Barrybeebensen
Have you seen The Bee Movie?
If you haven’t you can stop reading right here and go give it a watch.
If you’re a real fan, you might remember the opening lines:
“According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly.
…
The bee, of course, flies anyway.”
To my purely Western perception of the laws of aviation, this is how I feel about a lot of parts of Taiwan. In a lot of ways, Taiwan is a little miracle island. Full of things that shouldn’t quite work, but somehow do.
It first appeared to me walking down a Main Street one evening, gazing at rows and rows of bikes, feeling like something was missing. Something was.
Locks.
One of my housemates told me later that this was just how it worked in Taiwan. It was like there was this big collective agreement not to steal bikes, and as long as the standard was to not lock them, the agreement seemed to stay. He contrasted this to London, where he said people will smash your tires in with their foot just for kicks. Here though, it’s not uncommon for people to leave their keys in their scooters and their scooters running in the street while they stop into shops.
This brings me to the streets. They’re narrow and labrynthing, full of one ways. There are sometimes lightly painted pedestrian walks (人行道), but never sidewalks. As a pedestrian on these streets, you coexist equally with scooters, bikes, and cars. To my Ohio-Montreal mindset, it feels a bit dangerous at first. But there is a mutual respect between vehicles and pedestrians, and it all manages to ebb and flow in a really lively way that somehow works. One would expect far more accidents than there are, and if you tried to get American drivers to operate this way, it would surely be catastrophic. But here, it works.
Then there is the problem of trash. Throwing away anything is massively inconvenient. Most people have to chase the trash truck twice a week to get rid of their waste, and finding a bin on the street is such a quest that some foreigners already developed an app to locate the nearest trash can in Taipei. And yet somehow, there is absolutely no litter. In the US, you could line the streets with trash cans and pay people to recycle (we do), and we would still litter. It amazes me that given how difficult it is to dispose of trash, it isn’t all over the streets.
I’m not sure why any of this is the way that it is, or why any of these idiosyncrasies work. But it isn’t because Taiwan is some sort of police state where people act a certain way out of fear of government punishment—it’s not. There are more obvious cameras on the streets here, but it’s not a surveillance state, either. Despite existing in the shadow of China, in the sights of China, Taiwan is a free democracy. And this is maybe its biggest miracle: its whole existence is a little unexpected.
Taiwan, of course, flies anyway.