Kaohsiung, Taiwan
I think I have about two weeks left in Taiwan. My parents will be gone from New Jersey to travel, so I don't have to avoid New Jersey to avoid them. I think I'll go back to New Jersey at the end of March, spend about a week in New Jersey, and I'm still deciding whether to return to Deer Park before my parents return from traveling, or maybe the day after they return. I feel, just on my own, that it would be rude to avoid them completely and that I should leave the day after they return, but then I reflect on every other occasion that I've done something not to be rude, and found that it didn't matter to them one way or another. So no sweat whatever I decide, I suppose.

More pressing is that they will be traveling to East Asia: read Taiwan, and I do want to avoid them here. On one hand, it will just be really weird for me to be with them out of context of New Jersey, the only context in which I know them, and also because I don't want to risk being sour at them for being duplicitous about the monastic thing - telling me to my face that they're OK with it, but then telling everyone else they're against it and their footing the bill for my traveling to Taiwan is in hopes that I will change my mind, which at best is benign and uninformed, but at worst, condescending and offensive. On the other hand, I need to watch my negativity, and avoiding them would be a manifestation of it, and all of the "evil plan" theories of my parents' actions are hearsay through my cousin. It's not that I don't trust my cousin, but she certainly is biased, both against my parents and for me.

The point might be moot, however, since the weekend they said they'd be in Kaohsiung, I had already discussed with my cousin to visit a monastery in Taipei. I might get back the night before they leave (not so ironically to go to Taipei for a class reunion).

So I never did get the motivation to seriously consider joining up with the Deer Park monastics in Vietnam. I did find a blog of someone, a woman I think, who has been following them through Vietnam. I'll have to go back in her archives to get the whole experience, but I'm kinda glad that I didn't go. I'm still processing why. When she mentions "Thay", she's referring to Thich Nhat Hahn.