Oh, okay.

What brought you to China?

I was working for a zipper factory there as a COO and for a while working there inside of a factory.

I saw the real part of China, came back to Taiwan, my fever was insane, to really go to a real hospital, and the doctor said,

Kyle, if you didn't come back in eight hours, you'd be dead.

So you've been in Taiwan for 13 years?

Yeah.

And I've never been back to Canada.

I'm Taiwanese.

I do consider myself Taiwanese, and I will live here until the day I die.

Cole Fogel here, and today I am with,

I'll just let you introduce yourself.

My name is Kyle McDonald.

Where are you from originally?

So, like yourself, I'm from Canada, but I'm from the East Coast.

Not Prince Edward Island.

Nova Scotia.

Nova Scotia, close.

It's a peninsula, so it's on the East Coast of Canada, and it's part of the Maritime Provinces, so if you're familiar with the Titanic movie, or the event,

Yeah.

the people from my hometown went to rescue those people, and a lot of those people settled in my hometown because they were en route to go to New York and start a new life there, but they figured that my hometown treated them so well that they wanted to settle there.

The other big thing that came out of my hometown, there's a few actually, is the Halifax Explosion.

So that was the world's largest explosion in human history before the atomic bomb.

When was that?

1917.

Wow.

Yeah, and so two ships collided in the harbor, destroyed three cities around it, then there was a shockwave that went for tens of kilometers around.

The shockwave was caused just from the ships hitting each other, or was there something on the ships that caused it?

One ship was carrying caustic chemicals, very corrosive, and the other ship was carrying TNT.

Okay, so.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

Yeah, and what's the first thing that happens when you hear such a big explosion outside your house?

Go to your window.

So they went to the windows, the glass blew in, and immediately we had the world's largest group of blind people that the world has ever seen.

So we created.

Interesting.

Yeah, so in 1918, in March the following year, we created what's called the Canadian National Institute of the Blind.

Growing up where I did in Nova Scotia,

I mean, in a park like this, the road behind us there, after 5 p.m. you wouldn't be able to see that far because it's just covered in fog.

Oh, interesting.

And it rains every day.

Rainy, foggy Nova Scotia.

Yep, yeah, and you can't use an umbrella because the wind is too strong, it'll break your umbrella, so you just, you deal with it.

Interesting.

So, but because of that, a lot of people have seasonal depression.

Nova Scotia is pretty famous for pirates as well.

Like, we have the home of the blue nose, which is on the Canadian dime.

Oh, yeah, the Canadian.

Right, so, and so Nova Scotians, you can call us blue nosers because we would go out to sea and we'd get really cold, and our nose would turn blue.

When you think of Canada, and I think people watching would agree, you don't think of pirates.

Right, yeah, but we're,

We have a history of pirates.

We do, yeah, that's right.

It said on Georgia's Island, we used to hang the pirates there.

We have a big citadel on top of a hill called Citadel Hill, which would have guns aimed at the harbor ready for pirates at any time.

The Maritimes is that it has a connection to Al Capone, actually.

So, Prince Edward Island, which you had just mentioned a little bit earlier, a lot of the houses there are built using the whiskey crates from Al Capone because he would send the whiskey up the coast into Prince Edward Island.

You're talking when people couldn't drink.

That's right, prohibition time.

Yeah, prohibition, yeah.

He would undock the crates and then put it in a false bottom boat and send it back down to the United States.

The wood would stay on the beach and people, scavengers, would use that to build their houses and stuff.

Are you a history buff?

Because the way you're talking, it sounds like you could have been a history teacher.

I wanted to be Indiana Jones growing up as a kid.

Okay, I knew we had something in common.

Yeah, so I did go to university for ancient history, Canadian history, and I read a lot and spent a lot of time in the library.

And I used to raise money for myself because my parents didn't have a lot of money and I didn't have any, of course.

So I used to scavenge trash as a kid.

And I came across a church one time that had big black garbage bags full of every National Geographic from 1886 to 1994.

And they were just gonna throw it away.

Yeah, so I took them all home.

So you said you have First Nation background.

Right.

Which would be like similar to those that don't know what that is to being a aboriginal in Taiwan.

On my father's side, we're Métis, so they have my color hair, which is like a sandy blonde and brown.

And my color eyes, which would be like green, blue, gray.

And actually speak French as well on that side.

Oh, okay.

But my mom's side is Mi'kmaq, so we have dark color eyes and my mom had pitch black hair also.

Growing up as a kid, I had 390 brothers and sisters.

My family, they did what we call small options.

If you're familiar with the term like foster care, for example.

Of course, yeah.

So we did foster care, respite, and small options.

Oh, they took care of different like kids.

So my family is more peculiar because we would take care of the most at risk or disadvantaged or troubled or severe disability children.

So kids that came from broken homes, kids that even had a fire in the house that had no place to put them.

You grew up with these kind of kids.

Yeah, yeah.

I also did other work at the same time.

Like I also lived part of my life in a funeral home.

So my dad was the driver for a hearse.

So if you die, my dad would be the guy that drives the hearse to take your body to our house where people would wash you, give you a change of clothes, do your makeup.

Were you around the carcasses, the dead bodies?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

It was normal for you?

Yeah, yes.

And I found that dead people are very good listeners.

They don't talk back and they keep all your secrets.

Hold on a second.

Did living in that environment, have you made more peace with the concept of death?

Well, I've never seen a ghost.

So I don't believe in ghosts at all.

And I think the concept of death for me is more, yeah, I would say it's peaceful, but also like it's like another step to a new journey.

I feel that way too.

I've had kids and things that have passed away in my home.

So it was my job to get some of these kids up and get them showered or help them with their wheelchair in the morning, things like that.

And I go in, unfortunately, I find they passed away.

So I've been through a lot as a kid, yeah.

I changed to an adult, I would say, from a very young age.

Taiwan, the first place you lived in Asia, actually lived?

So I lived in China for a little while as well.

I lived in Jiangsu.

What brought you to China?

Like what was, why did you choose to live there as opposed to visit?

I was working for a zipper factory there as a COO and slash CTO.

And we had a few thousand employees there.

So I lived there for a while, working there inside of a factory.

I saw the real part of China.

So I would say that China, they've got what I refer to as like postcard cities.

Postcard cities would be like your Qingdao, Shanghai,

Beijing, Guangzhou, Guangdong, Ningbo, those big places like you would see on a postcard.

And they're beautiful metropolises and things like that.

But I lived in the real China and I would drive my scooter around town and I saw landfills where there would be an literal ocean of people living under blankets with four sticks holding it up.

I live in the real China, so I got to see that side.

That's where people have never seen a foreigner ever in person.

So I remember one time I was at a cafe and I heard a lady like maybe a kilometre and a half down scream and go, whoa, white woman, how swag.

She was like, foreigner, how handsome.

And I looked through the window.

Oh my God.

The whole town was out there.

The whole town's there.

You were a famous celebrity.

The whole town, it was crazy.

Did you like that feeling or was it overwhelming?

It was pretty overwhelming at first, especially since I was so new to Asia at the time.

Were you speaking the language at this point?

Absolutely not.

How long did you live in that environment?

Actually not long because I got a stomach parasite that almost killed me and I went to two hospitals.

A dangerous parasite?

A dangerous parasite, yeah.

What do you think caused it, from food or?

Yeah, where I lived, food there is grown with human feces was reported to me.

Oh shit.

You mean they use it as fertilizer?

Yep, yeah.

So I went to two hospitals there and that was a whole other story.

Could you have died?

Are we talking serious?

Yeah, so I ended up getting really more sick.

They gave me yogurt pills.

Oh, yeah, probiotics.

Yep, yep.

And I got on a plane and I came back to Taiwan.

My fever was insane.

I was fading.

So I was living in Taiwan but living in China as well.

So I was going back and forth.

Oh, okay.

To really go to a real hospital.

And the doctor said, Kyle, your bacteria count inside of your body, it's 5,000% what it should be.

And if you didn't come back in eight hours, you'd be dead.

They saved your life.

They saved my life, yeah.

Okay, so when you recovered from that, did you go back to China?

No, I said, no, that's it.

I'm gonna settle in Taiwan.

The food would have freaked me out at that point.

I went to university, like I said earlier, for ancient history and Canadian history.

And my professor at the time, he said, what do you wanna do with this?

What's your purpose of studying?

I said, well, I wanna be Indiana Jones.

I wanna be an archeologist.

And he said, listen, Kyle, I hate to break your heart but you're just gonna end up as a professor in the university like me and there's no jobs for Indiana Jones anymore.

And I said, nope, I do not wanna be a teacher.

Nope, that's the last thing I ever wanna do.

And here I am in Taiwan now.

I've been a teacher for 13 years now.

So you've been in Taiwan for 13 years.

And I've never been back to Canada.

Literally?

Literally, never, yeah.

Oh, man.

Yeah, I've been here the whole time.

Yeah.

The last 13 years of your life, you have physically lived here.

Yeah, yeah.

So I was like 11 years in Taipei and then two years in Kaohsiung here.

Do you have a favorite city of those two places if you were to be completely sincere?

I love Kaohsiung the most because I think Taipei people are very cold.

I told my friends in Kaohsiung that if you don't have money, you don't have friends.

If you don't have friends in Kaohsiung, you don't have money.

So in English, that would be like,

I spoke with my business owner friends who live here in Kaohsiung.

And we agree that in Taipei, if you have no money, you have no friends.

But in Kaohsiung, if you have no friends, you have no money.

Yeah, I agree.

Yeah.

Some of my best friends in the world are First Nations people here in this country.

Shout out to the Saisiaju.

Where are they from, Taitung or Shenzhen?

Up near Neiwan in the mountains deep in there.

And so we've got a farm together up there as well.

And I've grown really close with them through the years.

My goddaughter, Lucy, look her up on YouTube Music.

She's a very famous music star here now.

You can type in Lucy Taiwan, she'll come up.