cultural sensitivity

It is weird. My roommates commented on how a lot of the white guys here are more popular with the ladies than they would be in the US. Because women here like foreigners, these guys are able to date way out of there league. It is very annoying to us for some reason. I guess it is irritating to see ugly guys doing so well.

What was funny was that I hadn't noticed. I hadn't noticed because I don't look at white people here. Like, we are not sure how to notice/not notice each other. There are few enough of us that we always feel a little awkward about how to handle seeing each other. Because we both know that we have noticed each other, but then it isn't as though you know the other person. Sometimes there is a small, quick smile, sometimes just a bit of confused eye contact and the lookaway. I have been trying to think of a good way to handle the situation. "Hey whitey, what's up?!?" and going in for the high-five hasn't done the trick. Also, no one knows my secret handshake. I don't know what else to do. We all need cards to exchange or something.
Down in Taichung I actually did have a few white people say "Hey, what's up?" or "Hi!" - but there are fewer foreigners down there so I think it was less weird.

One of my roommates bought a neat little device to help her translate words in her Chinese homework. You hold the scanner over the words and it scans them in and translates them for you. She was extremely excited about how helpful this device was going to be. Then she got it home and took it out of the box. Guesses as to what language the instructions were in? Hint: -Not English.-

At some of the Starbucks here they will ask your name when you order your drink so they can shout out to you when your drink is ready. A common practice. A friend of one of the other teachers has been here for a few years. He is a tall blond man who speaks Chinese quite well . He went into a Starbucks and ordered a drink. His whole transaction took place in Chinese. When filling out his drink ordeer on his cup, instead of asking his name, the Starbucks employee just wrote "foreigner" on his cup. He was pissed. When he complained, the employee was confused, and said, but you are, aren't you? He tried to explain that if she went to a Starbucks in the States, wouldn't she be offended if she ordered a drink and got it with the word "Chinese person" written on it? No, she didn't get it. So he wrote some letters. The manager didn't get it. Eventually he escalated to someone who did get it, and he got an apology and some free stuff and a job offer as a Sensitivity Trainer, which he declined.

I think it would be funny to get a cup that just had "foreigner" on it. I might keep it.

Along the same vein, my guidebook told me about this toothpaste here. There used to be a brand of toothpaste here named "Darkie" with a black man with really white teeth on the label. Hmm. Um. So, there were complaints. Now there is a brand of toothpaste named "Darlie" and it had a black sillouette of a man of ambiguous race smiling with really white teeth. Nice, eh?

One one my roommates' old roommates went traveling in South East Asia and came back to Taiwan a little sick. She went to her family doctor to make sure she was ok, and asked about the bird flu. Her doctor said that if she had it that would be great. It would be the first case in Taiwan. She would only have a 50% chance of dying, and he would be famous! Luckily he is not
famous yet.

I walked around the jade market near my house today. It was neat, but I don't know good jade from plastic. And if I do want anything, I will need to go back with someone who speaks Chinese. I walked around today: white, and with a backpack, camera out and in my hand. I had "suckah" written all over my forehead.

The Starbucks employees here have to wear name tags. Someone I know saw a Starbucks employee whose nametag said "Egg." I think that dan is egg in Mandarin, and he went the extra mile on the name tag.

A friend of mine came to my Chinese lesson with me this week. I am just learning a few words to get by, so that it looks like I am at least trying to communicate with people. (In 2 months, I am not going to get very far with Chinese. I am aiming for the ability to ask "where is the bathroom?" and "is this vegetarian?" or to say "turn left here. . . no, I said left. Left, damnit!" and "you want how much for that? seriously?") Anyway, my lessons had been focused on basic conversation and pronunciation, but this week my lesson devolved (quickly) into how to insult people in Chinese. So now I can tell the man on the street (or my friend) that he is an extremely ugly, fat, disgusting, stinky, dirty bad person. I still need to find out how to ask where the bathroom is though.

I also learned the Chinese word for diarrhea, because my teacher asked me how my weekend was.

even more pics - this time of museums and temples

The herb garden at the National Science Museum:



Cool tapestry at the museum:



Cat-thingy:



No idea what's going on here: either there's some demons, or the emporer has no sunblock.



Some sort of pig-man!



A temple (again, a little dark):



Kenneth, I bought this for the front yard. Do you think the Board will mind?



Same temple:



Same temple:



Taichung folklore park:



And, finally, a temple in Taichung:

more pictures!

This is actually a fire station. I wish all of our public facilities had the cartoon themes going:



Bring me tribute or I will crush Taipei!



This is the golden buddha where I got kidnapped a few posts back:



This is a bathroom sign, using the well-known international symbols for 'woman' and 'man':



Random street scene - this one's a little dark, but you can see some greenery:

went to an art museum and saw some art

Besides seeing the buddha, I also went to an art museum in Taichong. My weekends were a little better down there for touristy stuff because I was all alone so I had noone to distract me from preparing for my classes, so I got my work done on Saturday and was able to go wander around on Sunday. Here in Taipei I sit around and talk to people instead of doing work, then I have to do it later and can't go to the museum.

The art museum was cool. It was pretty small, but it was free and air conditioned. It was a modern art museum. I guess with the fall of the KMT in the 80s -the dictatorship that was in power for about 50 years- when they went out of power there was an expansion in the right to free speech which caused was a Taiwanese artistic Renaissance. Some of the stuff was pretty cool. My favorite painting was one by Lian Jian-Shing called "Happy Land in a Corner of the Sea," which had a background of lush islands and aquamarine water, and a small island with a weird little amusement park on it. Then in the foreground there were powerlines, with elephants and giraffes moving along in cages and people on unicycles going around them. It looked like a weird dream.

I also liked one that had taken Mao's face and Dr. Sun Yat Sen's face (considered the father of the nation) and used puzzle pieces to turn them into one. It was creepy.

There was this wild painting called "Pachinko" by Lien Te-cheng. It was 3 panels, horizonal and stacked. The top one was a Japanese flag, the middle was the word "PACHINKO" in orange and blue, and the bottom was an idyllic and sappy Thomas Kincaid type of painting, with some big pachinko ball looking things traveling down it, and some surprised looking deer. Apparently, the word "evergreen" in Mandarin is also the Mandarin transliteration of the word "pachinko." (I think Mandarin. the card beside the painting said Chinese, so I think they meant Mandarin Chinese, but I don't know) So it is weird that pachinko and evergreen are the same word. And that is the Japan to Taiwan connection between the panels.

In addition to that, I guess that the Thomas Kincaid-like paintings were produced by the by the pound in Taiwan in the "early days" (days of the Japanese occupation?) and were exported to Japan by the ton where they were purchased at an alarming rate. Hugely popular, these crappy painting of idyllic scenes with dappled sunlight and evergreen trees. So that is the Taiwan to Japan connection. Evergreen to pachinko (Japan) in the form of paintings, and pachinko to evergreen in the form of language.

My favorite exhibit was this set for 4 flat screens showing videos of this guy, Kyang-yu Tsui doing sports in odd places. It was called "The Shortcut to the Systematic Life: City Spirits." The setting was London, and we saw him rappelling down trash piles, playing golf on small bits of green grass throughout the city, hurdling over inappropriate stuff and bowling. The hurdles and bowling were the best. You saw him earnestly running through the city and hurdling (as though at a track meet) over trash cans, fire hydrants, dogs, bikes, benches, and anything else waist high. In the background you could see him getting crazy weird looks from onlookers who were just out having their day and weren't expecting their day to include him and his nutty shenanigans.

For bowling, he would wander around London with a bowling ball until he found a long sidewalk at a park or cobblestone shopping area. He would get to the end of it and get into his bowling stance, take aim, and hurl his bowling ball down the sidewalk towards a bunch of pigeons, which, it turns out, look a lot like bowling pins. Then they would scatter and it would be funny. I guess he was just out doing his part to make everybody's day a little bit more surreal.

Oh, also, in one of the SAT essays that one of my students handed in, Bill Gates was called Bill Gazes. Heh heh. That is unrelated, I just thought it was funny.

Some pictures for you

Dr. Sun Yat Sen Memorial Temple:




Statue of same Dr. Sen:



The cleanest squat toilet that I have seen. I am ok at using these now.

golden buddha

But Evelyn, what have you been doing on the weekends?

My first weekend in Taichung, I decided to go see the statue of the Laughing Buddha at Paochueh Temple. The fifteen meter high enormous golden statue of the Buddha.

I looked on the map and tried to figure out where it was. I was pretty sure that I could identify which intersection it was at, and so I counted the streets and intersections that I needed to cross to get there, and started out. The problem, though, as I have mentioned before, is that the streets and the maps don’t always match up precisely. So I had to keep stopping and checking back and forth from my Chinese map to my Chinese/English map to my English map to try to figure out where I was. At one point, I couldn’t tell from the layout on the English maps where I was, so I was trying to use the Chinese one by matching up the characters on the street sign to the characters on the map. I knew about where the street should be, but I couldn’t identify it. After a few minutes, I turned the map 180 degrees and found it.

So then I knew that I was walking in the right direction. I thought I had 3 more blocks to go, but as I was walking, I saw to my right this huge ornate set of buildings with big walls and Buddhist symbols and a bell tower and I thought, hey, there can’t be 2 of these compounds within 3 blocks of each other, so I went over and sure enough, found the temple.

I felt a little out of place wandering in the area around the entrance. It wasn’t clear to me where I should or could go. There was a big dirt area and a pile of construction materials, and a very old looking sign pointing in just sort of pointing around. I started wandering over towards a big open area, behind one of the buildings on the edge of the big dirt area. This was where the statue ended up being. However, on my initial approach, I was denied access to the statue. Instead of being able to walk up to the statue, take a few pictures, and leave, I was accosted by two very nice tiny Buddhist women.

The women stopped me and talked to me very informatively for a while in Chinese. They were clearly explaining something. I could tell that it was something good, because they were smiling and nodding a lot. However, as I don’t speak Chinese, I had to simply nod back and try to go around them. Then they nodded and waved some more, and helpfully showed me out of the temple compound area, and around the block and down the street and up an alley and into a house. I thought at first that maybe there was some sort of admission fee that I had to pay, and they were taking my to the box office, but then when we kept walking and went into a sort of house I decided that I was wrong. (unlikely that I would have to pay a fee at a Buddhist temple anyway)

All the Buddhists were out and about that day. They were lining the streets and smiling and waving and nodding like mad. The ladies walked me right through them, and I felt like I was on some sort of victory walk. I also felt weird, because I had absolutely no idea what was going on. I felt very safe (I believe that it is unlikely that I would be kidnapped by a gang of tiny Buddhists) but I also felt completely lost. I adopted the always-easy plan of smiling and nodding and waving at everyone.

At this house (which, it turns out, was being used as more of a temple) they found someone who could speak some English, and she explained to me that that day was an extremely auspicious day on the Buddhist calendar, and that I was very lucky to be there that day. Then they had me write my name down on a piece of paper, and told me to wait. Then they gave me a few cups of water because I looked like a sweat hog, which happens whenever I am outside for 10 minutes in this country. (NO one else sweats, I swear. You can tell a foreigner from a mile away from the sweat marks.) Some people went in and out, a few more people came in and after a while the lady who spoke English motioned for me to follow her upstairs. I went up with a young couple and a grandmother who had her 5 year old granddaughter with her. At the top of the stairs we went into a room with a shrine.

The shrine was cool. On the wall was a large picture of the Laughing Buddha. In front of the picture was a medium sized table covered with a red and gold cloth. There were some incense sticks going, and the table was multi level and had candles and bowls of apples and mangos and little cakes. There were several kneeling stands in front of the shrine. I stood in the corner of the room, surrounded by tiny Buddhists, the couple, and the grandmother and granddaughter. A few more people trickled in. A nice Buddhist lady kept handing me tissues because I was still so obviously sweaty. After what felt like forever but what was probably only about 20 minutes or so, the holy man came in. The lady who spoke English explained that he was the great teacher of the temple. He went through a ceremony with some words and motions, then he had the young men in the room come up and kneel at the stands. There were about 7 high school age-ish guys in high school type clothing there. They went up and went through the motions dictated by the teacher, repeating words and kneeling and so on. Then the teacher said their names and burned a piece of paper with their names on it. The teacher took it pretty seriously, but the kids seemed extremely casual about it. Then the boys left and the Buddhists had me and the little granddaughter go up and do the same thing. It was kind of funny to me, but I figured, hey I am in Taiwan to experience a new culture. And really, the whole process was a really neat thing to see. And I guess now I am under the protection of the Laughing Buddha, which it totally the Buddha that I would have picked anyway, had I been given a choice.

The grandmother kept commenting on how white my skin was. White skin is big here. There are all sorts of skin whitening products out here, some safe; some, I think, not so safe.

As I was leaving I asked the English speaking lady if I could go back to the original site and take a picture of the statue. She said that would be ok.

So, finally, after an hour or two, I get back to my original plan of seeing the statue. It was huge. You start walking around the temple, and the first part you see is this huge golden toe twinkling at you from around the corner of the temple. Just sneaking around at you, daring you to believe that it exists. Then you go a little further, and you see some enormous jolly eyes looking at you, peeking over the edge of the roof. Then you can’t stand it any longer and you rush around the temple to see the gigantic Buddha himself. And he just sits and is big and fat and happy at you. And you are faced with the biggest happiest goldenest fat thing you have ever seen, and you have to sit down and bask in the big golden happiness. Then you get too hot because of the big golden happy sun beating down on you and so you go to 7-11 and get something cold and wet and lemony.

So that was my first weekend in Taichung.

I bet the Buddhists would have been psyched to know that I’m vegan.

non sequitor taichung

There is a pizza restaurant on my way home from work that sells pizza beagles. I tried to stop in and tell them that that is disgusting, but I don’t think I got my point across. Eventually I went away.

There is a size “F” here, which is Taiwan’s equivalent of “one size fits all.” I am discovering that “all” is an extremely relative term in this context.

I was annoyed with myself the other day because I forgot to stop by the 7-11 next door while on my way home from work to get some water. Then I realized that I could see three 7-11s from where I was standing, so really, no problem.

When I was up in Taipei, I needed to go to an ATM. I started walking over to a nearby bank, and my friend Patty gave me this horrified look (an “oh, god, you aren’t gong to eat that!” kind of look) and insisted that I go to the respectable 7-11 ATM.

There are a lot of dogs here. Just hanging out, running around in the street. This made me a little nervous at first, but it turns out that the only dogs that are barky and aggressive are the ones that are tied up. The feral ones that roam the streets are just nice, chill doggies. Dirty, but nice.

I went to the botanical gardens in Taichung, and there was a school group there. (Because there is always a school group, everywhere. If I went to the malt-liquor-and-shotgun store there would be a school group trying to enrich itself and running around after a tour guide.) Anyway, the group had matching t-shirts (always a school group tell tale sign) which were yellow and had “Good Monkey!” written on them. If the kids hadn’t all been so small I would have mugged one of them and stolen a shirt.

After walking around outside here for an hour or so, I become drenched with sweat. Doesn’t matter how hot it actually is, it is just so humid here that my body doesn’t know how to react, so, I don’t know, I guess it goes into some sort of confused emergency mode and gets rid of all the water in me. So I duck into expensive boutiques and stare at terrible clothing for long periods of time because expensive boutiques are always air conditioned.

Taichung is a friendly city. It is not uncommon for someone just to day ‘Hi!” to you as they walk by. For me, it is usually either another white person, or a little kid. I think with the white people we both feel like we know each other because we are both white, and no one else is. So we’re like, hey, what’s up? how’s it going being white? See ya later! And with little kids, it is the ones who have been taking English classes. Some little kid will just shout out “Hello! How are you?!?” as they are walking by with their parents. Which is really cute, and then I answer back, which the kid thinks is funny, because I think that for the kids, English as a real language is very distant and surreal thing, so when they experiment on a real person and it works, it is so funny and weird. As if it is so bizarre, that person speaks this foreign language all the time!

Also, kids are up late in this city. You see people wandering around with toddlers at 10 o’clock at night. I guess the parents are preparing them for the Taiwan school system. I was talking to some kids about this. They don’t really get serious about school until 6th grade or so, when they have to take a test that will determine which junior high they will go to (which in turn helps determine which high school they go to, which college, what kind of job, etc) School goes from 7/7:30 am to about 4/4:30. Descriptions varied, but it doesn’t sound like they get a lot of free time during the school day. One kid told me that they eat lunch in their classrooms. They also take a nap after lunch, which is cute, but one girl told me that she got a grade for naptime. In addition to this, a few hours of homework each evening and during their 2 month summer vacation, cram school to prepare for the school year. But the kids I have chatted with seemed pretty typical of American kids the same age. I guess you can normalize to anything.

While I was walking the other day I passed a moped parking lot. It was big and dark and dirty, and had a huge statue of Greek water nymphs in the middle of it.

There are some fat people here. Not too many, but some. I don’t know how they find clothing.

I think I am acclimating to the taxis. I took a cab home the other day, and the guy drove at a normal rate of speed, and went a way that the drivers don’t normally go, which felt a little circuitous. These things made me sort of anxious, so I kept making twitchy sighing noises from the back seat and looking at my watch and the fare meter. Then he started running red lights, and I relaxed visibly. It was weird.

Taiwanese music is sweet and nice and repetitive; usually some woman crooning about love or sadness or whatever. One of my kids told me that the term for it is “guava music.”

At the fruit stand the other day a guy walked up to me and demanded “How tall?” At first I was confused, and thought he wanted me to guess his height, but then I realized he wanted to know how tall I was. I didn’t know, in centimeters, so he walked away dissatisfied.

At that same fruit stand a few days later, I was standing in line with everyone else, waiting to buy my mangos and apples, and some guy just walked straight up to the front of the line and plopped his fruit onto the counter and expected to be waited on. I thought that maybe it was because I was as the front of the line, and I am white, or because all the people in the line were women. But then I realized that it was probably just that he is a taxi driver. The clerk yelled at him and he went, surprised, to the end of the line.

I leave Taichung today, so yesterday was the last day that I went to the Starbucks by work. I felt like I should say good bye, since the Starbucks people have practically been my social network, but I wasn’t quite sure how to frame it. I don’t know if there is an accepted etiquette for saying good bye to your local Starbucks staff. The girl who made my latte was named Purple.

clothing stores and being white

I have wandered into a few clothing stores. There is nothing like going to clothing stores in Taiwan to make you feel huge. I get gently nudged over to the extra, extra larges, or to the mens shirts. I mean, I am just curious as to what's around. I just want to look! Oh well. I don't think I will be buying a ton of clothing here. I feel like such a strapper.

So, anyway, I have been going into clothing stores and investigating Taichung and Taipei chic. Turns out, I don't know if I can make fashion mistakes over here. I was persuaded, before I left Seattle, by wiser heads than mine, to return the visor that I had bought to wear over here. Now, I hadn't bought the visor to look cool, I had just bought it because I thought some protection against the sun would be a good idea. I have a hat or two, but I thought a visor would be another useful thing to have. However, my visor was vetoed by my caring friends, because I look like a dork in a visor. However, after checking out some of the merch available on the streets here, I am thinking that the visor might have helped me blend a little.

It doesn't matter though, that the clothes here are a little silly here. The women here can pull off almost anything.

Those sort of baby doll shirts that come out all loose and flowy around the stomach are in around here, but the general style makes me think of The Limited in the 90s, or, like K-mart weirdly cut and colored clothing. And I haven't been looking at the cheap stuff either. (I am serious. The clothing is expensive and awful. Like $100 for something that I wouldn't pay $10 for at Target.)

Everything here is just as expensive as Seattle, except the restaurants. There are restaurants that are expensive, but the 2 places that I have been hitting are the Buddhist buffet near my hotel, and the Buddhist buffet near where I work. I can eat at those places for about $3 American, (90$ New Taiwanese) which I love. And they are all vegan. I think the proprietors of the 2 restaurants are starting to know me. There is only one problem- the posted hours that they are open are very open to interpretation. Like, open at 4:30 can be interpreted as open at 5:30, not b/c the food isn't ready, but b/c I have an errand to run. And open until 10:30 means open until 8, b/c that is how long the food lasted. And normally I can totally get behind that kind of ethic, but sometimes I am hungry and want to get home, or got home late and want some damn food.

At the place near my work, the owners have a 3 year old kid. I think he was terrified of the white lady (me) at first, because he screamed and cried the first few times I came in. (Or he just screams and cries almost all the time. I don't know.) But now he is used to me, and last time I went there he came over and sat with me, then showed me his cup with juice, then danced for me. Hmm, so, dinner and a show. Sophisticated.

The guide books on Taichung all listed the expatriot places to go and eat and hang out, which I think is a little weird. I mean, why go to Taiwan for Italian food? There are, like, 4 Italian places here. It is so strange. I mean, I can see wanting some familiarity after being here for a while, but why put stuff like that in a guidebook for tourists?

One evening last week I wandered around and found "Little Europe" in downtown Taichung. There were Italian restaurants, of course, and British and Irish pubs, a French bakery, and some other stuff. What I thought was really odd was that when I found it, I wandered through, and it was the most conspicuous I have felt while in Taiwan. Like, instead of being anonymous Caucasian lady poking around, with nice Chinese people nodding indulgently at her like she is a 5 year old (I don't speak Chinese so I think the theory is that I am a little slow.), instead of that I had a bunch of Caucasian ex pats who noticed me as -well, sort of as one of them. Like, seeing a bunch of white people made me feel like I should say hello, and be a part of their group or something. Or maybe it was strange because I looked like I was wandering through Little Europe looking for something, as though I had to be there for a reason. I guess maybe I am not entirely sure why it was strange, I just know that I felt really weird going through there.

One related thing. I totally have played the white card. It is great. Like, I took the train up to Taipei last weekend, and I guess being in a foreign country takes away your common sense, because I got my ticket and just got on the train and sat down. Turns out the numbers on the ticket mean something. In fact, they mean that you are supposed to sit in a specific seat. Whoops. So after a few stops, some guy comes up and very nicely explains to me that the numbers on his ticket correspond to the numbers on my seat. I look apologetic, get my stuff together, and we all have a good chuckle at the crazy foreigner who has never ridden a train before. Hey, I'm not from around here! We don't have trains where I am from! Or numbers!

Then I walked back to my seat and there was a guy in it. I looked confused, and showed him my ticket. Then he showed me his ticket. They were the same. Then he talked at me very kindly in Chinese for a while, and everyone around nodded and smiled and looked at me, so I nodded and smiled and stood in the aisle for an hour until a random seat opened up. I still don't know what happened. Maybe I was on the wrong train. Whatever, I got to Taipei.