IFYE Program Newsletter

My first glimpse of Taiwan was sea and then mountains as our airplane came down from the clouds. As we swung low for the landing, the view changed to wide flat land, divided everywhere into bright green fields and angular pools that reflected the early morning sky.

Taiwan is an island off the southeastern coast of Mainland China. If you look on a map, the island is located right on the Tropic of Cancer. This is the same latitude as central Mexico, the Bahamas, and southern Egypt, so it is hot! It is seven in the morning as I sit here writing. If it weren't for the fan right behind me, I would already be sweating.

Taiwan is about the same size as West Virginia. It has mountains and lots of trees, but somehow the landscape is entirely different. The wide cultivated plain I saw from the airplane that first morning stretches all along the eastern coast. Mountains rise abruptly out of this flat land. They are small, but seem impossibly steep. From a distance the mountainsides are a familiar West Virginia green. As we get closer I do not recognize the trees at all. They are a small, subtropical species that I have never seen before.

Last week, I joined a busload of junior high to college-age 4-H'ers on a two-day trip. The highway sticks to the flat coastal land as we head south from Miaoli. While I watch rice paddies go by on either side of the bus, the Taiwanese take turns singing karaoke. The bus has a large TV screen up front that displays the words as the background music plays. The 4-H'ers pass a couple of microphones around the bus and sing along. I have to keep explaining to them that it's not that I am being polite, or that I don't want to sing, but that I really can't follow a tune at all. No, not even if they play a song in English. So I keep watching the rice paddies go by, and feeling sorry for the farmers out in the heat. The songs all sound the same to me, slow and sad, with words I don't understand.

Our first stop is a lotus farm in Chiayi, about two-thirds of the way down Taiwan's eastern coast. The lotus flowers are bright blue, yellow, or pink. Their many petals sometimes spread wider than my hand. The farmers dry the petal for tea or ship them for sale as cut flowers. The lotus flowers grow in a field of water some minutes walk from the garage-like building where they are prepared for sale. To even put a one-lane road through here, the Taiwanese had to pave right up to the walls of the houses.

We eventually leave the bus behind and walk in the street. My guide, a Taiwanese IFYE who spent six weeks in Tennessee last year, tells me that this is "xiang xia" or countryside. Taiwan has to squeeze 23 million people into a space no bigger than West Virginia. (West Virginia has a population of only 900,000.) Here, even out by the fields of lotus flowers and rice, houses are never out of sight.Traditional one-story houses with cement tile roofs and red brick walls surround their courtyards on three sides. Boxy modern houses with flat roofs stretch two or three stories upward in search of space. Old or new, the houses often have a jumble of slippers out front, the Taiwanese solution for spotless floors. Hopeful messages for the New Year are written around the doorway on red paper, the luckiest of colors.

After the lotus farm, the 4-H group spends the afternoon at a national park before checking into a hotel in downtown Tainan for the night. After supper, some of the older 4-H'ers take me for a walk to see the huge Japanese department store and some historic buildings - and to ask me questions about America.

In the night, Tainan seems to be a city of lights. No one, not even toddlers have gone to bed yet. The air is more comfortable than it has been all day. Brightly lit signs in Chinese cling to storefronts and climb towards the sky. Car and motor scooter lights navigate slowly through the streets. (Motor scooters are like small motorcycles, but have space behind the handle bars for your legs, tools, a sack of bamboo shoots, or a small child.)

Here the storefronts open onto sidewalks instead of right onto the street. The sidewalks are often blocked by restaurant tables or parked motor scooters. This is not a problem, the 4-H'ers are just as happy to walk in the street. They are not as alarmed as I am by the cars and motor scooters that share it. The drivers do not beep irately, they just drive around us. With 23 million neighbors, they are used to putting up with other people.


Windsong