1/22/97
Singapore Airlines flight 5 was a surprisingly pleasant way to spend 13 hours and 20 minutes flying across the Pacific. Traveling with an infant entitled us to bulkhead seats and Kathryn to a little bassinet mounted to the wall. After she fell asleep we used her as a shelf for the odds and ends that accumulate on a long flight. The stewardesses wore curvaceous uniforms and spoke with refined accents as they handed out hot towels, slippers, and, for Kathryn, a baby flight kit with diapers, lotion, and a little purple hand puppet.
We flew in something called a "Megatop", the latest Boeing 747-400. Our plane came with "KrisWorld", Singapore Air's in-flight entertainment system providing some forty selections of movies, television channels, and video games on individual flat-panel TV screens. My favorite KrisWorld option was the realtime display that showed our flight data and flight path on an animated map. According to this display, our Megatop travelled a great arc, heading northward up the California coast, curving along the coast of Alaska, brushing the Aleutian Islands, and then dropping south, following the east coast of the former USSR, overflying Japan, and headed south-west towards Taiwan.
There must be a reason for such a circuitous route but despite drawing many diagrams on a handy orange we failed to discern it. It cannot be favorable winds, since our LCD displays reported headwinds of over 200 km/hr, holding our ground speed to just 720 km/hr (447 mph.) Hmmm. A head wind of 124 mph. Things must be very harsh at 11,900 m (39,400 ft) where the outside temperature is -53C (-63F) and the wind chill can hardly be imagined.
Our first stop was the Republic of China, usually called Taiwan. When the Communist Revolution swept over mainland China and established the People's Republic of China, the former Nationalist Chinese government retreated to the island of Taiwan. This little country has only 21 million inhabitants and is diplomatically isolated, due to pressure from mainland China, which does not permit a country to have diplomatic relations with both it and Taiwan. Yet in forty years Taiwan has grown into an economic power, one of the United States' largest trading partners and holding more foreign currency reserves than any country except the United States. After an extended period of martial law, Taiwan recently made a transition to democracy and last year the Taiwanese held popular elections for their President; people in Taiwan boasted to us that this was the first time in history that any Chinese people have democratically elected their top leader.
China and Taiwan have an interesting relationship. On the one hand China officially views Taiwan as a renegade province, and prevents most countries (including the United States) from having diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Over the decades military tensions between China and Taiwan have at times been high; during last year's Taiwanese Presidential elections the Chinese Navy held missile tests and combined navy-army-air force exercises in the narrow straits between the two countries, leading the U.S. Navy to send a carrier group into the area. When I visited Taiwan twenty years ago, if your passport contained a Taiwan stamp you were barred from entering China, and vice-versa, and tourists wishing to visit both countries had to resort to various subterfuges such as carrying two passports. On the other hand, as China has opened up to the outside world, Taiwanese businessmen have been traveling freely to China and Taiwanese companies are the largest foreign investors in China. With the return of Hong Kong from British to Chinese rule this year, Taiwan will be the only remaining Chinese country not under Beijing's rule, and people in Taiwan are closely watching what happens to Hong Kong.
A third of Taiwan lives in greater Taipei, the capital city, where we spent our four day stay. Taipei is sort of like Park Avenue meets the Third World. Over here is a gorgeous high-rise office building, sheathed with gleaming marble and furnished in polished rosewood, boasting the Pacific headquarters of famous American, Japanese, and German multinational companies. A block down the street a family makes their repairing motor scooters in a tiny, poorly lit concrete stall. This way is the world-class department store "SOGO", where immaculately dressed salesladies and glittering display cases offer every designer label I had ever heard of. A block away in a small stall, an old lady sells chickens and their feet, cooked or raw. At night the main streets light up in a blaze of illuminated signs and traffic lights. Through all these incongruities the residents of Taipei hustle and bustle to work and home in chaotic streets crammed with gleaming Mercedes and BMWs, the occasional Chrysler, all sorts of Japanese, Italian and French makes, yellow Ford and Toyota taxis -- and tens of thousands of motor scooters, buzzing by or parked tightly, filling every nook and cranny of the city.
I loved watching the scooters and their riders. Everyone rides a scooter. Crisply dressed businessmen, young girls in pink leather jackets, even whole families of dad, mom and a little child, all get around on scooters. I saw scooters with windshield wipers, roofs, rear windows, and trunks. I saw scooters hauling trash and delivering boxes. One day, when we experienced a sudden and remarkable downpour that left ankle-drowning lakes all over the sidewalks and rivers of water pouring down the streets, all the scooter riders suddenly sprouted brightly-colored ponchos and rode on.
After a while I started collecting scooter brand names. First there was the "Fuzzy" and the "Target", then the "Huzza", "Atilla", "Cabin", and "Fever", also the "Fly-One" (which seats two, by the way), and, all along, various models of "Duke". Later I saw the "Dynamic Arts" ("Status - Stylish - Sporty") and the Kuan Mei ("for your nice scene".) Some of the model names and subtitles were puzzling, like the "Sniper" ("we reach for the sky neither does civilization"), and I particularly appreciated the names which exhorted self-improvement, like the "ChaCha" ("Keep clean Keep pleasant Keep healthy Giving you the best sensation all I have".) Some were just funny, like the "AeroDyne 125" ("just for wind cutting".) But my favorite was the grandiosely-titled "Heroism 125" ("The Epochal Scooter".)
The only actual "sight" we visited was the National Palace Museum, a huge archive of Chinese sculpture, pottery, painting, and other art from 3,000 B.C. to the present day. When the Nationalist government left Beijing, first to escape the Japanese invasion and then the Communist takeover, it also evacuated (or plundered, depending on your point of view) the greatest works of Chinese art from the mainland. These priceless treasures were boxed up and went on a long and hazardous journey, overland to remote Western China, then back to the coast and over the ocean to Taiwan. The government built an imposing museum to display selected works, and over the years added flanking structures to house the remaining items. The Museum's inventory is so huge that at any given time only about 2% of its collection are on display.
Viewing five thousand years of cultural objects in a day resulted mostly in a undifferentiated blur, but a few things stood out. We found some old Chinese carvings which looked very similar to Native American totem pole carvings from the Pacific Northwest, with eagle beak motifs and flowing shapes. I was also enchanted by the cartoon-like features of a small bronze statuette of a barking dog with a studded harness.
I also wondered for a long time about the odd absence of perspective in the display of interior paintings. This genre of Chinese painting features closely detailed views of robed figures gathered around tables and mats in outdoor rooms and under shade trees. The Museum's exhibit included such paintings from as early as 700 A.D. up to the late Ch'ing dynasty in the early 20th century. What struck me was that these paintings show no indication of perspective as it used in the West from the Renaissance, with parallel lines converging in the distance. In these paintings, distant figures are the same size and show the same detail and clarity as foreground figures. The far edges of tables are as long as the near edges, and, in an interesting example of reverse perspective, they are often longer. I saw this in early paintings, such as "Enjoying the Shade of Pawlonia Trees" from the Sung Dynasty, in later works like "Reading Quietly in the Shade of Pawlonia Trees" (Ming Dynasty), and even in comparatively recent paintings from the eighteenth century. Chinese artists clearly knew how to portray distance -- in landscape painting from the same period, distant fishing boats are rendered smaller than near boats, and distant hills are misty and obscured while foreground terrain is crisp and detailed -- but for some reason they apparently felt no need to do so in interior painting.
However, most of our time was spent poking around the side streets around our hotel, a block off Taipei's main shopping street, Chungshiao East Rd, section 4, and we felt no need to travel to any real "sights". Within a mile's radius of our hotel, we found an endless supply of tea shops, takeout food, variegated stalls and vendors, and interesting little shops. Even a routine errand like going out to buy a Phillips-head screwdriver was fascinating, as it led us away from the glitzy boutiques of the main road, into a web of narrow alleys lined with apartments and tiny shopfronts, through a farmer's market where young ladies sold jewelry and fresh flowers as doomed chickens sqwauked in the neighboring bamboo cages, and out onto a bustling street where people bought appliances, fabric, deli food -- and screwdrivers.
At night I usually went out into the side streets and alleys around our hotel and browsed through the small stalls until I found something that looked good. Sometimes we had to point at what other people were eating, and sometimes we simply chose randomly from a placard listing choices we could not read. It was always fine.
We also went to Sunday church services with my aunt, but I missed most of it since Kathryn was inspired by the singing to gabble loudly and insistently while wriggling violently in my arms. This was sort of like a wrestling match in a hushed library, and ten minutes of half-Nelsons and "shushing" a determined opponent were enough to drive me out into the street, where my noisy daughter was instantly quieted by a bribe of a street vendor's fried pancakes.
Staying Connected: Taipei has three local Compuserve access numbers, two on the TN network and one on the Scitor network. Household electricity is 120v, outlets accept U.S.-style plugs, and modular phone jacks are the RJ-11 type common in the U.S., so getting online was as simple as it is at home. I sent and received a lot of email, checked some stock prices, and read my usual newsgroups. When I had to send faxes to the U.S., I did it through Compuserve for a US$1 fee and a NT$5 (about US$0.20) local call, far cheaper than the nearly US$8 it cost to send a paper fax from the hotel's machines. Postage to the U.S. cost NT$15 (about US$0.60) for letters and NT$11 (about US$0.40) for postcards.
Budget Travelling: We did not investigate the less expensive Taipei hotels, since our reservations had been set up in advance by my cousin, but we did prowl around looking for inexpensive meals. It turns out that you can dine on a bowl of noodle soup, or a plate of rice and assorted sides, from small shops for about NT$50-70 (about US$2-3.) For breakfast, there are numerous bakeries selling croissants, often with fillings, and other morning foods quite cheaply. For some reason, though, a cup of tea or a cup of coffee often costs NT$100 (about US$4) or more. In stores, the prices we found in Taipei for the things that we bought -- water, bottled juice, baby food, Phillips screwdrivers -- did not seem much different from Stateside prices, whether we shopped at the ubiquitous 7-11's and Circle K markets or the local shops.
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