The Day a Judge Picked Up the Phone

This is a personal recollection. I have left out every name, and I am writing from memory.

Some years ago in Taichung I was waiting on my scooter at a red light. The light turned green and I went. A rider coming across ran his red light and hit me hard. He went down. I stayed up.

The police came. It was one of the busiest junctions in downtown Taichung, and I was told the traffic cameras there had not been working that day. I found that hard to believe. I still do.

Then the man who hit me sued me.

I remember thinking that this could not be right. My light was green. But I could not read the papers, and I knew how it would look: his account in Chinese, mine in English, and no picture.

There was one piece of luck. The father of one of my students had been in the car behind me, by pure coincidence, with a small camera on his dashboard. It had recorded the whole thing. He took the recording to the police station himself.

When the day came, the recording could not be found. It had been handed in, and it was lost. I never learned how. What I had was his telephone number.

So the judge telephoned him, there and then, from the bench. He answered. He said yes, he had been behind me, and yes, the other man had gone through the red light.

That was the end of it. One call, and the claim was dropped.

I have thought about that call a great deal since.

Among foreigners in Taichung there is a standing joke that the cameras never work when one of us has an accident. I cannot tell you whether it is true, and I would not ask you to believe it. I can tell you why we tell it. When you cannot read the report that is written about you, everything rests on somebody else’s record of what happened: a camera, a witness, a clerk’s note. If that record is missing, you are a foreigner with a story.

There was another kind of door, and this one is no secret; anyone who lives in Taichung knows it. For years there has been a dance hall downtown where Filipino workers go at noon on Saturdays and Sundays, the only hours many of them have off. I went with friends, and it was a happy place. In my last years there I was turned away at the door: Filipinos only. I asked a police officer what the rule was, and was told the place had once had trouble with a foreigner, and that Taiwanese people were not let in either.

Later I heard a kinder explanation: the workers did not want their employers coming to watch them dance. I understand that. I also remember how it felt to be told at a door that the answer depended on what I looked like, and to find that nobody around me thought it needed explaining.

I tell these two stories together because they taught me the same thing. In a place where you do not read the language, you are safe only as long as someone checks: picks up the telephone, plays the recording, asks the person who was there.

In the traffic case, a judge did. I am still grateful to that judge, and to the father who answered.

In March 2024, in a criminal case that has since cost me my home of fifteen years, I applied to call five witnesses. The judge said at a hearing, through the interpreter, that they were unimportant to the case and not needed. None was summoned, and the judgment gives no reason.

I am not writing to accuse anyone. I do not know why a camera fails or a recording goes astray, and I make no claim about the motives of any officer or official. I am writing because one telephone call once showed me what a court looks like when it checks, and I would like to see that again.

The case, and where to read it

Every post about the case is on my other blog →

The pictures on this page are illustrations made with AI. They are not photographs or recordings of the events described. The account is mine, written up with AI assistance.