kafka with a human touch

Christ, I’m exhausted today. A kind of unfortunate outing yesterday evening combined with a few extremely unfortunate mosquitoes at night (wah. I want a frog.) combined with this strange get up and go morning vibe I’ve had the last few days that makes it impossible to sleep in. Before me right now is a little carton of goose meat that even I find a little too fatty (though delicious) and one of my favorite foods of all time, lurou fan, white rice topped by a scoop of an oily concoction of chopped up stewed meat.

Yesterday I failed to sell my motor scooter for a ridiculously low price to one of my favorite The Neighborhood Mama’s, by name of H.[1] The ridiculously low price was suggested by the local mechanic, and I’m cool with it. When I spend money I tend to consider it no longer existing in any form, so the idea that I can get any money at all for an object that is not, itself, money is always a little thrilling. When you sell a motor vehicle, you need to do a certain amount of paperwork; usually a motor scooter repair place will do it for you. All they need is the vehicle paperwork and the i.d. cards of the buyer and seller. We gave the guy with the ridiculously low appraisal the paperwork, my friend’s i.d. card, and my passport, and he reported back: No go. You need your residence visa. And it has to be valid. You can’t just use the residence visa you used when you bought the thing, if it’s no longer valid.

Much like a nation-state, Taiwan has somewhat complex and somewhat annoying rules governing the ways that people can be foreign in Taiwan. Americans and other nice people can get a non-extendable thirty-day visa upon arrival just for being them; but if you want to stay longer, you have to go to the non-embassy in your nice country first and get an extendable visa, which usually requires someone vouching for you. If you can’t get an extendable visa, you can always just leave the country, come back in from somewhere else, and get another thirty day just-cause-you’re-you stamp. But Taiwan is an island, so leaving the country means getting on a plane, which means spending at least around $300 to $400 plus at least a day in Hong Kong, where there’s nowhere to sit down and you have to pay money just to breathe the air.

If you’re someone like me, but not actually me, you can always get Academia Sinica to vouch for your extendable visa—it’s very easy to get affiliated with them if you can show that you are affiliated with a school in America and are getting an income of some sort. If you are actually me, you will never, not once, get your shit together early enough to have this process completed in time, and the thing will always still be in the works when you go to the non-embassy to try to get your visa just a couple of days before your flight. Then you’ll talk to the lovely lady at the desk and explain your situation and ask if she has any advice on what you should do, and she will be so charmed by the fact that you, an unmistakable whitey, talk Chinese to her that she will explain the situation to her boss and try to make sure you get an extendable visa anyway, even without the voucher, and then she’ll ask you, while you’re there to pick up the visa anyway, to translate some completely untranslatable concept into English for her, and then you’ll look like a fool. But a fool with an extendable visa.

If you stay here long enough to extend your visa a couple of times, and Academia Sinica still has not tired of your tiresome ways, you can get vouched for an extended residence permit, which allows you to come and go and stay freely for usually about a year, plus extensions. It also allows you to legally buy a motor scooter, a clause I took advantage of a couple of years ago. Subsequently I returned to the US, let my residence permit lapse, and came back to Taiwan, this time on a short-term extendable visa. I left my bike with Jennifer and her mom (whose scooter had just broken down) and picked it up again when I came back. The scooter is in my name and the parking tickets come to my address, so it seems like I legally own it; but now that I do not have a residence permit, it appears that I can no longer legally sell it.

Mama H and I followed the scooter fixer’s advice and went to the people in charge of customs issues, in a big office building about ten minutes’ drive away. We explained our situation to the lady at the information desk, who looked completely confused. “You can’t sell your scooter? That can’t be right. But we don’t deal with this issue here, and I don’t know who does. Maybe you should go to the central police station.” The police station issues visa extensions and residence permits. So we hopped back on the scooter and tootled over there, another five or ten minutes, and explained ourselves to two more people who had no idea what we were talking about. They suggested maybe I needed a residence certification, which would certify that I was a resident during the period that my residence permit was valid. I somehow did not feel that this was going to be very helpful, but Mama H insisted that I get one. In the meantime I asked the lady writing it up for me who is actually in charge of motor vehicle titles. She called information and got us the phone number. Mama H called up and talked to someone there for a while, and reported that we should go there, in person, together, and if it didn’t work we could go look for Mr. Lai on the third floor, maybe he could help us. We parted with this agreement and a date for Friday morning.

When I got home I called up the vehicle title place myself. I got someone on the phone and explained the situation to him (using what I think were probably a lot of misplaced and forced-sounding coloquialisms—Mama H speaks Mandarin like it’s Taiwanese and I always end up getting a little of those rhythms and particles myself when I spend time with her. I find it really enjoyable, it’s an unusually free kind of fluency for me, but I think it probably sounds fake on a foreigner). Here’s what you need to do, the administrator said. Where are you now? Are you in Taiwan? Okay, you need to come, you yourself, in person, with your passport, and the title for the scooter and the insurance paper, and the buyer needs to come, with her i.d. card and her chop. In person. Okay, I said, we can do that. And that’ll be okay? It won’t be a problem then? “Well, look, I can’t exactly say it’ll be okay, just like that” said the government administrator on the other end of the line. “Strictly speaking, it is not legal for you to sell your scooter without a residence permit. But here you are, you have a scooter, you’re about to leave. What are you supposed to do, get a residence permit just so you can sell your scooter? That would be totally ridiculous, right? Of course if you’re leaving, you want to sell your scooter. We don’t want to stand in the way of that, that would be completely unreasonable. We want to help you do this handle this paperwork. Just come by with all the documentation, like I said.”

We’ll see what happens tomorrow morning.

---

[1] What follows is a tale of woe about vehicle titles that can only be matched by the tale of woe about vehicle titles that I went through, and in some sense am still going through, in order to officially let my friend in Chicago to use my car while I am in Taiwan. That story would be much longer than this one, and have considerably more acrobatics (at one point it had him receiving my storage room key in the mail, driving out to the storage place, and climbing over all my belongings to look in my file cabinets for paperwork that did not exist, because the state of Illinois had failed to send me a title at all. Sorry D…). But currently we are talking about unreasonable procedures here, not there.