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Taiwan on....and on
by Mad Dog

I was confused, wandering around muttering aloud what I was reading on the street sign in the hope that it might sound remotely similar to one of the names I was seeing on the maps and in the guidebooks. It usually wasn’t.

    You will see signs advertising “Coffee - $35” like it’s the deal of the century, having to remember that it’s the New Taiwan Dollar they’re talking about, so it’s actually about US$1. You’ll see signs for 7-11, McDonald’s, and Starbucks on every block. Sometimes twice. You’ll see a sign on a store that says it opens at “AM 8:00” and closes at “FM 8:00.” But mostly you’ll see street signs which spell the name differently than the map the tourist office hands out. Which is different than the way they spell it in the brochure they hand out. Which is different than….oh, you get the idea.

    The problem with the street signs is that they use romanized Chinese. This wouldn’t be so bad except in Taiwan they speak two dialects: Taiwanese, which is a form of Hokkien, and Mandarin. Compound this by the fact that there are five methods of romanizing Chinese and you realize there are ten variations. And they use them all. They won’t make it uniform by utilizing the most widely used method, Pinyin, because that’s what they use in mainland China, and anything they do there just isn’t done in Taiwan. So whatever you do, don’t ask for Mao on your sandwich.

    Thus, ChungHsiao Road can also be Jungshiau Road. And Kuangjou Road can be KuangChou Road or Guangjou Road. And I was confused, wandering around muttering aloud what I was reading on the street sign in the hope that it might sound remotely similar to one of the names I was seeing on the maps and in the guidebooks. It usually wasn’t.

Food is everywhere and people are eating all the time. Amazingly, almost no one’s overweight. Contrast this with the U.S. where we eat three square meals a day and end up extremely round.

    See, the Taiwanese think moles are important. Not the ones which burrow underground or are undercover in the FBI, but the kind you find on your skin. They believe the placement of moles on your face helps shape your future. Thus, if you have one in an unlucky place you want to have it removed. There’s at least one booth at every night market where someone uses what looks like a toothpick to take care of the unlucky ones—the moles as well as the person who can’t afford to have a doctor do it so they won’t be scarred for life. Interestingly, they don’t transplant the moles to a better spot on your face to increase luck. Apparently mole luck, like matter, cannot be created nor destroyed, but only changed.

    It’s easy to have this done since there are night markets all over Taipei. They range from Snake Alley, which is so touristy the arch at the entrance actually proclaims it to be a “Tourist Market” to warn off any Taiwanese who are about to wander in by mistake—well, as long as they can read English, to the jam-packed Shrlin Market which is larger than the whole island. And more crowded. How they manage this is a mystery, but I suspect it utilizes the same technology they use to pack all those teeny tiny transistors onto one of the computer chips they manufacture so our computers can freeze up at the most inopportune time.

    The food at the night markets­­—or anywhere on the street for that matter—is wonderful. As in most of Asia, food is everywhere and people are eating all the time. And amazingly, almost no one’s overweight. Contrast this with the U.S. where we eat three square meals a day and end up extremely round. There was hao jian, an oyster omelet with sweet chili sauce, and pork-pepper cakes, which are spicy, crispy, filled buns. There were Taiwanese burritos I never found out the correct name for; smelly tofu, which doesn’t really smell bad but is fried tofu with spicy sauce; and shui jian bao, steamed dumplings.

In spite of the fact that there are fewer westerners in Taiwan than people who will admit to having watched The Postman, no one paid any attention to me. This was a far cry from Bali where I had just been. 

    One thing I never saw being sold by a street vendor was corn soup, which is what McDonald’s serves to localize the menu. In Bali it was rice and fried chicken. In Bolivia they offer coca tea. I’d love to find out who pulled the hoax on them by convincing them that corn soup was the National Fast Food Soup of Taiwan.

    If there’s one thing Taipei has more of than night markets it’s temples. There are the big ones, like PaoAn, Hsintian, and Lungshan, (sometimes known as Bau-an, Hsingtien, and miraculously always Lungshan) which are always filled with people lighting incense and praying. There are also small ones tucked between retail stores, also always filled with people lighting incense and praying. Incense is big business in Taiwan. Praying is the national pastime. Well, next to ignoring westerners.

    In spite of the fact that there are fewer westerners in Taiwan than people who will admit to having watched The Postman, no one paid any attention to me. This was a far cry from Bali where I had just been. There every Tom, Dick, and Nyoman wanted to know where I came from, where I was staying, if I was married, and if I had any kids, never asking the most important question, which was “Are you sick and tired of people stopping you on the street to ask you these same four questions?”

    At first I thought it was my greeting technique. In Bali when you pass someone on the street you raise and lower your eyebrows in a Groucho Marxian way, trying not to crouch when you walk and flick your cigar, both of which are considered rude, uncouth, and above all, puzzling, since no one there has any clue who Groucho was. You Bet Your Life doesn’t have a lot of meaning in a country where reincarnation and karma are a given.

Garbage trucks blast the same four lines of Mozart over and over when they’re stopped to collect the trash, sounding like Good Humor men on PCP. 

    It’s not that people are unfriendly, they’re just reserved in public. After all, there was the wonderful couple who helped me get on the right train after my bus tour of the gorgeous Taroko Gorge dumped me at a train station in Hualien in the pouring rain with a train ticket and a Chinese explanation of which train to catch to get back to Taipei. They ended up inviting me to stay with them the next time I’m in the country. And there was Maggie, a professional fortuneteller who took me to a Shanghai-style restaurant and marveled that I ate frog legs, Taiwanese crab cerviche, and whatever all those other things were. Right, as if she couldn’t tell that when she did my face reading.

    Taiwan is filled with interesting experiences. In Taipei you hear African and Belgian music in the park, English-speaking DJs on Chinese pop radio stations, and garbage trucks blasting the same four lines of Mozart over and over when they’re stopped to collect the trash, sounding like Good Humor men on PCP. You see the motorbikes, of which there are at least two for each of the city’s three million residents, all parked on the sidewalk. You see electric sliding doors on every store. Well, the ones that have doors, anyway. And you see trendy women wearing very long, pointy Ding-Dong-The-Witch-Is-Dead shoes, probably hoping to make their small feet look a little larger when it actually makes them look like a flock of Chinese Bozo-ettes on the way to the midway.

    And yes, you do get used to romanized Chinese. So much so that when I was in the departure lounge at the airport on the way home it took a few moments to realize that the sign on the “Vending Ma hine” wasn’t advertising a new brand of cell phones, it was telling me I could buy a soda. Now that’s a sign.

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These columns appear in better newspapers across the country. Read them, romanized for your convenience.