And of course many will know about the
country's occupation of a gray zone in international law, the fact
that it doesn't officially exist as an independent entity, the
legitimate government of the Republic of China in the eyes of certain
old Kuomintang stalwarts, the group marching under the banner of
“Chinese Taipei” at the Olympics, a requirement for awkward
phrasing for all but the 17 of the world's recognized sovereign
states who still regard the Taipei government as the legitimate
single China.
Until not very long ago at all, my
response wouldn't have been much different. Because to Western eyes,
the country is a cipher, a country people know, but seem to know
little about, and even fewer visit.
Which means that like all ciphers, it
can be visited without preconception. TripAdvisor can only take you
so far. Without knowing all that scaffolding that typically
constitutes “nationhood” in the popular imagination – an
awareness of traditional culture, literature, film, pop music,
cuisine, iconic architecture, and natural scenery – you're at a
loss.
Even after spending some time in the
country, it was hard to create a cogent metaphor, a unified image. I
suppose Taipei 101, one of the world's tallest buildings, and the
tallest from its construction in 2004 until the completion of the
Burj Khalifa in 2010, functions as something of a national landmark.
I didn't go.
Instead, I explored the back streets of
Taipei, the dizzying night markets where patient queues serve as a
rough metric for quality and local reputation, the neon alleys of
Ximen pulsing with Mandarin pop music, the banyan trees and decrepit
arcades of the older quarters, the grand shopping boulevards of
Da'an, the mouldering mid-century architecture, a legacy of the
importance of Taiwan in the old Japanese colonial empire, the
militarist aspirations of both early Showa Period Japan and the
corporatist governance of the country in the wake of the Chinese
Revolution.
Outside the city, the West Coast of the
island forms a great megacity, town after town blending into one
another, apartment complexes and light industrial parks punctuated by
tiny fields of rice and pineapple between them, never either fully
urban or fully rural, managed with the mindset of a nation with a
bare minimum of arable land.
And the East Coast is wild and rocky,
cut apart by steep canyons between high mountains of heavily warped
schist and gneiss, a testament to the country's position on multiple
fault lines, a landscape the Japanese army lost countless men trying
to build roads across, still remote enough for there not to be a
public transit route that crosses the mountain ranges that divide the
island.
That lazy old line from geography
textbooks, “a land of contrasts.”
With transportation being dirt-cheap, I
managed to get in quite a few miles. To the little town of Jiufen,
supposedly (although apparently not) Hayao Miyazaki's inspiration for
Spirited Away, with its black
beamed tea-houses and hanging red lanterns that dance in the anabatic
winds that blow up the mountain off the Pacific. To Shifen, with its
waterfall, its fire balloons, its train going down the middle of the
street to save space in the narrow gorge of the townsite. On a boat
across Sun Moon Lake, where branches full of cherry blossoms hung low
over turquoise-bright water. Over the Zhuilu Old Road, through the
Taroko Gorge, where I clung to a narrow cliff face over a 1000-meter
drop to the valley floor. Up rough trails through forests of palms,
bamboo, cedar, laurel, and pine as I ascended higher and higher, and
through Taiwanese aboriginal villages where woven-rattan walls still
enclosed yards of clucking chickens, the faces of the forest gods
carved into trees, the birthplace of the Austronesian peoples before
they migrated south and west as far as Madagascar, east as far as
Easter Island. On a rickety train through the half-abandoned coal
mining towns above Ruifang, where old murals of merry citizens living
the legacy of Sun Yat-Sen were left to gather grime along the railway
sidings, where at the little free library on the station platform,
about 30 books were made available to take or borrow, the only one I
recognized being a Chinese translation of the Marquis de Sade's The
100 Days of Sodom.
I ate incredibly
strange meal after incredibly strange meal. Noodles with pig
intestines, boar in numerous forms, shoved into fatty sausages and
served on skewers with cumin, massive sugar apples and durians,
sausage stuffed with mullet roe, a stew of beef tendons and tripe,
smoked shark, raw duck, the hearts, livers, and gizzards of geese, a
sweet green bean drink, country millet wine, “lovers' tears”
algae, pig blood cakes, lotus greens, some kind of funky identified
slop wrapped in sticky rice that apparently merited a 20-minute wait
in the eyes of the locals, raw squid with mayo, “mountain pepper”
that tasted less like pepper than Kix cereal soaked in limoncello,
venison stir-fried with celery, multiple kinds of fern, and the
national dish, stinky tofu, both in its fried form (edible, if not
something I'll seek out again, a testament to the egalitarianism of
the deep fryer) and its stewed form (which smells like wet dog and
has a texture like overcooked scrambled eggs).
But beyond the
concept of Taiwan, I also had to address the larger concept of China.
When Generalissimo
Chiang Kai-Shek's armies crossed the strait to what was then widely
known by the old Portuguese name, Ilha Formosa (the beautiful island)
and its outlying islands, the Pescadores (the fishermen), they
claimed to be the sole legitimate inheritors of this very old idea,
the idea of China.
The National Palace
Museum sits on a high slope in the Taipei suburb of Shilin, and it's
where the treasures of the Forbidden City were either absconded with
(according to the People's Republic government) or preserved
(according to the ROC government), and carefully arranged in rotating
exhibits, only a fraction of the museum's vast holdings being shown
at any one time.
Anyone who's ever
dealt with the influx of Mainland Chinese tourists in Southeast Asia
knows the score. Like Americans in Europe in the '50s, suddenly
finding themselves moneyed, they behave, by and large, like absolute
pigs. The Ugly American has become the Ugly Chinese in this part of
the world. Sure, you could blame Mao Zedong's seizure of the Nanjing
capital in 1949 and the chaos that ensued in its wake, but the truth
is that Chinese civilization had been in decline for centuries...
what Mao inherited was a culture on the verge of exhaustion.
Yet in the National
Palace Museum, you see wonders you couldn't imagine... delicate
jades, intricate strolls, pottery in the most gorgeous shades of
cobalt-blue, celadon, saffron, vermilion, and aquamarine, with detail
on a level that almost makes you think they had 3D printing
technology to achieve this degree of mechanical intricacy. The
realization hits that Ming Dynasty China was the most refined
civilization the world has ever seen, and in all likelihood, ever
will see. Nothing like this will probably ever exist again.
Then, a tour-group
member comes by and is taking a video of the every exhibit on her
phone, not even bothering to look at the damn art.
I thought of
Napoleon on Elba, the man who commanded armies now stranded on an
obscure island, of Thibaw Min, the last king of Burma left to rot in
a port town in India, living off a government stipend and
occasionally appearing in ads for cigars.
I boarded a plane
at Taoyuan International Airport, did a little light duty-free
shopping, looked through my notes and my few photos. Schist canyons, Tang Dynasty scrolls, boiled goose hearts.
And I thought of
the dialogue in Calvino's Invisible Cities between Marco Polo
and Kublai Khan, whose relics I'd probably seen:
“Marco Polo describes a bridge,
stone by stone.
'But which is the stone that
supports the bridge?' Kublai Khan asks.
'The bridge is not supported by one
stone or another,' Marco answers, 'but by the line of the arch that
they form.'
Kublai Khan remains silent,
reflecting. Then he adds: 'Why do you speak to me of the stones? It
is only the arch that matters to me.'
Polo answers: 'Without stones there
is no arch.'”
