The White Guy Without a Swim Cap | #235
August 12th, 2023: Greetings from Taichung, Taiwan! We are adjusting well to jet lag after a couple of days and our 5-month-old daughter fared much better than we expected. We are headed up to Taipei this week where we’ll set up a home base for a few months.
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It’s Tuesday at 6 am. We spent all of a time-zone-shortened Monday in an airplane with a five-month-old. Things went as well as they could go and we’re all pretty satisfied with the amount of sleep we were able to get. As I grab our bags and walk with Angie into the large arrival area in Taipei, a sense of calm flows through me. I travel back in time to the first time I walked into this expansive hall and reconnect with the excitement I felt in that first year of the rest of my life. I look around and find the layout to be exactly as it was two years earlier except for one cell phone carrier taking over the booth which I usually bought my unlimited SIM cards. Luckily, $20 a month for unlimited 4G is still the default deal and I gladly accept.
In the last five years, the longest stretch of time I spent in the US was in the last 21 months since October 2022. Prior to that, I had spent twice as much time in Taiwan as the US, spending less than 100 days in the US for at least three years. It’s been interesting to see how my behavior changes when I live in different environments. In the US I become more ambitious and talk myself into chasing bigger goals. In Taiwan, I slow down. I think more and reflect on what I’m doing with my life.
After a 90-minute car ride, we arrive at my in-laws, check out their new apartment, and head out to breakfast. Taiwanese breakfast is something Angie and I have been talking about for weeks. If you know any Taiwanese person, you know. There are about eight different stands within a two-minute walk that serve the same dishes and we pick one of them. We sit down and I order my favorite basic Taiwanese dish - “Dan Bing.” Its literal translation is “egg cake” but is better described as a fried egg wrapped in a thin crepe and served with sweet syrupy soy sauce. I order two for less than $2 and feel some relief from the past two years of intense inflation in the US.
On this trip to Taiwan, I am drawing more attention than before. Not only am I still the tall white guy that sticks out, but I have a tiny baby with me. At the breakfast place, my daughter starts crying and I pick her up and start walking around. All nine of the employees of the breakfast place lock eyes with her and follow us around. I’ve found that in Taiwan staring is not as big a faux pax as it is in the US. The stares make me happy. They are delighted by the sights of a baby.
We finish breakfast and walk over to 7-11, a store that shares the same logo as the US but not much else. Google tells me there are about 6,432 in the country which means that there’s one store for every 3,500 citizens. These stores really are “convenience” stores. They are the physical operating system of the country. You can buy train tickets, print things, ship and receive packages, get coffee, meet friends, pay bills, and get delicious rice balls and other snacks and meals. As I sit on one of the stools waiting for everyone to grab what they came to get I glance at one of the shelves and realize that even after five years and perhaps hundreds of visits, there are still items that are completely foreign to me. I realize I have no idea what they are and remember that in Taiwan, there is almost always more to find out.
The next day, I go for a walk. While writing in Taiwan during 2021, my greatest productivity hack was to do less. I would stop writing for the day or sometimes for the week and go outside. Whether I was in busy Taipei or the beautiful mountains in Hualien or a beach town in Kenting, I would arrive quickly in the present. No matter how long we live, it seems that the places where we grow up will always remain familiar while the places we adopt along the way will always have some underlying mystery. There are people that say you should be able to write anywhere, to have the ability to conjure up good words from an apartment in Austin as easily as a cafe in Taiwan. But I am not yet one of those people. I need a bit of mystery to pull me into the present. Environment matters.
As I head out, I notice the roads, buildings, alleys, stores, and sidewalks. One thing I love about the streets in Taiwan is that the streets feel completely different depending on the time of day. In the mornings people are headed to work or going somewhere to grab breakfast. During the day people might be going for walks, grabbing food from the market, or doing errands. At night, the industrial drabness of many of the buildings disappears into the darkness and the streets come alive with the energy of families sitting by the roadside eating dinner, young people walking and drinking boba, and groups of old men sitting around a plastic table drinking beer.
But on Wednesday I am wandering in the dead middle of the day, an hour after all the breakfast places have closed and at a time in which it seems no one is around. I walk past a guy in business casual doing tai chi on the sidewalk and a grandmother in a small alley who locks eyes with me and follows my path for at least 45 seconds. I’m on the search for food and this is never a straightforward mission. In my first couple of months in Taiwan, I would extend my walks for hours without eating because I was scared to attempt to order anything in Chinese. The amount of time it would take me to decode the characters, figure out what some of the translations actually meant, and then attempt to say the phrases in my Western pronunciation would be too much friction. In those early days, I would default to places that had visual menus where I could point and signal one with my finger.
I now know hundreds more characters and words and many of the common foods but that early fear still shows up as I’m walking around and I fail to build up the courage to drop into a restaurant to order something. To some people, this is why they don’t like to travel but for me, it reminds me of what Pico Iyer has written about travel, that we seek it out, “to become young fools again.” I definitely feel like a fool again and remember why it’s nice but also embarrassing to be outside of my comfort zone. I let the friction of not being ready to order guide me to keep walking.
I turn the corner and globalization offers me an olive branch in the form of McDonald’s. I laugh to myself. Every American who spends enough time abroad eventually develops some sort of relationship with McDonald’s and I am no different. Their chicken nuggets and fries taste the same (if not better!) in Asia and their ice cream cone is just a damn good deal in Taiwan.
But not today.
I wander a bit more and then turn another corner. I see to my amazement another McDonald’s, this time in the middle of nowhere. It’s not yet opened otherwise I might have caved.
I head back toward home and stop at a 7-11, my second one in as many days. I wander around the store a bit and find comfort in many of the familiar things that I remember from my previous times living on the island. I grab one of my favorite Taiwanese snacks, triangle rice balls, and a banana, and sit and eat them at the small dining counter. I forgot how delicious these were and am happy I didn’t go to McDonald’s. That can wait a few weeks.
The next day, I head out to one of the public sports centers. These are set up all over the country and are one of my favorite things. They are gathering places for people of all ages and include things like outdoor running tracks, Olympic pools, water gun massage pools, saunas, steam rooms, weight rooms, and yoga studios. I successfully buy one ticket to the pool area for about $3 after going back and forth in my head trying to remember if the counting word for tickets is “zhang” or “zhong” on my walk up to the counter. I pick correctly, saying “Yī zhāng yóuyǒng” meaning “one ticket swim.” Writing this out now I’m wondering if I leaving out the word for ticket matters or if there is a better way to say it but it was probably good enough for what I was trying to do. It’s always nice when someone understands what I mean the first time. A lot of times in Taiwan people are shocked that I am speaking Chinese and even if I say something correctly with the right accent (confirmed by Angie), people will not be able to understand because they are not prepared for me to speak anything except English. These are the kinds of get-through-the-day challenges that often break many long-term expats in places like Taiwan and other Asian cultures, but for me, they give me satisfaction that gives my days life.
As I change and walk into the pool I take note that I am the only white guy of 150+ people in a massive natatorium. I smile as I see a special section of the pool roped off for a few dozen children and then look over to the older men and women standing under the rows of various water massage tables and jets that would be a luxury in the US but are a regular thing here. It’s nice to be in a country where young and old co-mingle. In Austin, my gym consisted mostly of fitness-centric young people under the age of 40, but in this fitness center, you can find all ages and all levels of health.
As I do a couple of laps I reflect on my first few days in Taiwan. I had forgotten about all the norms and rules that are so obvious to everyone but that I often am unaware of. I reflect on the fact that in the US I am often looking to break out from being like everyone else but in Taiwan, I earnestly try to figure out how to fit in a little more. Of course, as a white guy, this can never fully be realized.
One of the interesting things about Taiwan is that it appears a lot more homogenous by looking around than in reality. When I arrived at the airport, I was reminded of this in the customs line when half the plane joined me in the non-citizen line. But in the pool, I don’t have signs to tell me who might be American, who might speak English, or who might have more in common with me than I might imagine. It’s this uncertainty that turns an outgoing American into a shy introvert. But in Taiwan, this solitude suits me. It allows me to write, it allows me to think.
As I get out of the pool after several laps, I grab my head. Shit. I didn’t wear my swim cap. No one had said anything to me but I am sure several people noticed. I update the sign in my head that says “days since unforced error” to 0 days and walk over to the sauna to join a few older men sitting and stretching in the Sauna.
As I ride back home on my bike, I notice how in only my first few days back that various emotions, feelings, and memories have flooded back into my consciousness. It’s as if they had been locked away, only able to be rediscovered each time upon arrival in this foreign yet familiar place. I’ve been so focused for the last couple of years on bringing our daughter into the world and making sure we can afford a US-priced life that I forgot a bit of what it had been like to live abroad — the slowness, the contemplative walks, the forced solitude, and of course all the embarrassment and discomfort that comes from being in a place that is not yours.
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I can definitely feel your current vibe in your writing. That feeling of coming back home. I lived in Taipei from 2012-14 and this brought back some good memories. Also, remember coming back to the U.S. and awkwardly waiting outside stores expecting the doors to automatically open like at 7-11. I hope you enjoy all the delicious food, the slow/reflective energy of the country, perusing through an Eslite bookstore while sipping on some Cama coffee, and the warmth of the people and community there.
This is fantastic, Paul. I had my third trip to Taiwan earlier this summer and, like you, have been studying the language for a while now. Seriously, there is a lot that resonates here... I've made many friends and just fall more and more in love with the people, the scenery, and the food each time I go. I'm currently debating on taking the plunge next summer, quitting my 9-5, moving to teach English for a year or two and writing about the experience.
Enjoy! Nothing beasts a good 蛋餅!