Most students who desire to spend time in a foreign country fritter away countless hours in time-consuming language classes ruminating on subjunctive usage, memorizing declensions, and chicken-scratching kanji character sets (the academic equivalent of gulag slave labor) .
My study abroad purposes, however, were far nobler. I’m talking leagues, here. These purposes were noble, in that “saving a damsel in distress” sense of the term. I would rescue, with American passport in hand, my distressed damsel of choice from the clutches of third-world domesticity in the motherland (Taiwan) by taking her as my wife slash cook. Sort of like mail-order brides, but on-site. Grand, ain’t it?
To accomplish this difficult feat in the projected timespan of four, maybe five, measly months, I planned to use any and all of the tools available to me-that is, anything short of an arranged marriage.
Around November (I left for Taiwan in February), Mother made the preliminary trek to stake out the territory and spread the word that Andrew (pronounced Antzoo) would arrive in just a few months. Uncles, aunts, cousins, second cousins and great-uncles were mobilized from Taipei to Taichung to Kaohsiung in search of a fitting match with the proper credentials-know-how around the kitchen, beauty and perhaps intelligence (in that order). None of my hundreds of extended kin would leave urban, town or village stone unturned in this extensive search of grave consequence.
Things didn’t go quite as smoothly as I expected. Promises of introductions to the daughter of Mr. Cheng or the niece of Dr. Lee never panned out. Cousins mentioned Winnie from the local college, Sandy from weekend ESL classes, Yvonne from bioengineering, but the supple forms I imagined would never materialize. Et tu, Brute? I never counted on such familial backstabbing.
With hardened heart and renewed resolve, I decided to forge ahead, alone, on my quixotic quest. First day of orientation at National Cheng-Chi University in Taipei: Seven gorgeous Taiwanese college co-eds (there were better omens) hailed my entrance into the orientation classroom. With “very good” (my language proficiency score) Mandarin and better-than-theirs Taiwanese, I managed to woo and swoon girl after girl as we exchanged introductions. A few were so impressed with my Mandarin skills that they thought I was actually from Taiwan.
My chances, I felt, were better than ever, if not straight out the roof. Who needs relatives when you have grace, charm, intelligence, that little blue book with “United States of America” gilded on its front cover, and more than a foot on every other male within a twenty mile radius? Take that, Yao-digga. And who needs shantytown village girls when you got cosmopolitan beauties lapping at your heels? That’s right, I was in the big leagues now. Taiwan was paradise.
About two weeks into my Oriental Eden, the brutal caveat to this whole game finally reared its ugly head. The seven Angels (and they were angelic indeed)-thus named presumably for their helpfulness-were not indicative of the greater university population. Seven for seven (or eight for eight) was a far cry from 420 out of 11,000. That’s a Jackson Hole plummet from 100% to 3.8%: Worse even than Bush’s approval ratings nosedive of recent weeks.
To make matters worse, the 420 pre-approved and seemingly available women (including the Angels) were actually entirely unavailable. Each and every one had a serious long-term boyfriend and was, as such, definitely fish out of the dating pool waters. Lies, all lies.
In the end, I was beat at my own game. With the last trick on the table, my American passport was not the trump card I thought it to be. I wasn’t the only one with chauvinistic pretensions (or intentions) in town. Every Taiwanese male in sight desperately coveted a Taiwanese female with the skills to wield a wok or the capability to separate whites from colors and once they got their hands on that petite maiden, their nimble little fingers never let go. I knew not that our goals were one and the same. Sadly, my fingers weren’t as nimble.
The logic, though, was simple: Dating back in the motherland still required a long and arduous chase. The girls bat their eyelashes while locked away in the ivory towers they resurrect themselves, waiting impatiently for the boys to get their act together. By the time the knights in shining armor find their testicles through all that steel, they realize that all of a sudden hundreds of dollars they never had have been squandered on romantic dinners in fancy foreign restaurants, red and white roses and repeat showings of X-Men II.
Thus three months quickly turns into three years-even the thought of starting anew seems too daunting. Why spend unnecessary cash-money to swap in the old Hummer for the new Hummer when the leather in the backseat is finally broken-in?
I returned from study abroad with no diamond rings and no offspring. I had failed my Confucian role as the oldest (and only) son entrusted with the legacy and future of the Lin family clan. I can only hope that after my next trip to Taiwan post-graduation, I will not return a Don Quixote, alone and insane, with no damsel, in distress or not.
Drew Lin is a senior in the School of Foreign Service. He is allergic to cats, monkeys and white people.
