http://www.teleport.com/~etrabich/
birth, Manhattan, that a couple of my young friends would soon be chiming
their wedding bells with their families in New York and Taiwan. I chose to
attend the Asian ceremony, figuring this would be a great opportunity to mix
in another Mandarin milieu as both a tourist and a wedding guest. They
were surprised but happy to find someone willing to travel that distance to
watch one of those storied Taiwanese weddings. I bought my Lonely Planet
guide, gathered together the Chinese language materials I'd been collecting on
shelves, and put down $626 for the return air ticket. I looked forward
to my first trip across the Pacific in 6 years.
Cirrus ATM's
Although I had only a month I wanted to be able to say a few things in
Chinese at the wedding. I knew I couldn't learn the tones without a
teacher so I asked the next Chinese lady I met, swimming in the lane next to me
at Portland State, if she'd give me a few lessons. She turned out to be a
former PSU Chinese teaching assistant (now a database administrator for
Oracle). I couldn't have done better if I'd done an elaborate search.
Later I found the tree in front of the student center under which Taiwanese
students hung out. I peppered them with questions like, "Will the ATM's
in your country take "Cirrus" credit cards," "How hot will it be in May?"
and "How do I get from the airport to the train station?"
Chinese without Characters: Pinyin
Having lived for 6 years in Japan and visited most of the other
countries in the region I was curious just what I'd find in Taiwan. I'd only visited
a few southern provinces of China, Gaungxi, Yunnan, and Guandzhou. That
was a tough backpacking trip. I'd also been in some neighboring countries,
Korea and the Philippines. I loved my time in both Cantonese settlements,
Hong Kong and Singapore although I never considered studying Cantonese, it
being "all slang" according to one friend from Hong Kong. Studying Mandarin,
however, from its romanized standard of Pinyin seemed within my reach.
Although I still recognize some Chinese characters from my Japanese
schoolwork I knew that, in the short term, reading phonetics in English
letters would be faster than trying to get a grip on written Chinese. I
quickly found out the truth: learning to speak basic Chinese is not
that difficult once you learn to hear and produce the four tones. There are
a few other difficult sounds like the rounded front vowel [y] found in
French. The grammar is notoriously easy. The verb "to be" is the same in the past, present, and future, for singular and plural nouns. Pronouns don't even
have gender, which is why you often hear Chinese refer to 'him' or 'her'
incorrectly. The other difficult aspects of Chinese are the "measure
words". In this way it's similar to Japanese. You don't say "He's a friend" but
rather "He's one of those friends" where the specific word for 'one' is
different for many different categories of people or objects.
Hostel life not so Hostile
I arrived in country more than a week early and headed straight for the
Lonely Planet's preferred hostel, the Happy Family Hostel #1, only a
stone's throw from the central Taipei Railway Station. The small private rooms
at the hostel were inhabited mostly by travelers who'd landed one day in
Taipei and started working as kindergarten teachers the next. In the
dormitory, for $8 night, were Japanese, Dutch, French, and Israeli backpackers. There were two double bunks in several sections of the dorm and no separate
sections for men and women. The community room had a big cable TV where
travelers hung out in the evening. Some of the Japanese were from nearby Okinawa and had arrived by ferry. They told me that they actually get longer visas (with the same passport) than Japanese from the four main islands. That's one of those Asian anomalies you learn to accept without further questions.
Is this China or Japan?
My first glance at life in the Republic of China revealed numerous
parallels to Japan. Taiwanese lived under Japanese occupation for more than 50
years, from the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894 to the end of WWII.
Senior citizens speak flawless Japanese, having learned it in school. The
widespread physical similarities to Japan are evident to all veterans
of life in Japan. The bakeries and "convenience" stores are near replicas
of those in Japan. These Chinese even love sushi. Taiwan has the
reputation of being the only place occupied by the Japanese where there is no
bitterness towards them. Even the concrete covers on street sewers are like those used in Japan. Apartments are built with terraces decked out with washing
machines and clotheslines, just like in Japan. Toilets are not quite as
elaborate as in Japan but kilometers ahead of the mainland. That they
don't even lock up the compulsory helmets on their scooters lead me to
conclude that Taiwan may be even freer of crime than Japan. The country is much wealthier than mainland China, not quite as rich as Japan. The people
of Taiwan are looser, more informal, and calmer than the Japanese. They
don't bow and don't have phobias about foreigners. Nevertheless, at any
moment a 2000 year-old Chinaman may appear, dressed in rags, dragging a full
wagon of soil with his shoulders, impervious to the modern world around him.
There are influences from other countries, of course. The cheap internet
cafes are filled with young geeks playing Korean and American video games like Star Craft and Half-Life. Taiwanese television is eclectic, with sports and
programming from everywhere, including Grand Prix racing from Europe,
Japanese baseball, and the NBA.
Taipei - First Glance
I hit some of the top tourist attractions of Taipei in the first couple
of days. At the National Museum, rumored to own the greatest collection of
Chinese treasures in the world, only 10% of the collection is visible
at any one time. A young British scholar led the daily 3 PM English language
tour and corrected one common misunderstanding about delicate jade objects
of art. Jade cannot be carved, we learned. It is rubbed. I also visited
the National Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall where I caught the changing of the
guard. These young soldiers put on an impressive exhibition of rifle twirling.
Both the governments of the Republic of China (ROC) and the People's
Republic of China (PRC) officially revere Dr. Sun.
The Formosa Gorge
Having just enough time for one trip outside the capital I selected the
most celebrated attraction on the scenic east coast of the island, Taroko
Gorge. My journey began with a scenic 4-hour train ride to nearby Hualien. The
East Coast of that island, although less populated, is where the Portuguese
were looking when they named the island "La Ilha Formosa" or "The Beautiful
Island of Taiwan". In Hualien I saw a sight that I will always
remember. A young mom on a scooter waited at a traffic light in front of me. Her 4 year-old daughter stood between her legs on the vehicle. Mom had a
cigarette in her right hand and was talking on the cell phone in her left hand.
The light changed, she threw away the cigarette but continued to chat on
the phone as she gripped the handle, twisted it, and accelerated. Her
scooter lunged forward. The child handled the sudden acceleration smoothly,
having been brought up on the front of that scooter. Yes, they love their cell
phones and scooters in Taiwan! Although it looks scary on the roads
there are few accidents. I swore I'd never get on a scooter. Of course, the
next day I saw Taroko Gorge sitting on the back of my French travel
companion's scooter. He drove me from Taroko to Tianshiang. The flow of the Liwu River through winding gorges, rapids, waterfalls, and hollows in rocks left
was particularly overwhelming when surveyed from an open scooter. The gorge
compares favorably to Oregon's Columbia River Gorge. It is steeper and
deeper, winds more tightly and has some unique rock formations with
sparrow holes. It also has numerous hiking trails. If Taiwan can ever get its
inadequate tourist department together this might easily be developed
into a major destination for climbers, hikers, and sightseers.
Bring a Red Envelope to the Wedding
By now it was time to head down to the wedding. I stayed in the bride's
home for five nights, affording me a look at home life in Taiwan. We were
taken to temples, hot springs, and local museums. Our hosts, typically, were
so relentlessly hospitable that they tried to pay for everything little
thing we bought. We had to work out diversions for them when we wanted to buy
personal things with our own money. Luckily our trip coincided with a
local exhibition of the famous terracotta warriors from Xi'an, on the
mainland. The complex relationship between the ROC and the PRC seems to allow this kind of exchange despite the tensions reported in the press. Every day
we spent part of the time drinking tea at home with the family. The Art of
Tea has developed into quite an elaborate ceremony in Taiwan. It is too
complicated to describe in any detail but definitely seemed to borrow
aspects of tea ceremonies as far away as Morocco and Persia. The
equipment is extensive and expensive. It includes a large wooden table, often
sitting on a large wooden block, with a number of compartments and drain
leading down to a garbage pail. There are many cups, several teapots, thongs,
strainers, and a nearby brazier for boiling water. It is said that tea
drinking began when leaves fell into the pot of water being boiled for
a Chinese emperor. A tea maker will sit down, drinkers will gather,
chatter will ensue and the people in the room will bond. The Taiwanese simply
love to sit and drink tea.
BOPOMOFO in Taiwan
As I drank tea I habitually scribbled notes in my pad anticipating the
thank you notes I'd be sending when I got back home. I wanted to get the
names of the family members right, of course. I was often, however, given two
names for family members, the Chinese ("Minjien") and the local Taiwanese
dialect ("Minguon"). Taiwanese is, I was told, a spoken but not written
language similar to the dialect used in Fujian, the mainland province just
across the Taiwan Straits. There was much discussion as I asked people to help me write their names. They discussed whether they should give me the Chinese or Taiwanese name and how they should write it in English. I couldn't get
anyone to write in Pinyin Chinese, the phonetic system used in my
textbook and by my teacher from Shanghai. The historic question of how Taiwanese should represent Chinese characters in a Roman alphabet is wrapped up in deep social, political, and cultural issues. It was, in fact, a major
issue in the election of 2000! Briefly, they still teach their children a
National Phonetic Symbol scheme, also known as "BoPoMoFo", a set of symbols
derived from radicals of Han characters, similar to Japanese Hiragana. This
system has been abandoned in China and is now unique to Taiwan. The Taiwanese either don't seem to realize they're using an archaic system or maybe
they just find it cute. I didn't stay long enough to figure it out. In China
children study phonetics not with symbols but with Pinyin, the
romanization standard introduced on the mainland in 1958. Despite its idiosyncratic use of x's and q's, it does accurately represent the tones and sounds of Chinese. When the Taiwanese do use romanization it is often the
discredited Wade-Giles system, rarely used internationally nowadays. It gave us
names like "Peking" and "Mao Tse-Tung." Individually, Taiwanese seem to feel
they can transliterate their language anyway they see fit. One character may
give you the following transliterations: 'tsao,' 'tsau,' 'ts'ao,' 'ts'au,'
'chao,' 'chau,' 'chhao,' 'chhau,' 'cao,' 'cau,'. In short, the names
you see and hear in Taiwan and the way people suggest you write them is utterly
confusing. I was actually given four spellings for the father's name.
On Windows 2000, for example, there is one code conversion for traditional
Chinese, one for simplified Chinese and six for Taiwanese Chinese. When
the student and teacher in me got frustrated I simply remembered my massage
therapist's advice to relax into it and "see the Zen in it". Yes, it
felt good to be back in a continent where inconsistencies and anomalies were
accepted as a normal part of everyday life.
Red Envelopes to Sister Number Three
The wedding was a huge affair with more than 300 guests. Taiwanese
weddings are notorious for their lavish treatment of guests. Sitting outside,
under tents, in a steady heavy downpour (good luck!) we ate an endless
multi-course meal with beef, chicken and pork dishes, drank beer, tea,
and soda, and made merry. The bride changed dresses five times during the
party and three more times relaxing afterwards. I accompanied the principals
as they visited each of the dozens of tables and greeted all their guests
personally. Our hosts admitted that they didn't even know all the
guests. We all were told to give the youngest sister our red envelopeswith money. Only red envelopes will do on this day, we learned. The bride's uncles
grilled the groom and me in Japanese, asking us what businesses our families
were in, what college degrees we had, and how much money we earned. We were told which uncle was number one, number two, number three, and number four
and addressed them as such. We were quizzed on this important information
to make sure it was absorbed. We stuffed ourselves, tried to decline more
food and drink but it was brought anyway. We finally figured out that if we
cleaned our plate or emptied the glass they would refill it so we just
left everything full.
Taipei Revisited
When all the wedding celebrations were over I was happy to return to my
Happy Family hostel in Taipei. I spent the last few days shopping and
visiting the local mountain resort, Yangmingshan, just outside of the
sweltering city. Along Jungshan (or Chungshan) Road I got to see a
darker side of the country one Sunday. Thousands of foreign workers, mostly
Philippinos, gathered on what one told me was his first day off in two
weeks. These people pay to come to Taiwan and work long hours in
high-tech compounds under tight regulations. The foreign workers make most
motherboards and many other computer components in Taiwan.
Taiwanese BOPOMOFO - Get over it
The island of Taiwan is distinctive and idiosyncratic. They speak a
dialect of Chinese, eat sushi, and play baseball. For a world hot spot it's
quite a relaxed society. While I was there the two English newspapers wrote
many stories about Makiko Tanaka, the first woman Japanese Foreign Minister
but seemed less concerned with big men in Beijing and Washington. Their own
woman Vice President, Annette Lu says that she would like Taiwan to
become a cuddly country, adored by the internationally community. She says,
"Taiwan's soft powers lie in its human rights, democracy, love for peace, love
for mankind and its high-tech industry." Since this trip I've had a
particularly difficult time dealing with jet lag, although it's always more
difficult coming from the East. One of my friends suggested that perhaps part of
me is still drinking tea with gentle Taiwanese people. This lovely island
would be an easy place to teach but a difficult place to learn Chinese. Taiwan
and China are now worlds apart. They've resisted adopting the mainland's
linguistic romanization standard of Pinyin long enough. I join the many
who think they should begin to teach their children this simple
transliteration. I doubt, however, that they will ever make their language easier to learn. That's the illusive Zen of Asia. It rarely gives you anything to grasp
without ambiguities.