中国大好き

Photo by 莊豐嘉, Febr. 2012. Plum blossoms & waterfall in Wulai, Taipei County.

Taiwan and China. Taipei, Hong Kong, Canton and Europe. Kalt & warm.

Taiwan can easily contain China. China cannot contain Taiwan. Because Taiwan is many things that China is not. Taiwan is open in ways that China cannot afford. These make it prosper. And attractive, also for China.

Just saw some great pictures from a snow-white Berlin, taken on Febr. 22.  I was in Tainan on Feb. 21 & 22. Very warm. Ran around barefoot on a public track next to the Confucius Temple. Stopped at a monument with a missile. They are not sure where and when it came from. It didn’t explode, and it won’t. But they are keeping it, like the temples and alleys. Went into the Patriotic Women’s Association. Nice place, from Japanese times. Sat around with a friend, wrote a poem into her notebook. Had been swimming in the mountains the week before, with another friend. Nice and warm there, too. It was cold on some days in Taipei, and in the wind on the island of Kinmen. But nothing like in Europe. Some of the people I went around with in Taiwan came from Berlin. Literarisches Kolloquium. Simon Urban was there, author of Plan D. Great novel, hilarious. Was just presented at Taipei Book Fair and will be translated into English, maybe also into other languages. It’s about a GDR detective, in late 2011. Yes, Communist East Germany still exists in this book. Now I am back in Vienna. The sun is out, but it’s cold. Was grateful for gloves yesterday on my bicycle in the afternoon.

Simon Urban and Tang Wei in Jiufen, Taiwan. Feb.5th, 2012

An den Rändern und in den Ländern rundherum habe ich mindestens ebenso viel über China bemerkt wie in den Jahren in chinesischen Städten. Das ist auch bei Österreich so. In Taiwan hab ich viele Leute kennengelernt, auch einige, die schreiben und übersetzen. Auch alte Freunde wieder getroffen, einen ganz zufällig, nach 22 Jahren. Er war 1988-1990 mein Vermieter in Taipei. Die abendlichen Gespräche mit ihm waren sehr wichtig und lehrreich. Er unterrichtet heute in Taichung und ist Vorsitzender des PEN-Klubs für Autoren, die auf Taiwanisch schreiben. Taiwan ist ganz ähnlich wie Österreich, in mancher Hinsicht. Kleines Land. Viel Geschichte. Schöne Berge. Zeitgeschichte, je nachdem. Lang unterdrückte Sprachen und Volksgruppen. Und so weiter.

标签： china, politics, society, taiwan

This entry was posted on 3月 6, 2012 at 9:42 下午 and is filed under March 2012, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.