimes in front of them and share words about this or about that.
"Do not hide your brilliance in a dark corner," he often counseled his students. "Upon further reflection, if you can, write a deeper journal. Revise your thoughts, and add to them. Or take away from what you already wrote. Throw the not so good stuff away. Revise, revise, revise."
[To be continued . . .]