writing on taipei
I read this article earlier this week and i really wanted to share it here on LJ because i find it fascinating how another immigrant to Taiwan writes about the place.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/05/ripped-away-from-home-we-are-haunted-by-the-hong-kong-taken-from-us
It's written by a Hong Kong journalist who escaped to Taiwan and touches on several issues that Hongkongers face in trying to settle in Taiwan.
As an outsider, you would think it would be a no-brainer for Taiwan to be the number one destination for political refugees from Hong Kong, since it's reasonably close by, similar climate, shared cultural heritage and so on. But in reality there are political hurdles that can make it a more difficult destination than Canada, Australia or the UK. New Bloom has been covering this story, here's just one recent article on the situation.
https://newbloommag.net/2023/01/05/hk-rights-nia-restrictions/
But aside from the political challenges, the original piece includes cultural observations that reminded me of my own posts about living in Taiwan, and Taipei specifically.
One complaint was that Taiwan is annoyingly bureaucratic. I'm surprised she found it that way coming from Hong Kong, but then i've never lived in Hong Kong so maybe they're a shoot first ask questions later kind of place. Mainland China was bureaucratic as all hell, so to me Taiwan seems like a minor improvement. Although it still sucks. But, to be fair, so did Canada. Life as an immigrant means dealing with a lot of bureaucracy people with local born citizenship privilege don't even realize exists.
To wit: this Wednesday i went to get my fourth COVID booster shot, ahead of traveling to Laos during Chinese New Year. I couldn't book online using the official vaccination website because if you type in the ID card number of a foreign resident card, it isn't accepted by the form. So i had to book online using a different mechanism. Everything went through, no problem. I got to the hospital, they pointed me to a different building a couple of blocks away, i got my health card scanned and was given a form, then i had to sign up as a new patient at the hospital with that form (even though i already did it online), then i had to tick some consent boxes on a different form, then give that to another person who gave me a ticket number to wait in line for my shot.
So far, so "healthcare industry". Everyone who's been to a doctor in their life has probably gone through the same process of filling in the same fucking details and checking the same fucking consent form over and over, even if they're citizens of the same country where all of this medical data should be on file somewhere since the day you're born. My number finally gets called - about 45 minutes later - and then, literally steps away from the vaccination cubicle, some officious dude in a lab coat was like "oh, you're a foreigner? you have to first go to this other place and get your previous vaccinations entered into the system". I argued with him, but to no avail. Then someone handwrote the name of the street onto a piece of paper, but because it was using a rare character that i have never seen before, and anyway handwritten Chinese is borderline illegible unless you're a professor of calligraphy, i spent another 20 minutes asking random people where the fuck this street was that i had to go.
Eventually i got there - about a 20 minute walk away - and i had to give them hard copy proof of my previous vaccinations, which i was very lucky i'd had the presence of mind to take with me in my bag that morning. They filled into their computer literally exactly the same details i had already filled into the internet form when i made the appointment several days beforehand, then told me i could go back to the first place to grab a number and wait in line all over again.
Fortunately one of the workers took pity on me and pushed me to the front of the line when i got back, but the whole thing ended up taking 2 hours, which for a local person would've been 45 minutes, tops.
Bureaucracy, fuck yeah.
Anyway, i was pretty pleased to get this new vaccination, which is one of the Omicron specials. I think all my previous ones were just standard formulation, but this one should provide some protection against the newer variants. Of course, it's also the first one that utterly wiped me out. Thursday i felt like shit. Friday i worked from home. Just feeling super tired and lethargic, a side-effect i didn't get with any of the previous shots. I suppose it doesn't help that my immune system is already struggling to deal with this endless skin condition.
Still, it's Saturday morning now and i think i am getting back to normal.
The other thing that the Hong Kong writer kept going back to in her article was how Taiwan is sleepy and slow. She gave an example of a clerk bagging something slowly, and i was reminded how every time i go to the Carrefour here i end up behind some local people who inexplicably spend at least 5 minutes paying for their groceries. The only other place i've ever experienced this was in Panama. I don't know what they're doing. It's like they try one card. Then they pay some cash for another thing. Then they ask about if they can get some discount. Then they show some kind of rewards card or gift coupon. Then they ask about some other payment mechanism. Then they check the receipt to make sure nothing got missed. And it's like, for fuck's sake people, just pay for your fucking food and move on, what the hell!?
But people line up all over the place. They line up for the metro, and - unlike most every other country i've visited - if the train carriage is just mildly busy, they won't step on. People won't even step on an elevator if there's more than about 5 people in there, they'll just wait. At first i thought this was COVID-related shyness, but now i think it's just a Taiwan thing. People don't care if they have to wait a couple more minutes. They don't care if they're late. There's no grumpy impatience in the doctor's waiting rooms, just a quiet resignation that it's going to take however long it's gonna take.
It's strange, because on the surface the city looks chaotic and bustling, cars and mopeds and bicycles swarming all over the place. But then when people get to the destination turns out it's island time. On the other hand, it's island time compared to Hong Kong or Shenzhen or Toronto, but Taipei is still a city, and it still goes harder than most rural places. Now, from what i remember from traveling in rural Taiwan, that's really the next level of sleepy. People ride mopeds, but somehow they ride them lazily. Flip-flops, betel nut, leaning back, 差不多 chabuduo ("she'll be right") mindset.
I was talking to my boss in my one-on-one on Thursday and we talked about vacation. (She's going to visit Japan again next week - she was hoping to get there before the Chinese opened their borders and bombarded the place with tourists, alas.) I said it turns out i'm only using up two days of annual leave for my trip to Laos due to Spring Festival, so i want to do another holiday soon, one where i get to travel around Taiwan a bit more. Go see those rural corners. I said i wanted to wait till it finally gets sunny, though. She said, well, you know, pretty much anywhere outside of Taipei is going to be sunny already. And i asked her "why did they build the capital city in the rainiest goddamn part of the country?" She said to me, "i've asked myself that many times..."
Taiwanese people know their capital is in a sad, drizzly armpit of the country, and yet... They keep moving here for work, leaving behind the sunnier and more cheerful corners of their island. There's probably some historic reason for it, but whatever the reason, people just kinda deal with it and move on.
I do wonder how much resistance Taiwan people would put up if China decided to play hardball with regard to blockading ports or invading outlying islands or dropping missiles on the local army bases. The culture doesn't seem like a particularly militaristic one. People seem kinda blasé and unbothered about everything, even as earthquakes shake the buildings and typhoons flatten the trees and missiles literally fly overhead. I get how that might frustrate migrants from Hong Kong who just spent a year getting beaten and peppered by rubber bullets as they tried to stand up for their political autonomy.
Oh well. Here is a picture of some noods.
Normally i don't like soup, but occasionally when it is cold and raining it hits the spot. That's just 青菜湯 green vegetable soup, which this guy makes from sweet potato greens and julienne ginger. Awesome for a post-vaccination slump and tickly throat in the winter. Side dish is 竹筍 bamboo shoots. Noodle is 粿仔條 which is similar rice noodle cake to char kway teow, but not fried, just with some bean sprouts and a good helping of chili sauce. It made me happy.
What also is making me happy? This weekend the sun is finally shining. I think tomorrow i shall go on a bike ride. But next up is shower and a Carrefour trip, to buy a baguette and wait in line.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/05/ripped-away-from-home-we-are-haunted-by-the-hong-kong-taken-from-us
It's written by a Hong Kong journalist who escaped to Taiwan and touches on several issues that Hongkongers face in trying to settle in Taiwan.
As an outsider, you would think it would be a no-brainer for Taiwan to be the number one destination for political refugees from Hong Kong, since it's reasonably close by, similar climate, shared cultural heritage and so on. But in reality there are political hurdles that can make it a more difficult destination than Canada, Australia or the UK. New Bloom has been covering this story, here's just one recent article on the situation.
https://newbloommag.net/2023/01/05/hk-rights-nia-restrictions/
But aside from the political challenges, the original piece includes cultural observations that reminded me of my own posts about living in Taiwan, and Taipei specifically.
One complaint was that Taiwan is annoyingly bureaucratic. I'm surprised she found it that way coming from Hong Kong, but then i've never lived in Hong Kong so maybe they're a shoot first ask questions later kind of place. Mainland China was bureaucratic as all hell, so to me Taiwan seems like a minor improvement. Although it still sucks. But, to be fair, so did Canada. Life as an immigrant means dealing with a lot of bureaucracy people with local born citizenship privilege don't even realize exists.
To wit: this Wednesday i went to get my fourth COVID booster shot, ahead of traveling to Laos during Chinese New Year. I couldn't book online using the official vaccination website because if you type in the ID card number of a foreign resident card, it isn't accepted by the form. So i had to book online using a different mechanism. Everything went through, no problem. I got to the hospital, they pointed me to a different building a couple of blocks away, i got my health card scanned and was given a form, then i had to sign up as a new patient at the hospital with that form (even though i already did it online), then i had to tick some consent boxes on a different form, then give that to another person who gave me a ticket number to wait in line for my shot.
So far, so "healthcare industry". Everyone who's been to a doctor in their life has probably gone through the same process of filling in the same fucking details and checking the same fucking consent form over and over, even if they're citizens of the same country where all of this medical data should be on file somewhere since the day you're born. My number finally gets called - about 45 minutes later - and then, literally steps away from the vaccination cubicle, some officious dude in a lab coat was like "oh, you're a foreigner? you have to first go to this other place and get your previous vaccinations entered into the system". I argued with him, but to no avail. Then someone handwrote the name of the street onto a piece of paper, but because it was using a rare character that i have never seen before, and anyway handwritten Chinese is borderline illegible unless you're a professor of calligraphy, i spent another 20 minutes asking random people where the fuck this street was that i had to go.
Eventually i got there - about a 20 minute walk away - and i had to give them hard copy proof of my previous vaccinations, which i was very lucky i'd had the presence of mind to take with me in my bag that morning. They filled into their computer literally exactly the same details i had already filled into the internet form when i made the appointment several days beforehand, then told me i could go back to the first place to grab a number and wait in line all over again.
Fortunately one of the workers took pity on me and pushed me to the front of the line when i got back, but the whole thing ended up taking 2 hours, which for a local person would've been 45 minutes, tops.
Bureaucracy, fuck yeah.
Anyway, i was pretty pleased to get this new vaccination, which is one of the Omicron specials. I think all my previous ones were just standard formulation, but this one should provide some protection against the newer variants. Of course, it's also the first one that utterly wiped me out. Thursday i felt like shit. Friday i worked from home. Just feeling super tired and lethargic, a side-effect i didn't get with any of the previous shots. I suppose it doesn't help that my immune system is already struggling to deal with this endless skin condition.
Still, it's Saturday morning now and i think i am getting back to normal.
The other thing that the Hong Kong writer kept going back to in her article was how Taiwan is sleepy and slow. She gave an example of a clerk bagging something slowly, and i was reminded how every time i go to the Carrefour here i end up behind some local people who inexplicably spend at least 5 minutes paying for their groceries. The only other place i've ever experienced this was in Panama. I don't know what they're doing. It's like they try one card. Then they pay some cash for another thing. Then they ask about if they can get some discount. Then they show some kind of rewards card or gift coupon. Then they ask about some other payment mechanism. Then they check the receipt to make sure nothing got missed. And it's like, for fuck's sake people, just pay for your fucking food and move on, what the hell!?
But people line up all over the place. They line up for the metro, and - unlike most every other country i've visited - if the train carriage is just mildly busy, they won't step on. People won't even step on an elevator if there's more than about 5 people in there, they'll just wait. At first i thought this was COVID-related shyness, but now i think it's just a Taiwan thing. People don't care if they have to wait a couple more minutes. They don't care if they're late. There's no grumpy impatience in the doctor's waiting rooms, just a quiet resignation that it's going to take however long it's gonna take.
It's strange, because on the surface the city looks chaotic and bustling, cars and mopeds and bicycles swarming all over the place. But then when people get to the destination turns out it's island time. On the other hand, it's island time compared to Hong Kong or Shenzhen or Toronto, but Taipei is still a city, and it still goes harder than most rural places. Now, from what i remember from traveling in rural Taiwan, that's really the next level of sleepy. People ride mopeds, but somehow they ride them lazily. Flip-flops, betel nut, leaning back, 差不多 chabuduo ("she'll be right") mindset.
I was talking to my boss in my one-on-one on Thursday and we talked about vacation. (She's going to visit Japan again next week - she was hoping to get there before the Chinese opened their borders and bombarded the place with tourists, alas.) I said it turns out i'm only using up two days of annual leave for my trip to Laos due to Spring Festival, so i want to do another holiday soon, one where i get to travel around Taiwan a bit more. Go see those rural corners. I said i wanted to wait till it finally gets sunny, though. She said, well, you know, pretty much anywhere outside of Taipei is going to be sunny already. And i asked her "why did they build the capital city in the rainiest goddamn part of the country?" She said to me, "i've asked myself that many times..."
Taiwanese people know their capital is in a sad, drizzly armpit of the country, and yet... They keep moving here for work, leaving behind the sunnier and more cheerful corners of their island. There's probably some historic reason for it, but whatever the reason, people just kinda deal with it and move on.
I do wonder how much resistance Taiwan people would put up if China decided to play hardball with regard to blockading ports or invading outlying islands or dropping missiles on the local army bases. The culture doesn't seem like a particularly militaristic one. People seem kinda blasé and unbothered about everything, even as earthquakes shake the buildings and typhoons flatten the trees and missiles literally fly overhead. I get how that might frustrate migrants from Hong Kong who just spent a year getting beaten and peppered by rubber bullets as they tried to stand up for their political autonomy.
Oh well. Here is a picture of some noods.
Normally i don't like soup, but occasionally when it is cold and raining it hits the spot. That's just 青菜湯 green vegetable soup, which this guy makes from sweet potato greens and julienne ginger. Awesome for a post-vaccination slump and tickly throat in the winter. Side dish is 竹筍 bamboo shoots. Noodle is 粿仔條 which is similar rice noodle cake to char kway teow, but not fried, just with some bean sprouts and a good helping of chili sauce. It made me happy.
What also is making me happy? This weekend the sun is finally shining. I think tomorrow i shall go on a bike ride. But next up is shower and a Carrefour trip, to buy a baguette and wait in line.