Correspondent number 2 weighed in last night. Here’s what Blake Carter has to say:

Ni hao Mike–

I suspect you’ve heard more about the craziness than I have. My boss likes the KMT because he says its’ policies are economically more stable. Foreigners and musicians all like the DPP (President Chen’s party) because he’s big on Taiwan as Taiwan. My teacher friends with scooters are all annoyed with the traffic jams caused by the protests. With only a 0.2% victory for Chen, of course the KMT wants a re-count which according to yesterday’s newspapers they’re going to get. My Chinese teacher says don’t go out at night because it may be dangerous, but she’s thirty, still lives with her parents, and hangs out at net cafes playing video games.

As far as a fake shooting no one can say yet though there are some pretty strange circumstances, eg despite the fact you can’t scratch your ass without someone taking a photograph, supposedly the only relevant pictures of the parade the police have come up with are 28 lanes from each other so they can only narrow down the shooting to a kilometer-long area (Chen didn’t notice he’d been shot till blood came through his jacket and Lu, the vice-president, only said she felt a sharp pain in her knee and thought she’d been hit with a firecracker).

There’s the bell for class; if I hear anything good outside of what the papers and TV say I’ll let you know.

Got to go,
Blake

Blake’s lived in Korea, China, and now Taiwan for (I think) more of the last ten years than he’s lived in the U. S. He played concertina in the earliest version of the BKB. He has a bright red suit, dark black dyed hair, and an interesting sense of humor.