In my last post I explained how Sonja and I ended up in an overpriced apartment that wasn’t as good as it originally looked, but I didn’t get to the main problem with the apartment, the thing that we just couldn’t quite get used to. The main problem with the apartment is how far from Sonja’s school it is. When we looked at the apartment I told the guy representing the company that owns the place, “I hesitate because this is so far away from Taipei American School, where my kid will be this semester.” Whereupon he told me, “That’s no problem. I know the American school has school buses that pick kids up from this neighborhood. Lots of families whose kids go to Taipei American School live around here, because this is one of the best [read: most expensive] neighborhoods in Taipei [implication: and thus a good fit for families who send their children to Taipei’s most expensive private school].” Well, that’s true. Taipei American School does have a bus that picks up around here. In fact, they have a whole fleet of buses, about 30 of them in all, that collect children from all over the city. And for a cool NTD30,000 (nonrefundable), the school was happy to add a whole new stop to the route of Bus #10A just for Sonja a mere 5-6 minutes’ walk from our building.
The TAS bus, though, has to drive through the same city traffic as everyone else, even when it’s picking a kid up from the poshest neighborhood in town and taking them to the poshest school in town. They do not have helicopters or an exclusive subway line that can take the kids right there, though I’m sure some high-powered donor has probably suggested something like that. So in order to make sure the kids can get to school on time, the bus is scheduled to leave our neighborhood one hour and fifteen minutes before the first bell. Which means: Sonja has to catch the bus at 6:30 am, which when we first got here was in full darkness, and even now is just barely daybreak. To be dressed, packed and waiting at a bus stop at 6:30, in S’s case, requires a 5:30 wake-up call. And after getting out of class at 3:30ish, he alights back at the bus stop around 5 pm–by which time, until recently, it was getting pretty dark.
It is not an ideal schedule for any high schooler. It’s certainly not what I had in mind when I originally applied for the Fulbright and floated the idea of half a year in Taiwan to Sonja: “Here’s an opportunity to experience a 55-to-60-hour school week!” I suppose that it is a way of experiencing one aspect of what many Taiwanese people’s daily lives are like. Housing is so expensive in Taipei that many people live far away from their jobs or their children’s schools. Many adults here work long hours and have long commutes, and kids often have cram school or special lessons (instruments, languages) after school, particularly in the 6th and 9th grades, at the end of which they take exams that determine where they can go to middle and high school. And certainly Sonja is not the only TAS student logging double-digit hours on the bus each week. Like I said, the school has over 30 buses. I don’t know that they’re all as big as Sonja’s, which is a full-sized charter bus with maybe 50 seats in it. But it’s possible that as many as half of the students at TAS take the bus. Similarly, some students at desirable public schools ride public transit long distances; you see them wearing their tracksuit uniforms and their student-ID lanyards on the metro and in the buses.
But it’s an exhausting way to live, and it made me sad to see Sonja looking more and more tired every day, and school absorbing more or less his every waking moment. During the week he was usually too tired to leave the apartment in the evening even to go out to dinner, and on the weekends he wanted to sleep, relax and recover from the week. Still, I felt trapped. Our rental contract had required that I hand over two months’ rent up front as a security deposit, and stipulated that if I ended the contract early, I had to pay half of that–one month’s rent–as penalty. The idea of throwing three thousand dollars in the trash was too painful to contemplate. Even now, when I write that, I feel a little bit sick.
So I’d resolved that we (well, Sonja) would just have to make do. But I felt awful about it. And then I had a couple of experiences that made me decide to actually do something. One was going out to TAS on a Tuesday morning for a new-family check-in meeting. I rode the public bus up (we’re in the southeast part of the city and TAS is in the northwest, so I say “up”) to the school from our neighborhood. It took almost an hour and I was 15 minutes late for the meeting. There were about half a dozen parents there, and the school staff did a little icebreaker game so we could get to know one another and the staff a bit. The idea was to “clump” with others in the room who had the same answer as you did to each question. So: what did you eat for breakfast this morning? I clumped with another oatmeal eater, while most people clumped together in the “nothing” group and a couple of other groups of pastry or fried-egg eaters formed. How many times has your family moved since you had kids? 5 moves (to Raleigh, Carlisle, Denver, England, Taipei) put me around the median of this highly mobile set of people. Then: in what district of Taipei do you live? Almost everybody gathered in the Shilin group; Shilin is where TAS is located. A few people formed a Beitou group (the neighboring district) and there were a couple of outliers. The organizer asked me, “And where do you live?” “Xinyi,” I said, and they smiled and said, “Oh, Shilin? Right over there,” pointing at the group where virtually all my fellow parents stood. (“Shilin” and “Xinyi” actually do have a lot of the same sounds, even though it doesn’t look like that–in Pinyin, Sh and X both make a kind of “shhh” sound so it’s not ridiculous that they mistook what I said). “Um, not Shilin,” I corrected, “Xinyi.” There was something like a collective “Ooh,” from everyone, and they pointed me to the other side of the room where one lonely school counselor was standing. She also lived in Xinyi, and when I joined her in our distant corner, she said sympathetically, “It’s a long drive.” I bet it is, lady, I thought to myself–imagine how long it is when you’re taking the bus.
A couple of days later, I was chatting with one of my Chinese conversation partners. For the past year and a half, I’ve been meeting with conversation partners online once or twice a week to practice my speaking and listening skills. I’d been meeting with Fiona, who lives in Taichung (a city a bit further south), regularly for a few months, but I hadn’t had to chance to chat with her since we’d settled in Taipei. When we met, she wanted to know all about our living situation, and she was horrified when I told her how much we were paying and how long Sonja had to ride the bus. “I know Taipei is expensive, but that is too expensive. I mean, how much would it cost you to stay in a hotel?” I don’t know what the Chinese equivalent of “for crying out loud” is, but if you append the phrase to that question, you will get exactly the tone with which she said it. I told her I thought it would be too much hassle and expense to try to move to a new place. She started texting me apartment-hunting websites. I told her Sonja was just experiencing what Taiwanese students who commute to good schools experience–maybe it was a valuable cultural experience. She wasn’t buying it. I told her, “We’re only here for five more months, I’m sure we can put up with it.” She texted back, “Wu ge yue, ye bu suan duan de shi jian a 五個月，也不算短的時間啊,” which means, “Five months is still a pretty long time…”
That’s the text that finally tipped the balance. She’s right, I thought: five more months of 10 to 11-hour school days would feel like a very long time. It had taken me roughly three days of full-time effort to find our first apartment; wasn’t it worth at least looking to see what the possibilities might be?
A few days and nine apartment viewings later, I had found a place that is a twenty-minute walk (or an 8-to-15-minute ride on a public bus) from Sonja’s school, close to a metro stop, has just about all the amenities we need, and costs a little more than half of what our original apartment costs. The new apartment is so much cheaper than the original apartment that I will save in rent almost (but not quite) enough to make up for the huge penalty for terminating our original contract early. The landlords are not a faceless company but a lovely couple who live in the neighborhood themselves and were flexible enough to allow me a five-month lease without requiring any additional rent (most contracts are for a year or more, and most landlords will raise the rent for a short-term contract). The broker didn’t require the standard 1/2-month rent as his fee; instead, he prorated it and took only 5/12 of that since I am only renting for 5/12 of a year.
This feels like a great second chance, a new start, perfect for the new Year of the Dragon that has just begun. We moved in yesterday, the first day after the official new year’s holiday ended.