Saru Church, Taiwan

Pastor Na InSu (The Second Batch)

Every country is culturally different.  Taiwan has a variety of cultural elements such as religion, politics, and education, which are different from those of Korea.  Let me briefly share some of my episodes here that illustrate the cultural differences.

Before coming to Taiwan as missionary, I had prepared traditional Korean fans and dolls for possible visits or special occasions.  Then, during my language course, I gave these to my teachers on Teacher’s Day.  But somehow, even though they smiled, their faces seemed a bit uneasy.

Then the next day, I found out why.  One of the teachers that received a fan gave me a Taiwanese New Dollar, saying it was the price for the fan.  When I asked him why he was paying me, he told me that in Taiwan, giving a fan as a gift means breaking a relationship for good.  It’s because of the Chinese pronunciation of fan (傘).  That’s why Taiwanese people don’t give fans as gifts and pay for the ones they receive as gifts.  I was embarrassed when my teachers’ uneasy looks came across my mind.  Then I thought, “What a huge cultural difference!”  I was disappointed that I couldn’t use many of the fans that I brought from Korea, but now I am using them as a way to introduce Korea when I speak at evangelistic meetings. There are things that should never be given as gifts in Taiwan: umbrellas, fans, neckties, shoes, wall clocks, and so on.  The Chinese use the same word for umbrella that they use for fan, and it means to sever.  A necktie given by a woman suggests putting a man under restraint.  Shoes mean that you want them to go away in those shoes, and wall clocks signify that it’s over, implying death.

There are cultural differences in religion, too.  Each day Taiwanese people burn a piece of yellow paper in a trash burner in front of their houses.  They say that living descendants keep burning it so that their dead ancestors will have enough to cover their traveling expenses in the next world.  Only then can the following generations live at ease.  One time, a new missionary brought all kinds of trash to a trash burner in front of another person’s house and burned it, thinking it was the place to burn things.  He was so fortunate that the owner of that house wasn’t there.

Taiwanese people recklessly set off firecrackers to cast out evil spirits, which startles me when I pass by them.  What’s more, after someone dies, they wait for a month or two in order to choose a lucky day to hold a funeral.  They use the main road in front of their house as the funeral place and block half of it with a tent for three days, but nobody complains about it. They just wait for their mourning to end.

Indeed, there are so many cultural differences between Taiwan and Korea.  Each culture is meaningful in its own way.