This was originally posted on blogger.

Greetings again,

Thanks for sticking around for the third round of semi-annual updates to family and friends.

In short, I’m still living in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and planning to be for another year (or so). But you can read more below :).

As always, I welcome updates – long or short – back in return! I’m ever-curious to hear what’s new and old and everything in between.

Until next time,

Rohan

Changes and Continuities

One big change this year is my good friend Leon, who moved with me from Berkeley, is going back to California. He couldn’t stay in Taiwan longer than a year because of complications with the military service here. But I’m happy to have some friends in the city from before, so starting off again won’t be as challenging as last year. I’ve also moved apartments, so I have Taiwanese flatmates and a new neighborhood to hang about.

Kaohsiung is a great place and I’m happy to be here for another year. I enjoy the nature in southern Taiwan, the warm weather and the warm people you find there. Taiwan is so small yet has so much to see – the beautiful east coast, the outlying islands, and the mountains. So to me there’s more than enough to see in my next year here.

I’ll be teaching at the same buxiban, an afterschool English center for kids. Many of my kids will be the same as last year, just going on to more advanced material. But I’m also starting an “ABC class” (complete beginners, maybe age 7)! Of course, with my training right from the start, they’ll be reading the New Yorker within a few months!

I enjoy my job more and more as I do it. With more experience, I feel more able to relax into the work. There’s lots of creative activities that kids enjoy, but I’ve learned that kids like a degree of ritual. We play the same games and dance to the same songs (typically Blackpink) again and again. It’s wonderful to get to know my students and see them improve, learn their personalities and strengths and weaknesses. When we watch movies like Lion King or Spiderman I feel like I’m going through these experiences with them with fresh eyes. All in all, my students are lucky to grow up in a place like Taiwan, and I’m grateful to be part of their lives as they grow up.

I’ve gotten to a good place in my Chinese level, one that I’m happy with for the time being. I can have long conversations in Mandarin; I can watch TV and listen to some podcasts; I can negotiate rent with my new landlord in Chinese. I also see my limits – reading news articles, listening to super fast conversations among native speakers are beyond my abilities. But I don’t mind that so much, because after all I do speak English. When I first came to Taiwan it felt like my every bit of free time could and should be spent learning Chinese, because the potential future benefits felt boundless. Nowadays I feel less confident that I’ll use Chinese directly for work in the future (especially given how intense work culture is in Asia). For now I’m rather happy chatting to the guy who sells me bananas or people in my ping pong class. Speaking Chinese is a great tool in my toolkit, and it’s given me a new perspective on what non-native English speakers experience.

Travels

I’ve been lucky to travel a few places since the new year. At the end of January, I went to Thailand and India with my parents. We stayed in Bangkok for three days and saw more Buddhist temples than I could count. Bangkok was a cool city – they have an awesome boat system on the river that you can take to many places. In India we went to Chennai where I saw my grandmother. She’s over ninety and still kickin’. It had a been about three years since I had seen her so I was happy to do that. India and Taiwan are vastly different places – me and my parents alike were unused to the level of chaos that one experiences getting around.

My friend Andrew visited Taiwan after that and did a grand tour of the island. Andrew found places I had never heard of, like the Fuyuan Butterfly Valley, and some I had, like the Taroko Gorge National Park. We made great use of Taiwan’s epic train system, affordable hostels, and epic vegetarian restaurants. Also in Taiwan, I recently went to Jiufen, a city near Taipei that is the inspiration for the setting of Spirited Away. And on my birthday I went to Green Island, a former penal colony that is indeed very green.

Over the Dragon Boat Festival I went to Shanghai to see my friends Hanji and Shuge from Berkeley. I was lucky they were both there to take me around and let me meet their friends. Shanghai is a large, large city. Its population is 23 million, more than twice that of New York City, and it has a sprawling underground with 408 stations and many more planned in the next decade. Shanghai was also remarkable in terms of green transportation – 99% of mopeds I saw were electric, and about half of cars were, too. It makes quiet, exhaust-free transport. China also has the world’s largest high-speed-rail network which I used to go to Hangzhou. It’s fast and much cheaper than the one in Taiwan. Life is good in China in these ways. Though I was unaccustomed to the number of security cameras, prevalence of online payment (frustrating because I couldn’t use it as a short-stay foreigner!), and Chinese Mandarin accents. Though geographically and linguistically close to Taiwan, China felt very foreign to me.

Fun things

After playing with my friend Etienne at his house for a few weeks, we decided to go in on group ping pong lessons near where I live in Kaohsiung. I played recreationally as a kid with my old neighbor John. I’d consider myself pretty good, even if I never had formal training. Taking lessons, though, has made me realize there’s a whole lot more to ping pong. We started correcting my basic form, which I realized had a whole lot of problems, and as I’ve improved the coaches teach me more advanced techniques. There’s something special about whacking a ping pong ball and sending it to the exact place that you wish it to go, and spin the way you want to. At the highest levels, every rally feels like a fast-paced chess match, each hit being a thought-out move on the board. I’ve written a couple blog posts on this topic!

I’ve also started learning guitar. The initial motivation was to learn an instrument that’s more harmony/rhythm based, a weak spot in my music skills. Guitar is fascinating – to me, the fretboard and fingerings seems very geometric and logical, the way everything is laid out. It’s a good exercise for muscle memory to learn the chords properly. And also to sing a melody, finger the chords and strum has proved to be challenging! But also means I have lots of room for improvement.

With my friends Etienne, Leon, and another friend Noé, I recorded a jazz album! It was quite the musical experience. We recorded 13 jazz standards that we had been practicing for a few months. Each took one to four takes, which is why the process was so exhausting – our own standards for perfection were self-defeating. Knowing that every note/sound would be recorded made playing much harder. And having the pressure of recording all the songs we wanted to do in one day was difficult too. Anyways, the music is still in the mastering process. When it’s ready, I think we’ll put it on Bandcamp (and it probably deserves another blog post). I hope to record again!

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1 comments captured from original post on Blogger

**jack sawyer said on 2023-08-03** Dear Rohan, What a pleasure to hear of your adventures.
Love, Jack..