by Adam Tervort
Ideograms are made by altering a pictogram. Knife 刀 is marked to become blade 刃. There aren’t very many of these kinds of characters.
Ideogrammic compounds are made by putting more than one pictogram or ideogram together. Wood 木 doubled becomes grove 林 and tripled it becomes forest 森. Sun 日 and moon 月 put together become bright 明. This makes up about 13% of characters.
The most common type of character is called a phono-semantic compound. This is the closest you get to an alphabet in Chinese. You get this type of character by combining a common character, like water, as a category, and another character which lends a sound. Lake is a good example. The water radical 氵 is combined with the character hu 胡 (which just lends a sound, not a meaning) and we have lake, 湖 hu. The radical tells us what the character class is (water) and the other part gives us a hint of the pronunciation. Some people say that 90% of Chinese characters are this type.
Transformed cognates are characters that were once upon a time identical but have morphed into two characters over time. They may look similar but the meanings may be very different. Test 考 and old 老 are examples. These characters are really great for tripping up Chinese students.
The last type of characters are called rebus, phonetic loan characters. This is a character that was once borrowed from another character that is archaic now. Oneself 自 used to be nose, but now it is just oneself. Not very helpful to know, but interesting nonetheless.
Got that? So learning Chinese characters is not a piece of cake, it's more like chewing rocks. Back to the story!
~~~
I started getting up at 4:30 to cram characters into my cranium, usually feeling that it was a futile gesture but sometimes seeing rays of hope as I watched the sun rise. On really frustrating days I would head up to the roof and watch the sun jump out of the ocean. If you've ever seen a sunrise in a place on the beach with clean air, you'll know that the sun doesn't peek above the horizon, it seems to leap out. Watching the sun I’d think, “Maybe that would be me, leaping out of the old me that can't and becoming someone new that can.”
Elder Soh was relentless. He corrected my pronunciation all the time, made me read from Chinese books in front of people when I was really not equipped to do so, and otherwise embarrassed the shame right out of me. I learned the characters in six weeks, and by the end of three months together I could read 80% of most anything I saw. That didn't make it easy because I still seemed a fool on the other 20%, but at least I was 80% of the way there. I started to read Chinese books without a dictionary, not because I didn't need it, but because I could guess at the meaning of the characters I didn't know. It turned out to be a really great way to learn new characters. Once a day I'd corner Elder Soh with my list of understood but unpronounceable characters, and he would tell me how to read them. After that I could pretty much remember them.
My Chinese was growing in leaps and bounds, and something amazing happened. As the Taiwanese people around me saw that I was trying hard to learn and to do it their way (by learning real Chinese instead of relying on pinyin) their attitude toward me started to change. Strangers waited patiently as I struggled to read, helped me with characters I didn't know, and then smiled and told me that I was learning a lot. The local church members adopted us and took amazing care of us. I stopped being the fat American and became the white guy who really worked hard on his Chinese. This was my first taste of Taiwanese "hospitality," called 人情味 renqingwei.
I started to fall in love with Taiwan. This qualified as a minor miracle considering my attitude while living in Taipei. The life of missionaries is not an easy one, and it is easy to get cynical. Some days I would talk to 100 people without anyone showing a bit of interest in what I had to say. Tracting was the worst. Maybe in some countries doing cold calls at peoples' front door is effective, but it sure wasn't for me, at least while I lived it Taipei. Some nights we would be hours in the rain without anyone even opening a door to talk to us. Part of the problem was me, because I started to feel that no one would open their door and my self-fulfilling prophecy came true. Elder Ke and I would make jokes about the people who slammed doors in our faces, keeping the best ones to share with missionaries at our weekly meetings. We had a terrible attitude.
Side note: We did have some doozies, though. My favorite funny tracting experience came on a cold, rainy night in Taipei. We knocked, and a man opened the door in boxers and an undershirt. Trying to contain our laughter, we asked if he and his family would be interested in hearing a lesson about Jesus Christ. His reply was that they didn't have time, his wife was washing clothes. We thought this was just an excuse and plowed on ahead with our pitch, and he replied again that his wife was washing clothes and they were very busy. Just then his son came into the living room in only boxers, and asked his dad who was at the door. A moment later another son came out in his boxers as well. The man turned to us and said "you see, we don't have any clean clothes! Come back sometime next week!" We almost fell down the stairs leaving the building, we were laughing so hard.
With Elder Soh, it was different. He is Chinese, and there was no Chinese bashing when someone slammed the door in our faces. Instead I got a course in Chinese Culture 101 from a master. I would make an unsuccessful contact and Elder Soh would sit me down and explain what I did that was impolite, or how I could phrase something in order to show more respect for someone older than me. He taught me the importance of using correct titles for people of different age groups, and how to talk to someone who was not Christian in a way that showed my respect for their beliefs.
The more I learned from Elder Soh, the more I started to respect the people I talked to every day and they started to respect me in return. The more I learned the more I wanted to love them.
There is another important part of this story that needs some explanation. I grew up hearing stories of my father's mission in France, and one of my favorites was the story of the day he fell in love with France and the French people. Being an American Mormon missionary in Paris in the 70's was not an easy thing. The French have a reputation of being short with the linguistically inept, and my father experienced this firsthand. He worked hard, tried his best to speak French well, and day after day felt insulted by the way people treated him. Try as he might, he just felt that the French were as unlovable as any people he had ever met. One day he was talking to his mission president, and the president asked if he loved the French people. My father is a very honest man, and he told the truth. He couldn’t stand them, they were arrogant, patronizing, godless, and on and on. His mission president listened to him and then told him that if he wanted to learn to love the French people there were only two things he needed to do. First, he needed to pray for the gift of the love of French people. Until that prayer was answered, he needed to pretend it already had been. He was doubtful, but said he would try it. A few weeks later as he was walking through a parking lot to retrieve his bike, his heart was flooded with a sudden love of the people he saw all around him. From that day on he loved France and the people, and he still does now.
I remembered this story, and while I was doing my Chinese bashing in the back alleys of Taipei it was always in the back of my mind. But how could I love them, they were so strange! In Taidong with Elder Soh my attitude changed as I started to understand more culturally and linguistically, but I was still far short of loving them. Respect, yes. Love, no. I started to pray that I could have the gift of loving Taiwan, and then tried my hardest to act like I already did.
My miracle happened one Sunday morning in church. A sister was at the pulpit saying the opening prayer, and in her prayer she thanked God for the missionaries who had come from so far away to teach the people of Taiwan about Christ. As I listened to her I was flooded with love. (And since I’m not as tough as my dad I cried as well.) The first test of my newfound love was when the members around me started to kid me about going into a prayer dry-eyed and coming out looking like a fountain. I loved them for their concern. I don’t
want to make this sound like it is more important than it really is, but that day changed my life. Everyone started to get the benefit of the doubt, and then I understood that they had been giving me the benefit of the doubt from the moment I stepped on their island. Since that day Taiwan has been home, just as much as Kansas City is home, and the feeling only gets stronger the longer I’m here. My heart split, and half of it will always belong in Taiwan.
~~~
So what about the pineapples?
Have you ever seen a pineapple growing? It’s strange. When we see pineapples in the store they are usually fruit-down, leaves-up, but when they are growing they are just the opposite. The base of the plant is a collection of really big pineapple leaves with a thick stock extending straight up. On top of the stock is an upside down pineapple, connected to the stalk at the leaves, with the fruit straight up in the air as if saying "please, come and pick me. I'm really good to eat!" There were pineapple fields all over in Taidong, and while I lived there I started for the first (and hopefully only) time in my life to carry a knife. Most of the farmers we met were really nice, and some of them told us that we could eat any pineapples we wanted for free as long as we did it in the field. I started to carry a knife around with me in case we ventured by a pineapple field and had a few minutes to chow down. There is nothing in the world as delicious as a really ripe pineapple, the flesh nearly orange, so sweet at the core and so sour towards the outside. I spent many a night on the toilet paying for my pineapple lust, but it was oh so worth it!
Chapter 7 - So this is what healthcare is supposed to be like!
My first trip to the doctor in Taiwan came just after leaving the paradise of Taidong for the big city, back to Taipei. I was making a leap, from being a junior companion to being a trainer of a brand new missionary and was scared to death. I flew to Taipei on a small plane, and met my new companion Elder Ban. We were to move to a nice area of Taipei called Beitou. We took the subway up to Beitou together with some other missionaries and an amazing thing happened. When I walked out of the train station and looked around at my new city, everything I saw looked normal. Not familiar, I'd never been there before, but none of it was strange or foreign looking. It was a shock to think that I was at home enough in Taiwan for a new city to seem normal, but it did.
One of the first people I was introduced to in Beitou was the mother of a family who lived across from the church building. Their family had been meeting with missionaries on and off for a few months, and they were very excited to have two new foreigners to adopt and take care of. This family was aboriginal, not ethnically Chinese, so many of the things they ate were new to me including the raw beef they gave us on our first visit. Elder Ban pled jetlag as his excuse to not eat, and so I had a double portion of the foul stuff. I didn't feel well the next day, but never threw up so I figured I would be OK.
The next week I started to get some pretty severe cramps. The climax came on a Thursday morning when I got off the toilet, looked down into the bowl, and saw a little white parasite pool party. None of the missionaries I have talked to then or since have had parasite problems in Taiwan, so it must have been the raw beef. I was frightened and went to see a member who was a Chinese chiropractor, hoping for a referral to a good doctor.
What I ended up with was a full-body adjustment. Brother Jiang was very nice about the whole thing and told me that his wife would take me to the hospital in the morning, but he wanted to work on me for a while and help me feel more comfortable. He started on my head, working and talking in a mixture of Mandarin and Taiwanese which I understood no more than half of. After the whole thing was over, Elder Ban told me he was seriously concerned that Brother Jiang was going to pull my head directly off my body, and it sure felt that way when he was working.
"The neck is the source of all of your problems," he'd say as he yanked my head around in a fast jerk. "If you can get your vertebrae aligned correctly everything will work itself out naturally." Crack! "See, doesn't that feel better."
(Holding back tears) "Yes, much better. Well, I'd better go home now..."
"Oh no! This is only the start of your treatment! I'll need to work on you for at least 45 minutes!" Crack!
The next day at the hospital was a revelation. I gave the receptionist my national health insurance card, and she asked for the equivalent of $3.00 US. That was the last time anyone asked me for money that day. I had a full blood and stool workup, saw both a general practitioner and an internist, and was given two weeks’ worth of medicine. The doctors and nurses seemed most concerned to figure out how, exactly, I had gotten the worms, and when I told them about the raw beef they chided me like an old grandmother. "You can't eat raw foods, child, it will ruin your whole experience here in Taiwan. If you aren't sure what to eat then just ask your neighbors or give me a call, I'll help you. Don't eat raw food. For Heaven's sake!" They were very nice, and I was amazed I got off so cheaply.
A week later I had one of the most horrific experiences of my time in Taiwan. I was sure I had watched someone die. I was to go out for an evening on exchanges with Elder Zhang in his area, a place that I had never been to before and he had only been in for a week. It was a rainy day, and Elder Zhang had forgotten his slicker. The zipper on his bag was also broken, so not only was he soaked but all of his books and teaching materials were soaked as well. He was determined to show me that he knew his was around the area so he took charge of the map, but he couldn't read very much Chinese at that time and we were lost most of the evening. The other thing about Elder Zhang was that he couldn't really ride a bike. He never learned how to as a child and so he learned "on the job" by crashing into everything he saw during his first two weeks in Taiwan. He was a bit steadier by that time, but not much. (He had something like 250 bike accidents in two years.)
After wandering around the city for two hours, we finally found the road we were looking for, but we were at the wrong end of it and had a long ride to get to where we needed to be. He took off, riding as fast as he could. Elder Zhang was really stiff when he rode, eyes down, arms locked, feet pumping like there was no tomorrow. The road was free of cars or scooters, just me and Elder Zhang and one car double parked on our side of the road 400 meters in front of us. The road was well lit with streetlights and storefronts. We rode and rode, and as we got within 100 meters of the car I started to wonder if he saw it. There was still no traffic, but if he kept riding like he was he'd ride smack into it. 50 meters away, no course change yet. 30 meters away I was getting worried, we were riding pretty fast still. 20 meters away, surely he saw it, it was the only thing on the road! 10 meters away, come on, swerve already! 5 meters away, he really hadn't seen it. Panicked by now, I screamed "Watch out Elder Zhang!" He turned his head around to see what I wanted. Crash! He crumpled to the ground, just like Wile E. Coyote. I remember thinking that he surely broke his neck, he hit so hard and so fast. I rode behind him and stopped, yelling my lungs out. He started to groan and move then he stood up, bleeding like a stuck pig. The car owner ran out of the restaurant where he had been buying dinner, just as scared as I was, thinking that a crazed foreigner going to attack him. "Why did you park your car illegally?" Elder Zhang yelled this over and over, delirious and going into shock. I asked to borrow a cell phone so we could call for an ambulance, but the restaurant owner told us we were across the street from a small hospital, so we made our way to the emergency room.
The doctor gave Elder Zhang 30-something stitches in his chin, and gave him some painkillers and other goodies and told him to come back in two days for a more thorough check-up. When Elder Zhang was around a corner the doctor told me that he was lucky be alive. The fact that he had hit a hatchback saved his neck, and turning his head to look at me saved his nose and face. "Please teach him how to ride more safely," the doctor asked, "or next time he will not be so lucky." We made our way home in a taxi with our bikes sticking out the back. Elder Zhang still had a lot of accidents, but never had to visit the hospital again so I guess it was i
mprovement.
Total cost of the emergency room visit: $20 US.
My next hospital adventure came after a basketball game when I went up for a rebound and came down straight onto my ankle. I was sure it was broken. I went to the best hospital in Taipei, the National Taiwan University Medical Center, and had two sets of x-rays, two specialist consults, and got medication and crutches. Total time in hospital: two hours. Total cost: $30 US.
I’ve had some other great experiences with the healthcare system here in recent years as well. Since marrying and moving back to Taiwan, my wife and I have been blessed with three children. All three kids were born by C-Section. Mei-yun (my wife) stayed in a private room for seven days post-op, the babies had wonderful around the clock care, as well as nurses who came in to teach Mei-yun about childcare two or three times before she was released from the hospital. Total cost: $600 US per baby.
Our second son Langston came down with a really high fever in the winter of 2009, and had a seizure just outside the door of the family clinic we go to. The doctor gave him some immediate treatment then told us we needed to take him to a major hospital as soon as possible. Since it was faster to drive him ourselves rather than wait for an ambulance, we took him to the emergency room where he was diagnosed with H1N1 (Swine Flu). He was admitted to a double room (and later transferred to a single room when one opened up), given a five day series of Tamiflu (an antiviral agent), and had round the clock care for seven days. He made a full recovery. Total cost: $350 US.
In August 2009 Mei-yun found a lump in her breast, and a biopsy showed that she had stage one breast cancer. After the diagnosis was made we transferred from the local hospital to the top cancer hospital on the island, similar to the Mayo Clinic, where she had a lot of tests, mammograms, ultrasounds, and consultations with a number of doctors before having a mastectomy on her left side. The surgery was a success, and she stayed in a double room for two full days afterwards. Total cost: $400 US. (She opted out of chemotherapy or hormonal therapy, and the costs for those would have put the bill just over $1000 US for two rounds of treatment.)
