In 1988-89, Steve Levitas, his wife, Tülin, and their three children lived in Taipei, Taiwan for a year and a half while Steve worked there on information systems.  Tülin taught at one of the Universities in the city.  The children attended the Taipei-American School.  In 2004, a very fine article on travel to Taiwan was published in the Washington Post.  Steve wrote the following letter to the author of the article.

Thanks for your wonderful article on Taiwan.  It was very thorough, and covered so many aspects of Taiwan!

In February 1988, my wife and I arrived in Taipei with our three children, ages 5, 8, and 12, to live, work, and attend school there for what turned out to be simultaneously a very long and a very short 14 months.  We were jetlagged and sleepless, arriving at the Grand Hotel amidst Chinese New Year activities.  We arrived with a bang!  Actually, it was more like bang-bang-bang-bang—all night long.

Memories.  We lived just one kilometer past the National Palace Museum, and visited it often.  For her birthday, my oldest daughter asked to have her birthday party touring the Shilin night market.  She later took Chinese in high school and majored in East Asian Studies in college.  My wife began to co-organize bus tours to local temples for the parents and staff at the Taipei-American School.  Unexpectedly, we adopted pets from the streets:  four dogs (we still have two), four cats, two pigeons, and a monkey for a day.  At last I got up the courage to try stinky tofu—and loved it!

For school vacations, we picked the kids up at 3:15 after school, and continued straight on to the airport.  We visited Hong Kong (“Shop until you drop!”), the People’s Republic of China, Korea (for the Olympics), Thailand, Indonesia, Japan, India, and exquisite little Kinmen (Keemoy to us).

We toured much of the island.  One day I took the kids for a drive on Yang Ming Shan, the mountain north of Taipei.  We drove along well-paved two-lane roads for some time among the mists, and suddenly came to a stretch of road where the mountain had fallen away, taking one side of the road with it.  Although I had to drive on the left, I used the remaining side of the road.

My wife, who always trusted acupuncture, has some pain from abdominal cysts.  We took a bilingual secretary from my office with us as a translator, and went to a well-reputed local acupuncturist.  His needles were in sterile single-use packs.  At the end of 30 minutes, I asked my wife if she had any relief.  She replied that the pain was “almost completely gone.”  Our young interpreter remarked that neither she, nor her mother, had ever used traditional Chinese medicine of any kind, and perhaps they should look into it.  How amazing that we should introduce local residents to this practice.  My wife also did a course of traditional Chinese herb medicine.  When she made a trip back to the US to have the cysts removed surgically, her doctor reported that they were already gone.

Our memories are intense and endless.  It was such a pleasure to see your article and have many of those memories recalled.  It was my Asian Studies daughter who spotted your article and sent me an electronic copy.

The culture shock was worse returning to the US than it was arriving in Taipei.  Our close friends simply missed seeing us about six times, but we had been around the world, and we were changed.