taiwanese politics

Before I start writing what I originally planned, a random interlude that only a parent would understand the post-worthiness of: while Daniel and I were watching Almost Famous on HBO this afternoon, Declan was playing around in the living room when, all of a sudden, he fetched the blue potty that he would have nothing to do with thus far, took the lid off it, squatted, and proceeded to pee a good amount of liquid into the potty. I reached and grabbed it right before he got up and seemed to be about to flip the potty and dump his pee out. He was not happy by that turn of events, and shrieked for me to hand it back until I asked him to follow me to wash the potty out in the bathroom. I don't know if his sudden matter-of-fact autonomous potty utilization was a happy, genuine step towards successful potty-training, or if he was just bored and thought, "Why not?"

Anyhow, back to our regularly scheduled content. So there's been a piece of news that's all over the TV channels and newspapers and some of my DPP friends' Facebook accounts. Basically, the (former) secretary-general for the Executive Yuan, which is currently dominated by Taiwan's nationalist party and DPP's (the opposition party...think Democrats vs. Republicans) main rival, has confessed to bribery and corruption. He's pretty much going to be a jailbird for a long, long while and his political future is utterly destroyed at the tender age of 44. And this is a major embarrassment for the KMT since he's so high-ranking. Now investigations into other party members are underway.

I hear the news and kind of shrugged. I despise the DPP overall for a lot of reasons that my DPP friends would never keep an open mind long enough to hear about, but I've studied the history of both Eastern and Western governments enough to hold no party infallible. This current scandal, which seems to be giving the average citizens spats of histrionics, is really...ordinary to me. Another person, faced with near-absolute power, falls to the temptation of becoming filthy rich. Yawn. And, unlike my DPP friends who want him crucified, I do find it slightly refreshing that he confessed fairly quickly. In past corruption cases where it's a DPP member involved (*cough* former president Chen *cough* and his wife *cough*), the standard fare is to admit nothing even after being indicted despite numerous appeals. And then have their rabid supporters continue to insist that it's all an opposition party conspiracy to besmirch their name. This is better. You know it is.

But it remains that there's a lot of angry, self-righteous ranting right now, and since my family lives in southern Taiwan, which is a DPP stronghold, my stalwartly KMT-supporting dad is absolutely heartbroken and unusually quiet these couple of days. Until tonight, when we were eating at a roadside buffet. I don't remember how it came up, but eventually my parents started talking about how the only reason why the party secretary embezzled in the way he did was because he was merely operating the way southern politicians do things i.e. DPP politicians, since they hold most of the offices down south here. My parents are not known for volume control, and we were in a fairly small A/C-ed room. I noticed, out of the corners of my eyes, people at other tables starting to stare at us. Also, I kind of disagree with my parents' rationale. Wrong is wrong, even if it's the political climate. If he's really a principled enough man, it wouldn't matter how other people do things. He should have stuck with what was right. I mentioned that, in an equally loud voice, in part to appease our eavesdropping audience. I do not want to be yelled at like what happened once when I disagreed with a taxi driver's political view and got kicked out of the cab halfway to my destination.  My parents argued back that it's like smoking--habitual smokers who grew up among smokers don't see what they do as wrong or bad. It's just a way of life. I pushed back and said, smoking isn't a crime. It's not the same as bad morality. And then I changed the subject to something about living in China, because the people nearby still wouldn't stop staring and in fact had turned their bodies to face us directly.

As it turned out, that wasn't a safe subject either. I had changed the subject to China by retrieving an earlier thread of conversation in which my mom asked if I should in fact visit Hsinchu with Daniel when he visits the university there. She worried that the accommodations wouldn't be good enough for Declan and me. I said that nothing here could be worse than what I experienced in China. I joked about how I loved doing dishes so much after returning to the States, because I actually have two basins and hot water and I don't need to stand in pooling water. As I was detailing how sucky China was, one of the people who own the roadside buffet came by to clear the table a bit. I was pretty liberal in my descriptions since bashing China is not that unpopular among Taiwanese in the south...until the person asked my mom in passing when the latter went to get more green bean soup, whether we're from the mainland because our accent is not typically Taiwanese. The person, you see, along with the other owners of the roadside buffet, came from Fujian. So I felt really bad for bashing her country right in front of her; I held out a wisp of hope that maybe she secretly agrees, hence the emigration to Taiwan. Still, I admit I'm pretty bigoted and prejudiced against China and Chinese culture on the mainland. I had hoped that living there would erase that, but my bigotry seems to have actually grown.

Oh, and also my dad then started talking about how Fujianese and Taiwanese are basically one and the same dialect, so Taiwanese people who are anti-Chinese and proclaim that we're a completely separate culture and, in fact, race, are just fooling themselves. Eyes turned and glared. So much for my attempt at peace-keeping. I finished my green bean soup and suggested we go. Like, right now, please?