Adventures in the Land of Singing Garbage Trucks

by Adam Tervort

  My companion started to get boxes of presents in the two weeks leading up to Christmas. His family in the US had decided he needed a 12 days of Christmas fiesta, so he brought boxes home with distressing regularity while I stayed empty-handed. Finally on Christmas Eve a small box came for me. As my roommate gorged himself on box after box of stuff, I cried as I took my new black sweater and tried it on for the first time. I got other things, but getting exactly what I needed made me happy enough to decide that I could survive life on the other side of the world, and I did. (And I still have that sweater, and wore it again through this winter.)

  A few days later move calls came again, and I was off to a new home in paradise.

  Chapter 5 - Creepy crawlies of all sorts

  Taiwan is full of things that are just not nice, like spiders, snakes, and insects. It took about two weeks on island for me to realize that I had no idea what kind of wildlife I'd be encountering there. I was a Boy Scout as a young man, an Eagle Scout even, so I thought that I had at least a basic understanding of different animals and how to keep myself safe. But boy scouts don't camp out in urban jungles and my troop never went camping in the tropics, so I was way out of my league in Taiwan.

  You've already read about my first brush with eight legged monsters in the introduction. If nothing else, I suppose I will always be grateful to Elder Shi from saving me from that green, hairy monster on my first typhoon day. Before even making it on island, I started hearing gruesome stories from other missionaries about the super-sized spiders in Taiwan, but I just wrote them off as either urban legends or attempts to scare greenies. After that fateful typhoon day I started to rethink my attitudes toward those urban legends because now I had one of my own. I know that one really happened, so who was to say the other stories I'd heard didn't?

  Brother Shi #1 from the MTC loved to tell us banana spider stories. He had lived in Yilan on the east coast of Taiwan for quite a while, and told us a lot of stories about the banana spiders that would show up in the church building. One day he came into the church for lunch and saw a giant black spider with yellow joints running up the stairs, away from him and his companion. Being the macho men that they were, they gave chase and chose as their spider hunting tool, ready for this? Hymn books. They were going to kill a giant spider by throwing hymn books at it. But when they had the spider cornered they decided to just drop the hymn books on it because throwing hymnals probably wasn’t a respectful thing to do. He reached over the spider as far as he could and dropped the books right on top of it. It shook the books off, gave them a reproachful look, and then ran past them down the stairs. It took them a week to finally get it, eventually stepping on it after they found it under the refrigerator.

  Elder Weng was an American missionary who loved shining shoes as much as I did. We would occasionally sit down and share tips and techniques, which makes us sound like old women sharing knitting patterns but that was how it was. He told me a story once of sitting down to shine his shoes and nearly dying. He got out his pair of black shoes and his shining kit and shined the right shoe. He stuck his hand inside the left shoe to start shining it, and he saw brown shoelaces on his hand. That's funny, he thinks, these shoes are black, not brown. So he pulls his hand out and sees a giant brown spider in his hand. Screaming, he throws the spider across the room and nearly goes into shock. It took him and the other three missionaries the rest of the morning to find the spider and make sure it wouldn't be hiding in anyone else's shoes. The lesson? Make sure you knock your shoes on the floor a couple of times before putting your foot in it.

  A few years ago I was asked to teach the seminary class for the local kids at my church building. (Remember that? Early morning before school, five days a week? Only this time I couldn't sleep through class, I had to teach it.) I would arrive at the church building about 5:30 in the morning and get everything set up for the students, who started arriving at around 5:50. One morning, a Wednesday, I opened the door of the church, came inside and turned on the lights, and there in the middle of the floor was a great, hairy green spider just like the one that had visited my apartment in the typhoon so many years ago. This one didn't run at me, it ran up the stairs (which were carpeted and made it really hard to see the spider) and hid. I knew that we'd meet again, so I started bringing a broom with me to class. The next morning spidey was there waiting for me when I arrived and was able to run faster than I could and got away again. On Friday I was determined to get it. Like a loyal puppy it was waiting for me again, but this time I walked straight in and smashed it. When the first student arrived a few minutes later and saw the dead spider, they apologized for laughing at me the last two days when I'd told them how big it was, which made me feel better.

  Taiwan has more than just spiders though! It wouldn't be fair if the arachnophobes were the only ones that got to freak out, now would it? There are poisonous snakes as well!

  A lot of the people I've talked to here have shared urban legends with me about how the snakes came to Taiwan. One of the stories was that during World War II the Japanese were having problems with the aborigines hiding in the mountains so they started loading airplanes full of snakes and flying over the mountains and dropping them on any settlements they found. It doesn't sound very realistic to me, but no one I've asked has been able to tell me different. There are a lot of snakes here, but only five types are poisonous. I've had meetings with two of them, the cobra and the turtle shell viper. There are two other types of vipers here, one called the umbrella stripe viper (with black and white stripes) and one called the 100 step viper (if it bites you, you bite the dust in 100 steps). The fifth kind is the most troublesome because it blends in so well in its environment. It’s called the green bamboo snake, and, can you guess? It lives in bamboo groves. I've only seen the last three kinds in the zoo, which is close enough for me.

  I met a cobra on a nice, sunny day in early spring. I was living on the east coast of Taiwan (meaning in paradise), and was visiting another missionary who lived in a small city. We were riding up a steep mountain to see some church members who lived at the top, and the missionary began to point out some of the fun things the local farmers did as we rode. We started to see fences on both sides of the road with lots of chickens running free inside the fence. It turns out that this kind of free-range chicken is really popular in Taiwan and gets a very good price, so a lot of farmers with land on mountains raise them. As we rode our bikes higher up the mountain I got farther and farther ahead of the missionary I was with and soon I lost him around a curve in the road. Ahead of me I saw what looked like a huge tree branch lying across the road, and I stopped to look at it. It seemed to be shrinking, the big knot in the branch moving closer and closer to the side of the road. It was a snake, not a tree branch. But I'd never seen a snake so big before, and there aren't any pythons in Taiwan. I called down to the missionary behind me, and told him to come and look at the giant snake. When he saw how big it was he got excited and said he wanted to try and catch it. When he got close to its tail is hurried and slithered the rest of the way off the road, and we continued on our ride up the mountain.

  That night at a church member's house we told them about the snake, and asked if they knew what kind it was. The father got out his big book of Taiwanese wildlife and started asking us questions. What color was it? Brown. How big around? As thick as my upper arm, maybe thicker. How long? At least two meters, closer to three. Ah, he said, that's a yanjingshe 眼鏡蛇. I knew that she was snake but I didn't know what kind he meant, so we got out our dictionaries. Sure enough, yanjing means glasses, she means snake, and yanjingshe means cobra. We were lucky it had just eaten a chicken, he told us, or it probably would have attacked us. I was really happy to go back to the city the next day!

  Seven years later I was teaching a family English not far from my home in northern Taiwan. They lived in a gated community on the side of a mountain, a very exclusive place. They had installed a small birdbath next to their garage door, but it didn't take long
for some frogs to discover it and take it over. The frogs were pretty cute so the family decided to let them stay and their birdbath became a frogbath. I arrived for my Friday evening lesson with them, parking my scooter next to the frogbath and putting my helmet on top of the right hand mirror. Two hours later our class done, I came out and sat down on the scooter and got my phone out to call my wife and tell her I was on the way home. As I was dialing the number, I looked up to see a snake curled around my helmet, looking me straight in the eye and hissing. We couldn't have been more than 25 cm apart. I promptly fell off the scooter backwards, away from the snake, and began to freak out. Why my scooter? Because I parked next to the frogbath. A few minutes later one of the neighbors pointed this out to me, and said "Don't you know that snakes love to eat frogs?" When the community security guard showed up a few minutes later to catch the snake with his snake stick, he said "Wow, this is a turtle shell viper, very dangerous. Did it bite you?" "No, it just hissed at me." "Oh, you're lucky; you would have been dead by now. Go buy a lottery ticket, you seem to have some great luck today." I didn't buy the ticket, I figured not dying was pretty good in the whole balance of things. Why push my luck?

  Cockroaches are the other great bane of life in Taiwan. No one escapes scrapes with them. It may seem strange to you if you live in a place with a cold climate, but if you live in a hot humid area that never freezes in the winter, you're in for cockroaches sooner or later no matter how clean your house is. When I was almost done with my mission, I lived next to some train tracks in Taoyuan, in northern Taiwan. My companion was new in Taiwan, and we moved in together. The missionaries who had lived in the place before us were real pigs, and they left us a huge mess to clean up. (When we came in there were even bowls with milk in them from their last meal of cereal. Disgusting.) Pigsty + Taiwan's climate = Lots of cockroaches. When we'd come home at night, huge cockroaches would fly down from the ceiling and attack us. Elder Yue came up with the ingenious idea of putting a can of Raid just outside the front door, and then jumping in like a commando and shooting the roaches in mid-flight, knocking them out of the sky like an array of SAM missiles or something. We even stated keeping track of who could take down the most roaches in the first minute after we arrived home. He was a really good shot.

  One of my friends in Zhongli, where I live now, has a more caustic approach to roach hunting. He takes a spray can of Raid and a cigarette lighter, and lights the roaches on fire. I've never seen him in action, but I heard that he was once trying to shoot a flying roach and burned a hole through his patio screens. But he got the roach!

  I saw an article in the newspaper once of a child who had a roach stuck in her ear. A baby roach had crawled into her ear while she slept, and in the days afterwards she had sharp ear pains and dizziness. When they went to the doctor, he took one look and reached for his pair of long tweezers. When he pulled the baby roach out, the girl's mother fainted. Both girl and mother made full recoveries.

  Sometimes you get even stranger bugs here. In the flying cockroach apartment in Taoyuan, we started to get "screamer beetles" on our windows at dusk. They looked like normal black beetles, crawling innocently on the window screens, and then they would let out blood-curdling death screams. They wouldn't stop until they got a shot of Raid in the face at which they would detach from the screen and fly away (looking back at you to say “Thanks for the snack, guys). The second time we had a screamer, one of the neighbors came over to check on us, thinking that the crazy foreigners were killing each other. The neighbor had never seen a bug like it before either, but was glad to know that we weren't homicidal maniacs.

  Chapter 6 - Paradise and pineapples

  On New Year's Day, 2001, I boarded a train (alone, which really freaks you out after six months of constantly having a companion with you at all times) to head to my new home in Taidong. I was heading for the east coast, a place so beautiful that every tourist to Taiwan must visit. I had heard it described as being like Hawaii but cheaper, Shang-ri-la in Taiwan, filled with friendly people and the best fresh fruit in the world. I was going there with my first non-Anglo companion, Elder Soh from Malaysia. I was petrified that he wouldn't be able to speak English, and that we would never get along because my Chinese would be too terrible to allow us to work together. What I was really scared of was another six weeks of silence.

  I met Elder Soh about 90 minutes into the train ride. He had been searching the train for me and finally found me in the compartment next to his original one. It took about 30 seconds to know that we would get along. His English was great, and in the following weeks I would find out that his Mandarin, Taiwanese, Cantonese, Malay, and Indonesian were also very good, and he was conversational in Japanese as well. It was the only time while I have been in Taiwan that I was sure we would meet no one we couldn't communicate with.

  While I was with Elder Soh two amazing things happened. First, I discovered I loved Taiwan and the Taiwanese people. Second, I discovered that if I worked hard my Chinese would improve. The three months we spent together were some of the happiest of my eight years in Taiwan. On one of our first days together he sat me down for a heart to heart.

  "Do you really want to learn Chinese, because I think you're smart enough to do it."

  "Of course I want to learn," I said.

  "Everyone says that they want to learn, but only a few people really want to. I'll teach you, but you have to work really hard."

  "OK, what do you want me to do?"

  "In six weeks you're going to start using Chinese characters for everything, no more lessons from English or Pinyin books, and you're going to memorize 3,000 characters. You'll need to study for two hours a day, at least, and I'll help you."

  I looked at him like he was crazy. "Are you sure that's possible?"

  "Of course it is, you just have to really want it."

  So the next day I started my two hours of morning Chinese study. Missionaries are supposed to get up at 6:30 AM at the latest, and in our mission we needed to leave the apartment at 9:30 to start teaching. Between 6:30 and 9:30 you had one hour for personal study (reading the scriptures and other theological books, no language study), one hour for companionship study (planning the day, preparing lessons and practicing teaching), and one hour to eat breakfast and get ready to leave. In order to get two hours of language study in it meant that I had to get up at 4:30 in the morning, alone, cold, and shivering as I tried to cram thousands of Chinese characters into my poor ole head.

  ~~~

  A short aside on the nature of the Chinese language

  So why was this such a big deal? Chinese isn't like other languages; there is no alphabet or phonetic system. Even though I had been working consistently to learn Chinese for six months, I could only speak and understand spoken Chinese, I could read only a few basic characters. Because the goal for missionaries was communication we weren't encouraged to start learning characters until we had a good base in our spoken Chinese. All of the study material I had used up to this point was written out in "Pinyin," a system of Romanizing Chinese set up by the Chinese government. Basically it meant that I could look at groups of letters with a tone mark, and pronounce them as Chinese. This was great for a beginner, but without learning to read characters it would be hard to truly understand Chinese.

  Chinese characters are complex. Unlike other languages where you can pronounce a word by reading it even if you don't know what it says, in general you can't really guess the pronunciation of a Chinese character. One more wrench in the works is that there are now two types of written Chinese, traditional and simplified. Traditional Chinese is used mainly in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and by groups of overseas Chinese. Simplified Chinese was begun by the mainland Chinese government in an attempt to make Chinese script more readily learnable for common people. Many of the traditional characters that are most difficult (have the most strokes) were simplified into a form that is easier to write and read. For a foreigner learning Chinese you have to dance between the two, since some books ar
e only in simplified or only in traditional, some dictionaries only have one type of character, etc. The pinyin system comes from China so many of the really useful learning materials that use pinyin are from China and use simplified characters. Most Taiwanese can only read traditional characters and all of our missionary study materials were in traditional characters. A complex language becomes even more complex.

  Here is a short overview of the different kinds of characters, six in all. (My source for this is Wikipedia if you are interested.)

  Pictograms are pictures of what they represent, even if it is a bit hard to tell in the modern form of the character. Mountain 山and water 水are good examples of this. Look at the mountain character and with a small stretch of the imagination you have a mountain. The water character can look like water rushing through a canyon. Around 4% of characters are pictograms.