So Long Taiwan

So Long Taiwan, Hello Canada

As per usual, I’ve not been very regular about keeping up my blog, so to some of you it might come as a surprise that I am writing this in a hostel in Vancouver, 2 months before I had originally planned to return home. The reasons for my early return are manifold, but the main reason is that I’ve had some nice offers from grad schools that I need to reply to urgently or I’ll lose funding, so there was no time to waste. So here I am in Vancouver going to check out SFU. Come this weekend I’ll fly to Toronto, and drop by York and Ryerson. After that, I’ll finally drag myself back to the land where the buffalo roams, where I’ll put my feet, rest awhile, and finally engage in that ever-wonderful pursuit of employment. At the moment I’m feeling pretty jet-lagged, considering I left on Tuesday April 11th, 2006 at 2:30 pm and arrived on Tuesday April 11th,2006 at 9:30 am. That’s right thanks to an intergalactic wormhole, or perhaps just the act of crossing the International Dateline, I have actually managed to do what physicists around the world have claimed is impossible. I have traveled back in time! And if you think flying to Europe gives you a headache, try arriving at a place before you even left for the bloody airport, and tell me how you feel. At least China Airlines and Canadian Customs were nice enough to stall me from leaving the airport until I had wasted sufficient enough time that I could balance my psyche, avoid preventing my own birth, and maintain the equilibrium of the space-time continium. While the customs line in Vancouver was the longest I’d ever seen (keep in mind I’ve now been to the biggest major airports in China, Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan), China Airlines did their part by conveniently moving my luggage off the labeled conveyor belt and onto random spots on the floor scattered over the concourse so, in addition to the hours and hours of fun on the plane, I now had a surprise treasure hunt on the ground! Yay!

As this blog was originally intended to journal my adventures in Taiwan, and as I won’t be returning to Taiwan in the near future, I don’t know if I’ll be continuing this blog or not. (Basically, I’ll going to be doing is looking for work. Do you really want to hear about my adventures flipping burgers at Wendy’s or informing non-suspecting telephone owners of “exciting offers” that aren’t really exciting or that much of an offer?).

Leaving Taiwan meant saying good-bye to the friends I had made there, so the last month I have spent basically trying to meet with them before I left, which meant a lot of going out for supper but a guy can get used to that ;). On the last night, I had a couple beers with my roommates, including my Japanese roommate Da Li Oh (His Chinese name, I’m presuming) whose new second semester, speaks little to no English, and is a pretty cool guy, though I’ve given up trying to explain to him that constantly wearing an English t-shirt that says “Will sell Husband for Chocolate” implies he’s a woman. When I asked him who the singer was of one of the Japanese songs he was playing, he gave me a four-disc compilation of every song she ever made. In return, all I had to give him was a junky old mattress and a desk lamp that could only have been stylish in 1984. My other roommate Da Peng, a Taiwanese student whose English was a little better than Da Li Oh’s, had like one beer with me and Da Li Oh before proclaiming himself drunk and needing to do homework (by which of course he meant all-night MSN chatting). We tried to convince him to have another, since it was my last night and all, but he did that strange wail-moan thing he always does so we figured it was best to just leave him be. Da Peng (whose name is pronounced Da PONG!) is a nice enough guy, but a little too nice sometimes, as whenever I’d try to make a joke with him he’d always seem to get embarrassed and try to quiet me. The jokes weren’t anything major, in this case he had said something in Chinese that sounded like “san nu pengyou” [three girlfriends] so I was said something along lines of “Wow, you have three girlfriends Da Peng? Must be expensive.” Another time, one of his Taiwanese friends whose always popping into our room unannounced (which can be a bit annoying when you’re in the midst of changing your clothes, and your door opens to the main hall) to use Da Peng’s computer and his stuff, one day decided he would just crash on Da Peng’s bed for no apparent reason (this was doubly absurd, because his own bed was in the room next door!).When I asked Da Peng, what was up, Da Peng said he didn’t know, but not to worry, because he’d find somewhere else to sleep. Da Peng’s a nice guy, but I think he gets used a lot. When I first arrived, he acted like he was my butler or something, constantly asking me if there was something wrong, until I finally told him that the only thing that was wrong was all the needless fussing.

Da Peng’s friend was also a familiar character at the residence, but (and I’m going to be honest here) for the life of me I could never actually remember his name. He was very active in the residence (for example: he was by the far the most eager of all the Taiwanese men to have the chance to dress-up as a woman), and had a very friendly smile and demeanor—a little too friendly at times, slapping Jakob’s ass and peeking into my bed-curtain (I had my bed surrounded in a curtain for privacy and also to block out the light, when I had to go sleep early and my roommates wanted to stay up) in the middle of the night to say hello. He only did this once, and I gave him a nasty look, so I guess he didn’t feel like it after that. I think he was also put up to it as a dare by one of the other Taiwanese, who always seemed to be either amused or insulted, I could never figure out which, by the fact I had put up the curtain. The Taiwanese, in general, don’t really have the same sense of privacy as Westerners, but I was having a lot of problems with insomnia, and I didn’t want to go on sleeping pills (Tamkang’s suggestion) for fear of becoming addicted (if I started needing pills to sleep, how could I ever stop?), so it was all I could come up with was a simple curtain to block the light. As for the frequent uninvited bursts into the room, I eventually convinced him to knock first, which he did occasionally, although he never waited for a response.

Da Peng’s friend did, however, pull a good April Fool’s prank on his roommate, my good German friend Jakob (the only other non-Japanese foreign guy there), who asked me to tell his story to the masses in Canada. Jakob is good man, when I was feeling low, he showed me the wonders of the Internet. So in your honour, Jakob, here is your story.

Jakob loves penguins.

Now back to Da Peng’s friend’s April Fool’s prank. Basically, he convinced Jakob that he was moving to China, going so far as packing up a box of stuff (which I have a lot of respect for, as it was work I really put off doing, even when it was NOT a prank) and getting an official-looking letter. For revenge, Jakob and I got our hands on a roll of tape, and decided to seal that package for him, and while we were at it, we also did the old standard of tape on the bed, the drawers, sticky-side up on the pillow, the works (see what happens when minds are left idle).

Because it was my last days in Taiwan, some people thought it was a good time for confessions. On another occasion, Jakob and I were frustrated with how slow the Internet got one evening (it always got super slow and unreliable in the evenings). So we decided to go on a journey to find out who was doing massive amounts of downloading, which we assumed was the cause of the problem, and to ask them if they could ease off a bit. Jakob (who is a good actor, and even managed to land a role, along with my French roommate from last semester Valery, in a Taiwanese drama) pretended to be a “bad cop” interrogator to the Taiwanese guy who happened to be working the desk (I did my part as well, although let’s just say I’m not Taiwanese drama material). Apparently the Taiwanese thought he was being serious, as when Jakob pressed “Come on! We know you’ve been downloading porn! Hours and hours of Porn!” the Taiwanese got all flushed and embarrassed saying “How did you know? How did you know?” Actually, at the time, he was not downloading anything, so his confession didn’t help us any (not to mention it wasn’t really a big shock since half the residence downloads porn anyway, you don’t want to know how many times I’ve been asked what the English term “blowjob” means as they couldn’t find it in their electronic dictionaries…perhaps its not proper Oxford terminology). But he did seem embarrassed about it, so I’m not going to say his name, if that helps any. At any rate, he was less embarrassed than that other Taiwanese guy who started having a nervous breakdown (he literally curled up into the fetal position, with a face redder than Heinz ketchup, a contorted expression, and a hyperventilated breathing patterns that caused many of his surrounding friends to be concerned. Luckily he managed to get himself back under control in a few minutes. What caused this episode, this particular Taiwanese’s embarrassment over his English-speaking ability, which was accidentally sparked by yours truly when I accidentally asked him a question in English about my Chinese homework, something like “How do you say ‘pencil’ in Chinese?” All I have to say now is oops. And sorry, but I doubt he’d ever try to read my English-language blog after that.

As for other unexpected, and not actually sought, confessions one of my Taipei friends (whose name I’m changing so my blog doesn’t turn into a gossip tabloid, which I kinda detest, as I’ve grown up in a small community and I know what kind of needless damage senseless gossip can do to people, in some cases even costing them jobs) Sally, who had previously come to Brandon as an exchange student, tried to get a confession out of me about having a Taiwanese girlfriend. Many Taiwanese think Western men only come to Taiwan for its women, which is true in many cases (Lord knows I’ve had Asian girlfriends in the past). You see lots of Western men with Asian women, but almost never the reverse (my Czech friend Ivana once said this was because the Taiwanese men seemed immature and were intimidated by western women’s self-confidence, and my last-semester Taiwanese roommate Little Kevin said it was because Taiwanese men didn’t like dating outside their own culture and western women were more masculine than their Asian counterparts, at the time he was also a little mad at Western men for “stealing” Taiwanese women. These statements were both made at the start of the year or near to it. Ironically, Ivana is currently dating a Taiwanese gent by the name of Andrew while Kevin is dating a Japanese cheerleader named Yuko. Go figure, eh?)

Sally though, I didn’t really know that well having only met her twice and being introduced via a friend of mine, Louis (also a fake name I just created), when I told him at a party I was going to Taiwan. She was a good person, gave me a free cellphone back in the fall which I would ultimately sacifice by accident on the altar of laundered clothing, but she was constantly busy like most of my other Taipei friends so I hardly got to see her (that I was also quite embarrassed about the cellphone). This time, I didn’t really have anything to offer her as a gossip story (Let’s just say, I never really hit it off romantically with a Taiwanese woman), so I just responded, in a half-assed attempt to get the spotlight off my back, “Sorry Sally, I didn’t have any Taiwanese girlfriends. Why do you ask? Did you have lots of Taiwanese boyfriends in Brandon or just Louis?” It was just playful speculation on my part, but her eyes went buggy and her mouth dropped to the table and then she started explaining everything about this “one evening” yada, yada, and then I told her she didn’t have to tell me everything.
“Why? Did you Louis tell you about it?”
“No,” I said, “But you just did.”
I mention this only because I find absolutely astounding how obsessed people are with gossip. Does it really affect your life, if Person A has a relationship with Person B instead of Person. Unless you’re a Person A, B, or C, or a product of the union of two of the aforementioned, it probably won’t make much of a difference to you.
Before I left Tamkang, I heard of a rumour being spread about yours truly and a certain master’s student from Guatemala named Greta Mancilla. Now for those of you who don’t know Greta, she’s a great girl, got an awesome smile, a head on her shoulders, a foxy physique, and knows how to have a good time. To be blunt, the mere suggestion that I could convince a Mayan goddess like that to actually be my girlfriend is something I consider to be a tremendous compliment (not to mention a boost to my self-esteem). So is there anything truth to it? A gentleman never tells…. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
Okay, maybe I’m no gentleman, but still…
Luckily, I do know I have friends there, friends like Greta, Carol, Magda (the three Guatamaltecas), like the Czechs Ivanna, Zuzanna, and Janna (who loaned me books, took me out for supper the last weekend, and increased the readership of my blog manifold THANKS GUY, I’ll put links to your blogs once I figure out how to do that, and no they did purposely choose names that rhymed), the Germans (Jakob, Charlotte, Simone, Linda and Rebecca) with whom I had many intellectual discussions and learned a new appreciation for Heineken (which is actually Dutch) and the word Schieze!, the French (Angeline, Elodie, and Valery, who helped me with my Chinese, even if the effort proved difficult, gave me explanations about Chinese culture that I desperately needed, and taught me a new appreciation for the word Merde!). Among the Taiwanese, I’d have to say Lian was the most patient with me even if we didn’t share the same sense of humour, and Little Kevin and Da Peng for putting up with me, and Big Kevin for fixing my computer. Thanks everbody!