Love Boat - Study Abroad Program, Taiwan 1994
Bryan Adams had the Summer of ‘69. For me, it was the summer of 1994. I had just graduated from University and was looking forward to a few months off before starting my first real job. The Taiwanese government was sponsoring a “free” 6-week cultural and language training program for overseas-born Chinese kids, mostly from the U.S. and Canada. I got accepted on my 2nd try applying to the “Love Boat”. It was the heyday of the Chien T’an summer program, with about 1,200 students participating. The purpose of the trip was to learn about Chinese culture and language, for purposes of becoming future investors in and supporters of Taiwan, and to meet potential mates. They had me at “free trip”.
Fast forward 25 years later to the summer of 2019, when a professor named Valerie Soe from San Francisco State University decided to make a documentary entitled “The Love Boat:Taiwan”. I unearthed photos that had been stored in boxes at my parents’ house in Atlanta for a quarter of a century. Though I have never been back to Taiwan since, I still look back fondly on that summer.
I’m in the middle (purple jacket). Joe Pan is next to me, on the right.
Long hair, bangs and glasses. Joe’s roommates were in this photo.
East Coast vs. West Coast Asians
Growing up in Canada and on the East Coast, I had never been around so many Asian-Americans at once. Though we may have all looked similar to Americans from the outside, our experiences were quite different. Harriett was the first Mormon Asian that I ever met, and she told me that her parents would not be able to attend her wedding in the Mormon church. The West Coast girls were prettier and more experienced - I mean, whose parents let them get fake boobs in high school? The boys were mostly nerdy, and liked the sweet, pretty and nice girls - so I was out of luck.
Here’s what I remember: I was so terrible at the fan dancing class that I was excused from performing in the end of camp show, we snuck out of camp after curfew to eat at the original Din Tai Fung with its narrow staircases, and “niu ro mian” at the hole in the wall noodle shop. I wasn’t a very good student of the Chinese language classes, either, since instruction was in Mandarin and my family speaks Cantonese. Someone got lost at the night market one evening and caused a minor panic among my roommate group (she took a cab back, which we found her later). We saw amazing works of Chinese art at the National Museum, including jade carvings.
Joe Pan had just graduated high school in Northern California in 1994, and was probably placed in the wrong group since the rest of us were 4-5 years older. I don’t even recall how we met, so it’s a good thing I found the photo above. He spent most of the weekends with his relatives in Taipei. After the summer program was over, we regularly wrote snail mail letters to each other, since the internet was still in its infancy. After one tax busy-season at Deloitte, I flew to California and to visit Joe at school in San Diego, where he introduced me to the importance of coffee. At Christmas, Joe sent home made cards with his artwork. He later came to Atlanta on vacation and I joined me and my friend Kevin for a weekend trip to Cancun. In 2003, Joe stayed with me in New York City for a month when he was between jobs. And in August 2017, I was thrilled to be one of only four people at Joe’s wedding to his long-term partner Garrett, at the courthouse in Compton, California. Joe told me recently that he had found the East Coast Asians to be “stuck up” and thought themselves better than West Coast Asians. Truth be told, we were just the piano-and-violin playing offspring of 1st generation immigrants, heading to safe careers sanctioned by our parents.
Tony
Most of the summer was spent in Taipei practicing our Chinese characters and honing our karaoke, but for the last two weeks of camp, all of the kids were bused around for a field trip around island. We visited marble quarries and and to Tai Zhong. I left my camera at one of the stops, but miraculously it showed up back in Taipei, hours before my flight back to the U.S.
Our field trip in 1994 was interrupted by a typhoon, which caused the bus to detour unexpectedly. I met Tony during this trip, and somehow we ended up during a storm in the dorms where the counselors were sleeping. He was a West Coast Asian from the Pacific Northwest. I found this letter with his Taiwanese glamour shot photos that he had sent to my parents’ house in North Carolina in September. I’m not sure what happened to him, but in my imagination, Tony is an investment banker who volunteers at animal shelters on the weekends. Ah, to be 22 years old again!