It's not often that I am irritated by developments in the Antipodes, though of late Australia's cross-dressing foreign minister, Alexander Downer, has been pushing it with smug lectures on the evils of Taiwanese diplomacy in the South Pacific. He really had me going for a while there, prattling away about the ruin our money is bringing to the Solomon Islands. Then it became amusing. Downer now has what he wanted: a new election and a new prime minister. But -- wait for it -- Cabinet appointments (including minister of police) have now been given to two men in custody on suspicion of inciting the riots that leveled Honiara's Chinatown.
Be careful what you wish for, eh, Lex baby? Hope you've been reading your Kipling:
And when your goal is nearest (The end for others sought)
Watch sloth and heathen folly
Bring all your hope to nought.
If you really want a voice of reason in the region, head southeast to New Zealand. Nothing like opinions out of a Western nation on the margins to give you real food for thought. And, unlike their big-noting cousins across the Tasman Sea, they have the decency to treat Taiwan courteously despite the lack of diplomatic ties.
But not everyone who hails from NZ can be trusted with a Taiwan junket. Take travel writer Amanda Spratt in the New Zealand Herald last Sunday: "Two-wheeling commuters, handkerchiefs round their mouths and noses like blue-collar gangsters" is how she describes your average Taiwanese salaryman and salarywoman on their way to work. Hardly polite.
But she started her tour with a massage in Yangmingshan (
"When she wasn't talking, she provided a disgusting degustational symphony, munching on potato crisps and burping in rhythmic sequence. And just as her hands started working on my feet, it came: the short, sharp, percussive finale. My masseuse had farted. It was so loud my companion heard it from next door. At least I was downwind."
The fact is, Amanda, you placed too much trust in your guides. Everyone knows the genuine Taiwanese massage is not performed by masticating, belching and farting ladies but by blind people. Try one next time you come; you'll be amazed at the difference. And while you're here, let me offer you Johnny Neihu's patented Blue-Collar Gangster Massage Therapy. Believe me: Once you go blue, you never go back.
Then her piece turns to history and goes off the rails like a Southern Link express, opining that Chiang Kai-shek (
"Kai-Shek [sic], who was forced to take his government to Taiwan after he failed to oust the communists in the Chinese Civil War, is something of a god in Taiwan. He was president until he died in 1975, and never saw his beloved country recognised as a state."
A quick history lesson, Amanda: Chiang and his party saw his state gradually downgraded from a fully recognized "China" to "Free China" to "Feel Free to Take Us Back, China." But it's not all gloom and doom, because the Solomon Islands still recognizes us. For now. And as for Chiang as a deity, I think your Cantonese skills haven't served you well. Your average Taiwanese, when asked about the Old Thief, raises his or her eyes high to the heavens and sighs: "Oh, God."
Speaking of "high," it seems impressionable Amanda was swallowing her betel nut juice instead of spitting when she wrote that Taipei 101 is 1.5km high, Taipei is the nation's second-largest city, that "most Taiwanese just have cereal for breakfast" and that EVA Air is Taiwan's national airline. Well, thanks for the "national" plug, Amanda, but in case you hadn't noticed, President Chen Shui-bian (
Now I don't want my more sensitive readers from the Shaky Isles to think I've got anything against their country just because of one scribe's Polaroid take on my home. The opposite, in fact: New Zealand produces people who don't take crap from anyone and prime ministers who stick it well and truly up the Americans, the Australians and the French when required.
The late Robert Muldoon once quipped that New Zealand migration to Australia raised the average IQ of both countries (no independent source has contested this claim, to my knowledge), while the much more recently late David Lange led the charge against nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed US Navy ships from stopping by for a visit, and attacked France as a terrorist state after the sinking of the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior in Auckland. Then there's the current prime minister, Helen Clark, the female leader of substance and maturity that Vice President Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) could never be.
Anyway, after an obligatory trip to the National Palace Museum where she spotted food art, Spratt continues with her thesis thus:
"I'm not sure what it says about a country's national psyche that holds pork and cabbage as national treasures -- it may explain my masseur's flatulence -- but food is prominent in Taiwanese culture."
Indeed, as food is in every culture. But don't forget: The National Palace Museum is the world's leading warehouse for refugee art. Yes, Taiwanese like pork and cabbage, but we like a lot of other things, too. I expect that if we were asked to carve something out of jade and submit it to that shrine to Chinese gigantism it would probably resemble a clove of garlic. Or a lump of tofu imported from the US.
But come to think of it, Amanda, I do forgive you for your transgressions, if only because of this passage: "Taiwanese are known as among the world's friendliest people. Some academics put this down to Taiwan being a tiny island of many immigrants, much like New Zealand."
How delightful and rare it is to see some truth about Taiwanese manners in print, although the explanation here by those trusty "academics" seems odd considering the buckets of blood of locals that "immigrants" shed every time they landed on our fair shores. Much like New Zealand: just ask the Maori.
But enough autopsy work for today. Time for some balance. If there is one Kiwi for whom I have the deepest respect, it is Ernest Shackleton, a World War I veteran who joined the UN soon after it formed and came to Taiwan as an "industrial rehabilitation officer," then witnessed the 228 Incident in Kaohsiung and wrote a memoir of his experiences, sadly only published well after his death. Here's a brief extract from his Formosa Calling, which talks about the world's friendliest people:
"As was to be expected, there was a marked change in the bearing of the Formosans in the streets after the rebellion, and nowhere was it more noticeable than among the children. ... we had always been greeted with cheers and waves from the smiling children. ... But after the rebellion there were few people in the streets and the sad-looking children were in no mood to give us cheery greetings. Sometimes, too, we saw boys or women struggling behind a plow and wondered whether they were trying to carry on the work of a father who had died to regain freedom for his country."
It angers this old Taiwanese ratbag that all those people -- my people -- with families or friends that fell victim to peddlers of "5,000 years of Chinese history" bullshit can't bother remembering the last 60.
And it's a sad thing that the National Palace Museum looms so large in the public consciousness when for living history -- for something approaching the truth about who we are and why -- we had to outsource to a handful of sympathetic witnesses from the West.
Like Ernest Shackleton, a Kiwi for the ages.
Heard or read something particularly objectionable about Taiwan? Johnny wants to know: dearjohnny@taipeitimes.com is the place to reach me, with "Dear Johnny" in the subject line.
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