Frank Gehry的故事

又來一個故事
他媽的我就是走上故事這條不歸路了..
addicted to stories

http://www.sonyclassics.com/sketchesoffrankgehry/main.html

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[Reading] Tell Me a Story, Chapter 4: Indexing Stories

I found the interesting comparison between the two analysis examples of goals, results, lessons, and so on that Schank gave in the beginning in this chapter:

"Trying to prove yourself may cause you to do things you don't want to so you can appear cool"
Topic: group acceptance | Goal: appear cool | Actual Results: feel lousy | Lesson: Be yourself

"Sometimes you act irrationally in a group when you wouldn't if you were alone"
Topic: group acceptance | Goal: appear cool | Actual Results: feel lousy | Lesson: Be yourself

There are still many other examples that he shown in this chapter, but these are the two sharing exactly the same topic, goal, result, and lesson - but the natural language expressions (and even the stories referred by the natural language expressions) of the knowledge are totally different!!!

Other interesting cited sentences are:

"...the indices for retrieving a story would be exactly thosethat were used to represent it. In this way, we could be reminded of a new story by an old story simply by storing the new story in terms of the same elements we have used to understand both stories, namely the themes, goals, plans, and such that characterized what was going on in each story."

"[To ascertain the themes being discussed] depends upon, among otherthings, the themes prevalent in the life of the hearer. You cannot understand very well what you neither know about nor have any experience of. The primary problem in understanding someone else's story, then, is determining the theme that is being implicitly discussed."

"One thing that we have seen is that indexing is an idiosyncratic affair: One person's indices are not another's. We are reminded of what we are reminded of...clearly a given story has no right index. Nevertheless, a right way to compute indices - that is, a vocabulary and method of construction - is common to us all. We construct different indices because what we pay attention to and what we know of the world are different, because the stories that we have already processsed are different, not because our indexing schemes are different in principle."

"Thus, a given story in our memory can have many possible labels, and a given event in the outside world can cause us to construct many possible labels."

"What we need to express these kinds of sentences is a language that would render them identically"

"Real stories are remembered because they have lessons that are derived from them that serve as indices to memory. Without a lesson, we have difficulty remembering something.... retrieving the story in a domain-independent way would be impossible...in order to get reminded of a story independent of the surface features of the current topic, the lesson provides the central part of the index."

"before you can find a good story to tell, you need to know the nature of the conversation and the ideas you have to contribute. The story is simply what happened - the goals and plans and results. The index is what surrounds the story - what reminds you of the story and what you want to add to it. Thus, an index has two parts. Something said in conversation brings an observation to mind."

"My claim is that storytelling strongly reflects inelligence. Telling a good story at the right time is a hallmark of intelligence."

"But we probably would not want to grant it real intelligence until it had made up those indices for itself. No one teaches us how to index, after all. We make up our own way of seeing the world, following generally accepted parameters, of course. Intelligence implies the creation and use of indices."

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Everything in Education

EVERYTHING!

is about inspiration

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[Reading] EM-ONE: Chapter 1,2, 5

Chapter 1:

1. EM-ONE uses as its commonsense knowledge base a library of commonsense narratives, each a story describing a fragment of the physical, social, and mental activity that occurs during a particular interaction between two actors.
2. Mental critics are implemented as pattern matching procedures that solve problems by case-based reasoning using a library of narratives cases.
3. Critics recognize problems by matching patterns encoded in a frame-based knowledge representation language that supports the description of structured scenarios involving many connected actors, situations, events, objects, and properties, including mental relations such as "observes," "believes," and "desires."
   

Chapter 2:

1. Narratives connect knowledge to purpose
2. Narratives help us control inference => it tells you when to stop inferencing
   
3. Narratives are easy to acquire => just like OMCS easier to build than CYC
   
4. Narratives can contextualize knowledge => it gives you the surrounding context
   
5. ...Unlike natural language, there is no syntatic ambiguity [in EM-ONE Narratives], so this notation can be easily parsed.
   

So I think the topic for Society of Mind's term project could be as follows. I think I'm interested in understanding (and understanding the similarity/difference between two) stories, so I'd like to look more deeply into the knowledge representation in Push's EM-ONE and Schank's Conceptual Dependency, since they are used to represent the memory, the plans, the goals, and everything. Specifically:

• How easy is it to translate knowledge from natural language into their representaions?
• How well do they help to find the similarity/difference within different stories?
  
• How well do they facilitate the practice of applying the knowledge gathered from the Opend Mind website?
• How well do they suit the layered architecture in Emotion Machine?
  
• How well do they exhibit the benefits brought by narratives?

Chapter 5:

Then I found from this chapter that there actually isn't that much difference between the two knowledge representations, because Push's work was mainly focusing on how the mind works, in terms of making decisions at different levels for physical, social, and mental realms. Schank's stuff, on the other hand, focuses on the way of representing narration without using natural language. The ACTs that Push used include "is-touching", "is-holding", "at-location", "has-speed", "moves-to", "looks-at", "grasps", "releases", "attaches", "lifts", and so on, in which some belongs to the "sensor frame" category, and the others go to the "behavior frame" category. And, he used "observes", "does", "desires", and "believes", that utilize these predicates and make mental states for critics. The major difference between these two representations, I would say, is the relationships between event descriptions within a episode. Push used simply sequential orders to characterize causality, whereas Schank used 7 or more ways to differentiate links that exhibit different meanings or even functions.

If I can make a dicision about what we should exploit, I would say, we should make some network similar to ConceptNet, only that each of the nodes represent a sentence or narrative. I think it's nice way to represent all the things we know, because the innate characteristics of a network helps to make it easier to do analogy and spreading activation, and it's easier to build using OMCS stuffs that are so fragmented. If we can make this kind of semantic network that uses a static set of vocabulary without any ambiguity, I think EM-ONE might be able to use it, and maybe other systems can use it as well.

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[Reading] Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding, Chapter 1,2

So from the first two chapters of Schank's "Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding", I found a couple things, and I make a summary right here.

Basically, Schank's Conceptual Dependency (CD) provides eleven different kinds of ACT, namely ATRANS, PTRANS, PROPEL, MOVE, GRASP, INGEST, EXPEL, MTRANS, MBUILD, SPEAK, and ATTEND. Using these acts, one can analyze a story and make a CD representation, in which states, mental states, and acts are linked through causal links such as "result in", enable", "initiate (mental states)", "is the reason for", "disable", "result in a state that enables", and "initiate a thought that is the reason for".

I haven't read the chapter about scripts in this book, but I think we may use existing knowledge to help understanding stories. In order to do this, the existing knowledge has to be in the CD representation form, such that when we translate the natural language stories into CD representation, existing knowledge will be able to be filled in the gaps during the reasoning process. So the hard question is, how are we gonna build a knowledge base that uses CD as a representation, using OMCS as a tool/resource? Or, is it possible for us to use CD knowledge built with OMCS as a tool to translate all the stories that can be found online into CD format, and make a even larger knowledege base ("script" base, if using Schank's terminology)?

The other thing I've been thinking about is, if we map Schank's CD stuff into Marvin's emotion machine model, is it gonna be the case that different ACTs shall go to different levels, and that we're gonna find the missing ACTs when we consider how the mind works in terms of reasoning and memorizing stories?

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[Reading] Scripts Plans Goals and Understanding, Chapter3

1. What scripts do, then, is to provide connectivity.
2. Thus, while it is possible to understand a story without using a script, scripts are an important part of story understanding. What they do is let you leave out the boring details when you are talking or writing, and fill them in when you are listening or reading.
3. Thus, a script is a predetermined, stereotyped sequence of actions that defines well-known situation. Scripts allow for new references to objects within them just as if these objects had been previously mentioned; objects within a script may take 'the' without explicit introduction because the script itself has already implecitly introduced them.

Chapter 3 is about script. Schank thinks that we understand stories based on the massive scripts stored in our minds. For example, a "restaurant script" gives us lots of information about what happens in succession within a restaurant context. Scripts are invoked by headers, which are conceptualizations of four kinds: Precondition Header (PH), Instrumental Header (IH), Locale Header (LH), and Internal Conceptualization Header (ICH).

During the reasoning process of a story, different scripts may need to be envoked because of detours or abrupt endings of scripts, such as interferences (preventing normal continutation of the script) and distractions (initiating new goals for the actors). Interferences are of two types: obstacles (missing preconditions) and errors (unexpected of inappropriate results). Another cause of envoking more than one script is that it is required for doing inference because of mixture of the situation faced (e.g. having lunch in a train's dinner car), different roles have their respective scripts, or a former situation influences the later situation's preconditions, etc. The three types of scripts include personal script, instrumental script, and situational script.

I think, we store both stories and scripts in our mind, and they exhibit different meanings to us. Scripts are sort of commonsensial knowledge that we learn about everything in the world along the way since we were born, and we use these commonsense scripts to reason all the stories or experiences new to us. These new stories may possess lots of other information than commonsential knowledge, such as one's personal traits, the effect of some particular events, or simply what some sentence means literally. Thus, if we think about Marvin's layered architecture of human mind, scripts and stories shouldn't be accessed in an identical way or by same layer(s). Should they?

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新網頁

http://web.media.mit.edu/~edward

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[Reading] Tell Me a Story, Chapter 1: Knowledge is Stories

I'm so excited about this book. Thanks Henry for recommending and lending me this. Here are some of the sentences I found very inspiring in Chapter 1:

1. "A good teacher is not one who explains things correctly but one who couches explanations in a memorable (i.e., interesting) format."
2. "Knowledge, then, is experiences and stories, and intelligence is the apt use of experience and the creation and telling of stories."
3. "A good theory of mind must include theories about how the stories of others are decoded to find in indices to enable their retrieval and storage, as well as theories of how and why our own stories appear in our minds in response."
4. "performance in conversation is an excellent measure of intelligence"
5. "When someone tells you a story in response to one you have told that captures an important generalization between the two, you believe that you have been 'really understood'. "
6. "Storytelling and understanding are functionally the same thing"
7. "We are always looking for the closest possible matches. We seek to retrieve stories that seem to us to be identical"
8. "Is being very intelligence just having a great many stories to tell? Does it mean being better at finding relevant stories to tell? Is it adapting superficially irrelevant stories into relevant ones, i.e., finding a story in one domain and applying it by analogy to another? Maybe it means combining stories and making generalizations from them -- or, perhaps intelligence is embodied in the intitial procecss of collecting stories to tell in the first place."

in which that last two are particularly interesting to me.

I like the 7th one because it talks about exactly what I'm trying to do in the storytelling system - "looking for the closest possible matches; retrieving stories that seem to be identical". It's interesting that the interaction between the user and my system actually constitutes collaboratively the thinking process of someone, since what Schank's saying right here is that the story retrieving process refers to thinking. The thinking of this someone, in fact, is really something I interpret as the construction process of the narrative. During the succession of popping up stories to each other, the user and the system are really working together and to think about what's going on next, which, as a whole, eventually would turn out to be a storyline.

In theory, this process may be used as a learning enviornment of "how to think" for the AI behind the screen, because it is allowed to see how the human participant responds, how he/she chooses the recommended results, and so on. It will learn by observing which similar abstraction pairs his/her choices are according to, and maybe even learn to select different kinds of abstraction categories under different context.

And I like the 8th one because it raises a good question about what I've long taken as an undoubtful assumption - "Does it mean being better at finding relevant stories to tell?" I think right here what Schank wants to address is that the point should be the strategy of designing the mechanism of understanding - e.g. "combining stories and making generalizations from them", as opposed to one of the consequences that it leads to, which is a search result of relevant stories - "being better at finding relevant stories to tell".

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爸、媽

我很愛你們

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[人物側寫] Hugh Herr

Hugh Herr 是媒體實驗室的教授。他帶領的"生物機電組" (Biomechatronics Group)位在實驗室的地下一樓，是我和小鄧一致認同是Media Lab裡頭，做的東西最屌、甚至是對全人類最有貢獻的組。每次帶大家參觀實驗室的時候，若是在三樓、四樓、或者地下室的其他各組，我都會大方的帶大家去看（甚至動手去玩）擺設出來的各種新科技；但是到了樓下Hugh Herr的這組，我都只會帶大家在門口偷偷地窺探，小聲告訴大家他們做的東西有多讚，然後就繼續帶往其他地方。我在想，也許是因為崇敬的心理因素作祟吧。

相信在人造腳(artificial legs)的領域當中，Hugh Herr的組無疑是全世界第一把交椅。他自己的兩條腿，都是在他帶領的實驗室裡頭做出來的。記得我第一次看到他們做的研究成果的影片，其中接受實驗的受試者是一個從小截肢、從來只用一隻腿走路的人。在實驗開始之前，他首先示範了他長久以來熟練自如的單腳「跳」樓梯方式。而當Hugh Herr的研究生們，開始替他接上了這條奇怪的腿後，我似乎看到了上帝的神蹟，他馬上就一階、一階、又一階地，開始地上下樓梯了。雖然動作不是很快，不是非常流暢，但是很快地他幾乎不必扶著扶手。

這真的很神奇。

因為這樣，半年多前來到Media Lab的我對Hugh Herr本人以及研究素有景仰。而第一次聽到他本人講話卻是在台灣。記得那是工研院創意中心辦的活動，我和幾位來自台灣不同廠商的工作者和Hugh Herr、Andy Lippman兩位教授在一個房間裡交換心得。在聊天的過程中，有人提到了一個對大家來說並不陌生的問題：「夢想和現實該如何平衡？」Hugh說，朝著夢想走就對了。我猜讀者也會有和我們同樣的疑問：「那養不活自己怎麼辦？餓死怎麼辦？」答案卻是令人意外的驚奇。

"If you follow your passion, you will get the money." Hugh解釋道，他從小就喜歡攀岩，實際上應該說是瘋狂地熱愛攀岩。為了攀岩，他沒有任何時間去外面打工，所以到後來常常身上半毛錢也不剩。然而無論如何，他就是要爬，因為攀岩是他的生命。但是，該怎麼辦呢？總不能餓死吧？「那個時候，回收一個鋁罐可以拿三十分錢，回收一百個鋁罐就可以拿三十塊錢，所以我就每天想辦法在垃圾桶裡挖舊鋁罐，這樣我就可以繼續攀岩。」就這樣，一座又一座的山，被他的熱情所征服（而且他沒有餓死）。在十七歲那年，Hugh並被公認為全世界最優秀的攀岩年輕好手之一。

但老天總是愛作弄人。Hugh在十八歲時因為在暴風雪中凍傷了腳，並不幸被截肢。即便如此，熱愛爬山的他始終不願意向現實低頭；不斷繼續攀岩的故事和照片，今天在網路上、電視上、書裡…到處都找得到。然而，失去雙腿總是增加了太多不便，傳統的義肢戴起來也真的太難受。為了爬山，他做了這樣的決定：「我要做我自己的腳。」成績一直都不是太好的他，一直都不是老師滿心期望能進入名校、鴻圖大展的對象。但為了讓自己能攀更陡更高的岩壁，Hugh在34歲時拿到哈佛的PhD，爾後並同時任教於哈佛與MIT共同執行的MIT-Harvard Division of Health Sciences and Technology，以及其他多所實驗室。今天，他穿著自己研發的腳。不論是膝關節、踝關節、大小腿肌肉等各部位的壓力控制，都是全世界最頂尖的發明。攀岩？那更不用說了。

電影《美國情緣》裡頭有著這麼一句話：「古希臘人在一個人死後，不寫訃文，卻只問一個問題：“Did he have passion?”」。然而，對我們之中的很多人來說，找到熱情其實並不是真的那麼難，困難的是在願意為了熱情而堅持。我永遠記得Hugh說的這句話，"If you follow your passion, you will get the money."我想，它比起電影裡說的啟發更甚。

延伸閱讀：
http://biomech.media.mit.edu/people/herr.htm
Second Ascent: The Story of Hugh Herr

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As "Interactive Cinema" really comes true...

Today is Oct 18, year 2025. Today the great interactive movie "The Life of Steve Jobs" will be playing on the internet after its 4-year production. This billion-dollar-interactive film is a huge project, in which 4800 clips have been produced by 260 people, and an estimation of 10 million of people will log on to explore this story tomorrow. Being interviewed this afternoon, the director of this work said that....

Imagine some day when there will be a new business as big as today's movie industry or TV industry that is based on the service of telling people stories. Different from consuming both them and all the other kinds of media entertainment, people are gonna create their own story lines, and no artifact (like a movie or a TV program) needs to exist. The stories will be created as people interact with the online "interactive cinema". By giving the cinema information about what you are interested next, the audience will be able to find out what happens next in this journey of exploration. It is totally different from the old thinking of interactive movie, because in that case there are only several, say, 6, possibilities of the story, since the director needs to plan all these possible stories, and ask the audience to choose at the points they think appropriate. In the future "interactive cinema", the audience will decide how they want to explore, when they want to go to a different direction, and how many stories can there possibly be. It is also different from playing games because all the stories will be real-world stories, and the visual appearance will be real people's real event in their lives.

People will pay for this interactive cinema - just like they pay for the movies or cable TV today. Why? It is fun to go to this new kind of cinema because everything is depends on what you ask for - you see what you describe, what you want to see - and other than that, you even find surprises that you can't even think of.

Sounds cool. But still far away. With commonsense reasoning, it seems at the first stage that the interactive film story is not impossible. However, we still have lots of lots of questions. How are we going to design the whole interaction? How are we gonna make the immersion such that people will feel deeply engaged - or even addicted? How are we decide how the video clips in the repository should be like in order to make the whole thing smooth, not fragmented? How do we ensure that the "rythm" of the whole story will be really fascinating?

How do we keep good continuity?

The way people get/view media has changed since late 20th century. In this post-modern era, everything is modulized, and the process of viewing/narration becomes multi-linear as hyperform is intensively employed. the above questions are raised as technology brings us to this new era, but the industry is still staying at the stage of artifact-production, because no one has really provided solutions to these problems, or even tried to solve these questions. To answer these questions, maybe we need to know more about commonsense reasoning, and more about stories.

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Problem of the current storytelling system

I played with the system for a couple of hours using Glorianna's examples. It turned out that the system works pretty bad, if we want it to give a series of clips based on a small paragraph like this,

"We decide to build some sensors for the dance. the choreographer invents a dance. the choreographer teaches the dancers the steps. a dancer had difficulty with one of the movements. she had to practice again and again."


There are many potential reasons, but I think the major reasons include the following:

1. The system works only on the "tokens" For the first sentence, it just collects "decide", "build", "some", "sensors", "dance", and can be regarded similar to any sentence that contains these concepts in a very different order/co-relation.
2. The system doesn't take into account the structure of a sentence. It doesn't recognize who is the main character, what is it that he/she does, who are the other participants in this event, and so on.
   
3. No relationship between sentences is considered. The sentences are processed individually, and the system cannot figure out what the audience would anticipate based on an event in one sentence, and try to find it in the following sentneces. It requires the understanding about relationships like conflict-negotiation in order to do that.

However, if the system is allowed to find several (say, up to 5) recommendations upon each input story sentence, then usually I can find something interesting/related in the results. In other words, if the users can choose from 5 results every time they input one sentence, and this kind of process proceeds iteratively, it might be a more interesting storytelling process, compare to those where only one video clip is found when one sentence is inputted. The reason is that, the activity will feel much like storytelling with recommendations, instead of storytelling with exact search. So, a better way to do it (to make it published) might be changing the interface and the interaction mechanism, and have users to play with it. The next step, namely, taking into account the sentence structure and the narrative, should be a big step and requires a bigger amount of time.

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Making the path for a story

According to what do we select the collection to be used in a story?

- interests of the viewers/themes
- I like games, so I use chasing with kids, basketball games, chess contests, etc
- traditional stuffs, like temple, budda, statue, market,
- city
- cars/traffic
- school => tests, classrooms, teachers,

- event/work
- discussion
- interviewing

- leisure
- chatting in the resutaurant

- natural
- natural scene

- artificial
- building


And, according to what do we construct a story path out of this collection of small pieces?

- chronology: tour log
- day structure: day1, day2, day3, day4..
- action structure: we eat, and we rode on the bus, we got off, and we walked...

- characters
- one particular person
- a particular group of people
- a category of people (kids, elders, teenagers, etc)

- comparison between different point of views
- same structure, but juxtaposing together photos taken by different people

- between two pieces, it cannot be too big a jump (in time, space, epsidoic continuity)

There are thousands of ways to make a theme of the story (which is in fact the selection of the whole collection to be used), and there are still thousands of way to sequence this selected collection of small pieces. Now that the commonsense resource is virtually general, I think we might be able to come up with some way to help the system to recognize the way in which the user wants to make the narrative.

Problems that we face right now:

1. The system does not take into account the time being shot of the sequences

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美斯樂‧中國‧台灣(VII) - 辦學

興華中學是當年段將軍還在的時候 籌劃建立的學校
將軍的初衷簡單而明瞭
要想維繫中華文化 "就是要辦學!"

多年來 因為泰國政府的打壓 不曉得遷過多少次校址
嚴重的時候 學校不能敎中文 大家就躲起來偷偷敎
今天上完了課 老師就會再告訴大家 明天在哪裡上
明天上完了課 老師再告訴大家 後天在哪裡上
就是一股氣
說什麼 都要把我們的文化傳下去
說什麼都要傳下去

今天的興華中學 白天不上課 因為學生們白天都得去泰文學校
所以從下午五六點開始 總共上三到四個鐘頭
禮拜六泰文學校不上學 大家就來朝會 升旗 然後上課
訓導的馬主任說
(馬主任和馬伯伯同姓但不是親戚 倒是隔壁鄰居)
現在要多加強國學教育 因為時間太少
所以學生的程度和上一輩比起來差多了
國文課 成語課 作文 國學常識....各式各樣不一樣的課程
就是希望讓學生能多了解一點中華文化
學生們背不了三字經 背不了大學中庸 馬主任就自己背給他們聽
告訴他們 這沒有想像中的那麼難
我只有中學畢業 都做得到 你們也一樣做得到

時代在變 學校也跟著時代走
現在學校要蓋電腦室 因為學生們都想學
因為學會了中文輸入 和各種中文軟體 大家到曼谷去會很好找工作

也許課要加在禮拜天 學生們很辛苦 但是是值得的

過去曼谷的公司徵人 都要求泰、英文流利
現在都改了 要求中泰流利
可見中文真的重要
"也許年輕一輩的人有不同的目的" 校長說
"但是我們的目的只有一個 就是守住我們的根"

周老師說 她的初三班畢業生 學生們都想去台灣
一個班裡面有三十個想去吧
不管是唸書 找工作 甚至嫁人
聽到周老師在政大唸書 在曼谷工作的經歷
學生們都想到台灣 因為能有比較好的發展
能夠成為更有用的人

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美斯樂‧中國‧台灣 (VI) - 回家

馬伯伯說 這裡的人 唯一的希望 就是別再有戰爭了
戰爭 太可怕
這裡的人 為了一場戰爭 花了五十年
已經第三代了 還在受戰爭的苦
不曉得要到第四代第五代第幾代 才能從戰爭中走出來

孩子們從六歲 到十二甚至十五歲
都得從早上到下午學泰文 晚上學中文 一個禮拜六天
大人因為小時候逃難趕路 像是馬伯伯自己 膝蓋就完全會風濕
所以到過台灣的他還是選擇回到美斯樂
老人們 想到當年的事情 滿腔說不出的悲憤
像是雷將軍 提起筆來 很多事情是寫不下的 因為太多太苦太難

一場戰爭 讓多少人流離失所
三五十個村裡 被問到的人 沒有不想回雲南的
青運會上
球賽輸了贏了 大家都不是那麼在意
也不過就是簡單的一句 "打家抖死總鍋忍嘛" 開懷地 說說笑笑
畢竟 一家人 有什麼好爭的

有什麼好爭的?

下了大雨 所有的人合力一起把傾倒的臺子 想辦法搭回去
下了大雨 躲到屋子裡的人 從各村來的都有 大家你一言我一語的 總是聊不完
下了大雨 足球場上加油的人沒走 比賽的人沒走
奮力地加油 奮力地踢球
奮力地
在異鄉活著中國人 活著中華文化

回家
所有的人都羨慕 我們在台灣 有自己的家
羨慕我們能回家
也都希望 就算不能去雲南 也許能到台灣 也算是回自己的家
那樣 就不必每天提心吊膽等著趕路
不必告訴孩子 這裡不是我們的家 要不了多久我們就會離開這裡
不會跟著媽媽一直走 一直走 永遠等不到這個問題的答案
"媽 我們要走到哪裡去阿~"
有沒有那麼一天
想回家的人 能夠真的不再身處異鄉

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美斯樂‧中國‧台灣 (V) - 雷將軍

雷將軍八十多歲了 他的大陸口音我真的不是很能聽得懂
見面之前 他在跟華興小學的李校長討論教育的問題
所以第一印象就是 他是個退伍的將軍 老了卻仍關心下一代的教育

然而 最讓我印象深刻的 是他講到美斯樂受到外界援助的情形
台灣過去有很多金援物援 但是因為政治因素 受到了影響
大陸那裡有很多老師願意來 很多書本要送過來
但是或者要放毛主席的像 或者要用簡體字 或者有鬥爭的思想
所以也都被回絕了
很多民間團體來 都各自有各自的立場甚至條件
泰國政府也有類似的情形
雷將軍說
"我不靠你 你也不靠我 我不給你好處 你也別給我好處"
他們知道自己是中國人 知道自己是共產黨的敵人 知道自己是誰
所以寧可靠自己 也不願為了生存 去接受各式各樣的條件
只有那些不計回報的團體 來只是為了付出 他們才願意接受幫助
是軍人的性格吧 我想 讓他們能夠有這種堅持
比較起來 軍人這年頭在台灣不再被看重了
或許吧
或許是因為 台灣過去有太多的不幸 是和軍人有關係的緣故
台灣和美斯樂一樣 過了多少年 還是走不出歷史
How sad

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美斯樂‧中國‧台灣 (IV) - 馬伯伯

馬伯伯給人的第一印象 就是那擋不住的 有些許像曾志偉的笑容
世界上再壞的人 都能被他的笑容融化吧
那次見面之後 我們就決定之後一定要去找他聊天
是因為他親切的態度和純正的國語
也因為他身上濃濃的中國味

"你們過年的時候都沒有唱過年歌呀?"
聊到過年的事情的時候 馬伯伯驚訝地問
"大門大大開 金銀財寶滾進來 滾進不滾出..."
他一邊唸著 屋子裡一邊整個都是年味了
他說小朋友過年的時候就是一家家這樣唱過年歌 從除夕夜十二點就開始
然後大人就會一個個給紅包 五塊十塊這樣
每個人過年的時候一定要穿新衣 帶新帽的
連跟著中國人過年的阿卡族 其他各族的 也都不例外
馬伯伯問我們有沒有打秋千 聽到的人都想著
阿不就是盪秋千 有什麼希奇
結果沒想到 他講的是三層樓高的秋千 大家每年過年的時候都會在那裡蕩呀蕩的
聽了叫我們每個人都好想要過年的時候再來
鞭炮 拜年 所有我們想的到的習俗當然更不用說
世界上怎麼會有一個地方這麼有傳統的中國味
很純很純的中國味 沒有西化的 沒有現代化的
沒有經過摧殘的 沒有被政治力量扭曲的
怎麼會 這麼濃

所有的人一到過年的時候 都一定要回家 吃年夜飯
其他的節慶像中秋 端午 清明 大家夥也都是要團圓
"中國人嘛 家是最溫暖的
一到這種日子就回到父母身邊 你看 多好"
我想著來的時候沿路看到的房子 跟在美國看到的房子完全就是一個不同
或許在很多人看來 這裡的房子破多了舊多了
但是在我眼裡 這些屋子 甚至街道 都是滿滿的
滿滿的... 我說不上來 也許是所謂的 人情味
美國的房子 街道 就是一個空 空蕩蕩
中國人 溫暖的不只是家 家的溫暖被擴展到左鄰右舍
甚至到整個鄉鎮 民族 都不誇張
我聽了他的話 覺得很驕傲
我們不是美國人 不是什麼別國的人
我們有很好的 難得的文化

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美斯樂‧中國‧台灣 (III) - 揭開面紗

天還沒亮 所有的人就整裝待發了
十一個人 帶著DV從大到小三台 相機無數台
開始了這次任務的第一天

走在天色還很暗的路上 要不是因為看的到泰文的牌子
實在感覺不出來跟在台灣鄉下有什麼不一樣
走著走著 沿路的店家 鐵門一間間拉起來了
有一家店裡頭還開著中文的電視 播著新聞
我們走到了半個鐘頭路程以外的市集
身旁的老闆娘賣的是雲南菜 有雲南粽
還有醃菜 也有湯 看起來都又酸又辣
也有很多人在地上擺著各個式樣的蔬菜水果
我買了一個還算便宜的梨子
花了十塊錢泰銖 (差不多就是九塊錢台幣)
和賣梨子的先生聊了聊 才發現原來他是泰國人 在台灣工作過
總之在這裡 不管是誰 會講中文都不怎麼稀奇吧

再往前走了幾步路 我蹲下來向路旁的婆婆買了個包子
一個包子五塊錢 吃起來大概跟7-Eleven的差不多水準
婆婆說她也是雲南來的
有一個姑娘和一個兒子 姑娘是這邊的中文小學老師
室內的市場裡還有賣肉的 賣雜貨的
賣雜貨的老闆很親切 看不出來他有五十幾歲
天灝跟彥廷都買了他賣的 緬甸手工做的煙 據說相當濃
一條條綠色的煙看起來很有意思

因為前一天晚上和Sam講好七點鐘吃早餐
所以我們大概逛了不到一個鐘頭就準備回去了
回程的路上在賣肥料和大米的店面碰到了國語很標準的馬伯伯
他聽說我們從台灣來的 很高興的跟我們講話
也說歡迎我們晚點去找他聊天
頭髮快白了的他 笑容很開懷 很真

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美斯樂‧中國‧台灣 (II) - 揭開面紗

下車之後的第一個conversation
發生在泰文學校對面的茶行
老闆娘從遠遠的地方跑過來
很親切地 邀請我們進去坐坐 喝杯茶

大概是看到生意上門了吧
最近應該不是旅遊的旺季
她講的中文和我們幾乎沒有差別
也告訴我們 這裡的人大部分的人都是戰爭時候從雲南來的
所以都是講雲南話 也會講一點國語

我們在聊天的時候
一大堆小朋友手上拿著原住民的各式手環 死纏著要我們買
"買一條買一條 一條ㄦ死塊" (一條二十塊)
後來我們才發現 原來他們不是像老闆娘一樣從雲南來的
而是當地的阿卡族
在Mesalong這裡 奇特的就是阿卡 漢人 泰國人
通通混在一起 也多少會講彼此的話

店裡一個十幾歲的很可愛小女生 幫忙倒著茶
我們問老闆你女兒幾歲 她說
"這不是我女兒 我女兒出去了 她是阿卡族 來打工幫忙的"
嚇了我一跳
因為同樣是阿卡族 這個女生完全像是漢人小孩
和圍著我們要我們買手環的其他小朋友
看起來乾淨很多很多 也懂禮貌的多
我們盤算著 往後兩天要再來刺探這個小女生
因為她算是來到這裡第一個有趣的發現

吃完晚飯 東西搬進旅館之後 大家都累攤了
只有精神奕奕的堯富 因為想在網路上多查一點資料
自己一個跑出去問樓下的網路能不能用
剩下的人一邊呈半昏迷狀態
一邊在房間裡討論 明天該分成三組散開探訪之類的模模糊糊的計畫
過了沒多久 一個超興奮的人從外面衝進來
告訴我們他發現了一大堆情報
包括一大早六點就開始很熱鬧的市集
還有現年八十多歲 每天早上都會去櫻花餐廳的雷將軍等等
是堯富跑進一戶製茶人家裡聊天聽來的
那戶人家裡頭的小孩看起來過的挺愉快 晚上就是坐在客廳裡看電視
也不用幫家裡扛太重的工作
一下子 我們馬上有了刺探的方向 有了隔天的行程

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美斯樂‧中國‧台灣 (I) - 異域

雖然只是短短的四天
這次的旅行 卻是滿滿的驚喜 滿滿的好運
這個故事 是關於中華民國的故事
是關於中華民族的故事
是一個我們所有的人都能感覺到一分熟悉
卻又陌生的故事

我必須承認
出發之前 連自己都不是很清楚整個狀況
天灝講了好多次 能不能向Sam多問到一點他自己的看法
不然我們迷迷糊糊地去了 恐怕找到好故事的機會不大
但Sam始終沒有告訴過我什麼細節
(後來我才發現 不會講中文的他根本很難知道些什麼故事)
所以從曼谷飛清邁的飛機上我也告訴阿喬
其實自己是抱著 凶多吉少的預設心態
挖不到故事不會讓我感到意外
如果找得到什麼 就算是我們走運

Sam夫婦來到清邁機場接我們一共十一個人
我猜Sam一定疑惑了老半天 因為這完全就是像一個觀光團
能拍出什麼東西嗎?
但是熱心的他還是帶著我們吃了午餐
接著到了他努力建立的孤兒園 解釋我們所要前往的目的地
Mesalong - 美斯樂
和柯俊雄有幾分神似的Sam仔細地
把所有他知道的事情用英文解釋給所有人聽
從我們十一月在飛機上偶遇
到泰北邊界的歷史 複雜而有趣的種族環境 政治環境
(簡單講 就是電影異域的故事
蔣中正的部隊留在泰北後沒辦法跟隨到台灣
就被逼著想辦法留在當地存活)
到我們講一個故事給全世界的人聽的可能
接著 他帶了我們在孤兒園的四周看看
這個屬於Nazarene慈善組織建設的園地
像極了當年的福隆營地
我想 是吧 雖然我們從不同的地方來 講不一樣的話
仍感覺得到他和我們心裡同樣的那部份

Mesalong離清邁的車程有三個多鐘頭
蜿蜒的山路引我們接近清新的空氣
還有對我們來說再親切不過的 純樸的農村
最讓我印象深刻的
則是在這三個小時的車程
車子似乎開過了台灣鄉下 開過了雲南山上
路邊的房子從色彩鮮豔的泰式房屋 慢慢變成了茅草屋
到了接近Mesalong的時候
燕尾屋頂 磚屋 春聯 奇怪的東西一個個從這些房子身上長出來
讓我錯亂: 我們 是在泰國吧?

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一個朋友寄來這封信：


比爾蓋玆為臺灣拍的廣告片... MADE IN TAIWAN
http://0rz.net/9a0Uh

比爾蓋玆為臺灣拍的廣告片，給他用力傳出去！！看完後真的滿感動的因為看見多少台灣人的努力，看見台灣的希望。好像適時的給台灣人回饋加油和打氣，大家仍要繼續努力拼經濟。



我一邊看 其實不斷一邊在皺眉頭
心裡懷疑著 是不是真的有很多人覺得看了值得驕傲
台灣做了這麼多全世界最屌的東西
平均工時還是全世界最長
國民所得在過去十年內還是在原地踏步
生活滿意度還是不高
比起很多歐洲人每天只工作我們一半的時間
碰到足球賽之類的事情就一直放假
平均所得還是我們的兩到三倍
這樣 到底哪裡值得感動
Bill Gates拍這樣的廣告
只是在告訴更多的人
"Hey! Taiwan's got the best labors in the world! They're the most flexible and the most tolerant, so you can basically do whatever you want with them to make biggest profit for your own!!"
是值得我們感到悲哀吧

振興經濟是要有方法的
沒頭沒腦一直苦幹 鋤地的人永遠都是在鋤地

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