Hartley Pool (who’s a native of Hartlepool, UK) is a pseudonym for John Anderson, a former language teacher in Taiwan now living in Kuala Lumpur. Stranger in Taiwan is his comic novel about a fictional language-teacher’s experiences here.
The narrator is Hartley, 31, a British teacher with previous teaching experience in Romania, Hungary, Spain and Singapore who meets a Taiwanese girl, Anita, in the UK, and flies to Taiwan to be with her.
He looks for teaching work but is initially judged to be over-qualified. After suffering from salmonella poisoning from eating shrimps, he lands a job at a junior high school. He buys Anita a Louis Vuitton handbag costing NT$60,000 in Taipei 101, twice the price, he ruminates, of the PlayStation 3 he’d hoped to buy for himself.
Several features of Taiwanese life are invoked — working on Christmas Day, 7-Elevens staying open throughout typhoons (they’re “the cockroaches of the retail world,” able to survive any disaster, he writes), night markets crowded with people looking for unmentionable animal parts as food, socializing at Taipei’s Brass Monkey, and so on.
There are several trips out of Taipei — to Hong Kong to renew his visa, to Miaoli to savor Hakka specialties, to Guilin, China, for a short vacation, then to Yulin, Kenting, and finally Miaoli again.
In the second half of the book he gets a teaching job with the British Council. Episodes follow describing being driven by Anita for the first time after she’s passed her test, cycling (one of the more entertaining episodes), riding the Maokong Gondola, and buying an apartment — a particularly nice and inexplicably cheap one on the fourth floor, facing a cemetery, is declined, reluctantly on his part but emphatically on Anita’s.
Then Anita’s aunt from the US comes to stay for three weeks, with Anita’s mother there too for much of the time. Hartley has a tooth extracted by a reluctant dentist just as the Year of the Dog turns into the Year of the Pig, an event that locates the story in early 2007.
The author’s fellow language teachers might find elements of his account that resonate with their own experiences and hence enjoy it more than I did. Anderson is a well-established stand-up comic and the novel reads like a comedy routine with laugh points regularly dispersed throughout.
The dialogue is sprinkled with mild obscenities, though there are no actual sex descriptions, merely an on-going joke about pedophiles which is hard to understand and consequently to come to terms with.
Both typhoons and earthquakes are treated with comic unconcern.
It’s unwarranted to criticize a book for not being something it never sets out to be, so it’s perhaps unfair to say that there are swathes of Taiwan life untouched by this tale. Few Taiwanese other than Hartley’s girlfriend appear, and none of those that do are presented in depth. The grandeur of the country’s landscapes doesn’t figure significantly, nor any of its cultural life. Neither politics nor public affairs make an appearance. Again, these were never on the agenda to begin with, but something of their nature could have been expected if Taiwan’s essential character was being depicted.
This, then, is a collection of fictional peeps from the window by a rather unadventurous Briton. Because the writer wants his narrative to be funny, they’re usually negative. But Hartley Pool isn’t entirely negative. Air Macau, some noodles at Yulin and a son-et-lumiere show in Guilin are all treated to generous praise.
By and large, though, this is a novel marked by a farcical breeziness, and you feel you ought to be hearing the author reading it aloud to get its full flavor. It’s not really a novel as such, but it’s no worse for that.
Stranger in Taiwan is available from Amazon both as a paperback and as a Kindle download, and is on sale in the UK, though apparently not yet in bookshops in Taiwan.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless