Flying out

My trip begins at JFK airport in New York City. As typical of my style, I arrive paranoid of being late and way too early. I haven’t flown out of the United States since high school, a trip to Japan with my family. So here I am, waiting for a 16+ hour direct flight to Taipei, Taiwan. From there, it is roughly a 2.5 hour drive to my grandfather’s home in Fangyuan Township, outside of one of the major cities in central Taiwan, Changhwa.

The last time that I had gone to Taiwan was the summer before I started high school. That trip was for the colloquially termed “Love Boat” trip that almost every Taiwanese teenager goes on. If you haven’t heard of it, Love Boat is a 3-week trip, typically for high school kids of Taiwanese-American descent, that takes you down and up the island of Taiwan. You start in Taipei and take a bus south through the major sites of the island with other kids your age. During the 3 weeks you make a lot of friends and do a lot of dumb and memorable things. I don’t know what the actual name of the program is, but everyone knows it as “Love Boat” because a lot of people fall in love during the trip and end up as far as marrying each other.

It’s kind of funny, but in retrospect it seems like a huge Taiwanese propaganda effort to make you feel like Taiwan is the best country ever. If you know me pretty well, you know that this has obviously worked on me (because Taiwan is the greatest country ever, duh). I am still friends on Facebook with one my closest friends from that trip, Steven, and remember a vague story of putting trash cans in an elevator in some hotel somewhere with him, the details of which I do not remember now. But I know that at the time I thought it was hilarious and there were propane torches and butterfly knives involved.

Anyways, back to the here and now. You’ll probably notice through the course of this blog, I am going to do a lot of reminiscing and Taiwanese propagandizing. Sorry I am not sorry. The terminal at JFK is full of people traveling all over the world: Seoul, Rome, Istanbul, Jamaica, Paris, and, of course, Taipei, Taiwan. I know I am at the correct gate because both of the people sitting next to me in the waiting area are wearing “SARS” masks and yelling at their children in Mandarin to put on their jackets or risk dying of cold.

I am not sure what to expect from this trip. I already know that there will be cousins there that I had never met or even known about. My dad tells me that several local traditions revolve around the importance of the eldest son of my grandfather’s eldest son, leading the family to a new beginning. Coincidentally, I am that grandson.