Why teach in Taiwan?

A few weeks before our class set off for Taiwan, I was asked: “Why teach in Taiwan?” I come back to this question after three weeks of living here and return once again to the puzzle put forward by Elizabeth Bishop in her poem Questions of Travel: How might travel with a stranger’s eye open us up to new perspectives on both the new as well as home?

I bring a stranger’s eye to this place and puzzle about a plethora of differences—from the organization of the street lined with vendors offering up noodles, oyster omelets, shoes, bedding, and betel, nut to the nerve-wracking, daily roar of F16s passing overhead, to the broad, rough and barren river beds with rocks as big as erratics seemingly tossed here and there in the last typhoon, to the mist-encircled sacred mountain of Dulan, where the sounds are as quiet as flitting butterflies, to the noisier foraging of macaques.

For me, teaching here is not the search of these new experiences in themselves but the invitation and opportunity to reflect on the remarkable sets of ways that people have made meaning in their place on this single earth, how people have weathered change with conflict, innovation, or perhaps migration, how the possession of mediums in the Taoist temple persists with such hair-raising power, and, of course, how I and the Taiwanese see my home named Mei Guo, the beautiful country.

Coming here to teach provides opportunities to learn deeply about another’s life and, in turn, our own.

Coming here to teach is to re-consider whether there are incommensurate knowledge systems and, if so, how can the surprising answers to the question of how to live life in relation to land, ocean, and people be understood, or applied, within a different culture.

Coming here is to re-learn not only the inevitability of death but also the particularities of a lived life.

I have spent the last year reading about Taiwan as a way to make a learning-bridge between two cultures. Diversity characterizes my text choices: Politics, botany, ethnobotany, indigenous cultures, trade, colonialism, martial law, foods of night markets, history, the great famine of China, the Green Revolution, and more. Slowly a platform emerged for asking questions about foodways, meaning-making through food and place, and the ever-changing lifeways on this island over the past 400 years.

Reading is not enough. As I stood by rice paddies in Taidong, I was overwhelmed by the understanding of the colossal communal energy required to grow rice intensively and clarity in how the steep mountains and typhoons provide the remarkable fertility and longevity of these systems. I now am left wondering how these communal feats of water-engineering for rice production and systems of water-sharing might lead to different social norms of helpfulness all the way to "minding each other’s business.” From afar, I reconsider California and the levees of the central valley upon which I have driven and bicycled my entire lifetime. I more palpably see the skill and backbreaking labor of Chinese immigrants who built the first intricate network of embankments. I am in awe of the levees first imagined in the 1850s and that today protect the vast tracts of rice, wheat, orchards, pasture, and row crops in one of the most fertile places on earth. I see the small town of Locke nestled in a curve of the delta—the town built by and for Chinese - anew.

As I consider a few of my experiences here during my brief stay on this beautiful island, the question of “Why teach in Taiwan?” can be split in two. Why travel? And why teach while travelling?

In bringing the poem Questions of Travel to a close, Elizabeth Bishop asks

'Is it lack of imagination that makes us come

to imagined places, not just stay at home?

I think our imagination is boundless, but we can never know a place without our feet on the ground, our face in water, our fingers feeling the strange, black, silty soil, our spirits shaken in confusion and conversation. We weave together the imagined and the real. We correct our path, and the world is as rich as the tales told by Calvino. This travel speaks to each of us differently; for some, it can feel like a coming home and to others a sense of loss or displacement. Teaching while traveling asks even more of me: Teaching while traveling commands discipline and accountability to both home and away. In the best of circumstances, we deepen our understanding of human ecologies, and with these new perspectives, we have the chance to step into our fractured and shared futures, refreshed and willing.

Suzanne Morse

Hualien, Taiwan