I'd like to say that if you live in Taiwan, citizen or not, you're under no obligation to love it all the time. No place on this Earth is heaven, and no country is perfect, and of course there are times when we're not fond of the place we're living in, when we compare it unfavorably to any number of other places throughout the world.
I'd also like to say that yes, at the time of writing I do like Taiwan. I've lived here for almost 24 years now, and I vastly prefer living here to living in my own country. Yes, some parts of life in Taiwan still annoy me, but I never question why I'm here or whether or not I should move elsewhere.
This hasn't always been the case, however. Back in 2008 I didn't like Taiwan very much, if at all, and toward the end of the 2007-2008 school year I even decided to leave it.
My decision to leave wasn't all down to disliking Taiwan. Looking back at it now, I realize that my thinking about both my family in the States and my in-laws in Taiwan had become very confused. This was partly because I wasn't getting a lot of social interaction back then. It was also due to the fact that I had my head in a lot of Chinese books from which I was extracting certain values about family and filial piety. It sounds ridiculous, but at the time I thought it was my duty to go back and either help take care of my parents or assume a more hands-on role in my side of the family. Such ideas seem laughable to me now, but I wasn't in the best head space in 2008.
Part of the reason for my confusion, I now realize, was the junior high school where I was working. I really underestimated the effect working with 13 and 14 year olds had on me, and in the course of two years at Tunghai Junior High I'd picked up not only an extreme sense of dissatisfaction but also an adolescent sense of alienation into the bargain.
You'll see this sense of alienation in a lot of junior high school teachers. We're around kids on the cusp of adulthood, kids trying to find out who they are and what kind of person they're going to be. Kids at that age are often rude, they push against boundaries, and it's only natural that in the course of a school year their teachers begin to mirror some of their less attractive qualities. I had this (literally) brought home to me not long ago, when my wife chastised me for "talking like one of my students." After she said this I quickly realized that I had unconsciously borrowed some of my students' less gracious mannerisms, and that bringing such mannerisms home isn't usually a good thing.
Bringing home mannerisms is one problem, but absorbing that adolescent sense of alienation and uncertainty is a whole other other kettle of fish. Returning to 2008, what was I, a foreign English teacher, going to do with that sense of alienation and uncertainty? What would be its object? Why of course its first object would be the kids I was teaching, but from there it ballooned outward to include my coworkers, the city where I lived, and finally to Taiwan as a whole.
From the vantage point of 2024 it's easy to think about this change in perspective objectively, but in 2008 it was another story. I suppose part of my difficulty was that I was new to teaching junior high school, and I underestimated the effect my students would have on me. Soon enough problems with individual students became problems with all of the students, and problems with all of the students became issues with various coworkers that were never easily resolved. After that point I became unsatisfied with Taitung, the city I'd moved to, and after that I was unhappy with Taiwan, the island where I'd lived for five years up to that point.
When you focus on anything so intently you'll begin to see it everywhere. Already disposed to see the faults in Taiwan, they multiplied to the point where I couldn't see any point in staying. Trash on the roads? It was omnipresent. Dangerous traffic? I saw near-death experiences at every intersection. Hot and humid weather? No set of clothes was ever comfortable enough. People staring at me? I became fixated on these things to the point of distraction.
Then there's the issue that many foreigners living in Taiwan obsess over: Taiwan's relationship with China. I became convinced that invasion was imminent, just as I was equally convinced that Taiwan was going to somehow "give up the ghost" and relinquish its independence for the sake of appeasing Beijing. I couldn't see a collective will in any aspect of Taiwanese politics, and in the absence of that I figured that China, with all its strident nationalism, was going to take over one way or another.
I'd really grown quite hysterical. I smile at this stuff now, but back then I was dead serious about it. And what makes it even funnier to me is how several foreign friends have gone down similar routes, leading to their own moves back to the US, Canada or elsewhere. I'm not saying that all of the worries expressed above aren't things that we don't need to take into consideration, but you have to be aware of how a sense of alienation and a fixation on the negative aspects of where you live color your perspective. You have to realize that this same sense of "being foreign" (i.e. not belonging) affects both how you view the place you live in and how you view your role within it.
My feelings toward Taiwan having reached a fever pitch, soon enough I was on a plane with my wife and two daughters, headed back to the States. At that time my wife still had her green card, so immigrating to the USA wasn't difficult. My wife, to her credit, went willingly, though she had some reservations about the move. Her uncertainty was to some extent mediated by the fact that we hadn't really lived (i.e. supported ourselves) in the States up to that point, and the glowing pictures I painted of our future in the US went a long way to convincing her to take a chance on America. I can see now that it was really myself I was trying to convince with those glowing pictures, but of course I didn't see that at the time.
You might recall that 2007-2008 wasn't a good year for the U.S. economy. This was around the time of the housing crisis memorialized in the movie The Big Short. Just go back and watch the depressing photo montage near the end of that movie -- that's right around the time we were on a plane, ready to start our new lives in Seattle.
Despite the odds my wife and I both managed to find jobs there. I got hired as a math and sometime substitute teacher, she began working as a manager in a downtown hotel. We were making decent money, working on saving enough to move out of my parents' house, and I suppose that if we'd loved Seattle more all of that would have been fine.
But Seattle had changed a lot in the years since I'd actually lived there. And even if Seattle hadn't changed, Taiwan had made me into a different kind of person. I found that I just couldn't enjoy Seattle the way I had when I was in my 20s. I liked it well enough, but there was something missing. Exacerbating this feeling was the fact that we couldn't ever save enough money, and that my job as a teacher was far from secure.
As that year went on, I also noticed that my hate for Taiwan was fading. I began to miss the most random things, like the sound of the doors opening in a 7-11 or the rumble of scooters idling at traffic lights. Seattle seemed so dark and drained of color next to my memories of Taiwan. The Chinese food we ate was never as good as what we ate here, the people in Seattle were polite but less friendly, and the excitement of Seattle at night paled in comparison to an evening in Taipei, Taichung or Kaohsiung.
Etc., etc,. etc. I struggled on like that for a while, until -- you guessed it -- my wife and I began talking about going back and restarting the lives we'd left behind. Perhaps she'd been waiting me out the entire time, knowing that once the reality of Seattle sunk in I'd be eager to leave it. Perhaps she knew that going back to Seattle was just something I had to do, and that once I'd learned to dislike parts of it again I'd be ready to come back to Taiwan.
At some point in April, May or June we began talking to my parents about going back to the place I thought I'd despised just months previous. I can't say my parents were very surprised when I the subject came up. And of course from talking we progressed to buying plane tickets, contacting old friends and coworkers in Taitung, and making other preparations. I took a job at an elementary school not far from the junior high where I'd worked, and before the summer ended the four of of us were arriving in Taoyuan International Airport, ready to give Taiwan another try.
It was an expensive lesson, but one I had to learn. I realize now that you have to guard against building up too much animosity toward the place where you live, that nurturing that sense of alienation is never good. I've since learned -- I hope -- to forgive Taiwan for its faults, and to not grudge it for its occasional failings. Because every place has its failings, no matter how idyllic it might seem from the outside.
All of that was almost 16 years ago now. Since then my daughters have grown up and are living on their own. My life, however, really isn't that different from what it was in 2008. The only big difference is how I see things, and with my readiness to find fault with the country I live in.
If you've found happiness in another country after living in Taiwan, great. You'll get no judgement from me for it. But if, like me, you've lived here for a length of time, be careful about holding grudges against Taiwan, especially if you're simultaneously idealizing the country you came from. There's no perfect place to be found on this Earth, save perhaps the one we make with those we love and care for.
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NOTE: I hope I'm not repeating myself here. I feel like I've discussed this episode in my life before, but I don't think it's been the subject of a blog entry. I've been writing this blog since 2009, the year after I returned to Taiwan.
