Bonnie G.’s Reviews > Taipei Story > Status Update

Bonnie, I knew you had experience and interest in China but somehow I didn’t know you had lived in Taiwan! You just get cooler and cooler. And I’m glad you’re reading this because it’s one I’ve wondered about and wanted to pick up.

Derek wrote: "Bonnie, I knew you had experience and interest in China but somehow I didn’t know you had lived in Taiwan! You just get cooler and cooler. And I’m glad you’re reading this because it’s one I’ve won..."

Thanks for affording me cool points, Derek! I am not so cool these days, apart from NYC restaurant intelligence, but I used my youth reasonably well.

Taiwan was my gateway to China. I traveled in Asia for two years after college. My BF was an Asian Language and Lit major (he spoke 15 languages -- only wrote Sanskrit and Classical Tibetan since they were no longer spoken). He waited a year for me to graduate and worked at the only Vietnamese restaurant in Lansing, MI, in 1983 (oh young love!), and off we went on July 4th 1984. Taiwan was home base; that is where we (illegally) taught English to make money to study and travel. About 9 months of the 2 years were spent in Taiwan. Mostly Taipei, but some time in Taichung -- we did a lot of marble climbing there in Taroko Gorge to prep for Himalayan trekking. That was when the country was under martial law, Hong Kong belonged to the British, and China was still poor. Fun fact I feel compelled to include since you are in Utah: we lived in a weird apartment complex for three months at the foot of a hill with a cemetery. Chinese people did not want to live there, so we rented a place with two guys from Mauritius for next to nothing, and the other 11 units were inhabited by Fundamentalist Mormons. Each wife had her own place. There were only two men, maybe 40 or so kids. The men had come there as LDS missionaries, moved to the fundamentalist side, and stayed because the Kuomintang left them alone.

I spent a lot of time in the PRC during those years. When I graduated law school in 1989, Chinese manufacturing started exploding, and I was suddenly a hot commodity. I was pretty much the only person who had spent time in China, and one of only a few who spoke Mandarin. That is how I ended up in China.

End of info dump! This is how you know I am old. I go on and on, unbidden, about the past.

Oh, this is not unbidden at all—please consider stories like these permanently and enthusiastically bidden! I find them fascinating, entertaining, and genuinely enlightening, and I stand by my assessment that you are extremely cool.

The apartment complex at the foot of a cemetery populated entirely by fundamentalist Mormon families?? That detail alone deserves a book-length exploration so we can unpack absolutely everything, lol. Also, as a linguist with an Asian focus myself, I’m beginning to suspect that one very specific type of person is drawn to you—apparently available in both straight and gay versions.

I’m still determined to make our conversation-over-wine happen so I can hear many more of these stories in person, but Goodreads is an excellent venue in the meantime (when my notifications and feed are actually working anyway!).

Derek wrote: "lso, as a linguist with an Asian focus myself, I’m beginning to suspect that one very specific type of person is drawn to you—apparently available in both straight and gay versions..."

Thank you for that laugh! This is possibly true. Most (though not all) of my straight and gay boyfriends have been multilingual. Talk about things to unpack! At some level, I just like smart people who are interested in the world. I am guessing the Venn diagram containing people who fit that description and people who speak more than one language has a lot of overlap.

I have had people tell me I should write about those two years between college and law school. I always say that these stories are better told over a cocktail than in book form (and I eagerly anticipate the opportunity to have that cocktail-inclusive conversation with you), but even if the rest never makes it to the page, that fundamentalist family is going to show up in a piece of fiction at some point. I got to know two of the wives a bit, and this 21-year-old Jewish girl from a Midwestern suburb was forever altered by those conversations.