New Levels

As has been my MO for Sundays in Taiwan not spent traveling, today I did absolutely nothing for the majority of the day, then set out in the late afternoon to try out a new church.

The new church, New Life Bilingual Church, was pretty good--different from any I'd been to, since it was fully bilingual (every song and sentence and verse went between English and Mandarin). Most of the service, though, I was just trying to come to terms with the fact that I will probably not find a church here that in any way parallels the amazingness of my home church in Seattle. This is not to disparage any churches here, New Life included--the City Church is just hard to compete with. Not, of course that church-building is a competition...maybe I'll just try to throw down the shovel here and stop writing.

Also during church, I saw my banker from Seattle, a lady from my parents' church in Eugene, someone who was at the AIT reading I did, the friend of a friend in Seattle, and one of the heads of the State Department who I met in Washington, DC. The thing is, none of these people were actually there. And no, I'm not hallucinating: I've simply somehow arrived at the point where all Westerners look the same to me.

In high school, my dear friend Emma, who was from South Korea, told me that we (and by we she meant us Americans) all look alike to her. I was dumbfounded, and quizzed her on this statement: what about our different hair colors? What about our different eye colors? What about our different skin tones? I could not imagine how it was possible that such a homogenous group as Americans are could all look the same.

Yet, here I am, just a few months into living in Taiwan, and everyone I see looks like someone else I know. I've always had a tendency to find resemblances where no one else could (you'll note that I *did not say* this means the similarities don't exist, BY THE WAY, just that I see them easier than others do), and now, apparently, as the Western population shrinks, this tendency grows. After all, there aren't THAT many Westerners in Kaohsiung, so there is usually a pretty good chance that anyone I meet at least has a mutual friend with me.

Still, when I told Karina (who was sitting next to me), she burst out laughing. "Maybe they ALL came to your AIT reading!" she said.

Maybe it was bad that we were sitting in church making jokes. But this was an unusual and unexpectedly monumental shift in perspective--a new level of acclimatization, if you will--and thus well worth noting.