A remedy for homesickness.

Last summer I visited home. To me, home isn’t contained in any four walls, not in any set city or district or town. To me, home is the country I was born. I find that strange. As a person, I feel very American. I feel most comfortable functioning in an English-speaking society. My upbringing has been thoroughly steeped in American culture, although I’ve also been exposed to a fair amount of Chinese culture as well.

The fact remains that I’ve been here since I was two and a half, and if you asked me what nationality I was over what race, I would answer that I’m American. I include myself when make generalizations about American society and our people as a whole.

But still, to me, home is a tiny spit of an island off the east coast of China. A little place called Taiwan. I know, I know. That place all the really cheap stuff you fish out of dollar stores comes from, right? Well, then, I’m a kindred spirit with those ten cent baubles, because I was made there too.

It’s tiny and cramped there. Life is completely different. It’s polluted and noisy and dirty, and I love it. I like to think of it as Taiwan being a miserable little island, but it’s the miserable little island I was born on, and I love it unconditionally in my gratitude. I’ll take the good things with the bad, because no country is perfect. It’s just a matter of finding one with flaws you can live with.

At any rate, we finally visited Taiwan again last summer after over five years of absence. It’s strange how the trips are all thrilling and dramatic, like chapters of my life unfolding while my time spent in America is just the space in between. The first time I visited since I was a toddler was when I was six and my grandmother was dying from stomach cancer. I remember only snatches, mostly of the funeral. Then I didn’t go back again until I was thirteen. That year I saw my deadbeat dad for the first time in ten years. He made excuses, he gave me some spending money, and then he vanished out of my life again after promising to take me out to a meal he never showed up for. Two years later, I met with my grandmother on my absent father’s side. She cried and she held me and she gave me pudding to eat like she would when I was little. She passed away before we returned this summer, something we only found out when we got there.

Something about life there feels surreal, and I wouldn’t trade that feeling for the world. The cost of living is cheap, the food is fantastic, and the people are for the most part kind. They work hard, most of them laborers or running their own small businesses. Chain stores are few and far between in Taiwan. Aside from fast food and convenience stores and shopping centers in large cities, everything is family owned. The food is almost always good in the hole in the wall restaurants because word gets around if it isn’t, and then they don’t make enough to pay rent and close down.

I find something about the way life is in Taiwan strangely romantic in that regard. And then I think that it’s not because I’m particularly Taiwanese that I feel that way. It’s because I’m so American that the Taiwanese way of life is exotic and enticing to me.

As for our trip, we started off at my uncle's restaurant, which I haven't visited in quite a while. It's changed a lot, but then again we opened something like sixteen-odd years ago. I once asked my mother why we opened a Chinese restaurant and her answer surprised me. She told me that it was only because it was all our family knew how to do when we arrived in this country.

After our obligatory stop there, we left for the airport and I took a handful of photos of Detroit Metro. It’s the airport I frequent to most because we go there to pick people up as well as leave. I like going places a lot more than I do picking people up, and the entire reason is I love going into the little plaza behind the security screening.






I would like to state now that I am terrified of flying. Or, rather, the idea of flying. Once I’m on the plane, I accept that my fate is no longer in my own hands and sit back for the ride.

We were in row 41, and I was in seat G. (All very irrelevant, but I like putting these things down for my own personal accounts.) First we waited on the runway and for some reason or another there was a huge delay. Our flight was supposed to depart at 3:10 but didn't get off the ground until just after 4:00. The reason?

(I've learned to tremble every time I hear the captain come on the intercom. It's never anything good unless he's talking about how much jet fuel we'll be burning [which, by the by, makes you feel like an awful person] or how the weather is.)

The captain came on the intercom to say that there was a delay because of a thunderstorm moving in, so either we'd get clearance in a few minutes to take off ahead of the storm or we'd have to wait on the runway another hour. This left me very, very nervous. For one, our layover in Japan was three hours, but with enough delays we were going to miss our connecting flight. For another? To the best of my knowledge, thunderstorms do not play well with planes.

So cue the second most terrifying takeoff I've ever experienced. (It was just shy of that Spirit Airlines flight we took on the way back to Florida which smelled of burnt rubber just as soon as the engines started.)

First they psyched me out by continuously playing with the cabin lights. It was like a light show on crack. They'd cut the power and then turn it back in in sections, then they'd turn off just the overhead lights or just the aisle lights and just. Then the plane's turbines started going and almost immediately the entire plane began to rattle. I'm not talking like a mild rumble, the way a train rattles when you're shooting through a dark tunnel. I'm talking my camera case made a suicide jump off my lap because everything was shaking so badly. I had to cover my ears because it was so loud, and even with my ears plugged the sounds were still perfectly clear. I was so sure we were going to rattle apart before we got any lift.

Somehow, though, miraculously, we managed to get in the air and thus started the next chapter of trip: The 13 hour flight to Tokyo.

The plane ride was uneventful for the most part. The only complaint I really had was that the cabin was so cold my legs cramped almost the entire way. In the future, I’m going to dress warmly for the plane ride regardless of whether or not my destination is a tropical island. My brother even gave me his really thin airline blanket in addition to mine and I had a hoodie on and long jeans but I was still cold. I'm just glad I packed my hoodie even though my mom was adamant I wouldn't need it. :|; I made an excuse about using it to pad my external HD, and then I started wearing it at my uncle's restaurant because it was chilly there too and didn't take it off again until we landed in Taiwan.

Anyway.

We were served three meals on the plane ride to Narita, which was a hilarious excursion. I took pictures of it all, and actually it was surprisingly good for airline food, especially the fruit and the desserts. The entrees were also startlingly edible. For dinner we had a choice of braised beef with potato and veggies or 'asian soy chicken breast with rice and carrots'. We all went for the braised beef.

It also came with a delicious shrimp cocktail and salad. The dessert was this marble brownie stuff which was fantastic. Then they gave us a mid-flight snack of grapes, water, an egg and cucumber sandwich. Lastly we had a swiss cheese omelet for breakfast, along with some of the most delicious sausage I've ever had. The menu said there would also be 'muesli and orange juice'. What the hell is muesli?

edit: dictionary.com says it's "a breakfast cereal similar to granola, usually consisting of rolled oats and dried fruit." ...which is a lie because we had nothing like that. B|




The only thing that dampened the trip was that I think the airplane deities could sense when we were about to eat. Every time food started getting passed out, the seat belt light would unfailingly come on. Followed shortly by turbulence. Every. Single. Time. I was so nauseous I saved most of my food for later.

Even though I painstakingly charged all my portable game systems, the only thing I ended up being able to use was my MP3 player because looking at the game screens made me too nauseous. I listened to 158~ songs from Detroit to Tokyo.

When we landed at the Narita airport, I... lost it. Good god, I ran off that plane like my life depended on it. We got through security again, and then therein was the Promise Land. I should mention that I’m a Japanese major, and I intend to study abroad in Japan someday.

I bought some kind of milk coffee I spent ten minutes trying to sound out the katakana of before realizing there was an English sign for it. It went something like みろやかミルクのカフェラッテ. I think that's trying to tell me it's a coffee latte? With milk? Oh screw it, I'm never going to get this language.

I also realized that I recognized the kanji for 'airport' but forgot the reading. Good job, self. Good job. (Annnd Japanese toilets scare the living hell out of me. All those buttons make me nervous.)






Next we boarded the plane to Taiwan. When we first took off, it went a lot more smoothly than the Detroit departure, and I got to see Tokyo from above at night. It was beautiful. It was so beautiful. I was exhausted so my thoughts weren't entirely lucid, but I couldn't stop watching. It's not like during the day, when Japan looks like the shore of some alien planet, all glittering silver facets. It was this world of inky darkness, intermittently broken up by rivers and glimmering lakes of light. The highways held a golden sort of glow, and the headlights of the individual cars gave a slightly greenish cast. From so far above, they seemed to move slowly and the highways pulsed with the hundreds upon thousands of soft, halo-wreathed lights. It was a clear night but there was enough humidity in the sky to soften every individual light, and just watching them made me want to write and made me want to dream.

I wondered if anyone else had seen this sight and let themselves be inspired by it. I wondered if the glimmering rivers of gently undulating lights was where the dream of pyreflies and Lifestream came. And I thought to myself, what a wonderful place. Here, I stared into what was by all means an abyss, a void where there was no light, and I did not fear what might not be there but instead dreamed of all of the darkness' possibilities. I tried to capture it in photographs, but it's something that really has to be experienced.



This would be a three hour flight, during which we would be served one meal. Guess what happened when they tried to serve it? If you said turbulence, you get a cookie! This time it was so bad the captain had to come on the intercom and to say in a very grave voice that we had hit 'significant unforcasted turbulence' and that he had to delay dinner service. They stopped for a while, started again, managed to serve half of us, and then it started and kept going so bad they had to cancel the rest of the service, which the captain apologized for. I still got to eat but I soon wished I hadn't because I spent the rest of the flight in a nauseated half-coma.

Anyway, somehow we arrived in Taipei's airport, and exhausted as I was, I still found it in me to be excited. Because I was home.

Humorously enough, the airport was full of a metric ton of signs showcasing the beautiful places to visit in Taiwan, of which I've never previously been aware existed. It was like they were afraid you somehow stumbled upon our country by accident and were trying desperately to convince you to stay.






After that, Mom got us a taxi van which took us the two hours to Taichung. I slept about the entire way home too, I was just so exhausted. I did wake up enough to catch my mother lamenting to the taxi driver that her favorite bento shop closed and she doesn't know why. To which the taxi driver replied that it was probably because the older generation earned enough for the younger generation to get the hell out of the business, because selling food for a living was a hard way to make ends meet.

For some reason that really made me give pause. I'd never thought about it in those terms before. Food is really absurdly cheap in Taiwan. The currency conversion rate is about 33 Taiwanese dollar to 1 US dollar. Almost everything on the breakfast menu of the places around here is 25 or 10 yen. It's nuts. You can get a delicious sandwich with egg, cucumber, mayo, and your choice of meat for 15 yen.

I never thought about how miserable the people behind the counter might be, though I've known since I was a child how hard the restaurant business is.

The way people live here is really different.

I'm not even sure how that makes me feel, except pensive.

Anyway, we went out to eat something, then went to the convenience store and stocked up on drinks and snacks and then I showered and went to sleep.




And so my first day in Taiwan came to a close. I spent four months there and took many more pictures and had many more fantastic experiences. I just haven’t gotten around to documenting it all yet. Maybe with this class this semester, I’ll finally find the time to.

...last pic:



...the last pic is just because I went lol, King's nuts. I know, my maturity is astounding.