Our early days in late Autumn on Penghu were fine as we explored the beaches and temples. The weather was breezy, but nothing too extreme. But around Christmas the winds picked up, and by mid January they were up to what Penghu residents refer to as “normal speed.” At one point during the Lunar New Year’s holiday I asked a neighbor when the winds might end. “June,” she answered.
The ruthless wind, though largely absent in the summer months, is Penghu’s most prominent off-season feature, giving trees on the island their pronounced southward tilt. The implications of a half year in a wind tunnel dawned on us before winter had even begun. A constant howl raged outside the windows of our ninth story apartment, a whining that ranged in pitch, tenor and severity without ever going away. Every waking moment seemed to have a weird tinge, and I found myself thinking more and more of switching from travel to horror writing. My fiancé took to blasting loud punk rock music at all hours to counter the horrible droning. In heavy rain, the wind drove the water horizontally into the glass of the windows with a deafening thud, as if someone was aiming a fire hose at them.
On sunny days we made the best of it, going out for long bicycle rides on Penghu’s wide and largely traffic-free roads. On good days our rides were fairly evenly split between agonizingly slow pedal-mashing headwind slogs and screamingly fast tailwind sprints. On bad days, the winds just pushed our bikes sideways.
By early spring, a deep sense of isolation had set in. All of the ROC’s outer islands have a remote feel, but in Penghu the isolation is especially pronounced. From Kinmen and Matsu you can see a large body of land on the horizon (even if you can’t legally get to it), and Green Island and Lanyu feel somewhat connected to Taitung. Geographically and culturally, Penghu feels alone in a vast blue sea. Perhaps more so than the wind, this is the reason only a handful of westerners call Penghu home for long. There are a few; one of our friends is an Australian surfer (of some renown back home) who came to Penghu specifically for surf and isolation. A few foreign windsurfers have also settled on Penghu, arguable one of the best spots for the sport on the globe. But for the most part, western faces on the island are few and far between.
Amy had mentioned in passing that on Penghu we’d feel like rock stars. Being naive, I assumed she meant we’d be offered access to cheap drugs and easy sex; alas, this did not turn out to be the case. What she really meant was that Penghu people have a tendency that most Taiwanese have thankfully outgrown – the compulsion to stare at foreigners. Penghu people are not shy when it comes to staring. Or pointing. Or calling their friends over to look for themselves before staring some more, as if they were confronted with beings completely alien, curious, or mildly distasteful. Had Amy substituted the words “burn victim” for “rock star” she’d have been closer to the mark.
It was this combination of local fascination and boredom that turned our wedding into a small media circus. When Laurie and I finally made it official at the Magong courthouse (allowing me to refer to her as my wife both for the remainder of this story and quite probably my life,) someone – perhaps an employee inside the oddly Soviet-looking building itself – took the liberty of informing the local press that two westerners were about to tie the knot. Before we’d even gotten to the walking-down-the-aisle part of what we assumed would be a quick and mostly private ceremony, a television news crew had showed up with a couple of print journalists in tow. After editing, the most important day of our lives had been transformed into a seven-minute human interest segment aired that night on Penghu TV.
Finding ourselves as unexpected local news celebrities wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. At last, we were able to convince ourselves (sometimes) that people were staring at us because they’d seen us on television, and not just because we happened to sport a mildly different shade of melanin. Perhaps it was because the incident happened in the summer, when the winds had finally died down, or maybe it was because the wedding happened well past the midway point in our year contract, but as the summer progressed we began to feel a bit more integrated into the local tapestry. Local friends began opening up to us on a variety of local issues, like ongoing-yet-unsettled plans to open up the island to casino gambling, which most regular people seem unhappy about but resigned to (“it will bring bad people to Penghu,” our friend who runs a coffee cart told us) and opening Penghu up to mainland tourists (“more lucrative than gambling and probably not as detrimental,” opined another friend).
As our year-contract winds to a close we find ourselves alternating between champing at the bit to leave and reflecting on the fact that, by and large, Penghu has been fairly good to us. Too windy for all but the most determined to put down roots, the archipelago has instead proven itself a reasonable perch from which to contemplate future plans. The world is filled with spots that fit well under the heading A great place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there; after nearly a year here, we think Penghu fits that bill to a T. And if such places aren’t worth writing about, where else is?
