Half Empty/Half Full 半空還是半滿

Sketch: Trees at the Beitou Library

As we’ve written about our adventures, we’ve gotten inquiries along the lines of “is everything really ideal over there in Taiwan?”

The simple answer is “no,” but, like everything else, it’s all a matter of perspective. Is the glass half empty or is the glass half full? Sometimes it feels half empty, but you always know it’s both: half empty and half full. We moved here four months ago, knowing there would be difficulties, hoping to handle them well and to keep our hearts open to what we might gain here. So far, so good; not that it’s been entirely easy.

We do miss certain things about the life we lived before we moved, and certain things are just as hard as we thought they would be.

Ping particularly misses her “wide open sky.” We both loved the vast expansiveness of the Central Valley. The sun rose over the Sierra Nevada and shined on us all day, it seemed, especially after we lived so long in Oregon. The only question seemed to be how long one could sit out in the backyard before the sun got too hot!

We miss snow! In Portland, we could drive to Mt. Hood. In Turlock, we could go to Tahoe or Yosemite for an instant winter wonderland. There’s snow here, but it’s not easy to get to, at least not by bus! Right now, it’s still raining.

Ping misses being able to dress up. No matter where we go, we walk. Pretty shoes and dresses are impractical when you walk half an hour to get to the MRT, or through the back alley and down the semi-dirt path to get to the bus stop. We spend a lot of time wearing essentially hiking gear. It was very different when all we had to do was step into a car and back out of the garage.

Mark misses being able to drive anywhere. He’s always loved the freedom of the road, and the U.S. is perfect for independent, long-distance exploration. Here, he can hardly find his way around without painstaking research, and we have no car, so we can’t just take off and hope to find our way. Ping spends a lot of time on the web, cross-checking the various bus company sites, figuring out how to daisy chain the bus routes so we can to get places. When he’s got to go somewhere, Mark almost invariably ends up on Google Maps’ street view and walks the route block by block. In the States, we could look at the same map and agree on where things were. Here, Mark tries to sort out the inconsistent and often inaccurate “Pin Yin” (semi-readable, Romanized spelling) while Ping looks for the real Chinese characters. A map that works for him does not work for her, and vice versa.

Along those lines, Mark’s facility with Spanish has absolutely zero value here in Taiwan.

After four months, it’s obvious that Mark’s not going to learn Mandarin by osmosis. Since Ping speaks such good English, Mark isn’t really in an “immersion” environment.  We still speak English at home. But Mark can’t expect to answer the phone and carry on a conversation longer than it takes to say: “Sorry, I speak only a little Chinese. Just a minute, I’ll get my wife.” Here in Taiwan, Mark has to contend with not just one but two new languages: most people here speak a mix of Taiwanese and Mandarin. Mark can follow a lot of Mandarin now, but he gets quickly lost when the conversation slips into Taiwanese. The older generation, our family here, and most folks in Beitou use a lot of Taiwanese.

This puts a lot of pressure on Ping. She is the communication hub: she has to translate critical family conversations, read every receipt, set up all accounts, and pretty much manage the household and most other business we do, all on her own. Mark had a conversation with another guy who recently moved from the States and they both agreed it was painful to feel so incompetent. Mark’s focusing more on learning the language, but it’s a lot harder at age fifty one than it would have been at four or five, and it takes more diligence than he’s devoted so far.

Still, it’s what we choose to focus on that determines how we view life. How we see things determines how our world looks.

Look for the richness and see abundance sprouting from every crack in the pavement, overflowing from the market stalls. Follow your nose down any street and you can’t miss the fragrance of some wonderful flower, or something yummy being steamed, boiled, roasted or fried. Just glance up the street to see the mist curling around the heads of the mountains. Turn the corner and meet yet another massive, gnarled tree with great, twisted roots. Follow the stone steps and find Narnia or Middle Earth.

Catch the eye of a child on the bus and enjoy her delight at seeing someone so totally different from herself. Smile at the grandmas sitting by the house on DaTun Rd 大屯路. and get a familiar smile back. Accept the receipt and change happily and respectfully handed to you (with both hands!) by the kind cashier. Say “good evening” to the ever-pleasant security guard at the Carrefour store who is always glad to see you and does his best to greet you with the proper English phrase. Thank the volunteer lady at the government building who looked up something for you, wrote it down for you, and escorted you personally all the way out the door, still telling you how the facility works and what you might be able to do there.

There’s always something good right here, right now. And we know there’s more just around the corner. When we focus on that, the world is always a better place.

No need to top off our glass. We have plenty.