The China/Taiwan Post

Okay, so here it is. Nobody here wants to talk about it, and my friends back in Beijing will surely cringe. But I need to get it out of my system (insert Taiwan stinky tofu joke here).

I've been in Taiwan for well over a month now and think I'm getting a good feel for the people and attitudes here. I wrote in my first blog post that "Taiwan is not China," and that initial reaction was correct, I think. But there's so much more to the story.

A few months ago, before I left America, I spoke to a friend of mine from Beijing. I told her, "Yeah, I'll actually be back in Asia this summer. I'm teaching English in Taiwan." "Oh," she said immediately, "you're coming to China!" "No," I said, somewhat aggravated. "Taiwan."

I told this little story to two of my 15-year old classes this week during a 2-hour "mock debate." I had no idea what a passionate and angry response I would get. I loved seeing the students that had been shy for 2 weeks finally spring into action, voicing their opinions about a tough issue. They rose to my "Devil's advocate" challenges and defended their country (at the end, I of course made it clear that I agreed with their views, which I do).

I've been surprised by the general venom amongst the Taiwanese people for any mention of China. We all know of the odd/awkward political struggle between China and Taiwan (if you're not familiar, read my first blog post), but I had incorrectly assumed that the Taiwanese people, especially young ones, would be at peace with a conflict that was at its hottest a couple decades ago. That was wrong. Taiwanese young and old make snappy, sarcastic remarks about the mainland, and tend to regard the vast majority of Chinese as uncivilized, dirty, and loud.

This weekend I went to the capital, Taipei, with my TA friends Emily and Patricia. We visited the National Palace Museum, a sprawling complex just outside the city. The museum is essentially one giant 'eff you' to China, a massive metaphoric middle finger reminding everyone of who the Taiwanese think is the rightful government of China. When Chiang Kai-Shek and the Nationalist party were expelled from Beijing by Mao and the Communists in 1949, they made one last tactical move before abandoning the city; they took a gigantic percentage of the country's historic treasures and artifacts, which were housed in Beijing's Forbidden City. 90% of the cultural treasures in the National Palace Museum are in Taiwan because of that "liberation" 62 years ago.

The museum is a major tourist draw, and for the first time, I saw the direct juxtaposition of Taiwanese, Japanese, and Chinese people. It seems (and this is just my opinion) that the Japanese and Chinese lie on opposite ends of a spectrum: the Japanese appeared cool, quiet, smooth, and well-dressed, while the Chinese tourists resembled massive hordes of loud-talking, photo-snapping, loogie-hocking mongrels. Please remember that I love the Chinese people, have many friends in Beijing, and had some of the best months of my life in their beautiful country. But from Taiwan, that's how it looks.

The Taiwanese are somewhere in between, but closer to the Japanese end of the spectrum. Young Taiwanese are well dressed, level-headed, and seem well-educated. And they don't spit.

While Japan and Taiwan both give dirty looks at any mention of the rising Chinese superpower, the pair seem to be in love each other. The best way to describe the way Taiwan and Japan talk about each other is like a couple that was forced to split up for reasons other than their relationship, but still secretly love each other. Many Taiwanese talk of the Japanese occupation of the island with nostalgia, and my friends here in Tainan proudly show off the Japanese phrases they know. Conversely, the Japanese flock to the island in waves, and many public venues and works were gifts from the Japanese government.

My friends in Beijing have said that one of the reasons Chinese look down on the Taiwanese is their infatuation with the Japanese, a people that have done so much harm to mainland China over the centuries and still refuse to officially apologize for atrocities like the Rape of Nanjing.

My friend Hannah, a TA with half Taiwanese and half Japanese blood, never pulls punches when talking about China. She told me that many resent Chinese tourists because of a series of incidents where they vandalized Taiwanese artifacts in Taipei, and because they move in massive packs that clog up roads and sidewalks. Not to mention their lovely habits of spitting and peeing wherever they please.

People keep asking me the obvious question: which do you like better? China or Taiwan? And it's honestly impossible to answer, an apples-and-oranges scenario. As with any international travel, I think I'll have to let this Taiwanese experience digest for a few months this fall before I can truly draw a conclusion about these two similar but vastly different nations.