Some random help Chinese writer and blogger Han Han (韓寒) received from strangers during his recent trip to Taiwan prompted him to ruminate on what is absent in the culture of his own country.
Han, 29, said on his microblog on Thursday that he left his cellphone in a taxi cab on the way to Taipei’s Yangmingshan (陽明山) and while he was frantically trying to find it, the driver had already delivered it to the hotel where Han was staying.
Han said he wanted to thank the driver with some money, but the driver, identified as Wang Hung-sung (王鴻松), declined and described his actions as “no big deal.”
“To be honest, I was stunned,” Han said.
The Chinese writer said “the super-rich and their craze for fancy cars and top-notch yachts will not help win respect for the people of a country,” adding that culture, laws and freedom are what make a nation great.
Han mentioned another example of Taiwanese kindness, in which Han’s friend took a pair of broken glasses to an optician, where the shop owner offered the friend a pair of contact lenses for free.
“The shop owner even said: ‘I’m really sorry that I cannot help fix your glasses due to your tight schedule,’” Han said.
Han said he remembered thinking: “Why on earth would good things like this happen to us? It doesn’t make sense.”
He said the owner was so kind and generous that they started to worry about their personal safety, as they were suspicious that the “authorities” must have made a special arrangement to impress them.
He said that there is no such thing as a perfect culture, a perfect system or a perfect place.
“In the Chinese-speaking world, Taiwanese culture may not be the best, but there’s nothing better than it either,” he wrote.
“They [Taiwan] can never afford to host the World Expo or the Olympics as China has done, but walking down the streets in Taiwan, looking at the taxi drivers, deli owners and passers-by, I don’t feel a sense of pride [in being Chinese],” Han said in his post.
Han said that as a Chinese writer, he feels lost in his culture, a feeling that was not triggered by his short trip to Taiwan, but by his own observation over the years.
“I’m lost in the culture I live in. Several decades ago, this culture taught us to be cruel and struggle against each other. In recent decades, it has made people greedy and selfish, and those characteristics have developed in so many of us,” he went on.
“Aside from pursuing self-interest and picking fights with people, we have become indifferent to almost everything else,” he said.
He said that news stories about the indifference and absurdity in China make international headlines and although the Chinese government may be to blame, “a sense of helplessness has become a feature of the Chinese race.”
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the