"You must be homesick while you're teaching in Kinmen. Does anything remind you of San Francisco?" I answered my friend's question honestly: "The One Piece 7-11 pirate promotion reminds me of home."
I couldn't have guessed that a pirate sticker from a popular children's comic book would resurface so many memories from an entire continent away.
I come from San Francisco, California, a city that has temperate and generally cool weather. In the absence of drastic differences in weather, I learned to associate the change of the seasons with updated franchise menus hosting "holiday flavors." In the mild weather of Kinmen, I have likewise come to associate franchise promotions with seasonal change: namely, autumn is marked by themed 7-11 stickers given with receipts. But when I went to 7-11 on September 19th, I saw the in-your-face illustrations of the characters of One Piece,which brought back memories of home.
One Piece was popular when I attended elementary school in San Francisco. I remember my Japanese cousins reading the mangas (comic books) long ago. However the global span of this cartoon-from Japan to Taiwan to America-fascinates me less than how children around the world relate to the symbol of a sea-faring robber.
When I was in middle school, pirates exploded as a global pop culture emblem with Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. In middle school string orchestra, we performed the movie theme. For entertainment, my friends and I mimicked their crude accents and speech. We found it fun to be a pirate, to be a rude character completely foreign from our otherwise-polite lives.
The concept of pirates as "fun" persisted through high school, and I even worked at a pirate-themed tutoring center. The idea of a pirate, however, transformed from a legendary figure that spoke in a silly way into an educational tool. I told children stories of the rotting gums of pirates, to encourage them to have good dental hygiene and to eat fruits. They, in turn, told me stories from their own imaginations.
Pirates became a simple theme from which any conversation, any story, could arise. Something about an appendage-missing captain searching for treasure on a map, living on a ship, and shouting slurred words triggered fantastical stories from children. As I prepared to be an English Teaching Assistant in Kinmen, I wondered if I could engage children in learning English in the same way I had taught at the pirate store.
I hoped to excite children in Kinmen I prepared a three-hour-long lesson for my elementary school students centered on International Talk like a Pirate Day. I worked on map-making activities, pirate hat making, creating eye patches, and a presentation for our English class. However, I struggled with how to teach them the concept of pirates in the Americas when they, presumably, had no prior exposure.
I woke up on September 19th (International Talk like a Pirate Day), ready to teach the themed lesson for my students at Shumei Elementary school, and ready to struggle to communicate a complicated concept with limited language abilities. Then, I walked into 7-11 and saw the One Piece sticker promotion. I later learned that Zheng Chenggong-a historical hero who cut down trees in Kinmen to create ships to fight against the Dutch and to remove their presence from Taiwan-was a pirate based on Kinmen.
People on Kinmen already knew about pirates. Students quickly became excited to hunt for treasure, make their own maps, speak in silly ways, and don a hat and eye patch. One of my students continues to flash the hand signal for a hook when he sees me.
Kinmen is vastly different from San Francisco, and yet, these ideas and stories that grew up with transcend distance. Pirates have some unexplainable universal appeal, from the West's romanticism of Blackbeard, to the East Asian romanticism of Zheng Chenggong as a national hero. It is seem in television, comic books, and film series.
Perhaps the popularity of pirates is something that only the imagination of a child can explain.