A week and a half after I got back from Beijing, some of us jetted off to Taipei for a three-night weekend trip. It was honestly a spur-of-the-moment trip, as we planned and booked the trip all of about four days before we left. Leaving on Thursday night, we picked up our itinerary on Wednesday morning and checked in for the flight on Wednesday night via the very convenient Airport Express Station in Central.
The reason why we had to check in so early was that I needed to make it to my last class on Thursday (Cantonese) to make a presentation. It ended at 5:00 p.m., and with the flight leaving at 8:55 p.m., I felt pressed for time. Back home, the main international flights leave Los Angeles International Airport. You leave super early because there is no subway/light rail system to get you there efficiently from my suburb, so you have to drive—and since everyone drives, you get stuck in traffic. Depending on your route there, you either go along the Pacific Coast Highway and hit traffic lights or you go on the 101 and 405 (which happens to be “at capacity” a.k.a. congested for fifteen hours of the day). On top of that, with such high security at airports, it’s not uncommon to wait for an hour to get into the terminal.
It’s different at Hong Kong. First off, there are airport buses going everywhere in the territory. The one from my dorm takes about an hour and costs half of what the Airport Express does ($48 HKD vs. $100), and after you take a bus to get to Central, which is where you’d pick up the Airport Express from, you’ve already lost half an hour, which is followed by the much-advertised 24-minuted train ride to the airport that would take 24 minutes if you didn’t have to wait so long for it to depart. So thinking time was in a crunch, since I had four hours to get to the airport, go through immigration, customs, and security, I opted for the Airport Express. It took me about an hour total to get there, and forgetting how efficient Hong Kong International Airport is in comparison to Los Angeles International Airport, I got through security in five minutes and immigration in four, not to mention that I forgot that Hong Kong doesn’t have exit customs (because I remembered China does). Basically, I ended up rushing to the airport, and after everything was all said and done, I waited two and a half hours for the airplane to leave. But enough about that…
Honestly, when I came to Hong Kong I never thought I would visit Taiwan. I remember looking out the airplane window when we flew over a corner of the island, never thinking for a second that I’d get my way over there before the semester was out. Lo and behold I did.
Taiwan holds a funny place in my mind. Partially because of my upbringing, I’m of the One China mentality—that is that there is one China (which includes Taiwan), which is the standpoint for any state that hopes to have relations with the big China. Before I get in trouble with some of my separatist friends back home, just read this post out. So in off-the-record contexts, I would likely suggest that Taiwan is a part of China, though I realize that in practice it is not.
After landing in Taipei Taoyuan International Airport after a one-and-a-half hour flight, we stepped of the plane. Officially the Republic of China (with China being the People’s Republic of China), immigration put a nice ROC stamp on our passports. The entry card was carbon-copied to a departure card, the latter of which was stapled into our passports. One of my friends drew political swords when his passport was stapled right through his Chinese visa.
Walking through their capital’s international airport, it seemed dark and dingy, which, while not speaking to the vibrancy of their city, did not bode well for first impressions. It seemed like this airport, which was built in the 1960s, was thought of as a temporary venue until the Nationalist government could return to Beijing. This sense of temporary placement seemed to follow me through Taipei. Having been mostly developed in the 1960s, it seems like everything was a little too new and that things weren’t built to last. Chiang Kai-shek, leader of the Nationalist when they were exiled, is not even interred; his body is in an above-ground casket, ready to be transported back to his proper burial space in Mainland China “when” the Nationalists capture back all of China.
Another thing that I reminded myself of was that more than a handful of my friends back home are on the Taiwan side of the cross-strait relations, which, while having warmed up lately, are still unstable at the core and in principle, which either party claiming the entirety of the other’s controlled territory. Many of my friends spend their summers there in Taipei and say that they are not (ethnically) Chinese but Taiwanese because they aren’t communist. Fine, but when I told them about Taiwanese aboriginals, they said that they weren’t that either. It seems they’ve lost the fact that Taipei looks very similar to Mainland China and that they speak the same “national” language, not to mention Taiwanese is mutually intelligible with the Fujian dialect of Chinese on the mainland.
That’s fine and all. We weren’t there anyways to talk politics.
Like my serial about Beijing, I have two more text posts about Taipei and two photograph posts. As for now, I need to call the United States consulate and see about getting refill pages in my passport.
More to come.
Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
This work may not be reproduced by any means without express permission of the author.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
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The ROC say that their capital is in Nanjing, not Beijing. The PRC moved the capital to Beijing in 1949 when they took control of the country.
ReplyDeletein the metaphorical sense
ReplyDeleteto understand why most of younger generation of taiwanese prefer to be separated from china, you need to see the issue from a taiwanese perspective. After all taiwan has been democratic "de facto" independent country since ww2, most of our generation who were born after have no association with communist china...well-educated taiwanese would recognize ourselves as ethnic chinese, but Taiwan as a country.
ReplyDeleteWhile I would not deny the fact that taiwan is losing ground in term of international politics, china's constant threat of reunification is purely egotistic and narrow-minded...a way to "save face" by using its military prowess...it simply does not respect the feeling of taiwanese people.
In no way do I claim to understand the mindset of the younger generation of Taiwanese, I've only talked to the American-born "Taiwanese" who identify themselves as such only to avoid being called communist. But to say that to be called Chinese is to be communist is, in essense, racism, xenophobic as it may be. To judge a people based on their government, simply put, is unfair. How many people living on Taiwan before the Nationalists, would go so far as to call Han Chinese Taiwanese?
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