Another Teen Vampire Tale: Vlad in Taipei

Long long ago, when you were just a baby, Chen Shui-Bian was not a disgraced former president of Taiwan, but the mayor of Taipei. Back then kids didn’t have cell phones, but played with “virtual pets,” a kind of simple electronic toy you'd probably find boring. Also, adults back then were foolish just as they are now, but back then they didn’t go crazy about Louis Vuitton bags and plastic surgery. Instead they’d line up for hours--sometimes even four or five hours--to buy a box of Macau egg tarts. Truly idiotic! Also, back then Michael Jordan wasn’t an old man: he was the best player in the NBA. And back then the English teacher Eric didn’t have a Mediterranean. In fact he was even more handsome than he is now.

So things were different. It was then, in 1997, that this story was written. It’s a vampire story, written about a vampire named Vlad who came to Taipei. The story was written by the just pre-adolescent students in a very smart English class--a class with students smarter than any students anywhere in Taiwan today. Yes, Taiwan’s students are getting stupider every year, it’s true, and it’s all because of “education reform” and American fast food. Anyhow, those students are probably all in top universities now--Yale and UW Madison and such--but back then they were only eleven years old. Some were even younger than eleven! And they wrote this story in English.

If you want to see how they wrote it, you can read the boring Afterword. But probably you'll just want to read the story. It begins below.

E.M.
2009