I love Taiwanese health care

Horror stories abounded last summer, concerning medical difficulties among past teammates. Complications had sent several people home. Owing to my excellent immune system, I put it in the back of my mind and dug in my heels for the year ahead. I do get truly sick once or twice a year (as opposed to the allergies I tolerate almost year round), so this was bound to happen, but I went to a clinic today. Ever since getting back from China 6 weeks ago - for which a blog is long overdue - I have had slight, but annoying chest congestion. This past week, I caught what my roommate has, which I think is sinusitis.

When my breathing was impaired tonight during my weekly dinner at McDonalds, I decided that I'd go on Saturday if I still felt bad. But as it turns out, my roommate Elliot was going to a nearby clinic tonight. I have health insurance through my school, so I'm sure it helped the ridiculously low cost. But I'll get to that in a second.

Elliott and I waited all of 6 minutes to be seen. We were diagnosed quickly, and got lots of medicine, including antibiotics. Cost of the visit? $150 NT, or 4 and a half American dollars. Of course, we'd have to find a pharmacy, which might take some time. But as my Kiwi teammate says, "no worries" - it was next door. A week's medicine - 15 small pills a day - a grand total of $20 NT. That's about 60 cents.

I'm an alien resident with no teaching experience and a mere 1-year contract, but I’m taken care of, thank God. 60 cents, wow.

Chinese is not hard

Yeah, you heard me. Though a brief explanation is in order. Early in my study of Mandarin, I told people that “Chinese is the hardest language I’ve ever studied.” Recently, I have clarified in my mind a cause to retract this statement. Which is to say that I’ve begun to get the hang of the language, and I can see some of its structuring. About my revision, here it is: “Chinese has the steepest learning curve of any language I’ve ever studied.”

The true substance of language is revealed by what I’ll call “colors and grays.” The color of a language entails its flair, comprehensiveness, and flexibility. The “grays” are the nuance, the ability to differentiate between similar ideas in life’s array of complexity. Mandarin Chinese possesses little of either. Daily vocabulary is predictable (I laughed out loud when I learned the verb “to cook” was simply “zuo fan” – “do rice”), and as for fine distinction, for example, there is only one word for chips, crackers, cookies, wafers and biscuits. "Bing gan" covers them all, whether they're bitter, salty or sweet.

Chinese is a tonal language; it has 5 tones, which means one has to say each syllable at a certain pitch or it means something completely different from what is intended. Mandarin is actually the easiest of the Chinese dialects. (e.g. Taiwanese has 6 tones, Cantonese has 9.) Yet saying the syllable "shr" can convey at least 40 different ideas. Mastering the five tones, and the unusual sounds of Chinese will, admittedly, take quite a bit of time. But once the basics are out of the way, the grammar is rather elementary.

To most language learners, this is actually good news. The reason English is commonly regarded among linguists as the hardest language in the world is its compulsion to break every rule applied to it. English has hundreds of rules, a complex tense schematic, senseless spelling principles, a superfluity of metaphors and slang, and so many exceptions and inconsistencies that it could make even a proponent of moral relativism dizzy. Just to enlighten you on the scope of English, I’ll quote Bill Bryson, in his book Mother Tongue:

“It is often said that what most immediately sets English apart from other languages is the richness of its vocabulary. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and the revised Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000, but that is only part of the total. Technical and scientific terms would add millions more. Altogether, about 200,000 English words are in common use, more than in German (184,000) and far more than in French (a mere 100,000).”

And regarding the ability to make fine distinctions:

“English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget’s Thesaurus. ‘Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books exist.’”

So the poor inhabitants of other lands are the ones who have it hard. I think that everyone I’ve talked to over here believes Chinese is harder than English. Perhaps they are thinking of the writing system, which involves several thousand pictograph characters. They win, hands down. But the spoken language is a much simpler affair.

English, Russian and Latin have much harder grammar and comprehensive nuance, and that appeals to language purists such as myself. My roommate Eliot put his finger on it when he remarked a couple months ago, “I think you like learning languages for the sheer essence of learning them.” I didn’t realize it until then, and neither had I asked for the aforementioned purism. I remember in junior high school I wanted to take Spanish and French as my two 7th grade electives, but they wouldn’t let me take two languages at once. (I should be thanking them actually; if I knew French I might inexplicably develop a virulent contempt for America.) But this decision might have catalyzed a desire to learn language early on.

My interest in learning languages, if you were interested, wasn’t truly realized until college. Five semesters into the Virginia Military Institute, I had studied piles of physics and astronomy, and I had taken every math class required of my major (all 18 hours of them). Switching majors halfway through my junior year in college - from a prestigious B.S. in Physics (with a minor in Spanish and Astronomy) to an easily attainable B.A. in Modern Languages and Cultures - was one of the more difficult decisions of my life. It was around then that I felt compelled to study every language that remotely interested me. But I digress.

Chinese isn’t as hard as you think it is. If you are truly interested in learning a language that will soon be of global import, choose Mandarin. Think about it; your resume will veritably glow, and, more practically, local Chinese restaurants might give you free Kung Pow chicken.

Sprecken zee English? Learn a second language

Tea guzzling Taiwanese aren’t the only ones in this city who have to listen to the terribly annoying, slow-moving propaganda trucks whose mounted loudspeakers blast a maelstrom of political slogans and mud-slinging rhetoric into the comparatively quiet streets around them. The breadth of the English-speaking world also resides in Taichung, including Americans, Australians, Britons, Canadians, New Zealanders and South Africans. I haven’t met any Scots or Irishmen yet, though I’m always eager to speak with either nationality for the grand prospect of mimicking such a sweet-sounding slaughter of the Queen’s English. Yes, there are many foreigners wandering the streets of this valley metropolis – enough so that the heads of native Taiwanese snap towards me in surprise for no more than a few seconds. Interaction between “us” and “them” is generally kept to a minimum, at least where the secular teachers are concerned. But eventually, the two groups have to talk.

I started noticing something a few weeks into my stay here: when it comes to interpreting what you’re talking about, the Taiwanese sometimes “fake it.” Here’s a scenario: I’m trying to convey my needs to someone, or I am trying to understand their needs. I inadvertently use slang or speak too quickly. They don’t understand. A few of the more studious might even pull out pocket dictionaries at this point (which aren’t extensive enough to cover the average intermediate ambiguity in the first place), inspect a few entries, emit an acknowledging sound of some sort, and then proceed to smile at me as if they actually knew what I was talking about. That’s what the majority of Taiwanese do, anyway. They usually don’t sport dictionaries, but one can speak for long periods of time to seemingly comprehending people, whilst they continue to smile, nod, and possibly even chuckle at the right times.

This pretense is performed to “save face,” for both of you. It saves them face by not admitting a lack of understanding, and it saves you face by not revealing the fact that you are blathering on too quickly in a language that you must know they’ve only studied casually, and possibly, only in order to accommodate foreigners. Checking for true understanding usually goes like this:

Me: “Do you understand?”
Them: “Yes.”
Me: “Really?”
Them: “Mm-hmm.”
Me: “So you do understand what I’m saying.”
Them: “No.”

Of course, this is the foreigner’s fault, not theirs. It is their country, and a dutiful alien resident would logically try to achieve moderate proficiency in the local language, particularly if he were content to spend 5 years teaching English here. But as it turns out, most miss out on the ubiquitous opportunity by spending all of their time with other foreigners, thus picking up merely survival Chinese and crude Taiwanese. To make matters worse, I was surprised to hear the stereotype that Westerners drink away their salaries at nocturnal European pubs – then get up only to make more spending money in the morning. If that’s commonly true, then I suppose it’s fortunate that they can still remember the route to work, much less memorize the labyrinth of Chinese script.

What am I getting at? I exhort you to learn another language. (Hopefully right after you finish looking up the meaning of the word “exhort,” unless you possessed an abundant vocabulary before I made my jocose little comment. Or unless you’re partial to the King James Bible. Or unless you’re a Mormon and have set that black pearl, Moroni 10:4, before the host of unsuspecting masses time and again. (note: to my LDS friends, I love you. That’s why I would exhort you to toss out the additional “scriptures” and rely on Jesus alone. One cannot be “exalted” into godhood [see Doctrine and Covenants 132:37, etc.])

Ok, where was I? “Well, Wandering-Tangent-Man, you were talking about foreign languages.” Oh yeah, everyone should learn a second language. While no statistic can realistically state the percentage of bilingual people in the world (in addition to the hopelessness of collecting such a large amount of data, there are at least a half dozen terms that define the circumstance, degree, and variety of speaking different languages/dialects/pidgins, etc.), it is loosely estimated that half of the entire world can speak a second language.

I grow a little weary from hearing self-important armchair generals sum up global foreign policy with a comment like: “Everyone else should learn to speak American.” Let’s get up off our xenophobic hindquarters and learn Spanish, or some other great language. I recommend Russian. Not only will you be able to communicate with 277 million people, but you will also, as an added benefit, automatically sound cool.

Summary points: 1) we speak English, not “American.” 2) Taiwanese people are too busy to carry English dictionaries around in their pockets for you. 3) Everybody should be bilingual. 4) Everyone will be impressed if you speak Russian.

Pretty soon we are going to live in an entirely global world. Excepting the second coming of Christ, communicating on cell phones with real-time display screens a-la-Star-Trek is nary a decade away. Soon the manager of your business/public relations department will be asking you, "You don't speak Chinese?!" (He will ask you this in Chinese.) So if you can’t learn a few grammar charts, then perhaps memorizing a single mantra will sustain you in the fully networked career fields of our imminent future: “That’s a beautiful tie you’re wearing today, sir. Can I get you some coffee?”

Just add some oil

Slang is awfully fun. It's all that and a bag of chips. (Non-native English speakers are at this moment asking themselves, “Slang is awful or fun? It comes with chips?”) Here are some common but confusing idioms: kicking the bucket, telling the difference, beating someone to the punch, getting one’s goat, giving someone a hand, and hitting the sack. What sets apart a purely academic student of foreign language from someone who has actual experience abroad is not just fluidity of speech and cultural experience, but also an understanding of appropriate idioms and slang. A purely academic student might ask, “What did the bucket ever do to you?” or “What am I supposed to say to the difference?” Despite the access ramp for confusion, language becomes more interesting by using these colorful expressions - rather than continually dying, differentiating, doing something first, becoming annoyed, helping, and going to sleep, respectively.

Knowing the usefulness and value of slang, it is incredibly satisfying for me to hear my level 5 (advanced) students recite, “Hey man, chill out.” This phrase is quite useful to them, as many Asians destined for America end up in California. Since it isn’t too much of a stretch to stereotype outspoken Californians with an obsession for anti-Bush rhetoric tantamount to inducing minor injury – like a sudden cranial implosion – the phrase “chill out” is then both academically instructive and applicable. (A cranial “explosion” first came to mind, but due to a physical vacuum in the brains of radical leftists – discovered in 2001 by the eminent Ukrainian physicist R.U. Seryus – an implosion seemed more scientifically plausible).

Here in the Republic of China, one prevalent piece of slang is the term “Jyahyo,” which literally means, “add oil.” The meaning comes out as “keep it up” or “drive on.” I propose that this popular phrase is symbolic of a fundamental thought process among the Chinese: “When something goes wrong, one shouldn’t waste time analyzing strategies or consequences of action. Get in there now and do something about it!” This line of thinking is not unlike a comical scenario regarding faulty car engines. Some guys will pop the hood - ignoring the existence of an driver's manual - scrutinize the alien wiring for a little while, blow on the spark plugs, then yell back to their wives, “Try it now!” Some of the hasty actions over here have amounted to little more than a brisk puff of breath.

For example, during our time in California I heard this story from a Taiwanese woman involved with our training: an Asian city wanted to install a mass rapid transit system, like that of Taipei’s MRT. They started excavating, and were nearly through the initial stage before they realized that it wasn’t possible to dig in that area, and that they had to start all over. The Chinese aren’t so many thinkers as dreamers, she told me. They are a visionary people, but sometimes the short term can be lost with a lack of planning.

While I haven’t experienced this method of problem solving to any earth-shattering result, I've seen it to a lesser degree many times. Almost like throwing money at problems (or, perhaps taking a leaf-blower to an insubordinate car engine), the Taiwanese like to “add oil” to squeaky problems, hoping they will just go away. We Westerners, despite perhaps a desire not to be "noisy foreigners," have to step in sometimes and point out the (supposedly) obvious truth that certain plans aren’t going to work.

One must be careful to do so in a Christ-like and inoffensive way, in order to “save face” and save feelings. So if you ever make it to Taiwan or China, think carefully before you comment or give advice. And try not to slip on the oil.

A hush falls over the crowd

Did you ever see the movie Hot Shots: Part Deux? If you haven’t experienced this classic of 90s comedy, there's a segment where Charlie Sheen runs through an Iraqi prison camp dressed like Rambo, shooting everything in sight. The movie – a spoof that it is – begins to tally a kill count like an old arcade game from the 80s. In short order, hundreds of Iraqis lay dead – after falling, spinning, somersaulting and pirouetting to the ground in some of the most ridiculous and comedic ways imaginable. Just as the last few enemies are wiped out in slow motion doing swan dives like synchronous swimmers, Charlie’s machine gun clicks dry, out of ammunition. Suddenly, a fresh group of soldiers comes out of nowhere and charges into the fray. Then – to my maniacal amusement – Charlie grabs some bullets from a nearby crate and sprays a handful of harmless metal casings in their direction, which of course kills them anyway.

Now, the fact that I have laughed at this scene until I cried on several occasions has nothing to do with the topic of this blog entry. However, throwing a multitude of small objects at a group of “newcomers to the fray” does much to illustrate how to teach the complexities and innuendo of the education field to some 20-odd missionaries in a mere 8 days. These consisted of loose-leaf papers and helpful advice. "A good EFL teacher has no dignity" was one shell casing tossed at us in mid-June during our Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) Basics course at the University of California Irvine.

The UCI staff did a marvelous job of putting together such an ephemeral affair. (Yeah, I know. But it’s good to look up words in the dictionary.) Though it meant we were peppered with handouts on EFL methods, games, behavior management, lesson planning, curriculum creation, linguistic analysis, and that mystical giant, formal grammar and all its proper appellations, (like gerunds, dependent clauses, the past perfect progressive tense, etc. ad nauseum). Two books and 42 class hours later, we were ready to set out into the EFL teaching world. One particular aspect of this profession was covered quite well, though it didn’t penetrate my sensibilities until I actually experienced it. It, being the stark silence of a foreign classroom, or – as I’ve called it here for the purposes of creating an attention-grabbing story title – “A hush falls over the crowd.”

And it falls quite suddenly. I suppose all junior high school kids are like this (and this pertains mostly to the boys), but during their 10-minute breaks between classes, they run around, put each other in headlocks, force other students behind doors and jeer at them, get into verbal bouts with the opposite sex, feed an insatiable yearning to rehearse their respective repertoires of Chinese expletives, and punch each other in the groin. (In fact, it has even been suggested that groin punching be included in formal lesson plans with an exercise in English exclamations, because they enjoy it far more than corny EFL games.) But as soon as those musical tones denoting the next class start buzzing through the courtyards and classrooms, hordes of mayhem-aficionados dash to their seats and soon exude glazed-over expressions that could, with the right connections, get them cast as extras in low-budget zombie movies.

Asking them questions is usually a fruitless gesture from that point on. Perhaps if they appeared overtly confused, or gave even a slight nod of understanding, the situation wouldn’t be so ambiguous. But, as it stands, middle school Taiwanese kids only gaze in my direction with sheepish smiles or blank stares after I implore their comprehension. No matter, I tell myself – I’ll ask them in Chinese. Yet this is almost as unsuccessful, for admitting a lack of knowledge is still a “loss of face” to many students, despite the years of indoctrination into Western styles of teaching.

I soon learned that extravagant pantomime, exaggerated pronunciation, and exceptional patience are necessary to teach English in a foreign country, along with a penchant for stale jokes that they don’t get in shameless attempts to keep otherwise apathetic young students interested enough to give you the courtesy of eye contact or a modicum of participation. (I have a new appreciation for all of my past teachers, by the way.) Be boisterous, perform with dramatic flair, do anything to keep those scattered minds on the task of learning another language before they fully learn their own. But that’s another blog entry. For now, I must be patient and nurture an indifference for repeating myself. Otherwise I might get punched in the crotch.

I think I'm turning Taiwanese

Welcome to my blog! Hey James, what's a blog? Well, the term is an abbreviation of “web log,” and it's an online forum for one to share personal stories, pictures, or anything else of interest with family, friends, and millions of strangers who firmly believe that web-surfing should qualify as an Olympic sport. The idea of “blogging” came from my roommate, Elliot, whom I moved in with almost a month ago. He is a tall, thin Floridian with curly black hair who enjoys writing and posts articles to his blog daily. Since my mass emails to home have dwindled to about once a month in frequency, I decided to combine the two time-consuming efforts of writing in a conventional journal and composing mass emails into this one venture. A mass email usually takes me about three hours to organize, draft, reconstruct syntax, and revise. So hopefully this blog will reduce my three-hour, three-page mass emails to brief updates regarding various ministries. Without further ado, I give you a glimpse of what the Portuguese first named the “Ilha Formosa.”

Quite a few things were strange to me upon arriving in Taiwan 9 weeks ago. The humidity on my first night made the air seem closer to a liquid state of matter than gas, the pollution was so thick that microbacteria were throwing up, and the plethora of raw seafood and other alleged comestibles barely fit within the definition of a concept Westerners like to call “food.” A short list includes: fish-flavored crackers, flower-flavored tea, strips of dried seaweed, “yogurt” that has the taste and consistency of soured milk, pizza topped with corn and squid tentacles, and, last but not least, stinky tofu (that's its real name), which can most unfortunately be inhaled several blocks away. All six of these are very popular. (Tofu, by the way, is a word borrowed from the Chinese “dofu,” a dish of bean curd that is prevalent in Chinese cuisine as a staple in dozens of varieties). And then there's a snack native to Taiwan called “mua ji.” It is the size of a large apricot, has the consistency of raw dough, yields little discernible taste, and is sometimes dusted with a fine, white powder – which, due to the availability of hallucinogens on the curbside here, could be cocaine for all I know. After my first taste two weeks ago, I determined that it would be my last. And yet, I recently scarfed down 10 nebulous balls of this indistinct gelatin in one day alone, (perhaps lending credence to the cocaine theory).

The point is this: the discordant sounds and peculiar sights that were once palpably foreign are now all but comfortable. There are, of course, one or two remaining exceptions. The garbage trucks that roll slowly down the street playing music reminiscent of ice cream trucks still bring to mind a foul concoction of rotting refuse and a favorite dairy dessert. And the Mandarin “r” in words like rong, (pronounced zhrohng), still sounds a little alien, particularly in alliterative sentences like “rong rao de ri ren,” which I have postulated, through circumstantial data and careful analysis, could be translated as, “A hot pepper has arrested my tongue's motor function.” But for the most part, I am actually enjoying the things that I swore I'd never try when I got here. While in California for those 2 weeks of teacher training before coming to Taiwan, some of my teammates would chant a phrase from a song I'd never heard: “I think I'm turning Japanese, I think I'm turning Japanese...”

Well, I think I'm turning Taiwanese. I'm going to turn into a lump of mua ji here in a month or so. I eat a decent amount of the food available at shady little kiosks. I drank and enjoyed a rose tea, despite the fact that it tasted like flower petals and milk with only a hint of tea leaves - the latter of which included so the Chinese would have an excuse to drink it in large quantities. And yesterday, I spoke Chinese in a dream for the first time. It wasn't anything big, just a “ni hao” (hello) to two Asian women standing on a street, but the psychological implications are significant. Now, if you'd like to know exactly what those implications are, you should ask someone who knows more about psychology – say, for instance, the cockroaches scurrying around my bathroom – but suffice to say that the Taiwanese culture is beginning to permeate my skin. Just wait: soon I'll be munching on chicken feet like a champ, and then dislodging stray bits of food from my teeth with the leftover claw. Soon I'll nonchalantly drive a motorscooter through 6 red lights in a row, beeping to let oncoming traffic know I'm there if I'm feeling gracious, all the while hauling on my tiny, burdened vehicle no fewer than four people and a dog. Ok, so I'll never do that. But those are famous last words.