Aside: This is the second of two vignettes on the topic of what it's like to be Taiwanese. Read the first one here.

"Mom, why is Grandad walking round and round the cherry trees again?"

Actually, that was my inside voice. I didn't ask out loud, because like many, good Taiwanese children are supposed to be quiet.  Something to do with how many people live on such a small island*, I think.

But I did ask it inside my head over the next few weeks, because Grandad kept circling around, shaking and peering up at the cherry trees beside our house, happily anticipating something.

Little did I know then that plum blossoms, not cherry, have a special place in the Taiwanese heart because they bloom with the winter snow and do best when seemingly overlooked.  Improbably, the colder the winter, the more beautiful the blossoms, or so the stories go.

In other words plum blossoms thrive under adversity and are all the more beloved for their resilience.

Grandad wasn't thinking of resilience though. 

After some thought he sawed off one of the straightest, thickest branches of the tallest cherry tree.  Filled with purpose, he set the saw at just a certain angle and when he was done he painted the cut ends with something black.

Then came the hours of polishing, first with his bare hands, then with a small rag and oil from the kitchen to shine it up.  Trimming the thin tip of the branch came next, with much measuring and testing, balancing and banging the branch into the ground. 

And all of a sudden, I saw that it was a walking stick.

My grandad's been gone for a long time now.  But the lesson of the walking stick was the same as the lesson of empty eggshells turned upside down in all of our houseplants (what a pain to water!) 

It was the same lesson as the two grains of uncooked rice stuck under a band-aid, used on an acupressure point to relieve a headache.   

In fact it was the same lesson as the 40-year old suit my Dad loves saying 'still fits' and the pair of shoes my mom says have been reheeled and re-leathered so many times, it's not fair to call them the same old great pair of shoes.  But Dad gets such joy from admiring "such good quality, can you believe they've lasted so long?!"

Living in Canada as we were at the time, surely there was a multitude of walking sticks to choose from in a shopping mall nearby.  But that's not the Taiwanese way. 

The Taiwanese way is to take pleasure adding value, or even better, finding value in places you might not normally look.

The Taiwanese way is to accomplish a lot with unexpectedly little (make something from nothing.) To use everything at hand to make life better.  To find a bargain or perfect fit for a missing piece.

Taiwanese find it fun to make something work, especially when it seems like it shouldn't and everyone else has given up.

For better or worse, Taiwan is about surviving and thriving, against the odds.  I guess that's a little like the plum blossom.

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*Taiwan has a population of about 23 million (c. 2005) living in about 32,000 square kilometers of land.  That's about 70% of the population of all of Canada, in a land area the size of Vancouver island, slightly smaller than the combined area of Maryland and Delaware.

**This above painting of plum blossoms hangs in my office where I write. You can find it, and other Taiwanese and Asian art, here.

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