Trip To Taiwan

Click here for an image of the plane that I will be riding in December.

This week I finally saved up enough to buy a ticket to Kaohsiung for the winter break. Prices jumped (oh how they JUMPED) since last month and I ended up paying 400 dollars more for my travel in December. My roommates think I am a little crazy...

I was discussing my itinerary with my grandmother over the phone a few minutes ago. I will arrive at Kaohsiung at night around 2340h. She started listing names of people she could call to pick me up from the airport, and I said "It's alright grandma, I can take a taxi. It's not like I don't know how to speak Min Nan."

"No, no," she said, "we had some incidents recently of women being kidnapped and murdered at night by taxi drivers. We are not letting you taking a cab."

Initially, scenes from the Bone Collector vaguely popped in my mind, and I shuddered. But then I remembered the news and felt a great sadness. The incident happened back in summer of 2005, during my last visit to Taiwan. The woman was brutally murder by an unknown assailant. To this day we are still not sure whether the perpetrator was a real driver or posing as one. The case is still open.

When I grew up in Kaohsiung I was very young, and I remember that it didn't seem so bad back then. But youth can give a false impression of the circumstances, especially since I was living in one of the most polluted city on the island. Taiwan has been going through a political mess since the demise of Chiang Kai-Shek. I've heard many stories of cunning people gypping money out of vulnerable individuals. Rape and murder became prevalent in the news. A few months ago, when my grandparents were visiting in the U.S., my grandfather's bonsais were stolen right out of his patio. On the ninth floor. My grandparents think that Taiwan is morally getting worse, and that people no longer hold considerations for others. I don't know if that is the talk of nostalgia or truth. It is hard to say, watching the news, because for all I know most of the negative information were censored twenty years ago. My mother has stories of her classmates from dissident families disappearing without a trace. No news, no reports. Maybe it was always like this, people just didn't know it.

Hopefully, this visit will make a difference in my grandfather's health. We are very close, in the fact that we were both born on the same birthday, and he is the only engineer on my mother's side of the family. We always have this weird mutual understanding of each other. I remember how we would spend our time together on his bonsai farm, not speaking at all. Because we understood that people change and stay the same, and given the fact that people are inherently crazy and destructive, tending to plants seems like the only good thing we can do for this world.