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Back in those long gone days when local English language newspapers would never even think of printing a letter to the editor that described foreigners as "international English teaching riffraff" I used to earn my living teaching English at a school called Big Bird.
Every weekday, I would leave my happy home just off of Shih -Ta Lu, hop on my trusty 125cc Honda, and risk my life hurtling through the wild streets of Taipei, all for the pleasure of teaching skeptical small children how to dance the Hokey Pokey.
My mother still thinks I'm crazy, but those moments spent dodging buses and taxis were the highlight of my day. People can complain all they want about how bad Taipei's traffic is (and certainly it's worse now than it was then, in 1986), but when you're out in the middle of it, on a motorcycle, you don't have time to grumble or bitch --you've got to stay alive!
It's much more than an adrenalin rush. It's an experiment in chaos theory in the truest sense of the Dao. You have to find the way that cannot be spoken when you ride a bike in Taipei. The first rule is that there are no rules. There are some guidelines, but you have to be flexible, ready for anything, trigger happy on both the throttle and the brake.
Just maneuver your way to the front of the pack waiting at a red light at any major intersection. Watch the eyes of the other drivers as they stare at the cross-traffic lights, eager for the first hint of yellow. And then they're off! Fifty motorcycles and scooters race for open ground.
But wait! A bus is blowing off the new red light, thundering through the intersection straight at the over-anxious bikes. Disaster is about to happen. Visions of motorcycle Apocalypse swarm through your brain, bodies and bikes flying in every direction. The end is nigh.
But it isn't. Like a proactive human Red Sea, the bikes flow around the bus, seeking the angle, shooting the gap. You might choke on some exhaust, and your heart might be beating a tad too quickly, but you're alive. You've learned what it means to be moving fast in Taiwan. You found a way where there was no way.
It's like the the National Central University math professor said to me the other day. "Taiwanese traffic exhibits very efficient exception-handling subroutines." For a place where drivers ignore traffic regulations as much as they do, there appear to be remarkably few accidents.
Which is not to say there aren't any mishaps. And certainly, motorcycle-driving attitudes take a sharp turn backwards once you've experienced your first top-speed loss of control crackup. Full throttle excitement never again seems so free and easy.
Here in the present-day nineties, where driving a motorcycle without a license can lead to a $6000 fine, and the new, (or proposed) helmet law is all the rage, I haven't been riding a bike. Instead I sit in an air-conditioned taxi watching scooters thread their way around me, or I stand in an over-crowded bus, sweating, late for an appointment. And there's no question that I feel some longing, some nostalgia.
But I like to think of Taiwan's traffic and the motorcycles therein as a metaphor. I like to think that the flexibility exhibited on the road is the same flexibility that allows Taiwan's entrepreneurs to roll with every punch the market gives them, or that the speed at which people drive is the speed of a society that wants everything, affluence, democratization, and fun--NOW. I like to think that even if I'm not sitting on my Honda, smelling the fumes rise from the dirty blue gas tank, swerving to avoid t hat taxi, darting around that crazed pedestrian, I like to think that even if I'm just standing on the corner, watching the traffic go by, I'm still on my way to Big Bird in the heat of the day, senses stretched to the max, ready for whatever the street can throw me.
I like to think that I'll always be driving a motorcycle in Taipei in my heart.
Andrew Leonard
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