Hello and welcome to my blog!
I have never written a blog before and I’m not quite sure how this works, so to start off here’s a short list of things that happened in the last 30 minutes at the airport:
- I’m flying on EVA Air’s iconic Hello Kitty-themed plane so I got a sick Hello Kitty boarding pass
- A TSA agent laughed at me and turned me away at security (not nice!) because the lady at the check-in counter gave me someone else’s boarding pass
- After stepping out of the security scanner, another TSA agent stopped me, looked me dead in the eye, and said “congratulations, sir, you are not pregnant.” (I thanked him)
- While I was collecting my belongings at security, a confused old man took my boarding pass and passport from my security bin and ran off with them. When I looked up I realized my stuff was missing and got very scared for a minute. He eventually realized his mistake, found me, and then returned it. He was smiling like he was some kind of hero.
To be perfectly honest, I’m pretty nervous about this trip (maybe my security experiences were bad omens). I've visited Taiwan before, a few times when I was super little (I don’t really remember any of it) and once earlier this year. However, I always went with my parents, who were both very fluent in Chinese and very familiar with Taiwan. I, on the other hand, have the Chinese abilities of a two-year-old (maybe even less) and have no clue how this country works.
My itinerary for the summer looks something like this: fly to Taiwan, arrive Friday morning. ICLP, the Chinese language program I’ll be attending, runs from the next Monday until mid-August. I found an apartment that I’ll stay at, and maybe I’ll go visit my friend in Singapore at the end of the summer. That’s actually pretty much all the details I know, I have no idea how or where I’ll get my meals or even what I’ll be doing at the program (all I’ve been told is to arrive by Monday). Many a surprise awaits, I suppose!
I should also probably elaborate a little on why, exactly, I’m doing this. In short, one of the main reasons I decided to spend the summer in Taiwan was because my mother is a Taiwanese immigrant, yet I have close to zero familiarity with this place. All of her family still live in Taiwan, and when we went earlier this year, I hardly recognized any of them (I couldn't even tell you most of their names/titles).
After visiting, I realized how much I was disconnected from her home/family/culture, so I decided it was important to me to try to find a way to spend more time there, learn Chinese, and figure some things out. Will I be able to reconnect with family? Will I reach some sort of new understanding and become closer with my mom? Will I figure out what it means to be Taiwanese-American-mixed-race-whatever? Does any of this even matter?
I truly have no idea what to expect. Maybe I’ll go through some kind of cultural awakening and come back speaking perfect Chinese and have a renewed sense of what it means to be of Taiwanese heritage. Or maybe I’ll learn nothing and just have spent the summer consuming incredibly delicious (and dangerously cheap) boba (which, honestly, still sounds like an excellent time). Who knows!
A huge thank you to the Light Fellowship for making this summer possible, I’m incredibly humbled and grateful for their support on this journey! Also, to my friends reading this blog, I’d 100% appreciate any and all feedback. Let me know if you think the posts are boring, or if the design sucks, or if the website is broken in some way (I just started dabbling in web development stuff a few weeks ago and I’m still super bad so things might very well be messed up or weird).
I'm also open to suggestions for a cool sign-off.
bye
-Matt