PSU talk

I don't think I'm quite ready for the PSU talk yet, but the CD with the images have to be delivered tomorrow, so I've got the CD made. That was the bulk of the day -- deciding what I will be focusing on (the making of Fatherland), choosing the images, & putting them in a sensible sequence so that all the elements/sequence in the book make sense. Here are a few of the images that I'll be showing:

The lay of the land -- Taiwan is mostly hills and mountains, and just like everywhere else, hills are prime real estates. In the case of Taiwan, the prime real estate is often reserved for the ancestors, ie, cemeteries.



You don't have to go very far from the city before you're in the middle of the woods. This was maybe 10 minutes walk from town.



On this hill not very far from my parents' house, there was this public cemetery. Here a Mr. Lu had posted a sign for his business. This particular sign says 'bone picking', but he has multiple signs up everywhere, and he evidently owns a turnkey operation for burial -- he takes care of everything, from the initial burial to tomb maintenance, to the exhumation 7 years later.



Here's a fairly new tomb.



And here's a tomb where the bones have been collected.



My book, Fatherland was conceived because I was walking up to this cemetery a couple of times a day during my visit, and it seemed like every time I went up there, something had changed -- a tomb had been exhumed, a new one had been put in, etc. The book was accepted into the Guild of Book Worker's 100th Anniversary exhibit which is traveling the US for 1 year, and it's here in Portland right now. So the 3 of us in Portland in the show are giving a talk on Thursday. Thus all this preparation.