Back for the first time since 1973, TC Brown revisits old memories and discovers how much the nation has been remade
By TC Brown / Contributing writer
I was 18 and a naive US Air Force airman when I first set foot on Taiwan in 1968. I left as a more mature, somewhat wiser 23-year-old.Despite transitioning to an adult in those important, formative years, I didn’t think much about coming back. Until recently. Last month, I returned to Taiwan for the first time in 53 years. It was not even remotely like the country I left in 1973.When I departed, Taiwan was a slow-moving, impoverished developing nation under martial law. Outside of the cities, people in conical bamboo hats hand-tilled expansive rice fields that dominated the countryside. Few city buildings, even in Taipei, stretched higher than 10 stories. The Grand Hotel on a hill dominated the capital then, but now hundreds of buildings at least 100 meters or more tall, plus Taipei 101 at 509 meters, create a once-unimagined, contemporary world-class skyline.
TC Brown is pictured in front of the old Taichung Railway Station last month.
In 1968, bicycles, scooters, taxis, smoke-spewing buses, some automobiles, hand-pulled-and-bicycle pedicabs and the occasional water buffalo towing a cart competed for space on city streets.THE ‘DIRTY DOZEN’
