Written by Thomas Lu (Pitzer College), Student Correspondent for CET Taiwan, Spring 2026
One misty afternoon, I got out of class and decided I needed to be outside for a while. Luckily, in Taipei, there is no lack of public green spaces. As I was wandering around, roughly moving towards my apartment, I came across Zhongshan park, in the middle of which sits Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall. I had walked through it tens of times to get to the MRT station, but I had yet to stop and appreciate it. It was late in the afternoon and the park was full of families with kids playing, old A-yis and Shushus practicing Qi Gong, and all manner of other people active at a good time of day. So, following the advice of CET Taiwan’s staff, “Do as the locals do”, I decided to plop down and do some homework at the park.
So, I was sitting in Zhongshan Park, right in front of Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall, wrapping up a paper when he first approached. He was an older man, of average stature, wearing a Yankees ball cap and a black backpack with the flag of the Republic of China stitched on the outermost panel. He sat down on the long curving bench about ten feet away from me. He was only seated for a minute or two before he approached another patron of the park, a younger fellow with tightly buzzed hair and a vaguely Eastern European accent. He talked with the older man for a minute or two before hopping up and holding his hands outstretched in anticipation. The older man reached in his bag and produced a white, grapefruit-sized ball. They began tossing the ball back and forth. I looked back at my computer and then took a moment and watched with curiosity. I gathered they were just playing catch, so I began writing again.
I got another half a paragraph down before I looked up again and noticed a change. The older man had backed up and was now throwing with a form more akin to a baseball pitcher than a casual amateur. The younger man’s tosses were long and arcing, leaving the older man plenty of time to catch them gracefully. He then would fire the ball at speed back to the young man, leaving him less time to react. The older man increased his intensity with each throw, with it eventually making an audible thwacking sound every time the young man caught it.
I began to understand the competitive impetus of the seemingly innocuous game. The young man finally dropped one of the pitches and the old man began to walk towards him as he fumbled to pick it up. Closing the distance between the two of them, the older man pulled out his phone and took a selfie with the younger man. They talked for a moment with the older man patting the younger man’s shoulder before they shook hands and the older man sat back down. The younger man collected his things and began sauntering away, eventually leaving the park and returning to the metropolis.
I took a moment to understand what I had seen, admired the changing colors of the sky at dusk, and returned to working on my paper. Oblivious to my surroundings, I worked, finishing my paper about half an hour later. I returned my computer to my backpack and looked up. Sunset was in twenty minutes and I decided it was worth my time to wait and watch the skyline transform from the clearly demarcated buildings I knew well during daylight to the blinking nebula of red and white lights I knew at night.
As I sat, watching the sunset, the older man approached. As he got close I hailed him and tried to introduce myself. I’ve come to understand through my first month in Taiwan that my Chinese is barely intelligible to the native speaker. Lacking in vocabulary and almost completely atonal, I am often left frantically translating specific vocabulary to communicate. As I stumbled through telling him my name and college status, he abruptly asked “English ok?”. I answered yes and he carried on through the rest of our interaction in perfect English, leaving me impressed and a little disappointed in my own skills.
He explained that he came to the park four times a week (every weekday except Wednesday) to throw the ball with random people he came across. He had been doing so since 2014 and had hundreds of selfies with people of all manner of backgrounds. He quickly showed me the folder of photos on his phone, which consisted of selfies with people from France, Australia, South Africa, Peru, etc. It was a truly impressive collection. He offered for me to participate and I jumped at the chance. He didn’t hold back either, throwing what I can only assume was a 90 mile per hour fastball right at my head on his first pitch. I, being competent but not remarkably good at throwing, fired back what I thought was a decent shot. We continued to play back and forth for a minute or so before he called it good. We sat back down and I watched the final minutes of sunset over the city.
I began to talk to him, asking him why he liked to play catch and about the people he had done it with. He said he retired in 2014 from a mechanical engineering position with a company who had offices in the US (ergo the perfect English) after which he said he was incredibly bored. He said he liked being outside and meeting people, so he started taking the protective lattice-like foam layer off of the asian pears he liked and wrapping them in packing tape to make his baseball approximates.
He came to Zhongshan park because it was close to his place and frequented by tourists. Eventually he showed me his Facebook page, with even more photos of many of the people he had played catch with. We talked well past sunset, with me asking about his life and what he thought of Taiwan, and him asking why I wanted to come to Taiwan so badly. We talked for a little over half an hour before I realized I needed to catch up with my house for dinner. I shook his hand, he patted me on the back, and I carried on. Right as I was walking away, I heard him say “come back, and bring your friends!”.
I told my house all about my strange experience over dinner that night, the skyline I watched transform looming over the Thai restaurant window we sat next to. We agreed that we had to go back and have a catch with 棒球叔叔 (bàngqiú shūshu – baseball uncle).