Free dinner at the police station
An unexpected bonus while filing a report…
I usually park my scooter on the street outside my building. This is standard practice in Taiwan.
The minor damage it’s sustained while parked is also nothing unusual:
- A seat partially melted by cigarette ash
- A snapped-off mirror
- Battle scars on the paintwork
(Kaohsiung has 2.3 million scooters but only 55,000 scooter parking spaces. It’s common for people to squeeze two scooters into one space—but this can result in scooters getting knocked over and mirrors getting snapped off.)
The broken mirror was no big deal. A friend helped me source a second-hand replacement for around NT$100 (NZ$5).
Meanwhile, I never bothered repairing the cosmetic damage.
But then, one day late last year, I walked outside to discover more battle scars than usual:
My Chinese isn’t good enough to talk insurance, so my partner—who was in Taipei at the time—called the insurance company for me.
The agent said they’d only pay for repairs if I filed a police report and the damage was caused by a collision. But to prove that, the incident would need to have been caught on CCTV.
Luckily, my scooter was parked across the street from a police station…
We got ’em! We got ’em!
I walked into the station and, with a mix of bad Chinese, simple English, and Google Translate, explained what happened.
There were five or six officers at reception. They were all 10 or 15 years younger than me, and seemingly excited to have something to do. (Taiwan is ranked the 4th safest country in the world, even ahead of Singapore and Japan. Crime is rare.)
The officers said they’d review CCTV footage and call me if they saw anything useful.
Thirty minutes later, I received that call.
“We got ’em! We got ’em!” the officer said excitedly, in English.
“Come now!”
Free dinner at the police station
When I returned to the station, more officers were standing around two 40″ TV screens mounted at reception.
One TV showed a live grid of video feeds from my neighborhood, and the other was showing—in frame-by-frame slow motion—a blurry RAV4 moving down my street.
Finally, in one of the frames, its license plate came into focus.
The cops were excited. They each pulled out an iPhone to snap close-ups of the number, and literally patted each other on the back. Case closed!
A traffic specialist arrived to interview me. While I was stumbling through our discussion, half-understanding half of his Chinese, an elegant older lady came down the stairs. She was dressed in civilian clothes.
“Can I ask you a question?” she said in English.
I was nervous. Was she about to point out a flaw in my (truthful) statement? Was she about to ask why I was wasting their time?
No. Instead, she asked me:
“Do you like Taiwanese food?”
I explained that I love Taiwanese vegetarian food, and rattled off the Chinese names of some of my favorites.
Then she asked if I’d eaten. (This is a common greeting in Taiwan—the equivalent of saying “how are you” instead of “hello”—but usually it would come at the start of the conversation.)
“Not yet” I replied.
“Wait here” she said, as if I had the option to leave. “I’ll get dinner for you.”
She returned with some warm cōng yóu bǐng (green onion pancakes; 蔥油餅), one of my all-time favorite street-market foods.
The officer finished taking notes.
I finished the cōng yóu bǐng.
I’m sorry, I promise to be more careful next time
A week later, I received a phone call from the offender, Mr Li.
The police had given him my details.
I explained in Chinese that, because I couldn’t speak Chinese, I would ask a Taiwanese friend to call him back.
My friend—also called Mr Li—phoned the other Mr Li, then set up a group chat in LINE. Bad Mr Li explained he was driving his friend’s car when he hit my scooter, and he didn’t have insurance.
He wanted to pay me cash.
Good Mr Li helped me get a repair quote. The total was around NT$4,000 (NZ$200).
“I’m sorry, I promise to be more careful next time”, bad Mr Li wrote, unprompted, in Chinese.
Unnecessary reparations
Some time later, after I’d received the money and my scooter was fixed, bad Mr Li started sending me discount coupons for various Taiwanese shops.
He also invited me to dinner with his family.
These were unnecessary reparations. My scooter was already repaired, I couldn’t understand the coupons, and besides, I’d already had one free dinner at the police station.
On good Mr Li’s advice, I quietly exited the chat.