Taipei Taiwan Quotes

Paul thought of how they'd kept delaying buying plane tickets to visit his parents in Taiwan - in December, which was next month, he knew - as if in tacit understanding that their relationship wouldn't last that long. Paul felt himself trying to interpret the situation, as if there was a problem to be solved, but there didn't seem to be anything, or maybe there was, but he was three or four skill sets away from comprehension, like an amoeba trying to create a personal webpage using CSS.

The leading clans (mostly natives of Fukien Province on the mainland opposite Taiwan) were traditional and conservative, and maintained close ties over the decades to the Chiang regime in Nanking and later in Taipei.

The scale of what Taiwan had accomplished, in just six post-war decades and under extremely straitened circumstances, was astonishing. In 1952, 42 per cent of Taiwanese were illiterate. Fifty years later, nearly 60 per cent of Taiwanese went to university. (Tellingly, the illustration on Taiwan’s 1000-dollar note was four schoolchildren studying a globe, though it wasn’t apparent whether they were learning their foreign capitals or plotting Chinese missile trajectories.) Taiwan’s 23 million diligent, dogged and courteous people had built the seventeenth-biggest economy in the world, and accrued the third-largest foreign reserves. Their tiny island boasted six domestic airlines, trains you could set your watch by and, in the shape of Taipei 101, the world’s tallest building. And they’d made their transition from military dictatorship to pluralist democracy without getting any blood on the carpet. For a country that didn’t formally exist in the eyes of most of the world, this was decent going. Having visited many broken-down, violent dumps where everybody insisted that The Struggle superseded all other considerations, like picking up the rubbish and teaching kids to read, and invariably blamed someone else for all their problems, I fell hopelessly in love with the place. Were I a George Soros-style billionaire eccentric, I’d establish a program under which the world’s nationalist crazies, idiot warlords and dingbat terrorists would be sent to Taiwan, to see what can be accomplished when people stick the grievance schtick on the back-burner, put in a day’s work and behave in a civilised manner. Taiwan

Once it drew me into its gravity, this strange and alien land I’ve chosen to call home for long stretches has been the one true constant in my life. Taiwan has granted me a near-constant reprieve from my most feared nemesis, boredom, but at times she’s driven me half-mad. Taiwan has been my muse, the source of inspiration for much of my creative output as a writer, while at the same time never quite letting me forget that the language in which I write is not the lingua franca of the place about which I write. I have loved Taiwan for nearly all of my adult life. At times this love has shone as brilliantly as the moon over Kenting during the Mid-Autumn Festival, at others far less brightly, like a crescent moon during the long rainy season in Taipei,…. So when I sang it was this love for Taiwan, waxing and waning, but always present, that I felt.

There is a Chinese superstition that those who commit suicide wearing red clothes will become powerful, vengeful ghosts. They will come back and seek retribution for the injury done to them when they were still alive.

The unindividualized, shifting mass of everyone else would be a screen, distributed throughout the city, onto which he'd project the movie of his uninterrupted imagination. Because he'd appear to, and be able to pretend he was\, but never actually be a part of the mass, maybe he'd begin to feel a kind of needless intimacy, not unlike being in the same room as a significant other and feeling affection without touching or speaking. An earnest assembling of the backup life he'd sketched and constructed the blueprints and substructures (during the average of six weeks per year, spread throughout his life, that he'd been in Taiwan) would begin, at some point, after which, months and years later, one morning, he would sense the independent organization of a second, itinerant consciousness—lured here by the new, unoccupied structures—toward which he'd begin sending the data of his sensory perception.

EVERY PAPER RECEIPT IN Taiwan is a lottery ticket for cash prizes from the government. It’s the Ministry of Finance’s way of ensuring that people ask for receipts for their purchases. When the QR codes are scanned for lottery winnings, they create electronic trails of taxable income that can be checked against businesses that try to cheat.