Swept up in the stresses of finishing my thesis, I holed myself up in an effort to minimize my social contact with the world. Taipei, however, had other plans.
「在寫程式嗎？」Writing code? The café owner’ s inquisitive glance at my laptop screen interrupted my typing.
「對啊。」I sheepishly affirmed. My eyes remained glued to my screen.
「寫程式很消耗能力。」Writing code is really energy-consuming.
「真的！」This time, I affirmed with a bit more conviction. I felt understood.
Soon enough, it was already 2am—closing time. The other customers had already filtered out of the café. My eyes remained glued to my screen, hoping to knock out a few more lines of code in these last few seconds. To my surprise, instead of gently reminding me it was closing time, the café owner reassured me I could stay a bit later. He had more tasks to finish anyway, he said.
Although the true Taiwanese response might have been to refuse the offer and leave for fear of overstaying one’s welcome, I am not Taiwanese. I thanked him repeatedly and returned to my code with renewed motivation. He took a seat and began sorting out the accounting for the day.
That night, I ended up serving as tech support and keeping watch of the café, even though I was hopelessly underqualified for either responsibility. His friend had offloaded a Mac onto him. It was supposedly dysfunctional, but the café owner, perhaps assuming too much of me based on the code on my screen, was convinced we could get it to work. As such, I ended up seated in front of that Mac, blindly clicking in an attempt to both understand and answer his questions about terms I was learning on the spot in Mandarin—硬碟（hard drive）、記憶體（memory）… Eventually, with no help from me beyond an arguable degree of moral support, he successfully got the computer running.
As he got ready to go on a run at daybreak, he informed me I was still free to continue working at the café, as long as I turned to face the door and keep watch. Only in Taiwan, I thought. In the event anyone actually tried to break in—or more accurately, walk in—there was absolutely nothing I would be able to do to stop them. But, given how safe Taiwan is, I assented, and sure enough, nothing happened. After the owner returned, he graciously cooked the both of us stir-fried ramen noodles with lamb and egg—my first time eating ramen as breakfast at 5 in the morning.
On this Sunday night, then, I pulled an all-nighter with a café owner who let me stay past hours and cooked me lamb noodles at 5am. When I finally left at 6am, he jokingly nagged me about the progress of my work, 「到底做完了沒？」So, are you finally done with your work or not?
I responded, 「當然沒有！是論文嘛！」Of course not! It’s a whole thesis, for goodness’ sake!
The following Wednesday, my plan for the day remained the same: work on my thesis. On the way to a café, I stopped to try a Hainanese chicken rice joint a friend had recommended to me. Here, the boss once again whisked me out of my thesis-engulfed world, asking me if I was Japanese. Incredulous, I responded, 「你怎麼知道我是外國人？我都還沒開口講話！」How did you know I was a foreigner? I hadn’t even opened my mouth!
She smiled back, saying something about how my disposition was different from a Taiwanese person’s. On some days, I feel embarrassed about my foreignness being noticed almost immediately even in spite of my ethnicity, but on this day, I was simply amused that fun social interactions were still finding their way to me. As I left the restaurant, she asked me, 「你是不是很有人緣？」You enjoy good relations with people, right?
The compliment took me completely by surprise. During this time, when I was actively minimizing my relations with friends in order to focus on writing my thesis, I was still lucky enough to enjoy such positive relations with Taiwanese people in my day to day. Too shocked to respond deftly in the moment, I missed an opportunity to tell her that the truth was she was the one with such 人緣. My friend who recommended me this restaurant similarly sang praises about her hospitality. The boss was the one who managed to have such wonderful relations with her customers, not the other way around.
The day after on Friday, I found myself in another somewhat absurd moment with Taiwanese strangers: we were stuck in the middle of a bustling street, waiting for the pedestrian light to turn green again.
The last time I had found myself caught there was almost two years ago, when I first arrived in Taiwan. The crosswalk was uniquely a bike crosswalk, meaning the duration of time in which it was green was far shorter than other crosswalks. As I walked absentmindedly across it, cars began zooming past me, scaring me out of my wits. Fortunately, I had made it to the middle of the street in that moment, where there was still an island for me to wait at until the light turned green again. Regaining my composure, I realized how right my mother was for warning me about traffic in Asia—a warning I had failed to heed until I was in the midst of it.
This time, however, I was scared not for myself but for my accomplices at the island in the middle of the road. They were an elderly couple; the wife walked with a cane, further supported by her husband. How did this 阿嬤 and 阿公 end up in such a dangerous spot? The patch of asphalt barely felt like it had enough room for all of us. Instead of any expression of fear or anxiety, however, they simply laughed. We smiled at each other in this liminal space, flanked by cars whizzing by.
Over the sound of the engines in front and behind us, we introduced ourselves to each other. My inability to understand the wife’s questions in Taiwanese betrayed my foreignness. The wife was an admirable 93 years old, and the husband turned out to be a retired NTU professor. Coincidentally, their daughter had also graduated from the NTU College of Public Health, where I was on the brink of graduating from. They were on their way to a routine health screening at the district health center. The wife told me the name of the screening they were to get. Told to me in Taiwanese, I did not know what screening she was referring to, but I felt grateful for a glimpse into how health is discussed among the elderly population—in Taiwanese.
The pedestrian (or biking?) light turned green again, and we parted ways.
「慢走！」I called to them, endearingly telling them to take their time walking. In my head, though, I hoped they wouldn’t take so much time as to end up caught in the middle of the street again.
A couple days later, that next Sunday night, I sat down to eat side-by-side with an elderly lady journaling at Seven Eleven. The Dragon Boat Festival was just around the corner. Craving a bit of festiveness and friendship as a thesis-writing break, I had bought a 粽子 (rice dumplings eaten especially during Dragon Boat Festival) and, in a buy-one-get-one offer, two bottles of maesil-cha (Korean green plum tea). I was thinking of my Korean-American friend who visited me and watched me participate in the New Taipei City Dragon Boat Race last summer.
The lady next to me expressed interest in the maesil-cha, so I decided to give her the second bottle I had received for free. From there, we embarked on a journey about her life, where I learned about how her one-year escapade to France turned into 20 years. She was a Chinese teacher who became inspired by her own students’ language learning progress to take up learning French herself. As she shared with me her interests and riffled through pictures of Van Gogh’s family, I thought of my own CLEA Chinese tutor who similarly loved Van Gogh’s story. My tutor had lent me his copy of a biography of Van Gogh translated to traditional Chinese—back when I utterly lacked the ability to efficiently read it. I mentioned to my new Seven Eleven friend that I had gone to an exhibit on impressionism at Huashan Cultural Park just a few months ago, at my tutor’s invitation. We bonded over these shared tidbits all up until I decided it was time to return to thesis writing, when we parted on the sentiment that we would surely run into each other again at this corner store.
That week of thesis-writing was supposed to be one of the most isolated weeks in my time in Taiwan. To guarantee I had as much time as possible to write, I made no social plans, and I was almost a ghost of presence to my own roommate. Taiwan, however, made this vision impossible with its 人情味, or its sense of humanity and community.
Often, people say that compared to cities in the South, Taipei is cold and detached. While this description may still be true（天龍國！）in relation to Southern Taiwan, where food is delicious and weather is far drier and warmer, nothing can refute the sheer warmth Taipei’s people have shown me in my time here. Even during a week where I actively ran away from any encounters with humanity, Taipei brought the encouragement and kindness face-to-face with me in the unlikeliest of places and times—even in the middle of the road. What I will miss the most about Taiwan, then, is its people. These encounters have made me endlessly grateful to be able to live here for two years, where these smiles and laughs have become quotidian. I am certain that moments like the ones I’ve recounted above will continue to resurface in my memory wherever and whenever in the future. Whether it be lamb ramen, Hainanese chicken rice, or maesil-cha, my time in Taiwan has imbued the ordinary with so much extraordinary meaning. Thank you, Taiwan, and I cannot wait to be back when I’m able to give even more back to you!
