Happy (well, not really, but anyway) Day of Mourning (which is yesterday now)!
Well, went over to my relative's place at Milpitas. June and Henry came to pick me up. I've only met June once before, I think more than 10 years ago, and she's a distant cousin from my aunt's side, which I later confirmed for sure is Cantonese (her parents came in '49), so some Cantonese was spoken. Big turkey (actually the smallest one), took 4.5 hours to bake. I played War of the Ring with Henry, which took about 4 hours, took a very long time to setup, had to refer to the rules many times, next game should be better. Throughout the night, Angel or June kept adding DVDs to watch, mostly chick flicks (one was an HK film, which was watched in Cantonese), although we started with Anger Management. So dinner was good, and Henry tried to compete with me but failed.
We only managed to finish off the appendages.
June left a couple hours after dinner, and I started to use Angel's laptop, which was riddled with problems, thanks to tons of spyware (190 problems on Spybot) and a couple viruses/trojans. I couldn't even run most programs at first until I got a registry fix. The rest of the night was spent scanning the laptop and fixing problems.
In the meantime, I discussed the issue of Taiwan and China with my aunt. To sum it up, she basically feels that Taiwan isn't doing very well. Taiwan does not have a lot of resources, especially human resources. All their talent has gone elsewhere, a lot of it sucked into China or just overseas as many people don't return to Taiwan once they go overseas. She stated how in Shanghai (where they were living for about 10 years), there are 200,000 Taiwanese officially, but unofficially, the figure is actually closer to 500,000,. That's just Shanghai alone. She also said how a lot of people in China who thought Taiwan was much better, after actually going to Taiwan, see that it's actually nothing spectacular and it's too crowded and so on. In other words, Taiwan's glory days are over, and it's really just in a state of decline now, and she feels at least that this is a decline that is relative to the situation of other Asian countries (i.e., other countries were hit bad during 1997, but Taiwan's actually doing worse than many of the countries economically).
Also, one of the reason she cites for people leaving Taiwan is the instability of Taiwan's society. Taiwan is becoming more and more inward looking. You rarely get any non-Taiwanese news anymore. As a result, people are getting lost in all the trivial news (like scandals and that sort of stuff I suppose), which is actually the same way I feel about the US's news. The difference though, she says, is that the US can afford to do this, being such a powerful (if not the most powerful) country. Taiwan cannot afford to do the same and lose sight of the outside world because Taiwan is nowhere near as strong. Anyway, she disagrees with this focus on the local stuff, and feels that there are more important things to worry about in Taiwan. The first of which is improving stability, then maybe the economy.
Meanwhile, she feels the opposite is happening in China, and they are able to lure people with a lot of skills there. As a result, everything Taiwan used to be known for, China can do, and do better, or will soon. She cited some past examples of products, and how if you buy things, there's a great chance it's manufactured in China. She says that this is happening to the electronics industry too in Taiwan. It's losing its ability to compete with China. Thus, if Taiwan becomes independent, it would just lead to Taiwan's demise as China does not have to cooperate with Taiwan economically. In the past, yes, but in Taiwan's current state, there isn't such a big incentive. On the other hand, she doesn't think Taiwan should be reunified either. In fact, because of the above reasons, China doesn't
really want Taiwan back. They've already got most of Taiwan's talent, and as long as Taiwan does not become independent, China won't lose face. So it's actually in China's best interest to keep Taiwan in the status quo, but outwardly proclaim they want Taiwan to be reunified one day.
Politically, she would never vote Green, but she wouldn't necessarily vote for Blue either. For example, Ma Ying-Jeou she would vote for, but the presidential elections? Both candidates sucked too much for her to waste her time with voting.
As for the polls that are supposedly showing a surge in pro-independence sentiment in Taiwan, she feels that in Taiwan right now, people are just in the mood for something new. They've been with the KMT for so long so the want to see if another party can do better, and that's where the DPP comes in. Except things have not really changed for the better under their rule.
She also doesn't think too highly of all the pro-independence people who live outside Taiwan. She feels that these people are often pro-independence because it won't really affect them. If Taiwan really tried to declare independence and China actually invaded, they aren't the ones to suffer while they live in Japan, the US, or somewhere else. It is the people in Taiwan. Yet, the people in Taiwan are being influenced into joining this blind fanaticism by the very people who have the least at stake.
We also talked about Simplified Chinese, and she basically talked about how a lot of the words are actually found in dictionaries or were in older Chinese text, so there really shouldn't be any outcry on the use of those words. She says how her father had read some text after the whole simplification process, and said that a lot of the simplified stuff he already recognized as already being commonly used in China unoffically by the people. But she definitely disagrees with merging words that have the same sound but different meanings into a single word, and she says that in China, there are actually people who are trying to fix those words. Also, some simplified words were not officially created, but came about as a result of convenience or ignorance (i.e., they didn't know they were using a word incorrectly). Kinda like the kind of spelling mistakes and shorthands you see on the internet nowadays for the English language.
