I made plans in College, but on graduation, the plans seemed kind of boring. So, I packed up and moved to Taiwan. But it wasn’t just Taiwan that drove me to tea. I could have lived there for years and never experienced tea.

On the Internet, Taiwan seemed like a nice place. Unfortunately, the job I found (and meticulously researched) was illegal. There’s a lot of details here about immigration and Taiwanese policy, but long story short, many foreigners in Taiwan are illegal. I entered the country legally, and with a visa, but after that it went downhill.

Being illegal doesn’t usually matter because businesses operate by bribing government officials. Virtually every foreigner I knew had high-paying, illegal jobs at language schools. Unfortunately, the day I started, my school didn’t give a big enough bribe. I was chilling in the teacher’s lounge when a quiet woman ran at me and screamed “FOREIGNER RUN, NOW! GO!” I was chased by her accomplice, a little Taiwanese cleaning lady, to the secret safe room on the 4th floor. The other teachers were there, and as the police raided the school, they explained the situation.

I escaped that time. The police raids happened several more times before I wised up and quit. I quickly found another job with a big pay cut, but at a completely legal school run by the Japanese. Before I could start my legal job, I had to deal with the aftermath of the illegal job. Turns out, my former employer faked my visa documents when they applied for my work permit.

By “former employer” I mean an ex-South African tank commander. Saw some hints that he might have been evil, but I was too busy running from the cops to prove it.

The new job took me from Taipei to Taichung City, which is a wonderful place. It’s a haven for tea and tea culture, both modern and traditional. You can order a green tea mixed with Heineken on the corner (pi-jiu lu-cha), and across the street get a tea ceremony the way the Emperors enjoyed it. The food is out of this world, and the night markets are unparalleled.

On the flip side, Taichung is not a wonderful place for finding English speakers. Yes, plenty of people do speak English, but unlike Taipei, it’s not a hot-bed of international culture. Lots of staring from people on the street. Part of my “re-visa-ication” was an extensive medical exam. I was blessed to not need to publicly defecate into a bowl in front of nurses, which apparently some people from South Africa had to do. I did get pricked many times, and in many places, without warning.

A few days after the got a phone call from a nurse in very broken English telling me that, “You fail blood test. Come in Friday, You have the AIDS”. It took her about 5 minutes to spit that out, probably the longest sentence I’ve ever heard someone mutter.

I was a little bit stressed. I drank a lot of tea.

When I came in for the re-test, the hilarity ensued. The receptionist was nice enough, until she looked me up in the computer. “Ahhh! The blue eyed foreigner. You look like Brad Pitt. But You have the AIDS”.

At that point, the room cleared, a secret window opened in the waiting room, and a nurse in a full-on Ebola virus prevention suit called me over. I stuck my hand in the window, which was promptly bolted down, and I was pricked a few times. She ravaged me and I didn’t even know her name. The window closed and a doctor walked out, standing as far away from me as possible. He explained that they had to send my blood to a government unit, and if I had AIDS, they’d call to deport me.

Because in Taiwan, they deport you for having AIDS. Taiwan isn’t in the World Health Organization, or the UN. So, it’s a weird spot to get sick. They had SARS pretty bad, and since then, people wear surgical masks everywhere, even in times without SARS or swine flu.

Three weeks passed. Those three weeks were pretty long. I spent my days trying to translate tea menus and studying Chinese to keep my mind off the ridiculous. I did not have HIV when I got on the plane to Taiwan, so I was a bit confused. Unless running from the police gave me HIV, it just made no sense.

I got pretty ticked off when I didn’t get a phone call, so I went in to speak to them. Found someone who had lived in Australia, and she explained everything. Turns out, the nurses knew “The AIDS” and not “We suspect you had a false-positive HIV test”. They also failed to mention that the false-positive rate in Taiwan is much higher than the rest of the world because they use gosh darn paranoid hyper-sensitive metrics. And since I did not have AIDS (and wasn’t being deported), they felt no need to call me back. Apparently, a lot of new foreigners, who have different antibodies, get false positives in Taiwan.

There was a lot of logic there that I didn’t understand. I was happy with the result, so I kept it at that. During the whole ordeal, I spent so much time listlessly sitting in tea shops that I kept up the habit for the rest of my stay in Taiwan. That’s how illegal immigration and AIDS got me interested in tea.