Three Hundred Meters

A stranger was offering me his motorcycle keys, and I was about to take them. This could be bad, I know.

But uncertainty seemed to be the unofficial theme of a journey that started with a rescheduled flight. Things were looking to swing good or bad, but there’d be a saving grace: guanxi. I’ll explain.

I was headed to Taiwan’s archipelago Penghu Islands. A friend who grew up there prodded me to visit his hometown on the grossly-overlooked smallest island. If I didn’t like Wang’an’s spacious seas or skies, I’d at least enjoy a meal with his parents. Sold!

His directions: “Go to the one gas station and ask for my dad.” Wait, that’s it?

But such was guanxi, the relationship concept central to Chinese society that pulls in distant connections. Guanxi made it acceptable not only for one friend to recommend his family to me but also for me to approach his father with no prior introduction.

So I did. But the strange man at the gas station didn’t understand why a strange girl had suddenly materialized. Awkward! What’d I expect, a smile and some cookies? Then confusion cleared to gushing generosity. In one breath, he offered me a room at his B&B (one of the island’s two), a meal at his restaurant (one of three), and a motorcycle.

I took the keys.

The ride showed why tourists slight the island: it can be circumnavigated and forgotten in minutes. Peppered by few houses and fewer shops (literally one), Wang'an is the boondocks of a tourist-light archipelago. Yet guanxi makes it otherwise.

Any tourist might see the island’s highest point as simply that. But through the father and his tales, I saw God’s Footprints in the modest peak – named because a deity stepped too firmly on Wang’an while urinating, leaving an indelible footprint on the rock.

Guanxi is more than getting motorcycle keys like The Price Is Right. Instead, it personalized Wang’an into faces and stories. Though regarded by its (few) visitors as a touch-and-go island, I saw through guanxi a township diminutive in size but not in vibrancy. Like good travel juju, guanxi opened up the island to me - not just a stranger’s door.

Or maybe it’s like this: that afternoon, I rode over to its wide beach, where sand folded into waters. Suddenly a bus stopped and choked out squawky tourists, who groped at cameras. Met only by the unadulterated horizon, they left, grumbling.

But I stayed, clutching the motorcycle keys, lingering beneath the uncluttered skies of an island created by a squatting god.