Last Fragment from a Taiwan Notebook: Traffic, Turn Signals, Fate
A day or two after our arrival in Taiwan, my family and I stood at the edge of the narrow road just outside the college campus where we now lived, wondering how to cross the street. There was no traffic light, no crosswalk, no sidewalk, and no break in the traffic, which was made up almost entirely of motor scooters. Coming from America, land of the Humvee and the monster truck, a motor scooter sounds like a child’s toy, but a torrent of them is actually pretty scary. We watched for a while, looking for a gap in the flow, lurching forward and then retreating. Finally, we lost heart and went home. In the weeks that followed, we learned how to cross that street, zigging and zagging between scooters with the casual air of a Taiwanese college student out for bubble tea. We never really stopped to consider how out of character that was for us, anxious American suburbanites normally obsessed with rules and safety—tending to equate the two, really. It was like we’d left our order-loving, non-jaywalking selves behind in America, along with our two overweight cats and Big Gulp cups. Meanwhile in our travels through the city we
