Yearly Archives: 2009

My social media capabilities are incredibly limited seeing that I can’t check my Twitter, Posterous, Tumblr, Facebook or Friendfeed. (I’m not sure if this is all censorship or half a connection problem, since the wifi bars just so happen to go down whenever I check those sites.) I can, however, access all of my self-hosted blogs, upload to Flickr, and Posterous-tweet via email (pseudo-hack win!).

This isn’t exactly my first time in China, but I would hardly consider Kunming, Dali, and Lijiang (in Yunnan Province) “cities” when Shanghai has a population of 20 million. This is definitely my first time in a Chinese city without cobblestone-paved roads, horse-drawn carriages, and yaks. In fact, I see exactly what I expected to see: grey skyscrapers, construction cranes, and more skyscrapers in the making.

In half a day, my mom and I went from Kaohsiung to Taoyuan to Hangzhou, with plans to go to Shanghai tomorrow. On the plane ride here, the gentleman sitting on our left gave us a few tips: speak as little as possible (as folks will judge by our Taiwanese accent) and only take metered taxis (to prevent overcharges). I figured I’d just be a starving mute for a few days. (Prior tips included eating as little as possible and buying as little as possible…to prevent getting diarrhea and fake merchandise.)

Being the obnoxious extrovert that she is, my mom ended up talking to our taxi driver in her wannabe-Chinese accent (“zhuo guai-r” instead of “zhuo zhuan” (left turn), naw mean?), which was possibly more insulting than reading the names of streets out loud for suspecting that the driver was going to drive in circles (and gyp us of a few extra bucks). He didn’t. (He also didn’t know the location of our hotel and had to call for directions while driving on the divider.) I was only concerned about the rackety door with loose hinges and the mysterious noises coming from his engine. I feared that if he stepped on the break, the door would come loose and I’d be flung into the middle of the freeway as to-be roadkill—and that would’ve been the end of my journey.

Well as with most beginnings, I come into contact with a taxi driver with an interesting story to hear or tell. In Denver, our Ethiopian driver told us about how he moved there to support his sister in college. In San Francisco, our turbaned driver joined in our conversation about Salesforce. In Brunei, our driver kept telling us about what he knew about our Obama versus his sultan. In Malaysia, our driver was stopped mid-freeway past midnight after driving 160km/hr while we had our passports checked. In Thailand, I’ve sat in back of a tuk-tuk driver who couldn’t read Thai or mutter a word of English (and needed a third party translator at the wrong location). When we first arrived in Taiwan, our driver shared his near-death experiences falling asleep at the wheel and driving down the day after a typhoon (then proceeded to stuff five business cards in my hands to pass on for him). I’ve also got the “Where you from? China? Korea?…wait you from California?! You no look American!” quite a few times.

Being voluntarily mute this time, there was no Babel-like banter, but I did make a few observations. This Chinese driver spoke Shanghainese to a lady on the phone, which meant he probably wasn’t a Hangzhou native (but being the giant tourist trap that Hangzhou is, he probably had more customers here). He couldn’t read the address and directions my mom wrote down (which were in traditional Chinese, but most people can guestimate between traditional and simplified). He looked relatively young, drove quite recklessly, and had no malintentions of overcharging us or taking us someplace else. He also had no intentions of talking to us or even glancing at the rear view mirror until the very end when he wanted his money, but he wasn’t unlikeable either.

China is possibly the least-personable country I’ve ever visited, but then again, I’ve only met one taxi driver behind a plexiglass barrier so far. (There was no bellboy at the Sheraton to bring our luggage in for us, nor did the reception lady smile much.) It has only been an uneventful first day though, and I haven’t ingested any chemically treated, meat-flavored cardboard yet, so my hopes are still high! I promise to rave on and on about Shanghai’s spectacular architecture, cuisine, and shopping as soon as I figure out how to get there via which train at what time from which stop for how much…and who to contact so I don’t stay mute forever.

view from our hotel room

view at night

Every 30 minutes or so, a train passes by directly beneath us. I feel like I’m traveling indefinitely…on and on with no set destination. Every 30 minutes, my auditory senses tell me so.

Addendum

To truly experience Taiwan, you’ve got to get out of Taipei and go down South, preferably to Tainan. And to better understand what it means to be “really Taiwanese”, I would recommend watching Cape No. 7, a film about a Southern young man who goes to Taipei for better prospects, only to be let down (you know, Grapes of Wrath/Little Miss Sunshine’s broken California dream). He comes back down to the South initially depressed, but slowly appreciates the oddballs who happen to know everyone else.

The movie pokes loving fun at various Southern stereotypes: men driving scooters without helmets while chewing beetlenut, politicians having petty arguments with each other then bonded by their love for the town, people gathering at the local church and singing praise songs in Taiwanese.

The one full day that I spent in Taipei hardly consisted of anything truly Taiwanese—I stayed at the Sheraton, ate lunch at the Agora Garden, visited my mom’s friend’s interior design firm, walked around the Mega House next to the Living 3.0 office—but then painstakingly tried lamb hotpot (heart, liver, feet and all) with a few of my ex-colleagues. (They were out of brains when we arrived—thank God.)

But the weekend that I stayed with my grandma in a small town in Tainan county was…”很台” and hilariously Taiwanese.

To get here, I took the high-speed rail down to Tainan and spent hours on rusted buses riding from town to town, watching students and grandparents step on and off at each inconspicuous stop. The bus driver signaled some special peace sign to other bus drivers of the same company while stray dogs j-walked strategically and beetlenut babes sat in their flashy neon-green booths looking bored. Two ancient grandpas on my left chattered loudly about health, wives, and dead classmates—I imagined my grandma killing me for not taking a taxi instead.

The first night, my grandma handed me a hymns booklet with numeric music notation, Taiwanese lyrics, and Romanization on the bottom. I followed along by sounding out the Taiwanese and guessed the meaning of each song. Listening to my grandma pray gave me insight on her understanding of bits and pieces of my [apparently puzzling] life. I assume my dad tried to explain to her what freelance meant, because her prayer went something like, “God, she has work to do but no formal position at any company…” Bless her worried soul.

Since then, I’ve experienced a shortage of water (due to some guy cleaning the water reserve tanks), drank mushroom juice “to cleanse my body and clear my skin”, and woken up at 5-6am every morning thanks to a very persistent rooster.

Despite being grateful that my grandma is a devout Christian and not some superstitious, statue-believing fretful soul, I can’t help but feel like Taiwan has repeatedly undergone some cultural brainwashing. (Christian indoctrination started as early as the Dutch occupation of Southern Taiwan in 1624 then fazed out when the Chinese and Japanese came in with other forms of influence.) Because my grandma (along with that entire generation) lived through the Japanese occupation and was taught Japanese in school, she can pick out the “Romanji” in my Taichinglish. Yet she’ll hand me a bottle of Kirkland’s “stool softener” and ask me to explain the English directions for her. “1 to 3 softgels before bedtime”—for your morning convenience.

To put it bluntly, Taiwan suffers from a slight identity crisis. The older generation speaks Taiwanese (with bits of Japanese) to the Mandarin-speaking youth, who exercise to the Korean hit “Sorry, Sorry” in the morning at the kindergarten next door. Street vendors sell clothes made in China and fruit imported from California, while others eat at the local McDonald’s (where they sell egg-corn soup) and buy slurpie’s (along with a steamed pork bun or tea egg) from 7-11. The South consists of die-hard DPPs who have been in Taiwan for generations while the North consists of more KMT supporters with ties to China. Because Chen Sui Bien gave the opening keynote at my great-grandfather’s 100th year celebration and because my great-grandfather was jailed for 228 days during 228 and because my ancestors have been in Taiwan for many generations (before Chang Kai-Shek and his men came over), I would be shunned for saying that Ma Ying Jiu has his merits.

As I am writing this, my grandma’s in the kitchen cooking fish whole, my aunt’s playing hymns on the piano, and random fireworks are going off outside. I leave for Kaohsiung tomorrow morning to reunite with my mom and be spoiled by car rides, gated communities, and fine dining courtesy of my maternal grandpa—a separate world from this one, bisected by a lack of efficient public transportation.

This entry was posted a day later due to the lack of internet at my grandma’s.

shot from the bus

What’s hotter than Bruneian sand? Singapore weather. What’s hotter than Singapore? Bangkok’s male population. What’s hotter than Thai men? Thai food, of course. Ouch…the roof is on fire.

Within the last five days, I’ve flown from the sandy shores of Brunei back to the busy streets of Kuala Lumpur, then to shopping central Singapore, and finally, to Bangkok, Thailand, where taxis are hot pink to lime green and hairstyles are jet black to bleach blonde.

I said I wanted an Asian haircut, but my mom persuaded me to “wait until Hong Kong”. I might just come back with asymmetrical bangs and another spiked fauxhawk that parallels our cockatiel’s crest.

I could also save that money if lightning were to strike me just as I walk out onto our 20-story balcony in the middle of a thunderstorm—as I did last night. We’re staying at our relative’s empty condo in State Towers, which is just as good as a self-serve five-star hotel with a breathtaking view. At dusk, our west window filters in beautiful sunrays, and at night, the boats on the Chaopraya River sparkle and wink at us.

I have seven more unscheduled days to fill here in Bangkok, but I feel like nothing worse could happen when I’ve already scrubbed mold off of furniture, stepped on the wrong skytrain, and flooded a public restroom with others waiting outside of my stall.