I just found out that i was joint winner in the general category of the Taiwan blog awards (peer-judged):http://www.taiwanderful.net/blog/2009-taiwan-best-blog-awards-final-results
So to the judges who voted for me a very big thanks.
In particular Fili: http://www.filination.com/blog/2009/12/26/top-bloggers-2009-best-taiwan-blogs/
Monday, December 28, 2009
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Taiwan Culture Shock: The definition of dangerous
The people who have kids will understand this one better.
I have an ongoing dispute with the mother-in-law about the definition of dangerous.
Her take appears to be straightforward: the bodies of young children have an inability to regulate temperature, but are resistant to drinking bleach.
When she is in my house, or looking after the children, she runs two paces behind them continually ready to take the place of their natural temperature gauge. In the summer, she is blasting aircon at them and nagging me every two minutes to take them back from the park because it is too hot. In the winter she has them wearing enough clothes for the arctic. The autumn and spring are the worse times of the year because the weather is changeable and the disputes increase. You arrange to meet the wife and mother-in-law in the park and, when you get there, of course, to combat the mild breeze they are wearing 3 layers of clothing.
“They are too hot,” you say.
“He is right,” would say the mother-in-law. “The sun is strong. Let’s go back to the apartment and turn on the aircon.”
“No. There is nothing wrong with the sun. Take off a couple of layers of clothing.”
I will of course then try and remove two layers and i will get terrible stares from the wife and mother-in-law.
“They will get a cold,” they say in unison.
I will insist, and the battle will then really begin as the mother-in-law follows them continually with that 2nd layer, taking every time the sun pops behind a cloud or the breeze vaguely picks up, to try and force a jumper over their heads.
I indulge this battle of wills for a while, but inevitably give up and go back to the apartment.
Once there, it starts again as she blasts on the aircon and adds layers and i turn off the aircon and remove.
“Wife. Take off the sweater. Feel his forehead.”
“It is cold.”
“So turn off the aircon.”
“Then it is too hot.”
And so on, and so on…
Meanwhile, during all of this it will be:
“Wife. Please ask your mother not to leave huge meat cleaver on the edge of the worktop. Better still, when she walks away to take a phone call, shut the damn kitchen door because she is actually cooking something on the stove.”
The wife will actually look at me, shocked that i could actually think her mother was careless.
So there it is: it seems children are impervious to meat cleavers, household cleaners left hanging around, and hitting windscreens because no seat belt, but if they are not wearing two jumpers they will collapse in an instant.
I have an ongoing dispute with the mother-in-law about the definition of dangerous.
Her take appears to be straightforward: the bodies of young children have an inability to regulate temperature, but are resistant to drinking bleach.
When she is in my house, or looking after the children, she runs two paces behind them continually ready to take the place of their natural temperature gauge. In the summer, she is blasting aircon at them and nagging me every two minutes to take them back from the park because it is too hot. In the winter she has them wearing enough clothes for the arctic. The autumn and spring are the worse times of the year because the weather is changeable and the disputes increase. You arrange to meet the wife and mother-in-law in the park and, when you get there, of course, to combat the mild breeze they are wearing 3 layers of clothing.
“They are too hot,” you say.
“He is right,” would say the mother-in-law. “The sun is strong. Let’s go back to the apartment and turn on the aircon.”
“No. There is nothing wrong with the sun. Take off a couple of layers of clothing.”
I will of course then try and remove two layers and i will get terrible stares from the wife and mother-in-law.
“They will get a cold,” they say in unison.
I will insist, and the battle will then really begin as the mother-in-law follows them continually with that 2nd layer, taking every time the sun pops behind a cloud or the breeze vaguely picks up, to try and force a jumper over their heads.
I indulge this battle of wills for a while, but inevitably give up and go back to the apartment.
Once there, it starts again as she blasts on the aircon and adds layers and i turn off the aircon and remove.
“Wife. Take off the sweater. Feel his forehead.”
“It is cold.”
“So turn off the aircon.”
“Then it is too hot.”
And so on, and so on…
Meanwhile, during all of this it will be:
“Wife. Please ask your mother not to leave huge meat cleaver on the edge of the worktop. Better still, when she walks away to take a phone call, shut the damn kitchen door because she is actually cooking something on the stove.”
The wife will actually look at me, shocked that i could actually think her mother was careless.
So there it is: it seems children are impervious to meat cleavers, household cleaners left hanging around, and hitting windscreens because no seat belt, but if they are not wearing two jumpers they will collapse in an instant.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Religion in Taiwan: Exhuming your long dead grandfather
When we first arrive it is really hard to believe how a nation of technology lovers and capitalists are also so religious.
Well, not so much religious as superstitious. In the west we are brought up to believe in one God, and all religious practicies and ceremonies deemed to ward off evil spirits, bring good luck etc. are firmly relegated to shows about the Middle Ages and how stupid we were back then.
Not so in Taiwan. Here they cling onto beliefs that the druids would have found illogical -Businesses routinely consult fortune tellers to ask which country they should go to a trade show in. Paper BMWs are burnt for those in the after life to drive. And so, and so on...
After the initial period of shock wears off you get used to it, and find your own way to deal. My way was usually to switch off and ignore.
On this occasion the future wife was back after spending a couple of days down south with the relatives. As we hadn't seen each other for a few days we were naturally on the bed and she was playing with my nether regions.
"So what happened?" I asked.
I did vaguely remember her saying something about the family felt they had had bad luck and a fortune teller had told they needed to dig up the body of their grandfather. I of course had switched off.
"Oh, it was not good," she said in her usual understated way.
"Ok, explain again please," I said. "Why did you go?"
She explained. The family had been having bad luck for a few years and someone from the local temple had told them it was because the grandfather had not been looked after well in the after life. It was simple: they had to exhume his body, scrape whatever flesh was still on his bones off, wash the bones, perform some prayers, burn some paper money, and stick him back down under again. Then they would all win the national lottery for the next month.
"Hmm, seeing the body of your grandfather. Dead five years, couldn't have been easy," I said.
"Uh, that was ok," she replied. "The ceremony went wrong."
"Ok. Why?"
Apparently, the people they had hired to do the scraping, didn’t turn up so they all mucked in – and he was still quite fleshy considering the amount of time he had been dead.
"And you helped?....Of course, you did. Stupid of me to ask. You are a good daughter after all."
I suddenly became aware of where her hands were and what they were doing. "I guess you have washed your hands?" I asked.
"Of course," she replied. "What is the problem?"
"Nothing, just i have never had hands that recently touched dead flesh on my body."
"How do you know?"
"True. I am not the best judge of character under the influence of alcohol."
"Stupid," she replied. "So you want me to stop?"
I thought for a moment. "No. No. Definitely not. My warped side has already kicked in. This should be a pull to remember for all time."
Well, not so much religious as superstitious. In the west we are brought up to believe in one God, and all religious practicies and ceremonies deemed to ward off evil spirits, bring good luck etc. are firmly relegated to shows about the Middle Ages and how stupid we were back then.
Not so in Taiwan. Here they cling onto beliefs that the druids would have found illogical -Businesses routinely consult fortune tellers to ask which country they should go to a trade show in. Paper BMWs are burnt for those in the after life to drive. And so, and so on...
After the initial period of shock wears off you get used to it, and find your own way to deal. My way was usually to switch off and ignore.
On this occasion the future wife was back after spending a couple of days down south with the relatives. As we hadn't seen each other for a few days we were naturally on the bed and she was playing with my nether regions.
"So what happened?" I asked.
I did vaguely remember her saying something about the family felt they had had bad luck and a fortune teller had told they needed to dig up the body of their grandfather. I of course had switched off.
"Oh, it was not good," she said in her usual understated way.
"Ok, explain again please," I said. "Why did you go?"
She explained. The family had been having bad luck for a few years and someone from the local temple had told them it was because the grandfather had not been looked after well in the after life. It was simple: they had to exhume his body, scrape whatever flesh was still on his bones off, wash the bones, perform some prayers, burn some paper money, and stick him back down under again. Then they would all win the national lottery for the next month.
"Hmm, seeing the body of your grandfather. Dead five years, couldn't have been easy," I said.
"Uh, that was ok," she replied. "The ceremony went wrong."
"Ok. Why?"
Apparently, the people they had hired to do the scraping, didn’t turn up so they all mucked in – and he was still quite fleshy considering the amount of time he had been dead.
"And you helped?....Of course, you did. Stupid of me to ask. You are a good daughter after all."
I suddenly became aware of where her hands were and what they were doing. "I guess you have washed your hands?" I asked.
"Of course," she replied. "What is the problem?"
"Nothing, just i have never had hands that recently touched dead flesh on my body."
"How do you know?"
"True. I am not the best judge of character under the influence of alcohol."
"Stupid," she replied. "So you want me to stop?"
I thought for a moment. "No. No. Definitely not. My warped side has already kicked in. This should be a pull to remember for all time."
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Non-PC: Angelina Jolie
One of the wonderful things about Taiwanese women is they just don't understand that a woman can't be beautiful, sexy and intelligent at the same time.
I have heard it is getting better in the west (don't quote me, though), but my generation women were conditioned never to mention looks - looks were the enemy in the fight to get equality. With other women they did sit around discussing what a particular model looked like, but they would never do so with their boyfriend because of the fear that he would immediately devalue them. Of course, as a guy, it went without saying you couldn't say anything.
It came as a surprise therefore when you first got to Taiwan and your girlfriend would sit with a copy of cosmopolitan picking apart the bodies of the models.
"Her nose is a little flat," she would say.
"What," I would reply, because my natural sense of self-preservation told me this was a trick.
"Look. Her nipples are so dark. In Taiwan we like pink ones."
"Really?" I said. "So why is that?" Trying to change the subject.
"Makes you look younger," she replied. "In Taiwan they go dark after you have a child. You know you can get them replaced. It is popular in Japan."
"Which one do you like?" she asked.
"Pink of course," I replied. "Like yours."
"Oh. You lie. You know mine are not so pink. My mother always complain me that her daughter is too rough. That i suit - "
"The foreigner," I said.
"Yes. That i suit the foreigner."
"But they are not so dark..."
We then had about a half an hour conversation about the shade of her nipples and what shade I preferred. During the conversation i contradicted myself a million times, but it didn't matter. It was something that i quickly learnt with Taiwanese girls: they weren't trying to get to the bottom of what you thought, on a mission to find the truth, rather just get a compliment. As long as you started each contradiction with a compliment they were never going to pull you up on it; dump you because they had discovered the truth.
The world was tough. Most people were full of bullshit. Just make sure you cover the cracks, seemed to be the motto.
Anyway, after the years of middle class brainwashing, I think i never really got used to this non-pc behavior. This was my favorite from the wife a few years later:
We were watching The Bone Collector on DVD. In the movie Angeline Jolie plays a uniformed police officer.
I don’t know why she did this movie. It is not really her,” said the wife, referring to the fact that the only flesh on display was above the neck.
“Well perhaps she actually wants to be respected for her acting?” I actually felt rather strange explaining this to a woman. “She can’t get her tits out in every movie.”
“Why not," she said. "She has a great body. You know that is what we expect. It is her."
“I feel your pain," I said. "I will complain to the DVD shop tomorrow...Do you have a trade descriptions act in Taiwan?”
I have heard it is getting better in the west (don't quote me, though), but my generation women were conditioned never to mention looks - looks were the enemy in the fight to get equality. With other women they did sit around discussing what a particular model looked like, but they would never do so with their boyfriend because of the fear that he would immediately devalue them. Of course, as a guy, it went without saying you couldn't say anything.
It came as a surprise therefore when you first got to Taiwan and your girlfriend would sit with a copy of cosmopolitan picking apart the bodies of the models.
"Her nose is a little flat," she would say.
"What," I would reply, because my natural sense of self-preservation told me this was a trick.
"Look. Her nipples are so dark. In Taiwan we like pink ones."
"Really?" I said. "So why is that?" Trying to change the subject.
"Makes you look younger," she replied. "In Taiwan they go dark after you have a child. You know you can get them replaced. It is popular in Japan."
"Which one do you like?" she asked.
"Pink of course," I replied. "Like yours."
"Oh. You lie. You know mine are not so pink. My mother always complain me that her daughter is too rough. That i suit - "
"The foreigner," I said.
"Yes. That i suit the foreigner."
"But they are not so dark..."
We then had about a half an hour conversation about the shade of her nipples and what shade I preferred. During the conversation i contradicted myself a million times, but it didn't matter. It was something that i quickly learnt with Taiwanese girls: they weren't trying to get to the bottom of what you thought, on a mission to find the truth, rather just get a compliment. As long as you started each contradiction with a compliment they were never going to pull you up on it; dump you because they had discovered the truth.
The world was tough. Most people were full of bullshit. Just make sure you cover the cracks, seemed to be the motto.
Anyway, after the years of middle class brainwashing, I think i never really got used to this non-pc behavior. This was my favorite from the wife a few years later:
We were watching The Bone Collector on DVD. In the movie Angeline Jolie plays a uniformed police officer.
I don’t know why she did this movie. It is not really her,” said the wife, referring to the fact that the only flesh on display was above the neck.
“Well perhaps she actually wants to be respected for her acting?” I actually felt rather strange explaining this to a woman. “She can’t get her tits out in every movie.”
“Why not," she said. "She has a great body. You know that is what we expect. It is her."
“I feel your pain," I said. "I will complain to the DVD shop tomorrow...Do you have a trade descriptions act in Taiwan?”
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Stereotypes: It is so nice even a foreigner would live there
Years ago when i was looking to buy an apartment, i would go with the wife to visit all these slightly out of town new complexes.
The moment they saw me it was: "Ok, I take you to see the swimming pool and the gym. I know that you foreigners care most about your leisure activity."
I would reply: "I would also like to know that the building isn't going to fall down and i have a shower, but you are right - Take me the jacuzzi. It is all that matters."
My wife tells me there is now an advertisement for an apartment building that takes these very ideas as its theme. The building is in Hong Shu Lin near Danshuei and, as it has a seaview, they built it with particularly big balconies.
Apparently, they have a big, fat foreign dude walking around saying things like:
"Wow, this wouldn't look out of place in America."
"Yes, even my family from back home would live here."
The moment they saw me it was: "Ok, I take you to see the swimming pool and the gym. I know that you foreigners care most about your leisure activity."
I would reply: "I would also like to know that the building isn't going to fall down and i have a shower, but you are right - Take me the jacuzzi. It is all that matters."
My wife tells me there is now an advertisement for an apartment building that takes these very ideas as its theme. The building is in Hong Shu Lin near Danshuei and, as it has a seaview, they built it with particularly big balconies.
Apparently, they have a big, fat foreign dude walking around saying things like:
"Wow, this wouldn't look out of place in America."
"Yes, even my family from back home would live here."
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Expat Culture in Taiwan: Pierre and the restaurant I
Pierre did actually open his French restaurant; lower priced French food aimed at the TGI market had always been a good idea, the only thing we had been worried about was whether he would pull it off.
He did. It was a big pity.
It was already three months since the restaurant opened and we had eaten there five or six times a month. If you wanted to meet Pierre he insisted it had to be in the restaurant. We ate for free in exchange for having to say how much we liked the food every two minutes, tell him what a good job he had done, and agree that they were lucky that he had reserved a table for us. There was a game: although he had invited us, he would look surprised, then stressed because ‘he had promised the table to someone else’, make us stand for twenty seconds, and then he would miraculously find us a table. While he sat he would stand at the bar surveying the scene with an extremely serious look on his face, and, every time he caught one of our eyes he would shake his head, and then seek recognition for the fact that it was all just too fucking busy and, yeah, it was lucky he was there. Finally, he would come to the table every twenty minutes and apologize profusely for the fact that he was unable to sit down for long. He didn’t say why, just pulled his take a fucking look around you face.
“I am thinking about expanding soon,” he said. “I am starting to look for other sites…four within the year. I think that is possible.”
It was fortunate he only ever had five minutes at a time because his tales of success had made him insufferable. First night he had spent 10,000 NT on flowers as was the tradition for a newly opened business, his partners had got an appropriate date and lucky gold characters from a fortune teller, and then he had made the unprecedented step of hiring a queue of people to stand outside – Taiwanese have a magnetic attraction to queues – and business had boomed since, even making his name in the local papers.
“What about your partners?” I asked. “What do they think?”
“They follow everything I want to do. They know who has made them successful,” Pierre replied.
“Have you got a contract sorted out yet? Man, you know these people fuck each other over all the time,” asked Eric, probably right on this one, but not through any balanced judgment of his own.
“Ours is a verbal one. You know contracts are no use in this country,” he replied.
“Well, yes and no, man,” pushed Josh not learning from the mistakes he made with his girlfriends about trying to help.
The truth was illegal work and non-contract work was still extremely common – When you arrive and teach you probably have one legal contract job but then all your privates, advertising work, translation, and other small bits of this and that are all cash in hand. But that is only half the story as it is not a story of marginalized foreigners having no choice. In fact, the locals were as equally guilty of not getting contracts: almost all small businesses didn’t give contracts to employees and few had contracts within partners. It was horrifying and mind-boggling to hear the stories because almost everyone had one of how they invested 10,000 US dollars in a business and the partner ran off. It was a kind of tax in itself: the at least once in your life, rip-off tax.
The common misconception is the idea that, for the older generation they were brought up in an era when it really was the case that the contract was no use. This is not entirely the truth as there has always been a legal system in place for these kind of small cases, especially the last twenty years or so, and while it may not be perfect it is not much worse than most countries – Bear in mind that getting your money back is a long and usually difficult process anywhere in the world, yet we all insist on contracts.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers for why they did it, but here are a few factors.
It can be pretty feudal at times - Things are usually simple and what makes the Taiwanese so friendly and nice also proves to be their downfall in business. Talk to them and they always refer to their business partner as their friend, insisting on muddying clear business relationships with personal connections. Go for an interview at a small company and their No.1 priority is to try and work out if you are a nice person or not, whether you will fuck them over in future. (Tip for getting a job: They want the guy who appears stable, not the hot shot). It is a disease for them: they will have a dispute with a business partner and it is all the more hard to separate because they intertwined their families, but a nasty bust-up will happen. They will talk about keeping the next relationship strictly business, then you will see them, and they will introduce their next business partner. For example: “Uh, this is Mr. Chang…He is a really good man…You know his great grandfather used to live in the village next to my mother’s aunt. He has two sons and a daughter, I have already fixed up his second son with Little Mei…You know, my sister’s daughter. You know both his sons went to such-and-such University they are very smart. Mr. Chang is a Pig (Chinese zodiac animals) and that really fits into my animal. Mr. Chiang lost a lot of money in China and he talks about how lucky he is to meet us. He now calls me step-mother. I went to see a fortune teller and he says that October is a good time for us to launch the business…”
I would go and bang my head against the wall very hard.
The economic miracle effect – For those just arriving in Taiwan this is hard to understand as Taiwan has changed dramatically in the last fifteen years. When I first arrived the country had just had twenty years of 8% economic growth and there was an incredible optimism. They would tell you how they had lost a fortune and made it back several times and such was life. It was clear: as long as you could get hold of a pile of money to invest and networked an opportunity would arise. If said opportunity wasn’t offering you a contract then you thought about it for a while and invested anyway, because only a fool would miss this opportunity. After all you had met his family and he seemed a good guy.
Chao and confusion doesn’t equal clarity – While ego, self-interest and damn right dishonesty did play a part in the disappearance of your funds, the answer often wasn’t so intentionally evil. Take two or three or four people who don’t know much about business, invest their savings together, don’t sign a contract, and are too polite to hammer out key issues of who handles finances, division of labor, responsibilities and company direction, appealing each time to their friendship or skirting issues. The result isn’t organization. And then when you are about to lose your house you grab what is left first and run for the door.
What about for the young people? Well, just because you know what your parents did wrong, it doesn’t mean you can stop yourself repeating their mistakes. If you are thirty or more you grew up with these tales of how all you had to do was work hard, take a risk, and the money would come in. How your father was introduced to this guy who was had been looking to meet a good man. How they both liked Johnny Walker whiskey and they shared the same radical in the third character of their name. And they made a fortune together. There might be contradictory evidence in front of you as your father was now driving a taxi and you were paying the mortgage and the costs of his fancy imported American anti-depressants. Circumstances hadn’t quite gone your way because you graduated from university but then, just as daddy was going to help you pay for that degree in America he lost everything. Now you are just an ordinary college graduate without that all-important foreign degree to break into the international companies and the really big leagues. You still know your father is talking nonsense but to admit that to yourself is not being a good son - besides, delusion rescued you from the knowledge that all your money for the next twenty years would be going on paying your father’s mortgage. Roll the dice. Give it a go.
So what has this got to do with Pierre? Well, like any system in the world there was a positive angle to their particular way of doing things. In this case, it involved lots of: back-slapping and arms around shoulders, deals in late night drinking dens, talk of how you were going to beat the system, large piles of cash changing hands, hand shakes and talk of trust and friendship; it was romantic, it was very gangster film, and it didn’t involve spreadsheets. In the old days the atmosphere was infectious and we were affected to some lesser degree. Pierre loved this idea, but he was also broke and lazy, meaning he had no choice but to go out on a limb.
Back to the conversation:
“You ain’t going to be able to kick the fucker’s asses,” said John. “It is their country so when push comes to shove they always have more gangsters than you.
“You have naked photos of their wives? Anything similar?” John liked to tell us a story about the security camera video of him with the manager of the Kindergarten in the playpen one evening. That was his bargaining chip if he had any problems. We assumed he was lying about their being a video, but he had told his manager the story, the event happened, and there was no way she was going to question the security guard. This, of course, is the other way you make sure you get your money and have no problems.
“But you don’t know how to handle the Taiwanese like I do. Make them your friend and it is okay. Besides, they need me they wouldn’t be so stupid as to squeeze me out,” said Pierre bullishly before downing half his bottle of beer and pulling far too many facial expressions.
We sat saying nothing before its was Josh’s turn to air his neuroses.
“Pierre, isn’t that your ex behind the counter? You gave her a job…And she isn’t…giving you problems?” he asked.
“Of course,” replied Pierre. “Why should she?”
“They are not all crazed stalkers,” said John. “You were unlucky, get over it.
“Besides, there is always usually a way out. This week I had to let one go so I started speaking Chinese to her – Wo. Yao. Xue. Jong. Wen. She stopped answering my calls.”
“But that was a little –,” said Josh.
“Sneaky. Yes. But think about it – If she was so sincere she would surely have been happy to speak to me in Chinese.”
“Hmm,” said Josh.
“Hmm, what?” said John. “You want to tell us what a pathetic bleeding heart liberal you are.”
Half an hour later we were in the taxi into the center. Josh was sat in the front seat repeating to himself: ‘they broke up and are now friends.’
I was struck by the image of Pierre seeing us to the taxi and looking a bit like a mother when her children leave.
“He is fucked,” said John.
“Nah, we don’t know that,” I replied.
“Have to find somewhere else for dinner on a Saturday,” we both sighed.
He did. It was a big pity.
It was already three months since the restaurant opened and we had eaten there five or six times a month. If you wanted to meet Pierre he insisted it had to be in the restaurant. We ate for free in exchange for having to say how much we liked the food every two minutes, tell him what a good job he had done, and agree that they were lucky that he had reserved a table for us. There was a game: although he had invited us, he would look surprised, then stressed because ‘he had promised the table to someone else’, make us stand for twenty seconds, and then he would miraculously find us a table. While he sat he would stand at the bar surveying the scene with an extremely serious look on his face, and, every time he caught one of our eyes he would shake his head, and then seek recognition for the fact that it was all just too fucking busy and, yeah, it was lucky he was there. Finally, he would come to the table every twenty minutes and apologize profusely for the fact that he was unable to sit down for long. He didn’t say why, just pulled his take a fucking look around you face.
“I am thinking about expanding soon,” he said. “I am starting to look for other sites…four within the year. I think that is possible.”
It was fortunate he only ever had five minutes at a time because his tales of success had made him insufferable. First night he had spent 10,000 NT on flowers as was the tradition for a newly opened business, his partners had got an appropriate date and lucky gold characters from a fortune teller, and then he had made the unprecedented step of hiring a queue of people to stand outside – Taiwanese have a magnetic attraction to queues – and business had boomed since, even making his name in the local papers.
“What about your partners?” I asked. “What do they think?”
“They follow everything I want to do. They know who has made them successful,” Pierre replied.
“Have you got a contract sorted out yet? Man, you know these people fuck each other over all the time,” asked Eric, probably right on this one, but not through any balanced judgment of his own.
“Ours is a verbal one. You know contracts are no use in this country,” he replied.
“Well, yes and no, man,” pushed Josh not learning from the mistakes he made with his girlfriends about trying to help.
The truth was illegal work and non-contract work was still extremely common – When you arrive and teach you probably have one legal contract job but then all your privates, advertising work, translation, and other small bits of this and that are all cash in hand. But that is only half the story as it is not a story of marginalized foreigners having no choice. In fact, the locals were as equally guilty of not getting contracts: almost all small businesses didn’t give contracts to employees and few had contracts within partners. It was horrifying and mind-boggling to hear the stories because almost everyone had one of how they invested 10,000 US dollars in a business and the partner ran off. It was a kind of tax in itself: the at least once in your life, rip-off tax.
The common misconception is the idea that, for the older generation they were brought up in an era when it really was the case that the contract was no use. This is not entirely the truth as there has always been a legal system in place for these kind of small cases, especially the last twenty years or so, and while it may not be perfect it is not much worse than most countries – Bear in mind that getting your money back is a long and usually difficult process anywhere in the world, yet we all insist on contracts.
I don’t pretend to have all the answers for why they did it, but here are a few factors.
It can be pretty feudal at times - Things are usually simple and what makes the Taiwanese so friendly and nice also proves to be their downfall in business. Talk to them and they always refer to their business partner as their friend, insisting on muddying clear business relationships with personal connections. Go for an interview at a small company and their No.1 priority is to try and work out if you are a nice person or not, whether you will fuck them over in future. (Tip for getting a job: They want the guy who appears stable, not the hot shot). It is a disease for them: they will have a dispute with a business partner and it is all the more hard to separate because they intertwined their families, but a nasty bust-up will happen. They will talk about keeping the next relationship strictly business, then you will see them, and they will introduce their next business partner. For example: “Uh, this is Mr. Chang…He is a really good man…You know his great grandfather used to live in the village next to my mother’s aunt. He has two sons and a daughter, I have already fixed up his second son with Little Mei…You know, my sister’s daughter. You know both his sons went to such-and-such University they are very smart. Mr. Chang is a Pig (Chinese zodiac animals) and that really fits into my animal. Mr. Chiang lost a lot of money in China and he talks about how lucky he is to meet us. He now calls me step-mother. I went to see a fortune teller and he says that October is a good time for us to launch the business…”
I would go and bang my head against the wall very hard.
The economic miracle effect – For those just arriving in Taiwan this is hard to understand as Taiwan has changed dramatically in the last fifteen years. When I first arrived the country had just had twenty years of 8% economic growth and there was an incredible optimism. They would tell you how they had lost a fortune and made it back several times and such was life. It was clear: as long as you could get hold of a pile of money to invest and networked an opportunity would arise. If said opportunity wasn’t offering you a contract then you thought about it for a while and invested anyway, because only a fool would miss this opportunity. After all you had met his family and he seemed a good guy.
Chao and confusion doesn’t equal clarity – While ego, self-interest and damn right dishonesty did play a part in the disappearance of your funds, the answer often wasn’t so intentionally evil. Take two or three or four people who don’t know much about business, invest their savings together, don’t sign a contract, and are too polite to hammer out key issues of who handles finances, division of labor, responsibilities and company direction, appealing each time to their friendship or skirting issues. The result isn’t organization. And then when you are about to lose your house you grab what is left first and run for the door.
What about for the young people? Well, just because you know what your parents did wrong, it doesn’t mean you can stop yourself repeating their mistakes. If you are thirty or more you grew up with these tales of how all you had to do was work hard, take a risk, and the money would come in. How your father was introduced to this guy who was had been looking to meet a good man. How they both liked Johnny Walker whiskey and they shared the same radical in the third character of their name. And they made a fortune together. There might be contradictory evidence in front of you as your father was now driving a taxi and you were paying the mortgage and the costs of his fancy imported American anti-depressants. Circumstances hadn’t quite gone your way because you graduated from university but then, just as daddy was going to help you pay for that degree in America he lost everything. Now you are just an ordinary college graduate without that all-important foreign degree to break into the international companies and the really big leagues. You still know your father is talking nonsense but to admit that to yourself is not being a good son - besides, delusion rescued you from the knowledge that all your money for the next twenty years would be going on paying your father’s mortgage. Roll the dice. Give it a go.
So what has this got to do with Pierre? Well, like any system in the world there was a positive angle to their particular way of doing things. In this case, it involved lots of: back-slapping and arms around shoulders, deals in late night drinking dens, talk of how you were going to beat the system, large piles of cash changing hands, hand shakes and talk of trust and friendship; it was romantic, it was very gangster film, and it didn’t involve spreadsheets. In the old days the atmosphere was infectious and we were affected to some lesser degree. Pierre loved this idea, but he was also broke and lazy, meaning he had no choice but to go out on a limb.
Back to the conversation:
“You ain’t going to be able to kick the fucker’s asses,” said John. “It is their country so when push comes to shove they always have more gangsters than you.
“You have naked photos of their wives? Anything similar?” John liked to tell us a story about the security camera video of him with the manager of the Kindergarten in the playpen one evening. That was his bargaining chip if he had any problems. We assumed he was lying about their being a video, but he had told his manager the story, the event happened, and there was no way she was going to question the security guard. This, of course, is the other way you make sure you get your money and have no problems.
“But you don’t know how to handle the Taiwanese like I do. Make them your friend and it is okay. Besides, they need me they wouldn’t be so stupid as to squeeze me out,” said Pierre bullishly before downing half his bottle of beer and pulling far too many facial expressions.
We sat saying nothing before its was Josh’s turn to air his neuroses.
“Pierre, isn’t that your ex behind the counter? You gave her a job…And she isn’t…giving you problems?” he asked.
“Of course,” replied Pierre. “Why should she?”
“They are not all crazed stalkers,” said John. “You were unlucky, get over it.
“Besides, there is always usually a way out. This week I had to let one go so I started speaking Chinese to her – Wo. Yao. Xue. Jong. Wen. She stopped answering my calls.”
“But that was a little –,” said Josh.
“Sneaky. Yes. But think about it – If she was so sincere she would surely have been happy to speak to me in Chinese.”
“Hmm,” said Josh.
“Hmm, what?” said John. “You want to tell us what a pathetic bleeding heart liberal you are.”
Half an hour later we were in the taxi into the center. Josh was sat in the front seat repeating to himself: ‘they broke up and are now friends.’
I was struck by the image of Pierre seeing us to the taxi and looking a bit like a mother when her children leave.
“He is fucked,” said John.
“Nah, we don’t know that,” I replied.
“Have to find somewhere else for dinner on a Saturday,” we both sighed.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Taiwan lifestyle: YoYo TV and how to love Taiwan
If you are feeling in a bad mood about Taiwan, there is no sure way to cheer yourself up.
Last night when i got home my daughter was watching YoYo TV, and it occurred to me that you can only have overwhelming love and respect for a country that employs a bunch of super cute twenty year old girls as children's TV presenters; then gives them names like 'peach big sister' and 'strawberry big sister', dresses them up as cartoon characters or nurses or Japanese anime characters always with a very short pom-pom style skirt and obligatory boots or long socks, and then makes them dance in unison while pulling V-signs across their faces and wiggling their fingers with wrists attached to their waists.
I am still not sure who the program is for...
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