Wealth and the People That Love It

Sometimes I think that Taiwan is a very wealthy place. I remember driving my scooter and getting cut off by a gang of cyclists, complete with lycra one-pieces and overly expensive aerodynamic helmets, and thinking that cycling is exactly the kind of vanity hobby that could only exist in a country with a little too much pocket change. The same goes for the car club I caught meeting in a parking lot near Taipei 101. A bunch of hyper-fashionable Taiwanese dudes were squatting around expensive Japanese import cars and jabbering about whatever superfluous engine modification they had made. It was kind of like watching Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift but there were no hot girls and the plot wasn't as good.

Sometimes I remember that for every Taiwanese yuppy in a cyclist uniform there is one old guy eating rice from a bowl on the ground in front of my apartment and another guy carrying his family of five on his scooter, with a kid strapped to each knee and the mom carrying the groceries.

Anyway, the number of sport cyclists and street urchins is irrelevant, because I devised a new rubric for wealth calculation - completely useless businesses. I had flowers delivered to friend in America for their birthday, and I realized that I had just transferred money over the internet so that some person could create a bouquet and another person could get on their bike or segway or whatever and deliver it to my friend's office. This is crazy. Online floristry and professional dogwalking are crazy ideas made possible by America's unique and perplexing combination of money and foolishness.

As I sat in my aparment and thought about how nice it would be to have my pets washed for me by a professional I realized that this kind of frivolity would never succeed in Taipei and I was filled with a mixture of admiration and pity.