I stood on the roof of my new abode in an up scale residential neighborhood in Taitung and looked out over the houses. There had just been a very loud exploding sound followed by a strong odor of LPG which hung in the air for 20 minutes. This prompted me to call the township. As I did, I was stopped by my spouse. “If you call, you'll make trouble for everybody.”
“How is that?”
“Everybody is doing something outside the law. It is all OK as long as nobody calls in a complaint.”
“But somebody could get killed. There is a large LPG leak somewhere.”
On the roof I located the source. The neighbor to the right has a very large lot and German Shepherd dogs to keep nosy neighbors away from his factory making dental appliances, mostly from semi-precious metals. This produces highly toxic chemical waste and uses very high temperature ovens both electric and gas. One of his tanks had busted a line.
My neighbor to the left, a Supervisor in the county construction roads department has a warehouse full of material and equipment for doing road repairs as a subcontractor, surely a conflict of interest. Two doors down a neighbor has a warehouse and carpentry shop in a designated residential neighborhood. To the rear, all of the neighbors have built additions onto their houses which are imposing on the fire access alley, all built without permits. Other have built steel and aluminum top floor additions on their houses without permits. And my friend Ah Ching was raising chickens in his additional bedroom.
And as for us, we ran a small language school out of our house which is legal as long as we don't exceed the limited number of students per class.
What a fragile and intricate web of deception we live in. It is just like the aboriginal peoples' chain dance with laced arms, except that instead of holding each other by the hands, we have each other by the balls.
I put down the phone as I saw all of these peoples lives tumbling like dominoes.
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