i've never really had an excessive amount of taiwanese pride, not compared to other taiwanese-americans i know, but the ignorance of the chinese here is infuriating.

today on our field trip to the hydro-electric plant (yeah i dunno) one of the local english teachers asked how it felt to be visiting the motherland for the first time and i somewhat jokingly replied 'taiwan is my motherland' and she responded with 'but taiwan is part of china anyways' at which point i very curtly said something along the lines of 'actually it's not and it never will be' and changed the topic.

later at dinner the subject came up again (ok i brought it up) and we entered a full on argument. i laid out what i knew of the history of taiwan, mostly gathered from the search for modern china and the numerous times i've been to taiwan, which was different from her account, though unfortunately i was wrong on some points. i asked them what kind of country would threaten one of their own 'provinces' with missiles (and not in a no-nonsense squashing-rebellion kind of way) and sit idle while a major earthquake affected thousands of taiwanese, to no avail. the most frustrating thing was when i told her (and the other local teachers at dinner) that the entire world, including the UN, regards taiwan and china as two separate countries, they shook their heads and flat out refused to even consider my words. they said taiwan would inevitably return to china, just like hong kong did, even though that had been an issue of british colonialism from a contract signed 200 years ago and hong kong had tried to prevent the annexation as much as possible, simply not the same thing at all.

this kind of thinking seems to be common in china. i came across an example that captures this attitude when i flipped through a chinese date book that someone had left in our living room the other day. in the beginning was a list of the area codes for all the different provinces and major cities in china, and stuck at the very end, at the bottom of the page, was 'taiwan province - taipei'.

time to sleep...if you don't hear from me for awhile, it's either cause i'm on our vacation around china, from aug 15-29, or i got censored and thrown in jail, in which case send me some tasty cookies and snacks please.

this is so stupid -

some pastor in texas gave a sermon condemning the Episcopalean Church's approval of the gay bishop. a quote from a member of the congregation: "I have never in my life applauded a sermon," Mr. Breckinridge, 51, said as he and his wife, June, left Christ Church Episcopal after the 9:15 a.m. service. "But I did today because this is so important." how is a sermon condemning the installation of a gay bishop more important than a sermon about the good news? shouldn't any sermon about Jsus be more important? and what's with kenyon martin and the nets? i'm very frustrated here.