Taiwan 101: Studying, Working, And Traveling In Today’s Taiwan, by Matthew B. Christensen & Henrietta Yang

While there is always the danger of a book like this becoming obsolete if it is not regularly updated, I found this book to be a deeply practical one concerning how it is to live, work, travel, and study in a country that I have (at least as I write this) never seen. My confidence in this book springs from at least a couple of sources. One of them is the authors themselves, one of them being a noted American travel with a high degree of knowledge of and interest in China and Taiwan as a whole, and the other being a native-born Taiwanese Ph.D who currently works as a professor in the United States. The authors have pretty strong credibility in writing about Taiwan, a land they have spent many years and are thus trustworthy to write about. The other reason I am confident about this book is from my own personal experience living abroad, which has involved some of the elements that the authors talk about in general, such as the experience of culture shock. While I have no personal plans to emigrate to Taiwan, those who do take this step have in this book a very useful guide to how to do it well, and that advice is well worth following.

As if often the case when one is dealing with good books, lessons that are given in particular here for Taiwan are also occasionally more general in their applicability. The discussion of culture shock is one such example of something that can be made a more generally applicable lesson. Wherever one moves, one is likely to go through the stages of culture shock until one has become accustomed to a new and different culture that one is living in, after one has first felt a variety of emotions and gone through (likely) a variety of stages in one’s feelings about a new place. Likewise, wherever one moves that are going to be different cuisines, different cultural attitudes to get used to, as well as behaviors regarding eating, living, traveling, communicating, and working that need to be taken into account. This book, being resolutely practical, has the benefit of allowing the reader the time and space to come to their own understanding of how these matters, presented in a specific matter, also are generally useful to understand in other cases where one may hopefully find other guides presented in a similarly practical fashion.

This particular book is a short one at 150 pages or so, divided into eight relatively short chapters. The book begins with the question of why one would want to live in Taiwan, which is presented as a desirable place to live on account of its development in economic and educational terms (1). This is followed by a chapter that examines who lives in Taiwan from a demographic perspective, there being four main groups of people who are from Taiwan: mainland Chinese who fled to the island in and after 1949, two groups of Chinese settlers who have made the country home for centuries, the Hakka and Fukienese, and a remnant of Austronesian aboriginal peoples who have lived on the island for thousands of years. To this group has been added a notable but not overwhelming percentage of foreigners (2). After this the authors talk about how one can travel around Taiwan, including bicycles, scooters, and trains (3). An entire chapter is devoted to the food scene of Taiwan, which in general can be said to mix elements of Chinese and Japanese cuisine together (4), based on its history. The authors also talk about living in Taiwan, which is often more expensive in the central business district of Taipei and less expensive towards the outskirts or in other smaller cities and suburbs (5). The authors discuss the experience of studying in Taiwan (6), as well as working and interning in Taiwan (7), and close with a discussion of Taiwan’s diverse geography (8), with urban centers on the north, west coast (towards China) and south of the island and remote areas mostly inhabited by aboriginal peoples in the rugged and largely inaccessible east coast of the island. Each chapter ends with some useful phrases in Taiwanese, which the authors recommend people learning if they seek to live on the island nation for any length of time. The book as a whole then closes with notes, an index, and information about the authors.