Taiwanese people are so friendly that even biker gangs run charities. I joined Robert Lo, the leader of the Taiwan Angels, on their annual Christamas Toy Run and learned a lot about motorcycles, community, and poverty in Taiwan.
In today’s climate of financial uncertainty, where layoffs are rife and jobs are increasingly hard to find in many Western countries, more and more people are looking to Asia for employment. Taiwan is a very attractive option to many people. Here are three reasons why.
Many questions arise when you are preparing to go teach English in Taiwan. What if I can’t find a job? Can I find one before I go? Will I need an English teaching certificate? If so, which is better, TOEFL or TESL? Where is the best place to live? Here’s what you need to know.
This piece, originally written for, but never published by, McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies has been one of the most popular pieces on this website ever since I first posted it, and has received many compliments.
Hunter S. Thompson
The theatre was dark and reeked with the stench of a hundred overfed accountants gorging on chemical drenched popcorn and syrup water. I’d been assigned to review No Country for Old Men for Rolling Stone, and was already a week past deadline, but had abandoned the assignment partly because when you eat as much mescaline as I had it’s very hard to focus on a predetermined task, and also because I realized what a fleecing the operation was. Fifteen dollars for a ticket. Eight dollars for popcorn. Four dollars for soda. This wasn’t art. It was a twisted perversion of the American dream, a herding of overweight suburbanites into giant pens with flashing pictures on the wall to stupefy them into paying outrageous prices for sickening foods.
I had brought my lawyer, a large hairy Samoan, and I explained this to him as we waited to purchase a package of Mentos, which is the only thing that will calm him in the throws of a powerful mescaline trip, but the mescaline was already batting his mind around like a squash ball. He kept looking around and talking about an agent and the ‘incident’ on his last trip to Batangas. Suddenly he muttered something about “the banana man” and ran down the up escalator, leaving a trail of sweatpants wearing housewives on the ground. I slipped into the theater.
The movie had started, but I was distracted by the raincoat-wearing pervert in front of me, who looked like the police sketch of a local pedophile. I was trying to get into position to snap his neck without drawing attention when I saw that a man further down in the theater kept turning to look at me. He was old and reptilian. Was this the agent that my lawyer had seen? Paranoia gripped me. Did I have any outstanding warrants? Was he an assassin? Or worse yet, a Republican? It was clear that I had to make a run for it and come up with an excuse for not finishing the article.
I ran out the emergency exit hoping that it would sound the alarm and empty the theater, but the alarm didn’t go off. There was a fire extinguisher in a glass case on the wall. I broke the glass and the alarm screamed. I sprinted back into the theater using the fire extinguisher to create a smokescreen. I thought I was in the clear, but as I ran up the aisle the agent leaped in front of me like an orangutan and punched me in the face. I awoke to my lawyer explaining to the theater manager that I was autistic and threatening to sue him for discrimination against the handicapped if he didn’t allow us to leave.
He pulled me to my feet and dragged me out my Cadillac, which we drove at top speed through the city, onto the interstate and headed for Vegas, where I had a friend who could give us some queludes to bring us back to our senses so that we could figure out who the agent was, and what he wanted.
Jack Kerouac
Neal and I had been planning to see No Country for Old Men because Neal and I always dug Cohen brothers movies and how they created such funny-sad characters that mirrored the funny-sadness of life, but when we were in the Royal having a beer before the movie Neal met a this beautiful little thin-hipped waitress who was almost finished work and decided to boost a car and drive her out of the city and make her in a field – Neal apologized profusely because beneath his animal sexuality he’s really a golden hearted angel and I told him that it was OK and bought a bottle of port to keep me company and hid it under my raincoat but that was a bad idea because I got too drunk waiting for the movie to start and couldn’t see clearly or understand the story so I started meditating on this crazy cat behind me who was moving around and mumbling a crazy dark monologue about pedophiles and agents and he kept getting more and more agitated like a tortured dark theater ogre until finally he stood up and bounded down the aisle on great long ogre legs and rushed out the door – then the fire alarm went off and he rushed back in shooting plumes of white foam across the theater while running up the aisle – but then suddenly a man stood up and punched him, which I hated because I hate to see anything hurt, and can’t even bring myself to kill a mosquito, and because I came to think that he was a of mad angel here to save us all from ourselves so I ran out of the theater and kept running for two blocks before realizing that I’d left the port in the theater and that I didn’t have money to buy more and that even after encountering a wild angel of the night, when your wine is gone and you’re alone the city is a desolate place – so I sat down on and cried into my knees wishing that Neal and the waitress would pull up in a car blaring bebop on the radio and carry me off into the hopeless American night.
Ernest Hemingway
I sipped gin from the flask that Ezra had given me and I hid it under my coat whenever the usher walked past. The gin was cold and biting and helped to pass the time while I waited for the movie to begin. After a while the theater became dark and quiet. The movie began. It was No Country for Old Men by the Cohen brothers, who always made fine movies, so I expected to enjoy it.
The story followed a man who killed people for profit and fun, a cowboy who discovered a bag of money, and an idealistic policeman. The story was interesting and I liked it although it wasn’t much like the brothers’ previous movies. The writing was refined and the cinematography was good.
The experience was all very good except for a man several rows behind me who kept talking and moving around. I kept turning around to glare at him so that he would be quiet. Eventually the man stood up and ran out the emergency exit. A moment later the fire alarm went off and the man rushed back into the theater screaming “fire” and shooting a fire extinguisher into the crowd. I had been enjoying the movie a great deal and this made me very angry so, when he came near me I stood up and punched his face. I could tell he wasn’t a boxer because he had no legs. He fell down and shouted for others to attack me because I was an “agent” and going to take him away for “water boarding”, so I punched him again and put him out.
After that the movie was postponed until the police could come, and I had an appointment with Gertrude for aperitifs at the Royal, so I left. I can’t say much about this movie except that the beginning is different from anything that the Cohen brothers have made, but it’s probably as good as anything that they’ve made, and it may attract lunatics, but it’s probably worth seeing if you’re not afraid to box a lunatic.
Xpat Magazine Winter, 2008
Tonight I ran beneath a crescent moon, thick like a section of orange, the color of lightning, surrounded by inky night speckled sparsely with stars. Golden Beach is the best place to run in Tainan. It’s relatively close to town and there’s rarely anybody on it at night.
I run there only at night, usually on Mondays. Ever since I started running at Golden Beach my Monday run has become something I look forward to.
Golden Beach is not a nice beach. It’s very dirty. There are always teacups and bottles and bags and Styrofoam littering the shore. Oyster trapping season has just finished and the trappers have, as usual, cut loose the old traps that are too old to use next season. So right now there are giant stacks of collected bamboo on the beach, and long piles of washed up bamboo lying lengthwise along the water line.
Most of the poles are as thick as a baseball and the length of two cars. If I go running at high tide, when the waves are pushing the poles up into the piles where they rattle around and a few roll back out by the wave, my run is like an Atari game, me watching the poles, timing their movements and leaping between them while trying to maintain my rhythm.
I run in bare feet so I need to run at the waters edge. If I run in the dry sand I risk stepping on broken glass. But if I run in the sand that has been washed over by the waves I can see the ground because the lights from the highway reflect off of the flat wet sand. I’ve seen thousands of tiny sand crabs, frightened by the sound of my feet, darting into the ocean in front of and around me. They come very close but I’ve yet to step on one.
I’ve also found that in Taiwan crave the feeling of seeing afar. After a week in the city, in the classrooms and alleys and city streets where you can rarely see more than fifty meters in front of you, my eyes yearn to stretch out across a horizon – any horizon. When I run at a Golden Beach they wander across the sky and the beach and the flat strip of multicolored lights that stretches across the black water of the Taiwan Straight.
But the reason that I really love running on Golden Beach at night is the same reason that I love going to the morning market. Running at Golden Beach gives me the same feeling that I get when I walk in the early morning sunlight among the butchers slaughtering chickens with tiny knives and the bamboo hat-wearing farmers with gummy toothless smiles. When I run on Golden Beach with the bamboo and the sand crabs and I look up at the moon (the moon looks very different on a tropical beach than it does in the high Canadian Rockies) and gulp the salty seaweed air, I remember; this is exactly why I moved to Taiwan.
It had rained lightly and steadily for three days on the festival grounds, a small grassy plateau high in the mountains of Taoyuan County. The dance floor, if you could call it that, was a flat formerly grassy area blanketed in four inches of mud.
We all danced in the mud and rain a frolicking mess of festival hippies. Everybody was happy despite the cold mud and rain. In fact, it seemed that the crowd was happier because of it. It made us feel earthy – animal – and because of it we were allowed to act less human and more like animals. Everyone was drinking and smoking steadily and that helped too. As the weekend progressed, we collectively became more and more muddy and animal-like until around three a.m. on Sunday when in our sleep deprived, weather-beaten, alcohol fueled delirium we became animals. But that passed quickly and in the morning when the sun came out everyone became human again and quietly packed up returned to their human homes and showers and televisions.
The festival was beautiful. I met many good people and got to spend time with many good people that I already knew. But event that defined the festival and the charitable goodwill of all the volunteers, performers, and the festival itself, occurred early Saturday evening.
I was dancing to Militant Hippi who were playing a fusion of hip-hop, ska and reggae. It was a good fusion of hip-hop, ska and reggae. I know it was good because I rarely listen to ska or reggae but I enjoyed their show immensely. It was 7pm and the party was well underway. A large proportion of the three hundred or so attendees were already caked in mud.
Because of the rain and mud I had shed my shirt and shoes and wore only a pair of shorts. I was having a wonderful time flinging my body around the mass of gyrating flesh sweat rain and mud. I was smiling absently and must have looked very friendly because many strangers talked to me. Several of them told me that I should paint my chest with mud. Finally one woman that I knew from Tainan bent over and immersed her hands in the mud and then stood up and slapped them on my chest, one on each breast, if men can be said to have breasts.
That was the first time that I was painted.
The second time it was a Norse looking woman, short with blonde hair and freckled skin. I had been watching her and was attracted to her and when I had first spoken to her earlier in the evening she only spoke to me in Chinese. But since she was a beginner to Chinese she began speaking to me in English soon after. We were dancing together when the music stopped or, rather, Millitant Hippi finished their set with a long drum solo and the singer, a man that they call Boston Paul, leapt off the stage and slid on his belly in the mud through the crowd.
With the music suddenly gone, and nothing to do, the Norse-looking woman asked if she could paint me. “Of course,” I replied. She was an artist. I knew because she had told me earlier. She had actually designed Millitant Hippie’s album cover, and many other bands’ album covers as well. I would have said yes even if she wasn’t an artist and I wasn’t attracted to her, but those things helped.
She dipped her hands daintily in the mud and began by carefully dotting my forehead, and then drawing a line on one cheek. Then she stopped and wiped away some of the dots with her thumb, like a mother wiping a mark off of a child’s face, and then continued painting. She apologized when she stopped to erase the mistake, but she didn’t need to.
After that many people complimented my body painting. A little later a tall, thin blonde woman told me that she liked my body painting and I thanked her and then she asked me, would I like to be painted more?
“Professionally?” I asked.
“Yes.” She replied. “Follow me.”
She took my hand and pulled me over to the side of the stage. At the side of the stage she showed me her painting kit. It was a small palette that looked like the watercolors that you used in elementary school, a blue flat rectangular box with a clear plastic lid through which you could see two rows of multicolored circles inside. But instead of water colors her kit contained pastes that she dabbed and stroked with a q-tip onto my face. I never saw what she painted (until today when I was browsing people’s photos of the festival on Facebook) but I received many compliments for it.
We talked as she painted. She was from a town very close to my hometown in Canada. I became quite absorbed in the conversation about towns and lakes and mountains that we both knew and I was startled when put her finger to my lips and told me, “Shhh. I think they’re having a moment of silence.”
Everybody was silent, the band, the crowd, everyone. I looked around confused and slightly awed. Onstage the band, a band of dark aboriginal people, stood like statues behind their instruments. There was a large circle of people on the dance floor, if you could call it that, holding hands with their heads bowed.
After what felt like a very long time the statue standing onstage behind the didgeridoo tilted its head forward ever so slightly so that its mouth rested inside of the long wooden instrument. A low groan grew slowly in the air – long and low and steady and increasing in volume until, after what felt like a long time, a drum beat, also low and slow and steady, thumped out from the stage and carried solidly through the crowd, growing weaker as it traveled, eventually dissipating somewhere in the rain filled air above the green valley that stretched out like a giant yawning mouth below our plateau.
Then the circle began to turn, everyone chanting. We stood at the side of the stage watching slightly confused but happy and content. I later found out that the circle was the peace circle and that they have it every year at Peacefest (this was my first year). The silence was for all of the people suffering in the world. The circle was the physical manifestation of the meaning of Peacefest; the money that it collected for various charities, the volunteers that organized it, and the general goodwill that one felt during the festival.
The circle was the philosophical epitome of Peacefest, and I found out all of the reasons why later, but nobody had to tell me; I already knew it as I stood shirtless in the rain, thrice painted, watching the circle turn.
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