The World Games are not my Games

Have I been away? From this place yes, but I've been hard at work updating my information about Taiwan.

They changed the name of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall back again. His statue was still in there all the time, and anyway, Democracy Memorial Hall was such a weird name. A memorial is for somebody or something that's dead, so was democracy dead? Silly name gone, old dictator's name back. So what.

I also followed a little bit of the World Games in Kaohsiung, on Taiwanese web sites, because that's actually the only place you could find out anything about the event. I only learned a week before the opening that the previous games were held in Duisburg, Germany. Never heard of them before, the Games that is, not Duisburg. The sports are too exotic, the participants too completely unknown. As to sports, I like my events focused on one type, like Wimbledon with all tennis, or next year's World Cup, all football, or soccer as I used to call it before I lived in Europe.

The major events at the World Games seem to have been the Brazilian girls who went sunbathing topless on the beach - imagine that! - and the American teacher guy who went streaking past a rugby game. Those might have been sports in their own right, as good as tchoukball and fistball and the like.

According to my research, the Deaflympics will be the next sporting extravaganza to hit Taiwan, with a local model appearing naked at the opening with her painted body. Will Kaohsiung send its police to tell her to cover up?

Quite weird reading how the World Games improved Taiwan's image, considering nobody ever watched it. Europe was too busy looking out for those lads cycling around France in their colored shirts. The Deaflympics will not suffer a better fate, I'm afraid.

So what will put Taiwan on the world map? I guess it will be me, but I'll need another meeting with my friend from a couple of posts before to find out how and when. Anyway, it will be something sinister. You can always count on me for that.

Researching Taiwan

So I did what the man asked me to. I refreshed my knowledge of contemporary Taiwan.

Sitting out here on the second floor of my countryside home - or first floor as the locals call it - I have a view of the tops of the trees and a piece of blue sky. The only way I get to hear about Taiwan these days, is over the Internet. The local newspapers never mention the place. There was an exception about a week ago, when they said Taiwan was going to attend some world health conference in Switzerland. Of course, the report was written by some obviously biased correspondent, so she had to whine and moan about how it meant the government was selling out Taiwan to the Chinese etcetera. I know the people who write this.

So anyway, there was Taiwan back in the news again. While I'm listening to the soundtrack of Slumdog Millionaire, I surf the Internet for news about Taiwan. The view not from the international media, but from the ground so to speak. The expats. I'm one of those myself, even though I never thought of myself as one. The word 'expat' to me reeks of swimming pools, maids, chauffeurs, and a house in the hills I don't have to pay anything for. A life of privilege, and I have never lived a life like this myself.

The work I do is well paid, but I don't live in villas with swimming pools unless it's part of the game. Sometimes you just have to if you want to fit in. I attended one of those world health conferences myself once, but that was just to get closer to one of the delegates my employers thought the world would be healthier without.

But back to Taiwan. Economy going down, just like the rest of the world. Scared of swine flu, just like the rest of the world. Corruption and complaints and clashes, just like the rest of the world. But when my employers call me, I know something is different.

I knew what it was about Taiwan when I reached the fifth forum thread about the island's politics. It's always that, isn't it. If it wasn't for politicians, there wouldn't be trouble. If it wasn't for politicians, there would be no need for people like me to intervene. Ringa Ringa, goes the music.

April 3, 2009

The call came at 10 a.m. and I remember it well because I was in the middle of making some fresh marzipan. Had to wipe my hands before looking for the special cell phone reserved for occasions like this.

The guy was talking about the beach and I knew immediately he wasn't joking. Hell, if I wanted jokes, I read the Taipei Times editorial page. He wasn't the type to joke with. Gave me a time and didn't care if it was my wedding day.

I drove off in my Mercedes, and one hour later I was crossing the border. Twenty minutes further, I reached the place. Flat lands, a ditch, a narrow road, a low wire, a bicycle path, and one line of dunes. The beach was on the other side of the dune, but you couldn't tell if you were down by the road. It was just land, agricultural land. Nobody there, just one house in the distance. Some old guy with a cap on was cycling by, another guy in a track suit was jogging closer. It had to be him. He had the hood of his suit pulled tightly over his head. After all it was April, and in Europe that's still almost like winter.

'Do you follow Taiwan?' he told me when he halted right in front of me. Told me, not asked me. The hell I was still following Taiwan. I was busy with nuclear weapons, animal liberation, carbon emissions, Guantanamo, waterboarding. As if any of the local radicals cared about Taiwan.

'Keep an eye on it. We need you up and ready to go within a couple of months. So read about it, it's called the Internet, rehash your Taiwanese.'

'Chinese,' I said. 'Mandarin Chinese.' I never knew any Taiwanese. Wasn't fashionable at the time.

A rough young guy passed by on a bike, on the road for cars. He probably thought we were drug dealers, or gay lovers meeting in a place like this.

'Who?' I asked.

I knew it was the wrong question at the wrong time. He gave me one dumb look and jogged on past me without a word. I looked at him running away. There wasn't a car anywhere, except mine. Time to go home and get ready to uproot my life again. Someone else would take care of the European radical fringe.

Europe 2009

I'm on my way out of Taiwan now, so I can quit moaning about the Taipei Times and about AIT. Let's go back to where this sorry adventure started. Not that I am sorry about it, I should be proud, but I'm not allowed to be because of the constrictions of the environment, and the place I'm in.

Let's go back two years, to March 2009.

Here I am, living in a small European country. Fitting in as well as a wealthy not-quite-young but not-quite-middle-aged American can. Of course, I tried to learn the local language, but there's always an accent left. One of the reasons I got the job was my talent for languages. I could understand the locals as long as they didn't veer too far into dialect.

Anyway, I wasn't there for language studies. Infiltration was my hidden agenda. Publicly, I was a concerned American at the time we got a new president and you didn't have to pretend you were Canadian if you were really American. In Taiwan, when you say you're Canadian, people think of drug-dealing English teachers. In Europe, they think of an improved version of Americans.

So I was a local activist for more cycling paths, fewer cars, even if I drove a Mercedes myself, but the locals didn't find that a contradiction in terms. I was a good citizen, pretending to favor environmental and other soft-left causes. That was in my adopted hometown.

But I could travel to other parts of the country and adopt a rawer image. A health nut, a stark opponent of nuclear energy, nuclear weapons and animal exploitation for corporate greed. Of course, I took care to leave the Mercedes on the other part of town, inside an underground garage. I plotted the activists' illegal entry into nuclear power plants and NATO military bases. And I plotted their arrest as well. That was all part of the job.

My home life was pretty simple. No confusing women things, maybe my neighbors even thought I was gay, I don't know. A bit of gardening, which helped me getting rougher hands, useful with the eco crowd. Lots of Internet stuff, but hey, I was an American geek, right. I never paid much attention to news from Taiwan, or from anywhere else but the US and my adopted European home country. That all changed in April 2009.

AIT

You saw that AIT guy on TV last night, moaning again about how Taiwan should let in American beef?
Like this country isn't in trouble enough, it should worry about eating American beef instead of that awful Australian beef, do you hear me right?
They're so deep in financial, political, economical, military, societal, ethnic trouble, so Mister Wonderful AIT wants them to eat American beef.
They were right to warn me never to let those bums at AIT get anywhere close to my project. They may be Americans, but they're the softhearted, wimpy, useless, big mouth/big face/big no-no type of Americans.
The kind that people all around the world rightly object to and protest against. They're stuffing the big stick right in your face and they still think they're being subtle.
Anyway, AIT is almost behind me now. They chose this dreary, rainy day to tell me it's my last one. In Taiwan, that is. The weather will not help my mood, but it will certainly help me cover my tracks. Took my last pictures of the Taiwanese sunlight yesterday afternoon. Nice weather, but I thought I could venture out one last time by the river without raising any undue alarms. Everyone's at home sitting by the TV watching how this sorry episode of Taiwanese history is going to play out.
If AIT is at all involved, then it will be pointing in all the wrong directions. Not because I kept them gloriously uninformed of what I was up to in the first place, but because they're so full of beef.
Rough seas, rain, wind, cold. I better dress warmly, without letting on that I'm off on a nautical voyage. People like me leave Taiwan on airplanes, to Hong Kong, or even to China these days, ironically enough. Open doors. I'm gonna walk right through them, but in a different direction than they're expecting. Of course they'll be looking for people escaping. But they're not expecting someone who looks like me. And I'm not headed for China or the Philippines anyway. I just want to get deeper into the Pacific. The time is set, the place is in the hands of the people I meet in the dark.
I'm out of here. Forever. I'll forget about AIT. The American Institute in Taiwan. Right. They won't forget about me because there is nothing to forget. I never even met any of them, just got warned about them before I even reached Taiwan.
But that was on another continent again. Maybe that's where I need to begin my story.

Spitting It Out

I know what you're thinking. I'm supposed to be a photographer and all I come up with is this kind of amateurish blatant postcard stuff.

Remember, it was only a cover. All I had to do was to shoot pictures of dull men in suits sitting behind tables and starlets doing really awful songs. And you know what that is on the picture, right? Taipei 101, the tallest building in the world. Once. The Burj Dubai in the United Arab Emirates has overtaken it now. So maybe my next job will be there.

Anyway. I was picked for this one because my Chinese was great, they said. Five years in Okinawa translating boring commie speeches into English for the military. Intelligence work. Still, it's the Taiwan bit I want to tell you about now.

Especially that nasty cover work as a photographer. A full year of really dull work, then I got sacked for missing what could've been the most important picture of my career. The picture that would've graced the cover of Time, Newsweek, and other publications around the world. The only thing they didn't know: I didn't want to take that picture. It was my work to make the content of that picture happen. And I did, and that's all I cared about. No matter what that egotistical tyrant raged about after the fact. I knew what was going to happen, so that time I was prepared. I knew how he had pestered one of my colleagues away to replace him with his girlfriend. The international media, free and unbiased, give me a break. Luckily, their bias helped me get the information I needed to help carry out my mission.

As I'm waiting for the extraction - still a couple of days away, but I can't let on too much - I know I did a terrible thing, yet it was for the good of millions of people, even of that tyrannical madman and his girlfriend. They don't know it and they'll probably keep raging about that photographer who missed the biggest news in the history of Taiwan. Let them rage. I'm happy now I spat it all out.

I'm In The News!

I did it! I'm in all the newspapers, news agency reports, TV news shows, and so on.
Of course, it's not my name, and certainly not my face, only what I did. But that's fair enough for me. That sort of vindicates all the trouble I've been going through.
I've been reading the papers - or at least their online versions, because this time I want to go out as little as possible, just want to get my face on convenience store cameras or noticed by people - and I must say, as usual, they have it completely wrong.
The international media like CNN of course sent reporters from elsewhere who don't know the first thing about Taiwan, hell, some of them even can't speak Chinese, or read the local press.
And then there are the local papers and news agencies who have correspondents here, you know the Taipei Times and AP and the like where as usual, everything is slanted according to ideological preference, or the ideological preference of the reporter's local girlfriend.
Anyway, I'm just glad my news got so much feedback despite all the other nonsense going on elsewhere in the world, and the media as usual got it completely wrong, which means I'm safe for the time being. By the time they get the real story, if they ever do, I'll be long gone.