It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Bird Fish!

Thursday, June 18, 2009

As Wil and I walked up the stairs to the meeting room at Shu Guang High School to meet the other Plano Youth Ambassadors, we saw a puzzling sight. We were convinced we had seen two boys headed in the opposite direction. Boys? What are they doing at Shu Guang High School, an all girls' school. Were we in the wrong place? The mystery was solved during the school information session when we discovered that while the senior high grades were strictly girls, the junior high grades permitted boys. With that conundrum behind me, I could now focus on the formidable task of hand-painting a t-shirt to wear to tai chi class.

While working on my shirt, conversation led to learning some of the creative and unusual English nicknames that my new friends at Shu Guang went by. The girl I spent the most time with asked me to call her Bird Fish. Later, I met Bird Fish's friends: Goldfish, Taco, Slowly and Candy. I am not making this up nor was anything being lost in translation! If a student here does not establish their own English name, they often go by a random nickname that their friends call them. Just don't ask the student the reason for their offbeat name; they never seem to know. In addition to the people I met today, over the past week I have also met Fly, Mr. Magic and Kiwi, just to mention a few.

The students here were very friendly, but rather confused by my nationality. I often received puzzled looks followed by statements such as: "Where are you from?" or "You don't look American," or the hesitant, "Are you Asian?" My favorite affirmation came from a girl named Debbie who ran up to me exclaiming, "You look like us! Maybe we're twins!" After this discovery, I just had to get a picture with my long lost twin. Blending in here has been a somewhat pleasant change for me since I am used to being one of a handful of Asians at my predominantly Caucasian school.

Having attended Prestonwood Christian Academy from Kindergarden to the present, I hardly ever notice the fact that I am a different. The student body doesn't treat me as an anomaly; but, I do realize I "stick" out in the sea of blond heads. It has been a different experience here in Taiwan blending in with the crowd. The attention my fellow Plano Youth Ambassadors receive makes me feel blessed to live in a place where I can be different yet not feel out of place or receive inquisitive stares from passersby.

After school, Eleanor, Amanda, Maya, Wil, our host students, some of their friends, and I all headed over to Coldstone Creamery. The line was literally out the door. I had never seen so many people in line for ice cream in my life. On top of that, Coldstone was three stories high! Quickly consuming our ice cream, we decided to play spoons and used the nose-gos game to determine who would fetch the spoons. Vicky lost so we told her to get six spoons, which she looked terribly embarrassed about. We didn't understand her terror until after she left and her friends explained it to us. Somehow in a misunderstanding, she thought losing the game meant that she had to go and touch six people's noses! Wil ran to stop Vicky but wasn't fast enough to prevent her from touching two surprised strangers' noses.

That night, I had dinner with Vicky's family. Her mom had prepared more kinds of tofu than I ever imagined possible. Tofu is a staple in their diet and she wanted me to try all the variations of the native dish. I felt like a judge for an Iron Chef competition with tofu as the secret ingredient. My favorite was of the cold variety and had some sort of special egg on top. It looked gross and moldy since the egg was green but it actually didn't taste bad, kind of like a hard boiled egg. There was so much food, I felt bad for hardly making a dent in the bountiful cornucopia of food. It was definitely tofu mania and I truly appreciated Vicky's mother's hospitality. I learned there must be 101 different varieties of tofu. Vicky's mom proved that.