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.

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.