Boss of the Block
Friends,
The view in the photo above is from the balcony outside my department at National Taiwan University. Usually it’s full of students fairly quietly playing volleyball (along with one person who is overzealous with a whistle), but on this day a photoshoot was happening. I love it. Did they meet on the volleyball team? Was it love at first spike?
We’re nearing the end of the semester, and the end of the academic year, when everyone on campus is a little bit slaphappy. Overwhelmed and dazed but aware that relief is just around the corner.
Taiwan’s political situation continues down two curvy roads: the first is the ongoing recall elections saga, about which every article has an element of bafflement and uncertainty. Read Frozen Garlic for more, though it’s two weeks old at this point so I’m sure there are new updates. The second is a crack down on interactions with China, which involves more scrutiny of political actors’ travel to China, tighter enforcement of laws against holding Chinese IDs and Taiwanese citizenship, and a morally complex deportation of Chinese influencers (read A Broad and Ample Road for perspective). The article I read about travel caught my eye because it specifically mentions a political position I’ve been curious about: “This will affect public servants at all levels, whether they are elected officials or not. Legislators, public servants, members of the military, borough chiefs, and others will all be required to notify the government of planned travel to China, as well as comply with regulations when there.”
Borough chiefs, aka neighborhood chiefs, aka 里長 are elected officials who are part of the executive function of the government. They’re unpaid (minus some subsidies), and are basically in charge of implementing and encouraging buy-in with government policy. They also check on household registrations, celebrate the community’s elderly, organize events, communicate electorate concerns to their party, etc. And they’re frequently part of controversy: bribes for votes, connections to China, and more. Despite these downsides, it seems like a good idea to have someone like this in theory, though in practice I’m guessing it would end up more like a government-sanctioned HoA. In the US, there’s city councilors that represent individual districts of a city for the lawmaking body, but no executive equivalent (outside of, as far as I can find, borough presidents in NYC which represent a ton of people each). Taipei also has city councilors, but their districts are larger. For example, Xinyi District, where we live, has roughly 200,000 residents (which is roughly in the middle for Taipei’s 12 districts). For those 200,000 residents, there are 41 neighborhood chiefs. I don’t recognize 卓秀娟, our neighborhood chief, but I walk past her office nearly every day and her district is where an overwhelming portion of my life takes place! I should stop by and introduce myself sometime. You can even find her budget online, and the majority of her expenditures are longevity noodles, probably to celebrate the oldest people’s birthdays in our neighborhood. I know I’m romanticizing it, but I love the idea of a very service-oriented position like this. Also, the position’s connection to the neighborhood elicits a response from the other party. My neighborhood chief is from the KMT party, but right across the street from our apartment, the DPP party has what’s called a 服務處, basically a “service center” where every Thursday evening a party official comes to listen to complaints and answer questions from people in the neighborhood (or mostly chat and drink tea with a regular cast of characters, it seems).
The first time I ever heard of a neighborhood chief was when I was trying to find out what to do about a very noisy neighbor when we first moved in. If you look in foreigner discussion boards online about this situation, they recommend getting in touch with your neighborhood chief if you can’t work it out with the neighbor or get the landlord to help. I asked my Mandarin teacher about this, and she said that might have been a common thing decades ago, but now it’s only the kind of situation that happens in a movie - usually with comedic results.
TaiwanPlus has a lovely English-language explainer. Neighborhood chiefs Wikipedia page has no English version, if someone wants to take that up. There’s a good story of one particular neighborhood chief’s experience from a 1992 issue of Taiwan Panorama - the photos are great too! Most of the chiefs are retirees. This AARPesque website article describes a retired art professor who ran for the office and talks a lot about the benefits of the job keeping her active and involved.
Speaking of retirement, my cousin visited recently and we discussed how elderly care works here in Taiwan. Because intergenerational living is more common here, the elderly tend to stay at home, with either a female family member or a hired caretaker assisting them. There is a whole system of hiring caregivers from southeast Asia, complete with tons of bureaucracy and unsurprising smatterings of unjust conditions. Unlike people like me who arrive to teach in Taiwan, the nearly quarter-million caregivers in Taiwan don’t have an avenue to residency, nor do they have full access to the national health insurance program. You can read about the struggle to improve their situation here. As a result, nursing home-style living is less popular here, but it’s growing in popularity due to changing mindsets.
A friend of mine recently recommended the Taiwan public television show 誰來晚餐 which means “Who is coming for dinner?” but they market just as GuessWho. It has a great premise - introduce a family with some unique quality, then have a famous person come eat dinner with them. We started with the newest season on YouTube, Season 15, and the very first episode was about two sisters who voluntary chose to move into a retirement home instead of living with their children. It was great - really serious discussions about loss of mobility and end of life, realistic, difficult, and more. However, it then zoomed in on one of their spouses, a man with dementia who was approaching death, and showed footage of him that he absolutely could not have consented to. It felt really wrong to me. But we pressed on and tried a second episode, where we learned about a couple in Hualien who very bluntly tells the audience about how they are so busy that they have to schedule sex on the calendar (with code words so the children don’t know) and the husband blaming his difficulties with the children on himself being beaten as a child. It’s a lot! I don’t know if we’ll keep watching. But if you want to check it out, it has English subtitles and is here. Tell me if you find a good episode.
Further reading:
NPR’s guide for replacing doomscrolling with movement is super useful and actually seems to be working some.
Alice Su at The Economist has a really thorough look at the surviving records of Taiwan’s dictatorship’s surveillance. It highlights how far transitional justice still has to go in this country, but also shows the hard-won victories since. H/t to Kerim’s Triptych for the link.
I had no idea about the connection between Steve McQueen and Taiwan until I read Min Chao’s fascinating look at the film The Sand Pebbles.
Very much admire Catherine Chou’s dedication to making bilingual European university classes work here in Taiwan - she goes through a lot more than I do to make sure her students succeed, but also faces many familiar challenges. We both have problems with students being intimidated (often wrongly so - their language skills are better than they think) by English content. She addresses this by working with a translator; I do it with silly little jokes in Mandarin to try to balance my less emotive face.
Something I’ve always found interesting is how Korean and Japanese cultural exports (along with the NBA and F1 racing) hold near-complete sway over my students’ attention. Yet China, who in theory should easily have in-roads due to language, is virtually absent (though gacha games may change this fast!). Tang Meng Kit in New Bloom lays out some of what happened to China’s soft power.
Bluesky is the only social media I still participate in, and a few months ago I was really optimistic about it, but I just no longer have any hope for large-scale social media engagement. Small-scale is the only path towards decent interaction online. That said, Bluesky seems better than all the other options still, as Kyle Chayka’s New Yorker profile of the CEO shows.
For the flipside, Charlie Warzel on Careless People in The Atlantic.
Big kudos to Lydia Kiesling, who writes about cancelling a speaking event at Sweet Briar College due to its anti-trans stance. The kids are all right, as they say, and I hope she finds a way to meet with or help out those students who supported her.
HORMBLES. CHORMBLES. “Maybe Tony Chocolonelyed so Hormble could Chormble.” I don’t know.
This afternoon I gave a talk at my university about using LLMs for writing, a topic I’m largely sick of but everyone else wants to talk about so I press on. This is one of several “talks” I’ve given in Taiwan, and each one follows the same pattern: I agree to it initially because it sounds like it won’t be much work due to being similar to lectures I’ve given in the past, then when it gets close to time I feel the need to adjust and expand probably unnecessarily, then right before I feel overwhelming dread and anxiety and regret agreeing to do anything, and then as soon as it’s over it seems like it wasn’t a big deal and I’m satisfied with how it went.
Very similar to each semester’s first day of teaching, actually. The rollercoaster never goes away. It just gets more familiar.
I hope any required rollercoasters in your life are getting more familiar as well.
-g