Despite being the opposite of a solo traveler — afraid of hostels and couch surfing, and not even particularly well-traveled for an expat — in 2020, I decided that I wanted to backpack a circle around the island of Taiwan (where I was working as a translator) speaking only the local language and accepting only free lodging.

Maybe you’ve seen the twinkle that appears in competent Taiwanese-speakers eyes when a foreigner — or even a local who just doesn’t speak it that well — expresses an interest in the seemingly most local of the local languages.

So what if you refuse to learn Mandarin and insist on only learning Taiwanese? What will this mean in the context of everyday life?

What language is most useful for living in Taiwan? What’s “Taiwanese,” the language? What’s the difference between Taiwanese and Minnanese?

There’s a Taiwanese word for people who don’t believe in fortune-telling and the supernatural: thih‑khí — someone who has a “hard mouth” — meaning someone who argues unyieldingly and refuses to admit when they’re wrong.

Roughly 800 years later, I was standing in front of Ji Gong the god. The late-12th century Chan master had been deified in Taiwanese temples like the one I was visiting, and like in the poem above from the Qing Dynasty Era Biography of Ji Gong even in godhood, Ji Gong was depicted as an irreverent drunk…

In response to Trump calling COVID-19 the “Chinese virus,” a Taiwanese spoof news YouTube channel has urged the U.S. to “stop stigmatizing China” and instead call the coronavirus the “fake China virus,” the “bandit virus,” or the “Xi Winnie virus.”