This is my article in that issue. While I think it was accurate for the time, some things have certainly changed:
- Traffic mayhem. Not so much any more. Taiwanese driving skills have improved 1000% since I first got here in 1990.
- Betel nut is not nearly as ubiquitous as it used to be.
- Very few "random acts of violence and brutality by scooter gangs and gangsters" these days.
- The national identity crisis has been resolved. Taiwanese are Taiwanese.
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Stranger in a Strange Land
A long time ago, in an airport not so far away, I got off a plane knowing only two things about Taiwan: 1) People here spoke Chinese, and 2) It had to be better than China was in the late eighties. Well, those facts were generally correct, but not particularly important. And like all of us who arrived here looking forward to learning a new culture, nothing could have prepared me for the bizarre stuff:
Thousand year eggs. Election time sound trucks. Traffic mayhem. More superstitions than you can shake a stick at. Streets speckled with red liquid so that it looks like there has been a knife fight on every corner. Stinky tofu (some guide books will refer to 'pungent tofu'. 1 say stink is stink). A national identity crisis that is no closer to resolving itself now than it was in 1 990. Pole shrimp fishing.
nut is not yet a fixture at the poker or chess game, it is probably accepted, and the 檳榔一百塊 (Betel nut $100) guy is a mainstay of expat hangouts. When checking out an apartment, you find yourself noting that the river facing the property is pretty good feng shui. The concepts of 'law' and 'traffic' move farther and farther apart mentally, so that they hardly ever converge in your mind. Stinky tofu is still a culinary abomination, but you've already figured out how to pass upwind of the night market.
But this is still a fairly odd place, right? Things are generally much more sensible back home, aren't they? I don't want to sound like the professor in your freshman year sociology class, but there may be a certain amount of (ahem) relativism involved with the concept and use of the word 'strange'. Let's do a quick and unresearched comparison of cultural weirdness:
In Taiwan, people believe in ghosts. In America, 73% of the population believes in angels. Not some kind of angelic force, actual angels.
In Taiwan, there are random acts of violence and brutality by scooter gangs and gangsters. In Europe, hardcore football fans get together to participate in organized acts of violence and brutality on people who have the audacity to support a different football team.
In Taiwan, people eat chicken feet. And like it. In Scotland, they eat haggis. In America, some people eat deep-fried Hostess Twinkies. In England, they eat English food, and in Australia they like to put pickled beets on hamburgers.
Taiwanese people can spend hours playing Mahjong. Canadians can spend hours watching hockey. And talking about hockey.
The government of Taiwan is hopelessly compromised to business interests and organized crime figures! And so are the governments of Florida, Canada and Italy.
Move along, nothing to see here.
So, the weirdness in Taiwan is not some kind of universal peculiarity. It's just the differences that we deal with when we arrive. After a time, we adjust to the new culture, and note thankfully that at least nobody here is trying to put pickled beets on our damn hamburgers. And the quirks and oddities become a kind of subtext for your interactions with other expatriates, while they are edited out of your relationships with locals. And it is those interactions and relationships that lead us to:
Comments on 'Stranger’.
Most people when they arrived here knew either nobody, or had only a few friends and colleagues. But this is a situation that should be easily rectified. There aren't that many foreigners here, so surely there is a fairly cohesive expatriate community. One that you can slide into as you adjust to life in this new country. Right? Not in Taichung. Not anymore. I'm not going to bore you with how things were back in 'the day', suffice to say that that the expat community here used to be... sort of a community. There were English teachers, and there were defense contractors, and everyone pretty much went to the same places and did the same things anyway. Only difference was that the defense guys drove nice cars and the English teachers rode beater motorcycles to get there. There were no cliques or factions; groups were not separated by industry or nationality or musical preference.
But today, Taichung has more cliques than a suburban U.S. high school, and a rumor mill that would generate power equal to that of a nuke plant, if some way were found to harness the energy. I don't think there is any point in trying to lay blame for this fact, and it may well be just the result of a critical mass of foreigners in one place. Too many people and the cohesiveness, the community, start to bleed away. (Though as a stodgy middle-aged man, I am always willing to reproach young people, so maybe it's all their fault). The thing that seems to defy explanation is the one-upmanship on how long you have been here. I have heard people say with some smugness that they have been here a full 6 months longer than the person they are talking to, as if some kind of victory had been achieved regarding social status. By what rules do you win by having been in Taiwan longer than the other guy? Whatever happened to the traditional benchmarks of how tall you are, how many credit cards you have, or how long your penis is? Damn young people.
What this means to us and the topic of this month's issue: people can still feel like a stranger here, even after being here a while and making an effort to meet people. When making Taiwanese friends, you find that it can be difficult to truly connect unless your Chinese is really good. When making expat friends, you need to be careful that you don't stumble into one of the 'uncool' crowds, like those geeky chess players at Salut on Sunday nights. Still, fragmented as our social scene may be, everyone can pretty much find their communal place here eventually. With the growth in the expatriate population, there has been corresponding growth in sports and social activities, cultural stuff, and people to meet and hook up with. So the next time you see a stranger in this town, especially one who hasn't been here as long as you, ask them out for an evening of chicken feet and shrimp fishing.
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