Date: 08/28/2002
Time: 4pm
Location: Pasadena French Restaurant
Who is the greatest hero in your life? For me, it’s my father. Comic-book-wise, it’s Batman. Basketball-wise, it’s Kobe Bryant.
Who is the greatest villain in your life? Some bully who beat you up in third grade? Some coworker who took the promotion that was supposed to be yours? The manager who fired you?
Batman’s greatest villain is the Joker. They are different sides of the same coin. Polar opposites and yet they complement each other’s existence. That’s why the stories and their battles are so intriguing. It’s a never-ending saga.
What if you are both Batman and the Joker simultaneously?
I am Robert “Rob” Bao, an ordinary person born in an ordinary middle-class family in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. My childhood was not special. My father, Ivan Bao, was a local government official for most of his career. My grandfather was a steel worker, who labored his whole life to provide for a wife and four children. He was born during Japanese occupation of Taiwan, a time period when Han Chinese were second-class citizens and the Japanese ruled. Grandpa didn’t speak Mandarin Chinese. Taiwanese was his native tongue, and he learned the Japanese language in school. He could read, write, and understand Japanese when it was spoken in a slow pace. I remember when I was ten, we went on a family trip to Japan. When we came back, Grandpa wrote to our guide in Japan for us. He translated our writing and sent a postcard. Pretty cool, wasn’t it?
Grandpa was missing his left index finger. It was chopped off during a workshop accident when he was still a teenager. He was an apprentice back then. Even my father did not know much detail about the accident. Grandpa was a man of few words. Solid, resilient, and hard working. Those trying times near the turn of 20th century and early modern Taiwan development saw a slew of young men and women who refused to bend to their environment and upbringing. They created their own destiny. I miss him dearly.
Rob, Grandpa wishes you success!
These were his last words to me before I went abroad to the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign as an exchange student in 2005. He passed away in Kaohsiung Medical University Chung-Ho Memorial Hospital the night before a scheduled kidney stone removal procedure. He didn’t suffer at all. The nurse alleged Grandpa was on his way to the bathroom. He was found beside the bed without any sign of life at round 4:52 am. Mom and Dad kept the news from me. My older sister finally broke silence and told me a week after the fact. The shock hit me like a 60mph freight train. I was depressed for five days, couldn’t go to class, grieved alone in my room without family support or anyone to cry with. Moreover, I didn’t attend the funeral because my parents thought the flight wasn’t worth the $1,082. In their mind, school was the first priority.
When I was in junior high school, I won Kaohsiung City Government Award for Excellent Writing on Youth Smoking Prevention. I basically wrote about my friend Andy. He was a “bad boy,” the wild kind that girls’ mamas didn’t like, but girls did. Andy was 5'5", relatively short comparing to me, 5'10". We were classmates from 2nd grade to 6th grade. To enter good junior high schools, kids in 6th grade in 1997 took entrance exams at different schools, I was the number one student entering Kaohsiung Municipal Ding Jin Junior High School, while Andy got into the lesser Kaohsiung Municipal Minzu Junior High School. We still played basketball every week with a bunch of grade school buddies. There were Allen, John, Chad, and me Rob. Every Saturday or Sunday, we biked to a nearby school to play pickup basketball in outdoor courts. Kobe Bryant was the common idol for Andy, Allen, and me. During that time Kobe was just a 18-year-old teenager navigating the adult NBA League. We all grew up watching him, idolizing him, mimicking his every move on the court. He was amazing! Dazzling us and the world with his talent, drive, and a relentless will to succeed.
Andy didn’t smoke. Well, he does now but not at the time I wrote about him as a character in my essay. It was so obvious the character in my essay was modeled after Andy that the girl who liked him back then became upset for the fact that Andy might be smoking. They had mutual attraction. Therefore he was mad at me! This was 21 years ago. We are still friends to this day. How ironic things turned out! I predicted his nicotine addiction before he even smoked his first cigarette. For the Kaohsiung City Government Award for Excellent Writing on Youth Smoking Prevention, I had a chance to meet the mayor at the time, Mayor Frank Hsieh. He was an intelligent man, articulate and analytical. A lawyer and a politician, Frank Hsieh lead the wave of early political movements in which the Democratic Progressive Party of Taiwan began gaining power before one day finally ruled the country.
Senior high school was the best time of my life. Some people peaked at high school and lived the rest of their lives reminiscing the youth energy, the wild creativity, the academic or extracurricular overachieving, the carefree attitude, the bravery to take on initiatives, oh, and the happy days.
Those were my happy days. Studied hard, played hard. For two and a half years out of the three years of my senior high school life, it was as perfect as it could be. I played electric bass in a rock band called “Hawaiian Shirts.” We were quite famous locally, and even performed in Tainan (the city next to Kaohsiung). There were fans (ok, more like friends I admit) of mine traveling all the way from Taipei to Kaohsiung for our show!
It was music, rock ‘n roll, and my band members that ignited my passion, blessed me with joyful times, and created everlasting memories I still reminisce to this day, some 18 years later.
(To be continued… click here for the next episode)
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