Friday, January 8, 2016

Even Fresher Cultural Perspectives After My Latest Visit Home

First impressions as I enter my apartment:

Wow, everything is so short and small. The table is like half the height of American tables. The Couch is half the size of American couches. The Refrigerator, cabinets…literally everything about my apartment is a significant downgrade when it comes to size compared to America. The ceilings even seem lower. It reminds me of how Japanese this place is actually. You could fairly say that Taiwanese people and their culture are a good part Japanese. The food, the styles and even their excessive politeness. 


As I completed each leg of my return Journey, I went on a kind of a reunion tour through all the places I’d lived in the past decade. I left from my childhood home in Upper Gwynedd to go to my beloved city of Philadelphia. After that, I took a flight to Beijing, where I had lived for about a year. Then, I arrived in my current location of Taipei, where I have been for the better part of 3 years. Each place reminded me of why I felt the way I did when I lived there. And, the unique experience of being in these places one after the other afforded me an opportunity to make some new observations and to compare and contrast once again from my present perspective.

Upper Gwynedd left the same impression as it always does on me. It was really nice to see my parents and family and they have a beautiful home, but one must drive about 10 minutes to access even the closest business. I got the feeling after being there for about a week of being trapped on all sides by oceans of roads where only single file traffic passes. All goods and services are restricted by a tide of very slow moving drivers in single file, cramming through town intersections to access the large strip malls and shopping centres. I find that the wanderlust in me cannot tolerate knowing the sparseness of the sprawled suburban towns that awaited an hour in each direction. The wait in the traffic lines is a heavy price to pay for limited cultural experience if you ask me. 

Let me backtrack a little bit there though. I used to say that the Lansdale area had no culture. But that is definitely not true. It has a very distinct small town culture. It is the historic American culture first brought by the immigrants who came to the American East coast and settled in Pennsylvania. When growing put here I perhaps did not appreciate these things, but on my return visit, I paid special attention to the colonial architecture of the houses and businesses, surely some of which must be over 2 or 3 hundred years old. These towns and hamlets are breathtaking beautiful…rolling across the rich farm land and forest south of the Lehigh valley. You can see the small nuclei of what used to be disparate towns. This area has as much history if not more than anywhere else in America. The Pennsylvania Dutch, the Schwenkfelders, the Irish and Italian Catholics, the Presbytyrians, the Swiss-German Mennonites,  and our own tiny town of Upper Gwynedd, which was founded by Welsh Quakers.
At this time, many immigrants from other places have come to call the region home. There is now a Jamaican barber shop on Main Street Lansdale, and plentiful Korean owned stores with Hangul translation on them. A Greek restaurant and a Spanish restaurant (although I severely doubt its authenticity) now also inhabit Main Street. There are sushi restaurants run by Chinese people and even Vietnamese pho restaurants. There have been improvements in diversity no doubt, yet I still feel that all of these places have been extensively “Americanised”. While at a local sushi restaurant, I ordered the aptly named “Godzilla Roll”; A freakish conglomeration of fish and mayonnaise all rolled together in seaweed and rice wet with the tears of Japanese sushi chefs who lament the bastardisation of their magnificent art. 


The Korean grocery store Assi is certainly authentic enough however. Complete with ridiculous English translations of Korean product logos, this place gives one a true feel of what Asia is like. I think the Koreans have really colonised the area quite extensively. They have their own Churches, supermarkets, restaurants and schools now it seems.

Because I have forgotten to do so, let me now say a bit on the magnificent Italian American culture which is uniquely American. “Italian” restaurants in America can be found nowhere else. Even in Taiwan, the Italian food is quite accurately Italian. You cannot find a Chicken Parm Hoagie at these places, or even Chicken Parmesan at all, “Italian” hoagies, or even the American pizza which has denser dough and is much larger than usual. You can only find what we would refer to as “artisan” pizza, but is probably just what the Italians call “Pizza”, although I have also heard of it referred to as “Napoli” style. Don’t misunderstand me though. I LOVE American Italian food. It’s one of my favourite things to eat back home. The Italian American deli, or even just the deli in general (Jewish I suppose) seems to be pretty uniquely American. You just don’t find that stuff here. I don’t think there is anywhere in Taiwan that you can just walk into a deli and tell them I want such and such on a Kaiser roll. In fact, I don’t even think they have kaiser rolls. 

So, these are the things I noticed in my home town. Everything seemed bigger and clumsier than I remembered. And although while in Taiwan, I have touted the superiority of American drivers, I actually found them to be cumbersome and fearful upon my return. I have become used to the free flowing Taiwanese way of driving. That is not to say that I am used to psycho drivers here. After all, a psycho driver is a psycho driver no matter where you live. 

Next on my reunion tour was Philadelphia, a city of great culture, history and character where I spent about 5 years working and studying. I returned to West Philly to visit some friends and was quickly reminded of how much I love the place. So beautiful…so rich in culture and history, and with such a wealth of diverse, intelligent, and interesting inhabitants. And the musical culture is so rich! There is not enough room to begin to elaborate on everything Philadelphia has to offer. It is the “big city with a small town feel”, the home of Rocky, and birthplace to some of the greatest musicians in American history. It is a foodie and a beer snob town, and also home to some of country’s best universities (namely Penn). 

While in Philadelphia, I had the opportunity to compare it with Taipei. Everything downtown seems to be in a large stone building, which is a bit different from Taipei, which has haphazard stands everywhere. I wouldn’t have noticed that before. I was struck there by the relative sparsity of nearby businesses in West Philly. Every destination required a walk of several blocks or so. Which, in the bitter Pennsylvania cold, was something I had to reacclimatise to. Taipei has spoiled me. There are like 50 businesses within a 5 block radius where I live. And the climate is much warmer here.


Beautiful, however, Taipei is not. The architecture here is straight up ugly. It’s just a very ugly place. It has a ramshackle charm to it, no doubt, but it does not even pretend to approach the beauty of a city like Philadelphia. After the awful experience I had as a customer in the Philadelphia and Chicago airports though, the Taoyuan airport just outside of Taipei was a breath of fresh air. Nobody does convenience like the Taiwanese, with the exception of perhaps Japan. Everything is clearly marked, and there are uniformed attendants waving you in the correct direction, even though the airport is very small. When approaching the baggage claim, there was a mobile digital display to tell you where to go to get your bag. That is the asian proactive customer service that I have become accustomed to. In Chicago, I had to get the attention of restaurant attendants to find out where to go. And in Philadelphia, only a passing pilot assisted me with where to go. The checkin lady didn’t even tell me which direction to walk in after checking me in. It was a bewildering experience and triggered some rather strong feelings about how far my own country has to go to improve things.

So I am back in the city that the Taiwanese tourism department refers to as “The Heart of Asia”. It is good to be back, but I have had such a whirlwind readjustment in the last two weeks. Traveling to America after a year and a half abroad entailed some serious reverse culture shock. Everything is just so huge in America. After re-acclimating to a more regal space, I find myself a little disappointed coming back to my little apartment. We live in very close quarters, and the walls are quite thin. Every morning I get woken up by a phone alarm that plays music from what sounds like a nintendo game and it’s impossible to know where it’s coming from because of the way the sound echoes off of the many building facades lined up facing each other. I often hear the children in the apartment above whining when I’m in the bathroom, and the sounds of the street drift right up and keep me awake if my windows are open. Taipei is a loud and ugly city. This is kind of the stark reality that I have to accept as I return to spend the next 1-2 years of my life here. 

An ugly city, but a convenient one. Everything is so convenient here. Doctor’s appointments, job interviews, traffic. Everything moves quickly and efficiently. You simply make an appointment online and then you are in and out within an hour usually. There are convenience stores everywhere and so many businesses are packed together so tightly. It’s a very dense city. 

Beijing was pretty much the same as I remember. With every sentence ending in an “Arrr” and everything moving at a snails pace. I even snapped some hilarious misspellings on the restaurant menu at the airport. I don’t know what it is about that place that they can’t spell English words correctly. Of course, Beijing is the place where I was delayed overnight because of a luggage issue. It took them about an hour of deliberation and about 10 phone calls to figure out that I had to stay overnight. Everything in Beijing just takes like three times as long and has like three times as many steps as it should. Even at the currency exchange booth, they had to stamp like 10 documents and sign like 4 carbon copies. But one thing I will give to Beijing airport: it is still way better than Chicago! I leave you with these hilarious photos: 




PA is cold!

That's a noodle boi!
Nobody does sandwiches like Wawa!
Scooter culture slowly creeping into Lansdale? 
West Philly Charm (Ali's Place)

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