Thursday, February 22, 2007

Day One

"At that moment, when the world around him melted away, when he stood alone like a star in the heavens, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of icy despair, but he was more firmly himself than ever. That was the last shudder of his awakening, the last pains of birth. Immediately he moved on again and began to walk quickly and impatiently, no longer homewards, no longer to his father, no longer looking backwards."

- Siddhartha, Herman Hesse

Six years ago, I would hardly have imagined myself on a plane to Taipei. East Asia wasn't even in my range of perspective, much less a destination for living. But I have always wanted to travel, from a very early age I felt a wanderlust that over the years has taken many forms.
My aims are part of a larger oscillation between two poles of existence, between Realist international security management and humanitarian impulses; in a very simplistic sense between cold pragmatism and idealism. In angrier, adolescent times I fancied being a mercenary-for-hire or international hit man. Then a diplomat in the Foreign Service. Then an officer in the CIA's Directorate of Operations. Then as a former Peace Corps volunteer working for some NGO in Africa. Then an international salaryman. Then an analyst with the CIA or DIA... essentially covering a fairly broad range of professions, but they all fall into the same mold. I am a wanderer by nature. I've chosen East Asia because, as the saying goes, that's where the action is. Or will be very soon.

***
I arrived into Taoyun airport in Taipei closer to midnight than I would have liked, nearly an hour late. Taiwan Customs was even breezier than Germany. Luckily, the driver that the school had arranged for me had waited.
I walked out into Taiwanese air for the first time amid the din of a busy airport pickup lane. The air smelled of exhaust, an odor that as I found later, permeates the whole city. The driver and I took off in his van onto the freeway, and I got my first glimpse of what expats had been talking about: Taiwanese traffic. Cars weaved into and out of lanes as though they were driving around a track, honking madly and nearly hitting every other car. I would later discover that pedestrian traffic is exactly the same.
I arrived at the hostel where I'm staying after check-in hours, but the guy who runs the place had stayed up to make sure I got there okay (the guy's reputation as a very kind man preceded him, and it's why I booked a room there). After putting my bags in my bed closet, I ventured down to the OK corner store to get something to drink. I found my first real communication challenge, when I realized that I had no idea how much the soy milk I put on the counter cost, and the guy behind the counter didn't speak English, and there was no register screen facing me. So I gave him an NT$100 bill, and he gave me NT$82 back. So a bottle of soy milk was NT$18, or roughly US$0.50. Not bad for convenience store prices.
The next day, my first full day in Taiwan, I'd find out just how cheap food is here. I ate a very nice lunch, a rice bowl with some various meat and vegetables, a side plate of edamame, and a glass of tea for NT$85, or about US$2 and some change.
I wandered around Taipei on foot all day, just watching. In the middle of the day, I met a Swedish guy (originally from Chile), who is here studying at the university. I found the Residence of the President, a few parks, and the Taipei National Museum.
***
Unfortunately, my hour at this cyber cafe computer is about up. While it's only US$1 an hour, I have to check out of my hostel and into the accommodations provided by the school. I'll post again in a few days.

Posted by Brewster at 12:06 | | Comments

Wednesday, February 7, 2007

mounting excitement is difficult to handle when faced with excessive free time

Well, I lied, I'm posting again before I leave.

I just received word that I have been assigned to a school in downtown Taichung. Pretty good news, it was my second choice (my first was Kaohsiung, third being Taipei). Taichung is Taiwan's third-largest city, at a population of about 1.1 million (roughly the population of San Antonio, Texas). For reference, as of 2000 Boston had a population of about 600,000, Portland had 520,000, Tampa had 300,000, and N.Y.C. had about 8 million. (note that none of these figures include the cities' surrounding "metro" areas.) The city is quite dense, too, with 6,200 people per square kilometer (Tampa and Boston measure about 1,000 people per square kilometer, Portland measures at 1,500.) These figures are to indicate that my new home will be the most metropolitan area I have lived as of yet.

Taichung is located on the west coast of the island, just about smack dab in the middle latitudinally, as you can see on the overly colorful map to the right (it's the city in the blue county). The good news is that it's protected from typhoons by the mountains to the east and the hills to the north, and it has milder weather than most of the rest of the island. Also it's within easy reach of Taipei, without actually having to live there, and it's a quick bus ride to national parks and Sun Moon Lake. The bad news is it's more polluted than the southern area, and it's target #2 for the PLA.

The city is home to one of the country's oldest foreign communities, which is always excellent. No lack of Western bars and restaurants for when the inevitable homesickness hits. Actually, Taichung reputedly has more cafes, restaurants, and bars per person than anywhere else in Taiwan. That will be excellent for when the staff at a particular place gets tired of my mad signing, hand-waving, and notebook pictionary while trying to order the chicken and noodle soup.

Housing is also much cheaper than Taipei or Kaohsiung, and more English-friendly to boot. The real downside to life in Taichung as opposed to Kaohsiung is that the public transit system isn't as well developed. There's only a bus (no subway or light rail), and the bus system in some parts of town is unreliable to the point of being useless. Looks like I might have to get a scooter sooner rather than later. Because if traffic and the driving situation is even close to what's reported, there's no way I'm riding a bicycle in the city; I love having all my limbs too much for that.

Soon I will be in Taiwan and wondering where all the English signage went.

Posted by Brewster at 09:17 | | Comments

Monday, February 5, 2007

Kulturschlag

It's just a matter of a few weeks now before I'm in Taipei. I'm arriving a few days before my training starts, and I plan on wandering around the city, smiling at everyone as they stare at the big white guy and learning very quickly how to dumb play the phrase, "how many of these crazy bills do you want for some of that food?" Because let's face it, I'm not going to remember, "Nî hăo. Wŏ yào yí fèn zhá jiàng miàn. Yí gòng duō shăo qián?" Hell, I can't even pronounce most of that. (a note on pronunciation: in Mandarin, the tone of each syllable can change the literal meaning of the word. Not like in English, where the tone can indicate contextual meaning... the difference in tone can indicate the difference between "cat" and "to file one's taxes." I'm looking through my Mandarin phrasebook and I foresee a good deal of miscommunication. "I will not buy this tobacconist, it is scratched. My hovercraft is full of eels!")

In any case, here's some notes on Chinese/Taiwanese culture. Since I have yet to actually see or experience any of these things, this is all second-hand from various texts I've encountered over the years:

***

The Taiwanese, the Western expat community claims, have better preserved traditional Chinese culture than the mainland. Mainland China has embraced a global culture very quickly and without reservation, and Mao did a pretty good job of wiping out a lot of traditions, social norms, and history by executing intellectuals, burning art, suppressing religions, forcing urbanization on a massive scale, and accidentally starving millions of peasants to death. Perhaps he may have been too future-oriented.

The KMT, on the other hand, latched onto Chinese culture with a death grip, because tradition and "the old days" were part of the ROC's legitimating claim. The KMT put a lot of money into cultural preservation, and had actually brought with them a sizable portion of the Chinese collection of artifacts and art from past dynasties.

But where to begin? I'm no anthropologist, though my academic training borrowed quite a bit from the discipline, so my definition of what actually constitutes culture is a little basic and textbook-y.

I'm going to start with religion and philosophy. I lump the two together because it's very difficult to talk about one and not the other. Even in the West they were inextricably linked (and in some cases, the same thing) until that whole "Reformation/Scientific Revolution/Enlightenment" fiasco. The religions that exist in China are a mix of Chinese folk religion (a set of localized polytheistic beliefs, geomancy, and ancestor worship) and Taoism. Confucianism is a more rational/intellectual pursuit, and Buddhism... well, Buddhism's hard to define. When I say 'mix', I mean it. None of these sets are mutually exclusive, and many Chinese ascribe to multiple beliefs. Islam exists in quantity on the mainland, but not so much in Taiwan. Christianity is present but the numbers are unknown due to serious government oppression (there's a lot of interesting background on this... a lot of Chinese equate Christianity with the English/American domination/opium trade.)

Chinese religion is difficult to relate to from a Western/Judeo-Christian perspective. There's generally a conception of an afterlife, a "Heaven" that is an omnipotent force, which is worshipped with a variety of shrines and rituals. Taoism is difficult to explain, and to be honest I don't quite understand it, having never read the Tao Te Ching. I did, however, read the Tao of Pooh, which is actually a pretty excellent way of explaining the basics to us Western folk through the musings of a familiar bear. Taoism is both a religion and a philosophy (Taojiao and Taojia), focusing on "the Way," which is, as far as I understand it, achieving a balance between all things (light and dark, good and evil... the yin and yang). Honestly that's as far as I've gotten.

Buddhism is a can of worms I don't even want to touch. It's not of Chinese origin, and it appears to be mostly an adaptation of Buddhist principles and practice to traditional folk religions (though this is not a major change; Buddhism is a Hindu heresy, mind you).

So now I've gotten off track, or rather I've spent too much time on religion. Not to worry, the rest of this entry is a rushed, cursory treatment!

For now, I'm going to ignore art, until I've had some time to experience it and read more about its history. Needless to say, on anything but the most basic, reductionist level, art in Asia is very different from that of the West, conceptually-speaking.

Modern clothing in China, like most of the rest of the world, is Western. Brand names are important, like DKNY, Gucci, etc. Also popular are the weird t-shirts with random English, like one sees in Japan (pictured to the right).

Traditional clothing, though, varies by region, and in Taiwan it carries influences from the Japanese. I'll have more on that when I actually go to Taiwan, eh?

Actually, come to think of it, things like art and cuisine and day-to-day life and whatnot would be best left to experiential reports, rather than this pseudoacademic nonsense.

***

I think that's as far as I'm going to go with this "introduction to Taiwan" business. Though it has, at the very least, offered a diversion from packing and paperwork and all the nonsense involved with moving across the globe.

The next entry will likely be after my arrival in Taipei.

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Posted by Brewster at 05:47 | | Comments

Friday, February 2, 2007

Au Sujet du Historie et de la Nature de la République de la Chine

Part the second of the introduction to Taiwan. It might be drier than gefilte fish, but it certainly tastes better:

***

The prehistory of Taiwan is generally considered to be anything before the 17th Century, CE. Previous to the formal entrance of the Han Chinese under the Qing Dynasty, tribes of peoples now referred to as Taiwanese aborigines inhabited the island. While there were quite a few tribes, there were two main divisions in their societal makeup, between the plains tribes and the mountain tribes. The plains peoples lived in defensively-structured villages (proximal construction and high bamboo walls) and farmed, while the mountain peoples were of the infamous "headhunter" stripe, with all the accompanying raiding parties, head shrinking, and jungle war paint that the term conjures.

Now, the Han Chinese started to really settle in the middle of the 1600s--additionally the Dutch maintained a colony in the southern end of the island--and of course with settlement of land already inhabited by indigenous peoples came conflict. With conflict came war. One doesn't have to be an historian to guess who won.

And so the Han came to rule Taiwan, and spent the better part of the next two centuries "acculturating" the aborigines to Han customs. However, the Han didn't bother with assimilating the mountain tribes; that assignment was left to the Japanese.

Conquest by the Japanese Empire needs no explanation. They came in the late 19th Century with organization and equipment unseen in those parts, and took Taiwan part and parcel with the rest of the South Pacific. The Chinese on the island were treated as second class worker bee citizens, and the Japanese Empire plundered the island for its resources and exported Taiwanese women as "comfort women" for the Imperial Army. But the "acculturation" of the aborigines was even more brutal, and mostly consisted of a policy of "speak and act like you're Japanese or we'll kill your family. Also, you can only live on these particular plots of land." (eerily familiar, yes?)

For some reason the Japanese Empire dissipated in 1945, and control over Taiwan was given to the newly-created Republic of China (representing all of China, led by the big cheese himself, Chiang Kai Shek). Fifty years in a flash: Communist revolution, Mao, Chiang and the KMT do their "screw this, we're making our own country" bit, the Cold War, "two Chinas" then "one China," ... democracy formally proclaimed in 2000 with the election of the ROC's first elected president, Chen Shui-bian.

I was, of course, glossing over a tad bit of information. Taiwan developed economically at a fantastic rate in the 1960s and 1970s, becoming a premier economic power in the East. Democratization was not a sudden leap, but came as a process started by Chiang's son in the late 1980s, and truly took root with the formation of a second political party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

As it stands now, Taiwan is an economic power in Asia only behind the true giants, Japan, China, and India. The vast majority of the Taiwanese, ethnically speaking, are Han--what we Westerners parochially refer to as "Chinese"--but in the eyes of the Taiwanese that group is subdivided into "Taiwanese"--those descended from the original Han settlers--and "mainlanders"--anyone who came to Taiwan after the Japanese occupation. The aborigines make up about two percent of the population. The aborigines suffer from a situation much like the indigenous peoples on my own home continent; under- or unfunded schools, rampant social and substance-related problems, and disproportionately high unemployment.

Politically, the Taiwanese are currently divided into two main groups: those who favor unification with the mainland, and those who don't--a situation with many similarities to the climate in South Korea. People in favor of unification generally fall into the "peaceful rapprochement with Beijing and slow absorption into the PRC" slot, but there are still some "we own the whole damn mainland and Mongolia, too, why not" types around. The other side of the fence favors a wholly independent ROC, complete with UN membership and invitations to embassy parties. These are the types who are generally the most pro-America, since most of their guns, tanks, planes, and ships are printed with "made in the USA." They are also the most threatening to Beijing, and perhaps to the United States, but as the saying goes, only time will tell.

***

Stay tuned for a whirlwind tour of Chinese culture.

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Posted by Brewster at 11:44 | | Comments