Slippers (or) Here is Great!!

I went with some friends on a weekend trip to a place called Ilan, which is situated on the eastern coast of the island. This should give you an idea of how small Taiwan actually is: Taipei is more or less on the west coast. It took us less than an hour to get to our destination on the other side of the country. (If you're interested, you can take a look at the map at http://www.tlfq.ulaval.ca/axl/asie/images/taiwan-map-admin.gif. I think it's a pretty decent one.)

At any rate, in order to kill time on what in Taiwanese terms amounts to the longest drive ever, my friend asked me if I had become accustomed to life in Taiwan yet. I answered that yes, for the most part things were ok. It was just the little things, I said, that still made me feel out of place.

"Oh," she said. "Like what?"

"Well, like, for instance, you take off your shoes when you enter the house here. In America we don't do that."

"Oh, I know," said her husband. "You wear slippers inside, right?"

"No," I said. "No slippers."

They paused and looked at each other.

"Then what do you wear?" he asked.

"Our shoes."

Another pause.

"What shoes?"

"Our shoe shoes."

"You mean your shoes from outside?" My friend looked troubled.

"Yeah, just our regular shoes. We don't take them off or change them when we go inside."

"Well that's weird."

The truth is, I really can't get used to what I am now referring to as the "slipper culture" here. They have slippers for everything. For example, in my apartment I have:

1. A pair of slippers next to the front door. When I come home, I have to take my favorite pair of Converse off and leave them vulnerable and alone outside the door, take an elephant step in through the door, and put on a pair of slippers. These are my Wandering Around the House Slippers. When I leave again, I must acrobatically and strategically find a way to step out of the house and directly into my shoes, since apparently walking outside in your socks - even if it's just in the hallway in front of the apartment door - is frowned upon.


2. A pair of slippers in front of the bathroom. They're bright pink with pictures of hippopotamuses (hippopotami?) on them. These are my Bathroom Slippers. When I want to use the bathroom I must first a) take off my Wandering Around the House slippers and b) replace them with the Hippopotamus Bathroom Slippers. This is due to another strange cultural phenomenon: the absence of any shower curtain in my bathroom, which leaves the bathroom floor literally in a puddle of water every time I shower. The Hippopotamus Bathroom Slippers both keep my socks dry and keep my feet from making muddy footprints on the floor, in the unhappy event that my Wandering Around the House slippers are not doing an adequate job of keeping my feet clean.

3. A pair of Semi-Outdoor Slippers for the enclosed patio upon which my clothes are hung out to dry. This brings to mind another cultural oddity: people here think clothes dryers are for sissies. It's not that most of them couldn't afford one; they just really prefer to hang the darn things up and let them dry naturally, which in the Taiwanese humidity can take three or four days. It drives me crazy, because not only do my jeans take a week to dry, but when they finally do dry they come out wrinkled and stretched out. And to add insult to injury, I must wear the Semi-Outdoor Laundry Slippers when I am hanging them up.

It sounds silly, but it's really those trivial differences - the no shoes in the house, the no shower curtain, the no clothes dryer - that make me feel homesick. This morning, however, when Ned sent me his daily message on the internet to check in on me, I told him I was missing home and he merely wrote, "No."

"No?" I typed. "No what?"

"Don't go back," he said. "Here is great!!"

I had to laugh in spite of myself. Here is, in fact, great. Even if I do have to wear pink hippopotamus slippers in the bathroom.

A Small Request

I understand that there are people out there who disagree with me about a lot of stuff, especially in the area of politics. I also believe that these people have as much right as I do to express themselves. I don't mind my blog being used as a forum for political discussion either; as a matter of fact, I welcome it. Insightful, spirited debate is always a good thing.

But please, please, please, for the love of God and Pete and all that is Holy, don't post anything vulgar, offensive, uneducated, or rude. I've had to field a few nasty comments from mainlanders in the past few days, and I'm unimpressed. Educated, well-thought-out arguments are fine, but you're not going to win anyone over with snide, insulting remarks.

You Know You're a Foreigner When....

Just about any foreigner who has lived here for any length of time will tell you that Taiwan is a great place. The people are super friendly, the food is amazing, and it has a certain charm to it that you can't find anywhere else. I would venture to say that there is not, however, a single expat who bears any fondness at all for the bureaucracy here. And it's especially bad for foreigners, because it seems like the government tries to make life as difficult as it can for us. You have to leave the country to renew, change, or generally deal with your visa. The rules regarding employment and studying are bizarre, unenforced, and nearly incomprehensible. You need a visa to come here, but in order to stay here you need to spend even more money and apply for yet another piece of paper. And really, that's all it is. Just a $30 piece of paper.

Today it was my turn to pay $30 for a piece of paper. I've been here for 15 days now, and it was the last day for me to apply for my Alien Resident Certificate - kind of the equivalent of a Taiwanese green card. So I got up early, collected my passport and some cold hard cash, and followed the directions in my student handbook to the police headquarters, which is apparently where they do that kind of thing here. The directions led me to a metro station, and then abruptly and dramatically ended. Long story short, the police station was nowhere near the metro station, and I had to ask a myriad of people for directions and walk around for two hours before I finally found it.

Then I had to wait in line for two hours.

Then the guy who helped me was watching TV while he was filling out my paperwork. Or should I say, instead of filling out my paperwork. While I was waiting for him I looked up at the message board on the wall and saw...

Pacman. Pacman was chasing some little monsters across the marquis at the foreign affairs office of the police headquarters of Taipei county.

So I left home at 9 am this morning, and when I was done with everything I had half an hour to make it to my 2 pm class. Sure that I would never make it in time if I took the metro - assuming I could even find the station again - I hailed a cab. The cabbie was super friendly and loved to talk, but he kept repeating over and over how pitiable he thought Taiwan was, as though I could do something about it just because I'm white.

"Lots of people thing we should join the US and become a state," he said, and whether he was joking or not I couldn't quite tell. "What do you think?"

They should change the official name of the country, he said, from Republic of China, which is too close to the mainland's People's Republic of China, to Taiwan. Taiwan is losing face because it's not allowed to carry its own flag in international sports competitions. It sucks to be a cabby in Taipei because all the business owners in Taiwan are moving their factories to the much cheaper mainland, which is affecting the Taiwanese economy, and it's all interrelated you know. These are the things I learned from my afternoon cab ride.

The problem is that in a lot of ways it's true. I haven't even been here that long and I can already feel it; there's a huge gap between the ambitious, optimistic attitude in Shanghai and the downtrodden, hopeless attitude I feel in Taipei. These people are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Most of their money now comes from the mainland: if they do something to endanger those ties, it would bode ill for the economy here. And yet their identities are wrapped up in their independence from the mainland. Most of these people see themselves as being as Chinese as much as Americans might see themselves as being British. They share a history, but in the here and now they are very much their own people with their own way of doing things and their own extreme love for their democratic independence, an independence which they see threatened by the potential of mainland interference. The differences between the two countries, and yes I'm being assertive when I phrase it that way, are overwhelming. Their traditions, their personal interactions, their ways of viewing the world, at least from my outsider's point of view, are not only disparate; I personally can't even see how they could be compatible.

A Student Once More

The Chinese - especially the Taiwanese, who tend to be more traditional - still use their original lunar calendar when it comes to defining the dates for special traditional events and so forth. It's lunar July now. Actually, it's the second lunar July; for some reason this year is special and has two Julys. Ned tried to explain why, but he tried to explain it in his broken English and two weeks later my head is still spinning from trying to understand it.

At any rate, lunar July is apparently Ghost Month, and although most Taiwanese will tell you it's just a silly superstition they all still seem to look back over their shoulder whenever the wind blows wrong. Ned, who is getting married in December, even decided to wait until after lunar July ends to go get his wedding pictures taken, just to be cautious. And wedding pictures are a big deal here.

And me, I'm a stupid white girl. I live in a rather big apartment, all by myself, and when I got home tonight I was a little creeped out because a door that normally remains permanently closed for some reason kept opening itself. Forgetting that it is Ghost Month, and forgetting further that I am in Taiwan, I mentioned jokingly to a friend:

"I think I have a ghost in my apartment."

"Oh!" he said in all seriousness. "Do you need to come stay at our place?"

I can't seem to adapt my sarcastically playful personality to the local culture. Every time I try to make a joke, even a small one, I end up freaking someone out.

In further news (I mean further than its being the second lunar July, which I'm very sure everyone at home cares about) I finally started school this week. I am overjoyed, because having nothing to occupy my mind was getting slightly dangerous. I was actually originally placed in far too low a class - whether it was due to some administrative mix-up or my own incompetence on the placement test I'm not really sure - and I've had to spend the past three days changing classes and filling out paperwork and negotiating with teachers and etc. etc. etc. trying to get in a class that was more suited to my level. It's been exhausting, but it's keeping me busy, which at this point is the general idea. The class I ended up in will still be a little easy for me, but I think it's just at that right level where I can review a little without being too bored.

Lifestyles of the Taiwanese and Famous

I was having tea at a coffee shop with my friend Roy and his girlfriend Cherry tonight when Roy caught me ogling an extremely good-looking man sitting in a corner in front of a laptop.

"Handsome, right?" he asked, nudging me a little.

I flushed, embarrassed at having been caught staring, and admitted that he was indeed rather attractive.

Roy shrugged. "He's a singer. He was a celebrity." He leaned forward and repeated for emphasis, "Was."

I find the celebrity culture in Taiwan a little baffling, to tell the truth. Here this guy who apparently used to be quite famous was sitting off to the side of some nondescript coffee shop minding his own business, and all the rest of the people in the place knew who he was and were just kind of ignoring him. No one was pointing or staring or whispering behind his hand like they would have with a has-been in America. He was just another guy who at one point happened to have been famous. Roy would never have even thought to mention it to me if he hadn't noticed me looking at him.

The thing is that for as small as Taiwan is - the population of Taipei isn't much more than that of Seattle - they still manage to produce a thriving pop culture that's almost on par with our own, if on a somewhat smaller scale. They have the beauty magazines and the pop stars and the famous models, and it's a culture that extends across the strait and into the mainstream on the super-populated mainland. What the Taiwanese don't seem to have much of, however, is the culture of idolotry that we tend to. My sneaky suspicion is that the size of Taiwan makes it a little more difficult to be high-and-mighty, because at any point any of your fans could bump into you on the street...