I feel like I’m going as crazy as this tiger

I know I seem to have abandoned Lao Ren Cha for a bit. I didn’t want to, but I had a bunch of other (paid) writing work, and my job situation changed slightly. One employer did something that’s difficult to forgive, so I went full-time with the other. What’s more, I’m in the throes of (somewhat early) perimenopause. It’s important to be frank about women’s health and the challenges we face, so I want to talk about it.

First, let me drop a few links to my paid work, although it’s a bit weird to mention it alongside discussions of the healthcare system. I’ve written two longer pieces for Go Ask A Local, one on spending four days in Taipei, and another on accommodation. I’m also still writing for Taipei Quarterly and Taiwan Everything. Here’s something recent on Chaozhou Street.

I haven’t been writing as much because it’s really hard to do so in the throes of a hot flash. Contrary to the name, they are not flashes, they are long, uncomfortable periods of feeling like every part of your body that has an angle or curve is emitting heat and sweat like a polyester-clad buttcrack in a Taipei August. Like I’m trapped on Mount Doom and just can’t chuck the ring in.

As for how long they’d last, well, you know how sometimes when you get on public transportation and there’s that weird sweaty person with messed-up hair that you try to avoid? That was me a few times, riding the blue line from Nangang to Tucheng, one class to another. Practically melting the plastic seat under me for the entire ride.

It’s also made me more sensitive: I’m still not over Carrefour, which had fantastic, affordable own-brand items, turning into the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Dystomart or whatever the fuck it’s called these days. I just haven’t been in a great mood.

To combat these changes, I’ve of course been seeking treatment. I’ve relied on, and mostly been impressed by, Taiwan’s National Health Insurance for the past twenty years. I’ve never felt the need to seek supplementary insurance, although it hasn’t always covered what I’ve needed it to. My tooth implant is a prime example. I hope I never need another, but I probably will.

With perimenopause, however, it’s been a different story. I’m very loyal to my OB-GYN because she speaks English (I do speak Mandarin but past experiences have resulted in me saying things like “我的妹妹很癢” so maybe it’s better if I just don’t). Plus, she’s a straight-talker. I once wore a t-shirt with a picture of Jesus that said “Disappointments, All of You” to an appointment, only then noticing that she was wearing a little crystal cross, and she tactfully ignored it. She’s a good one.

However, what she’s been able to offer me, and what it costs, has in fact been a disappointment that would make Jesus weep. Perhaps I need a second opinion, but according to her, there aren’t many treatments for perimenopause that are covered by NHI. Unfortunately, none of the covered options worked for me.

First, I was given Tibolone, which is a popular treatment for symptom alleviation. Google says this is not covered by NHI, but I could swear I paid very little for it. In any case, it induced a period so bad that it ruined one day of my Vietnam trip in January. We’re talking floodgates. Honestly, you don’t want to hear more than that. Absolutely not, no thank you, next.

Oh yeah, and like the covered medications, it didn’t actually work. I still got frequent hot flashes, which are my worst symptom, and I was still depressed for no good reason. (Or many good reasons, if you’ve been watching the news at all).

Now, I’m on an estrogen gel and progesterone pill, neither of which are covered. The gel costs NT$1000 or so per bottle, and a bottle lasts a month. Some women can reduce their dose to make it last two months, but I can’t. One pill is NT$50, and on my treatment plan I need 42 of them to last two months.

These are working. At least, I don’t have hot flashes every day, and they don’t last as long as they used to. They’re now triggered by specific things instead of randomly coming on, and if I can avoid those things I’m generally fine. I’m just not used to having to pay over NT$1500/month just for the basic treatment I need to live my life.

I complained about this when I got my tooth implant and will complain about it again: a proper NHI system, which Taiwan mostly has, shouldn’t just cover what you need to survive and cheaper elective treatments (like acupuncture) because they’re popular. It should cover what a doctor actually says you need, even if you could technically survive without it. I needed a tooth; not having one put my dental health in jeopardy as missing a tooth can cause problems with the teeth around the gap.

Likewise, I can survive without treatment for perimenopause, but I can’t really live. This isn’t the United States; Taiwan is capable of covering a range of medications so that every woman can find one that works for her. If none of the covered medications work for some people, the only sensible response is to expand the list of what’s covered. I’m lucky that I can afford to pay out-of-pocket for the only thing that stopped my hot flashes and bad mood, but not everyone has the cash. Are poor women just supposed to suffer? Again, this isn’t the United States where suffering because you can’t afford medical care seems to be the norm. That shouldn’t have to happen in Taiwan.

This is true in many areas of medicine, not just women’s health. I only happened to run up against it when I hit my forties.

I’m very grateful that other treatments I need are covered at reasonable rates. I see an endocrinologist every three months — covered. I see a psychiatrist, too, for the ADHD and insomnia (and recently, mood swings) — covered.

But if it’s happening to me simply because I’m a woman in my forties, apparently it’s a roll of the dice whether what I need will be covered or not. It can’t just be me: there must be so many other women for whom the covered options don’t work. That’s not right.

Some graffiti near Sanyuan and Quanzhou Roads

The truth is, I wanted to write about the absolutely stupid anti-weed bill that has been recently proposed, but that will have to wait. It’s so dummy dummy dum-dum that I need to find a way to write about it without sounding like a stoner* heckling the Ministry of Transportation with “LAAAAAAAAME!”

*I’m not really a stoner. I’m pro-weed but always obey laws.

Let’s see if I can conjure up a mature take on that one, shall we?

Instead, let’s talk about how we’ve all been entertaining ourselves during these endless plum rain days. These weeks when everything is damp, every dehumidifier fills up in a few hours, park benches are moist, your clothes smell of faint eau du mold, the air is moist, you are moist, everything is moist. It’s been pissing down so much that I almost lucid-dreamed myself into believing I was in London.

Today, Taipei mostly got a break from the pissfest; the air is still so muggy that splotchy cotton t-shirts stick to my skin and rivulets run down my ‘career line’ and pool in my bra (gross, right?) The clouds hung low and dark.

But it wasn’t actually raining, and that mattered.

Bored, and until recently resigned to the notion of another day inside, faffing about and accomplishing precious little, I realized that I had a shot at a day outside for once. Faffing about in Taipei is a lot more fun than faffing about at home, especially if you’ve felt trapped there by the weather for too long.

The 568 bus, which runs very infrequently, would be coming at just the right time. It would take me to the Taipei Botanical Garden with just enough time to have a short walk around before checking out Seven 7 Vintage, a store I’d marked on my map years ago. I took the bus, enjoyed the wander, and headed over to the vintage shop.

Closed, despite hours clearly indicating it should have opened. Alright, onto the next plan. It was still not raining and I was determined to enjoy my Saturday. I backtracked to Quanzhou Street and had lunch at the locally-famous “Three Treasures of Quanzhou Street”, which I’ve written about before. These are Huang’s Sausage (黃家香腸), Yuan Fu Lemon (元富檸檬), and Authentic Auntie’s Intestine Noodles (正宗阿桑大腸麵線).

It took me years to develop a taste for the sour preserved plum-infused lemonade at Yuanfu, but now it’s one thing I’ll defy my endocrinologist’s advice and enjoy on rare occasion. Some people order it “extra sour” but the regular level of plum suits me fine.

Authentic Auntie’s Intestine Noodles also come with oysters. I like it with chili oil, white pepper and a generous helping of black vinegar (烏醋).

From there, I walked down Tingzhou Road 汀州路 to Nanhai Road 南海路, passing a funky-looking secondhand shop (跳蚤二手北市南海店) that I just had to check out. I’m a sucker for any store with a bunch of quirky discount secondhand items I can dig through like a grumbling trash panda.

I saw a few things I liked in the ceramic section, but the proprietor was playing DJ and the extremely quick turnaround from Michael Jackson (ok) to some Chinese propaganda to some Taiwanese propaganda (that is, propaganda which is correct about Taiwan being a country) to heavy-base hardtechno that made me feel like I was being kicked out of a German nightclub for being insufficiently homosexual* was a bit too much. I left without buying anything. But I would go back.

*I did rip that joke off, fair warning

I snapped a few photos: election campaigning is in full swing in this neighborhood, so politicians’ Photoshopped and airbrushed faces smiled from just about every blank wall.

It was time to wander down to the Youth Park. I’d been spritzed with a little rain, but it wasn’t enough to deter me from going outside and staying out as long as possible. I even found a little grass to touch!

There are always some quirky buildings to see on these walks; this one was trying to be a castle.

The area itself was a very pleasant walk, and one I hadn’t done before. I flitted around on Google Maps for awhile, looking for interesting shops around the park. The most interesting thing to come up was Maison Stella, a small sourdough bakery that bakes fresh loaves every day and uses Taiwanese flour.

I popped by there and talked to one of the proprietors for awhile; in addition to a regular wheat sourdough loaf, he sold me on a Basque goat cheese and cranberry loaf. I’ll be going back for the chocolate loaf, which uses 70% Taiwanese chocolate.

Having started eating them, I can highly recommend Maison Stella if you’re looking for good bread in Taipei. The crumb has just the right chewiness, and it’s clearly sourdough without being overly sour. There’s no added sugar unlike many breads in Taiwan (their toast does have added sugar, however).

Maison Stella’s whole wheat Taiwanese flour sourdough

By then my husband was finishing up his Saturday work, and I looked for a place to meet. I was a 20-minute walk from the Wanhua Lin Family House that had been turned into a Starbucks. Why not? Uni-President owns Starbucks in Taiwan so the franchises here have nothing to do, that I can tell, with the union-busting freaks in the US. I walked through the lanes to avoid busy Wanda Road and then engaged in a battle royale to get a table.

That’s not really true; I just waited for a bit and used the bathroom, and a table happened to free up next to an old man watching Chinese dramas at top volume. We hung out for awhile, and I realized the sun had come out. The sun! I hadn’t seen that in weeks! A walk was in order, and we were both feeling peckish. I knew exactly what I wanted: snail noodles. Or rather, snail wontons.

Some things I saw on my Wanhua walk through the lanes

Snail noodles, or luosifen (螺螄粉), are a signature dish of Guanxi Province in China. I like to get it at a small restaurant near Longshan Temple, which I actually wrote about in the Louis Vuitton Taipei City Guide back in 2023.(I’m unsure if it will make it into the 2027 version). There is no snail meat in the noodles. Rather, river snails are added to the stock along with pork bones and some very interesting spices (think black cardamom) to produce an absolute umami bomb of a soup served with pickled vegetables, tofu skin, chili oil, peanuts, tree ear mushroom, and meat, noodles or wontons as you like. I do very much like wontons.

We did a few more things before heading home — I got a shoulder massage from one of those blind massage places, we strategized on how to buy good cheese for our fancy sourdough loaves — but I already felt the depressive funk of the last few rainy weeks melting away.

I live in a city, I realized. A bustling, diverse, quirky city. There’s no reason to hang around one’s apartment like it’s a McMansion in the suburbs and there’s nothing else to do. It depresses me when I do so for too long.

If you catch a few rain-free hours over the next week or so, I suggest you do the same. Go out and seize them. Because it looks like it’s going to rain all month. Taipei is interesting — let’s go be interested in it.

At the Forbidden City in 2016. Notice the skirt.

It’s no secret that I don’t care for China. I don’t mean the people; as long as we stayed away from certain topics, and leaving aside the two pickpockets I encountered, the people were almost always hospitable. There was a lot to like about China: the scenery, the food, the history where you could still find it. And yet, of all the countries where I’ve spent significant time, it left me with the most ambivalence.

After my semester in India, I spent a long period wanting to move back. That only changed when I realized Taiwan was a country I could call home. I spent about two months in Turkey, and left thinking Istanbul was one of the few cities that could potentially draw me away from Taiwan. And I say that as an Armenian-American! I did my Master’s in the UK, and never wanted to leave when my summer lectures finished. And of course, I moved to Taiwan expecting to stay for two or three years; this September will be my twentieth.

China? I spent a year teaching English in a city in Guizhou. I won’t say which one because I want the story I’m going to tell to remain as anonymous as possible.

I used that year to visit Xi’an, Chengdu and other parts of Sichuan, Chongqing, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Shandong (Qingdao and Yantai), a few cities in Yunnan, and East Turkestan (which China calls Xinjiang). After my year was up, I packed my bags and left on a backpacking trip that began in Beijing to procure some visas for my onward travels. By the time I made it back to the US, I had no specific desire to return to China.

I can’t point to a single event that caused my general dissatisfaction with my year there. It was more of a pervasive miasma; a feeling of inescapable unease. My mail occasionally arrived opened. The local paper interviewed me and then printed things I never said. I was paid in cash because getting a bank account was “too difficult”. The owner of the school presented her boyfriend as the “director” because parents expected to see a man in charge. I had access to the real Internet only because the school owner’s younger brother set up a VPN.

A photo from my time in China


I didn’t think too much about what that implied when he did it. I should have.

I mentioned once that Taiwanese didn’t seem to have a strong desire to unify with China; I was told this was a lie by the “oppressive” Taiwanese government and all Taiwanese understand that they are brothers and sisters of the Chinese people.

Interactions were generally friendly, but felt a bit like that first layer of ice on a pond in winter. Tangible structure, observable hospitality, but brittle and surface-level. Underneath them was always a feeling of otherness, like I was the foreigner people were being polite to, not a fellow human being with whom one might truly connect.

I don’t feel this way in Taiwan; I got the impression that if I stuck around, I could make real and lasting connections on a human level, and have done so. I never felt that spending longer in China would have a similar result. Maybe I was wrong, but my heart was telling me to leave.

The Guizhou countryside

There were two exceptions. One was my brief roommate Nina, a school employee who was asked to live with me so she could keep tabs on me but ended up becoming a real friend instead. She refused at some point to report on me to the school, which I’m sure got her in trouble. When I overheard the boss’s younger brother calling me fat — I’d learned just enough Mandarin to understand this — he blamed her for telling me what he’d said (she didn’t) and she got fired. I felt terrible about this, and wondered if I should have let his comment slide.

I hadn’t known at the time that she was already in a little trouble because of me, and I’d had no way of knowing they’d use this as an excuse to get rid of her. We kept in touch for years, but eventually lost contact. I don’t know how I’d find her again; she can’t be on any social media I use, and she has a very common name.

You can imagine that I’d grown a hearty dislike for the boss’s younger brother. I blamed him, rightly, for what had happened to Nina.

In India, Taiwan, Turkey, I’d imagined what it would have been like if I’d stayed. In Taiwan, I actually did. When the end of my contract came in China, I did not renew it. I packed my bags and prepared to travel. I only had a few thousand dollars saved up; I genuinely didn’t know how I was going to make it from China through Laos and Thailand, back to India with a side trip to Bangladesh, then a week each in England and Ireland. I suppose anything is possible when you’re young and strong-backed, able to sleep anywhere, and it’s 2003.

From the highway in Guizhou

The school threw me a going-away party. We’d had our squabbles, but I suppose I was a good enough teacher. At least I wasn’t the one who showed up drunk and caroused in brothels after class. That was my coworker. I was on time every day, planned and taught lessons, was faultlessly sober at work, and the kids learned some English.

We had a banquet-style dinner with my boss, her parents, her younger brother and her annoying boyfriend. My two foreign coworkers and the school secretaries showed up, as did the only other friendly foreigner in town (there was an unfriendly one, too, but I never spoke a word to her).

After dinner, the foreigners retired to the riverside bar that sold awful Guizhou beer and somewhat better Qingdao beer. The boss’s younger brother joined us. The coworker with problems tottered off at some point to find a brothel. The other guy went looking for him and came back awhile later saying he’d fallen in a gutter with his pants down, but would survive. My other coworker and the guy bonded; they’re married with a kid now.

We all spoke minimal Mandarin, and the boss’s younger brother didn’t really speak English. I suppose we communicated through the medium of beer. We sang songs nobody really knew the lyrics to, cracked peanuts, and generally held the sort of meaningless conversation that drunk people hold.

I even started thinking maybe I could forgive him for calling me fat that one time, and they were probably going to have found an excuse to fire Nina no matter what.

That’s about when he started confiding in the foreigners, either drunkenly or smartly assuming that we neither could nor would rat him out to the authorities. We’d been talking and singing loud enough for other tables to hear, but when this began he he had the presence of mind to drop his voice low enough that it could only be heard at our table. This was also well before the era of true mass surveillance, when you could still talk to other people as long as you didn’t publish any anti-government commentary.

A photo from my time in China

I can’t quote him exactly because it was so long ago, but he started in with how much he hated the Communist Party. They try to control everything, he said. He’d thought he could learn more about the world from the Internet, which was fairly new in China at the time, but they’d clamped down on that, too.

We admitted in our bad Mandarin that we didn’t like them either, that we actually liked China but the government made us uneasy. It made it difficult to stay. I wanted to live in a democracy, I said. That’s why my bags were packed. It wasn’t really about China the country.

He agreed. He did too.

I said I was thinking about eventually moving to Taiwan. He said that would probably be a good idea.

Do you know why I hate them so much? He asked it like it was rhetorical, but it wasn’t. We didn’t know. There were plenty of good reasons to hate the CCP. So why?

I was at Tiananmen Square, he said.

He’d been a student in Beijing at the time. Of course, as the son, he’d gotten educational opportunities that his older sister hadn’t (they were both just a little too old to have been born under the One Child Policy).

While there, he’d heard about protests in the square. He’d been young, idealistic, and quietly pro-democracy. He went with his friends, including his best friend, to join the protests. I assume the atmosphere was electric; if he described it all I didn’t understand because I lacked the language skills.

I’d experience that electricity a decade later at the Sunflower protests, where a critical mass of people would gather to demand change. Only the protest I attended would not result in any deaths.

Then the massacre started. He tried to hide with his best friend, at first they both managed to stay alive.

From my trip to East Turkestan


Then — and he didn’t say how this happened — his best friend was shot in front of him. One minute they were two young students protesting for reforms in their country, the next they were trying to survive a massacre, and the next one of them crumped to the ground, dead.

I don’t know how the man talking to us survived, but he did. Not without massive trauma, of course.

I hate the CCP, he said. I hate them, I hate them, I hate them.

I’d picked up enough Mandarin to understand that. He started crying and we consoled him; I decided it didn’t matter what he’d said about me before. He’d been through a lot, and a lot more than I ever had. And on the big stuff, we were aligned. I hate the CCP. I hate them, I hate them, I hate them.

I really can not imagine how he must have felt. I’ve never had a best friend die, let alone have him be murdered by the state. It had been almost fifteen years, and here he was sobbing as he told his story to quite possibly the only people he could tell. I won’t pretend to understand the depth of that pain. This is what dictatorship does. It ruins lives. It is never, ever excusable.

That was my last night in that city in Guizhou. The next morning I was going to have to fly hungover to Beijing to start my long journey home. I'd been looking forward to seeing the city for the first time. After that conversation, I began to dread it a little.

From my time in China, I think in Dazu

A monastery in northern Armenia

Although this blog focuses on it, I simply don’t have a lot to say about Taiwanese politics these days. This is partly because my travel writing side hustle is picking up which requires a lot of creative energy, and partly because I’m planning something big for myself next year that’s taking up most of my brainpower. Those of you who’ve followed me for awhile know that I’m learning three languages simultaneously, with a focus on Armenian and Taiwanese. I’m always working on actively improving my Mandarin, so I count that as the third language.

Taiwanese lessons are important to me because speaking it makes me feel closer to the culture, and honestly, when I use it people do treat me differently. I’m not very good at speaking it as my lessons are mostly Audiolingual: I’m very good at translating sentences but rather bad at coming up with original statements of my own. There is also a great deal of vocabulary in the Maryknoll series that is simply useless to me in a contemporary speaking context, from the difference between a pastor and a priest to words like “fountain pen” and “cassette player”.

Dancers making a video in Dilijan

Armenian is a different animal entirely. I decided to learn it because my mother was Armenian; she never taught me how to speak it because her father never taught her. That was intentional on his part: he moved to the US at the age of 11 and decided to transform into Johnny Apple Pie, using Armenian only with his older family members and raising his kids as English speakers who had no need for their father’s native tongue. Even his siblings, who retained more of a heritage connection, neglected to teach their children.

As a result, nobody in my generation or even my mother’s generation speaks Armenian. I figured somebody had to learn, and as the resident weirdo, it would have to be me. No one else was interested enough to actually take that step.

I’m a better speaker than I ought to be in Armenian, because most of my “lessons” involve me attempting to communicate. My teacher can’t really explain grammar, so I either have to look it up, or absorb it naturally. This is a slow process, but produces a surprising degree of automaticity in speaking (a concept in fluency where retained language items can be quickly recalled and used with little or no hesitation).

I have no such automaticity in Taiwanese, but perhaps it will come with time. This may sound arrogant, but I do sometimes reflect on the likelihood that I am the only person in the world who is learning both Armenian and Taiwanese. (There are probably Armenian speakers attempting to learn Mandarin; it’s far less unique. My tutor says she knows Armenians who regularly go to China for business because they own import/export companies).

A monastery (I believe it’s Noravank)

If there’s another one of you out there, please do get in touch. We have something in common!

These forays into language learning have me formulating a plan: I want to spend something close to the equivalent of a semester in Yerevan, focusing on improving my Armenian through daily immersion. I’ll surely improve if I have to use it every day at markets, cafes and with people I meet. I can meet my tutor in person. I’ve been to Yerevan and liked it; it’s a place I could live for a short period and enjoy myself, and I can just about swing it financially if I keep my online classes going in Taiwan. Perhaps not for a semester, but three months would be doable.

Now that my cat has passed away, I can start making plans in a way that I couldn’t when we needed to spend US$500 a month to literally keep his heart going. I want to spend mid-March to mid-June in Yerevan. I might even keep up my Taiwanese lessons, if I can afford it. If anything, it’ll keep my brain flexible.

I consider this something of a controlled explosion. I don’t want to demolish or implode my life, because despite some career disappointments, it’s pretty good as it is. But I need to do something totally different for awhile, and soon — I don’t function well without a massive goal or adventure providing a curve of purpose in my life. A ‘next thing’ to look forward to. That purpose doesn’t have to change the world, because I probably can’t, but it does have to mean something to me.

I’ve just written a lot of paragraphs on language learning, but what I really wanted to talk about in this post is how we define success. That’s because to me, this opportunity to go to another country to basically play around in one of my second languages for awhile is one sign that, despite so many indications to the contrary, that I am leading some form of a ‘successful’ life.

Mount Ararat from Khor Virap

As an immigrant in Taiwan who didn’t choose a corporate career path, I feel that traditional measures of success don’t apply so easily. You know, the ‘dream’ of homeownership, some kids, maybe a car, a well-remunerated and upwardly mobile career. How can I own a home when even the banks that will offer mortgages to foreigners have such crappy terms? Why would I want a car when I live downtown? Children are a matter of personal choice, and I did not choose to have them. I chose flexibility, freedom and creativity over a 9-5.

So, I rent and I’m not rich. I’d wager that most of my students in Taiwan earn more than I do. At my age my parents had one kid in college (me) and one in junior high. They had two cars (though one was a beater) and owned their own home. I would say honestly that we were middle-class, but struggled to stay that way. Vacations were to a beach within driving distance; we took one family holiday abroad, for a wedding. I did hear my parents talk tensely about money, and I don’t know how they afforded that one short trip to Europe.

Am I successful against that metric, or not? I genuinely don’t know. I am pretty sure that when they were my age, they earned more than we do, but we live in Taiwan where the cost of living is lower. They were also my age in the 1990s, when the same amount of money could buy more. I don’t even know exactly what they made, as I was raised with an unhealthily avoidant relationship to money that I’ve worked hard to overcome. In other words, they didn’t like to talk about it, so I had “not talking about it” unintentionally inculcated at a young age.

The interior of a monastery

But they did raise two children and buy a house with whatever money they had, and I…haven’t done that. I suspect they intended to retire at a reasonable age. Like many in my generation, despite having savings, I have no idea how or whether I will retire. I don’t understand how it could be financially feasible to do so. I know I’m not the only one.

You know what they didn’t do, though? What they probably couldn’t have afforded to do? Pay two language teachers just for the fun of learning. They certainly would never have been able to contemplate, let alone plan, a three-month trip to some random country like Armenia simply because they wanted to learn its language. I suspect my mom might have liked to, but she never did, and I doubt it would have ever been feasible.

The Cascade in Yerevan

I’ve done other things that are markers of success, too. My mom always wanted to see the world. In the end, she made it to Canada, France, England and Japan. She had wanted to go to Armenia, or perhaps our actual ‘hometown’ in southern Turkey. In the end, she didn’t make it to either place.

I’ve been to approximately 55 countries. This year is an odd one, because I probably won’t visit anywhere new, and yet I went to Vietnam for the second time and will get three days in Istanbul in August, also for the second time. I’m also going to the United States, but I barely count that as travel; that’s family obligation. Does that make me more successful, or am I trading retirement later for travel while I’m relatively young?

(This is a rhetorical question. Even if we’d saved everything we’ve spent on travel since we got married in 2010, it still wouldn’t be enough for retirement.)

In terms of preferences, it’s not just in having children where my parents and I have differed. I chose to leave the US entirely and immigrate to another country. My mom used to say that being an ‘expat’ sounded nice, but I suspect she really was thinking of those upper-class folks for whom an employer takes care of everything, and who typically don’t intend to stay forever in the country where they’re posted. I don’t think the notion of being an ‘immigrant’ ever crossed her mind.

Somewhere in small-town Armenia

I also choose to live downtown in an apartment I could never, ever afford to buy (also a moot point because I can’t afford to buy any apartment in the Taipei area in the current market, and would struggle to get a mortgage even if that weren’t true). They were able to buy a house because they chose a small town. They owned cars because they had to, and I don’t think they ever considered a life where it wouldn’t be necessary.

Career-wise, I never quite got the boost to full-time teacher training that I wanted, and I’ve been hoping, somewhat unsuccessfully, to pivot to learning design. It’s not that I don’t enjoy teaching, it’s just nothing new. It also doesn’t pay well enough (at least not as well as teacher training). I’m sad to say there are almost no teacher training opportunities in Taiwan now — they’ve slowly disappeared since the pandemic — and I’m deeply disappointed to know that.

Debed Canyon

As someone who is a sort-of creative (I’m not sure English teaching counts, but travel writing does) who has chosen a life in Taiwan, I guess I just don’t know by what metrics I can measure a successful life. If it includes an ever-upward career, homeownership or an assured retirement, I suppose I am a failure. If, however, it’s measured by what my younger self would have thought if she were told about the life she’d lead, I have succeeded.

Young Jenna would have been very pleased to know that she got so much of what she wanted: a life of travel (maybe not this year, but in general). A Master’s degree. The chance to live abroad. Pretty reasonable fluency in one difficult language and the chance to learn two more just for fun. Writing opportunities that might not make up a career, but are a solid side hustle. Lots of free time. A very successful marriage to an equal partner who does chores (I love my dad but he was never very good at equal division of household labor), works hard and with whom I can talk openly about money. And, of course, with whom I can be open and vulnerable about how damn hard it is for me to do so. A downtown apartment in a city with great public transportation.

For a girl who really thought the only option was an office job, house in a small or suburban town, and kids, and who could not articulate why that depressed her, she’d be delighted. Ecstatic.

The question is, would older me say about younger me’s choices? Of that I’m less sure.

I am certain, though, that Old Jenna will someday look back on her life and at least agree that it was interesting. And she, too, will be delighted that she got to spend three months in Armenia, in a move not many people have the opportunity to undertake.

Downtown Yerevan with the Noy distillery

The outskirts of Alaverdi

Green Island

I know I could be writing about all sorts of things, from the too-small defense budget to the Trump-Xi talks, but honestly, I don’t feel like it. Although I published my last post after it happened, I’ve been on a short break since my cat passed away and want to ease back into it. I know cats aren’t people, but losing a cat really is like losing a family member. I didn’t cry a lot because we’ve been expecting it, but internally I’m gutted.

So instead of politics, let’s talk tourism. I’ve not only had a lot of travel writing work recently, and I also had a few friends visit Taiwan. One came with her own friends, rented a car and drove around the island. The other stayed with me and I did one of my favorite things: trotting around Taiwan as not just a friend but a bespoke tour guide while I get to enjoy the country I call home.

I just love doing it. I get to practice my Mandarin beyond the usual “where are you from” and “wow, you can use chopsticks”, I get to take people to my favorite destinations, and it’s very important to me that my visiting friends leave Taiwan with a good impression. I’d do it professionally but I’m not sure I’d enjoy guiding people I don’t already know.

There are downsides to traveling in every country, however, and during these two visits I became curious about what my friends might not have enjoyed, or what they found difficult about traveling in Taiwan. Or, honestly, what I think might be difficult for foreigners taking a trip in Taiwan, for any reason.

The first thing I’ve come to realize might be a problem is traveling to Taiwan’s outlying islands if you don’t know how you’re going to arrange transport.

On both Green Island this year and Orchid Island last year, I ran into people at the ferry terminal who had not thought ahead. They’d assumed Taiwan was an easy, friendly place where it’s always possible to get some kind of transportation. They were mistaken.

It’s not only a problem in terms of renting, but arranging and paying for rentals. I cannot stress this enough: if you are going to Green Island, Orchid Island or frankly any outlying island (though Kinmen isn’t so difficult), arrange everything in advance, think about transport before you get there, get an international driving permit, and especially on Green and Orchid Islands, bring lots of cash.

On Orchid Island, it was a European woman who lacked an international driving permit. The last time I was there, the car was a loaner from the hotel owner’s friend and they didn’t even ask for our names let alone proof we could drive. Now, everything is done according to the law, and not even scooters (none of them electric on the island) can be rented without an IDP. I’m not saying the law is a bad thing, just that it’s tough for travelers who don’t know. So she found herself at Orchid Island, her hotel on the other side of the island, with no transport and no means of renting any.

She was frustrated and frankly surprised that one could land somewhere in Taiwan and be squarely SOL in terms of getting where you need to go. She hadn’t expected it.

The ferry port workers found me — “I heard you speak Chinese, maybe you can help” — and I got everyone understanding the problem before I had to get on the boat. My suggestions were that the hotel pick her up and she rent a bike to at least see that side of the island, or they find someone who will drive her around and she pays them well for it. I don’t know what happened next but I hope she had a satisfactory trip.

I’d rented a car in advance (I was traveling with a family with a child, and I dislike riding scooters) through my hotel; they contacted the guy who rents them. I used Mandarin to do this, but everyone involved appeared to speak enough English to deal with foreign tourists who can’t. The hotel used Line, which many foreign tourists don’t have and have never heard of.

The only means of payment for the car is cash, or a bank transfer to the post office bank, which only people with a Taiwanese bank account can do. The only ATMs on Green Island are post office ATMs, which don’t accept foreign cards. My friends were lucky they had a resident with them who could pay for everything, and we could square it later.

When we arrived on Green Island, we ran into a Singaporean family who, once again, landed on the island assuming they could take a taxi to their hotel and figure out transport later, or rent a car on the spot. At least one family member had an IDP. Electric scooters would have been immediately rentable, but none of them felt comfortable on a scooter.

We ended up giving them a ride to their hotel, and they were able to talk to our car guy who said there would be rentals available later that afternoon. I assume if I hadn’t been there that someone else would have helped them, but it was clearly a difficult situation to be in.

I had arranged a car in advance. I got the information for the one (1) car rental service on Green Island from the hotel I booked. They spoke English, and it turned out the car rental guy spoke some too (I hadn’t realized this because I arranged it all in Mandarin), but the hotel used Line, which most Western travelers don’t have. I could only contact the car rental through a phone call, which would be expensive, at least, if I’d done it outside Taiwan. All payment was in cash, up front. No problem, but if a foreign tourist used to using a payment app for everything and ATMs that take foreign cards on the Taiwan mainland shows up, they’re going to have a problem.

I always rent cars because I’m not very comfortable on scooters, but mostly on these islands, scooters are what’s available. That’s a problem for foreigners who can’t or won’t ride them.

This is not to imply I’m a better traveler. I’ve just been here for a long time and know the deal. I also don’t mean to say that Taiwan should bend over backwards to be a completely easy travel destination, or that it’s okay for travelers to show up naive, without having done their research. All travel will have bumps, difficulties, surprises. That’s part of the adventure.

I do think, however, that either these travelers are not being given good information. Is it not stated in guidebooks, or are today’s travelers simply not reading them? How am I running into multiple people who just don’t know what they need to know to visit these islands? Is there anything we can do tourism-wise to make it a little more straightforward for foreign visitors?

I’m not sure, really. There probably isn’t demand for a better bus system (Orchid Island, I believe has a very minimal bus service). A tourist bus that stops at the main sights and runs multiple times a day — perhaps once an hour — during shoulder and peak seasons would be lovely, but something tells me the scooter rental racket would oppose it.

Banks whose ATMs take foreign cards don’t have much incentive to set up ATMs on these islands. There’s no big incentive to be active on an app that’s not Line. The rule that one needs an IDP to rent anything is annoying, sure, but it makes sense. I did always think it was a bit funny that in the past, a car would be handed to me without any sort of check that I could drive it.

My visiting friend brought up another issue: her trip was very smooth, but that’s because I arranged it all. She admitted she’d have had no idea how to get ferry tickets without just showing up at the port and hoping for the best.

“The hotel helped me arrange them,” I said.
”Right, and I wouldn’t have known to ask the hotel.”

Admittedly this is not a huge problem: Google “Taitung to Green Island Ferry” and all sorts of answers pop up, including ways to buy them on Klook or KKDay. Most Westerners, in my experience, have never heard of these apps, but I use both and they are generally reliable.

Arriving back at the ferry port, last year we ran into a problem. All the smart kids had arranged pick-ups in advance. I’d assumed there would be taxis hanging around. There were not. Finally one drove by and I was able to snag him before the other dozen or so people who’d been caught out could get him (would have shared, but we were four people). I knew this time to arrange a pick-up to meet us at the port to take us into Taitung city. (By the way, there’s not much to do in Taitung that’s not a long drive out of town. If you have a few hours to kill there between your ferry and your train, I’m not sure how you kill them without hanging out at a cat cafe as we did. Not a complaint, just saying.)

Transportation in the rest of Taiwan is also something of a problem. It’s possible to get around the cities, even the ones with poor public transit like Tainan, with a combination of walking and Uber. (Not Taitung though — no Uber there). One issue we ran into with just walking around Tainan is that it was so hot that my friend truly struggled. We had to rest in cafes a lot, and at one point return to the hotel so she could take a cool shower just to feel better. The city could really use a functioning bus system that covers the city comprehensively. And if you build it, I promise, they will come.

Outside the cities, however, Taiwan is not friendly public-transit wise. In Japan, I was able to get to and explore the small temple town of Koyasan by train, funicular and bus, with a special “Koyasan pass” that gave us discounts. It wouldn’t have even occurred to me to rent a car. In Taiwan, other than hiring a driver for certain trips (say, Hualien to Taitung), I don’t really know how to show visitors the beauty of Taiwan’s countryside without driving. There are a few places accessible by public transit, but not nearly enough, and not my favorite places.

I would prefer not to tell friends coming to visit that they should get an IDP. I would prefer that they didn’t have to. But as it is now, it’s essential if you want to get out of the cities.

I suppose I can drive, I just don’t want to — and I truly won’t in cities. I know people will defend this dearth of public transit by saying that’s just how Taiwan is, people like to drive (again, no: if you build it, they will come), Taiwan doesn’t think about tourism in this way. That last one is true, just unfortunate if you happen to be a visitor who loves nature but doesn’t drive. And Taiwan isn’t a ‘low-cost’ destination like Vietnam or India where hiring a driver is a minimal expense.

The discussion of transit issues sparked a debate at our shared dinner table in Tainan. While munching on delicious yakitori at 老厝1933, the friend who’d rented a car pointed out these transit issues and said that if Taiwan wants to present itself to the world as a first-world “or at least second-word” travel destination, it would have to deal with the poor public transit (although she did say the trains were quite good).

I didn’t like hearing this, and neither did my other friend. I think of Taiwan as more advanced than the US in many respects, from the health care system to Taipei’s MRT (I just wish we had more of that in other cities) to the high-speed trains to the superior Internet. As my other friend said, if Taiwan is a “second-world” country, we have to be prepared to call the US one, too. The US, after all, has even worse public transit than Taiwan, by a wide margin.

Taiwanese don’t typically compare their country to the US though, they compare Taiwan to Japan. And Japan, by an even wider margin, has Taiwan beat on public transit. Maybe that’s part of why all those tourists are going to Japan now, and only a trickle are coming to Taiwan.

There was one other issue that my friend-with-a-car ran into: she lost something valuable on a hike in southern Taiwan. When she noticed it was missing, she reported it at a police station in Kaohsiung. They helped her contact the local police station for the forest recreation area. There was a significant language barrier, but ultimately they suggested she call the park as someone would comb the trail for her.

In this way, Taiwan once again outshines the West. If you lose something of value in the US, Europe, Australia etc., you can assume it’s gone forever. In Taiwan, there is at least the possibility that you’ll get it back.

The problem was, she did call the park. Nobody at the office spoke English. She asked me to call for them, but I was on a flight to Taitung when she contacted me so I didn’t see the message until much later. By the time I arranged a phone call, more than 24 hours had passed so the staff was unwilling to comb the trail (the item was not in Lost and Found). They were irritated that the local police hadn’t contacted them, because according to the park rangers, they should have.

I know this is a one-off issue, and one could argue that you shouldn’t bring anything on a hike that you’d be heartbroken to lose. Okay, fine. And I don’t expect that everyone will speak English; the language barrier could be an issue in any country, including the much-vaunted Japan.

But the police dropped the ball and didn’t help out doing a fairly simple thing for a foreign visitor, which they could have done and everyone I talked to agreed they should have done. My Taiwanese friends also felt this is how it should have happened. Especially in the south, I generally find Taiwanese people are much more hospitable and helpful than that. Their actions were…not hospitable.

I’m not trying to say that Taiwan is unfriendly to tourists. I don’t believe that’s true. In fact, I find it to be an easier country for tourists to travel in than when I moved here twenty years ago. More and more temples, for example, have foreign-language brochures so you can learn something about the temple beyond “wow, cool, another temple”. Although I’d prefer paper copies of maps of tourist sites in foreign languages (ideally English and Japanese, perhaps also Korean and a selection of Southeast Asian languages), there are often QR codes for foreign language versions. It’s not perfect, but it’s something. There are apps now like Klook and KKDay that can help tourists book experiences and transport. If they know to download Line, they can talk to hotels and other service providers.

When I first moved here, with terrible Mandarin, the best I could do sometimes was exactly what those hapless tourists did on Green and Orchid Islands: just show up and hope for the best.

Green and Orchid Islands are some of Taiwan’s most beautiful places. One might argue that we don’t need more tourists going there; they’re small and can’t handle much more volume. Perhaps, but I shouldn’t run into someone who’s found themselves stranded at the ferry port every time I go, either.

I do think there’s room to improve, however. Better public transit. Better information, somewhere, for travelers. Perhaps this means better travel guides, or getting people to actually read travel guides again. This is a personal pet peeve, but let’s end the QR code ordering system at restaurants, especially if the only option is Mandarin. I can use them, but I find myself ordering for everyone if no one else can.

That’s a weird place to end this post, but I’m not sure what else to say. Taiwan is better than it used to be for foreign tourism, but there are ways in which it could be a bit more hospitable. Travel is always going to come with difficulties, so it would be silly to say Taiwan should be this perfect, seamless travel destination. Of course, it won’t be, for everyone. And I suppose you could point to many other countries and say “well, it’s easier to travel in Taiwan than…Tajikistan”, and that would be true (probably — I’ve never been to Tajikistan). However, Taiwan does seem to want to present itself as a friendly, easy and open destination, whereas nobody expects Tajikistan to be easy.

Taiwan is still one of the easier countries to travel in, I suppose, although it lags significantly behind Japan and South Korea in public transportation.

I just think, in the spirit of continuous progress, that a few amenities tourists (and locals) use could be a little less challenging than they are.

Back in 2021, my husband and I co-wrote an article on general histories of Taiwan in English. I read more than half, he read more than the other half, and we overlapped on a few.

At the time, we both hoped a more contemporary general history would be published soon, as the most recent one dated from 2014 (A New Illustrated History of Taiwan) and thus didn’t cover the seminal Sunflower Movement and what followed it. While a very good book, and one of our recommendations, it’s a bit dry in places, and covers Taiwanese history by topic rather than chronology, diving into what makes Taiwan the country it is today on a cultural level rather than following the Great Men of History in All Caps. That’s fantastic for people who already know the chronology and fundamental beats of Taiwanese history, but might be unclear in places to readers who don’t even know who, for instance, Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga) was.

We also hoped for something more engagingly written, as other, older works could also be somewhat dry or academic (Forbidden Nation and Taiwan: A New History, respectively).

Enter Rebel Island: The Incredible HIstory of Taiwan, a 2024 general history by Jonathan Clements that provides some, but perhaps not all, of what Brendan and I were looking for when we wrote that article five years ago.

This book has many positives. It starts out with a more in-depth accounting of Indigenous prehistory than most other works. Like A New Illustrated History of Taiwan, it then weaves that Indigenous History into the narrative wherever possible, something other histories tend not to do. To read Forbidden Nation, you might not even realize that most of Taiwanese history was Indigenous history, and A History of Agonies treats Indigenous people and culture downright offensively.

Rebel Island is also engagingly written, to the point that one actually wants to pick it back up again, rather than feeling like they have to (a problem I’ve encountered with many a general history; I never even finished a particular book on Armenian history, it was so bad). It is especially good right up until the Japanese era, providing a clear overview that is easy to follow for the Taiwan history novice, and provides interesting details that the well-versed might not know.

For instance, I hadn’t known that the Indigenous leader Toketok, who agreed to talk to Charles LeGendre after the Rover Incident, had sent his daughters to tell Chinese emissaries that “they were not worthy of an audience”. Awesome. Love that.

It also lays a strong foundation for refuting the premise that China has a historical claim to Taiwan, pointing out again and again the amount of time China did not control Taiwan, did not control all of Taiwan, or treated Taiwan like a colony it didn’t even want.

There are a few factual errors, however, which I’ll let you read about in Steven Crook’s review.

The battles between the 1895 Republic of Formosa forces under Black Flag Liu (Liu Yong-fu) and the Japanese are also well-handled; Clements provides more detail than I recall in any other general history I’ve read, including some interesting points about the stamps they issued. To quote the book, I love a little philatelic skullduggery.

When Clements gets to the Japanese era, I felt it skipped over quite a bit. I had been hoping for at least a few paragraphs on the nascent home rule movement under cultural icons such as Chiang Wei-shui, which might be considered among the first Taiwanese identity movements after the 1895 rebellion. I read a lot about education under the Japanese for my Master’s thesis, and felt this warranted a paragraph or two as well, as it was the first introduction of universal education to Taiwan.

After the Japanese era and World War II, the narrative gets a little more questionable. Again I’ll let you read Crook for the details. I want to focus my discussion of Rebel Island’s flaws on the last few chapters. They’re problematic enough that when I’ve lent my copy out to others, I’ve told them that everything up to Chen Shui-bian’s presidency is fine, or where there are factual errors, it’s close enough or the mistake is minor. After that, the editorializing really starts to bother me.

I don’t have an overarching problem with editorialization in history books, especially if the author is forthright about it. However, Clements tends to save his personal comments for criticisms of the DPP, and almost never criticizes the post-democratization KMT.

For instance, he states former president Ma Ying-jeou’s dismantling of the White Terror exhibition at Dead Dictator (Chiang Kai-shek) Memorial Hall as fact, which is fine. But then he calls former vice president Annette Lu’s criticism of the KMT as having their bags packed and foreign citizenship ready to flee “ungracious”.

It wasn’t a kind remark on Lu’s part, but she also wasn’t completely wrong. As for actions that are “ungracious”, I think Ma’s removal of a White Terror exhibit far better fits the adjective, but Clements saves his criticism almost wholly for DPP figures.

That’s just one example. Let’s look at another, a few pages later. Clements’ summary of the Sunflower Movement is almost farcical:

But the actions of the Orchid Islanders were a sideshow compared to the youth movement in mid-2010s Taiwan.

Perhaps, though “sideshow” is an ungracious thing to say, and the youth movements included anti-nuclear protests that represented similar interests to the Orchid Island protests.

The movement defined itself as pro-democracy, thereby implying that all claims for Taiwan as a democracy already were worth nothing to the island’s younger voters.

Wrong. Painfully, insultingly, dead-ass wrong.

I actually sent a photo of this paragraph to a friend who was a Sunflower occupier. He immediately called me and we spent more than an hour on the phone complaining about this one paragraph. He was very clear that the mid-2010s youth movements cherished and recognized Taiwan’s democracy, they did not think it was “worth nothing” or didn’t exist. They felt that Ma Ying-jeou’s actions were abrogating that democracy, and they wanted to save it, not criticize it.

Again appropriating floral imagery in imitation of the Wild Lilies, the ‘Sunflowers’ occupied the Taiwanese parliament to protest at the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement…

Two minor points, but also wrong. They became the Sunflowers because a florist donated some Sunflowers to the cause, and the name stuck. They didn’t ‘appropriate’ anything, they just didn’t stop people from using that symbol after it happened. It wasn’t intended, by the occupiers, to call back to the Wild Lilies in any intentional way.

They also, as my friend pointed out, were not technically protesting the CSSTA (though most were probably against it). They were protesting the black box politics that caused the CSSTA to be passed against standard parliamentary procedure.

If you know a lot about Taiwan and were in Taiwan during that time, you know this. This is the sort of basic thing a person with sufficient expert knowledge to write a history of Taiwan ought to know.

…a treaty that many believed would expose Taiwanese infrastructure to mainland interference and control.

First, I’m not sure it was a ‘treaty’, that’s a specific thing, and second, we don’t need to be calling China ‘the mainland’, as Clements does repeatedly. It’s just China. Taiwan doesn’t have a mainland.

They were evicted by riot police…

They were not.

In fact, this is a major problem with the narrative, although the error might seem minor to some. In fact, the police cannot enter the legislature without the consent of the actual legislators, and they did not give that consent. The occupiers stayed in the legislative chamber peacefully for about three weeks and were at no point evicted; they chose to leave when they felt they had done what they could with their protest after KMT legislative speaker and Ma Ying-jeou rival Wang Jin-pyng talked to them and gave them a few assurances.

Some Sunflowers were evicted from an attempt to also occupy the Executive Yuan, but this was not a main Sunflower event. Clements really needed to distinguish between the legislative occupation and the aborted executive occupation, but didn’t.

…but were supported by a large crowd marching on the government offices outside.

Huh?

There was a large encampment outside that saw a rotation of supporters, day and night, for those weeks. I would know, I was part of it most evenings. There was never a ‘march’, though there was a large sit-down protest — one of the largest in Taiwan’s history, if not the largest, but don’t quote me on that — on March 30th, which I also attended.

At any rate, they were not evicted from the legislature at all, and were not supported by a “marching crowd” when their eviction didn’t happen.

There are other issues, such as calling Freddy Lim a “key figure in the Sunflower Movement” (he supported it and had many friends in the movement, but was not actually a leader or occupier), but this paragraph alone should give one pause. If this is how Clements treats the Sunflowers, can he be trusted on more recent history?

I’ll also correct one mistake Crook points out: on the next page, he states that Wang Ju-hsuan was Tsai Ing-wen’s KMT opponent in 2016. This is wrong. Eric Chu was the candidate after the KMT replaced Hung Hsiu-chu due to her miserable poll numbers. Wang was Chu’s running mate. Again, someone with the expert capacity to write a history of Taiwan really ought to know, or at least have the forethought to check, this sort of thing.

A few pages later, Clements repeatedly quotes Xi Jinping’s absolute nonsense about “national sovereignty and integrity” (for China, not Taiwan). This is acceptable, as China’s threats are very real, but he never quotes Tsai Ing-wen in opposition to this, and to some extent paints the independence movement as “anti-KMT”, which is not exactly the case (many people who support Taiwan independence still vote for their local KMT pork-barrel clown because of, well, pork). l

Only Xi’s words get any air. This is a problem. This has been a problem in Taiwan-focused journalism for years, and has only fairly recently started to improve. Clements’ treatment of this topic feels like an article written in 2015.

In the end, those last few chapters soured what was initially a very pleasant and engaging reading experience. I can only hope that a future edition of this book will be a bit more balanced in its editorial critiques, include something — anything — from the pro-Taiwan side in rebuttal to Xi Jinping’s claims, fixes all the factual errors, and completely revamps its treatment of the 2010s youth movements.

The overall sensation of reading the book was a wonderful, scenic Sunday drive down a well-mapped road, and then suddenly coming through a thicket to careen off a cliff. Everything was fine, fine, fine — then suddenly you’re free-falling and don’t know quite how you got there.

Or it’s like watching a student get A-minuses (minus for the few factual errors) on every paper and quiz, only to bomb the final because they didn’t do the reading. I mean it: those last chapters get even the fundamentals wrong.

All of Clements’ build-up to the ridiculousness of Chinese claims, and the horror that the KMT inflicted on Taiwan during the White Terror, come to nothing as he seems to pivot toward painting the KMT as the more reasonable of the two parties in democratic Taiwan. Which, of course, is an opinion I don’t agree with at all.

Worse, it’s an opinion. Editorializing is acceptable, but you have to distribute those comments evenly, or not at all.

Until then, I’m still waiting for a more recent general history of Taiwan to be published that not only includes 21st century developments, but handles them well.

A few days ago, Reuters put out an explainer on Taiwan’s status and, surprisingly, it’s not bad. I spend a lot of time complaining about and tearing apart laughable, nonsensical and ridiculous articles and points within articles about Taiwan. For once, it might be pleasant to take a look at what happens when a media outlet gets things mostly right.

Yes, “mostly”. It’s not a perfect piece. It’s good enough, however, that I’d send it along to people asking for a basic rundown of Taiwan’s current status and how it relates to China.

While I will add some notes here and there, my main point is that this explainer is somewhere between “not bad” and “pretty good”. It doesn’t read like some random parachuter who doesn’t actually know much about Taiwan shat it out. My additions are fairly minor, as you’ll see.

We start here:

Previously known as Formosa, the island has been ​home to indigenous people for thousands of years, before the Dutch and Spanish briefly ruled parts of it in the 1600s.

Great beginning!

The Qing dynasty incorporated Taiwan as part ‌of Fujian province in 1684 and only declared it a separate Chinese province in 1885.

Following the Qing’s defeat in a war with Japan, it became a Japanese colony in 1895. In 1945, it was handed over to the Republic of China government at the end of World War Two.

Brief and to the point. I would have added a few things if I had the word count. For instance, for most of the time Taiwan was part of Qing China, they treated it like a colony and it wasn’t even deeply desired as a territorial holding. One emperor called it “a ball of mud beyond civilization”. They tried to sell it back to the Dutch. Second, they only governed the western third of Taiwan, not even bothering to map the eastern portion until well into the 19th century. The Republic of Taiwan months are also left out.

Overall, however, I’ll take it. Let’s skip ahead a little (I don’t know if I can legally quote the whole thing, so I won’t.)

Currently only 12 countries maintain formal ties with Taipei, mostly small developing nations such as Belize and Tuvalu.

Most major ​Western countries and U.S. allies maintain close unofficial ties with Taiwan by recognising the Republic of China passport and having de facto embassies in each other’s capitals. Taiwanese citizens can freely travel to ​most countries using their Taiwanese passports.

Many people don’t realize this, so it’s good to include.

The U.S. severed official ties with Taipei in 1979 but is bound by law to provide the island with the means to defend itself. The U.S. officially takes no position on Taiwan's sovereignty under Washington's "One China" policy.

This is a solid foil to all those “but what about the One China Policy” commenters.

China says it will not renounce the use of force to bring Taiwan under its control. Beijing has offered Taiwan a “one country, two systems” model similar to Hong Kong, which promised the city ​a high degree of autonomy, though no major political party in Taiwan supports that.

Opinion polls in Taiwan have repeatedly shown most Taiwanese wish to maintain the current status quo in relations with ​China.

Pointing out that China is the aggressor? Check. Taiwanese don’t want a Hong Kong model? Check. Most Taiwanese also don’t want unification? Check.

I’d have been a little more clear about what the status quo actually is, though later on the piece does state that Taiwan currently enjoys “de facto independence” so this is, in essence, covered. I would simply point out here that most Taiwanese want both sovereignty and peace; they don’t want a war, and they don’t want to be part of the PRC under any model. They want to govern themselves. In that sense, the status quo is something akin to independence.

China also says that United Nations Resolution 2758, passed in 1971, means the world legally recognises Taiwan belongs to China. The resolution states that the People’s Republic of China is the only legitimate government of China.

The ‌government in ⁠Taipei says that is nonsense given the resolution made no mention of Taiwan or its status.

Very good. I would have perhaps pointed out what the resolution did say, which is that the “representatives of Chiang Kai-shek” cannot represent “China”. Which means that Taiwan actually could join the UN as Taiwan, if China dropped its opposition. It absolutely qualifies.

Taiwan, whose people elect their own leaders and whose government controls a defined area of territory with its own military, passport and currency, enjoys de facto independence even if that is not formally recognised by most countries.

Taiwan’s government says the Republic of China is a sovereign state and that Beijing has no right to speak for or ​represent it given the People’s Republic of China ​has no say in how it chooses ⁠its leaders and has never ruled Taiwan.

Awesome.

I’d only add that having a “defined area of territory with its own military, passport and currency” means that it qualifies as a country under the Montevideo Convention, which is now widely accepted as a method of deciding what does and does not qualify for statehood. Taiwan does.

Since taking office in 2024, Lai has said on several occasions that ⁠the Republic ​of China and People's Republic of China are "not subordinate to each other", which Beijing says means he believes the two ​are separate countries and so he is therefore pushing an independence narrative.

Beijing isn’t quite wrong. Lai and the DPP (and Lee Teng-hui before that) were indeed pushing an “independence narrative”, and still are. The point, however, is that they are correct and Beijing is wrong. I suppose you can’t say that in an explainer, but I’m more than happy to point it out.

In 2005, China’s largely rubber-stamp parliament passed the Anti-Secession Law that gives the country the legal basis for military action ​against Taiwan if it secedes or if the “possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted”, but the law is vague and does not give details.

The title to this section is “Does China have a legal framework to prevent formal independence?”

I appreciate that Reuters called the PRC simply “China”, because that’s what most people imagine when they imagine “China”. Not some rump state on life support called the ROC, where most citizens call their country “Taiwan”.

However, China, being a different country, does not have any actual right to “prevent” Taiwan from doing anything. It can, and has, threatened war. But its legal frameworks don’t mean anything in Taiwan, which is fully sovereign and has its own government (the article does point this out in a part I didn’t quote).

China can, I suppose, enact a “legal basis” for military action just as any country can pass any old bullshit legislation it wants. I suppose. It does not constitute a proper legal basis, internationally, for military action against Taiwan. It’s literally just some nonsense they said.

I also don’t like the use of “secedes” without scare quotes. Taiwan can’t secede from the PRC, because it has never been a part of the PRC.

I would have called out the use of “reunification”, but it’s part of a quote from the Chinese law, so I can let that slide.

All in all, this is pretty reasonable. If anyone asked me for a quick explainer, I’d feel okay sending this to them. I might add or clarify a few things, but overall, well done.

Some countries, and people, will gobble up nonsense the way these fish gobble up food from a little machine

Recently, Chris Horton had an excellent piece in Nikkei making the argument that the governments around the world who erase Taiwan’s reality as a sovereign, democratic nation are just as much to blame, if not more so, than China for its attempts to escalate such erasure.

I agree wholeheartedly: every country’s government is responsible for its own choices. Nobody is forcing them to pretend Taiwan doesn’t exist or treat it as a part of the PRC, which has never governed Taiwan. It is entirely within the capability of world leaders and legislatures to tell China, and Chinese pressure, to stick it. That they don’t is their own fault, and is objectively ethically questionable, if not outright wrong.

Imagine a toxic friend in some hellish version of junior high school, who consistently pressures you to bully and ignore the quiet, smart kid whom you actually kind of like, or at least don’t dislike or have a problem with. But your crappy friend harangues you if you don’t force this person to sit alone at lunch or struggle to find a partner for project work. Your crappy frenemy is rich and well-connected, so you go along with it.

It’s wrong, and you know it’s wrong, but you do it. The moral consequences of that are, however, on you. It’s still your choice to engage in bullying, and still your responsibility as a good person to refuse to engage with such behavior.

This is exactly what countries like Mauritius and the Seychelles are doing when they give in to Chinese pressure to deny Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te a flight path to visit diplomatic allies like Eswatini, which happened recently.

I’m glossing over how unscrupulous Taiwan’s relationship with a government like Eswatini is, because it’s really not the point. A bully told these countries to exclude someone they don’t like, and rather than stand up for what’s right, they give in. That’s not (just) on China, that’s on them.

The reaction of these governments is both simple and logical: China is huge, it’s tough to be on their bad side. There’s probably a lot of backlash headed their way if they say no to the bully, just as there would be in junior high school. I can understand how the decision seems straightforward in a realpolitik sort of way. It is, however, wrong.

The argument might be reframed very slightly, however. I do think we still need to keep an eye on China as the originator of the bullying. If they weren’t there insisting that Taiwan be excluded and treated as a non-entity, none of those countries would be engaging in Taiwan’s erasure. They — not Mauritius or Seychelles and anyone else who sidelines Taiwan — are the ultimate force setting up a culture of bullying in world affairs.

This is also slightly off topic, but I’ll try to bring it all together at the end. In my mind, I can’t help but connect this to the current public discussions of what freedom of speech means and guarantees, both generally and in Taiwan. I’ve been worried for some time at the consequences of the Taiwanese government denying entry to Taiwan for Chinese influencers who call the country “Taiwan, China” or say that Taiwan should be militarily annexed by China. There have also been Chinese influencers in Taiwan forced to leave for advocating similar positions.

Not because I think these people deserve to be allowed into Taiwan, nor because I think they are anything other than disingenuous, but because Taiwan choosing to stand up to China in a way that other countries won’t does give the opposition some ammunition.

Some people call this oppression, a denial of freedom of speech. I would argue that freedom of speech doesn’t extend to foreigners — especially those not currently in the country — who advocate for the destruction of said country.

I’ve said openly that I think the Chinese government should fall (from within: I’m not talking about, say, US invasion). I also genuinely believe China has every right to deny me entry if they so chose. I’m not actually a threat because there’s not much I could do toward taking down Xi Jinping. I’m nobody, and I’m not Chinese so it’s not my direct fight, but they wouldn’t be wrong to say that my views threaten the Chinese government’s interest.

Of course, I have no intention of trying to enter China to test this out. Why would I?

I do worry that taking a fairly firm stance on not allowing in influencers advocating for Taiwan to be annexed by China will look like suppression of speech, just enough to give enemies of the DPP ammunition. That is to say, a belief that the DPP can’t respect that some people truly believe Taiwan is part of China. Some KMTers (and TPPers) also believe this, so it looks like an attack on that viewpoint.

This is, as a friend put it, a simple and logical argument, but wrong. Some moron KMTer or TPPer has every right to their opinion that Taiwan is Chinese, or that China should take over Taiwan. As citizens, there’s not much to be done about their very loud wrongness. That same right does not necessarily extend to a non-citizen advocating enemy action against the country they are trying to enter, however.

It’s also Taiwanese law, which specifically states that the country has the right to deny entry to any foreign national who will “harm our national interest, public safety, public order”. Saying that Taiwan, under any name (including the Republic of China), should not exist does, at least to me, harm the national interest.

Just as it bullies other countries into erasing Taiwan, China is intentionally using these influencers to peddle an anti-Taiwan viewpoint. Betting that the current government will follow the letter of the law in not allowing them to enter or stay, they stir up public controversy and try to bully Taiwan into a definition of “freedom of speech” that has never actually been the law.

Perhaps at one point the primary target of this disinformation was the Chinese public, but they’re increasingly pushing it in Taiwan, as well. Chinese social media is rife with attempts to deceive Taiwanese into selling out their own country in the name of “peace”, when the lack of peace is actually perpetrated by China, not Taiwan. None (or essentially none) of these people are innocent popular influencers who merely have an opinion that contradicts the DPP. They are disinformation peddlers, and it is intentional.

I do happen to think that if someone genuinely believes Taiwan should be Chinese, they have a right to that opinion, just not the right to enter Taiwan. Just as I have the right to my opinion that the Chinese government should topple, but not the right to enter China, per se.

Taiwan, like all those countries who have the ability to tell China to stuff it, still has the right to react to this as it wants. The world has chosen to bend over for China. To deny airspace, participation in global organizations, the right to use their own name in sporting events, or anything else, because China says so. Taiwan has chosen to react to this threat and treat China as the enemy state it is — essentially standing up to a bully in a way that the rest of the world won’t.

China wants the Taiwanese government to erase itself, to allow disinformation peddlers to enter the country and poison the discourse. Taiwan has chosen to say no.

The DPP will get pummeled for it, though: I already see the discussions online and it doesn’t look good. There’s a lot of backlash, some of it real, some manufactured, some amplified by a media environment that prioritizes sensation. Again, this reaction is simple and logical: it looks anti-free speech. It’s also wrong.

The flowers are pretty but that wall is still topped with barbed wire.

I wasn’t going to write about Cheng Li-wun’s visit to China. Not because her trip was insignificant, but because it was just going to be the same old boring “only the KMT can work with China!” propaganda that, in a better world, I could ignore. Significant, but not interesting or novel.

But the crap started coming and it didn’t stop coming, gumming up every single one of my social media feeds. That’s partly my own fault; my algorithm is obviously trained to feed me news about Taiwan. I just don’t particularly want to see this news.

But if my algo won’t let me escape it, I thought perhaps we could take a look at a few of these propaganda pieces and tear apart what makes them so insidious.

I didn’t address this before, but let’s start with something not quite related to Cheng, but close enough: the insidious shortening of the KMT’s full name, the Chinese Nationalist Party (中國國民黨) to simply the “Nationalist” party. Here’s an example from the New York Times:

One likely Nationalist Party contender for the presidency, Lu Shiow-yen, recently completed an 11-day visit to the United States, promoting herself as a solid partner of Washington. By contrast, Cheng Li-wun, the chairwoman of the party, hopes to visit China in the next few months to meet President Xi Jinping, an event that she has said could ease enmity with Beijing, which claims Taiwan as its lost territory.

The term “Nationalist” makes sense when discussing the Chinese Civil War, in a Chinese context. It can only mean one thing in that case: Chinese nationalist. In Taiwan, however, there’s also the idea of Taiwanese nationalism, which is completely at odds with the KMT’s party line.

In a Taiwan context, they are Chinese Nationalists. That’s their full party name. They are not “nationalists” (or even the capital “Nationalists”) for Taiwan. It’s misleading; it might lead readers who don’t know Taiwan well to think that the KMT cares about Taiwanese identity or the Taiwanese nation. You know, their nation, as “nationalists” tend to do.

Formosa Review has already covered this:

It is with absolute historical illiteracy and a complete mockery of political analysis that Western media insist on referring to the KMT or Chinese Nationalist Party, as the “Nationalist Party” in the Taiwanese context. This misleads readers into thinking that the party represents the national identity of people in Taiwan, and believing that the dispute between China and Taiwan is merely political, not a fundamental divergence of national identities.

It’s worth emphasizing, however. These writers should know better. Please stop.

Let’s start our Cheng Li-wun Propaganda discussion with CNN. They write that “China touts peace — and points to global conflicts — in rare meeting with Taiwan opposition leader”. The article isn’t so bad but the headline makes my blood boil.

I find it rich that the guy touting “peace” also does this:

Her visit to China comes with Taiwan’s ruling party under pressure from both Beijing, which has ramped up military pressure on the island, and Washington, which is pushing it to pass a stalled $40 billion defense spending plan.

Okay, China, so do you want peace or not? Because “military pressure on the island” is not peace. It’s ridiculous to take seriously — headline-level seriously — any talk of peace from the guy who won’t stop threatening war. You want peace? Abandon your threat to invade Taiwan if they refuse to be annexed! You’re the warmongers, China.

Cheng herself is full of it, too:

Cheng said she hoped that “through the tireless efforts of our two parties, the Taiwan Strait will no longer be a focal point of potential conflict, nor will it become a chessboard for external intervention.”

Oh shut up you MAGA-hair sellout. (Sorry, that was mean, but her rhetoric really irritates me).

The CCP isn’t interested in ending “potential conflict”. Their only goal is annexation, and Cheng certainly knows this. Taiwan isn’t a “chessboard for external intervention”: that makes it sound like someone other than China is threatening war. She probably means the US, and while it is true that the US sells weapons to Taiwan and provides other material support, but that’s because China keeps threatening Taiwan.

Taiwan wouldn’t need that kind of support, or a huge defense budget, or to be buddy-buddy with the US (which admittedly isn’t great; it doesn’t make me feel good at all), if China would just stop threatening war.

It’s the worst kind of double-speak. In fact, calling it double-speak is too kind: it’s just a lie. The only warmonger here, again, is China, and Cheng knows this.

Here’s another one: Reuters’ “Taiwan opposition leader talks peace with China as her party skips defence talks in Taipei”.

At least they admit in the headline that the KMT is not actually interested in defending Taiwan.

It hints at another insidious lie, however: that the KMT is the bringer of “peace” whereas the DPP creates the conflict. Once again, China creates the conflict. The ruling party has always been open to dialogue with China.

It was difficult to even find this link, although I’ve linked to similar articles multiple times across multiple platforms when people start blaming the DPP for China’s actions: every article that pops up is not about Lai’s call for talks, but Cheng’s trip to China. It’s absolutely flooding the Taiwan news cycle, by design, and I hate it.

It’s China, not the DPP, that rejects such talks. They only talk to the KMT because the KMT agrees that Taiwan is fundamentally Chinese, and has indicated a willingness to sell Taiwan out — not even trying to defend it.

There are only two ways to get them to stop: an overthrow of Xi Jinping and putting someone less focused on Taiwan in his place (which Taiwan is not trying to do, but I’d love to see happen), or annexation of Taiwan. Or, they need to be sufficiently deterred until such a point that annexation of Taiwan is no longer in their sightlines. This could take generations. I hate it, but it’s probably the best possible (or the most possible) option.

In the Reuters article, Cheng’s statement is summarized:

Birds not missiles should fly in the ​skies, Taiwan opposition leader Cheng Li-wun said on Thursday in Shanghai in a plea for peace, as government lawmakers ‌in Taipei expressed anger at her party for skipping crucial defence budget talks.

I’ve seen this “birds, not missiles, should fly in the skies” quote a few times, and it sounds very nice.

The only problem is that it’s the CCP, the exact people she’s going to meet, that need to hear that message. Not Taiwan. Since democratization, Taiwan has wanted “birds to fly in the skies”. To be left alone to govern itself.

The side threatening war, yet again, is China. They’re only talking to her because she’s willing to talk about Taiwan as being fundamentally Chinese, even though the vast majority of Taiwanese do not identify as Chinese.

Then there’s NHK’s “China unveils economic incentives for Taiwan after KMT leader’s visit”.

The Taiwan Affairs Office of China’s State Council on Sunday unveiled the 10-point package, which it says is aimed at promoting exchange and cooperation with Taiwan.

The office says China will promote imports of Taiwan’s farm and fishery products and help Taiwan’s small and midsized companies expand their business in China.

Beijing will also fast-track the full resumption of regular direct flights across the Taiwan Strait.

The move came after President Xi Jinping met with Kuomintang chair Cheng Li-wun in Beijing on Friday. These were the first talks between leaders of the Chinese Communist Party and the KMT since November 2016.

Xi stressed China’s opposition to “Taiwan independence” while showing willingness to boost dialogue with the KMT, which is seen as more conciliatory toward Beijing.

There are two problems here: first, China is openly disrespecting Taiwan’s democracy by refusing to meet with the ruling party, and the international media has the audacity to call it “peace” or a “lessening of tensions”. Real peace talks don’t involve one government trying to undermine the other.

Second, this is the same old economy-trap bullshit. They pulled this during Ma Ying-jeou’s presidency, too. The goal is to push Taiwan to be so enmeshed in the Chinese economy that, when annexation comes, it’s harder to defend Taiwan. In the short term, whenever Taiwan does something China doesn’t like — usually just the normal governing of a nation, like electing whomever the voters choose — they pull back on these “economic incentives” to attempt to coerce Taiwanese to vote the way they (China) desire.

Regular flights are great, I guess (not that I can take them), but it’s not so great that China disrupts this just because it doesn’t like something the president said. Imports of farm and fishery products are fine, I suppose, until they stop those imports for bogus reasons because someone in the government said the 1992 consensus wasn’t real (which it isn’t).

Another incentive is apparently to allow in Taiwanese television which has “correct orientation, ​healthy content, and high production quality” — as though content in a mode of artistic expression could ever reasonably be labeled “correct” or “incorrect”. What they mean, of course, is that they’ll allow in pro-unification or “all Taiwanese are Chinese”-coded programming, which doesn’t incentivize Taiwan so much as push Taiwanese studios to produce pro-China garbage.

Yet another is to ease tourism curbs, which is hilarious as that’s exactly the economic strong-arm they tried to pull — stopping tourism — when they didn’t like whatever Tsai Ing-wen was doing at the time. They’re not even trying to hide it.

The only goal of these “incentives” is to find pressure points to try to force Taiwan closer to annexation. It’s not new, it’s not kind, it’s not “peace” and frankly, it’s not even that interesting. They’ve done it before, stopping tourism just to punish Taiwan and banning agricultural products.

What’s also scary is how far down I had to search just to find sources outlining China’s previous economic strong-arming of Taiwan. For now, anyway, Cheng has successfully buried all that, so observers like me have to hunt for it and non-Taiwan-oriented readers might not even know it’s happened before.

Cheng is horrible, but she isn’t stupid. She knows what these tactics are. She just doesn’t care.

What really worries me is this: this strategy of pretending that the KMT can actually create meaningful peace with China, pretending that they care about Taiwan’s sovereignty, was exactly the schtick that Ma Ying-jeou used to get elected. Of course, he was always a filthy unificationist at heart. But he lied about his intentions, and he won.

After a few more avalanches of press coverage like this, will Cheng Li-wun’s likely presidential run win because voters don’t remember what happened under Ma and how much they mostly hated him by the end?

There are a thousand and one more articles like these. I don’t expect much from the comments, because most commenters on the Internet these days are bots, but they’re especially bad now. The new favorite seems to be that Taiwan and China are like East and West Germany (they are not; perhaps they might be compared to Germany and Austria). There’s also talk of “unification without any shots fired”, ignoring the fact that Taiwanese generally do not want unification. Some call it “integration” when it’s really annexation.

Some croak that these “peace talks” are sticking it to the US with its warmongering in Iran. That would be true, if they were really peace talks instead of political manipulation. Cheng is trying to score a political victory against the DPP (and from the media coverage, appears to be succeeding). China is trying to undermine Taiwan’s sovereignty. One said that Chinese people were “friendly” (which they often are) so Taiwanese should be “proud” to be part of China (which is irrelevant).

Same old, same old. This is just a trip to try and re-package the Chinese Nationalist Party’s unchanged pro-China, anti-Taiwan orientation. It’s a trip to make you forget, to make you believe the old nonsense that didn’t work in 2008 will suddenly start working in 2026. That it’s possible to negotiate with terrorists.

And yes, Xi Jinping is a terrorist.

Yawn. Call me when China actually talks peace by abandoning military threats against Taiwan and engaging in dialogue with a leader it doesn’t like.

“I’m planning to move to Taiwan. What is the best way to learn Mandarin?”

I see social media posts like this several times a week, when I bother to read them. It makes sense: it’s the language I concentrated on when I moved here, and the lingua franca of much of Taiwan (though less so in rural areas and the south). Until a few years ago, I only knew a few phrases in Taiwanese, most of them swear words taught to me by adult students who thought it was cute for a foreigner to have a foul mouth in the language they grew up with. Even now, with a Taiwanese language tutor, my skills remain unimpressive.

What’s it like, though, to come to Taiwan and immediately start learning Taiwanese, not Mandarin?

What would it have been like to do this in the last decades of Martial Law, when Taiwanese wasn’t banned, per se, but it was deeply discouraged?

That’s the question Linda Petrucelli answers in her forthcoming memoir, Mother Tongue.

Linda, a minister who feels deeply drawn to her craft despite sexism that makes her feel less welcome in some congregations, decides to embark on a four-year missionary trip to Taiwan with her husband, Gary. Unsure of what exactly they will be doing in Taiwan — the church will find them roles at some point in the future, depending on the level of local language proficiency needed — the couple head to Kaohsiung.

They’re told quickly that Mandarin is the preferred language to be learning, as it’s more widely useful and easier to pick up. They are quickly told, however, that they’ll be learning Taiwanese, or as Linda’s teacher Ong Lau-su tells her, “the Southern Min dialect”.

(Ong Lau-su calls this the ‘more correct’ name of the language, and I’m willing to let that slide because it was the 1980s and beliefs evolve over time. But it’s actually not the same thing: in relation to the Southern Min spoken in Fujian, Taiwanese is a dialect. They are not exactly the same. In relation to Mandarin, however, it is a language.)

While Linda and Gary’s peers start learning daily-use Mandarin very quickly, they struggle with simply mastering the arcane pronunciation of Taiwanese. I’m not so sure about the teaching methods employed here — generally pronunciation is harder to master if the sounds being made have no contextual meaning to the learner; it’s better to learn it alongside some language basics — but it is indeed true that Taiwanese is far more difficult to pronounce than Mandarin for English speakers.

The book documents Linda’s early struggles with the language alongside the tale of their first few years in Taiwan. The heat, the raucous neighbors, the cultural differences and yes, the sexism of 1980s Taiwan are all engagingly documented (especially the neighbors). Gary is given a position early where language proficiency is less needed; Linda struggles more, and as a result, learns faster. It’s a short memoir so I won’t spoil all the details here.

I can relate deeply to the daily battle to learn Taiwanese. The pronunciation seems to have been dreamed up by torture-masters purposely looking for the most difficult system possible. Frankly I think it’d be easier to learn Klingon. The grammar isn’t quite as bad, but it’s just different enough from Mandarin to be maddening, and it’s a pain to keep similar-sounding lexis differentiated. Did you know that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ sound exactly the same except for their tones, but of course their tones change depending on where they fall in a sentence? Fun!

As with all good stories, this one has both a climax and lessons learned along the way. It offers a familiar expat/immigrant arc of unfamiliarity, followed by becoming an font of advice to newcomers.

Most importantly, that what language you speak in Taiwan, especially in the 1980s but even now, has political implications. Mandarin might be the more popular language to learn, but it’s also the language forced on Taiwan by its more recent colonial masters, the KMT.

It’s no surprise that Linda’s church associates seem to lean deep green (pro-Taiwan, anti-KMT). Especially in southern Taiwan, Protestant churches and the DPP have deep ties. Some Catholic ones too: my teacher is devoutly Catholic and uses their Maryknoll system. It’s hellaciously boring and teaches quite a bit that I don’t need (I’m not religious so it’s amusing to me that I learned “minister’s wife” before I learned “miss”). But, I have to say, for a series from the 1990s that uses an Audiolingual approach that I usually don’t care for, it is carefully constructed.

I, too, felt the political pull to start learning Taiwanese. My late start wasn’t because I lacked interest, but because in Taipei it can be hard to find a qualified tutor. Everyone here wants to learn Mandarin. I didn’t think the Mandarin classes I briefly took were all that well-taught, either. After about 15 years, Mandarin became the language I worked on because it was a useful lingua franca; I need it to get by in dark blue Da’an. Taiwanese was the language that held a deeper interest. Though it is not as old as Indigenous languages in Taiwan, it was the predominant one for a long time until the Japanese, and then the KMT, showed up. Taiwanese feels more deeply connected to Taiwan’s identity and history. Mandarin, less so.

It’s generally interesting to read memoirs by missionaries. I was raised Christian (WASP on one side, Armenian Protestant on the other, and my dad converted from Catholicism without realizing it — don’t ask, I don’t know how that happened either). When I was a teenager in the 1990s, my parents’ church briefly had a female minister who was something like an apprentice or deputy (again I don’t really know). Although the church I grew up in was liberal, I saw the sexism she faced firsthand, so I wasn’t surprised to read about it in Mother Tongue. Now, I’m deeply committed to my total lack of religion, but hearing about others’ experiences offers perspectives I otherwise wouldn’t know much about.

All in all, Mother Tongue is an engaging read, well worth the time of anyone interested in southern Taiwan during the Martial Law era or Taiwanese language learning.

I don’t have a good cover image, so here’s a picture I took of a Taiwanese streetscape.

A friend was telling me recently about his upcoming business trips, some of which will be to China. He wasn’t particularly thrilled about it; he has no more desire to spend time in China than I do (I have none).

The topic shifted to talk about freedom of speech, and how everything I’ve said to criticize the Chinese regime, while perfectly legal in Taiwan, might make me persona non grata in China. I don’t think I’m important enough to actually be on a blacklist; on the other hand, I’ve said that the world would be better off in the long run if the CCP were to topple, and Xi Jinping deserves the Ceaucescu treatment. He won’t get it, and that’s a shame.

We talked about how he hates the Chinese government as much as I do, but can still go to China (on a stupid ‘Taiwan compatriot’ entry card — ugh — and yes, he thinks it’s stupid too). The difference between us is that he limits his speech on this topic to friends, and I’m vocal about it online.

“Does it feel bad,” I asked, “to not be able to say what you really think online because you have to go to China for work?”
”Well, it’s for business,” he said. “It’s just what I have to do.”
”Right, but maybe you feel some way about it. Although you have freedom of speech in Taiwan, perhaps you don’t really have freedom of speech because you have to go to China sometimes. So China still decides in some way what you can and can’t say online.”
”I do think it’s wrong and unfair, but I try not to think about it too much.”
”Why not?”
”Because it would just make me sad.”

Fair enough.

Sometimes I wonder if this kind of attitude — thinking about it sucks, so I try not to — plays into the tendency in Taiwan to live life as usual in the face of a massive threat from the bully next door.

Perhaps not: I’m not Taiwanese, but I also get through my days trying not to think too much about the ever-present threat from China. I choose to live here despite that threat. While there might be a cultural aspect to acting like everything is fine and running smoothly on the surface, I don’t want to put too much stock into it as an explanation.

The international commentariat, however, seems to love observing that Taiwan doesn’t appear scared or anxious enough, and assuming that this means they don’t take the threat seriously, or have no will to fight. A prime example of this can be found in the Nicholas Kristof opinion piece that I previously tore apart.

I also see lots of posts from people who want to visit Taiwan but are nervous about the threat of a Chinese attack, many of whom seem to think that Taiwan is always in a state of high alert (I’m sure the government is on some level — at least I hope so — but the people aren’t).

As I’ve written before, and as Catherine Lila Chou and Mark Harrison noted in Revolutionary Taiwan, refusing to live cowering in fear, insisting instead on acting exactly like citizens of the sovereign developed country that Taiwan is, is a form of resistance itself. China wants Taiwanese to be constantly terrified; through that terror, they want them to vote only pro-China politicians into office so that Taiwan might be slowly annexed despite almost no Taiwanese wanting to be part of the PRC.

Saying no to this is resistance. Getting up and going to work or living your life each day, voting for who you want to vote for without fear, saying what you want to say, is resistance. I’ve been to China for work before, and have essentially torpedoed any chance I have at doing so again (I don’t particularly want to, but the paychecks were fat). Speaking up, despite being a literal nobody, is my form of resistance.

My friend may not speak up as I do, but I can guarantee he votes for who he wants and lives his life as he pleases instead of being a nervous wreck all the time.

Predicting that people won’t fight because they’re living their lives now just doesn’t work. People, Kristof included, praise Ukrainians for standing up for their country, but I am quite sure that before the Russian invasion, they were also living their lives as usual. To say that Taiwanese won’t fight because they’re not acting scared now, or their society is too gentle (it’s not that gentle; street crime may be low but gangs and scammers are frighteningly common) is not only unfair to Taiwan, it feeds right into Chinese narratives. China doesn’t want Taiwan to have the will to fight. They want Taiwanese themselves to think nobody will fight, and therefore there’s no point in resisting. Why play into that? Why police how Taiwanese people should and should not act now based on what you think the Taiwanese reaction should be?

The best tool we have to discern whether Taiwan will fight are polls. They’re certainly not perfect: nobody knows how they as an individual will act when war comes knocking on their door. Some people who put on bravado now may cower later. Some who say it’s not worth fighting might suddenly realize how much their democracy and sovereignty mean to them. Self-reporting is notoriously problematic. But it’s all we have, and to some extent we have to trust people at their word.

To put it another way, Taiwan isn’t required to perform anxiety to anyone else’s standards. People are not required to wreck their nervous systems just for commentators and observers to feel Taiwan fully understands the threat. People know. They’re not stupid. As my friend said, however, feeling sad or anxious sucks, and sometimes it’s better to simply live.

The polls say that not only are Taiwanese willing to resist a Chinese invasion, but that the majority would do so even if the USA didn’t intervene. This is not a fluke; polls have consistently shown that most Taiwanese believe in fighting for their country if it is invaded. There’s no good way to dismiss that based on one’s personal opinions about Taiwan.

Taiwan is war averse at the same time. People will consistently vote against initiatives that they might otherwise support, such as applying to change the name of Taiwan’s Olympic team, to avoid tensions with China. That means they’re not willing to fight over symbols for the sake of it, but it does not mean they won’t fight when it counts, when their actual sovereignty is at stake.

This poll is also important because it refutes the notion that Taiwanese resistance to China is somehow an American psy-op, or that Taiwan is betting on the US to step in. They know perfectly well that it might not happen, and choose resistance anyway. The truth is, for most of the post-war era, the US has opposed de jure Taiwan independence, and supported (or at least tolerated) the KMT, which sees Taiwan as Chinese just as the CCP does. Taiwan’s desire to resist China has nothing to do with the US. The desire for de jure independence exists despite the US, not because of it.

That’s not to say I don’t worry about Taiwan’s future or ability to fight. I absolutely do, from voting patterns to energy security to the defense budget.

Taiwanese voters choose whomever they want to represent them, regardless of China’s threats. The thing about voting as you please, however, is that it might go in multiple directions. For my friends, it typically means choosing the DPP despite Chinese retaliation (if China says it will only communicate with the KMT, then voting against the KMT is also a form of resistance). For others, it might mean voting for the KMT despite, not because of, their pro-China policies. I do know people who have no desire to be annexed by China, but don’t want to feel ‘forced’ to vote for the DPP for that reason alone.

I hate the KMT — I personally have no forgiveness in my heart for decades of brutal repression and mass murder under the old dictatorship, care about Taiwan more than the ROC, and don’t think Taiwan is fundamentally Chinese — but I suppose I can understand this.

I do worry, however, that electing KMTers to national-level positions including the legislature will do…well, exactly what it has done: make it difficult to pass a realistic and necessary defense budget. I just doubt that everyone who voted for their local KMT gangster and/or nepo baby had this at the top of their mind on election day. Most Taiwanese don’t want to be annexed by the PRC, therefore, it makes sense that they would want a robust defense budget.

Polls seem to support this, though the data I could find is a few months out of date. Although overall support for increased defense spending is very slightly below 50%, support outweighed disagreement in all age groups but one (hint: it’s the age group that is also more likely to vote KMT). More people support than oppose defense spending increases overall — opposition was 39.7% according to the poll.

People who don’t want to fight to protect their country’s sovereignty would, one expects, not support such defense spending. But they mostly do, indicating again that polls are our best, albeit imperfect, tool for assessing the public will. Not Some Guy’s Opinion On Taiwan.

It’s tempting to say that the difficulty passing Lai Ching-te’s special defense budget isn’t just a KMT/DPP split, nor does it indicate that all KMTers oppose cutting defense spending as offered alternatives to Lai’s proposal also increase overall defense spending. While it’s true that how much Taiwan spends on defense is a nuanced conversation that requires considering everything else the country needs to do with its budget, I agree with Michael Turton that the opposition alternatives budget far too little and don’t set aside enough for developing asymmetric warfare capabilities:

American defense authorities last year spoke of turning the Taiwan Strait into a “Hellscape” in the event of a PRC invasion. Wen writes that last month the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) released a set of recommendations for creating that Hellscape in the Strait. The report recommended that Taiwan deploy drones to mine the sea. Once mines are in the water, ships can be channeled into areas where missiles can sink them….

“The technology is ready. The concept is ready. America’s top defense think tank published the playbook. All Taiwan needs is the budget,” Wen says.

The budget? The KMT has blocked the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) special budget proposal that would have funded this. The KMT’s own budget proposal, 70 percent smaller, mandates purchase of existing US weapons systems, and defunds the undersea drone program….

The only real beneficiary of the KMT’s smaller budget is PRC war planners. If the KMT budget passes, they will not have to face the asymmetric weapons of the type the US is facing against Iran. It be should noted that the Iran war is not only providing an avalanche of intel on US military practices, it is also showing the PRC how a great power should go about subduing a middle power which has top-notch engineers and significant asymmetric capabilities.

The whole article is good, and I suggest you go read it.

All this to say that concerns about Taiwan’s future are real. Taiwan does need the right defense budget to build the capability to resist China, potentially without US help and almost certainly without US boots on the ground. It does concern me that a bunch of pro-China yahoos in the legislature are wrecking this for Taiwan. It does not mean, however, that Taiwanese people are unaware of the threat or aren’t nervous enough about it.

They know, they say they’ll resist if and when it’s necessary, and in general people do want adequate defense spending should the worst occur.

Some friends visited me in Taipei last August, and I took them to Bao’an Temple (保安宮). While introducing the temple to them with the usual tour — I’m not a tour guide but having written about the temple, I can talk about it in some depth — we got to the shrine of Lady Zhusheng (註生娘娘), typically worshipped when asking for a pregnancy. I explained the practice of bringing either a red or white flower, and switching it for a flower of the other color depending on whether a son or daughter is wished for.

From this, we got onto the topic of gender preference in babies in East Asia and how its slow evolution where one does see families occasionally hoping for a daughter, my friend brought up the effects of the “one child policy”.

Me: “What? Huh? In Taiwan?”

My friend, it turns out, was unaware that there was never a one child policy in Taiwan, and in fact the government has more or less always encouraged families in the direction of hearty procreation. “That law is from China. But Taiwan has never been governed by the People’s Republic. Not even for a day. It’s a totally different government.”

”Really, not ever?”
”Never.”

My friend is a highly intelligent woman who had studied International Affairs in college. To be fair, she hadn’t concentrated on Asia (I had, switching after an illuminating study-abroad stint in southern India. Strongly influenced by Tamil politics, I hold an abiding dislike for the BJP).

Of course she was aware Taiwan wasn’t part of the PRC now, and I ruminated that it really wasn’t her fault that she hadn’t known that it never had been until she visited. We simply weren’t taught these things. There hadn’t been a good book covering Taiwan from a Taiwanese perspective in our curriculum. There may not have been one at all. Taiwan: A New History is more a collection of academic-leaning articles and was published while we were in college. State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle was from the end of the Martial Law era. The Great Transition, from 1989, focuses on KMT rule — the same KMT that insists Taiwan is culturally Chinese and part of China. Regardless, we weren’t required to read any of these.

What the world needed was a book about modern-day Taiwan and its push for identity and recognition from a Taiwanese perspective, or at least one that centers Taiwan, not some concept of China, be it the PRC or ROC.

Although I hadn’t read it yet, it turns out that I already had that book on my shelf: Revolutionary Taiwan, by Catherine Lila Chou and Mark Harrison.

The book covers an abbreviated Taiwanese history, with a strong emphasis on defining moments in the formation of Taiwanese identity. It starts by discussing how both Chinas — the PRC over in actual China, and the ROC here in Taiwan — oppose the formation of a clear Taiwanese identity based on the country’s unique history. This is a refreshing move away from the “here’s all you need to know about why Taiwan matters” books which are often blue-centric if not straight-up China-centered, quietly pro-KMT and written by people who are perhaps not experts on Taiwan.

If you suspect this is a dig on Kerry Brown’s Why Taiwan Matters (a stolen title), you are correct.

It also moves away from the common-to-the-point-of-boring “silicon shield” that people talk about regarding why Taiwan is important to the world. I understand why people make that argument; I just feel that Taiwan matters for far deeper, more existential reasons. I don’t think every crucial thing in the world is about the economies of other countries.

After that, it goes into the different ways one might “tell” Taiwanese history from a variety of perspectives, moving up to the present day with discussions of current social issues, the COVID-19 response and why the term “Chinese Taipei” exists at all.

It’s a short book, 161 pages sans bibliography. That’s perfect when your goal is to encourage people to understand Taiwan without giving them a university-length reading list. It’s not too much to ask someone to read one brief book. I read it in two days. Someone who takes their time, perhaps reading a section before bed, might finish it in a week. For people who perhaps don’t know Taiwan intimately and only care to a certain extent (perhaps to the extent that their friends live there), that’s perfect.

It’s also an excellent choice for university curricula. Most students, even in International Relations, are unlikely to take a class centered entirely on Taiwan (though some will). In broader survey classes covering a region, it’s common to assign one larger regional history text, and a few shorter readings about more specific issues in that region. Revolutionary Taiwan is perfectly positioned to encourage university lecturers to decide that Taiwan is worth a discussion, and to center Taiwan, not China, in that discussion.

I like books like these because, even when I know all of the broader facts, there’s always something new to learn. For example, I know that the early Republic of China hadn’t considered Taiwan part of its territory. As far as I’m aware, Sun Yat-sen never considered Taiwan anything other than Japanese. I had not known that the first provisional constitution mentioned “Outer Mongolia, Tibet and Qinghai” along with twenty-two provinces, but not Taiwan, nor that the constitutions of 1923 and 1931 hadn’t included Taiwan either.

Revolutionary Taiwan also makes strong arguments for Taiwanese identity and recognition. Frankly, you’d have to hold some animosity toward Taiwan to even attempt to tear them down. For example:

Without a paradigm shift in the goals and ideology of the CCP, or significantly stronger pledges of international support, the Taiwanese people cannot elect their way to an internationally-recognized Republic of Taiwan. The most they can do is try to evaluate, via the ballot box every two and four years, the best strategy — wether resistance, negotiation, or coerced cooperation — for preserving their democratic way of life. Choosing incorrectly could result in permanent losses. For now, deliverance — from invasion, annexation, or unwilling absorption — can only ever be conditional….

Thus, the Republic of China endures as a part of Beijing’s efforts to prevent a nation called Taiwan from coming into being. The CCP reaches out to the KMT in strategic ways but expresses only monomaniacal opposition to the DPP. It rejects the right of Taiwanese people to engage in the democratic process itself….

Yep. I also appreciate that the book calls Chinese pressure anything but “reunification” (barf). It is clear that the Taiwanese do not want to be annexed by China, so any taking of Taiwan by China is annexation, by invasion or otherwise. Many other books on Taiwan somehow forget this.

Later in the book, we get this gem:

Closed off by design to Taiwanese perspectives, the international system struggles to grasp the experience of a people who simply have no choice but to live with the threatening presence of their huge neighbor and whose everyday life is a form of resistance to relentless efforts to define their identity on their behalf.

YES. All the people complaining that Taiwan is not afraid enough, anxious enough, or willing enough to eat away its own insides over fear of China could stand to read this book. Refusing to bow down and just living life is a form of resistance. Constant anxiety wears you down and accomplishes nothing. All you can do is live.

Revolutionary Taiwan takes a good amount of time simply making a case for the validity of Taiwanese identity. In one passage, it talks about the National Museum of Taiwan History outside the city of Tainan:

At a press conference to celebrate the opening, the new director Lu Li-cheng (呂理政) declared, “We will present the history of the Taiwanese people in a museum designed for them.” The simplicity of this statement belied the boldness of the claim that “Taiwanese history” and “Taiwanese people” existed as categories that could be documented and displayed in a museum.

To me, this is just as worthwhile as, say, a huge museum in Taipei dedicated to all the treasures brought to Taiwan from China, which talks a lot about Chinese history and says little to nothing about Taiwan or Taiwanese history. Most of those treasures are from times in history — which was almost all of time — when Taiwan was neither a province nor a colony of China, and when Chinese people had little to no presence here. But, guess which museum most visitors put on their itineraries?

In too many articles and books ostensibly about Taiwan (but really about the writer’s desire to be recognized and applauded for having a Good Take on Taiwan), Taiwan is framed as being “dangerous” or doing dangerous things like, oh, voting or not wanting to be part of China. How dare they, right? Taiwan is so often blamed for China’s threats of violence, as though Taiwan somehow encourages or precipitates them.

Although I don’t wish to compare the struggle for Taiwanese nationhood to the struggle for civil rights in the United States, this victim-blaming does remind me of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words:

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn’t it like condemning the robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery?….We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber.”

Again, not to compare the two struggles, but China is the robber and Taiwan, the robbed. It is not wrong for them to continue their effort to build a nation just because an evil government next door doesn’t believe they have the right. They are not the ones precipitating violence — not wanting to be annexed is not violence. China is the one making the threats, not Taiwan. It is not acceptable to tell Taiwanese people they cannot decide their own identity or future.

Revolutionary Taiwan understands this, and gives the reader all the reasons they need to understand and appreciate Taiwan’s struggle for what it really is: a struggle for identity and dignity.

At 22 in Gyeongju, South Korea, gallivanting around with the man I’d eventually marry

This was an incredibly vulnerable post to write. I only felt I could publish it when I was in an emotional position of acceptance and self-embrace where love and validation of my struggles would help form a journey to better health. I’m not interested in fat-shaming, of me or anyone else. Nobody deserves that, even if it’s been done to them for years, in Asia, as someone who is not thin. If you feel the impulse, quiet it. If you can’t, go away. This is not for you. Thanks.

I promised an old friend from my year in China that I would scan some photos we’d both look upon with nostalgia, prioritizing any photos of people we both knew, or of ourselves. We’d worked for the same school, but different branches, and taken one trip with a fellow coworker to East Turkestan (also called Xinjiang, in the far west of China).

Perhaps I finally got around to it because I just finished Philip Pullman’s The Rose Field, which takes place in a fictional other-universe ‘Sinkiang’; regardless, I pulled out the photos recently and began scanning. I hadn’t looked at some of these in a decade or more.

I may do an East Turkestan photo essay at some point just so people can see the place that they’re condemning to CCP cultural genocide when they do nothing, or worse, defend China’s actions. That’s for a future post. I do have many lovely photographs to share.

My first thoughts were pure nostalgia: oh yes, I’ve been to this contentious part of the world. I did learn rudimentary Uyghur. I can still speak a few sentences of it. Because of this, I feel a connection, however tenuous and distant, to the Uyghur struggle for freedom.

In East Turkestan

I felt nostalgia for who I was: to be 22, broke as a joke with no major health problems. To still fit into vintage clothes. To have a net worth of three digits — high three digits if I was lucky — and still somehow manage all these adventures on essentially no money. I’ve forgotten how to have adventures without a sound financial cushion, which of course renders them hardly adventures at all. Maybe that’s a very privileged thing to say, but I’ll stick by it as a true emotion.

As I scanned and reminisced, though, a sadder thought shone through these old memories.

They’re beautiful, the pictures. Mostly. They show a smiling young woman and her friends in a moment of time while we navigated this slice of our dewy, uncertain twenties in a foreign country. We probably thought that country would help us “find ourselves” or some such nonsense. We were only beginning to realize that you are who you are wherever you go, and foreign locales are not mere backdrops for white people seeking self-discovery.

Regardless, that Jenna was smiling, but underneath the smile was the ineffable melancholy of something not quite right.

While I was in China and indeed long after I left, I described it as an “interesting” experience, but could conjure no floating veneration, no effervescent reverence for my year in that country. I’ve loved every other place I’ve lived — India, Taiwan. I’ve loved the places where I’ve enjoyed extended stays — Turkey, the UK. Why couldn’t I conjure much love for China?

It mostly made me feel bad about myself, and I couldn’t quite explain why. It’s easy to point at the CCP and say that they were responsible for all the worst parts of China. That’s often correct. It’s common to say that one loves the country and the culture but not the government. True enough, I guess. How can one hate a country?

I didn’t hate the country. But I didn’t love it either; I felt compelled to, but I simply could not. Even in these photos, something was held back. It wasn’t the government, it was some other reaction from my contact with the culture; like I was a battery whose positive end had somehow been inserted into the slot the wrong way, and now the whole thing was either completely dead, or a fire hazard.

But what does that mean, really?

I’ve never been thin; I’m naturally a bit tall, with broad shoulders and Eastern European curves. Whether they’re from my Armenian or Polish side doesn’t particularly matter.

I spent most of those years, however, absolutely convinced I was irredeemably fat. A schlubby gorgon, a horrific cryptid. Something Chthulhu would spit back out like, nah, no thanks. Got any hot ones?

All societies are complex and dynamic and have people of all sizes. And nobody, regardless of their actual size, deserves to feel bullied or belittled for their body. There are differences in cultures around the world, and many cultures bully larger women with microaggressions at best and open mockery at worst, but I’m still not sure whether to define this as an aspect of the culture with which I was incompatible, or something other than culture, something merely rude.

There were the little things: clothing rarely fit unless I bought a size that would be embarrassing to me in the United States. Not that we should be embarrassed about our size, but the copious Xs just didn’t match up to my Western size. In China, I bought men’s sweaters and pants if I needed them. Often, these were too small as well, offering no room at all for a proper butt.

And I was made to feel it, with looks and often comments. In the USA I was merely chubby, at worst, I was kinda fat when I was fat, and curvy when I’d managed to lose the weight.

In China. I was fatty fat fat fatty fat.

In many parts of Asia it’s more socially acceptable than in my native slice of the US to comment on someone else’s body, but it felt most common in China. My boss made offhand remarks about my size. My closest local friend, Xiaomin, told me about the man who broke up with her because he couldn’t circle her waist with his hands. Not really about me, but that kind of ridiculous posturing about one woman’s weight is an attack on all women. Xiaomin was, of course, thinner than me, an average-to-slender build for a Chinese woman. I was an average-to-chubby build for a Western woman, a Chinese fatty fat fattoo.

Not everything about me was reduced to my weight, but it happened often enough that it bothered me: I couldn’t really eat properly under that much pressure and gave up white rice (which, incidentally, led to weight loss). I showed my students a picture of my situationship, who was of Indian heritage, calling him my “boyfriend” because that’s the word they understood. My slender coworker showed a picture of her own situationship, a conventionally handsome white man, and someone commented that she found him because she “takes care of herself”; she then glanced back at me.

Aha, so fatphobia is tied up with racism too. Coulda guessed it.

I don’t want to say that this was the moment that ruined China for me, but I never did improve my overall impression of the place.

In Taiwan people make comments too. I usually laugh it off, or refuse to act embarrassed or like I even have the time for such nonsense. I could do that in China too, of course, but it was so constant. Moreso than Taiwan, truly.

Not that it matters — again, no woman deserves this — but I was thinner then, too. The sexism was so rampant, and not just about weight. Xiaomin got fired because the gossipy girls in the office blamed something on her that I’m fairly certain she did not do. The owner of the school had her boyfriend strut around as the director because parents would better trust a man in charge of operations. As for what he really was, well, best not say.

In India on that same trip, dressed locally because it was the easiest way to get men to stop harassing me so much (also I loved that sari dearly)

These comments do happen in other places. But they’re rare and I can deflect them. They’re not so prevalent, so wholly inescapable, that they begin to define you.

I left China with a bitter, barely-defined taste in my mouth about the way women are treated in that culture, and found it much more bearable in Taiwan where, at least, there has been a growing movement to end this kind of bullying of women and their bodies. Taiwanese women still face body-shaming, but social awareness of the misguidedness of such treatment is gaining traction. Bullying fat women never provokes weight loss: they already knew. All bullies do is wreck the self-esteem they need to assess whether it’s necessary to take charge of their bodies, and how.

I’d like to say that more than twenty years of living in Asia — that’s almost the entirety of my adult life — didn’t impact my self-esteem, that I didn’t let it get to me. That I still loved myself for who I was regardless.

That would be a lie. It did get to me. I look back at these pictures and think even if this woman had been fat, she didn’t deserve the way she was treated that year.

I might even say, from the vantage point of 2025, that that woman had attractive qualities and should have thought of herself as such. She deserved to see herself as a whole person. She did not deserve every Chinese person with an opinion on her body offering it up. She did not need her grocery store and restaurant purchases commented in by clerks. “Oh, I see you like chocolate, ha ha!”
”Oooh, vegetables. Very healthy.”
”A second bowl? Are you sure?”

But at the time, it felt like all of Asia was conspiring to tell her — me — that I was indeed just a crashed planetoid mass.

At the Bo Hanging Coffins

Sometimes they didn’t need to say anything at all. I’d walk into a store and the clerk would try to sell me a blouse that was more of a poncho, or a bedsheet with a hole cut in it like a Halloween ghost costume. Why don’t you buy this? It’ll fit you!

I realize, of course, that it really doesn’t matter to anyone else what a person weighs, and even if you are fat, that’s your body and your business, and fat people absolutely can be and are beautiful. Nobody deserves judgement for the body they have. People are just people with bodies that they can or can’t control to varying degrees due to complex factors, and it has nothing to do with anyone else.

I realize it now. I would have said the same thing then, but not applied it to myself. That’s how low self-esteem works. But I still wouldn’t have wanted to spend all that time in a society that tore me down constantly. And, as a white woman, I suspect I got that treatment quite a bit less than Chinese women did!

It wasn’t just Asia. My short time in the US as an adult also sent me the message that I was an unlovable blob of lard and gristle. But at least the clothing in the stores fit me, and not even the largest size, and at least people didn’t typically make unhelpful or passive-aggressive comments. Just about everyone kept it to themselves, if they thought of it at all. Even in Taiwan, such comments are rare.

Again, I don’t know if the difference here is cultural and I’m a poor fit (pun intended) for that culture because I can’t laugh it off or pretend it’s okay, or if it’s just rude people being rude. I don’t know if my discomfort in China originated with my low self-esteem, which made every comment feel like everyone was out to get me, or whether the way I was treated there actually was worse. I lean toward the latter, though. I get those comments in the US and Taiwan, but they’re so much more rare. Interestingly, I did not get them much in India, to my memory.

I’d love to say this is all in the past and the more self-aware and self-respecting person that I am now has gotten over it. I’m not sure I have, though.

East Turkestan

Spending all of those years with my body type in this part of the world taught me that I didn’t need to bother with makeup or the finer points of hair styling, because I was fat and none of that could help me, unless I was auditioning for the role of Beach Ball the Clown (this is how I thought of myself, not what I think about other people). Perhaps that’s a good thing; now I don’t need makeup to feel good about myself, and indeed don’t wear it. That’s probably been a net positive for my skin. It’s still a soul-killer to think it doesn’t matter for you, though.

It’s affected me in darker ways, too. As I’ve fought the diabetes that came on suddenly after my first fight with COVID, I’ve realized that I can keep it in check with diet, and if I really work at it, I can probably come off the medication.

Here’s a real mind-fuck though: when one is first diagnosed with diabetes, they tend to lose a lot of weight. I did that, kept it off, and am now two sizes smaller than I had been. The weight loss curve stopped when I began medication. I absolutely thought to myself, hey, maybe if I could have the life-threatening untreated diabetes for a little longer I could be three or four sizes smaller and then start the medication!

What the absolute shitbrick of thinking is that? That’s messed up. It’s disordered. But, dear readers, I thought it. Then struck it from my mind and worked on my health.

That has made me wonder, though: when I do eat unhealthily, and not just as a treat, is it because I’ve convinced my subconscious that it doesn’t matter? That I’m going to look like one of those sacrificial hogs at Taiwanese shrines no matter what, so why not have a second plate of mac & cheese when I’m not even that hungry? That I may as well eat more pierogies because I’m gonna look like a pierogi whether I do or not?

That sucks. That’s not healthy. Not just because it’s not true, but because that can do real damage to your insides. It’s psychologically horrific, as it sets your entire internal eating mechanism off-kilter.

If there’s one thing I wish I could tell everyone whose unhelpful commentary, its that it doesn’t help, and hiding it behind fake “concern” doesn’t either. In these pictures, I look happy. I am, somewhat, even though my year in China was tumultuous and most days I felt lucky to have any money at all. I certainly had no self-esteem, and much of that came from life in China itself.

But I was also fighting the spectre of self-loathing when I would have been much better off focusing on actual flaws. I had a temper, and I could be self-centered (still can, though I try not to be). I didn’t know how to manage my undiagnosed ADHD. I probably had depressive episodes, which I’m medicated for now. I didn’t even realize it; I just thought I deserved to feel that way. Truly! Why shouldn’t Porko McFries feel sad? She’s an oinker!

As everyone does, I had plenty of real imperfections, and still do.

Maybe now that I’ve seen these pictures and realized that I was never the person I’d thought I was outwardly, I can spend more time looking inward.

And being more honest about what exactly it was about China that puts me off. Because yes, it’s the government, but it’s also a tendency in the culture that I simply have no tolerance for. Culture doesn’t excuse bullying. My year in China came with many high points, and many fascinating areas of cultural exchange and exploration. It also wrecked me.

Trans Pride 2024

A very good article has just come out in Taiwan Insight about trans rights in Taiwan. In it, Ricarda Rodenas writes:

According to the Ministry of the Interior’s executive order issued in 2008, a person must undergo sex-reassignment surgery (SRS) to change their legal gender. This requirement blocks an estimated 90 per cent of transgender people from obtaining national identification that matches their gender identity. Therefore, every aspect of daily life that requires ID, from registering at a clinic to passing through airport security, becomes a potential site of distress and discrimination.

Rodenas goes on to point out that this has been challenged by some transgender people in Taiwan, who have successfully fought for the right to hold a national ID card that matches their gender identity. However, most people don’t have the resources for this kind of legal recourse — of course they don’t. If you can’t access surgery (likely because of the cost), you probably can’t afford to engage the legal system, either.

The article is worth a read, and I won’t repeat its points in detail here. However, I wanted to extend the discussion of one specific point that Rodenas almost makes, but not quite.

It will take me awhile to get there, but I want to talk about how “no self-ID” is fundamentally at odds with the notion of Taiwanese identity. If we state that a person cannot choose what gender to identify and be identified as, and that identity is in part constructed by others and their beliefs about who you are, then how can we say that Taiwan has the right to self-identify as, say, Taiwan?

Fundamentally, the notion of “no self-ID” (also the name of an anti-trans organization in Taiwan) is founded on the assumption that self-identification with a specific group is not sufficient qualification to actually be a part of that group. It’s inherent in the name. Sometimes, this makes sense, at least on its face: think of all those obviously white people in the US who claim to be “Native American” because there’s a story that their great-great grandmother was Native American. Sometimes she was, sometimes not, but the lived experience of these people is ‘white’, and I would indeed argue that can’t just be Native American because you say you are.

In other ways, however, it makes no sense at all. A trans person likely doesn’t have a lived experience as just a man or woman; this is anecdotal but every trans person I know has known their reality is different in some way and often been treated as such by society, often through discrimination in not conforming to societally-imposed gender norms.

The realities of gender in this world are pretty clear to me: biological sex itself is very complicated. Plenty of people don’t fall, even physically (including chromosomes in some cases) within a gender binary. Some countries require gender reassignment surgery before allowing one to legally change one’s gender; others don’t offer any path at all. If a person wants to change their legal gender, most can’t access the surgery requirements, or in their country there is simply no way to so do. Some, I suppose, don’t want surgery at all.

I accept the idea that gender, as a social construct, is changeable. I therefore see no problem with allowing people to self-identify as another gender. I don’t care about their genitals, because I’m not a weirdo. As a cisgender woman, I have no problem at all with people assigned male at birth identifying as women, surgery or not. I could spend more time on this, but I won’t. If you care about my personal feelings on the matter, ask me (respectfully) in the comments.

No Self-ID cuts their FAQ a little short on this issue. They state:

The full name of Self-ID is Gender Self-Identification. It is the concept that by “declaring to be another gender”, one can receive new legal documents as well as the rights to be treated as that gender.

The transgender rights activists who support Self-ID usually agree that:

• One’s sex is their privacy.

• One can ask for the rights and treatments based on their gender (identity) with the society and nation’s neglect of their sex.

• If anyone disagree to any above points, it is a discrimination against transgender people.

In Taiwan, the supporters of Self-ID such as Taiwan Alliance to Promote Civil Partnership Rights (TAPCPR) aim at the legal sex change based on one’s self-declaration without providing any medical reports. This system can also be called as “Free Legal Sex Change” or “Unconditional Legal Sex Change”.

However, Self-ID is more than legal sex change. It is a concept of “self-declaration” which will influence the making of policies previously based on sex.

They do not take their view to its logical conclusion here, which is that people have no right to self-identify…presumably, as anything. That identity is, to some extent, decided by other people, be they doctors or society at large.

There is a group in Taiwan, however, who states this obliquely: the Taiwan Statebuilding Party (the link is to my old blog post referencing their viewpoint).

Rodenas doesn’t mention this leftist Taiwanese party as one of the opponents of trans rights in Taiwan, but they have come out against it in the past. Rodenas only mentions the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU):

A concrete stance did make its way into third-party politics. The Greens (GPT) nominated Abby Wu, Taiwan’s first transgender woman, to run for the Legislative Yuan and made “defending bodily autonomy for people of all genders” a part of their party platform. On the other hand, the Taiwan Solidarity Union firmly positioned itself as the only political party against abolishing compulsory surgery for changing one’s legal gender.

I don’t pay much attention to the TSU any longer because they no longer hold much, if any, political influence. However, they’re not the only third party to come out against abolishing the surgery requirement. In 2024, Statebuilding wrote a long, difficult-to-read post about it.

Here’s the part I take issue with:

在「免術換證」部分，由於長期以來相關立法的空缺，台灣現行法規事實上從未規定「性別該怎麼認定」，這是推動免術換證的民間組織提起訴訟的立基點，也是現在的爭議核心。如果性別這種身分僅僅只是一種自我宣示，而不會影響到其他社會生活實踐，那麼或許過去大法官、現在立法院對性別定義的存而不論，可能是一種「進步」的表現。但問題是，「身分」的實踐不能自足，必須透過他人來完成，亦即身分從來都不只是一種想法的宣示，而是一種進入特定社會遊戲規則的要求。

My translation (I did use Google to help out as this is a bit tough):

Regarding “gender-based identity without surgery”, due to the long-standing lack of relevant legislation, current Taiwanese regulations have never actually stipulated “how gender should be determined.” This is the basis for the lawsuit filed by the NGOs advocating for this verification process, and it remains the core of the current controversy. If gender identity were merely a self-declaration and did not affect other aspects of social life, then perhaps the past leniency shown by the Grand Justices and the current Legislative Yuan in defining gender could be considered a sign of “progress.” However, the problem is that the practice of “identity” cannot be self-sufficient; it must be accomplished through others. In other words, identity is never just a declaration of an idea, but a requirement for entering the rules of a specific society. (Emphasis mine).

Anti-Statebuilding signs at Trans Pride 2024

First of all, as a cisgender woman, I support welcoming trans women to women’s spaces. (Transgender issues are not only about trans women, but trans women seem to be the group the anti-trans lobby is so afraid of). So, it’s unfair and simply not right to say that because “women” want and need spaces free of those with male genitalia, that therefore they should be welcomed. I’m a cis woman, and I not only don’t want or need such spaces, but I actively reject being a part of exclusionary spaces!

That’s not my main point, however. I want to get back to Taiwan.

If the KMT — who actively oppose Taiwanese self-identity as Taiwan — were to take this stance, I wouldn’t be surprised. (As far as I know they take no obvious stance on the issue, and Rodenas appears to agree). It would suck, but it would at least make sense within their general viewpoint that entities do not have the right to choose their own future. To them, Taiwan is the ROC, and part of “China”, regardless of how the Taiwanese themselves identify, or how they view their country.

Statebuilding, however, takes the opposite view on Taiwan. It’s right there in the name: they want to build Taiwan as a state. A nation. This is built on the notion that Taiwanese see themselves as Taiwanese, not Chinese, and their state is as they identify it, not the rest of the world and certainly not China or the KMT.

One can argue that Taiwan is a state because its history shows it to be one: thousands of years of Indigenous history, and comparatively little time spent as a colony of China under the Qing. I do believe this, but the rest of the world doesn’t. The construct of the ROC doesn’t accept this, the KMT doesn’t accept it, and certainly China doesn’t accept it. It’s evidence enough for me, but not enough for those “others” to support Taiwan in entering the global space as Taiwan.

None of the other evidence seems to convince the world (or the KMT) either: that there is no clear treaty declaring whom Taiwan belongs to; that even during the Qing Dynasty, Taiwan was treated as a colony for all but about 12 years, not an integral part of China; that Taiwan is sovereign now. Let me repeat: these are all valid reasons, but the world doesn’t care.

Even so, I support Hong Kong, Tibetan and Uyghur independence. They’re not currently sovereign. There is a treaty that cedes British control of most of Hong Kong back to China. Nobody seems to care how Tibet and East Turkestan (Xinjiang) were treated under the Qing. They still deserve self-determination.

That is, self-ID.

The rest of the world doesn’t seem to see it that way, however. They either don’t recognize Taiwan’s, ahem, self-identification, or they actively repudiate it. Even Taiwan’s diplomatic allies are actually engaged in relations with the Republic of China, not this self-determined notion of Taiwan that is rooted in Taiwan’s own identity and choice. The idea of Taiwan rests merely on the declaration of Taiwan as Taiwan, and many Taiwanese want to enter society — the global community — as Taiwan based on that.

To steal a phrase from someone on Facebook that I wish were mine, regardless of its history, Taiwan was Assigned Chinese at Birth. Only by insisting on a different identity can it obtain that identity.

In other words, the entire foundation of any pro-Taiwan party, but arguably especially the Statebuilding Party, is that Taiwan has the right of self-ID. That the practice of Taiwan’s identity can be self-sufficient, and does not need to be accomplished by others.

If they genuinely felt that identity in and of itself could not be “self-sufficient” and “must be accomplished through others”, if they genuinely believed that “identity is never just a declaration of an idea, but a requirement for entering the rules of a specific society”, then they fundamentally could not support Taiwanese self-identity and therefore, de jure, globally recognized independence.

But they do. They contradict themselves. For Taiwan, self-ID is acceptable. For transgender people, it’s not. Why?

I’d go so far as to say that if you are anti-trans, you cannot be pro-Taiwan. If you are against self-ID for transgender people, you cannot be in favor of self-ID for Taiwan. It’s hypocritical.

That is, if you deny the notion of identity as a self-declaration, then how can you support the notion of Taiwan’s self-declaration as Taiwan? With its own government still called the ROC, and nobody in the world recognizing Taiwan as Taiwan (at best, it is recognized as the ROC, and at worst it is not recognized as anything at all), with an ROC constitution and flag, and only a few months of unrecognized existence as the Republic of Taiwan back in 1895, what does Taiwan have to declare itself as a nation other than its own will, regardless of what can be “accomplished through others”?

Nothing. It only has itself. That is, it has self-ID.

Happy Lunar New Year!

Sometimes, I avoid writing posts because, while I do have an opinion on this or that news item, it’s not particularly well-suited to a more verbose format. At these times, I really miss the old Twitter.

I’ve decided this time to do a series of “shorts”: a link to an article or video, a quick summary, and my opinion.

Let’s start with the movie Murder of the Century, supposedly about the murders of family members of democracy activist Lin Yi-hsiung on February 28, 1980. February 28, locally called “228”, is also an important day in Taiwanese history, and many believe it was intentionally chosen as the date of the murders.

Apparently the movie producers failed to contact Lin or gain the Lin family’s consent to make the movie; the actors were not apprised of this and are demanding a halt to production. Even weirder, the leaked script implies that another pro-democracy activist committed the murders. That, of course, makes no sense and although the murders have never been solved, is probably not what happened.

According to my Taiwanese teacher, the implied murderer is either Su Beng or You Si-kun. General gossip is that funding for the film is questionable, and may have come from China, the KMT, or some sort of funnel from China through the KMT (honestly I’m not even sure how the CCP and KMT differ at this point).

My opinion? No one is that stupid. This wasn’t a dumb mistake. You’d have to be too much of a hopeless moron to fail to do the most basic groundwork when creating what seems to be a well-funded film. I’m just a blogger and even I know that you simply would not do this blindly.

So, while I can’t prove it, I’d easily bet that China is ramping up its disinformation campaign. Not content with garbage-filled websites and misleading articles and posts in Line groups — among other things — they’re trying to discredit Taiwan’s pro-democracy forces through big-budget films. That, or the KMT. Honestly, both. Is it even a secret anymore that the KMT takes money from the CCP?

Next up, the Taiwanese legislature has pushed through a bill exempting the China Youth Corps from the Ill-Gotten Assets regulations. These were put in place years ago by the DPP to find all the money the KMT stole and hoarded from its time as the dictators of Taiwan and wealthiest political party in the world.

There’s a lot here, but I just have one thing to say: now we know where the KMT is hiding a bunch of ill-gotten assets. Thanks for pointing us to them, KMT.

Third, the US House of Representatives has passed the PROTECT Taiwan Act, which warns China of “consequences” if it threatens Taiwan’s security.

Frankly, good. I can’t stand Republicans, but good.

I’ve long been worried that the KMT’s general pro-China stance and the DPP’s general pro-US stance would start to be a problem for the US as Trump’s presidency grows, well, more and more demented, and I mean that literally. Quite unlike the attitude Taiwanese people seemed to once have of Trump — someone who was a bit of a quack but pro-Taiwan, so support for him was higher than you’d think or want — most people I talk to now think he is, at the very least, sick in the head. They don’t seem to care that much about Venezuela, and they think threats against Greenland are a bit of a joke, but there’s no longer any way to hide that the dude is just a whackjob.

It’s great that people are realizing this, though my main evidence is anecdotal. However, an unstable US with an unstable president (again, I mean that literally) might make China look like the more appealing choice to some fence-sitters. Certainly, I’ve heard people say that if the US is going to be so unreliable, then maybe the KMT has a point that Taiwan needs to make nice with China.

To be clear, this won’t work. China only wants to play at diplomacy with Taiwan insofar as it furthers their annexation goal, and will only ever use it to try and push Taiwan toward annexation. It will never be interested in Taiwan’s perspective or opinion on the matter. China simply does not care what Taiwan wants. Every “diplomatic” win is just another strategy by China to salami-slice Taiwan into a dependent or tributary state, leading to eventual absorption. This is usually done through economic agreements that the KMT insist will be good for Taiwan, but only ever seem to benefit China. There is no world in which diplomacy with this kind of government will lead to stability, security and peace.

But, not everyone thinks that deeply about it, and some people might glance the surface of the issue, read some disinformation, and think that better relations with China are more important than bolstering Taiwan’s relationship with an increasingly deranged US government. At least, it’s an easy way to attack the DPP’s friendliness towards whoever is in charge in the US.

The only spot of hope I see here is that Taiwanese mostly seem to care about whatever will protect Taiwan, not the bigger picture of what another country is doing (see: Taiwan-Israel relations, and doesn’t Taiwan buy Russian oil?). I don’t even blame Taiwan for this: under such an existential threat, they have to do whatever is necessary to protect themselves. Any other country would probably do the same. It’s time we stopped judging Taiwan so harshly for just trying to survive in an very turbulent world with a massive threat just off the coast. I hate President Pedophile, but I don’t blame Taiwan for trying to work with him.

Steps like the PROTECT act and lowering tariffs are a means to that end.

A few quick ones:

Taiwan reaffirms support for new nuclear technology

Frankly, good. I think it’s time we stop assuming the DPP is totally anti-nuclear (the KMT is quite pro-nuclear). Yes, they play up anti-nuclear sentiment because so many of their supporters oppose it, but we need reasonable policy that is not opposed to a technology per se, but is willing to look at any option that can be done safely. The key here, and what the KMT fails to understand, is “safely”. The KMT has utterly failed to gain public trust on nuclear issues because frankly, it hasn’t even tried. It doesn’t care what the public thinks. It doesn’t think public consent is necessary.

It is, though, and I do think that if approached correctly, nuclear is an option for Taiwan. Just not in the haphazard “we don’t need no environmental assessments!” way the KMT approaches it.

KMT-CCP Forum was not political, KMT says

Haha, LOL.

The CCP only ever wants to interact with Taiwan if they’re pushing a strategy aimed at eventual annexation. Tourism, business, disaster prevention? All past avenues they’ve used to try to force Taiwan down a path it doesn’t want to go down. Remember all those Chinese tourists in Taiwan? Remember how the businesses catering to them were “one dragon” (一條龍) businesses — owned start to finish by the same organization — with the profits mostly going to China? Remember economic agreements that bled Taiwan’s workforce, mostly creating jobs in China? Remember how, once upon a time, China tried to insist that international disaster aid to Taiwan must go through China?

Not political, my big fat white butt.

What is it with old farts who spent time in Taiwan once upon a time — usually in Taipei, and usually without a lot of experience in the rest of the country — opining on Taiwan’s threat of war now, and won’t read a single poll?

Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times op-ed from January 17 is just such a time capsule. Late in the piece he says that he spent time in Taiwan in the 1980s. For once, I feel like being a literal child in the 1980s, not old enough to have lived in Taiwan then, is a boon rather than a drawback. I’m here now, and I know what Taiwan is like now. His opinions are of that time as well. Some oldster who knew what Taiwan was like back in the day but has no idea what a 2026 Taiwan could be. It may as well be from the 1680s, it’s so outdated.

The piece starts off okay (merely okay) by outlining what China might do in an invasion of Taiwan, and mentioning common grayzone tactics. Sure, fine, whatever. He talks about undersea cables potentially being severed, slowing Taiwan’s internet connection. I don’t know if Kristof has been paying attention recently, but China has already tried grayzone tactics to sever these cables. I didn’t notice any slowdown, but then I live in the wealthiest part of the country.

He also ignores the most ubiquitous grayzone tactic, as though the Internet barely exists, or is only used for email and chat rooms: disinformation. Plenty about how China might attempt a “decapitation” by bombing the centers of government (again — okay, sure), nothing about what it’s doing right now, bombarding people’s Line chats with fake news, setting up fake websites, and using old, China-acquired media to convince people that being part of China isn’t so bad.

Frankly, considering the way disinformation got Donald Pedophile Trump elected and played a massive role in the Rohingya genocide, among other things, it’s a wonder that more Taiwanese haven’t been turned into logic-lacking unificationists. The disinformation is having an effect as it always does, but Taiwan is still not on board with annexation by China.

I would know. I’m here now, which is more than I can say for Kristof. I have neighbors who spout pro-China garbage they saw on some fake news TV program. I’ve been handed disinformation turds by a literal legislator that my neighbors elected.

My neighbors, almost all deep blue/pro-KMT, are nice people in the day-to-day. I don’t hold out much faith in their critical thinking skills, however.

This lack of crucial context is where the op-ed starts to go off the rails, and it only gets worse:

But here’s the central puzzle of Taiwan: While the rest of the world frets about the risk of war in the strait, many Taiwanese don’t seem to. During the recent Chinese military exercises around Taiwan, for example, Taiwan’s stock index rose.

Does Kristof still know any Taiwanese people? Truly?

Everyone worries about war, but if you think about it all the time and don’t live your life now, you don’t have a life. This is what China wants. Endless worry, leading to weak-kneed surrender because nobody can get through each day under that much stress, all the time, for years.

Taiwan’s stock index rose not because people don’t care, but because people want to make money. I’m not an economist, but perhaps it was because shareholders believed that Taiwan would succeed in getting its US tariffs lowered, which it did. The Taipei Times says it has to do with the AI bubble and loose US Federal Reserve policies, which is likely.

Taiwanese are used to military exercises and all manner of threats from China. All you can do is keep on keeping on. Perhaps Kristof no longer is, because he’s not here living through it. We are. a

It gets worse:

Some Taiwanese acknowledge the dangers but don’t see any point to even trying to resist China, seeing it as hopeless. When I asked an old Taiwanese friend, a journalist, what the island should do if attacked by China, she didn’t hesitate. “Surrender,” she answered.

Cool anecdotal evidence, bro. Read a damn poll. Although not as high as the 70% or so that polls used to find, more than half of Taiwanese say they’re willing to fight to defend Taiwan.

People are understandably worried that the country doesn’t have the ability to defend itself, however. This makes sense, with the KMT’s tomfoolery in the legislature stopping necessary defense spending from going through. The problem, as usual, are the unificationist pricks, not the people who want to keep Taiwan sovereign.

The anecdotal evidence doesn’t stop there:

Another old friend, a businessman, said he expected that in 10 years, Taiwan would be under China’s control, whether through war or by Taiwan reluctantly accepting a promise of autonomy under Chinese rule. (Skeptics point to what Hong Kong has endured and consider this hopelessly naïve.)

This may come as a shock, but I don’t actually care what this guy’s friends say. All my friends say that being part of China would be an unbearable devastation and they’d do anything to stop it. They are businesspeople too. My anecdotes are as good as his, so why should I care about one businessman?

Skeptics, who get only a parenthetical, seem to be the majority in Taiwan, though you wouldn’t know it from Kristof’s dismissiveness. Most people do not want to be part of China, and either want to maintain the status quo of independence in reality despite a lack of recognition, or they want to move toward independence. Maintaining the status quo — which is sovereignty for Taiwan, as Taiwan currently governs itself — consistently wins in this poll. Unification is always at the bottom.

Anyway, the skeptics are right. Anyone who thinks Taiwan would retain autonomy under China is, and I say this sincerely, a fucking idiot.

I love Taiwan. I lived here for a time in the 1980s, studying Chinese, and it has been remarkable to see the wealthy, high-tech democracy that people have built since then, a place with everything except a consensus about how to preserve all this.

Read. A damn. Poll. Please. I am begging you.

Most Taiwanese do have a consensus on how to preserve all this: don’t provoke China, maintain sovereignty, don’t unify with China. China is the warmonger, not Taiwan, and they want to keep it that way. They want to govern themselves. That is a fucking consensus.

Taiwan’s politics are poisoned by bitter feuds, both within each party and among them. The upshot is that compared with other places that face existential threats, such as Estonia and Israel, Poland and South Korea, Taiwan seems much less prepared. If Ukrainians are a model of political will to resist a powerful aggressor, Taiwan is closer to the opposite: Many people seem unprepared to make major sacrifices to preserve their island’s independence and freedom.

Do you need reading glasses? I just linked a poll above noting most Taiwanese are willing to fight to defend Taiwan.

Also, Israel is a warmonger. It’s committed so much genocide against its one threat that it’s no longer a threat. Way to bring Zionism into it.

Taiwan is much less prepared than it should be because there is a problem with the politics: like the US, there are two major parties. One of them sucks cockroach ass, and the other just kind of sucks but…at least it’s not cockroach ass. In Taiwan, the one that sucks less got elected, a lot, from 2016 onward. People get sick of one party running everything for too long (except in Japan, it seems), but the only other options are the cockroach ass sucking party, or the cockroach ass sucking-adjacent party that basically votes with the cockroach ass suckers (that’s the TPP).

Voters want a change but there is no other choice, so the cockroach ass suckers get into power, and immediately start ruining Taiwan’s ability to defend itself. People hate it but we’re stuck with it for a few more years.

Or, in the US, they just do crime everywhere, all the time, including pedophilia.

He keeps on with this:

President William Lai, whom China despises, seems to appreciate the risks and has tried to increase military spending and boost military readiness. But it’s not clear whether the Taiwanese people want to be led in that direction, and his proposed supplementary military budget may not even pass the legislature.

Yeah, because the cockroach ass suckers saw an opening and crawled through it. Also, all that disinformation I mentioned above.

And why does China “despise” Lai anyway? Lai has said he’s open to talks with China. He wants dialogue, as Tsai Ing-wen did before him. China keeps refusing, only being willing to talk to the people they directly aid in the Taiwanese government. Could…could…oh my word…could China be the real problem here?

All this raises a fundamental question: Why should Americans risk their lives and spend billions of dollars defending Taiwanese who aren’t clearly willing to make major sacrifices themselves? I asked Taiwanese officials about that.

Make a case for that beyond “my friend said so”, and then I’m open to hearing this point. Until then, read a damn poll.

This isn’t the old KMT dictatorship you used to live under. We have polls now. Amazing, I know.

“Taiwan’s defense is our own responsibility,” acknowledged Chen Ming-chi, the deputy foreign minister. “We have to tell our young people, defending your democratic way of living is your obligation.”

Joseph Wu, the secretary general of the National Security Council, put it this way: “We can’t ask other countries to help Taiwan if Taiwan does not help itself.”

Translation: “important Taiwanese officials disagree with me but, I lived in Taiwan in the 1980s so I still think I’m right.”

Officials noted that Lai is trying to increase military spending so that it will exceed 3 percent of G.D.P. this year and 5 percent in 2030. Taiwan has also extended mandatory military service from a pathetic four months to one year (only for men).

I actually agree with the implication that if there is going to be military service, it should be for everyone. All, or none. But Taiwanese elected this guy who is trying to improve Taiwan’s defense. Doesn’t that go against Kristof’s central point?

The article ends in a basically okay but “meh” way that goes against every bullshit point argued above:

Given the stakes, a top priority for American foreign policy must be deterring China without provoking China. Deterrence means working with Taiwan, Japan and others to achieve a common front not just against an invasion but also against gray zone pressures. If deterrence failed and a war actually erupted, then it obviously would be better to win than to lose, but this might be a case where, as President John F. Kennedy once put it, “even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth.”

Sure. That’s all fine. I don’t disagree.

But please, sir, I am on my knees asking from the bottom of my heart that if you want to make any other points, stop asking one friend like it means anything and read a poll.

MRT Zhongxiao Fuxing, for no reason at all

Living in Taipei, if I didn’t pay attention to international news, I’d barely be aware that President Pedophile’s administration had seized Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro. Really, you’d hardly know it from living here.

The reaction among commentators, however, has mostly been one of fear for Taiwan’s safety and future. If the US can simply snatch up a foreign president, they say, what’s to stop China from invading Taiwan? What international law exists to ensure it doesn’t happen? Some fear it will “embolden” China (though not necessarily making an attack more likely). The UK’s foreign affairs committee chair has said as much:

On Monday, Emily Thornberry, the chair of the UK’s foreign affairs committee, warned that China and Russia may be emboldened by the lack of condemnation for the US’s actions. But events in the Americas are unlikely to change Beijing’s fundamental thinking with regards to Taiwan.

The latter point is more or less correct, but it contradicts Thornberry’s assertion.

Apparently, it’s being called a “blueprint” for Taiwan on Chinese social media:

By late Monday, topics linked to Trump’s capture of Maduro had received more than 650 million impressions on Weibo, China’s X-like social media platform, with many users suggesting it could offer a template for Beijing’s own potential military takeover of Taiwan.

This is just plain unlikely. At least in my opinion, Beijing’s gonna Beijing no matter what the US does. That is, they don’t really care about international law or norms; if they want to invade Taiwan and think they can win, they will. As the Guardian article continues:

Firstly, although China cares about international narratives with regards to Taiwan, and puts great pressure on other countries to recognise Beijing’s claims on the island, it does not see the matter as being one of international laws.

In the past, I’ve said that the only thing stopping China from invading Taiwan is whether or not they think they can win easily. If they see it as a fairly straightforward invasion with a strong chance of relatively pain-free victory, they’ll go for it.

In that sense, the US invasion may embolden China only insofar as part of their equation on whether an invasion would be achievable or a nightmare centers on whether the US would come to Taiwan’s aid. It might be less likely if the US is wrapped up in Venezuela, or elsewhere.

That’s it, really. No example-setting, no international norms, none of it matters. Can China win? How easily? That’s all that matters to Beijing.

Analyst Yang Kuan-shun offered a different opinion:

On the one hand, of course, there are some voices that are [saying] that the U.S. is not a good actor because it violated the international order that, in some way, it helped establish after World War II,” said Yang Kuang-shun, co-founder of US Taiwan Watch, a think tank. This could further fuel skepticism about the U.S. in Taiwan, he said, at time when there is rising concern among Taiwanese about whether they can count on American protection.

On the other hand, Yang added, the attack demonstrated American willingness to decisively use force beyond its borders, giving hope to some Taiwanese that the U.S. would come to their aid. Taiwan relies on Washington for unofficial support under its policy of strategic ambiguity, which does not clarify whether it would intervene in a conflict with China.

I generally both like and admire Yang’s work, but must respectfully disagree here. The first point is fair enough, but the second implies that the US acts rationally or consistently. It does neither. The US “decisively used force” in Venezuela because some whackadoo in President Pedophile’s cabinet wanted to, not due to any sort of principled stance that it might also apply to Taiwan. How the US feels about Venezuela has no relationship to how it feels about Taiwan.

For it to be otherwise, the current administration would need a moral compass. It has none. It would need to be capable of principled views. It is not.

I agree with Yang’s other point, however:

The Taipei-based analyst Yang Kuang-shun summarised all of the above succinctly in an X post on 8 January: “Taiwanese already view international politics as great-power politics. We don’t romanticise international institutions as being very helpful because we’re just not that included. We see the world very differently because we already know it’s not a fair game for us from the beginning.”

In fact, the one person to get it right doesn’t really discuss how China is taking the Venezuela mess at all — Chris Horton. He notes in the same Observer piece linked above:

Few in Taiwan care about any erosion of international law that may or may not have occurred on 3 January. And why should they? After all, the international order has never had time for Taiwan. Look at it today: it is a sovereign, democratic country, yet is recognised by only 12 governments in the world.

Taiwan is not a member of the UN, and China, because of its sway over the international organisation (and its security council veto, which once belonged to Taiwan’s government), can block Taiwanese membership. What is more, since the signing of secret agreements with Beijing in the 00s, the UN has taken things a step further by referring to Taiwan as “Taiwan, province of China”, despite the fact that Taiwan has never been part of the People’s Republic of China.

This shows that the most potent analyses, the ones most likely to make a good point, focus more on what’s going on in Taiwan rather than filtering everything through a China lens.

Old friends in China (we still keep in touch) figuring out how to build a rock bridge to get around a stream blocking their circumnavigation of Karakul Lake in East Turkestan

I almost didn’t post this — the recent attack near Taipei Main Station and Zhongshan has me rattled. But, it’s an important issue and I have a (rather less important) opinion on it. I’ve also had a string of personal things recently (long story, don’t want to talk about it, some involve health). Additionally, it’s painful, as an American, to live through the USA’s Oops All Pedophiles moment. But I’m still shaken by recent events and I’m not going to try to write it as smoothly as I usually would.

* * *

The other day, someone I know said of the recent hullabaloo in the legislature that he wished there were “a system” to deal with such issues.

I wasn’t quite sure how to reply. There is a system; this is how it works. Obviously, he meant he’d prefer some sort of different system, but it wasn’t clear what that would entail. Perhaps he wants a presidential veto, but other than negating the moves currently available to the legislature, I’m not sure how that would change what’s happening now.

Here’s a quick catch up for anyone who might need it: the legislature passed a bill that would allocate more funding from the central government to local governments. I’m no expert, but I don’t disagree with the bill per se, as local governments other than Taipei and perhaps New Taipei seem chronically under-funded. However, the DPP says it would cause the government to take on too much debt and tarnish its international image, and Premier Cho Jun-tai has refused to counter-sign it. The DPP claims this is in line with the ROC constitution according to Article 37, and the KMT, of course, has said it is not. The TPP does whatever the KMT says, so you can guess where they stand.

Taiwan Plus has a great explainer on this, so watch that first.

Article 37 is very short:

The President shall, in accordance with law, promulgate laws and issue mandates with the counter-signature of the President of the Executive Yuan or with the counter-signatures of both the President of the Executive Yuan and the Ministers or Chairmen of Commissions concerned.

I’m not a constitutional scholar, but it reads to me that the president must promulgate laws if the premier has counter-signed them. It doesn’t say the premier can’t refuse to counter-sign, so if we’re playing with Air Bud rules here, Cho has the power to refuse. But it’s hard to be sure, as this is a first in Taiwanese political history.

The president has no veto power, so it’s also one of the final checks and balances that keeps the legislature from being able to push any law it passes without the executive branch having any means of pushback. Typically the premier would first send the bill back to the legislature for reconsideration, but of course, it took the legislature, currently in its villain era, approximately 3 milliseconds to reject that option by immediately passing it again.

The premier can also send the legislation to the constitutional court for review, but Taiwan is in its Oops All Constitutional Crises feedback loop where the legislature passed a bill requiring the constitutional court to have ten justices to make quorum, when they currently having only eight. They did this just as some justices’ terms ended, and haven’t exactly been confirming Lai’s judicial nominees to replace them.

The legislature can then pull a vote of no confidence on Cho, forcing his resignation, and has said they’ll try to impeach President Lai — although Lai can’t do much without Cho’s signature, and has promulgated all sorts of bullshit that helps the KMT and harms the DPP simply because it was passed legally and counter-signed. It’s hard to argue that he’s an obstructionist at heart. I’m not sure where that’s going to go.

From here, Cho can request that the legislature be dissolved and new elections occur, which nobody really wants after the whole recall fiasco, or the legislature can try to get rid of Cho (fairly easy to do) and Lai (not so easy).

So, we’re in a constitutional crisis in which the court can’t meet to decide what is and isn’t constitutional, thanks to the legislature. The same legislature that is claiming that Cho’s action is unconstitutional. In a system — a cesspool really — that they intentionally created where the rules, apparently, don’t have to matter.

Of course, the court did meet, and claimed those same rules barring them from reaching quorum with 8 judges were — you guessed it — unconstitutional!

In other words, every legislative accusation is a confession. They did something unconstitutional, then accused the other side of contravening the constitution, and then got mad when the court with the responsibility to rule on constitutionality came back saying “actually no, what YOU did to us was unconstitutional”.

The KMT and TPP are spitting mad at that:

The KMT slammed the Constitutional Court for convening a session despite having only eight grand justices, saying it contravened the law.

“This has buried the independence of our judiciary,” it said, adding the that the Court aimed “to clear obstacles for Lai to realize a ‘green dictatorship’ where executive, legislative and judicial powers are consolidated.”

According to the revised and the original version of the constitutional litigation law, at least six justices are required to convene a session, the KMT said.

“The Constitutional Court session was therefore held illegally, and the ruling is, of course, illegal,” it added.

They probably thought their attempt to do away with one of the checks and balances on their power is not bending quite so easily. It’s probably a bit more difficult now to impeach the president when the constitutional court, the body to which you’re supposed to appeal, isn’t taking their removal from the political board game so meekly.

If this is reading like a shitshow, that’s because it is one.

What should bug you about all of this: the legislature keeps acting like everyone else is violating the constitution, when as far as I can tell, Cho, Lai and the court have followed it, insofar as it provides any real guidance. If someone tries to take away your ability to meet and issue rulings, but you’re the court, you do have the right to issue a ruling on whether that’s legal, do you not?

By saying the constitutional court does not have such a right, they’re accusing the DPP of “green dictatorship” but in fact confessing that what they really want are no obstructions to their power from the other two branches of government. They have certainly attempted to hobble both the executive and the judiciary.

Basically:
KMT: You DPP are unconstitutional for not countersigning!
Constitutional court: No, YOU’RE unconstitutional for ruling that we can’t meet with a quorum you refused to give us.
KMT: No, YOU’RE unconstitutional for…meeting as the constitutional court when we took away your quorum!

Every accusation is a confession. The legislature keeps accusing Lai and the DPP of trying to ruin democracy and grab unchecked power, but in hobbling the constitutional court, that’s exactly what the legislature is doing.

What they want is a blue dictatorship in which the TPP and KMT can pass whatever they want in the legislature and neither the constitutional court not the premier or president can stop them. The bills have to be countersigned, according to the KMT, even though it doesn’t say that in article 37 — it only says the president must promulgate them if they are signed. The court can’t decide on the constitutionality of rules affecting it, and thus can’t meet, and thus can’t provide an outlet to give the bill to another checks-and-balances observer.

It’s not just a shitshow out of nowhere, it seems to be an intentionally constructed follie à feces. I’m not even sure I disagree with the bill per se but I’m pleased that the DPP is ready to sacrifice their premier to redirect the underlying current here: the more benthic intentions in this game being total legislative control over all laws and the functioning of all government agencies in every branch of said government.

If you couldn’t see before that hobbling the constitutional court was one step in this direction, well, now you do.

This could be Taiwanese political toomfoolery and it might be left at that, but I don’t think so. Most people are smarter than this. This isn’t just an intentional KMT power grab; they have allies who would benefit greatly from a constitutional crisis and perhaps even a collapse in law and order — the CCP is surely savoring and analyzing this, if they’re not ultimately behind it (which they may be).

If the KMT truly cared about the constitution, they would have approved Lai’s nominees so that it would be able to make quorum. Whatever the quorum rules are, they should be fair and achievable. I don’t see why they had to be changed, but of course it makes sense if you’re planning on dicking around your opponent’s nominees. Saw that coming from a parsec away. Then they could have passed their budget reallocation bill and if the DPP didn’t like it, they could send it to the court. The KMT actively tried to cripple that court.

But no quorum, no court, and we move straight to TO THE DEATH moves when it never needed to be like that. Not with two parties who, in this fantasy world, respected the checks and balances on their power, which is how the system is supposed to work. There is a system. It just doesn’t seem to be functioning like one because one party is hell-bent on destroying it.

First, I’d like to extend a warm “thanks for nothing” to the folsk at Oxford University Press, who managed to send me two hard copies of Making Punches Count, with neither one arriving. It took awhile to read because I eventually, exasperatedly, bought the e-book.

With that out of the way, let me say that I’ve always been fascinated by legislative brawls. Yes, they’re showy, but more than that, I’ve wondered why politicians choose to get into knock-down, drag ‘em out fistfights when their constituents are turned off by it. Are voters actually that anti-brawl? Is brawling necessary or helpful in a functioning democracy? Why do so many Taiwanese legislators resort to fisticuffs in a culture that otherwise tends to avoid open conflict?

Nathan Batto and Emily Beaulieu attempt to answer some of these questions in their book, and it’s a fascinating look at why legislators brawl.

Making Punches Count is an easy, pleasant read despite technically being an academic book — I’m fine with academia, but the academic register may turn some readers off. The authors wisely avoid this and go for clear narrative, bringing in statistics and research methods only when needed to provide evidence for their point. If you trust their data, which I do, some of this academic-talk can be lightly skimmed. Others may find it interesting to read in detail.

The authors look at two case studies that share key similarities: Taiwan and Ukraine. Both are fairly new democracies, both face existential threats from a powerful neighbor, and both have legislators who get into physical fights over lawmaking. Most of the qualitative evidence comes from Ukraine, as they’ve had fewer elections to analyze, and quantitative analysis is generally provided by the Taiwan side. Included are stories of legislative brawls around the world, from Mexico to the US (historically) to South Korea.

Batto and Beaulieu offer signaling theory as the driving force behind brawls: they hypothesize that as most of the electorate finds brawling distasteful, legislators who engage in it are making a strategic choice to ‘signal’ to specific groups or people, not the voters as a whole. These are not spontaneous bursts of passion for the policymaking process, the authors are argue. They are messages, and there may be some element of premeditation in them.

To signal what, exactly? For newer, younger or less well-known legislators, they may want party elites, powerful oligarchs or kingmakers, or specific factions of voters energized by a particular issue to learn who they are, and that they are willing to fight either for their party’s ideals, or for this particular issue. More established legislators, they find, are less likely to brawl because these people and groups are aware of who they are and what they stand for — their “type” is known.

These signals are apparently quite costly: not only might it turn off a large number of voters, it may slap them with a reputation for violence, or result in physical injury. Batto and Beaulieu also look briefly at the costliness of such a signal for female legislators (in Taiwan, female politicians are not less likely to brawl than men), but it’s a complicated factor with no clear answers. Expectations of women in lawmaking positions are different, from how women are thought to behave to what’s needed in a brawl— would you want to be a male legislator engaged in a physical fight with a female counterpart? Would that look good for you? Yeah, didn’t think so.

Batto and Beaulieu also find that most brawlers are in the political opposition: with few tools to stop the majority from passing their agenda, they may feel that showing some groups of voters that they’re willing to fight — literally — for their principles signals their commitment, while sending a message that the ruling party is moving against voter sentiment.

Most of the book is concerned with “opposition disruption” brawling, that is, the opposition resorting to physical means to block the majority, but “honor brawling” is also discussed. That is, when one legislator lobs an ad hominem against another, and the insulted party must defend their “honor”, such as it may be.

Batto and Beaulieu also find that brawlers tend to command more media coverage, and “any coverage is good coverage” is taken as a distinct likelihood in politics. They note that brawlers have a very small but significant re-election advantage: brawling isn’t a pre-requisite for being re-elected, nor is it sufficient to win re-election, but it appears to help.

What impressed me about the book was how, every time I thought of something I might add, Batto and Beaulieu cover it within a few pages. The initial discussion of honor brawling seemed to assume that the insulted legislator had to defend themselves against whatever allegations instigated the brawl, and I immediately thought, “OK, but what if the accusations are true? Most legislators in Taiwan accused of having ties to organized crime actually do have such ties” — the authors are on it.

When reading about the re-election advantage, I thought, “sure, but that might be correlation without causation. Maybe legislators who brawl are also more charismatic, better at connecting with constituent sentiment, or better fundraisers?” The authors point out soon after that this may indeed be the case.

Making Punches Count ends with an exploration of South Korea’s attempts to curb legislative brawling and how, despite a reduction in overall fights, such reforms probably didn’t do much to stop the brawls so much as a change in general attitudes toward them (if I’m reading their point correctly).

Batto and Beaulieu point out again that it would be hard to find someone who thought brawls were actually good or necessary for democracy, and yet they persist in part because at times the majority feels it must pass unpopular legislation, and the minority doesn’t always have the tools to show strong opposition. Surveys of voters and even interviews with legislators bears this out: nobody will claim that brawling is a good thing, thus it’s rational to seek reforms that may reduce it.

I wonder, though. I’m not a fan of brawling; nobody is, really. I don’t approve of literal punching in any legislative body. But, I have to admit, sometimes my own opposition to what the KMT is doing here in Taiwan is strong enough that I don’t wholly disapprove of, say, a legislator showing their passion by running off with a bill, or eating it. I don’t think it “helps” democracy, but it wouldn’t stop me from voting for a pan-green candidate (not the DPP per se, but certainly not the KMT), if I could vote here.

If anything, I would have liked more stories from Taiwan in the book. Remember the ractopamine beef brawls? Remember when the legislator from Kinmen got her finger caught in a door and used it as an excuse to hook herself up to an unplugged oxygen machine while KMT legislators surrounded her hospital bed? (That one may have been outside the window of data collection, but still, LOL).

Does that make me a radical or factionalist political watcher? Am I one of the thin slices of the electorate these brawlers are trying to appeal to? I don’t know. Lord knows I’m not an oligarch. Life would be easier if I were.

I appreciate, however, that the book challenges notions that legislative brawling is indicative of a cultural predilection to violence or passionate outbursts; nothing could be less true in Taiwan. If anything, I find dispute resolution here can be too passive-aggressive at times, and prefer a more direct approach. It also dispels the idea that brawling is either necessary for a functioning legislature, or a sign of an ill democracy.

Go ahead and grab this book. You’ll be surprised at what you learn.