Bit by Bit - Language Unlocks (Culture)

(Bit by Bit is a series that seeks to better understand timeless truth through gaming metaphors. The title refers to our progressive sanctification. And, you know, 1's and 0's)

Haven't done one of these in months, but I continue to be impressed with how gaming metaphors apply to unchanging truths and principles of life. Today's entry is related to my overseas work. It's not meant to discourage anyone who feels they can't learn languages well, but to encourage everyone to keep going.

The Struggle to Connect 

Language is one of the biggest barriers to ministry in East Asia. The difficulty of languages like Japanese, with three writing systems mixed together and complicated grammar, and Mandarin, with lots of similar-sounding words distinguished tonally and thousands of characters to memorize, is something most people are aware of.

When I say language is a huge barrier to ministry, I don't mean that one must be impressively fluent to do ministry over here. English teaching is always a way to help and meet people, and one can train many local pastors through a translator and accomplish important long-term kingdom work without spending years trying to get fluent in their language.

The problem, rather, is the relational issue: to connect with the average local person who does not speak your language, you need to speak their language well enough to do so, and while there are exceptions, most ministry that will not evaporate fairly quickly after you leave depends on that kind of connection. Without the language, you're also permanently separated from the culture; you can learn about it, but you'll always be missing a huge part of everything, a black box into which you rely on other people to look inside for you.

Language learning is tough, but that difficulty can be over-hyped too; there are some people who do struggle to learn any new language, but for most people with most languages it's a simple question of learning correctly (the right content studied in the right way) and investing enough time and effort to pound it into your brain until you make new neural pathways for it.

That means to learn a new language is to re-wire your own brain, so it only makes sense it would be a challenge. The attitude I condemn is neither the fear that one cannot do a good job in learning a new language due to its difficulty, nor the natural frustration that comes after much effort put into learning with seemingly little result; it's the attitude that says "language learning is hard, how little can I get by with and still serve?"

For me, as a Christian living overseas hoping to share my faith with as many people as possible in my community, language is a constantly present, relevant, and exhausting challenge. Most of my day-to-day communication here is done in Mandarin, and the more used to speaking it I become, the more obvious it becomes that it's not adequate. That doesn't mean I can't do what I do now with the language level I have now, it means I can see opportunities that lie beyond my reach because my language abilities aren't up to them yet. I want the language keys that open those doors.

There are discouraging days, where I feel like I should just give up and use English, and there are encouraging days where I can turn and see that, although the mountain ahead seems ever higher, I'm looking from a vantage point far above the plains below where I started.

But one of the most motivating things about the process of learning a new language, whether you've just started or over the long term, is that with every new useful phrase or word you learn, you are opening up new conversational or even social possibilities. This exciting process of slowly increasing your ability to function effectively in a new place and culture, at the same time greatly expanding your versatility and flexibility in ministry, is very similar to learning the rules and techniques of a new game.

Let's compare that process to an old classic:

Super Mario World

This is one of my favorite old games of all time. I think the designers hit a perfect balance of great art and level design; fresh and varying content and enemies so the levels don't get boring; memorable music themes, sound effects and cues; and secrets hidden everywhere. And yes, nostalgia may play a part; we did not have a SNES growing up, but I spent many hours playing it at friends' or cousins' houses.

One of my favorite parts of Super Mario World was how many secrets there were to unlock if you knew how. Whether flying above the screen in the Ghost House to unlock a secret level that gives you infinite lives (basically the secret to beating the game), or going to Star Road and finding all the different colored Yoshis, even the secret levels sometimes had their own secrets.

Secrets within secrets...

One of the more fun secrets to unlock in SMW are Switch Palaces. Everyone knows Mario games involve jumping under lots of blocks; Super Mario World introduced the innovation of several different colors of "exclamation point blocks" [ ! ], which must be "switched on" at the hidden switch palaces. (Only the first palace, Yellow, is in plain sight, the others must be found by discovering secrets in various levels) Until you find and activate the correspondingly-colored switch palace, these colored blocks are shown only as dotted outlines, showing where the blocks will be.

Early in the game, you had probably switched on the yellow blocks (further levels became fairly ridiculous if you didn't), but not yet the green, red, or blue ones, and every so often you saw a weird little area where you knew there was something going on, but only had the outlines of the potential colored blocks, so you wouldn't be able to reach the secret there without finding the switch palace of that color first.

Our family tradition was to run, jump, then switch directions exactly as he landed

Correct me if I am wrong, dear readers, but if memory serves, it is possible to finish the game with only the yellow blocks switched on. You don't need to unlock the secrets to finish it, you can make your way through and achieve the main goal of beating Bowser in his castle, which after everything it takes to get there is actually not terribly difficult.

However, that is not "really" beating the game. There is a way, by beating secret levels in the right way, to actually permanently change the in-game graphics from Spring/Summer to Autumn. The enemy designs change, the color palette changes, it's a victory which accomplishes much more than simply defeating the last boss and watching the credits.

Again, if memory serves, one cannot beat the final secret level and cause this change without the presence of the different colored blocks which you need to switch on at the hidden switch palaces. In other words, you can beat the final boss 100 times and the game won't change, but by switching on the missing blocks and unlocking the secret levels, you can affect the game itself.

Unlocking a Culture, Block by Block

Language is like that. Living in a new culture, in a new language environment, you start out with few things you can do. "Survival" language skills give you what is necessary to keep living there in the basic sense; you can get done the very basic things that must get done without finding someone that speaks your first language or someone to translate. You could continue in this way for a very long time, and many people do. 

But you won't even know what you don't know. You'll never have the conversations that could have opened up new doors, never get to know that local who can't speak English at all, but who is very influential in their own context, or can encourage you or be encouraged by you. You can set goals, ministry or otherwise, and reach them, and even "beat the game," by accomplishing everything you set out to do in a given time period.

What you set out to do might not be the best or most effective thing you could be doing, however. Missions is fraught with examples of people doing what they thought was a good idea and actually causing serious problems. But on a less extreme level, how many times have I read about and personally witnessed people who worked very hard, yet somehow found the long-term fruit from a given ministry was surprisingly absent?

That's not to denigrate their effort; God rewards our motive, not the outcome, which we are never totally in control of anyway. (sometimes not at all) But if your goal is to be as effective as you can, without enough language to get deeper into the culture, to understand the lives of the people you are ministering to, you won't know whether you're working in ways that make sense for the culture or not. I have been in the situation more than once of being present for someone ministering in English while listening to the attendees speaking Chinese, and realizing the attendees' assumption of what was happening and that of the person leading were wildly different.

I wonder how many times that has happened to me in the past, when I had no way of knowing.

Like the colored block outlines mentioned above, you might become aware that there are opportunities eluding you, but until you unlock the next level of your language abilities, you simply won't have access to them. That's not to say they're automatically open to you at that point. The secret levels are typically especially difficult or confusing, and have their own secrets. But knowing they exist gives you a whole new set of goals to strive for.

The Final Word

So if you are headed towards, or already work/minister in a multi-lingual context, my advice is this: To avoid burning out, make your default language goal whatever is enough to accomplish the goals you or your organization or ministry or team currently have--following our Super Mario World analogy, unlock those Yellow Blocks, then go ahead and set out to defeat your Bowser.

But set another goal too, which is that along the way you will keep trying to find those Switch Palaces and unlock new blocks to help you get into new areas. Then use the opportunities those new language abilities provide to go places and do things you couldn't before. Maybe the Star Road is where you'll find that breakthrough you've been praying for.

10 Things I Miss about America: After a Year in Taiwan

I wrote, before leaving America, things I expected to miss about the place. I then checked again 6 months later, to see how accurate my original guesses were. Now, a year later, as I am getting more fully adjusted and settled in for the medium-term, I will take another look.

 

Original List (not in any particular order) of things I expected to miss:

1. Driving                                                     (6 months later: confirmed)
2. Spring and Autumn                                   (6 months later: partially confirmed)
3. Wardrobe flexibility due to summer heat    (6 months later: busted, it was fine)
4. Being able to make jokes people get         (6 months later: partially confirmed)
5. Real southern food and Tex-Mex               (6 months later: confirmed)
6. Pop culture/movie references                    (6 months later: confirmed)
7. Political discussions                                 (6 months later: busted, did anyway, heh)
8. No garbage cans                                      (6 months later: confirmed)
9. Not having to worry about water quality     (6 months later: busted, a very small issue)
10. Blending in                                            (6 months later: confirmed, of course)
11. Added in the 6 month post: Being able to flush toilet paper!

Updated List: Things I Miss After One Year

It turns out I did a pretty good job of guessing, overall. (I don't blame myself for the talking-about-politics one, too many interesting political things happen in Taiwan not to at least discuss them. And I discovered refusing to participate in that kind of discussion irritated some people more than simply expressing an opinion.)

A year later, a few of the original list deserve a second look:

2. Spring and Autumn (Yes I still miss them, but keep reading)

My impression of Taiwan last time I lived here was that there was winter, a rainy period in late Spring, then a typhoon-filled summer and a nice few weeks of Autumn (hard to call it Fall when very few leaves do) before it got cold again.

That's not far off, but what I think has happened this time around is that I've begun to accept that Taiwan, for geographical reasons, simply doesn't have 4 seasons. America might not either, really. If you watched the weather patterns closely for a few years, then set about to define your own local seasons, I bet you wouldn't come up with 4, and they wouldn't be all the same length. People who have lived in the same place for decades/have family roots there often know the ins and outs of the yearly weather patterns.

So I do still miss Spring and Autumn, especially early Spring and the warm days/frosty nights part of Autumn, but I think we should embrace the richness of our local climates which never line up with the astronomical seasons anyway. (Where is it not summer weather until June 21? Alaska?)

This was about as close to Autumn leaves as I got this year. They didn't really crunch...
I hear there's a bit of leaf change in the mountains though, something to check out next year

5. Southern food and Tex-Mex

I think I mentioned in the 6 month update that this was true but not a problem because of all the good local food. And Taiwanese food is -amazing- so that's not wrong. But I think it's seasonal too. Over the summer I was fine (I think if it came down to a contest, Taiwan would beat America for warm-weather food), but as the holidays have arrived, I've begun to miss some of the tastes of home. Fried catfish, BBQ baked potatoes, etc. I think maybe it's not so much the taste itself, as enjoying that taste with other people who also know the same food and are anticipating enjoying it just like you are. Then there are the little rituals of "ok, it's cold enough, we can start drinking hot cocoa and making neiman marcus brownies," that sort of thing.

Then the Tex-Mex is just a personal preference. We had some great Tex Mex restaurants in Alabama, and even better ones in Dallas, and from time to time, I am really in the mood for some good tacos de lengua, pollo loco, or steak quesadilla. I have yet to find a good Mexican restaurant in Taiwan. I went to the one that was supposedly the best, and it was very "meh." They had some of the basic dishes, but they were bland, mild, and lacked any piquancy. Maybe they were worried about people not being used to the stronger flavors and heat; I might go back and ask them if they can spice it up a little.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Go to your favorite Tex-Mex place (Or mine, for those of you who know what that is) and enjoy a meal there (pray for Taiwan when you bless the food, if you please), and take a picture, and send it to me or tag me in it. I won't be mad that I can't eat the food, I will enjoy the experience vicariously that way.

Like I said, Taiwanese food is amazing, so I cannot complain whatsoever. I think my revelation over the past  6 months has been the thing about sharing familiar food (family recipes, seasonal dishes) with people who know and anticipate them like you do. I expect that might change over the long-term in Taiwan as I also begin to recognize seasonal dishes here and look forward to them, and share them with friends.

For now, I am both loving Taiwanese food and also really want a good taco. I might go looking for some ground beef and spices later... (I think an international store might have corn tortillas...hmm...)


6. Pop Culture/Movie References

This is very slowly changing. Your Chinese has to be pretty amazing to really 'get' pop culture in Taiwan and know what's going on and what's popular. (Obviously, not everyone keeps up with that sort of thing in their own culture; I certainly didn't in America. But you catch things by osmosis, by articles you don't bother clicking on, that sort of thing. My Chinese is not good enough to do that yet)  So Facebook is my best source of that kind of information for now, but I've seen at least a couple movies here now and when I reference them, people can at least figure out what movies I'm talking about. (It's a start!) Watching a couple Taiwanese TV series has been interesting and helpful as well, though it's incredibly slow if I really want to try to pause it and figure out everything everyone is saying.


8. (+ 11.) No garbage cans, no flushing toilet paper

This is still occasionally frustrating, but I've noticed that as I get used to the lifestyle here, I start remedying the lack of trash cans in various ways. A lot of the trash I need to take out of my house is recyclable, so the old lady down the street gets it. I've gotten better about throwing things away outside the house when I get the chance, and not bringing trash home with me so I don't have to deal with it later. The no flushing toilet paper thing is still weird, though it's instinctive at this point. (I'm definitely going to need to hardcode that switch in my brain and switch it off next time I'm in the US, heh) The biggest result of it overall is that bathrooms are generally much less pleasant places than they are in the US. Though, ironically, it's partially a result of having adopted western toilets. You don't normally need as much paper after using a squatty. (They're all around more efficient... I'll leave it at that)



10. Blending In

"One of these things is not like the others..."
(The bags are me helping someone carry their stuff, I think it was houseplants, oddly enough)

I will never blend in here, barring some kind of historically unprecedented situation where tens of thousands of Westerners want to come live permanently in Taiwan and Taiwan lets them do so. So it's deceptive to even say I 'miss' this, because it's so obviously impossible. It does get tiring to be permanently treated as an outsider and according to different rules, though in Taiwan at least this is both polite and obvious. (Taiwanese people who don't know you are typically either shy or warm and effusive; there are far worse places to be an outsider)

I'm thankful for a few contexts where due to my previous experiences in Taiwan I've been around long enough to be an "old friend" or "familiar face." The attempt to eliminate discrimination in America may be a praiseworthy goal, but personally I don't think discrimination itself is wrong; it's simply recognizing difference. I am different here. I do stand out. To be treated differently is not anything to be offended about. To me the question is not whether we discriminate, which is natural/instinctive behavior, but whether we are loving or not towards those we treat differently because we perceive them to be different.

So now...

Would I add anything to this list? After a year, I could add maybe two or three things I miss:

A. Literacy

I often get polite compliments on my Chinese (that's not bragging, you will get those at any level of Chinese, and they taper off when you're really good), but I'm only conversational, and barely that after missing a lot of sleep. But even being conversationally fluent, which I should be able to achieve some time next year, is not the same as being fully literate. This is where being highly literate in English actually hurts me. I'm used to the written word being something I utterly take for granted, like shapes or colors, not something I have to stare at for a moment and actively think about before I get it. It's humbling in a good way, but I'm hoping there comes a day when I can be sort of aware of what's written around me without having to focus on each thing.

B. Not Feeling Guilty for Leisure Time

This is not so much a Taiwan thing as a missionary thing. Taiwanese work very hard, usually, and I find that work ethic inspiring. The hard part is working the weird hours of a missionary, when there's no clear "at the office/at home but on call/on vacation" distinctions. In my previous incipient career as a computer engineer, I would work 40+ hours a week, attend a couple Bible studies and Sunday morning and evening services at church, and (being single) no one criticized how I used the rest of my time. Saturdays were mine, and I enjoyed them. I don't really get criticism from anyone here (I'm staying quite busy with ministry as it is), but what I miss is that "off the clock" feeling. But I really wonder now, is that right? If I really am a believer, called to the Great Commission by Christ as the whole Church is, isn't it true that I'm always "on duty" for the gospel, and wrong for me to have thought before that my secular employment set the hours? I'm still thinking about this. Another aspect of it is that, as a missionary, you always wonder, if I spent a little more time working on that ministry, making more contacts at that school, etc., would I see more fruit? I did not wonder this as an engineer, as my company was pretty adamant about not paying me for more hours than they'd asked me to work. But as a missionary, my hours are the 24 that come with each day. What does "free time" even mean anymore?

A resulting problem is that I end up needing rest and recreation time and taking it anyway, but feeling vaguely guilty about it. Or, I don't "rest hard/play hard" when I have the chance, and so my working times start suffering, and I fall into the trap of time-wasting activities that aren't all that fun but don't make me feel guilty like "having fun" would. I'd be curious to hear people's thoughts on this; I have a feeling there are lots of books and articles addressing this exact phenomenon. (I know part of it is resulting from something I discussed in my look back at this past year, not having the friendship networks I thought I would.)

The problem is, though, that even resolving it for myself, it's nearly impossible to explain to my (much older) Taiwanese coworkers, who have expressed their appreciation for missionaries in the good old days who didn't play around but were serious about the work. (Not aiming that at me, as far as I could tell, just reminiscing)

And I can't really imagine The Apostle Paul deciding to sink a few weekend hours into a TV series he missed, or go visit a nearby town "just for fun,"... so I don't know. Maybe it's me that is immature, or confused by an immature culture (Americans all are to some extent, that's for sure), and I should simply apply myself more diligently. I would appreciate any reflective thoughts on the subject.

A Year of Missions in Taiwan - Part 1

In a few days, I'll have been in Taiwan a year, again. The experience of my first year here -seven years ago now- and this one have been radically different. In this post, Part 1 of my look back over the past year, I want to outline some of the differences between that first year, a 'long short-term' trip, and this one, my first of many years here as a long-term missionary, Lord willing. It's been harder than I expected, in many ways, but He is good, and we see Him at work in our midst every week.

My previous year in Taiwan vs. This Year:

1. The Sense of Distance

Thanksgiving 2007... An unknown sea lies ahead

That year: Last time I lived in Taiwan, I had the fascinating experience of a whole year in which I felt the "coolness" of living overseas, in a culture very different from my own. Tolkien once described someone as having wandered into the remote distance of a certain place, yet retaining that enjoyable feeling of remoteness even after what had been distant was now his surroundings. That's how the first year felt, even after the initial adjustment. It never stopped feeling exciting; there was a little thrill every time I went outside, like someone had put a filter on reality that upped the contrast on everything, or caffeinated the air.

Early 2014...  A mountain has been climbed... but there are more

This year: This time has been exactly the opposite, so consistently that I was quite surprised. I haven't gotten the deeply excited, travel-y feeling even when it would make sense to have it (visiting little towns up in the mountains and pounding rice to make mochi, watching the World Cup with a bunch of other people at 3AM in a McDonalds in Kaohsiung, painting a paper lantern with Chinese characters and sending it up during the lantern festival, etc). I even wanted to make it happen sometimes, trying to close my eyes and get the feeling back, to help with the cultural adjustment. But other than a few brief moments (a dusty, late summer sunset over Taichung, a lone dragon kite on a rain-misting afternoon by the sea, white egrets in an emerald rice field glimpsed from a train window...), Taiwan has refused to seem anything but a perfectly normal place on planet earth in which I currently happen to be, which is in many ways much stranger than the opposite feeling. I don't have a good explanation for it, but I'd love to hear from anyone with a similar experience. (For some reason, I have the strong impression that passing the one year mark will make a difference, perhaps by making it undeniable that I'm moving into new territory in my Taiwan experience, despite the fact that this is already constantly true. The mind is a tricky thing.)

But when those moments do happen...

2. The Human Element

That year: My organization had an office in Taipei, I lived in my organization's housing in the middle of Taipei, and participated in a few different ministries with other missionaries, both long-term with my organization and other foreign teachers there for the medium or shorter term. I hung out with mostly expats in Taipei (foreign teachers and missionaries), but spent a great summer with my local friends down in Taichung doing evangelical summer camps, and by the time I left had a number of local friends in Taipei as well. It was pretty awesome.

This year: This has been the hardest thing, hands down. Both the organizational office and housing got sold a couple years back for reasons unnecessary to delve into, and no one else in my organization is up here anymore. Of the fun cross-organizational church-planting team that was here when I arrived a year ago, all the non-Taiwanese members have returned to America for varying reasons, and I'm the only foreigner left. (I'm single, so it's just me here) I definitely am blessed to have Taiwanese coworkers with whom I share "one heart and mind" in the Lord, but they are of my parents' generation and also not able to understand what it's like to live and adjust cross-culturally. I also discovered my friends in Taipei were 6 years further along in their lives, a few had moved abroad, and most didn't see each other often anymore. On the other hand, I have been very encouraged to find a few Taipei friends from before were excited to see me again, and to have made a few new friends here as well. But as it happens, all those friends, both old and new, are non-believers. It seems that, once we have a social circle at church, we stay inside it. I've been pondering this phenomenon and thinking it might be a crucial part of the reason we find it so hard to evangelize. (I could, of course, go to a church to meet Christians, but since I'm working on planting one, I don't have Sundays available to do that.)

So having lost both the expat and local relationship networks this time, working missionary hours (because when your work involves people attending optional activities, you are busiest when people are free and most free when they are busiest), and investing most of my time in lower-income community outreach and ministries that involve mostly young children and retired/elderly people, it's been a rough slog, relationally speaking. It's easy to say "go get plugged into new social groups, find churches that meet on other days than Sunday, etc." but hard to do so when you're an introvert and have invested most of your social energy in your outreach ministries, and also when you don't know at least one person in that group who can introduce you to the others, or even one person to go there with you. "Hey tonight let's go check out that group..." is very different than "Hm, do I want to be the random new guy tonight?" Not when I'm exhausted, no. Some coffee and a book, please, so recovery can start... not for socializing, but for the next day of ministry.

(If this section sounds like complaining, it's not meant to be; especially I want to emphasize that it's no one's fault. A wide range of factors all contributed to my current situation, and it will improve over time. It's just been especially difficult for this ending-of-the-beginning stage.)

3. The Work

That Year: Having quit my job as a computer engineer for the year of ministry in Taiwan, I still found a use for my skills in doing some work on the office computers. I participated in several English club programs, helped out at a local church, did a summer and winter VBS and eventually started an English Bible study there, and spent the entire summer working at evangelical summer camps.


This Year: Having recently graduated from a fairly well-known seminary, I receive a certain amount of respect here for having those credentials but I have not yet been able to use most of what I learned there. (It's ok, those kinds of opportunities will steadily increase if God chooses to prosper our church planting efforts here.) But we've done summer camps and VBSs and Bible studies, and we teach English in after-school classes and Bible stories and music classes to community kids and parents. I continue to meet with friends and students fairly often for English/Mandarin practice (with those conversations tending to be fruitful ones), and we've recently started a weekly house church meeting.

Being able to speak some Mandarin makes a huge difference this time, letting me jump into ministry right away. I still can't preach in it (I could "share," or spend a very long time writing a sermon and then read it from the pulpit, but I can't preach a full length sermon off of main points yet), but I can pray in Chinese now, and my current level lets me have lots of conversations (sometimes fairly deep ones) and be able to teach people who need everything except the exact English phrase or word being studied to be in Chinese, which is really helpful.

To use the common analogy, we've done lots and lots of seed-planting and lately some watering, and we trust that God will do with that as He wills, and we'll be able to see more fruit in time. The mission field is a long-term game, really a multi-generational one (whether you realize it or not, which is the scary part; everything you do has long-term consequences one way or another). We've also received a couple of short term teams who had great servant-minded attitudes and worked hard, which was as always very tiring for us as the receiving missionaries but fruitful as well, and our endeavor was blessed by the good work they did.


4. The Ministry Struggles


That Year: Language was a big struggle then, because without a translator I couldn't talk to anyone who didn't have at least some English, and definitely had to stick to English for any actual teaching or ministry. This meant I often struggled just to understand what was going on (A language barrier can be surprisingly easy to overcome when communicating one-on-one, but is more like a language cliff when lots of things are going on around you at the same time and you need to know what some of them are). Sometimes I struggled to understand what the Taiwanese people I worked with were thinking and expecting, and experienced some frustration both when I met with unexpected difficulties and when people seemed to expect me to know what they were thinking. It took time to learn that local people and even coworkers, unless they have spent some time as a cultural outsider in a new place themselves, can't really empathize with your difficulties in acting "normal" and communicating effectively. We might laugh at the unenlightened soul back home who says "why can't they just speak English like normal people," but people in other cultures don't necessarily think much differently. (This time in Taiwan I've had a number of people express surprise that I was a different kind of person than they thought I was. It turns out some of them hadn't realized I didn't talk about certain things because I didn't know how to do so in Chinese; they just assumed I never thought about those things or wasn't interested in them.)

This Year: Being on a church-plant opportunity, we continually seek to figure out the needs in our community and meet them as a testimony to the gospel and a demonstration of God's love. This area has barely been touched by the gospel, and while a few small churches exist on its outskirts, once you leave the main road it's only shrines and little temples inside the neighborhoods. There is poverty, not desperate but real. We recently discovered some kids that attend our community English class hadn't been eating lunch before doing so. One girl's parents are a man who lost an arm in an accident and now sorts trash for a living, and the wife he got from Vietnam. The daughter has a serious learning disability. She always sweetly shares her food with the other kids. Some of these people are just barely getting by. Some are not so badly off, by comparison, and comment that our English classes are too easy for them/their kids. Our classes are a mix of white and blue collar, working and middle class, kids who attend specialty school after school to get a headstart on their college exam, 12 years early, and kids who run around the neighborhood unattended after school because their single parents can't be away from work to watch them.

I have years of education in logic and apologetics, and a mind that is naturally equipped for critical and analytical thinking. I am not being boastful but simply stating a fact when I say that most of my friends and family would advise against trying to argue a point with me. And, those abilities don't go very far in this community, in this kind of work. That's not to say that logic and apologetics are not valuable, they certainly are, and have been helpful when I've had the chance to share the gospel with college students. But it's become clear that in a sense I've been trained as a world class sniper when what's wanted here is hand-to-hand combat in the trenches. A lot of humility comes with the realization those loving, but odd, and not very bright people that you once struggled not to look down on as an immature young Christian might run circles around you when it comes to being Christ to struggling people.

After grad school/seminary I could parse New Testament passages in the original Greek and explain the difference between nominative-accusative and ergative-absolutive languages. In some of our outreach ministry, I am inclined to think someone who was good at hand puppets and doing silly voices would be vastly more useful. Yet God works through our weaknesses, even weakness we had in other contexts pridefully assumed was strength.


5. The Cultural Adjustment

2007... What -is- this?
Trying a new food with my Taiwanese friend Carol
('a-gae', in Danshui)

That Year: I'd done three short-term trips to Taiwan, so it wasn't a totally new experience coming to Taiwan, but living here certainly was. I still remember my first trip to the drugstore, my exploratory trips to local restaurants, etc. (I get a bit nostalgic thinking about how everything was an exciting adventure.)

I had a bit of culture shock, and was a bit homesick for the holidays (though I haven't ever experienced the really severe homesickness that some people do; we moved a lot growing up so I don't have any one particular place that is obviously home, and missing my family tends to be heavily mixed with gratitude for having a loving family to miss), but Taiwan is a fun and interesting place for a young person to live, and I enjoyed the process more than I got stressed out from it. It was the reverse culture shock that hit me going home that came as a real surprise and took some time to get over.


This Year: I had sort of assumed that, having lived here a year before, I wouldn't have culture shock this time. In general that was actually true. I wasn't surprised by much I encountered, was actually looking forward to the food that scares a lot of short-termers, etc. What I've found though, is that what we call culture shock is really a combination of a number of things. Some of it is displacement shock, which you get moving to any new place, and some of it is what I call "life" shock. Things happen to make you realize your life isn't how it used to be, and those kinds of changes can be unpleasant. Now I did have some culture shock this time too, mostly having to do with being immersed in the culture to a much greater extent than I was last time, and being in a different community. I can't recall getting a lot of frowning stares living in the middle of Taipei city, near a major university, but I get them in this community fairly often, that sort of thing.

But, for example, as I mentioned above, it wasn't that my friends spoke a different language from me (I could muddle along in it reasonably well by the time I got back here), and I already knew they'd use different -ways- of communicating (a deeper difference than simply using different-sounding words), but I wasn't thinking of the fact that 6 years for me had passed for them too. Upon arriving, I spent a confused month or two before rapidly discovering, to my disappointment but begrudging understanding, that things were "different now," "not like before," etc. (I don't believe any human being enjoys that realization, but denial only hurts yourself. In this world we will have trouble, but Christ has given us His peace, and not as the world gives.)

2014... I think I know what this is...
Trying a new flavor with the same friend Carol...
in the brownie shop she's now opened 7 years later

So here I can offer a bit of advice* to outgoing/new missionaries, which is: don't confuse all the 'shock' you experience for culture shock. That can lead to resenting the culture, which can cause all kinds of problems in both the short and long term, and greatly inhibit the depth of your ministry. So much of the discomfort is simply displacement shock- moving to an unfamiliar place, losing your relationship networks, encountering weird people (it's hard when you don't know the culture yet, but sometimes it really isn't your lack of cultural flexibility, they're just an odd person), going through legal processes that are hard no matter where you are, etc. And sometimes, as I found, life can shock us all on its own.

(*- Offering advice is always a risky business, but I'll try to do my best at providing some for new missionaries in the second part of my reflections on this year in Taiwan, coming soon.)
PART 2 >