I was about to write out my feelings here, but then a friend emailed me asking for updates (for which I hope she doesn't regret now) and I ended up word vomiting out what happened earlier today to her. I might as well post the pertinent information here, since it played a huge part in my doubt/uncertainty/distrust/confusion about Taiwan culture now per the personal anecdotal experiences I am compiling...
---email excerpt---
The timing of your email is pretty interesting in that it was a really hard day, emotionally, for me. Case in point, I'd been visiting (along with Daniel, Declan, and Petra) my parents in Kaohsiung for the past week and took the high-speed rail this morning back to Hsinchu. Daniel had to keep riding the rail north to Taipei for a conference, so I disembarked with the kids and two giant luggages (things my mom wanted me to take) to the taxi pickup place near the high speed rail station. As my turn at the taxi came, I rolled the luggages by the taxi trunk and was making sure Petra wasn't running towards the other idling cars as I wore Declan on my back. Usually, at this time, the taxi driver would be loading whatever luggages the passenger has into the trunk, but the taxi driver assigned to me stood by his open trunk and yelled at me as I was picking up Petra that it's not his job to put my luggages away for me, that they're so big and heavy and he doesn't get paid enough to do that much work, that this isn't his personal taxi company, etc etc...he just went on and on complaining about his job and the taxi company and how the system works, all in a really nasty tone as I proceeded to load my luggages while he stood there literally yelling next to me. I admit that I got pretty angry and muttered under my breath "I'm doing everything so you can stop complaining now" as I picked up the second luggage. Then, as he was still complaining, I moved to slam the trunk hood closed--to make a point about doing everything myself--and hit him on the head with the hood.
It was accidental (I promise!), but no doubt hurt a great deal. It wasn't until he pushed the trunk hood back up and then slammed it back down while screaming swear words at me that I realized what I'd done. I really did feel terrible and repeatedly apologized as I strained to see if the hit caused visible damage to his head, but he kept yelling more swear words until I got angry again at how he's now trying to get everyone to look at him and how poorly I've treated him. Since he wasn't responding to anything I was saying, I turned, popped open the trunk again, and this time dragged out all of my luggages and deposited them back onto the sidewalk. After he quieted down and glared at me for some time, he got into his taxi, drove a way off, got out, and gestured for the people waiting in line behind me to board his taxi. Then the entire row of taxis waiting after his drove past me. I silently watched each of them pass, one after another, as I held onto Petra with Declan on my back, wondering how I was going to get home by bus.
I felt really terrible, and prayed several times throughout the day afterwards for the taxi driver's head to be okay, that I didn't hurt him seriously. At the same time, I couldn't believe that all the other taxi drivers took his side. This, in addition to a currently ongoing standoff with several immigration officers about Petra's last name (Israeli birth certificate lists her with my maiden name but US recognizes her with Daniel's last name...In the eye of the Taiwanese government, I have two different daughters of different surnames but same first names born in the same city at the same time. Amazing! But also this means Petra is having a hard time acquiring her Taiwanese citizenship and therefore national health insurance) -- all made me feel like "returning" to Taiwan is a terrible mistake. That I don't belong here. But this has been my longed-for home for so long. If I don't belong here, where can I go? I actually missed Israeli bureaucracy and Israeli interactions. For some reason, getting yelled at in Israel never fazed me as much as all the things (several other incidents that I won't belabor your attention span with) that happened today did.
----end of email excerpt----
If this had been China or the US (except I wouldn't catch a taxi in the US, since that would be way too expensive), I would almost immediately chalk this up to a rotten culture/society. So rude, so insensitive, and so expected. But it's Taiwan, and my impression had always been that Taiwanese people = polite and service-oriented. Clearly, this reflects first my bigotry towards several other countries/cultures, and perhaps a bit of an entitlement attitude I have regarding myself in Taiwan. (Also, I might have been confusing Taiwan with Japan. Half-jk!) Maybe that's why this incident haunted me all day, because as awful as I felt he acted, I clearly shouldn't have lost my temper and brained him, even accidentally. Damn it, why can't it be more black and white, so I can work myself up into a self-righteous tizzy and then just benevolently forgive him? I suck, too.
Friday, August 29, 2014
Saturday, August 23, 2014
on vacation, technically
So far the visit to Kaohsiung to see my parents have consisted mainly of:
Morning - get woken up by the kids, yell at the kids to settle down as they start destroying things, get dumplings for breakfast from vendors downstairs, dress the kids in swimsuits and head to the apartment complex's swimming pool
Afternoon - naps, sometimes by the kids too, then walk to a mall and let the kids play at the arcade because it's too hot outside; usually joined by my mom at this point
Night - dinner, see my dad during his brief break from work (although not at all tonight), fight with the kids about proper bedtime for one or two hours, then I stay up waaaay too late relishing alone time (such as not sleeping until 2:30am last night and wanting to kill myself this morning as the kids jumped around me)
Today followed the above template, with a slight, ever-so-exciting variation of dental check up for Declan and shopping for kindergarten supplies at Carrefour. Growing up, I've noticed with bemusement the huge "back to school" sale catalogues for the local shopping centers in Oregon. Since I did my own school supplies shopping in the US, and most of the time at garage sales, going to Carrefour to pick out lunch set, water bottle, etc school supplies for Declan today was my first ever participation of this autumn ritual. I felt like such a MOM, and it made me strangely giddy.
I also stopped by Eslite to see if they carried the Divergent trilogy by Veronica Roth in the original English. Astonishingly, they did not. This lack was not what astonished me--it was the fact that Eslite did however carry the Fifty Shades series in both English *and* Chinese. How is such a stupidly written* porn-in-words "literature" ubiquitously found in every country I've visited since the series' conception, while a beautifully-themed post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction series like the one by Roth is...not. Is this me being a literary snob? No, I think I just actually have standards.
*based upon 15 minutes of skimming through the first book in the series at the bookstore in Horev Center. The first clue was the email exchange format in huge chunks of the book (yuck!) and the last clue was how it feels like reading the diary of a drunk 12-year-old.
In the end, I bought the Chinese version of Four. (They didn't have it in the original English.) It's been on my ebook hold list at the Vancouver Public Library. Sadly, Joyce's generously shared library account recently expired and so kaput goes the hold list too. I figured reading Four in Chinese will help me improve my language even if it turns out to be a dud.
Five more days left in Kaohsiung before we ride the high-speed rail back to Hsinchu (and Daniel solo onwards to Taipei for a conference). I hope we don't get stuck in this particular routine.
Morning - get woken up by the kids, yell at the kids to settle down as they start destroying things, get dumplings for breakfast from vendors downstairs, dress the kids in swimsuits and head to the apartment complex's swimming pool
Afternoon - naps, sometimes by the kids too, then walk to a mall and let the kids play at the arcade because it's too hot outside; usually joined by my mom at this point
Night - dinner, see my dad during his brief break from work (although not at all tonight), fight with the kids about proper bedtime for one or two hours, then I stay up waaaay too late relishing alone time (such as not sleeping until 2:30am last night and wanting to kill myself this morning as the kids jumped around me)
Today followed the above template, with a slight, ever-so-exciting variation of dental check up for Declan and shopping for kindergarten supplies at Carrefour. Growing up, I've noticed with bemusement the huge "back to school" sale catalogues for the local shopping centers in Oregon. Since I did my own school supplies shopping in the US, and most of the time at garage sales, going to Carrefour to pick out lunch set, water bottle, etc school supplies for Declan today was my first ever participation of this autumn ritual. I felt like such a MOM, and it made me strangely giddy.
I also stopped by Eslite to see if they carried the Divergent trilogy by Veronica Roth in the original English. Astonishingly, they did not. This lack was not what astonished me--it was the fact that Eslite did however carry the Fifty Shades series in both English *and* Chinese. How is such a stupidly written* porn-in-words "literature" ubiquitously found in every country I've visited since the series' conception, while a beautifully-themed post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction series like the one by Roth is...not. Is this me being a literary snob? No, I think I just actually have standards.
*based upon 15 minutes of skimming through the first book in the series at the bookstore in Horev Center. The first clue was the email exchange format in huge chunks of the book (yuck!) and the last clue was how it feels like reading the diary of a drunk 12-year-old.
In the end, I bought the Chinese version of Four. (They didn't have it in the original English.) It's been on my ebook hold list at the Vancouver Public Library. Sadly, Joyce's generously shared library account recently expired and so kaput goes the hold list too. I figured reading Four in Chinese will help me improve my language even if it turns out to be a dud.
Five more days left in Kaohsiung before we ride the high-speed rail back to Hsinchu (and Daniel solo onwards to Taipei for a conference). I hope we don't get stuck in this particular routine.
Sunday, August 3, 2014
my son's first significant friendship / something tragic
A few days ago, I wrote a Facebook message to the mother of Declan's best friend from gan: "Declan was eager to show Kimi his new shirt today, then he told me after gan with some surprise, 'Kimi wasn't at gan today.' I don't think he's fully grasped the extent of their separation yet."
The previous day, to give her some time to pack and her husband more time at the office before their trip to Germany, my husband and I oversaw a playdate between Declan and their two older children: Kaya, who is six, and Kimi, who is three and in the same gan (daycare) as Declan. Declan and Kaya had a memorable time laying ambushes and swinging around sticks while pretending to be King David. As the playdate ended, Kaya called from the backseat of their dad's car as they drove past us: "Bye, Declan!" and Kimi yelled, "Love you, Declan!" "Love you too!" Declan yelled back.
Every time I went to pick Declan up from gan, he would be in the middle of something with Kimi. When I dressed him in the morning and prepped him to go out the door, Declan would want to hold one toy "to show Kimi."
It's starting to hit me, I think, that we're leaving. I've finally started setting down roots and found genuine community in this country with a strong clannish culture (which seems to be the case of this entire region, actually). And now, as I start to pack definitively, the roots are being ripped out bit by bit. I find myself morose, avoiding people's invitation to hang out because...what's the point? The real kicker is listening to Declan chatter on every now and then about how he's looking forward to Kimi coming back from the latter's family vacation. How they'll play together again when he returns. When my husband and I tried to prepare him for the transition, Declan said, "I will make friends at gan in Taiwan. Then I can play with Kimi in Taiwan, and Kimi in Haifa!" He tells me he likes his gan now, even though not everyone is his friend there.
I wish we can stay. I have no idea what living in Hsinchu is going to be like, or if I'll actually make friends there without the typical local regard of me as someone slightly (or a lot) freakish. At least here I'm not expected to fit in. Tired.
And I hope this operation officially ends by the time we leave.
The previous day, to give her some time to pack and her husband more time at the office before their trip to Germany, my husband and I oversaw a playdate between Declan and their two older children: Kaya, who is six, and Kimi, who is three and in the same gan (daycare) as Declan. Declan and Kaya had a memorable time laying ambushes and swinging around sticks while pretending to be King David. As the playdate ended, Kaya called from the backseat of their dad's car as they drove past us: "Bye, Declan!" and Kimi yelled, "Love you, Declan!" "Love you too!" Declan yelled back.
Every time I went to pick Declan up from gan, he would be in the middle of something with Kimi. When I dressed him in the morning and prepped him to go out the door, Declan would want to hold one toy "to show Kimi."
It's starting to hit me, I think, that we're leaving. I've finally started setting down roots and found genuine community in this country with a strong clannish culture (which seems to be the case of this entire region, actually). And now, as I start to pack definitively, the roots are being ripped out bit by bit. I find myself morose, avoiding people's invitation to hang out because...what's the point? The real kicker is listening to Declan chatter on every now and then about how he's looking forward to Kimi coming back from the latter's family vacation. How they'll play together again when he returns. When my husband and I tried to prepare him for the transition, Declan said, "I will make friends at gan in Taiwan. Then I can play with Kimi in Taiwan, and Kimi in Haifa!" He tells me he likes his gan now, even though not everyone is his friend there.
Declan with his best friend in Israel.
They have a fascination with action figures...
I wish we can stay. I have no idea what living in Hsinchu is going to be like, or if I'll actually make friends there without the typical local regard of me as someone slightly (or a lot) freakish. At least here I'm not expected to fit in. Tired.
And I hope this operation officially ends by the time we leave.
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