My parents and I were on holiday in Taiwan last week, and during our two days in Taipei, I was excited to visit the 24-hour
Eslite Bookstore, named in
TIME as the best bookstore in Asia.
I want to set up tent and LIVE in that bookstore. I would explore one floor a day and still have a basement level left over at the end of a week. I would teach myself how to read traditional Chinese characters (an older form than the simplified characters now used in Mainland China) from the books on its shelves. It would, in short, be Heaven.
Unfortunately, I only had a few hours in Eslite, so I thought I'd better stick mainly to their English language books. I picked up a copy of Ursula Le Guin's 1998 translation of the
Tao Te Ching, which I've never managed to find in Australia, and also Mary Midgley's
The Myths We Live By, because I wanted something to read on the plane back to Shanghai. (On the plane over I read
The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie, which would make a magical film - look it up, producers.)
Timber from national forests washed into the ocean by Typhoon Morakot last August. A huge amount of valuable timber, some from endangered trees, has already been retrived from the beaches, but piles like this remain, awaiting collection.Taiwan itself I found to be a frustrating, beautiful, and somewhat depressing place. Taiwanese people seem to
believe - with a ferocity, an uncynical patriotism and religiosity that is unfamiliar to me, from living both in China and Australia. The national flag is more prominent and more frequently on display than anywhere I have been in the PRC. Temples and shrines are everywhere, and often they comprise the only new or well-maintained structures in evidence. No longer the Asian Tiger lauded by Western economists and politicians as a miracle in the 1980s and 1990s, and overshadowed by the rapidly growing China, today Taiwan is beset by a shrinking population, the outsourcing of its local manufacturing base,
political scandal,
natural disaster, and increasing reliance on tourist dollars from its old enemies, China and the former colonial power, Japan - a tourism that relies on the island's pristine natural environment, and its uniqueness from Mainland China, which floods of foreign visitors simultaneously destroys. Given the assult on its self-sufficiency, its independence, and its values, an undercurrent of bitterness in the Taiwanese could hardly escape notice, even beneath their impeccable politeness and good humour.
Our tour guide for the entire 10 days, Mr. Lin, a former executive who lost his entire fortune (and his wife and children) after investing in what turned out to be a real estate scam, told us that the prevailing mood in Taiwan since the financial crisis seems to be fatalism, and its motto:
Let's dance while we still can. Retirees are blowing what remains of their hard-earned savings on traveling and holidays, thinking that the social security system will catch them when they fall. But for how long? And at what cost?
My fellow travelers, with the exception of my parents, were all from the PRC, and the impression of Taiwan that they left with was:
This cannot last. This place is still in the past. We can learn from them, but we must not become them. It saddens me, but I think they are probably right. Opportunism, for the moment, seem to have won out over idealism.
Tags: books, taiwan, travel
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