Do I Speak English?

My Korean, Japanese, and Indonesian classmates speak a strange breed of English which is completely unintelligible to me, the only native English speaker in the room. The problem is that they aren't speaking English, but merely sprinkling "English" words into Chinese sentences. For instance, a Korean girl said "在韩国我们最近再有sauce。" Which means, "In Korea, we just got sauce again."

After about 10 seconds I realized she was talking about a recent SARS outbreak in Korea. To be fair, I should have understood what she was talking about based on context, because I came into class coughing and weezing, but she said SARS exactly like an American would say "sauce," so I was naturally distracted by what sounded like proper English, regardless of the context.

The worst part is, I sometimes have to intentionally mispronounce words to make myself understood. One of my students is named Neil, but whenever I call his name all the kids start cracking up and saying "Not Neil, NAIL." Neil sounds kind of like the Chinese word for cow, so I have to call this poor, misguided kid Nail all the time.

Other curiosities:
Cecil = seesaw
Bitch = beach

Big Fire

I heard there was some kind of natural disaster going on in San Diego, but I thought my mom had just burned another roast and my dad was making the whole thing up to save face. Then in class this morning, my teacher asked if I had heard about the "Da Huo." For a second I was really intrigued by the idea of an enormous pot, hiding in Taipei, waiting for me to hear about it, but I realized that she was talking about the big fire, which is the literal translation "Da Huo," or Chinese for "enormous, uncontrollable fire which drives humans before it like so many recently homeless squirrels." At least, that is what my dictionary said. Big fire seems descriptive enough to me.

The Japanese girls in my class seemed genuinely concerned when I accidentally implied that the fire was inside my house, instead of my hometown.

Things I Learned on my Scooter

1. Scooter-riding girls in converses and stockings are distractingly attractive. When I die, I will probably go out crushed under a bus, craning my neck for one last look at the classy girl in the Mondrian Chucks.

2. I have started to dream about dodging buses, and having nightmares about bus drivers gone postal, fed up with dodging the insect-like hordes of scooters that prevent him from driving anywhere.

3. I get extremely jealous when I see a couple riding a scooter.

4. Those surgical masks Chinese people wear to block carcinogens from entering their lungs are about as effective as a lump of coal tied to your face with asbestos.

Dump Trucks

Taiwanese people tend to be very well educated. There are various subtle reminders of this, like the language that is used in advertisements, street signs, and other things designed to be read by common people. Essentially, Taiwanese ads and road signs have some really obscure words on them. Imagine if street signs in America said "Maximum Velocity" instead of "Speed Limit," or ads promised to improve your ocular ability and rejuvenate your epidermis. In China, the vocabulary set was much more limited, presumably because the government and media outlets assumed the peasants wouldn't be able to read otherwise.

Another reminder is the sheer number of people who can speak English. My uncle, who just visited, assured me that it still seems like there aren't enough English speakers to comfortably get around the city, but I feel like I'm in an English speaking country. In China, English was very much a status symbol, and the only time I was ever served by someone who could speak English was when I was paying $30 bucks a meal. Here, I've been in cabs where the driver spoke better English than Abdikarim in San Diego. (Abdikarim being, in this case, a stereotypical Somali name I found at http://www.babynamesworld.com/category-somali-names.html)

Finally, The garbage trucks play classical music. When I first heard the 2 bit Mozart being played, I thought there was an upscale ice cream truck selling gelatos to the children of people with too much disposable income. I was kind of disappointed when it was just a malnourished-looking guy asking me if I had any trash or recyclables. In Taiwan, people have to take their own trash to the garbage truck, which means that being a garbage man means riding on the back of the truck and making sure people don't miss, and that hearing Mozart being played on a xylaphone means it is either 2 in the afternoon or 10 at night and I better get my ass downstairs or I'm going to be chasing a garbage truck down the alley.

Taiphoon Troubles

Today was a typhoon day, which is kind of like a snow day in the Northeast, but you make ramen instead of hot cocoa. Or so I'm told. In elementary I never got to miss school due to inclement weather, and was left envy all those Michiganites at home shoveling snow while I languished in San Diego's partly cloudiness.

Anyway, on typhoon day all school is cancelled, and the only businesses left open are the internet cafes and restaurants. Unfortunately, the phone companies are closed, and the DSL installation guys chose not to heroically brave the typhoon in order to hook me up with the internet, and typhoons tend to inhibit long-distance travel, so I spent a lot of time at the local internet cafe. Which is where I am right now, talking to the attendant's younger brother, Vic, and watching Taiwanese people play absurd looking Taiwanese computer games.

Where the Wild Things Are

I took a bus today. I ended up in a place called Linkou, which means “Mouth of the Forest,” but it felt a lot more like the middle. One minute I was passing noodle shops and KFCs and the next I was in the heart of a forest primeval, wondering just how far into the jungle a $1.50 bus ticket would take me. My tour guide was a guy named William. William, besides speaking passable English and having more than one thing negative thing to say about America’s environmental record, contracts gullible young English speakers out to large Taiwanese private schools for a living. I’m not sure of the quality or quantity of the cream William is skimming off of the top, but he told me he is only managing 10 teachers right now and still manages to afford a painfully skinny secretary named Theresa. Maybe he just isn’t paying her enough.

Anyway, William told me about a teaching job at a private school in Linkou. Being a relative newcomer to Taipei, I don’t realize that being in Linkou equates to being in Alpine, which is a reference only my San Diego readers will understand, and for which I do not apologize. I left from my school, which is called Taiwan Normal University, to meet William. We headed out together at 2 o’clock, and didn’t make it to the school until 4:30. I don’t know what kind of hurry the previous teacher, Eddie, left in, but the school administrators were desperate, and agreed to hire me without a demonstration of my meager teaching abilities. I was slapped into Eddie’s former desk, still sticky with the residue of his hastily removed name tag, and was left to contemplate how to tell William that I just couldn’t handle a 2-hour commute every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday.

In my rather limited experience, business in Taiwan has a tendency to work out in this hasty and informal manner. Contracts don’t appear to be very common, and decisions get made very quickly.

Zhonghe City Living

Finally found a place to stay. It is not actually in Taipei, but in Zhonghe City, which is a suburb of Taipei, and the commuter subway into the big city takes about 15 minutes. After getting the place, David, my roommate, and I decided to run to Ikea and Costco to spruce the place up a little and make it habitable. The Ikea was kind of boring, it was exactly like every other Ikea I have been to, except the food court was slightly cheaper. The furniture and sheets were not cheaper, however. I’m not sure how Taiwanese people afford all this stuff, but the sheets, pillows, and assorted room fixings costs me at least 100 bucks.

I got a job, maybe. I’m not entirely sure how I’m getting paid, or what the stipulations for my employment are, but every Wednesday and Friday afternoons I take the Bannan Line subway, get off at City Hall, and take the Blue 5 bus to an afterschool childcare center. I have two classes of 12-year olds, and I’m going to have to find some way of keeping the little rascals in line for 90 minutes. I had to give the administrators a demonstration of my mad child-rearing skills, and after 30 minutes of pleading with little Leo and Bruce to stay in their seats, and little David to stop reading the Chinese translation of Harry Potter while I was teaching them how to spell January, the powers-that-be revealed their absolute desperation and decided to hire me permanently. Permanently is probably a poor choice of words because I signed no contracts, and very well may never see the $17/hour I was promised for my six-hour work-week.