Foreigners made up a considerable but not overwhelming proportion of the total walkers. Among foreigners I saw a former classmate of mine and a girl who is in my Chinese school now. Of normal people I saw the aforementioned community activist, a journalist friend of a friend who I’d had a very nice interview with a long time ago, and Lin Zhengxiu, who graduated from the urban studies department at National Taiwan University a little bit before a couple of friends of mine, was a leading force in one of the first community activism movements (the one that gave rise to the wonderful area around Yongkang Park), went on to become the head of the Civil Affairs Department and then the oversight department of the Taipei City Government, and is now running for national legislature. Legislative elections are coming up in December and more or less any event is a chance to get your little truck and broadcast speeches and hand out tissue packages with your name on them, but he was the only one there. He gave actually a very nice, pretty impassioned speech as he rolled along on his little truck right in step with our walking. I generally have a very good impression of him, and I’m convinced it’s not just because he has a really cute, dorky haircut and is a member of the Green Party.

The small size was actually very nice, not only because it proved once again how tight Taipei social circles are but because the atmosphere was very chatty and friendly. I talked to the prostitutes’ rights people. Prostitution, as I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere, was legal by license until around 2000 or 2001 (although licenses were increasingly rare). For some reason Chen Shuibian as mayor and then Ma Yingjeou after him decided to completely delegalize it. This organization technically wants it relegalized, but they seem to realize that this is not likely; so they are also training former prostitutes to do other things. Specifically, they’ve set up a special healthy-vinegar brewing operation right near my beloved Taiwanese puppet theater. I’d actually heard of this place before and had even tried to find it, with no success, but now I having talked to these people I am now armed with a website (in Chinese) where I can get more information and the address, and I expect to be eating vinegar soon. The phrase “to eat vinegar” in Chinese means “to be jealous” (as in of a spouse or lover), so of course after I reported my findings back to the group we foreigners had to cluster and make amongst ourselves the silly puns appropriate to people of our kind.

The parade was a good time, but it was a good time with a lot of people under a bright sun, and by the time we’d completed the route and ended up crowded in the little square next to the restored Japanese-era theater (which used to be a famous gay pick-up place and is now a high-class café and puppetry exhibit) in Ximending, the super-fab glitz lush adolescent shopping district whose weekend crowds are more or less intolerable to anyone over the age of twenty-three, the foreigners were about ready to catch another vibe. We hopped on the subway and made our way to the opposite end of the world, a tea house in the wonderful area around Yongkang Park.