Breathing in Taiwan
Even though this is an excerpt from my travel journal of 1991, I have been back to Taiwan since then and it is even more true today.
The Buddha stands; I sit. Perhaps we are both listening. Listening to what? To the clean air as the wind rushes past us.
Wind, where are you rushing to? River, where are you running to? You rush; I rest. Your rushing helps me relax.
I have been too long out of nature. I have been too long out of air. I need nature. I need fresh air — the kind you can’t smell, the kind that is light and colorless and kind.
Why is mankind so unkind to the air? But air will have its revenge on us.
I am spending some much needed time with Smokey the Bear’s Taiwanese cousin, Smo Wang Lee. He lives in Taroko Gorge on the eastern side of the island of Taiwan. I have discovered the twin sister of Santa Barbara (California) in Hualien, a small city neatly tucked away between the ocean and the mountains. I have also found California Route 1’s twin brother. The two sides of the Pacific are identical, no matter how many thousands of miles divide them.
For three days now I have actually been breathing. It’s a wonderful feeling. I have discovered that good air is the absence of what you can see and smell and taste. And oh, it is so light! It floats around you and in you in a way I can appreciate much more since I have a deeper acquaintance with heavy, smelly, thick air that corrodes my innards.
Coming here was an adventure on a rather frightening road through the mountains from Taichung that can barely be called a road at all. Nature and this eight-hour wonder of a path crossing the mountains are in constant conflict with portions of the road regularly dropping into the abyss or being covered by mudslides. It was spectacular, to be sure, made more exciting by coming in above the clouds and looking down only on fog. We were driven by your typical impatient, betel-nut chewing and spewing bus driver who hates being behind schedule no matter what the road conditions. The corkscrew road added nausea and people throwing up all around me to this mixture.
I came here because I thought I would go absolutely crazy if I couldn’t breathe some air that didn’t feel like lead in my lungs. Another teacher told me to go to Hualien during our few days of vacation because that side of the island isn’t heavily populated or polluted.
Once I saw, and felt in my lungs, how wonderful Hualien is, I wondered about finding a teaching job here for next year. However, less population also means fewer schools.
At least I got to breathe good air for a few days and have seen, literally and figuratively, another side of Taiwan.
P.S. When I returned to teach in Taiwan in 2004, I went directly to Hualien where the years had brought in more population and more opportunities for foreign teachers to work. The air was still a stark and welcome contrast to the pollution of the ”other” side of Taiwan.
Tags: Hualien, Taiwan; pollution in Taiwan; Taroko Gorge, Taiwan; teaching in Taiwan, Travel
