Taiwan (First draft)

Authors Note: When I use a Chinese word transliterated into English I also include the original
Chinese characters for reference.

Taiwan is a small island in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of China. The island is pretty and
green. Taiwanese people like to say its shaped like a sweet potato. Everyone knows what it
actually looks like is a tear drop, but sweet potato sounds so much nicer. Just outside the city
there are old ladies wearing those Vietnamese looking straw hats working in bright green rice
fields. The water comes up to the very top of the boots and the birds circling overhead wonder
how they keep their feet dry.

There are temples everywhere and, unlike in other parts of Asia, they are actually used. Walking
by you can smell the sweet mix of incense and rotting fruit wafting out from ornate dark red
buildings. Upon entering the temple through the smoky haze you can see ordinary Taiwanese
people carefully stacking brightly colored things or tossing painted bones for guidance while the
angry looking statues of gods look on. No tourists found in these temples. Often in the late
afternoon you could hear the din of discordant Chinese clarinets and the off-rhythm banging
symbols of a religious festival snaking through the streets going from temple to temple.
Whenever, a new temple is reached several long strings of fireworks is set off to scare away
demons. This happens on a weekly basis, so Taiwanese demons must be the worlds most
terrified demons. That or Taiwan ended up with more than its fair share.

One of the demons to beset Taiwan was its big neighbor to the West. Prior to world war two
Taiwan was a Japanese colony. The Japanese took it from China around 1900. After World War
Two it was decided that Taiwan should be returned to China, but because the Chinese civil war
was going on it was unclear which China Taiwan should go to. In 1949 the losing side of the
Chinese civil war fled to Taiwan and set up a government there. Throughout the cold war
Taiwan was viewed as temporary base from which the mainland would be reconquered. This
idea became more and more laughable as the communist party became stronger on the mainland,
but still to this day Taiwan calls itself the Republic of China and maintains territorial claims to
all of China.

There was an air force base next to where I lived and French made mirage Jets and American
F-Whatevers would streak over our house late at night and wake me up with their whining
broooohm! The people anxiously plotting defensive aggression against the Mainland couldnt
sleep at night, so therefore my host family and I shouldnt be allowed to sleep either.

With nothing else to do besides run jets overhead and wait for the American war support that
never came, the Chinese government in exile decided that Taiwan was not sufficiently Chinese
and set out to fix that. The main problem in the mainlanders eyes was that no one spoke
Mandarin Chinese. Taiwanese people spoke a type of Minnan1 Chinese, which is for political
reasons is called a dialect of Mandarin, but is really a mutually unintelligible language. The
mainlanders banned broadcasts in Taiwanese and forced school to be taught in Mandarin. They
only had limited success in getting people to actually learn Mandarin though.
1

One of those limited success stories was the host dad in my first host family.

He was overweight and short and the result was he looked almost completely round. Sometimes
Id describe him to the host sisters in my other host family as a bowling ball, because thats what
he looked like to me. The description stuck for other reasons too. He loved to talk and he loved
to talk loud. He talked so fast that hed stutter to give time for his thoughts to catch up with his
words. In a crowded room hed zoom over to someone blast off a shouted greeting, a speedstuttered string of information, a joke, and then a loud cackle followed by a furious round of
blinking before crashing into the next personpin.

Im not sure where his education ended, but it might have been before high school. He had very
hard time switching into mandarin and when he did it was a pronounced, or rather
mispronounced, struggle. The struggle was made even slower by the fact that the only person he
consistently used mandarin with was a native English speaker, with an even greater Mandarin
problem, whom he was hosting at his house.

For my host dad, speaking Mandarin Chinese was a near impossible task, so English was
completely out of the question. The extent of my host dads English was money, 1, 2, 3, 4,
and his English name aluminum, which he pronounced ahhh-loo-me because he learned it
phonetically from Chinese characters2. My English name didnt lend itself as well to phonetic

conversion, so after a week or two hey, you, I was given the name Jiakai3 . Sometimes people
would ask me if my name was Jack because they thought thats Jiakai was getting phonetically
converted from. Id always say noo, my name is Russ, and actually why dont you just call me
that?

I asked people to call me Russ because I didnt like my Chinese name. For one thing it just
wasnt me. Whenever I heard Jiakai, Id think Im not Jiakai, Im Russ! Get it right! The other
reason I didnt like it was because to my ears it sounded like Jackass. My host dads volume
combined with a drawn out quality he added to the name accentuated the problem.

We didnt talk a lot because of mutual language barriers, so what I most often heard from my
host dad was:

Jaaaackass! What do you want to eat today?

Jaaaaackass! Come downstairs! Dinners ready!

My personal least favorite was Jaaaaaackass! Hurry up youll be late for school! Every day at
6:30 am my host dad would wake me up with this morning greeting. Then Id stumble down the
stairs and begin eating whatever greasy bit of breakfast food hed rustled up. It wasnt until I
went to live with my second host family that I learned that typical Taiwanese breakfast food isnt
fatty glistening bit of undercooked meat wrapped in greasy dough. Evidently, this is what he

liked to eat, so lacking any input from me; he assumed it was what I might like to eat too. He
was getting up early every morning, so I didnt want to appear ungrateful and tell him I thought
the food was disgusting, so he assumed I must like it. At one point he found out I liked
vegetables, so the next mornings breakfast was completely green because hed asked the person
making it to add handfuls of green onions for, Jaaaackass, the vegetable lover.

Most mornings while I was in the kitchen eating he would go to the living room would strip to
his underwear and sleep on the couch in front of a blaring TV. When I was done eating hed
wake up, slip on his pants and shirt, and drive me to school.

Once at school, Id fall asleep at my desk for half an hour. Then at 8 all the students would
summoned to the school parade ground for the morning flag rising. After the flag was raised, one
of the Jiaoguans4 would come forward to take the Mic.

One of the relics of the military dictatorship that ruled Taiwan into the 80s are the Jiaoguans.
Jiaoguans are active duty soldiers who enforce discipline and teach military readiness classes.
They are the ones who wander through classrooms at the lunch nap time to make sure everyone
is actually sleeping. They are the ones who made Julian, the German exchange student, and I
write lines for throwing paper airplanes out the window. At the morning assembly, Their lecture
topics ranged from the vaguely useful We Jiaoguans have been watching the weather reports
lately and it looks like therell be flooding. Today we want to talk about the importance of being

safe in the water. to the truly bizarre Students, There is too much trash in the trashcans! You
all need to eat less!

The Jiaoguans were mostly harmless, but the school also had a more sinister presence: the
Mishu5. Very early on the principals personal Mishu (secretary) had decided to make the five
exchange students his personal project. His favorite trick to do was to call us out of class and
spend an hour or so, telling us that we werent getting along with our classmates (how did he
know?) or we werent studying hard enough (what were we supposed to be studying? We didnt
have any Chinese classes and no one gave us any textbooks.) His favorite thing to do was to, (in
Chinese) complain about how bad our Chinese was. Sometimes I still see his big nostrils flaring
in anger.

When I got back to the US, the sponsoring organization had all of the exchange students from
eastern Washington meet up to swap stories and debrief. At the closing meeting a man asked
those who wouldnt do it over again. What with the secretary, long hours at school with nothing
to do, and the many awkward angry encounters that cropped up with my second host family, I
wasnt prepared to say that going on exchange was an unequivocally positive experience.

I raised my hand and as all the eyes in the room swung towards me I instantly regretted it. It was
not the happiest year of my life, but good things had happened. It is my memory and I can
choose remember what I want to remember. After all Sweet potatoes taste better than tears.