Nicole Yang (楊捷) sits in the crowded office of one of Harmony Home's halfway houses for people with HIV/AIDS, in the Xinyi District of Taipei. As the non-profit organization's founder and secretary general talks about the disease, volunteers play with and coddle infants in one room while in another former patients care for adults with full-blown AIDS.
The firm but loving care given by the workers is in marked contrast to the reaction Harmony Home has received from residents in other communities. Local opposition to the organization has forced it to move out of several sites.
The residence in Xinyi is Harmony Home's third in as many years and the fear of neighbors finding out that there is an HIV/AIDS hospice in their community lingers in the back of Yang's mind.
PHOTO: NOAH BUCHAN, TAIPEI TIMES
"It's already occurred often enough," she said. "We are used to it."
Taiwanese attitudes towards HIV/AIDS are the subject of a lecture being held tomorrow by the Lung Ying-tai Cultural Foundation (龍應台文化基金會) in cooperation with the AIT's American Cultural Association (ACC). Titled Global Citizen: What Do I Have to Do with AIDS?, the organizers aim to raise awareness of the virus in Taiwan.
The lecture, to be held entirely in English, features Yang and a host of other speakers including Nicolas Papp, ACC director, and Regan Hofmann, editor-in-chief of POZ - a magazine dedicated to providing support and education on HIV/AIDS and empowering those suffering from the virus.
Past Taipei Salons have seen all available seats fill up very quickly.
"This time [registration] has been very slow," said Lung Ying-tai. "And this tells us something ... . It's already clear to me, how ignorant the community is about AIDS," she said.
In the March 9 edition of the Taipei Times a piece by Ninon Godefroy ran with the headine “The quiet, gentle rhythm of Taiwan.” It started with the line “Taiwan is a small, humble place. There is no Eiffel Tower, no pyramids — no singular attraction that draws the world’s attention.” I laughed out loud at that. This was out of no disrespect for the author or the piece, which made some interesting analogies and good points about how both Din Tai Fung’s and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co’s (TSMC, 台積電) meticulous attention to detail and quality are not quite up to
April 21 to April 27 Hsieh Er’s (謝娥) political fortunes were rising fast after she got out of jail and joined the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in December 1945. Not only did she hold key positions in various committees, she was elected the only woman on the Taipei City Council and headed to Nanjing in 1946 as the sole Taiwanese female representative to the National Constituent Assembly. With the support of first lady Soong May-ling (宋美齡), she started the Taipei Women’s Association and Taiwan Provincial Women’s Association, where she
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) hatched a bold plan to charge forward and seize the initiative when he held a protest in front of the Taipei City Prosecutors’ Office. Though risky, because illegal, its success would help tackle at least six problems facing both himself and the KMT. What he did not see coming was Taipei Mayor Chiang Wan-an (將萬安) tripping him up out of the gate. In spite of Chu being the most consequential and successful KMT chairman since the early 2010s — arguably saving the party from financial ruin and restoring its electoral viability —
It is one of the more remarkable facts of Taiwan history that it was never occupied or claimed by any of the numerous kingdoms of southern China — Han or otherwise — that lay just across the water from it. None of their brilliant ministers ever discovered that Taiwan was a “core interest” of the state whose annexation was “inevitable.” As Paul Kua notes in an excellent monograph laying out how the Portuguese gave Taiwan the name “Formosa,” the first Europeans to express an interest in occupying Taiwan were the Spanish. Tonio Andrade in his seminal work, How Taiwan Became Chinese,