"Where are all the kids playing baseball?" One is a photo-grapher for an internationally known geography magazine; the other the founder of a magazine for children in the U.S. They came to Taiwan separately to do stories. When they were interviewed, they both said they expected to see the streets filled with kids playing baseball, because they remembered Taiwan's miraculous Little League teams of the past.
Are Taiwan's kids still enamored of baseball? The answer of course is yes. In Taipei there are costly week-long baseball camps; parents still don't flinch at buying a complete uniform and cleats, glove, and aluminum bats. In eastern Taiwan, the kids aren't so well off materially as in Taipei, but their skills are better once the ump calls "Play ball!" In Taitung County alone there are more than 130 little league squads. The boys of the summer camps get their heads shaved and sweat their way through long workouts and laps. (See "The Boys of Summer" on page 30.)
Some people say this is a sign of the flourishing of youth baseball. But others say this is because "kids in eastern Taiwan can't compete academically with kids in western Taiwan, so they try to make it by playingball." Can it be? Now that professional baseball has begun in Taiwan, young stars no longer worry about where they'll go after the Little League World Series in Williamsport. Didn't the men's team just bring the silver medal back from Barcelona?
From the days of "winning glory for the nation" and the dream of going to Williamsport to dreams of Olympic gold and the big leagues, young ballplayers in Taiwan have never lacked for motivations to win. From teams stacked with "ringers" and the "win-the-medal" mentality to subsidies and the Unified Competition, it seems that adults in Tai wan are finally trying to move away from the "elite" teams of the past. The only questions are, do kids who are good at playing baseball really make poor students, and can kids who are good students really "make it" without playing baseball?
Those days of Williamsport and the "Triple Crown" surely give us some warm memories: the whole family up in front of the TV in the wee hours of the morning to cheer on the team overseas, watching the children coming through the screen from the other side of the world winning the title "world champions" even as those in Taiwan were straining away to get the economy to take off and the country was meeting diplomatic setbacks in the 1970s--what adult wasn't moved to tears? Then the streets and alleyways would fill with the sound of firecrackers, giving everyone a chance to release their frustrations.
In those days, the TV still had a cabinet with doors you could lock up. Mom and Dad would prod the children transfixed in front of the set--who should have been doing their homework--by using the excuse, "Too much TV and you'll burn out the tube." (Somehow it never did when we watched those baseball broadcasts all night!) In those days, younger sister would wear what older sister had worn; rarely did anyone bear to part with the NT$4 it cost to get in a cab; in those days one never heard of "latchkey kids" or "amphetamine addicts"; life was perhaps lacking in material goods, but it was full of hope. (See "In Search of Industrial Heirlooms" on page 78.)
It seems inevitable that nostalgia has become trendy in an age of plenty. In the program "Signs of the Times" recently broadcast by the BBC, there was a thought-provoking conversation between mother and daughter: The mother points to the antique furniture in her daughter's house and wonders, "What's the point of spending all that money just to buy back some old junk?" The daughter replies, unperturbed, "This 't junk, this is history, the beautiful remnants of history...." "And what do you know about history?" asks Mum. These things merely remind her of the inconvenience and hardship of her grandmother's generation. "If I'd known you'd have all wanted them, I would have kept them around and today I'd be rich!"
If everybody had kept around all their old stuff, would everybody have gotten rich? An amusing question. In today's disposable, everchanging world in which we live, are our days really more convenient and easier? That's another problem. At least from the point of view of transportation, the answer is not necessarily yes. In the 196Os, when an auto was just a dream and a Sanyang motorcycle in the bride's dowry was considered something only for the hoi-polloi, probably very few people thought that when everybody achieved car-owning status, cars would become instruments of abuse.
A Mercedes Benz 600 rolling along the streets of Taipei at one kilometer per hour is no laughing matter. Because the driver sits ensconced in a glittering steel case, with treated air and soothing stereo, cars have become the biggest obstacle to interpersonal communication and just getting around.
What is surprising is that with the world in a recession, and auto mobile factories closing, Taiwan's imports of cars went up 200% last year. Since last year, Taiwanese have bought at least 4,000 Mercedes Benzes, of which one-eighth have been the 600 model costing NT$6.3 million.
Faced with the unbearable "dark ages of traffic" which the people of Taiwan must nevertheless bear, a reporter from afar contends: "People in Taiwan are really optimistic; in the past they devoted themselves to the economic miracle, and now they have decided to solve the problems."
It is this confidence derived from the creation of "miracles" that enables people, when asked why Taiwan children always manage to win at baseball, to respond, "Didn't they lose this year to the Philippines in the Far Eastern championship? Oh well, they're just kids--as long as they're happy, that's enough."
