Weekends in Kinmen
When I tell people I live on the small island of Kinmen, the response is often: “so…what is there for you to, like, do there?” This is an understandable query. For my part, I also did not know much about Kinmen before I received an email stating that I had been placed there for the year. Once I got the placement, I took to google to learn about the key Kinmen sights and found answers including “wind lions” and “beach tank” [one of of my favorite wind lions pictured below]. These answers left me with even more questions, a few of which I have resolved two months into living here.
In an effort to explain what one does in Kinmen in their free time, I have compiled this list of several memorable weekend activities. Today’s selected recap will include 1) school birthday 2) taro festival 3) kinmen military sites and 4) tai wu mountain hike.
Activity #1: School Birthday Weekend
In Taiwan, I have been introduced to the tradition of the School Birthday Party, where schools put together a day of performances and lavish meals to celebrate the anniversary of their school’s founding. The school I teach at, Jinning Junior High School, celebrated its birthday this Saturday December 8 with festivities that lasted from 8 AM until mid-afternoon. I first learned about the upcoming celebration when I received a maroon teacher sweatshirt that says “CNJH NEVER STOPS” and was told that it would be my uniform for the day. I was very excited to receive school merch so I also wore it to class a lot during the week prior. (Teachers here wear very casual clothes to school, an adjustment I was initially nervous to make — out of fear of seeming like I wasn’t taking the job seriously — but have now embraced).
At 8 AM on Saturday, I showed up to school in my sweatshirt and milled around watching students prepare for the day’s activities. A small group of the 9th graders were dressed up to greet guests in what looked like flight attendant outfits. I later learned there was a height requirement of 160 centimeters to be part of this group; some of my students were upset to not be able to participate because they were too short. (“The height requirement is like how there is also a height requirement to be a flight attendant in Taiwan,” one teacher told me by way of explanation.)
The students waved me over to the first attraction of the morning, a bustling food court setup where I picked up a bubble tea, a bubble-shaped chocolate chip waffle on a stick, a “Slow Down” sticker for my scooter helmet, and a wind lion-related item that I still have not identified. I spent an hour or two stuffing myself at the food court then went inside for an all-school assembly led by some of the 9th graders, pictured below all dressed up.
At the assembly, we saw awards presented to successful alumni then watched a series of incredible Chinese yo-yo performances and dances. Jinning Junior High has a competitive Chinese yo-yo team that recently won a national tournament in Taiwan, so I was very excited to get to see the student yo-yo performances. They did not disappoint. I have never seen anyone jump rope and yo-yo at the same time and I’m not really sure how what I witnessed was physically possible. There were also yo-yo performances at the all-faculty lunch, which took place immediately after this assembly ended. However, the audience was not as dialed into these student performances as most people’s attention was instead fixed on the massive amounts of food and gaoliang liquor piled up on every table.
At the faculty lunch, I was placed at the vegetarian table, where we only had 4 seats filled yet received a family style feast that could indeed have fed most of my extended family. I tried multiple different dumpling varieties, soups with maybe 12 kids of mushrooms, sweet and sour tofu, and crispy taro sesame balls for dessert. The feast paused only when a herd of people arrived at my table with huge glasses of gaoliang liquor, including the school principal. They told me “喝喝喝” (drink drink drink) so I took a shot of gaoliang with the group and then we took a photo together. My expression in this photo is sort of pained as I unfortunately still have not acquired the taste of gaoliang. It is a work in progress. After this lunch I went home and took a long nap.
The weekend celebrations continued on Sunday, when one of the local English teachers at my school took me and three of our 9th grade students out to a delicious hotpot lunch. We spent a lovely few hours chatting in a mixture of English and Chinese while everyone politely pretended not to notice me making a mess of my fancy mushroom ingredients and dipping everything in the wrong order. Things really picked up when the students began offering their opinions on celebrity outfits from the September met gala (Kendall Jenner’s outfit got a thumbs up, Olivia Rodrigo’s was bad, Rihanna embarrassed herself). They told me that they all watch a lot of American tik toks to practice English comprehension and their favorite tik tokers are Charli D’Amelio, Addison Rae, and James Charles. These 3 students are awesome at English so I guess the tik toking must be working.
To clarify, we were at hotpot to celebrate another big event of the week: the three 9th graders had all just participated in the Kinmen County English Speech Competition. For this contest, selected participants from Kinmen’s five middle schools wrote, memorized, and delivered a speech entirely in English. At my school, I have been working individually with five kids on public speaking and pronunciation skills for over a month to help prepare them for this competition. Getting to see the speeches live after all of their hard work was truly a highlight of my time here — especially when one of them placed third overall and got to take home a cash prize !!! In the spirit of good sportsmanship I am sure that this would have been a memorable experience even if our school didn’t win anything….. however I will add that seeing one of my students on stage, grinning ear-to-ear while getting his award was incredibly special.
Activity 2: Taro Festival
On a very different note, in October a few ETAs and I spent a Saturday attending the Taro Festival on Little Kinmen Island (Little K for short). Little K is even smaller than Kinmen island and can be reached from normal Kinmen by taking a 10-minute ferry. At this festival, we enjoyed taro in many different forms, including baked taro-flavored sesame balls and taro chips. If you get the right tickets in advance you get to dig for your own taro in a field. We did not get the right tickets to dig for taro but we still got to hold some prize-winning taros with the mayor of Little Kinmen Island. My neighbor later asked me about this moment without me having told him about it, to my confusion. He then showed me that it had been immortalized in the local news as seen below.
At the festival, we also were invited to take some photos with soldiers who had brought a tank and an Instagram frame setup. They offered us all of their gear to try on. It was very heavy.
The military forms a fairly constant backdrop to life in Kinmen, despite the peaceful pace of our day-to-day existence. Many of the local tourist spots are artifacts from mid-20th century conflicts, which brings me to activity #3.
Activity 3: Learn about Kinmen history
In one of the first English classes I taught in Kinmen, I asked my students to suggest places that I should visit in Taiwan. Most of them suggested Taipei or Kaohsiung, along with other smaller cities along the island’s west coast.
“Let’s get some other suggestions. Try to give me places no one has said yet,” I said. One student raised his hand with sudden excitement.
“Yes?”
“China!” he exclaimed.
My co-teacher laughed. The other students did not laugh. I hesitated, trying to decide how to respond. Did he not understand the prompt? Was he just trying to be funny?
“Fina, sometimes they are confused because we are so close to China here,” my co-teacher said quickly. “They might think Xiamen (厦门) is almost Taiwan. You can just move on.”
“Ok,” I said. “Thanks, Louis. I do also want to visit China. But remember that we are talking about places in Taiwan, you know, like Taipei or something.”
That weekend, I watched the sun set over Xiamen’s skyscrapers from the roof of Kinmen’s “Triangle Fortress”, a refurbished former military fort on the island’s west coast that features a birdwatching exhibit (naturally) and a rooftop café. From where we sat in the café, I could see the city of 4.3 million people flashing with the lights of buildings and animated billboards. It looked close enough to reach out and touch.
Although we can’t currently cross the border into China, glimpses of its coastline are a fixture of day to day life, as are reminders of the not-so-distant history of conflict between Taiwan and its neighbor. Before watching the sunset from Triangle Fort, we had just visited the site of the Battle of Guningtou, a bloody confrontation between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and Taiwan/ Republic of China (ROC) that took place in October 1949 — near the end of the Chinese Civil War. This battle formed the impetus for the construction of many of the military fortifications still visible in Kinmen today.
Taiwan had almost emerged from the civil war with Kinmen (then called Quemoy) under its control, yet the Chinese commanders still aimed to capture it. Upon hearing of a planned PLA attack, Taiwan’s troops laid land mines, set anti-landing spikes on the beaches and prepared to ambush the PLA when they approached. The PLA was caught off guard by the extent of Taiwan’s defensive preparations and suffered a surprise defeat in a battle that left thousands of soldiers dead on both sides. The Civil War officially ended soon after, in December 1949, and Taiwan has held onto Kinmen ever since.
Today, you can visit the beach where the conflict took place, accessible by scootering through some fields then climbing down a rope onto the sand. On the beach, I stood at the water’s edge and stared at the shores of northern Xiamen, trying to imagine the PLA ships sailing over 72 years earlier. The dramatic images in my head were almost impossible to reconcile with the calm I felt watching the waves crash slowly along the sunny coast.
Visiting sites like this serves as a bit of a reminder that we live on a piece of land frequently referred to by major news outlets as a “frontline island.” Otherwise, it’s almost jarring how quickly you can get used to the military as a constant background presence while you live your own peaceful life drinking bubble teas and scootering through fields to school.
Activity 4: Tai Wu Mountain
The highest peak on Kinmen is called 太武山/tai wu mountain , a 252-meter climb along a winding road where you can find a series of little temples, abandoned military temples and even a little coffee shop and restaurant. The trail is quite accessible by scooter from any point on the island so I have strolled up it a few times while I’ve been here, most recently to catch the sunset.
The first time I hiked Tai Wu Shan, my friend Lexie and I were surprised to come across a restaurant open for business near the top. We stopped inside with plans just to buy a cold iced tea (it was 3 pm) and met the restaurant owner, who offered me a sample of the crispy tofu he was grilling. As soon as I bit into the tofu I let out an involuntary expression of surprise. It was amazing. The owner grinned, then offered me another piece, and another.
“Ok,” I said, handing him my cash. “I would like to buy the meal you are making.”
Lexie and I planned to just share the one plate I had ordered, thinking it would be plenty for a mid afternoon snack. However — the owner came out with two full plates of food and said, smiling, that the second plate was on him. This wasn’t the end of it. While we were still eating (feasting), the owner came out yet again with two little cups of black coffee, then pointed to a garden behind the restaurant and told us that he’d grown the coffee beans himself.
In the two months I’ve spent in Kinmen, I have often felt overwhelmed by the kindness of strangers, whether it’s a surprise free meal or simply directions offered on the street the minute I look lost. This ever-present willingness to help people you’ve never met before has really caught me off guard and is a quality that I deeply admire in others. Beyond any particular activity or outing, i find myself thinking back on these frequent moments of kindness when I ask what has left the strongest impact on me so far. I can only hope to be able to pay it forward in the months of teaching and weekend wandering to come.
