A rite of passage for any foreigner in Taiwan is the compulsory annual medical check-up that we have to undergo to get and renew our working visas and Alien Resident Certificates (ARC Card in everyday lingo). My latest test took place last week. These health checks tell you nothing about your actual state of health, just that you don't have any transferable diseases, like AIDS, Hepatitis, etc.

The tests are administered by nurses who often seem to have better things to do than take samples and other vital statistics from bewildered and discomforted foreigners. The worst part of the test comes right at the beginning when we are handed a urine sample bottle and another bottle with a scoop-claw-like thing attached to the inside of the lid. This latter contraption, I'm sure, is intended to make foreigners reconsider their choice of Taiwan as a place of employment. This is for collecting a stool sample, "about peanut size" we are told.

That instruction is only the first part of the horror. The second part of this medieval practice comes when going into the toilet to obtain the aforementioned sample. At the clinic where I go for the test, there are no Western toilets, only the traditional Chinese squat hole-in-the-ground porcelain dishes, which I have never learned how to use. After all, how do you ask someone to teach you to use one of those? Last week was no different to the previous four occasions I have been subjected to this torture.

The glimmering hole-in-the-ground sneered at me knowingly, seemingly aware of my discomfort and inability to squat correctly. I positioned myself, leaned forward, repositioned, leaned backward, stood, crouched, repositioned, and all to no avail. I pushed and breathed and breathed and pushed and all the time kept thinking, "All I need is a peanut." And that's what I got, just when I was ready to give up. A peanut. No more and no less. And then the terrifying prospect occurred to me that I might lose my peanut in trying to retrieve it from the sneer in the ground. Gingerly dipping the scoop-claw thing into the dish I managed to retrieve it without breaking it in half and deposited it into the bottle with an inordinate sense of triumph.

The rest of the test after that - eye test, blood work, blood pressure, pulse, X-ray, height and weight - were a breeze. I now have another year to learn how to use Chinese toilets.

28 September 2003

Dion Marc Delport

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