It didn’t take long for any of us to realize we weren’t going to learn a whole hell of a lot in our respective high schools. We spoke the equivalent of chinese baby-talk, and with all of the cooing and attention we were receiving from our classmates, they weren’t learning much either. One by one, we removed ourselves from the classroom whenever possible, always aware of where the ‘jiowguan’ or ‘guards’ were, so as not to be reported to the Rotary. I found myself especially frustrated around the 2000 elections, because I expected to be able to open the Taipei Times and find out who the conclusive winner was. Everyone remembers what a giant clusterfuck THAT election was, and it was extremely difficult to find any current information. While the US president may just be a figurehead and a puppet for stronger, hidden political forces, I wanted to know who our figurehead was going to be. It was then that I discovered the tushuguan (library). The library had the regular library things–books, magazines, and current newspapers, but more importantly than that, it had a computer lab with internet access. Ploddingly slow internet access, but internet access nonetheless. From here I was able to find out current news, and contact my boyfriend, whom I’d sorely missed over the past few months. Letters were not an effective form of communication, ESPECIALLY letters with packages. I had more packages seized by customs that year than I actually received. It always infuriated me to think that some postal employee somewhere was rocking out to MY cds. The tushuguan became the place to be–as Jessica stated in our yearbook, “What do I like about Taiwanese high school?? I love the tushuguan!! I love the tushuguan so much. She is my best friend in the world.” It’s hard to read in this picture, but underneath the Chinese, they have written in English, ‘Your good taste has been torn into pieces, too!’ Those administrators, always suspecting the exchange students when it came to tomfoolery. And perhaps they were right to do so. Muli spent her time in the tushuguan pondering ways to torture Hello Kitty. Those of us at 中正高中 were a little more…constructive. Yes. I’m not even sure how it came about, but one day we decided the time had come to start building forts. It’s possible that with all of the babytalk, we had regressed to our 5-year-old selves. It was not a fantastic fort, and we really weren’t sure how we could construct a better one with our limited materials. That was when Raul told us about the abandoned second floor of the tushuguan. Let those words sink in a little bit. Abandoned second floor of the tushuguan. … Lo, we were like unto the gods from that day forth. We immediately set upon building another fort. A bigger, better fort. Oh Raul and Beth, why must you always hurt me so? Lucas got wind of our fort activities and came up to check things out. He was always very high-energy to the point of ADD, and VERY VERY forthcoming, which made him endlessly entertaining and also a tad creepy. I think this photo is an excellent representation of both. We completely took over the second floor of the tushuguan after that day. We’d have ‘girl parties’ upstairs which basically amounted to dancing to Madonna on top of the tables and bitching about things that were going on. We ALL bitched A LOT. But we were also each other’s built-in support system. We listened to each other bitch, and sympathized, because we understood what they were going through. We listened to everyone bitch because we wanted to make sure that someone would listen when WE had to bitch. But our time in the tushuguan was definitely more ‘dance party’ than ‘dear abby’. Eventually, we assembled the materials to make a truly spectacular fort. The three of us came up with a series of songs and dances with which to establish dominance over our new territory. There was a lot of semi-melodic shouting of “TAI-WAN FO-OORT” and some walking like egyptians and some mashing of potatoes. BEST. FORT. EVER. After we built our ‘secret’ lair, we further determined we needed superhero identities. Taiwanese superhero identities. The Taiwanese are very…out there with their bodily functions. No hiding or muffling or holding it in, whatsoever. You’ve got to fart? Let ‘er rip. There was what appeared to be bloody spit all over the sidewalks from the betelnuts (more on this in a future post). The thing that skeeved me out the most (besides the practice of putting used toilet paper in a garbage can next to the toilet instead of flushing it) was the way my host families, my second one ESPECIALLY, would ‘clear their sinuses’ in the shower. The apartments had fairly thin walls. Imagine the sound of someone hawking a loogie. Now imagine it continuously for upwards of ten minutes. NOW imagine being next in line for a shower and what you’re probably stepping on. Yeah, eww. So, henceforth, we were Super Burper (Beth), Super Farter (Emilie), and Super Loogie (me), fighting against the forces of good taste everywhere! Beth and I got into a dramatic argument about the best tactics with which to take out Miss Manners, our arch-nemesis, with our superpowers. Super Farter and I test out our newfound superpowers out the window at the jiowguan. Being a superhero is hard work, so I took a power nap, while Super Farter practiced her patented Death Stare in order to protect our valuable resources of Wheat Thins. Eventually we tired of our tushuguan activities, and were ready to take our superpowers out into the real world. This, my friends, is when Raul taught us to jump the wall and escape. Raul was basically the Jedi Master of school avoidance, but he would only teach us lessons when we were ready to learn them. It was very important to make sure a guard wasn’t watching, as the guard’s station was very near the lower, jumpable, section of wall, but eventually we turned it into an art form. Later, we discovered a hole in the wall surrounding the school back by the track, possibly for drainage, but large enough to fit through, and found ourselves in a rice paddy, which made for a soggier but somewhat easier escape. I had a very Office-Space revelation. “I don’t like school. I don’t think I’m going to go anymore.” I felt I could see and do more things, and absorb more culture, if I wasn’t stuck inside for 8 hours every day. Around January, I stopped attending school altogether.

It wasn’t long before language cram school ended and we were all off to high school. Jessica, Emilie, Hannah and I were off to 中正高中, a mixed gender school. Beth, Clelia, Claire, Sylvie and Muriel (correct me if I’m wrong, Beth!) went to 高女山中, an all-girl school. Lucas also went to my school, and there I met Raul and Jorge, two brothers from Paraguay whose parents were diplomats. Their other brother, Eduardo, went to a different school. Along with Lucas, these three brothers pushed us to new levels of exchange student monkeyshines because they had the most important thing of all: diplomatic immunity. They did whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted because it didn’t matter. It wasn’t long before all of us started acting as if we had diplomatic immunity as well. School uniforms were the traditional japanese-hyper-fetished pleated skirt with a button-up shirt on top for regular days, and windpants and polo shirt on gym class days. Additionally, each school had their own bag with the school name printed on it. Wearing skirts to school became particularly awesome on monsoon days, when sheets of rain would hit your legs and tremendous gusts of wind would attempt to blow your skirt up. Add this to the gusts of wind coming from the MRT (subway system) and many of us oftentimes felt like Marilyn Monroe, battling against showing our dingy underwear to the world. Taiwan is tropical, but during the winter with all of the humidity in the air, it doesn’t matter what the thermometer says–it’s FREEZING. Those days the wind just bites into you, and skirts are woeful protection against it. Some schools compensated for this by having school sweaters. My school did not. An umbrella was an IMPORTANT THING to remember every day. In Seattle, we pick out tourists by who’s carrying an umbrella. In Taiwan, they pick out idiots by who’s NOT carrying one. I had at least 10 different umbrellas over the course of the year–you’d lose them, or someone would take yours when you leave it outside of a shop, or it’d simply be destroyed by the wind. They sell umbrellas in such massive quantities there that they run about $3 US. Or, if you happened to be out of money and caught in a freak storm, you’d share umbrella karma by taking someone ELSE’S umbrella from outside a store after yours has been taken. That’s just the way things went. Umbrellas were like community property. I lived fairly far away from my school; over an hour each way, counting walking and buses and transfers. I was more fortunate than students like Maria, however, who had to travel by train out of the mountains to get to a subway station and then go to school–she traveled nearly two hours each way. They don’t do school districts in Taiwan; each student is tested extensively and placed in a school according to their learning ability/aptitude. So where you lived had nothing to do with where you would be going to school. The students who went to the best high schools were the ones most likely to be admitted to university. All exchange students were placed in the highest-ranked schools in order to discourage us from associating with riffraff. My first host family lived nearest to Dingxi, my second was at Yongan Market, my third at Xinpu, and my school was at Mingde. Students in Taiwan work very very hard at their studies; many of them spend six to eight more hours in a cram school after their regular school day is over. This made it very difficult to get to know any of the students; they simply didn’t have time to waste with us. The after-school job is virtually unheard of in Taiwan; extra time is to be spent studying. I don’t know how else to explain this without being deeply offensive, but it keeps them immature longer because they don’t have any life experience outside of school–being with 17 year olds at 中正高中 was like being with 12 or 13 year olds in the states. That also made it really hard to relate to them. Much in the same way that people from the US make generalizations about other countries–“Taiwan is all sweatshops and child labor,” “France is full of stinky, rude, and cowardly people,” the Taiwanese make assumptions about us based on what they see in movies. Therefore, people wanted to know where I kept my gun. Joyce and ‘Sweetie’ brought Beth and I chocolate because they ‘heard we were American’. People assumed that in America, we see gang fights on a regular basis, and when shit blows up, that’s just normal. Hell, I might see three different cars blow up on my way to school and not think twice about it. My first day at school, my classmates surrounded me and started PETTING MY HAIR. All I heard were coos of ‘blond! blond!’ coming from all around me. I felt like a scared baby llama at a petting zoo being poked and prodded by preschoolers. Emilie got the same treatment in her classroom, except they tried to poke her eyes as well. We were both majorly freaked out by this development. Jessica got off fairly easily, being dark-skinned, with dark hair and eyes, and I’m not sure how Hannah fared because she stopped hanging out with us immediately after school started. We were already used to being novelties, but this was a step above and beyond what we’d experienced in the past (people talking about us on the MRT, people pointing us out when we walked by (my Chinese got better as the year went on, but for all I know at the beginning they could’ve been saying “LOOK OUT SHE’S GOT A GUN!”)). After lunch, the notes started landing on my desk. Of course you let them take their picture with you, or you fill out their hello kitty contacts book with your vital info (height, weight, blood type, phone number, favorite color, etc) to be nice, but it really has the tendency to make one feel less like a celebrity and more like a monkey who can read and write that’s escaped from the zoo and making the rounds in a uniform. More about schools later, I think covering the first day was enough for today. A starter for tomorrow’s topic, which I believe will be about food (I’m not always sure what I’m going to write about until I’ve started writing it): Muriel, Beth, and Sylvie pose outside their school with suckers….butter flavored ones. Mmmmmmmmm butter.