美国女博士回复：
Kenny has a very nice apartment by my standards. It is a pleasure to observe how clean it is. I confess that my own apartment at present is filthy. That is partly because I am preparing to move to a new one this weekend. And it is partly a mess because we have had too many people and too many things crowded into too small a space for too long. My roommates are not as neat as Kenny, but in truth it takes a great deal of labor to get this place looking clean.
Did anybody edit that at all for you? It has crossed that final degree to native speaker quality. In truth, it is really quite rare that anyone whose mother tongue is Chinese can do that without growing up speaking the language. You do have a gift for language.
Sounds like you're doing well in Canada. I'm glad you've found some things you appreciate about the place. Canada seems nice in many ways, though I've never been there.
There are still some old haphazardly put-together structures where old people live that are not clean and neat here. Years ago there were many of them, and many were occupied by soldiers who came over with Chiang Kaishek. These places were dark caves with corrugated iron roofs that looked built without a plan. One neighborhood like that was torn down years ago and replaced iwth a very large park, Da An Park. It's Taipei's version of Central Park. It really is pretty big and does offer some relief from the city, but it's still an urban park and you can hear the traffic on all sides.
There are a few other neighborhoods where people clearly built their own houses, with narrow pathways running between homes on a mountain side. Everything seems to be irregular shapes and sizes. These places are often a bit damp. There is sometimes something charming about the cockeyed way things are laid out. People saved one neighborhood like that called Treasure Hill from destruction - a bunch of artists started camping out there and refused to leave. It became an artists community and eventually I think they got government support, so now people are given those spaces to use as studios.
There are a few places here and there where you can still see the old style of store front, from the days when most people lived in the same building as their store. Some of those places are pretty interested, packed up to the cieling with odds and ends that the elderly people inside think will be useful. There's barely any room for the people, sometimes. Things are stacked so high that it is like walking through a tunnel or maze to get into their space. They sit in chairs watching the street. Places like these are fairly exceptional.
Public bathrooms here are not always clean. Women have that nasty habit of neither sitting on the toilet seat nor lifting it up, so they sprinkle pee all over. You can tell a higher class establishment because you won't see this in the bathroom. It's not clear to me that buildings here have heat. It doesn't get very cold in Taiwan for long, so people just stick it out. A cold day here is a rainy 15 degrees celcius.
Taipei is much much cleaner than it was 15 or 20 years ago. They have made getting rid of garbage terribly inconvenient - you have to listen for an electronic song broadcast by the garbage truck (usually Beethoven's Fur Elise) and then run down to meet the truck at a fixed point in time every day. In other words, people no longer leave piles of garbage bags on a street corner stinking in the hot sun waiting for a garbage truck to come by, with dogs and cats picking at it. The air pollution, while bad, is much better than years ago, as is the traffic. Partly that's due to the nice clean bright subway they built. Unlike New York, the subway is cleaner than the street level of the city. You will find the New York subway shocking perhaps, as it is dilapidated and dirty by Asian standards. The city of New York has not prioritized public transportation in its city planning for many decades and the result is clear.
Many people seem to live in fairly clean apartments here. I have seen many apartments that appear to have been renovated inside at some point. I don't always like people's taste, but even twenty years ago I found the standard of living acceptable. Men here chew binglang. It's a big business. But unlike one slum district in Hong Kong I have been to where there are red streaks of binglang juice marking the walls in stairwells, I don't see that here. I don't know where the working class people spit their binglang juice, but I don't see it all over the street or anything. It seems to be a working class thing.
Another sign of just how much things have changed here in 20 years is the condition of animals. Before, you used to see a lot of mangy strays living off garbage. They were afraid of people and didn't have enough hair. Now you hardly see strays any more. But you do see people walking around with little designer dogs in baby carriages dressed up in clothing. It's so silly. It's absolutely absurd that people think furred animals have to wear clothing in winter here. There are an awful lot of larger dogs patiently tolerating t-shirts or sweaters as if this is a normal thing. I guess it is emotionally satisfying to the people. At the same time, there are now quite a few of animal rescue associations that pick up stray animals, neuter them, and find homes for them. This remains necessary because other people continue to dump their pets when they become inconvenient to care for. There is some old notion that if you dump the animal in the countryside it will be able to survive on its own. People dump very old animals that nobody except a very, very kind person wants to adopt. But the fact that there are people who are deeply concerned about the condition of pet animals is probably a good sign in terms of the standard of living of people. Years ago you also used to see more live animals being killed in the markets and rather gory butcher stands. Those seem less common. Rather sterile, brightly lit supermarkets selling prepackaged food have become more common, although they are not always quite as clean as their American counterparts would be. Outdoor markets used to stink here. Now they don't really seem to stink - people don't leave vegetable or other garbage around.
That's the material infrastructure. As for public access to institutions, that's hard for me to gauge. I'm not in the public school system. It seems to me that university campuses make everything available to their students that they can. It doesn't seem too hard to get access to a library. The most amazing thing to me is the healthcare system. I have never had such free access to high quality healthcare before. It is so inexpensive. Everyone is covered - there are almost no people without insurance like in the US. Unlike the privatized US system which is fragmented, inconsistent and has much higher adminstrative costs, there is only one level of insurance here. It covers a great deal and gives people free choice of any doctor they want to see. You can see a traditional doctor or a western one. You don't have to wait a long time for appointments -- it's quite efficient. The quality of care in large hospitals seems pretty good. I am grateful all the time for the kind of medical care I can get here. It's really too bad that there's almost no possibility of the US getting rid of its private insurance system to adopt the more economical Taiwan style single payer system. Canada also has a single payer system. I'm not sure if it's as efficient as Taiwan's or not.
Another thing that changed radically here is politics. People make constant use of their right to free speech on the radio and in the news. In person, many people here in the north prefer to avoid confrontation and conflict on political topics, since it can get heated. In the south, people are quite anti-KMT and very vocal about it. They seem more willing to engage in conflict behaviors. The tone of political exchange can be unpleasant or distressing at times. It's pretty clear, however, that many people value the right of free speech and the right to vote. I don't think they'll be willing to give that up any time soon.
Another aspect of political change here is the strong expectation that government will not be corrupt. People are really offended by embezzlement or corruption on a scale that would be hardly worth considering in the US. The former president embezzled a few million USD. A sum that might buy one or two of John McCain's seven houses. A sum that would pay for the American military in Iraq for less than one week. But people are outraged about corruption, even when it is only a matter of 40,000USD of coupons for use at a department store. Part of the problem is that things that are now considered corruption were just standard operating procedure in the old KMT days. New procedures for how political parties should handle funds have not been clearly established. One of the ironies of all this is that the desire for impartial, objective rules that apply the same to everyone in the name of fairness - which often translates into a new inflexibility about rules - probably tends to make life harder for people without any powerful connections or lots of money. Corruption was the way government operated under the old KMT, in my opinion, on a scale that utterly dwarfs anything for which politicians are now being prosecuted. But the fact that they can prosecute a former president through the legal system, debate it on television every day, and maintain a stable society throughout is rather interesting. In the United States, we are not capable of prosecuting a former president. No matter how objectively justified, I just don't think that politically it will ever happen. I'm sorry about that. I wish they would charge Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the other major players in the Bush administration who made torture permissible with war crimes.
Stefani
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