An e-mail I got from the States this month suggested that homes in Taiwan are tiny and cramped. The sender had mentally merged apartments here with the notoriously small flats of Hong Kong and Japan. Taiwan’s older apartments run on the roomy side. The e-mail prompted this post reviewing more mainstream myths about Taiwan. It pays to figure the place out. The International Monetary Fund ranked Taiwan the world’s 20th largest economy last year. It exports piles of laptops, plastics and machine tools. You probably own something made in Taiwan. Taiwan is also sitting on an unresolved geopolitical conflict. Taiwan and its mighty Asian neighbor China have not figured out what to do about Beijing’s insistence that the two someday operate under a single flag. Taiwan prefers the self-rule it has had for nearly 70 years. China says no way. It’s China with the mega military and 10 trillion dollar economy.
Here are the five myths I hear most often:
1. Taiwan is flat and completely industrialized.
Industrial parks speckle the west coast of the 35,980-square-kilometer island southeast of China. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest contract chipmaker, is based in one such park. Formosa Plastics Corp., giant producer of material for pipes, bottles and home construction, also bases its plants along the west coast. Square kilometer for square kilometer, Taiwan is mostly mountains. More than 280 peaks rise past 3,000 meters above sea level. Northeast Asia’s highest peak stands 3,952 meters in southern Taiwan and you can climb it. Few factories scale the mountains. The topography has spawned instead a small leisure industry ideal for cycling, boutique agriculture and weekend retreats.
2. Expect the best food in Asia.
Market stalls shovel out fried chicken, sautéed spinach and bacon-wrapped asparagus on sticks past midnight. Hours later breakfast bars roll up the metal gates with egg sandwiches and milk teas. Imitation Japanese, buffet take-outs and hot pots are in fashion now, aimed mostly at the vast budget market. Food is cheap and filling. But most of what you get here you can get somewhere else, and it may have originated offshore. Taiwan’s best known restaurant chain Din Tai Fung uses a clean, consistent but unadventurous recipe for meat-filled flour dumplings, an old staple from China. Fruits in Taiwan, though easily edible, sit on the same five-star plate as produce from elsewhere in the subtropics.
3. Taiwanese are global beacons of friendliness.
Most claims to outsized friendliness rest on comparisons of Taiwan to China, a rival ethnic Chinese territory where some still shout, shove and spit in public. It’s impossible for me here not to remember the loads of help I got from mainland Chinese during my seven years in Beijing as well as encounters in Taipei with shoving, shouting older people. To quote the World Walk About blog post on living in South Korea, “Once you get to know Korean people, they’re almost always amazingly nice. I assume this is true for most people in the world actually.” The same goes for Taiwanese, likewise most people in the world as far as I can tell. Areas where friendliness lags: Bigger vehicles always have an unspoken though illegal right-of-way in traffic, you stand a 50-50 chance of getting lost objects returned and a large number of younger people are too shy or aloof to sustain simple conversation, except with their smartphones, at social gatherings.
4. Reduce, reuse and recycle, for real.
Taiwan has generated a reputation at least in Asia for environmental consciousness, probably based on the elaborate household waste scheme that promotes recycling and even handing back kitchen waste to feed pigs. While environmental awareness is rising, Taiwanese use an average of 72 gallons of water per day, more than in Europe or the United States. Officials called off water supply cuts in several urban clusters this month after one big storm brought hope for relief of a year-old drought. Just when conservation habits were settling in, people got the message to never mind. Actual methods of garbage disposal vary depending on the diligence of individual disposers and the rules of each building’s management if there is any. Some major chain stores reward customers with tiny discounts for bringing their own shopping bags or coffee mugs, but most merchants provide ample packaging, such as a separate plastic bag for every individual baked good on your tray, even if asked not to. Taiwan is a recently modernized society. To have is good.
5. Where’s my connecting flight to Phuket?
People well offshore confuse Taiwan with Thailand because of the phonemic similarity and common geographic region, Asia. This confusion gets the Taiwanese tied in angry knots because they fear it means their identity is misunderstood, if understood at all. That fear forms a backbone of island-wide psychology because China has tried to minimize Taiwan’s global profile since the 1970s. The Communist government wields its economic clout to make other countries bar Taiwan from international organizations such as the United Nations and requires that Taiwan use fictitious names to enter others, ways to avoid world perception that it’s a sovereign nation. Lowering the profile takes attention away from sources of pride such as high-tech exports, democratic institutions that are unusually mature for Asia and a path to progress from authoritarianism and poverty to the lack of either.
