During peak morning commute hour on Wednesday, a massive earthquake struck Taiwan.
Prologue
This trip gave us an opportunity to try Taiwan’s High-Speed Rail (HSR) because we made plans to visit my aunt and Hong’s aunt, who lived in parts of the island far from the capital. People had warned us about crazy traffic on the eve of the Qing Ming long weekend, equivalent to the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. I thought they were exaggerating. On top of the freeway system, long-distance buses, and conventional trains, the HSR alone ran no fewer than 60 trains per day in each direction through all of Taiwan’s population centers. That had to be plenty of capacity to meet all demand… right?
Tickets for the entire Qing Ming long weekend, including the eve, were scheduled to go live for booking at midnight on March 6th. I didn’t feel desperate, but midnight in Taiwan happened to be 8am in California, so it was pretty easy for me to log on within the first 5 seconds of the purchase window. To my surprise, the site was not responsive. Apparently these train tickets were indeed hot commodities like Taylor Swift concert tickets, and people gave up sleep to refresh their browsers. Good thing I had some practice purchasing collectible coins from US Mint, and knew how to manage. Two laptops, four browsers, and a whole hour later, I was able to secure the train tickets my family needed. I checked back a few days later and learned that everything had sold out. Had I waited to book, this trip wouldn’t have been possible anymore.
Side note – compared to China, Spain, Thailand, and even Japan, Taiwan’s online HSR reservation was a joy to use. The site was functional, had no frills, had a full English interface (though I didn’t need it), required no passenger details (no need to enter a bunch of passport numbers), and accepted foreign credit cards without wonky processing errors.
All this is to say, despite the ride not being too expensive, what we had on hand were highly valuable and irreplaceable tickets. I suggested heading to the train station an hour prior to the departure just to be safe, but Ba insisted that 30 minutes was more than enough. It was his turf so I didn’t argue, but deep down I was nervous having been scarred by Bangkok. Even with a massive margin built into the timeline, we nearly missed our train last summer.
The Quake
A few minutes before 8am, our family of six were on the red line platform at the Dongmen MRT station to head toward Taipei Main Station, where HSR was. We waited orderly and quietly in line among hundreds of morning commuters. A minute or so before our train rolled into the station, I started to feel a mild vibration. It was a milder vibration than how my old Queens apartment felt when a subway E train or a LIRR train was nearby. In other words, it was merely some white noise in the city.
The vibration intensified. Even though it still was nothing like how Acela Express would shake an NJ Transit platform, something felt off. The Taipei MRT had always been smooth to the point of sleep-inducing, so this vibration couldn’t have come from any of the trains. As I shifted my focus from worrying about the HSR timetable to observing my immediate surroundings, I realized it was an earthquake. Okay, no big deal. I had lived 30+ years on the Ring of Fire, and some ground shaking here and there had always been a part of life. Let’s avoid the embarrassment of calling it out like some insecure dork. Ignore it, wait for it to pass, and ask people the “did you notice that?” question later.
But the shaking grew even stronger. A stranger in line broke silence with, “Oh! It’s an earthquake!” To which Ba responded with, “Mmm. Earthquake indeed.” By this time just about everyone had looked up from their phones, some even showing slight concern. Yet this is Taiwan we are talking about. Who cares…
Instead of fading away, the earthquake picked up a notch. The ground was no longer just vibrating but also violently being jolted from side to side. Holy shit! Had I ever witnessed an earthquake like this? Being two stories underground, I was reminded of the Universal Studios ride simulating a movie scene where the ground collapsed from above and a firetruck rolled down into a ball of fire. Should we make a run up the stairs? Could we possibly manage to dash far enough to make a difference in the most devastating scenario? Would being above ground be any safer? The strangers’ worried faces around us indicated that everyone was making the same mental calculations. “Let’s do not panic,” the dude who spoke up first called in a clearly audible but calm voice. Ting moved away from her spot. I was just about to yell at her to get back in line, and saw that she merely moved three feet to hold onto the wall. That was fine, I suppose. Ma almost lost balance a couple times and grabbed onto Hong. The fear inside me intensified. I was pretty sure some other people were deeply scared, too, but nobody panicked. No running, no screaming, and just overall extremely minimal outward expression to even acknowledge what was happening.
Some time before the shaking came to an end, our train rolled into the station. When the door opened, the vast majority of passengers got out in an orderly fashion like the calm, stoic big city commuters you’d expect to see at 8am on a Wednesday. In hindsight I wondered whether it was typical for so many people to disembark at Dongmen, or were they actually escaping the horrors of that earthquake on a moving subway train. For a good minute, the train wobbled up and down relative to the platform edge like a boat at the dock.
Our family got on the train and was happy to find all those empty seats.
The Detour
Some of us, like Hong, quietly contemplated philosophical questions like whether we should get on an underground vehicle right after a major earthquake. All I cared about was our HSR scheduled to depart in less than 30 minutes, and this MRT’s doors weren’t closed yet. The marquee display signaled a generic message about the train being temporarily held in station. Okay no big deal. A minute later it was updated to recognize the delay being due to the earthquake. Cool… but we can go soon right? Finally, the marquee changed again to announce that they gotta inspect the entire MRT system so this train was out of service. We needed to leave. The lights even turned off.
We were no strangers to public transit service interruptions, and understood that swiftly rerouting ourselves was infinitely better than whining about the circumstances. So did the other travelers on our train and on the four platforms. Hundreds if not a thousand of us poured orderly out of Dongmen station onto the street surface, in near silence, as station agents assisted us with the gates.
And my heart sank. A feeling of helplessness so identical to Bangkok rushed through my head. The nightmare scenario of missing our train was upon us, despite my active attempt to avoid it. Unlike the borderline hopeful case last summer that pumped us with adrenaline for that mad dash, there was no way we could reach Taipei Main in 20 minutes without the MRT. I was scared – why did this always happen to us while catching a train? At this rate we’d run into actual zombies when we take the train to Busan later this year! I was also mad – see! That’s why we should have left earlier in the morning!!!
Ba and Ma debated our next move. The right bus had just gone by and the next one wouldn’t come for some time (Taipei has this amazing GPS-powered bus tracking app). Ma suggested hailing a cab which I supported. But looking around at our intersection alone, there had to be over a hundred people wanting the same thing, and this wasn’t a neighborhood with much taxi traffic to begin with. Ba suggested that we take the next bus which would bring us closer to Taipei Main, and walk the rest of the way. I didn’t fully appreciate the idea then, but also didn’t know any better alternative.
While all this was happening, Ba and Ma were also checking their phones for real-time news updates that their friends were sharing over Line. I had no idea how they were still in the mood for social media. There were a bunch of TikTok-styled videos showing the damages the earthquake caused in different parts of Taiwan, and half of them were visibly fake. Gotta respect the misinformation industry for keeping up their professional pursuits even while a major natural disaster was ongoing. How did they do it? My computer can’t even render a video in so few minutes.
While on the bus that would neither take us to Taipei Main nor do so in time, it occurred to me to check the High Speed Rail’s website… OH!!! Just like the MRT, the entire HSR system had been taken out of service. Through that announcement I also learned the official numbers, that the quake had struck Hualien at 7:58am at 7.4 magnitude, making it one of the strongest in Taiwan’s history and far worse than any I had previously experienced. Some buildings at the epicenter toppled over and nearby roads collapsed, killing some people. English-language news sources that Hong and I read had also posted about it by now on their front pages. Friends back home even started texting to ask if we were ok. It began to sink in for me what a big deal this was… far beyond whether or not we make this train. Holy shit.
The Resumption
I questioned if there was even a point in continuing to go to Taipei Main at this point, assuming (incorrectly) that the train service disruptions would be indefinite considering the severity of the disaster. Ba insisted on moving forward, arguing that even if we ended up needing to get our train tickets refunded, we’d need to do so at the train station.
A memory blur later, we found ourselves among hundreds of anxious of travelers again, this time under the HSR schedule board listing a bunch of “delayed” trains since 8am. Ours was 4th on the list. I suppose it was great news that these trains weren’t (yet) simply cancelled but I also didn’t know what to think. BART’s tendency to casually cancel back-to-back trains during peak commute hours had taught me to be quite humble with expectations, so I really couldn’t understand Ba’s optimism when he insisted on entering the station to wait in line on the platform.
The next hour was a cocktail of mixed feelings, fluctuating mental calculations, and strategic debates. Ba turned out to be making the good call at every turn, with the central theme being to forget about our seat reservations and jump on the first available train’s unreserved car. The 8am train ended up leaving the station just past 9am, with standing room packed full. Our 8:30am train was eventually cancelled so my hope to wait for it would’ve been in vain. We got on the second train to depart Taipei Main since the earthquake, at 9:30, and all six of us had seats thanks to being in line early enough.
Our very first experience of Taiwan’s High-Speed Rail was not only full of drama but also… very low speed. It ran at a cautious pace that seemed like a crawl even when compared to conventional trains. The 47-minute trip to Taichung took 2.5 hours. But we were lucky that it worked at all, and luckier that we didn’t have to stand through the trip. Aftershocks, including a couple over 6.0 in magnitude, took place during our trip.
We reached Taichung roughly 3 hours behind schedule. While that cut down our time to spend with Gu Gu, it really was hardly an inconvenience considering the circumstances. A huge earthquake of historic proportions had just taken place, leaving a few unfortunate people dead, but where we were was virtually unaffected. Buildings tall and short remained standing, and sophisticated transit systems continued to operate after temporary precaution. Compared to what happened in Haiti in 2010, when a magnitude 7.0 earthquake killed a quarter million people, it really was a blessing that we had such amazing engineering to protect us.
The rest of the trip went on according to plans, including our onward HSR train in the evening, which ran at the normal high speed.
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