This post originally appeared on my first blog Gawain in Taiwan, on Sep. 27, 2007.

At Berlitz, one of my students asks why I like Taiwan at all. A banker, he’d just answered the question my teacher’s addition instructed me to ask, carefully phrasing his response to use the same words I’d given him. “I think the economy situation in my home, Taiwan, in the last twenty years is . . . not good.”

“Economic situation,” I said by means of correction.

He repeated the correction, and then I told him I thought thing’s were pretty good. I’d gotten in the habit of contending with Kenneth, his English good enough to pick out even the finer points worth disputing. “Just across the way is a designer department store so massive they separated it into twelve distinct buildings!” Indeed, just behind Taipei 101 (at the time, still the world’s tallest building) is the infuriatingly large Shinkon Mitsukoshi department complex. Massive…it actually manages to sprawl luxuriously across wide courtyards and covered walkways. Sprawl in a city with 25,000 people crammed into every square mile.

Kenneth has a disarming grin, though, and as he steeples his hands, employs it. “But the 1970’s was the,” he pauses to to taste his direct translation, one he knows works, as either side of his neatly parted salt-and-pepper bangs twitch, “Golden Age.”

The 1970’s was?

He catches his mistake the second time. “And XinGuan (he uses the Chinese name) is Japanese! Look at the Taiwan GDP - it’s only growing at four percent. In Japan, the GDP is much better!” I nod sternly, as is my job, and stress Taiwan GDP twice before he changes it to Taiwanese, then counter his point. “But that’s Japan. What about, say, Korea?”

“That’s the point!” Kenneth leans forward excitedly, “Ten years ago the average Taiwanese made more than a Korea person!”

Korean.

“Right, but now their GDP is growing nine percent and they make more than we do! Even me! I’m moving to Shanghai,” he pronounces the city’s name in Mandarin, with the tones intact.

“What’s the wrong with Taiwan?”

“Taiwan missed the chance to grow with China. Look at any other economy - Scotland, Ireland,” he pronounced them half in their Chinese transliterations, but I didn’t interrupt. “As long as there was a dispute [a battle between unification and independence], they couldn’t grow. That’s Taiwan.”

“Do you think China will invade?” I say, asking the question I never even touch.

“No. Taiwan will always,” again he pauses and I can see him tasting his words, “play it safe. China will never have an excuse. And so we’ll wait.”

I can’t decide if it should be we will wait, or just we wait. I paw for a moment at my tie, tap my dress shoes, think, then go ahead and read the next question the book gives me. Across the way, in the Japanese department store, girls in dress hats futz with their white lace gloves. They’re paid to stand in the elevator, ask your floor, and announce your arrival. What do they do when there aren’t any customers?

-sb

I looked up all that stuff he said about the GDP. In 2006, Taiwan’s was 4.6%. Japan’s at 2.2% and South Korea is growing at 4.8%. China is schooling everybody with growth of 10.7% and the US is at 3.2%.

Own the center line. That bus’ll run suicide across three lanes of traffic to make that left-turn light. Any cab could squeal backwards a hundred meters in reverse to beat out the other man coming up fast for that fare you’re passing. Keep the left-lane open, so you can knock your speed up to a sprint when the coolie truck’s clutch problem threatens to box you in or some Lexus can’t make up whether or not to turn right a block ahead. Snow hare, you’ve got to be quick.

I had a dream shortly after buying my scooter that I was back home again, lost, riding past fresh green lawns on a sun-soaked afternoon. I couldn’t make sense of what I was doing, trying hard to straddle the middle of the narrow city block, dodging around cars that weren’t there, racing the same Taipei shuffle on Milwaukee lanes. I was certain that the police would soon be on me, but I couldn’t stop and I couldn’t slow down. The wheel was wobbling - and I feared if I slowed up it’d come clean off.

If you haven’t seen it, it might be a tough thing to imagine, the number of scooters in Taipei city. In rush hour, they easily outnumber cars ten-to-one. It’s an institution, the puttering steed of the salary-man masses, like their riders worn long with heavy use, worked for every ounce of oomph they’ve got, packed in with just enough space to breathe. Despite the similarities, like owners who resemble their pets, it’d be foolish to try and draw some soul of a people message from the scooter’s total dominance of the city. For most people, driving one was a last resort.

A scooter’s hard to love. Heavy and unweildy, even a nice new Vespa looks crummy ankle-deep in the four-stroke haze of a thousand Yamahas. They’ve tiny wheels, pudgy black donuts, and you ride them with your knees together, like you have to take a leak. I always splayed my feet out, let them slide into the scooter’s nose in a slacker stretch, but even that couldn’t make this look cool. None of the power, speed, or excitement of a motorcycle, and all of the danger.

The rain’s the most miserable part. That rumbling, caustic mob of scooters sitting at the top of the red light’s like a drain clog, their massive raingear slick with road spatter, secretaries’ bare feet idling on the asphalt while their high-heels dangle at one side. That’s what makes Taipei ‘Scooter City’ in a real way, and not in some quaint, “did-you-know-they-wear-wooden-shoes-here” sort of way: that their tiny 3-stroke engines grind the air around you to shreds, and that it never stops, even in the all too frequent land-squalls. Rain or shine, the scooter parade never takes off. I’ve ridden mine in at least a half-dozen typhoons.

I could write an Ode to the Scooter, but like everything in Taipei, that would really just be an Ode to Convenience and Cost-Effectiveness, hardly subjects to rouse and stir. The scooter can’t be admired. Not even the split-eared charms of the street dogs whose heads I daily pat can be gifted to the lowly scooter. Instead, like workhorses the world over, they could perhaps twist pity into something nearing respect.

So, here’s how it works: into the same sort of congested traffic you’ll find in any densely-populated city, empty a hundred thousand swarming hornets and let them find their way down every crack and between every open space, trailing one another like water through weakening dams. In a city where no one gives each other that “personal bubble” I remember diagrammed in baby blue on my driver’s ed. bulletin board, this frantic addition tips the traffic scale from ‘manageable’ to ‘crazytime.’

The alternative, however, of all these people driving cars, would be a gridlocked city. Since Taipei’s actual square-mileage leaves little room for more traffic, zipping from one end to the other on something we see as a toy Stateside not only makes sense, it keeps the place from turning into what I saw in Bangkok and Tianjin - honking queues of cars jumbled together like fallen dominoes.

Back when I was among the throng, before an accident killed my scooter (which was then stolen), my students all told me I was crazy. At last I had a big one, an all-too-close accident which every rider is either on one side of the other, some tried to make me eat humble pie. Nodding knowledgeably to me in my sling, they went on as though their months of cliched warnings had been prescient and not just conventional wisdom.

Those students are still wrong, scar or no. I wasn’t crazy; the whole city is nuts - frayed from nose to tail from thousands of scooters let loose like figurative marbles in a sick man’s head. And why be sane in a town gone mad?

I never turn down a cab because of its shabby appearance, but I know people who do. I figure natural selection got us this far, and I don’t really want to wind up riding to my morning teaching gig on a peacock. This morning, though, the first one to reach me cuts across three lanes of traffic and rumbles to a stop. There’s tape on the handle, the car’s boxy, with the sort of silver trim popular twenty years ago. I think about a story my friend likes to tell, about arriving at the airport dizzy and half-asleep after spending more than an hour in a backseat with a carbon dioxide leak. I get in anyways. The fact is, a cab ride is a cab ride, and this is more true for me in Asia than anywhere else. It’s hard to give a damn about the sheen on seats or how worn the steering wheel, when no matter what, I’m still going to end up getting there in the same amount of time, and having the same conversation en route. Today, like most days, my driver is curious about my Chinese, and he’s caught me without headphones.

It’s been long enough, I’ve got some statistics for you:

At twenty-five, it’s alright that I’m not yet married, but 70% say thirty is pushing it. Only 50% ask about dating Taiwanese women, and 0% get an honest answer. 100% complain about the number of scooters, which (along with cabs) get the blame for making traffic in this town what it is. About 10% are so upset about the glut of taxis on the road that it’s clear that competition has stretched them to the breaking point. Every driver I’ve talked to has said they drive in twelve or fourteen-hour shifts. Roughly 80% would run down their own mother to get a fare, but less admit it. None have discussed the possibility of finding other employment. Most know someone who immigrated to America, and over 70% volunteer the opinion that America is a much better place than Taiwan. I’ve never heard a specific reason why.

This same general sequence repeats itself nearly everyday I’ve been here, often enough going forward basically without my participation. Lately, though, the conversation has changed. For the past two to three months, most of my cab drivers start by asking about Barack Obama.

The first question is always why I supported him, as opposed not to John McCain, but Hillary Clinton. McCain never seemed to be much of a blip on the radar in Taiwan, though cab drivers all know his name (for now). I expect this stemmed from the Republican Party’s signature marshaling of myopia to run a campaign, things that, even when they work in America, are too petty to register at such a distance. To whit, a Taiwanese person (from any walk of life) is as unaware of a Christian fundamentalist as fundies are of Taiwan (or, it would seem, continents).

When inevitably they ask why I like Barack Obama, my Chinese begins to stall. Who has the vocabulary for health-care and education debates, or to explain the doctrine of deregulation? I’ve got no real way to talk about leadership, either, and so I settle for saying that “I believe in him.”

There is always silence at this. Racial gears are certainly spinning away in their air-conditioned skulls, and who knows what else. After a moment, when the driver speaks, the statistics finally begin to break down, and the conversation becomes distinct, an actual exchange. I’ve had many times to argue race, but this is like debating the virtues of coconut milk with a penguin (expect to see more on this in the future). Other times, my driver will mention Chen Shui-bian.

As of yesterday, Mr. Chen has entered prison. Nine years ago, he was the most popular man on the island, and his fall (first from glory to irrelevance, then crushing disgrace) is the kind of political narrative common enough in Asia, except it shouldn’t have been. Chen was no junta leader, or hot-shot executive turned politico. In 1985, he was political dissident and prisoner. As a lawyer, Chen represented the defendants of the Gaoxiong Incident, one of Taiwan’s most significant events in terms of human rights and political freedom. A native son of Taiwan, he represented the half of the island that was here when the defeated nationalist army (KMT) landed in retreat, local Taiwanese who instantly (and for the second time in one generation) found themselves repressed and pushed to the margins.

Chen’s story could have been that of triumphant democracy as the eventual destiny of all people, which was indeed the message when in 2000 he rode a great wave of optimism to the highest office in the land. Free at last to really choose their own leadership, many Taiwanese people chose choice, and to re-imagine themselves not as a population in exile, but a citizenry. More powerfully, many average people chose also to dare to dream of total freedom, of Taiwanese nationhood. I wasn’t here, but in the wistfulness of many Taiwanese I meet, the word was hope.

That hope was not to be rewarded.

It seems Chen is a man destined to be remembered for the photo of him entering jail, handcuffed arms in the air leaving him looking like a hung duck and erasing the image of monumental accomplishment his election in 2000 had been. Even with the arrival of Chen Yunlin, a mainland official working towards reunification under China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, and the reinvigorated sense of national identity that accompanied current President Ma’s concessions in these meetings, when the last measure to keep him from the jail cell failed yesterday, there was a deep sense of vindication and relief. The near-universal underpinning of such feelings, even among his former supporters, is crushing bitterness. The promise Chen offered has been matched only by the scale of his inaction and alleged crimes.

This morning, my cab driver went tense when I asked about Chen as a president. “Eight years, millions of dollars, and for what? He changed the name of the airport (to revoke the namesake honor from the island’s former generalissimo, Chiang Kai-shek)! That’s it!” He’d voted for Chen. Twice.

Could Obama be another Chen Shui-bian? I must admit the possibility, because both Mr. Chen’s corruption and the meanness of his nationalist initiatives (the airport being a prime example) were parts of a single overarching mistake. Not unlike George W. Bush, Chen failed to separate his sense of individual destiny from that of his nation. After running on a platform of change and a new day, when he got into office, Chen didn’t seem to realize he could no longer get away with business as usual. Before his time, like most of Asia, political corruption and favoritism were the standard in Taiwan, and small-minded politics (like fighting over an airport name), as well as personal enrichment, could be placed ahead of the public good. His election had been a turning point, even if his administration failed to live up to the expectation of something other than business as usual.

Chen made the mistake of thinking an old-style politician could survive in the new era he helped usher in. This ability to re-imagine will be Obama’s real test, not to live up to the hype of his campaign, but to operate under a different set of assumptions from previous presidents. Moreover, he will have to wrangle this paradigm shift from an old-fashioned, partisan Democratic party famous in recent years for its divisiveness within and lack of direction without. Unless Obama can deliver something other than business as usual, he is sure to fail.

Most times, the cab stops before I can muddle through this notion in butchered Mandarin, but sometimes I get a chance to tell them that if Obama does not bring with him a new standard of conduct and politicking, then he, like Chen, might end up history’s roast duck.