Pedestrians in Taipei, Taiwan (Image: EPA/Ritchie B. Tongo)

“May you live in interesting times” is a quote with many meanings. Some describe it as a Chinese curse rather than a blessing: life being better and safer during the uninteresting times of peace and tranquillity, rather than the chaos of interesting times.

Which brings me to how I find myself living in interesting times in Taiwan, a place recently described by The Economist as “The most dangerous place on Earth”. This must be news to Ukrainians.

Years working in advertising eventually drove me to drink, so opening a bar seemed a sensible career move. My wife Gemma was born in a rustic Taiwanese fishing village and later moved to Japan to run bars for the Yakuza. We teamed up in Sydney to open the original Mamasan Bondi, before evolving into Bad Mama in Surry Hills.

Our mutual hunger for adventure brought us back to Taiwan three years ago to build a Bad Mama out of an old fishing boat in a 150-year-old derelict building up a dark, skinny, medieval laneway where hookers brawl with gangsters behind a massive temple to the goddess Mazu, the patron saint of seafarers everywhere in the wild port city of Keelung. 

Any sensible discussion of contemporary Taiwan requires both context and history. Keelung was inhabited for hundreds of years by the Ketagalan — one of the many tribes of Indigenous Taiwanese peoples who share DNA with Samoans.

They were subsequently raped and pillaged over centuries by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Qing Dynasty Chinese — even the British and French too, before modern Taiwan was created during the Japanese colonial period from 1895 to 1945. 

It remains a somewhat inconvenient truth for our neighbourhood bully that the Chinese Communist Party has never governed the island of Taiwan. Ever.

The world’s press has currently whipped itself up into a frothing frenzy about the imminent invasion of Taiwan — but the fact is that nobody I talk to here gives a fat rat’s arse about these turbocharged, titanic tanties. Nobody here fucking cares. Nobody even talks about it. 

Because it’s been going on continuously now for nearly 70 years. This bellicose, bellowing brat has been banging on and hanging around like a fart in a spacesuit — all hat and no cattle. It’s like an Angus Taylor press conference: no one is listening. We’d rather just get on with living than live in fear.

Reading the international news coverage of Taiwan makes me feel like a pregnant woman in America — everyone is threatening me and screaming what I should think and how I should act. 

The greatest irony of all comes from my friends in America who tell me they fear for my safety here, which is interesting coming from a nation that only has one political party — the other having morphed into a domestic terrorist organisation. 

When you own a bar it becomes a magnet for rumours and raconteurs, so I do get to talk to the very few people who actually have an opinion on the current situation. Consensus is China will continue to fart in our general direction but the risk of losing face is far too great to try it on. For now.

Another beer, mate?