Merry Christmas from Taiwan

Merry Christmas! It certainly doesn’t feel like a second Christmas has passed since my arrival in Taiwan, and yet, I know it has.  I was pleasantly surprised last year how much less heartbreaking spending the holidays away from home turned out to be, and, for as much as I look forward to a future Christmas with my family, I wasn’t heartbroken this year either.  I’ve had this conversation with people a lot recently, and I would say it comes down to technology, social networking and Skype have kept me in contact with all of the people who are most important to me.  When my mother was around my age she moved to Mexico for a while, and saved money for weeks to be able to call my father for the first time.  Now, for no money at all, I got to see my parents on Christmas day (and open my presents with them), and I joined my high school friends at a Christmas party via the computer screen (I even dealt myself into their game of Cards Against Humanity and was able to play by holding my cards up to the camera).  It helps to keep the world a much more manageable size.

I didn’t send my entire Christmas week on the internet, that would be a waste of all of the wonderful things there are out here in Taiwan.  Instead, I spent my day in Yuanlin with my “Taiwan family” of co-teachers, where we ate gingerbread cookies and did a Yankee Swap-style gift exchange (which was fun, but I do miss shopping for specific recipients rather than for generic gifts). 

Merry Christmas from the reindeer teachers!

Aside from the Christmas festivities, the other major event of this weekend was the third consecutive weekend of birthday celebrations.  December seems to be the month of birthdays among the Taiwan teachers, and within the last three weeks we have had a barbeque, teppanyaki dinner, a mountain hike, and now the experience of a Gold Class movie theater.  What is Gold Class you might ask? It is the movie theater equivalent of flying first class; you get a recliner, a blanket to curl up with, and a meal served to you in the theater, is there any other way to see a movie?

A view from above, dinner at Spaghetti House.

For all of the things I love about Taiwan, there are still aspects that drive me crazy, and one repeated aspect happens to live below me.  You know I’ve talked about my neighbor countless times because she is known for unplugging my internet whenever she sees fit.  That has been annoying, but I have taken solice in the face that she appear to be afraid of me and returns to her room if she knows I am in the hallway.  The new game today, and it better be some sort of misunderstanding, is that someone has stopped my washing machine mid-cycle.  They did not steal attempt to kick my clothes out of the washer to run their own load, they simply stopped the spin cycle from continuing so my clothes were not being cleaned, but were simply sitting in a pool of water.  It seems to be petty and college-like behavior if you ask me.

Enough about that, I had a very interesting conversation with my manager today, which is the basis for my cultural note of the week: baby names.  A name is a very important part of any person’s identity, and different cultures go about selecting their children’s names based on birth order, family history, name meanings, and an uncountable other selection of reasons.  In Taiwan, parents must consider many more factors that commonality or pronunciation.  There is a superstition that the number of strokes that make up each character of a name as well as the total number of strokes in a child's name can be lucky or unlucky, so a fortune tell is to be consulted when considering what the name shall be.  A fortune teller should also be consulted to help select lucky names according to the bazi, which are the four pillars of destiny based on the year, month, day, and hour of birth.  The fortune teller will provide the parents with a list of names that according to the alignment of the 'blocks of time' will be lucky, and the parents then select the one which they feel best fits their child.  To an extent, it would be nice to have something narrowing down the long list of potential baby names, but it also means that you can't really pre-plan the name.  The other thing that is interesting about certain days or times being lucky is that it causes an increase of C-sections for the more desirable times.  There are just so many things to consider when selecting a Chinese name, and most children (at least in Taiwan) end up with an English name as well which means they might not even use their Chinese name later in life, what a strange realization.