In no particular order, bits of info I wish I’d known prior to teaching here, as they would have helped me connect with people faster, saved me from embarrassment and/or enriched my appreciation of Taiwan sooner.

1. Chien-Ming Wang: Taiwanese pitcher for the NY Yankees, and probably the sole reason the only baseball games sports channels feed here are Yankees games and reruns of past Yankees games. He recently signed with the Washington, D.C. Nationals, we’ll see how that changes the branding of Taiwan, because right now, you could throw confetti in the air and bet it will land on five people wearing Yankees merch. ( Wang is pronounced “Wong”, like rhymes with “song”, by the way.)

2. Lee Ang: is how the Taiwanese director of Brokeback Mountain is referred to here, because family names are listed first.

3. “Cow” & “Muffin”: Teaching farm animals and breakfast foods to little kids always rouses laughter because “cow” sounds like an incredibly vulgar word and “muffin” sounds like sounds like “horse sh*t”.

4. Lucy Liu: Charlie’s Angel is the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants to America. She spoke only Mandarin till she was 5 years old.

5. Hot pot/Hot springs/Cold springs: These come up in answers to questions as you’re trying to get to know a Taiwanese person. Hot pot is a favorite cold day food—it’s a seasoned boiling stock served on fire in the middle of your table and you cook your own raw meat and veggies in the stock, then fish them out to eat over rice. Natural hot springs—public or fed into hotels—are the every-weekend standard in cold weather for Taiwanese, and in the hot summer months, visits to natural cold springs take their place.

6. 119: not 911, is the emergency number, just in case. And, my students always use it to describe a crazy event, like something you would need to “call 119” about.

7. Pop: Korean Pop, Japanese Pop & Taiwanese Pop—if you can Google or Youtube what’s hot in these music genres, or better yet have a current hit song as your ring tone, you will be feeling the pulse of Taiwanese youth.

8. Jason Wu: the fashion designer made his home country proud when he came to major fame for his gown Michelle Obama wore at the White House inaugural ball.

9. Jerry Yang: A co-founder of Yahoo, is Taiwanese, and perhaps one link to why Yahoo is a stronger presence here than Gmail and other Google products (except for the one mentioned in No. 10!)

10. Steve Chen: A Taiwanese co-founder of YouTube, place of children latching onto the latest phenomena and quoting it all day. Currently, the saga of the aptly named “Annoying Orange” has infiltrated our lives via our students. Witness it for yourself, this is their favorite one, bringing back the “Wazzzup”, as if it wasn’t drawn out for long enough in the States: