From Taipei to Seoul

I’m in the lounge at the Chiang Kai Shek airport in Taiwan, boarding a plane to Incheon Airport in about an hour. My bags are way heavy — probably heavier than they allow — because Taiwan is comparable to a sauna, whereas Korea is apparently near freezing at night. I’m struggling with this keyboard, which appears to handle every language known to man, but cannot supply a backspace key of a reasonable size, so I keep typing backslashes.

I am looking forward to exploring a little bit of Seoul, since I have never been. It will be interesting to contrast it to Taipei. The first time I was in Taiwan was in 1999, and I visited the capital, and the cities of Tainan and Kaohsiung. The country has changed tremendously already. Back then, as I noted in the poem “Driving to Tainan”, it reminded me of New Jersey. Today, it reminds me more of the other side of the river. A district that was mostly rice paddies now holds a six story mall. Wide boulevards and gardens, more cars and fewer motorcycles (though they still exist in profusion), and PC games for sale in the 7/11 stores. At Chili’s you can get the chicken crispers and they taste pretty much just like back home, and the menu is all in English.

There’s something of the vibe of say, Shanghai, where you still have that “expat” feeling. The Westerners cluster in certain bars and restaurants, and if you wander in the right direction, you’ll come across the parts of town that still exhibit life as it was. In Taipei, it feels a little bit harder to find that. Everyone speaks English — passably to excellently — and even the Snake Alleys are marked with posters in English saying “Please no photos of the snakes.”

In the toy stores, you find Japanese comics and Finnish Moomintrolls. On the radio, it’s an American interviewer joshing with a British comic about his character with an Australian accent. Last time I was here, I was taken to an expat bar. There was a jazz band from San Francisco fronted by an R&B singer who couldn’t make it in LA. The room was half local, I would guess, but the mixed drinks were mostly Western.

It isn’t that this bothers me; if anything, the Taiwanese have a remarkable accomodation with their tangled cultural heritage. Rather, the thing that strikes me, as I move from black Lincoln Town Car to Grand Hyatt to Chili’s to mall to shopping district with giant signs (Sony, Panasonic, an extra virgin olive oil ad depicting a naked woman swimming in olives) to luxe airport lounge with Internet terminals that support eight languages — the thing that strikes me is how there’s a whole world that exists that many never get to see: the world of the jetsetter, which is really a bubble-world. A world where the closest you come to beef noodle soup served by the side of the road is when you get taken out for lunch to sample the local cuisine, and get lucky enough to have a guide who prefers the real stuff. A world where you go out shopping for local souvenirs and end up in a mall that carries mostly foreign goods.

There’s a comfort in getting the International Herald Tribune delivered in English at your door each night, but I also miss that rare thrill, the moment back in 1999 when I was led between a gaggle of motorcyles, down a wet alley where laundry hung from windows, my host telling me that he was sure there was a good place to eat around there…

Down an alley we find a square,
An empty lot loomed by cosmetics ads.
Plastic sheeting circles plastic tables,
A sizzle of shells, sashimi and squid.
The fish eyes are everywhere, and
Taiwan beer tastes very familiar:
Perhaps there is only one beer, and many bottles.

In bubble-world, there is only one core experience, like the beer in those bottles; it’s like there is only one black and white coloring book, and we fill it all in with “local color.” It’s sitting down at a computer in an airport lounge to find it pre-equipped with Skype, since you just finished reading your V. I. Warshawski mystery.

And yet–I think this is the future. From it, Cleveland or Jacksonville look as provincial as Tainan, and like the classic New Yorker cartoon, your perspective inverts until you see the whole world as nothing more than the spaces around airports.