I Love Bananas

I'm starting this blog to collect memories of the three years I lived in Taiwan as a child. Here you'll find pictures, stories and anything else I can post as a collection of what I've found was a most unusual childhood. I'll have the first post be something I wrote last week to start everyone off:

I love bananas.

I always have. Mom was always worried I’d get sick from eating too many bananas but I never did. When I was three years old she told me we were moving to a place called Taiwan and pointed to it on a map of the world.

“It looks like a banana!” I said. I even remember it being colored yellow as it was one of those maps with all the nations set apart by color. To my added delight, the country turned out to be absolutely overflowing with bananas. They grew on trees there. No, really. You didn’t have to go to a grocery store and pick out the ones that just stopped being too green. Just pluck a big old bunch off any tree that has ‘em and they were yours. Of course if you did that you’d probably be stealing from someone’s crop.

Mom still wouldn’t let me, of course, fearing I’d get sick. Didn’t matter, I’d get Grandma Wu to give me as many bananas as I wanted any time I wanted. I wasn’t yet smart enough to hide them, though, and Mom would catch me red-handed, half-eaten banana stuffed in my mouth and the rest of the bunch in my arms. I think Grandma Wu confessed, too, although I don’t see her owning up to it with anything other than pride.

I’m getting ahead of myself with the story about Grandma Wu, though. That was in Hai Ou, a tiny fishing village on the south end of the island. Go ahead, look it up. You probably won’t find much information about it at all. You’ll get lots of information about the Hai Ou class missile the Taiwanese navy developed, but not the actual village of Hai Ou where I spent two years of my childhood.

Before that we lived in Gaoshung for about 10 months. Bananas growing on trees are a little harder to come by in Gaoshung. My memories of that place are of a lot of dust, construction, noise and geckos.

I hated geckos. They frightened me to death. I didn’t care how many mosquitoes and bugs they ate or how harmless they were. One night I was crying and wouldn’t go to bed at a friend’s house because the guest room was at the end of a hall crawling with some four or five geckos; all different colors.

My memories of Gaoshung aren’t many. We were only there less than a year, after all. Plus I think the place wasn’t fundamentally that much different from any other city in the world like the ones I’d already lived in: Kansas City, Chicago and Rockford, IL where I was born.

They don’t speak English in Gaoshung, though, and I learned Mandarin Chinese there as quickly as any 3-4 year old child would. The human mind just works that way. Doesn’t matter who you are if you’re young enough you’ll learn whatever language you’re exposed to.

When we moved from Gaoshung to Hai Ou I had to learn a new language: Taiwanese. To give you an idea of how quickly kids learn languages, my Mom asked me a month after moving to Hai Ou when I was going to start speaking Taiwanese.

“I think it will come in 3 days,” I told her. I was four years old, so I know I wasn’t bragging or exaggerating. I was saying it as plainly and obviously as I would say I had blonde hair. That’s about how long it takes: one month and three days.

After three years of high school Spanish I found myself begging Spaniards in Zaragoza to repeat things in English so I could understand them. After one month in Hai Ou I was playing with the other kids, shooting my mouth off in a regional dialect with eight tones. Mandarin only has four.

If you’re unfamiliar with tonal languages, let me explain. It’s like singing while you talk. The intonation of a word is part of its meaning. If you’ve ever spoken to someone from Vietnam who’s learned English you’ll get a taste of how important vowels and tones are to them and how insignificant consonants are. To English-speaking ears a Vietnamese speaking English doesn’t know how to enunciate. If you ask the Vietnamese he’d say he’s saying the vowels just right, so why don’t you understand him?

For the opposite reason many westerners are difficult to understand when trying to speak in a tonal language. They’ll read words like “Cam u’n” in Vietnamese and read it aloud, emphasizing the hard “K” sound at the beginning, giving the “U” a “ooh” or “ah” sound and totally screw up the tones. It will sound to an English speaking person like they’re saying “Come on!” and a Vietnamese will have no idea what this silly American’s trying to say.

I know I’m unique in this, but I don’t quite understand why hearing and repeating the tones is so difficult. I honestly think the majority of the problem is ego. Once you’ve heard enough jokes about the Chinaman naming his kids by dumping silverware down some steps you have a hard time taking tonal languages seriously.

Believe it or not, Americans sound the most like they’re speaking a tonal language when they’re making fun of it. Next time, listen to your neighbor Jason say “Ching chang chong chang!” when he’s whining about some stupid kung fu movie he totally wasted eight bucks on the other night. I’m willing to bet “Ching” is said with a flat tone, “chang” is said with a falling and rising tone, “chong” is said with a rising tone and the last “chang” is said with a falling tone. There you go, Jason’s a budding English-Chinese translator.

What’s more, English is a tonal language. Tones aren’t use as much and certainly not officially but very often the same word can have slightly different meanings depending on tone. Take “yes” for example. If someone says something you agree with, the “yes” you’d use would have a falling tone to it: start out high and drop off at the end. If someone gets your attention and you reply “Yes?” you’re using a rising tone.

The first “yes” means “I agree” and the second “yes” means either “can I help you?” or “can you please repeat?” That’s a tonal language.

The big difference between English and true tonal languages, of course, is degree. The majority of English doesn’t use tones for meaning, but every word in a tonal language has a meaning tied to the consonants, vowels and tone.

This is a big reason I was once informed by an American who lived for a year in Taiwan that “Taiwanese is impossible!” The four tones of Mandarin are already just about too much to handle for westerners. Double the number of tones and I wouldn’t blame someone for giving up. Even Vietnamese only has 6 tones, although sometimes I think it’s more like 7.

Not tough for four year old me, though. One month and I was fluent in an 8 tone language. Well, as fluent as any four year old can be with any language, of course. I spoke Taiwanese until the age of six or seven. I can’t say for sure because I don’t remember exactly when I lost it all. We moved back to the states when I was six, living in a small town on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in North Dakota. Nobody there spoke Taiwanese.

How did I end up living in all these different places at such an early age? My parents were involved in an organization called the Institute for Cultural Affairs. It was an economic development and “human potential” organization that conducted projects around the world. Mom and Dad joined up in Chicago in the early ‘70s and I was born into the institute.

When they had been given a chance to do work in Taiwan they jumped at it. I, of course, had no say in the matter. But, I got to eat all the bananas I wanted.