On December 29th - I touched down into Taoyuan airport and made my way to Taipei. Immediately, I noticed the architectural features that are so representative of East Asia - dense, almost suffocating vertical development and massive urban sprawl with neon signs everywhere. One interesting thing to note was that while Mainland China switched to the simplified script, Taiwan still uses traditional Chinese characters, which made navigating without English translations somewhat difficult. Another striking observation was the (relative) lack of nighttime activity in certain districts - it was around midnight when I had unpacked at the hotel, and there were not many restaurants open at that time. The morning after, I took a guided tour of Chiang Kai Shek memorial hall and watched a traditional flag-raising ceremony; I learned about the Wild Lily demonstrations of the 1990s and the significance of large guang chang (广场)s in supporting large-scale political movements. To me, this really spoke to how the more collectivist mindsets of Asians are extremely culturally ingrained - whereas Americans are more individualistic and capitalistic, Asians are much more likely to band together and carry out large-scale movements in response to issues regarding politics, identity and general societal well-being, and this has mentality has been so reinforced throughout history it reflects in the architecture of cities, in the form of guang changs and similar places. Another example of this was during New Year’s celebrations - I was lucky enough to have been in Taipei during this occasion and it was an exhilarating experience to witness fireworks shooting out of the Taipei 101 with a million other folks around me in the Xinyi district.

During my transportation back and forth from the hotel to these landmarks, I talked to taxi drivers about how they felt as citizens of Taiwan, and how separate they felt like their identity was from Mainland China. Arguably, my Mandarin was extremely broken so I’m not sure how accurate of a response I was able to glean from them, but the general consensus was a mixed bag. Some older taxi drivers were actually expats from Mainland China, and they seemed to side firmly on Taiwan being an indispensable part, in some capacity, of Mainland China. Most, though, who were born and raised in Taiwan, were very insistent on their national identity being separate from China and took great pride in it. The next day I took a trip to Jiufen, a mountainside village of sorts in the outskirts of New Taipei City. There, I discovered the Taiwanese people’s preoccupation with pineapple cakes, which were delicious. No profound cultural insights here, just great dramatic views of the ocean and good food.

After day 3, I left the Taipei metro area and headed east towards Hualien, a smaller port city. What was striking here was the Japanese influence - on the architecture of the buildings, and also the food available. As I am not a big foodie and don’t plan my trips around food, I usually just eat whatever, whenever I feel like it, and I think in Hualien I ate at more Japanese restaurants than Taiwanese restaurants, simply because they were more abundant and available. It was a beautiful city - and because it’s slightly more remote than Taipei and has significantly less geopolitical influence, the old Chinese cultural influences (from the original Hakka people that moved to Taiwan to China over 100 years ago) were much more evident - in the architecture, agriculture, and food. After a night in Hualien soaking in the peaceful small-town views, I headed to Taroko National park, where I saw some beautiful mountain scenery and drove through some dramatic gorges and cliffsides. I found it surprising that although China, Korea and Taiwan can be quite different in terms of geography and climate, what all three countries share is the same endless sprawl of foggy, green mountainsides that seem to stretch on forever. At some points in Hualien the scenery felt indistinguishable from some areas in central Korea - although not a strong correlation, this probably points to the diversity in human migration in East Asia back in ancient times that have contributed to our modern-day identity - similar views, scenery, arable land and climate, combined with advanced naval technology for the time probably promoted maritime movement and the influx of different ethnic groups from the peninsula and mainland to the islands, and vice versa.

A drive through the Taiwanese coastline brought me to Taitung. Taitung was quite interesting because it is one of the only, of not the only major city in Taiwan to have a significant minority population of indigenous people. At a restaurant, I talked to a waiter who was of part Atayal ancestry, one of the 5-6 original indigenous groups to inhabit Taiwan stretching back thousands of years. His perspective was mixed; according to him, the gradual Sinicization of Taiwan is not quite as black and white as simply being able to say colonialism is bad. He said that many Atayal still live in the mountains and more rural areas near and around Taitung, as well as the southern coastal areas of Taiwan, and cultural assimilation is a nuanced issue - the discrimination isn’t quite binary (Han Chinese vs. Indigenous minorities), because discrimination also exists between the recent Han chinese expats from mainland provinces like Fujian, and also “Hakka” people who are also ethnically Han, but were much older immigrants to Taiwan and have been occupying the island for more than 200 years. Then lies the relationship between the Hakka and the indigenous; all in all, it seemed there were layers to this issue and it was not as evidently one-sided as I would’ve initially imagined it to be. I am not Taiwanese so I can’t claim an opinion on any of these issues - but one thing is for certain that it is going to take long periods of serious, nuanced discourse in order to make progress towards unraveling political and ethnic tensions between all these groups that coexist in Taiwan.