It was 1:00 in the afternoon when Winnie, one of the people at the Jing Si Café, first warned me about what was to happen that afternoon. “At 1:30, there’s going to be an air raid drill.” Not certain I’d heard correctly – after all, it’s not like we practice hiding from invasion very often in Boca Raton, Florida – I asked her to repeat herself.
“An air raid drill. They’ll turn on the siren and then we have to turn off the lights and not move. You can’t go outside and you have to hide inside.”
An air raid drill! A real air raid drill! I hadn’t known that Taiwan practiced them, but it made sense when I thought about it; after all, a country constantly threatened by war to the point of having forced conscription probably should have air raid drills. I asked a few more questions, and learned that we’d be having the “easy” drill today. There are two drills a year, one easy and one hard.
At 1:30 the siren began to sound, and sure enough, a policeman came to stand outside our door and we were told to turn off our lights and sit in the back room. We had customers, but they (clearly) knew what was going on and had to just sit at their tables and not move. Half an hour of sitting in the dark would have been torture, if it hadn’t been for the novelty of the whole affair. I was incredibly excited, especially when two Americans walked into our café from the inside door (the café is part of a larger building, so they came in without ever having walked outside.) They were confused at the lack of staff and stillness of all our patrons. One of our staff ran, ducking his head, to pull them to a table and sit down, but they couldn’t speak Chinese. That’s when they called me, and I had to hide from the policeman as I ran to the table and explained the whole thing to them.
“Duck! The Policeman’s Turning Around!” I immediately ducked my head, and watched the policeman take a quick scan of our café. I guess I was in time, since he turned back around. Back in the safety of the back room, I asked what happens if someone’s caught moving around. A fine, I was told, with increasing amounts for repeated violations.
This was the easy drill? I wondered what the hard one’s like! That one, they told me, was an hour long, and wasn’t just about turning off the lights and not moving around – the people in cars who were told to just pull over this time would have to park and hide inside during the “hard” drill; doors are locked; the MRT (subway) stops running; electricity is cut; everyone must hide out of sight from outdoors.
Can you imagine having air raid drills like that, even if only once a year? It must be difficult to force yourself to be quiet and still in a small back room for so long. Don’t you “Anne Frank” me, it’s not the same.
Air raid drills and forced conscription? I think I’ll stick to the US. The mandatory military service was the reason we chose not to apply for Dual Citizenship, I don’t want to have to serve in the military for a year (it was a two-year term up until last year) - especially when I don’t even live in the country. Steve can go enlist and carry the big stick; I’ll do the soft speaking part.
(A quick note: obviously, Chinese is spoken in Taiwan. The quotations are all translated.)
