Missed last week for no particular reason. You know, beyond laziness.For Halloween, my boss “volunteered” me to dress like a gorilla and go from class to class playing games with the children. An unanticipated consequence of this is, now when I sub for another teacher, the children greet me as “Monkey Teacher Ben”. Know what I don’t need? Dignity.
Actually, there was one good result of Halloween; I made a small girl cry. During my vocabulary-word-laden retelling of the legend of sleepy hollow, I removed a zombified head mask from my bag. This elicited a bout of terrified laughter. But then I passed the head around the class, eventually having it end up on the desk of one girl who really did not want it. Thankfully, this experience prepared me for the waterworks caused by me telling a different girl to team up with the fat kid. I know, I am such a dick. What was I thinking?
Yesterday I went downtown to pickup my new visa, and ran into the anti-China protests. President Ma’s negotiations with mainland diplomats have caused considerable consternation here, specifically because the Chinese delegation will not address Ma as “President”. The protests outside the President’s residence and Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial were huge, complete with food stands, loudspeaker trucks, and T-shirt carts (sporting multilingual “Yes We Can” shirts, no less). Many people wore ribbons with “Taiwan is My Country” written in Mandarin, English, and Russian. The chant for the day translates roughly to “Communist Bandit Go Home”, or so I was told. Surrounding the many government buildings were large portable barbed wire blockades and legions of riot police.
I witnessed the crowd surge on a firetruck, breaking off its mirrors and trying to physically block its path. Later that night, protesters attacked the riot police with sticks and bottles. This must of made the police feel rather odd, given that I imagine they are rather nationalist themselves (how many cops do you know who you would not classify as “nationalistic”?).
The truth is though that the protesters have little reason to complain. The negotiations are merely aimed at making travel and trade between the two countries less difficult, and did not touch on any independence-related issues. Meanwhile, Taiwan has practical autonomy guaranteed by the US, so long as it does not provoke a war by actually declaring independence. The relatively small (23 million) republic has no chance in a war against the Peoples Republic of China without American help, and it hardly seems worth it over a title and a vote in the UN.
1 comment:
Hi, Ben Great photos! And just think of all the "monkey" related idioms you can now teach the kids! Monkey see, monkey do! I'll be a monkey's uncle! No monkeying around! and you can teach them to "do the Monkey" (get the music on-line- you were not only not born yet- you weren't even though of- and the prospect of your mom doing the "Monkey" is so horrifying your little student will certainly start to cry again! As a preschool teacher who at age 56 has been known to crawl around the floor of someone's living room trumpeting like an elephant, I agree- dignity is over rated!
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