I Once Lived in Taiwan

When I was 27 I spent a year teaching English in Taiwan, in a little town called Chang Hua. Here are some excerpts from the journals I kept then:

January 31, 1994

We live in a little house, a little wood-frame cottage, attached by guy wires to the top of a seven-story building. From our back porch you can see red tile roofs and tree-size poinsettias growing in roof gardens and the big red temple on the mountain and the blue head and shoulders of the temple’s 60-foot-tall statue of Buddha. At night red light shines out of the Buddha’s eyes and out of the little dot on his forehead. . . .

February 12, 1994

Rob and I camped on an abandoned road just past a bridge that was overgrown with grass. The road ran between a mountain and a little rock bluff along which grew an old betel nut orchard, so it (the road) was very well protected from the wind. We were in the middle of nowhere, and from our campsite we could see, in the distance, a lone betel nut stand with its huge brilliant lighted sign.

Betel nut stands look just like phone booths, except they are filled with boxes of betel nut. They are that small. This particular betel nut stand kept blaring advertisements for itself on a loudspeaker out into the wilderness all night. There was nothing else anywhere around–just the blue mountains and the mist and the old orchard and the skeletal stray dogs–and it seemed very brave and pathetic, the loudspeaker, crying into the night, “I am here! I am here!”

February 26, 1994

The other day was Lantern Day, the culmination of the New Year’s celebration. Lots of fireworks. Children running around with plastic lanterns shaped like butterflies and dragons and dogs. Men speeding by on their scooters with burning torches. I saw some children carrying a cellophane dragon over their heads, and it looked like it was made using one of those jumbo bubble wands. . . .

March 7, 1994

Yesterday we went to Tainan, the old capital of Taiwan. We toured so many old temples and a park full of pink-blooming orchid trees. There was about an acre of these trees, the branches full of the most flamboyant pink-freckled flowers shaped like swallowtail butterflies. The ground was carpeted in fallen petals.

There was a green turtle pond with a little white bridge arching over it. And there were banyan trees, so huge, their trunks all bumpy like enormous dripping candles, and they had long tendrils–aerial roots–hanging down.

There was a little boy with a tiny green and red bird on his shoulder, and the bird was so tame and so loyal that it hung on even when the boy ran at full speed. There were kites everywhere, shaped like birds and butterflies. Some sad monkeys in cages, and a snow-white peacock that looked like he was wearing a wedding gown with a huge, unwieldy train.