Why I like Taiwan
Since I’ve lived here for the past 8 years, and spent most of the preceding three years here, I thought it was time to list out the qualities I find so attractive that I really wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.
1. My family.
This is a no brainer. They’re here so I like it here. Two of my children, my step-daughters, are Chinese and my son is Australian. My wife is Chinese. In a family where everyone speaks both Chinese and English, I am the odd man out. I failed dismally to learn the language of my host country. So sad. However, I am living quite well in spite of that.
2. My wife’s family or surname.
It is Kao – it means ‘wisdom’. She didn’t change it when we married and I would never want her to. There are enough women on the planet that embraced and then discarded my quite respectable English/Irish surname – I wouldn’t want to add another one. And how do you beat a name that means wisdom? You can’t. Instead you sit back and savor it, realizing that with a wife called wisdom there will always be hope…
3. Chinese food.
When I first came here I had no knowledge of Chinese food, except for what passed as ‘Chinese food’ in my youth – curried prawns and rice, chop suey, spring rolls and dim sum (but I’d never eaten these). I was surprised by some of the exotic dishes like chicken’s ass, duck’s head, fish head, tea egg, stinky tofu (really stinky!), and pig lungs. But these are the exception I have found.
In general Chinese food is very yummy and nutritious. I like cooking it which probably makes it non-Chinese food, at least that’s how my wife seems to feel about my culinary efforts. She often peers over my shoulder while I am preparing a dish and makes a comment that usually begins with the words: “Chinese people don’t do that with…[vegetable, animal body part, rice, noodles]”
I had a reputation that I am still trying to live down for not liking Chinese food. This was my own fault because in the first few years, due in part to a traumatic first experience dining in Taiwan, and due also to my irregular dining habits, I usually refused to eat what amounted to take away. I also found myself craving beef with potato and bread. (I have Chinese friends who experience rice cravings in other countries). So I usually begged to be taken somewhere – anywhere – with potato, steak, and crusty bread on the bill of fare, and I could never understand a menu in any restaurant I ventured to enter anyway, so I was stuck with McDonalds, pizzas, and subways for some time.
This gave the impression that my tastes were so degraded that I was incapable of enjoying the best food in the world. I knew that was the impression and I didn’t knuckle under and start gnawing at cooked goose skulls whenever offered – I weathered it out, for many years. The damage to my reputation was probably irreparable.
4. Chinese tea.
That’s not true, strictly speaking, because I don’t really like any tea much (except maybe the buttered salty variety I’ve had in Tibetan monasteries), but intellectually I know that Chinese tea is the best.
I was raised on tea, not coffee, and having a cuppa was a frequent daily event until I was old enough to own my own kitchen. But the English came lately to tea and due to colonizationatory factors got stuck with Indian and Ceylonese.
The Chinese have been sucking it down for over 3,000 years and doing a great job of making it. Here one can buy all kinds of tea – green, black, red, and all flavors – lemon, kumquat, something… tea with bits of fruit in it, tea with scary little gelatin balls that you have to drink through special large-bore straws. These guys know how to treat tea. But if I don’t like it why do I have it on this list? Because it’s here in stunningly abundant varieties if ever I decide that the juice of the coffee bean is not for me. Never!
5. The climate.
Ho ho. Now I am being sarcastic. How can anyone like the climate? You can’t – unless you’re a mango, or a freshwater carp, or someone with an abnormally low core temperature. In the first year that I came here I died every day. When I got back to Sydney I’d stare up the blue sky, touch trees beside the footpaths, marvel at flossy white clouds, put on my favourite jumpers and think how lucky I was to live in Australia.
These days the climate doesn’t get to me so much. Right now it’s winter and that means the outside temperature is about 14 degrees (Celsius). I get to wear my warm coats for about three weeks out of the year. Right now I can take a walk on the roof and feel a chilly breeze. I lap up these ‘cold moments’ and store them up for the coming days of August when I will be leaving sweat marks wherever I touch. The climate sucks – but you can’t have everything.
To be continued.
