To round off our reconnaissance trip to Hong Kong last week, we popped over to Taiwan to see my old tongxue 同學, Desmond, who teaches English at a university in Kaohsiung. It was an opportunity to visit a place we’d wouldn’t normally have gone to and a fascinating glimpse into a welcoming and polite culture.
Having been to a certain extent indoctrinated against the Taiwanese government by my education and work in the PR of China, I was pleasantly surprised by the extremely welcoming and obliging hotel staff and the politeness of the culture. The streets are wide and clean and, isolated through geopolitics, Taiwan seems to have developed the trappings of globalisation in a quiet way, parallel to but largely separate from the multinational chains that we see everywhere else in the world.
Quoting from Wikipedia:
In the early 1960s, Taiwan entered a period of rapid economic growth and industrialization, creating a stable industrial economy. In the 1980s and early 1990s, it changed from a one-party military dictatorship dominated by the Kuomintang to a multi-party democracy with a semi-presidential system. Taiwan is the 22nd-largest economy in the world, and its high-tech industry plays a key role in the global economy. It is ranked highly in terms of freedom of the press, healthcare,[18] public education, economic freedom, and human development.[c][13][19] The country benefits from a highly skilled workforce and is among the most highly educated countries in the world with one of the highest percentages of its citizens holding a tertiary education degree.[20][21]Kaohsiung is a major port city, and we walked around in the intense heat and humidity with Desmond and his 12 year old son Jake, who are returning to make their home in the UK this summer. In common with many of the the Far Eastern Tiger economies, such emphasis is put on cramming maths and science into schoolchildren that sometimes their emotional and personal development can suffer. I was struck by the reverence our taxi driver held for Teacher Desmond, and his fascination at us. (My Chinese is coming back and I found him surprisingly easy to understand.) Perhaps they don’t have that many funny-looking Westerners here, but people were too polite to be caught staring at us. Taiwan still carries reminders of its colonial past: it’s been a colony of the Portuguese, the Japanese and, briefly, the British whose rule is commemorated in a tableau at the bottom of the hill near the former consulate. We lunched on dumplings (emphatically NOT dim sum) in a modern shopping mall full of Western designer brands, and, having walked around the harbour to see the huge cargo ships waiting for their pilots in and out of the natural deepwater harbour, we drank iced tea with grapefruit. We viewed from afar the tall building shaped after the character gao 膏 (tall). I’m sure you can pick it out in the photo. We strolled past pleasure boats on a canal over to the site of the old rail terminus, where sugar cane grown in Taiwan’s hilly countryside was unloaded ready to be sent by ship to Japan. It’s now a park where Kaohsiung families come at weekends to fly kites and run around, being careful to pick their way around the railway tracks that are still there. It was brilliant to catch up with Desmond and Jake, and Kaohsiung was well worth the sweltering detour.
