The kid went back to school this month. This is cause for a flurry of panicked shopping. The teachers give the students the list of "things to buy for next year" in June, but September seems so far off then, and so for three years in a row we wound up at the only store that's open on Sunday, battling past elbows to get the last 30 centimeter ruler or whatever. The school shopping was not as last minute as usual this year, and I thought things would therefore be better, but they were pretty much the same. I always want to find perfect things, a colorful bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils and a backpack that will finally enable a level of organization that means he can go a full week without losing the locker keys, lunch card, or homework assignment...but so far no luck.
I think partly this is because the schools here require what I consider ridiculous things. These ridiculous requirements prevent me from being able to choose items that I would consider sensible. For example, all notebooks must be covered in plastic. I understand covering books against wear and tear, but this is the equivalent of covering a magazine. The notebooks are thin, slippery, plastic-coated things; the plastic is also thin and slippery, and not ever quite the right size. You can either reconcile yourself to too-large covers that the notebooks will fall out of, or you can cut them down to size and then try to get them to stay put. The project is too much for a nine-year-old, so I undertake it full of purpose and plans, but I always I wind up with bits of plastic stuck in my hair, glue on my fingers, and a level of irritation comparable to that induced by long airline flights. All that shoving of one-size objects into other-size spaces. This takes hours, and at the end of it I have no energy left for hunting the perfect backpack. "Listen," I say, "the one from last year is fine."
Which it probably is. I think another part of the problem with going back to school is that he is not going "back" to a school that is familiar to me. We covered our books in paper bags from the grocery store. THAT made sense. Covering notebooks in plastic does not. We put our things in little cubbies; we had a coatroom at the back of the class. THAT made sense. Giving a child a locker key does not: every morning is a frantic hunt for said key and I don't get the point. We had the same schedule every day so we knew what to expect. THAT made sense. Making every day different means inevitably one book that should be there is gone, or the kid can carry the whole 5 kilo set of everything every day, which he does, but it doesn't make sense.
I look around at the other mothers, confidently waving goodbye to their kids at the school doors, the other kids with their perfectly covered notebooks and brand-new backpacks and cleverly attached keyrings, and I think that I am really not good at this at all. I know that to a certain extent the problems are his personality (scattered) and mine (the persistent delusion that if everything is planned, it will be fine) but I think it's also because I'm from a different culture. It's all alien to me. Other parents may also be struggling with the plastic covers, but their struggle is physical. Mine is physical and mental. "Why do we have to do it this way?" I mutter through the tape that's mysteriously stuck at the corner of my mouth, a question I wouldn't ask if I didn't know there was another way. As ever, I am stuck in wanting all the cleverness of my birth culture and all the comfort of the culture we've adopted, with none of the complications of the former and none of the maddening slowness of the latter. The fact that benefits have their downside hits me every time I run against an aspect of the system I don't really understand. Police stations. Health insurance offices. Doctors. Schools.
I don't know. Obviously we choose to live here, which makes things easier, because awareness of choices makes them more bearable. But sometimes I feel like... it's been 12 years. When am I going to feel like a part of the system that is running, rather than always standing outside of it and questioning how it is run? Is this the fate for all transplants?
Or is this me?
I guess a lot of countries have stories about their taxi drivers, and Taiwan doing everything it can to "connect to the international community" as the standard phrase goes when you want to show that you are international and progressive, is of course joining the club. There is a campaign to teach taxi drivers to speak English, and they are encouraged not to discuss politics or religion and refrain from chewing the (mildly) narcotic betel nut. In the old days, there was no regulation of the profession, which meant that it was full of ex-convicts that couldn't find a job elsewhere. When I first arrived here in the late 1980s, newspaper reports about taxi drivers raping, robbing, beating up and/or murdering customers were fairly common.
Ex-convicts or not, they have always been a fierce bunch, and more than once have different taxi fleets laid siege on police stations to have a fellow driver released from custody, sometimes leading to violence and bloodshed.
Quite some time ago, D took a taxi somewhere here in Taipei. She was in a bit of a hurry, so she got in the first cab that stopped, although we normally always pass on those sat-down, worn-down, smoke- and betelnut infested old Ford Telstars and wait for a nice new car instead. It felt wrong the minute she sat down and he took off. Only then did she realize that the car indeed was old and the seats sat down, and that it reeked of betelnut. The guy looked as if he was falling asleep, his eyes glazed from another 24-hour-shift of driving and betelnut-chewing.
D didn't say a word besides letting him know where she was going, and she told him in Taiwanese, because you don't want to set these guys off if you can avoid it.
After a while, they got to a red light, and the car ahead of them, another cab, did a sudden brake, maybe because he didn't notice the red light, but more probably because he was planning on running it, and then realized that the cars in the other direction had already begun moving. D's driver, of course, had to do an even more sudden brake to avoid running into the guy, not that a run-in would have made any difference to his old wreck.
That was all he needed. He started yelling and shouting, with red betelnut juice flying out of his mouth in every direction as if he had received a physical slap on the face by the driver in front of him. He got out of the car, popped the trunk, got out the crowbar, and went completely berserk on the car in front of them, going wild on the doors and smashing the windows, screaming and shouting, while the driver locked it from the inside and tried to move over to the other side of the car before he got hit. D had no change, so she placed a thousand entee dollars ten times the fare on the driver's seat before quietly slipping out of the car. After all, you don't want a pumped-up, crowbar-wielding, betel nut-chewing berserk on your tail.
These days, however, this is the exception, and taxi drivers are really quite nice. I wouldn't mind if they stopped chewing betel nut, but apart from that, you can have the greatest, weirdest and funniest conversations. One day not too long ago, I got in a taxi and told the guy where I wanted to go. I could hardly hear his answer, his mouth was so full of betel nut, but in the end, it turned out to be yet another of those memorable taxi rides that I only get in Taipei.
-I want to go to Roosevelt Rd. Could you go down Heping East and then turn left at Roosevelt, please. I'll get off before you hit Shida Rd.
-Heping West and Roosevelt?
-No, just go down Heping East and then turn left onto Roosevelt.
-Are you getting off on Heping or on Roosevelt?
-Roosevelt. Just go down Heping East and then turn left onto Roosevelt. I don't know the exact address, but I know the place. I go there every week.
-OK.
He stopped. He actually seemed to get it.
-Here, do you chew? Have one.
He handed me a whole bag of betel nuts.
-No, I don't. Thanks, though.
-Your Chinese is good. You been here long? Are you an English teacher?
He spat in the plastic cup he had next to his seat, already brimming with old chewed out betel nuts and bloodred spittle. But at least he held the cup up to his mouth before he spat in it so he wouldn't miss. Then he managed to squeeze yet another betel nut into his face.
-Thanks. No, I'm a translator. You have to be a native English speaker to be an English teacher these days, and I'm not.
-Where are you from?
-Sweden, so I speak Swedish.
-North Europe. Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland. See, I'm good.
-And Finland. You know your geography. Have you ever been to Europe?
-No, no. I'm not leaving this place. I owe the government too much money, NT$8 or 9 million, so they won't let me out.
What did he just say? Why would he talk of such things to a complete stranger?
-What did you do?
-I didn't pay my taxes.
-Really? You make that much driving a cab?
-No, I was in construction, and the company went belly-up.
That figures. With all the corruption involved in the construction industry from buying contracts and paying "consultancy fees," that's precisely what you'd expect.
-So how much do you have to owe the government before they stop you from leaving the country?
-Oh, NT$1 million (about US$31,000 or so), I think. But I owe much more than that. NT$9 million.
-How long will it take you to pay it back?
-I ain't paying it back. I owe the government, I'm not paying them back.
-How come they don't put you in jail, then?
-I've done time before. I like doing bad stuff. I just can't do good things. It doesn't work, I can only do bad things. See, I'm not allowed to turn here, but I'm turning anyway. I don't care.
He's just dying to show me how bad he is. With all the cars whizzing past not expecting us to do what we're doing I'm sure now I'm going to be in another crash. The last one I was in going to Jiufen a while back was really quite innocent. The only thing that happened was that the driver couldn't open his door and had to get out on the right side of the car. It was also caused by our taxi driver who drove on the left side of the road through a sharp left turn. Then he blamed the oncoming guy for driving too fast and in the middle of the road, almost over on our side. Afterwards, he still wanted us to take his taxi back to Taipei.
-Yeah, I see. That's alright, though, it's in the right direction.
-I've never had a job. I've tried, and the boss always gets in my hair and then I smack him and I get fired. I'm just a bad guy. I only think bad thoughts and try to find ways of doing bad stuff.
-I guess some people just can't take orders. You should just run your own company so you can make all decisions and come and go as you please.
-But I can't do that. I tried. I just only want to bad things. It's like at some time in your life, you make a turn down a road and that's what you're going to do for the rest of your life. I did something bad, and now I'm a bad person that can only do bad things, you know like the five bad elements in China. Have you been there?
-Lived there for two years a long time ago.
-You know that turn before, it was a wrong turn, I think. I seem to be taking you for an extra ride, we could have gone straight.
But you were so eager to show me how bad you are, remember?
-It's fine, we're still going in the right direction.
-We are? OK. So you know the five bad elements, then? Landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightist elements. I'm two of those, a bad element and a counterrevolutionary. I used to be a smuggler there, you see, smuggled things to Taiwan.
-What kind of stuff?
-Girls.
Then he went into a long monologue about distances in nautical miles between Keelung and Hsinchu and then the distance in kilometers between Keelung and Hsinchu beforing adding distances in kilometers between other places in Taiwan and converting those to distances in nautical miles and then doing the same thing for places on the Fujian coast to show that he knew the coast lines of Fujian and Taiwan the way only a smuggler would. I recognized a lot of the names from when I lived in Xiamen but have no idea whether the distances were correct or not.
-Then the Taiwanese government wanted to put me in jail so I moved to China. I stayed there for several years, but then my mom got sick so I came back.
So not even a bad guy in Taiwan is badder than that he has to come home and take care of his sick old mom, even if it means going to jail.
-And then they caught you and put you in jail.
-Right. So when I got out, I started driving a taxi.
-You have quite a good life, then. You owe the government almost 10 million bucks that you refuse to pay back but you still have your freedom to move around and drive your taxi and make money. Pretty good. Nice government.
-Yeah, but I have to go the police station all the time so they can tell me to be a good boy and follow the law, and I can't go anywhere anyway, so I'm still in prison. Here, see. This is the last paper they sent me to tell me to go the police so they can talk to me to keep me from doing bad stuff. That's why I'm driving a cab.
-But with your smuggling connections you could surely go to China anytime you want.
-Sure.
-But then you don't have a passport, so I guess you can't go anywhere else.
-Right, but China is big, there's a lot of places to go, and I can make money there. Hey, you said Sweden, right? Isn't that where Hagar the Horrible comes from?
Hagar is called "The Little Hero of the North Sea" in Chinese and everyone has to bring him up when they hear that I'm from Northern Europe. Maybe it's the beard, the big moustache and the rings in my ears that make them think about pirates.
-Yeah. Funny that you should mention that.
-I want to be a pirate. I like pirates, they're bad guys, too, like me. It would suit me well.
-But then you should go to Indonesia, not China. There are a lot of pirates in those waters.
-And the Philippines, there are even more in the Philippines. Yeah, I could go there.
-Oh, look at that, here we are, this is where I get off. Thanks for the ride.
I made sure I paid him right. After all, you never know, maybe he really was a baddie, what do I know. What I do know, though, is that I just have to start taking the taxi more often.