Taiwan Travel Quotes

I’d learned so much from traveling to familiar places that I figured I’d learn twice as much by going to a place I knew nothing about.

It was one of those striking moments in life where you find familiarity in the inexplicable.

Statuettes of drunken sailors, velvet pictures of island maidens, plastic seashell lamps made in Taiwan. What contempt the people who think up souvenirs have for other people.

And so we went. And so it went. And, slowly, I began to learn: speaking in the same language does not equal communication, especially when there is a cultural divide.

And where I couldn’t find words, I fell to other languages: to plants, to history, to landscape.

There were signs everywhere but none that I could read or even hope to decipher. These multi-lined symbols unhinged my familiar world.

As the silence returned, I sat back and felt the tension ease away; I hadn’t even known I was tense. A few moments passed and once again the cycling fan laced in with the clanging chains and mixed with the rumbling mower and the buzzing insects.

My professional life had started and here I was at a professional dinner full of uninhibited drinking.

Somehow, we were passing the boundaries of language and finding clarity in shared thought, even if we were just talking about beer!

I looked out again at the rising moon and I let the weight of my day, my week, lift away with the rushing wind as I was blown into the depths of myself.

Traveling is not going to famous places and taking pictures in front of them. It is understanding the culture, talking with locals, eating their food…and essentially, being home, no matter where you are! While tourists always stand out, the travelers become a part of the place and its people”- an excerpt from the notes, Taitung, Taiwan, May 2014.

Being a writer, then, is as much about observation as it is imagination. I try to let new experiences inspire me. I’ve been lucky enough in this field that I am able to travel frequently. When I visit a new country, I try to let the culture, people, and experiences there shape themselves into a story. Once when I visited Taiwan, I was fortunate enough to visit the National Palace Museum, with my editor Sherry Wang and translator Lucie Tuan along to play tour guides. A person can’t take in thousands of years of Chinese history in a matter of a few hours, but we did our best. Fortunately, I had some grounding in Asian history and lore already. (I lived for two years in Korea as an LDS missionary, and I then minored in Korean during my university days.)

The flight is delayed by five hours. Snowstorm,’ she says. I hear myself producing a weak ‘Fl…’ Runner flicks his gaze toward me. He’s obviously enjoying this. ‘We are flying to Taiwan. You are pale.’ ‘Of course I’m pale!’ I bark. ‘The fastest I’d travelled before I met you was with a donkey cart!’ I

In 2020 nearly eight billion diverse peoples dress, listen, talk, travel, and communicate in an increasingly homogenous manner that mostly follows the examples of those in the United States, Europe, many of the English-speaking former colonies of the British Empire, and the Asian democracies of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

This is not a place I could simply learn, and it is not mine anyway. I belong in a forest in a much bigger, colder country. I am not built for heat any more than my mother was built for winter. I speak in broken tones, making half sense to everyone I meet in Taiwan. My worlds exist in halves.

A taxi driver asked me why my Mandarin was so good for a foreigner. “My mother is from Taiwan,” I explained, and he turned on me in reprimand. “Then why is your Mandarin so poor?

His was a slow leaving. He had resisted it. In his letter were parts I had never seen of the smiling, quiet man who had made spaghetti or folded dumplings, who had danced giddy with me in stacked shoes at holiday parties. They were parts left in Taiwan, pieces he shared with no one, things he had lost in China. They belonged to those places, and the person he had been when all of him was there.

Our versions of the truth so often dwell in the language we chose, but the words we use have consequences, they signify allegiances, shared histories, harms and losses.

Dharma Master Cheng Yen is a Buddhist nun living in Hualien County, a mountainous region on the east coast of Taiwan. Because the mountains formed barriers to travel, the area has a high proportion of indigenous people, and in the 1960s many people in the area, especially indigenous people, were living in poverty. Although Buddhism is sometimes regarded as promoting a retreat from the world to focus on the inner life, Cheng Yen took the opposite path. In 1966, when Cheng Yen was twenty-nine, she saw an indigenous woman with labor complications whose family had carried her for eight hours from their mountain village to Hualien City. On arriving they were told they would have to pay for the medical treatment she needed. Unable to afford the cost of treatment they had no alternative but to carry her back again. In response, Cheng Yen organized a group of thirty housewives, each of whom put aside a few cents each day to establish a charity fund for needy families. It was called Tzu Chi, which means “Compassionate Relief.” Gradually word spread, and more people joined.6 Cheng Yen began to raise funds for a hospital in Hualien City. The hospital opened in 1986. Since then, Tzu Chi has established six more hospitals. To train some of the local people to work in the hospital, Tzu Chi founded medical and nursing schools. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of its medical schools is the attitude shown to corpses that are used for medical purposes, such as teaching anatomy or simulation surgery, or for research. Obtaining corpses for this purpose is normally a problem in Chinese cultures because of a Confucian tradition that the body of a deceased person should be cremated with the body intact. Cheng Yen asked her volunteers to help by willing their bodies to the medical school after their death. In contrast to most medical schools, here the bodies are treated with the utmost respect for the person whose body it was. The students visit the family of the deceased and learn about his or her life. They refer to the deceased as “silent mentors,” place photographs of the living person on the walls of the medical school, and have a shrine to each donor. After the course has concluded and the body has served its purpose, all parts are replaced and the body is sewn up. The medical school then arranges a cremation ceremony in which students and the family take part. Tzu Chi is now a huge organization, with seven million members in Taiwan alone—almost 30 percent of the population—and another three million members associated with chapters in 51 countries. This gives it a vast capacity to help. After a major earthquake hit Taiwan in 1999, Tzu Chi rebuilt 51 schools. Since then it has done the same after disasters in other countries, rebuilding 182 schools in 16 countries. Tzu Chi promotes sustainability in everything it does. It has become a major recycler, using its volunteers to gather plastic bottles and other recyclables that are turned into carpets and clothing. In order to promote sustainable living as well as compassion for sentient beings all meals served in Tzu Chi hospitals, schools, universities, and other institutions are vegetarian.

The suspicion that European travellers in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century may from time to time have stumbled across charts and maps containing the remnants of a lost geography (perhaps even the maps of Marinus of Tyre, said to have been superior to those of Ptolemy) is intriguingly enhanced by the first of Alfonso de Albuquerque's two letters. It introduces a 'piece of a map' that Albuquerque has acquired in his travels in the Indian Ocean and that he is sending to King Manuel. The fragment, he explains, is not the original but was 'traced' by Francisco Rodrigues from: 'a large map of a Javanese pilot, containing the Cape of Good Hope, Portugal and the land of Brazil, the Red Sea and the Sea of Persia, the Clove islands [effectively a world map, therefore], the navigation of the Chinese and the Gores [an unidentified people, thought by some to be the Japanese, or the inhabitants of Taiwan and the Ryukyu archipelago] with their rhumbs and direct routes followed by the ships, and the hinterland, and how the kingdoms border on each other. It seems to me, Sir, that this was the best thing I have ever seen, and Your Highness will be very pleased to see it; it had the names in Javanese writing, but I had with me a Javanese who could read and write.