I've got tons of things that I should be doing right now (as usual), but on the way home from shopping, I caught some of this interview with NPR China correspondent John Ruwitch in which he reflected on his experiences in China since 1992, when he first visited Kunming (this is around 10:29 in the interview). That was about the time I started living in Taiwan, so I started thinking about what I might say about my own memories of those days. I'm at a point in life where I'm constantly worrying about forgetting things, so perhaps I should write down a few impressions before they're washed away.
Ruwitch was talking about the economic growth in China between the first time he was there and 2001, when he returned to report from there, so I'll mention a few impressions about what I saw (or what I think I saw) in Taiwan. (I realize that other people might have seen different things or disagree with me about what I saw, etc., etc. Feel free to add comments to this post or write about your memories on your own blog and send me a link.)
One thing that I often think of and mention about economic change in Taiwan was how it was reflected in the students I was teaching at different times. I remember that when I surveyed night school students in my class in the Foreign Languages & Literature Department in 1993, quite a few of them wrote that their parents were farmers or factory workers.
Skip ahead to when I was teaching in the 2000s, and I recall more students whose parents were college-educated and/or were in more white-collar jobs. Some of their parents even owned factories, particularly in China. One student told us that her father had retired at the age of 44 after running a business in China. He was one of the 台商 (Taishang, or Taiwanese people running businesses in China). According to the Chinese-language Wikipedia article on Taishang, this was during the third investment peak of Taishang in China.
One of the social phenomena regarding Taishang was how it complicated marriages. You'd sometimes hear about relatives or relatives' relatives or friends' friends who had gone to China to invest in a business and were living there for years. Somehow, the husbands who went, usually by themselves, would get involved with a local Chinese woman. Sometimes they would even get married. So there they'd have a wife, and in Taiwan, they'd still have a wife (and usually a family). These kinds of situations would also become material for the media to talk about, on the news, talk shows, and TV dramas. Some students in my Freshman English for Non-Majors (FENM) course even used it as material for an English-language play they wrote and performed. When one of the actors said to another, "He has a woman outside" (a direct translation of "他在外面有個女人"), I couldn't resist looking out the window, which got everyone laughing, including the actors. (I guess I had a bit of a mean streak.)
I don't know what has happened recently with the Taishang phenomenon; I've heard that a lot of them have moved to other countries in southeast Asia due to the political issues between China and Taiwan, and also due to the fact that salaries have gone up for Chinese factory workers, I believe. Maybe I should read this book by Shelley Rigger (reviewed in the Taipei Times).
Anyway, I wanted to write down something of what I remembered from my days in Taiwan. Maybe I'll write a few more of these if I get the urge.
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