I like to joke around that I know much more about Taiwanese history than most Taiwanese do. Unfortunately this is not too far off the mark, which is a shame because just in the past hundred years alone, Taiwan has some truly incredible history. Thankfully as time goes on more and more of those stories are coming to light, so it's out there for people to learn out. I just hope that they'll get some more attention as I think they can be a true inspiration to the people of Taiwan.
Actually, one of the reasons that I'm even living in Asia is because of my fondness for Chinese history. Back in 8th grade I read a biography on Mao and that got me interested in more recent Chinese history. Yes China has the quoted 5,000 years of history, but what truly fascinated me was it's 20th century history and how so many things happened especially with so many regiment changes in such a relatively short time. One of the great things about living in Asia is that I not only get to learn more about the history, but I get to talk to people who lived it and I get to see the effects of that history. I'm very fortunate to have and continue having this experience.
Well as promised the story of the key chain and how it relates to what I just talked about. As mentioned yesterday I was at the shopping mall and there were about three or four stores that happened to sell souvenir key chains. Most of them were key chains that had names on them, like you'd see at any souvenir stand. However instead of names like Steve, Mike, Susan, they were Chinese characters for common Taiwanese last names.
It not being English was not too much of a problem, as for western names there are ways of writing them using chinese characters, so I figured I'd just get the character which was the first one in the chinese writing of the recipient's name. No such luck. I tried first name, middle name, last name...nothing. I tried words that mean the translation (as if somebody's name is Rose, than I tried to find the chinese word for rose) of her first name, middle, last....nothing.
This is when I was starting to see something strange, the names were all Taiwanese names and not Chinese family names. The importance of this being that when spelling westerner's name using chinese characters, usually Chinese names are used. It was also a bit strange, why have Taiwanese names, since Taiwanese aren't tourists. Wouldn't it be better to have Chinese names since Chinese are tourists, or better still Japanese names because a large amount of tourists in Taiwan are from Japan.
Regardless, with no such luck on the name front, I was forced to move on. The last store we came across that had key chains had ones like the one in the picture. Shaped like Taiwan with the words "I love Taiwan" in chinese. Also it had a 10 Taiwan dollar coin in it. I told my friend that I didn't want to get it cause the coin has a picture of Chiang Kai-shek whom I'm not a fan of. But she said that it's a picture of Sun Yat-sen. This would make a big difference because everybody in Taiwan loves Sun Yat-sen and he is even called "Father of our Country." I told her that unfortunately it was not, but still she insisted it was. To prove that I was right I asked the two Taiwanese guys who were shopping next to us, and they said that of course it's Chiang Kai-shek.
They actually teased her about it a lot, which i'm ashamed to say only added to my delight. It also inspired me to get this key chain. For it might have a tyrant on it, but my mother can now look on it with pride knowing that her son is more knowledgeable about profile images of historical Chinese figures than a Taiwanese person. I mean there's not much difference between a skill like this and let's say, curing cancer. What a lucky mother to have such a talented son!
