The Journey Home - 回家路

by Charles DeBenedetto

(The first bullet train of the day. Photo Credit: Author).

Looking out the window, you see a gentle, flat ocean, then endless green rice paddies, broken only by the occasional slivers of roads, with busy streams of cars rolling over them. From this view, it looks idyllic, and you wonder if first-time arrivals expect to land in the past. The flight attendant asks you if you need an arrival card, but you decline the offer, because you’ve been working here a while and you have an “Alien Resident Certificate” (ARC). In your mind you make a joke about how it sounds like you arrived here from Mars to work.

The plane lands on the clear, wet runway. It’s raining again, you observe. You look at your now-active-again cell phone. May 28^th. Ha. It’ll be raining until June 28^th, certainly.

The tourists line up in a zigzag fashion for customs, but you follow the Taiwanese to the electronic customs. A scan of your residency card, a look into your soul from the dead-eye of the electronic camera, a finger scan, and a robotic-yet-friendly “Welcome back!” in perfect robot English. The doors to the country slowly open for you, and then slam shut again the moment you pass through them.

After collecting your luggage, you could stop for food at the many restaurants in the airport, but you choose to head straight for the airport MRT (subway). Immediately, you chug along past tall buildings, busy roads, and beyond them, those deep green mountains, rounded on top and surrounded by mist.  You think about those old Chinese paintings where nature is huge, and humans are small (the correct proportions, you conclude). About twenty minutes later, you arrive at the bullet train station.

You’ve been here many times before, but you still gape a little, looking at how modern it all is. Swiping your metro card to leave the subway, you notice the trip costs less than one US dollar. You use a machine to buy your bullet train ticket, and you think for a moment about how you could be virtually anywhere on the west coast of the island in less than two hours. You buy your ticket, scan it to enter the terminal, and buy a rice ball and a coffee from 7-11. Moments later, the signature bullet nose of the orange-and-white train speeds into the station, followed by the twelve immaculate enamel-white carriages.

You bought a window seat. You always do. Looking at the LED screen, you notice the train is traveling at its top speed of 300 km/hr. You use your phone to convert that to 186 miles/hr. You let that number sink in, and wonder, why not build a bullet train to connect Boston to New York, and New York to DC? That Taiwan built this will always impress you. You notice how the aisle, the seats, the trays, they all look exactly like an airplane’s, but when you pull up the window screen, it’s not clouds, but those jade-green mountains again, and those light green rice paddies. A lone temple, with the classic winding dragons perched on the roof, protects the rice paddies, and a lone white bird with a long neck and far-reaching wings circles around, looking for something. Towns and cities blink by in seconds, giving you a reference point with which to understand just how fast you are going. You finish your rice ball and coffee, play with your phone a little, watch the Taiwanese countryside fly by, and already it is time to disembark.

Again, the bullet train station is large, looming, modern, and you notice familiar brands like Starbucks and 7-11, as well as brands that have come to be familiar, like Mos Burger and FamilyMart. There are reunited family members embracing, taxi drivers outside leaning on their cars and smoking, and a huge LED timetable listing the arrivals and departures. You determinedly push past it all to the adjacent local train station, scan your metro card again, and wait a short while for the train to arrive.

The local train has fewer passengers, but it is still clean, and the automated voice still remembers to declare all of the destinations not only in Mandarin, Taiwanese, and Hakka (a local dialect), but in English as well. On this train, including English is just for you, you think with a smile. It takes longer to get to your neighborhood because this train goes a lot slower and stops a lot more frequently than the bullet train, but that’s alright. You’re tired anyway, and you are enjoying watching the different city districts drift by, with the maddening traffic and the bombardment of Chinese advertisements covering every inch of building space. When you disembark, you are the only one, and the station is practically empty, except for a quaint piece of modern art sitting in the middle. A teenager is leaning against it and staring at their phone. You roll your luggage outside and get on the next bus, which promptly takes you to your apartment on the outskirts of the city.

Watching the bus roll away, you then turn to face your apartment. You wave to the security guard, and look past him to the clock on the wall. Not much time has passed, really, considering the distance you have traveled since arriving at the airport.

You reflect on Taiwan’s modernity, so much more advanced than you thought it would be when you first decided to come here. You silently joke to yourself that you’ll never need to buy a car.

* * *

Back home, I am often asked questions about Taiwan like, “Does Taiwan have cities?” or “Can you find ice cream in Taiwan?” I do not blame anyone for asking these questions, because most Americans have just never had the opportunity to learn anything about Taiwan before.

Of course, the answers to those questions are “Yes” and “Yes!” Taiwan is modern, sometimes bafflingly so. Transportation is one way to experience such modernity. Whereas in America, good luck to you if you don’t have a car and don’t live in the center of a city, in Taiwan there really is an extremely intricate network of subways, buses, trains, and bullet trains connecting the busiest of city streets to the remotest of mountaintops and countrysides.

An American without a vehicle is imprisoned to their home and anywhere they can get on their two feet. But a Taiwanese person with a little money on their metro card is truly free.