A.1 Understanding Taiwan Before Interpreting It

Before writing about how Taiwan feels, it helps to understand how Taiwan works.

A lot of writing about Taiwan starts with impressions — friendliness, food, freedom, tension with China. Those things aren’t wrong, but without context they’re incomplete. It’s easy to admire Taiwan and still misunderstand it.

This site takes a different starting point.

Instead of jumping straight into personal reactions, it begins with how Taiwan functions as a place people actually live in: its history, systems, institutions, and everyday realities. From there, interpretation makes more sense — and stays grounded.

How This Site Is Structured

This site is organised into several categories. Each one looks at Taiwan from a different angle. They’re connected, but they serve different purposes.

Taiwan Insights

Taiwan Insights is the backbone of this site.

This is where I write about how Taiwan works as a society — not in theory, but in practice.

Posts here focus on things like:

• how Taiwan’s history shaped its current political and social structures

• how democracy developed and operates under ongoing pressure

• how identity, civic behaviour, and social norms show up in daily life

• how people navigate life in a place with limited international recognition

• how institutions like education, media, and public systems function

• where outside narratives about Taiwan not always match lived reality

  
  

These pieces are about patterns and systems, not news cycles or opinions. The goal is to explain what’s there and how it fits together.

Cultural Reflections

Cultural Reflections is where personal experience comes in.

This category focuses on what it’s like to live in Taiwan as a foreigner — and to move back and forth between life there and life in Germany.

Posts here are based on lived moments: daily routines, misunderstandings, small cultural frictions, moments of ease, and quiet contrasts that only become visible over time.

Rather than presenting conclusions, these pieces explore how experience shifts once context is in place — and how perception changes when you’re no longer just passing through.

Language Log

Language Log looks at Mandarin — especially as it’s used in Taiwan — from a cultural angle.

This isn’t a learning resource or a place for grammar explanations. Instead, it’s about how language reflects how people think, relate to each other, and move through the world.

I write about characters, expressions, and everyday usage that reveal cultural habits, social expectations, or ways of framing experience — things you usually only notice once you’re living with the language.

Tea & Taste

Tea & Taste focuses on Taiwanese food and drink culture beyond “what tastes good.”

Food and tea are part of daily structure in Taiwan — tied to seasonality, routine, family life, and social behaviour. This category looks at those connections through observation rather than reviews.

It’s about how people eat, when they eat, what gets repeated, and what that says about daily rhythm and values.

In the Spotlight

In the Spotlight focuses on Taiwanese festivals, holidays, and seasonal traditions as they appear in everyday life.

This section is divided into two parts:

Cultural Calendar highlights free, publicly accessible cultural events across Taiwan — often tied to public holidays, traditional celebrations, or seasonal rituals. These are events locals attend as part of everyday life, not ticketed attractions.

Culture in Practice takes a closer look at those same holidays and festivals through longer-form articles. These posts explore where traditions come from, how they are practiced today, and what role they play in Taiwanese culture beyond the surface level.

A Site That Grows Over Time

This site isn’t meant to be finished or fixed.

As I spend more time living in Taiwan, the focus of each category will naturally expand — especially Taiwan Insights, which will increasingly include practical observations about education, bureaucracy, healthcare, and local governance.

The approach stays the same: pay attention, check assumptions, and write from what’s actually there.

Writing With Care

This site is written from the position of someone living between two places, not speaking on anyone’s behalf.

The aim is simple:to describe what I see, explain how things work when possible, and be honest about what remains unclear.

Everything else follows from that.