Takeoff

You try to sleep, you watch movies, you read, you talk to the person next to you about everything you can think of, you get up and try to stretch your legs, you eat airplane meals, you snack, you gulp down tiny cupfuls of liquid to try to stave off rapid dehydration, you pee, you shit…and then you still have 7 hours left! Truly, I did all those things, but also spent about 2 hours studying Chinese, and I talked with my seat neighbor ‘til I was hoarse, and still, hours remained.

But the plane did eventually touch down in what turned out to truly be Taiwan. All the white folks, Thai, and Vietnamese went one way; all the Taiwanese—and me—went the other. After about 15 minutes in one of about 20 lines of visitors and residents, I was through and on my way to see S.

S. was there waiting for me, looking all lovely in a skirt outfit with purple in it—my favorite color. I was in a totally different country—okay, well, at least in a country far away—but instantly felt at home with S. at my side. As we got into her car and pulled out of the airport onto the highway, there was no jarring disconnect. The busy highway full of fairly new mostly Japanese-made cars, the big transport trucks (albeit with flashing colored lights on them), the signs of high-tech companies glowing on the shadowy hillsides nearby, unintelligible music playing on the FM—we could have been driving on the 128 through Waltham or the 101 through San Jose.

A couple hours later though, it was into the fray, bustling, work-a-day Taichung, with signs a-flashin’, scooters a-buzzin’, and bin lan shi si in hot outfits a-sellin’ betel nuts by the roadside. That’s when I realized I was really somewhere new.

A few things account for the totally different visual impact you experience in the cities of Taiwan. First of all, almost all business signs are at least vertical and quite often both vertical and horizontal. The vertical signage comes about due to the fact that the Chinese characters used have, until quite recently, always been read in columns from top to bottom instead of left-to-right rows. Add to that the fact that for main-drag businesses the signs use characters that are about a foot and a half square each, and you get a pretty striking effect. As mentioned, often these vertical signs are accompanied by a horizontal sign providing the English or Romanized Chinese name of the business. So in the end, with the giant Chinese character vertical sign and the respectable-sized anglicized horizontal sign, you get a riot of signage you won’t see anywhere in the west.

But that’s not all. You need to add to that the rampant use of multicolored masses of police-style rotating lights on at least one business on every block. And, only slightly less frequently, the ubiquitous spray of green neon rods in the shape of what looks like the rays of the sun on the horizon. These two features are often associated with the bin lan shi si but seem to have caught on with many other small businesses as well—anyone who wants to attract even more attention than they’d get from the normal excessive signage.

So you may be wondering about the bin lan shi si. Well, if you didn’t know about them, and you found yourself riding around Taiwan through towns away from Taipei (where they’re now forbidden), you would find yourself wondering “Who are all those scantily clad young women sitting in giant fish tanks by the side of the road?” Well, those are the bin lan shi si. You can recognize a bin lan shi si by the following identifying marks:

• Flashing multicolored police-style lights
• Spray of green neon tubes
• Small building at roadside with glass walls
• Well-lit to aid seeing who’s inside
• Sexy young woman (the level of sexiness declines precipitously as you get more rural)
• Scantily clad, with preference for miniskirt, go-go boots, and small top
• Countertop mounted at level to provide maximum amount of leg viewing from road

Finally, the last major difference is the profusion of scooters. Taiwan is densely populated enough in spots to have plenty of car traffic, but you can add to that 5 to 10 times the amount of scooter traffic, with actual motorcycles falling a distant third. Taiwan is a relatively prosperous country as countries go, but it’s fairly working class, gas is expensive, salaries are not high, the population is young, settlements are dense, and streets are narrow. That is, the balance is decidedly tipped towards using motor scooters—which run around $1,000 new for a basic one--to get around. So there’s pretty much a scooter—okay, several dozen—everywhere you look, and as a result driving becomes a whole different experience. This meant that for me, being in a car meant constantly thinking we would kill someone everywhere we turned. But no matter how aggressively we moved, the bikes would always swerve out of the way…or even, sometimes, wait for us to pass.

So picture us cruising through this onslaught of major signage, flashing lights, human fishbowls, and scooters on our way to S.’s house. When we arrived, it was probably 11:30 p.m., and I hadn’t slept at all on the plane, so after a quick tour around the spotless premises, it was lights out.