American culture is hard to describe, primarily because the country is huge and the livelihoods of people varies greatly from state to state. The country is very young, compared to other societies around the world. Thus, we don’t have much of a traditional culture to speak of. Honestly, I didn’t think there was much of an American culture to refer to when I was living in the States. Having grown up in the US, and with limited experiences outside of the country,  it was a bit difficult for me to conceptualise American culture. Even so, I had an idea of how American values are unique. I felt compelled to experience another culture firsthand to gain a better understanding of the large spectrum of human natures.

Before attempting to understand the culture of a country/society/etc., one must study a bit of their statistics and history. For this, I turned to a well-revered and trustworthy source: the Internet!!
The main island Taiwan has quite an interesting history. But, before we get into that, I also think it’s important to read up on some of the basics. Therefore, I have created a page on this blog that goes into some detail about different topics regarding Taiwan, such as: statistics on the population, languages, religions, history of Taiwan, and some links to facts and news websites for Taiwan.

If you’re interested, please check it out!

________

I’ve decided to relocate from another blog I had started because I’ve heard many great things about WordPress. Here is my first blog post, from 3/18/2010:

So…. I’ve been in Taipei for about two months now. To read up a bit about Taipei, click on the link, and then click on “Taipei travel guide” for loads of info on Taipei, or “interactive map” to learn about other places in Taiwan.

Two months sounds like a long time to me. After two whole months here, what have I done, exactly? Let’s see….

Just some background information about me:

I’m 22 and I recently graduated with a Bachelor’s of Science at the College of William and Mary. My major was Neuroscience. I really enjoy studying Neuroscience, and I hope to make a career in this field. I have been very interested in East Asian culture for several years now. Really, ever since I took a short trip to Seoul, South Korea about five years ago. You could say it was my “first exposure” to the wonders of Asian culture. I took a year of Japanese language at William and Mary, and I took some anthropology classes on Japan. At the end of the year, close to graduation, I met my current boyfriend . He was a graduate of William and Mary a year prior and he majored in Chinese studies and Environmental Policy. He studied in Beijing, China for about 6 months – he then moved to Tianjin, China for an additional two months. I wasn’t very interested in Chinese language or culture until I met him. We decided to travel to Asia together, and we settled on Taiwan. He wanted to go somewhere to practice Chinese, and I just pretty much wanted to go anywhere in East Asia. Taiwan interested us because I had heard it is very open to foreigners.

Taiwan is one of a few places in the world that systematically uses fantizi (traditional Chinese characters), along with Hong Kong and Macau. Traditional Chinese characters are also used as a part of the written language for Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and Cantonese (and more?).

Many traditional (“standard”) characters are no longer used in mainland China. The Chinese mainland first introduced jiantizi (simplified) characters in 1956 – this was done on the theory that simplification of certain complex characters would make it easier for people to learn to read and write. However, if you want to learn to read and write both simplified and traditional Chinese characters, it is much easier to learn fantizi first. This is because the simplified characters still maintain the basic form and elements of the traditional characters, so it is not difficult to learn the simplified characters if you already know the fantizi. On the other hand, because the simplified characters omit some elements of the fantizi, it’s not so simple trying to learn the fantizi characters from their jiantizi versions. It’s not impossible, though, because simplification tended to follow a pattern, and once you become familiar with this pattern, you can generally guess what the fantizi may look like.

Here is some more information on fantizi and jiantizi.
Here is some general information on the Chinese language script.

But, I digress….! Many people have asked me, why Taiwan? I don’t have a consistent answer to this question. I’m not quite sure why. To tell you the truth, I was tired of America. It’s a funny thing to say, because America is huge, and the culture of America varies depending on where you are in the country. Nonetheless, the idea of moving to California didn’t excite me. I wanted to go halfway across the world, not halfway across the country. So… here I am in Taipei, Taiwan.

We (myself and my boyfriend) landed at Taoyuan International airport in Taipei on January 19, 2010 around 10pm local time here. The trip here took about 24 hours. Most of the time was spent in an airplane, whether waiting on the tarmac due to delay or actual flying time. We barely made our connection at Narita airport in Japan, so we went from a 15 hour flight from Detroit, MI straight to another four hour flight from Tokyo to Taipei. This was due to a two hour delay in the airplane at Detroit before take off – apparently there was some oil pressure gauge malfunction and they had to do a full “routine check-up” of the airplane before we were cleared to enter the sky.

We landed late at night in Taipei, tired and worn out. Gladly enough, we met up with a family friend there. A long time friend of my father’s ( to the tune of about 30 years!), Peter has lived outside of the USA for more than 20 years now. He studied Chinese language and culture in college and graduate school. Actually, he studied Mandarin in Taipei, Taiwan for a year or so during the late 1960′s.  Eventually, he ended up settling with a job at the Associated Press. He has been in Taipei now for about five years with his wife, whom he met when he lived in Israel. They have a son in fifth grade, whom they adopted as a baby from Vietnam. They let us stay with them in their apartment here in Taipei for about two weeks when we arrived. So wonderful! We spent much of our time walking around the area of TianMu  in the northern Shilin district of Taipei. This neighborhood is a very nice area. and is situated practically at the base of several mountains, full of great hiking trails – the most popular is called YangMingShan (Yangming mountain). Along with great hiking trails, it has really nice hot springs. Here is some information on hiking trails in Taipei – starting on the page about YangmMingShan and TianMu. This website is really useful, actually, if you’re interested in touring Taipei.

Also, here is some brief information on the different Taipei districts.

There are many foreigner families living in this area, due to the fact that this is the location for Taipei American School (TAS), Taipei Japanese School and Taipei European School (TES). The curriculum of these schools is mostly in English, and very advanced. In fact, currently TAS has a huge population of native Taiwanese children. The rule to get into this school is that your child must has a foreign passport. Thus, many rich Taiwanese parents will travel to the USA to give birth to their child so that their son or daughter has a foreign passport and can enroll at TAS or TES. TianMu is an area rich with japanese shopping malls and nice restaurants. It’s not very representative of the rest of Taipei. Nonetheless, it’s a great place to start if you’re fresh out of a nice American city/suburb and are the type that is easily susceptible to culture shock. Most of the people in TianMu speak an intermediate level of English, thus it is quite easy to live there for years and to never learn much Mandarin beyond “ni hao” and “xiexie”.

I found this to be the case of many of the foreign wives. They move to Taipei because their husband (most likely he is an engineer or business man of some sort) gets a nice job. They never get a job themselves here because their husband makes more than enough money for the whole family. Thus, you have a very active and dedicated PTA at these immersion schools. TAS is a hubbub of activity during and after school. Even on the weekends, there are people coming in and out for soccer practice (events organised by one of the mothers) and social meetings. The PTA is made up entirely of mothers and it is a tight-knit social group. Granted, many mothers spend their time studying Mandarin, but I’ve also come across plenty that don’t even have a basic understanding of the language. I guess I can understand, as it was never really their intention to move to Taiwan except for the fact that their husband got a great job here. Thus, they feel no obligation to assimilate to Taiwanese culture.

For me, I came here in need of a change. My boyfriend and I decided that we wanted to live somewhere closer to the center of Taipei city. I enrolled at the Mandarin Training Center (MTC) language school here at National Taiwan Normal University (Shi da) before we came over. The school is located in the Da An district in Taipei, which is actually quite close to the center of the city. I wanted to live somewhere within walking distance of this school.

We spent our first week in Taipei just hanging out and getting used to the pace of things. We then spent our second week searching intensely for apartments within walking distance of Shi da. We found a really great little place near the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall, which is a giant section of land set aside near the center of Taipei, officially dedicated as a memorial to Chiang Kai-Shek. It has beautiful Chinese architecture and a garden surrounds the entire area. (I’ll post some pictures later).

We moved into our apartment on February 3rd; we signed a lease to end the beginning of August 2010.

The Mandarin Training Center at Shi da is a very well known school for learning Mandarin as a second language. The school has been around for a long time – before mainland China opened up to Americans. Thus, all American students wishing to study Chinese in a Chinese-speaking land came here to Taiwan to study. MTC is the oldest Chinese language school still in operation. Each session of classes lasts three months and sessions are offered year-round. You must spend at least 15 hours a week in class if you are here in Taiwan on a student visitor visa. My session started March 4th, so I’ve been in school for almost two weeks now. My class time is a bit late in the evening, but my only other options were very early in the morning or around noon – however all of the noontime classes were full already and, to be honest, I am just not consistent enough with early morning classes to warrant signing up for that time. As a foreigner staying in Taiwan on a visitor visa for the purpose of study, I am obligated to have a good attendance record (no more than 11 hours of absence every session of school, which is three months long) and good grades. If I miss more than 11 hours of classes during my three month-long session, than I may not get my visitor visa extended. Knowing myself, I am likely to miss many classes if it is very early in the morning every Monday through Friday!

Anyways, my classes are pretty good so far. I will go into this more in later posts – information regarding visas in Taiwan, my experiences at MTC, etc.

I have so much to say about Taipei and my experiences and impressions here. So much so that I can’t try to fit it all in one post. I’ll have to update more often to catch up to my current experiences.

I think this is good for now, though!

Until next time (which will be really soon, because I have lots to catch up on),

再見！