THURSDAY 14 MARCH 2019
01:19
Tuesday evening I was waiting at a busy intersection in the city. As people rushed past me on their scooters and motorcycles, I thought how each and every one of these people had a story – something you could find out if you spent a minute or two with them.
Little did I know how I would have the opportunity the next evening to find out just how true that was.
11:24
So it came that my wife and I walked from the restaurant last night where we had dinner, to an ENT specialist in our neighbourhood where my wife wanted to go for her flu symptoms. As we walked past a series of businesses on the walkway, I saw from the corner of my eye a woman stepping out from a psychiatrist’s consulting room. (I noticed her because she looked for a moment like someone who was in a class of mine for a while.)
A few businesses further, we came to the doctor’s. I said goodbye to my wife, and continued on the same walkway.
Not thirty seconds later, I heard a voice calling out, “Hey!” Seeing that little English is heard in the streets of Taiwan, I immediately suspected that I was the target of the call. Looking back, I saw a woman approaching, who looked very much like the woman who had exited the psychiatrist’s practice.
“Where are you from?” she immediately demanded.
Here I have to explain that after twenty years in Taiwan, I have a policy about this question. If you approach me politely, and say, “Excuse me, may I ask, where are you from?” I will respond. If you shout at me from a distance, and then without any introduction demand information from me, I’m not going to answer you. Or, I’m not going to proceed the way the person might have assumed. “Where are you from?” I asked her back.
No answer, just a repetition of her question.
“Why do you want to know?” I asked her with a hint of a smile on my face. “Are you from the police?”
The next hour and a half would make it clear that this was the wrong question.
She then became aggressive. “Why you don’t want to talk to me?” And then, a few seconds later, a more bizarre question: “Why you and you wife so poor?” This mention of my wife confirmed that she had seen us together before she approached me; most likely, as I suspected, when we had walked past her at the psychiatrist’s. I ignored her, and as I rounded the corner of the building, I quickened my pace, now just about a minute away from our apartment.
At this point she had moved away from me, but continued to scream in my direction from the other side of the street. “Why you look down on me?” (Interesting twist, I thought: First we were “poor”, and now she felt I looked down on her.) A series of words I couldn’t make out followed the English.
Ten meters further, I heard her running towards me.
What does a man do when he is in public, he is aggressively confronted by a woman he does not know – whom he happened to have seen at a psychiatrist’s office, and the woman shortly afterwards charges at him? Not only did I not want to be attacked, I didn’t want to be in a position where I would have had to defend myself with possible force.
The by now well-known advice, “Run, Forest, run!” had been floating in my subconscious the past few days. And so I started running, in my plastic sandals, with the woman following in furious pursuit. In the haze of the moment I also heard something like a plastic bottle being thrown in my direction. For some reason I didn’t go straight up the street to our alley, but down the street behind our apartment building. I heard her scream, “I’m going to call the police!” As I ran, my mind translated her further utterances in Chinese: Stop him! Stop him! He …
Almost at the other side of the street I noticed a man observing the whole affair. He first looked at her, then at me, and then he grabbed my arm. I pulled away, and told him in English, “She’s crazy! Call the police!” He seemed to be unsure of what to do, and I took the opportunity to run past the woman in the direction from where I came, around the corner, past another few shops, around another corner, into our alley; unlocked the door to our apartment building, rushed up four sets of stairs, and called my wife as I arrived at our apartment door.
Out of breath I told her: “There’s a crazy woman who just attacked me in the street! I think she may be on her way to you!” My wife was naturally unsure of what was going on, but I could hear the woman screaming in the background. “She’s already there!” I said.
In the apartment I put my wife’s soup and dumplings and her bottle of Coke on the coffee table (“Forest” even had to run with a plastic bag with food in his hand), got myself some socks and put on my sneakers – to be better able to run away, and called the police as I was leaving the apartment to go and save my wife. I gave the officer on the other end our address, and told him about the unstable one who had attacked me. I also informed him of my concern that my wife might be her next target.
Not more than a minute later, I was back in the walkway to the doctor’s office. As I had expected, the woman who chased me was standing outside, now surrounded by four police officers. “That’s him! That’s him!” she shouted in Chinese, with a fierce finger pointing in my direction. I calmly walked past the police, into the consulting room, and told my wife: That’s the woman I was talking about.
For the next few minutes, I explained to the police – one had already taken hold of my arm – my side of the story. Seeing that my liberty – in the truest sense possible – was at stake, I reckoned it was pertinent to inform them that her narrative, wrong as I knew it to be, may not have been a malicious lie, but the figment of a mind that may not be one hundred percent healthy. I prompted them to follow me. We proceeded down the walkway in the direction of the psychiatrist’s consulting room. There, I told them, in somewhat incorrect Chinese, that I was 99 percent sure I had seen her leave the room no more than one minute before she had confronted me.
Certainly essential to mention at this point that I fully understand that there are people with mental disorders, and people suffering from chemical imbalances. I don’t look down on people with health problems – physically or otherwise. The fact that I referred to her as crazy was not a medical diagnosis, but a simple remark based on her bizarre behaviour at my expense in public. I also don’t hold it against anyone if they want to or need to see a psychiatrist. Why would I? Do I look down on my wife who wants to see a doctor for her cough and sore throat? However, if a person acts aggressively towards me in public, and threatens my wife’s well-being, and calls the police and fabricates a story that I attacked her or something (it later came out that I had supposedly stolen money from her while she was speaking to me, which explains the “Why are you so poor?” comment), I am definitely not going to keep it to myself that I reckon she might be capable of believing figments of her imagination, based on the fact that I had seen her at a psychiatrist.
The police officers – three of them had accompanied me, probably in case I decided to start running again, then asked the receptionist at the psychiatrist if there had been a woman with them a few minutes ago. The receptionist came out on the walkway, looked down in the direction where the loud one was still waiting with the other officer, and slowly nodded her head.
I could see how the officers’ attitude towards me changed. I again explained in Chinese (for which I would at least have gotten a C+) what had happened, how she had tried to talk to me, how she had been rude and that I didn’t want to talk to her, how she had shouted at me from the other side of the road and threw a bottle at me, how she had charged at me and I how I felt compelled to run-Forest-run!, how a man grabbed me in the street (did she grab you, the officer enquired in Chinese), and how I first called my wife at home and then the police. The one officer pointed to the CCTV cameras in the area, with the implication that it would surely confirm whose version of events were accurate.
We then went back to the other doctor’s office. The other patients who were waiting with my wife in the small room looked more sympathetically at us, gesturing that we should calm down and sit – that everything would be all right.
Because I had also called the police, they wanted me to go with them to their station to make a statement. Because my wife would remain to see the doctor, I wanted assurance that the Chinese woman would not be in the area. They assured us that she had already left with a female officer.
I climbed in the back of the police car and drove the kilometre or so to their station. After arriving there, one lead me to what was clearly the back of the building, through a door into what looked like a basement, past a barking dog in a cage, and into a long, narrow office with padded walls, a few desks, and a TV high on a shelf with a blue screen and two Chinese characters gliding across the screen. The one officer then explained that everything was okay and I just had to make a statement. I gave him my Taiwan ID card, and he asked me to relate the whole story again. Which I proceeded to do, in my best Chinese. After a few more questions, he read back what he had written, with me asking for clarification here and there.
Along with my ID card, I also saw the woman’s ID card, and I surmised why I was in the basement: The woman was also in the building and they probably didn’t want her to flare up again.
A policeman in civilian clothes had since brought my wife, and after I shook hands with the officer who had taken my statement, we walked the few blocks home.
All in all, the incident probably ended not too badly. Four things counted in my favour, and I think the woman didn’t expect one of them. I was back at the scene within a few minutes, despite the presence of the police, and in spite of the fact that she was pointing at me as the person who had done X, Y or Z; I had called the police myself and told them I was concerned about my wife’s safety because of this person’s behaviour; I could tell my side of the story in Chinese; I could share with them that I suspected she had a health problem that could have influenced her narrative.
One somewhat unpleasant consequence is that quite a few people in the neighbourhood where we have been living for almost five years saw me bolting down the street with a bag of food in my hand, with a woman following anxiously behind me, all the while screaming that she was going to call the police and that I had done something to her. I have to face the other residents in this neighbourhood again, walk down the same streets and alleys, and walk past the same businesses where I had climbed into the back of a police car.
One should probably just have a thick skin, I encouraged myself, and keep your head high. What other choice do you have after all?
Oh yes, and I may have to think twice before talking to strangers in the street again.
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