What about your trip

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What about your trip?

The Taiwan life

The supermarket where I shopped

As a long-term resident in northeast Asia, I could spontaneously compose a book on life for foreigners out here. However, as time is rather short, I will confine myself to my home for three and a half years: the island of Taiwan.

While it does not offer enough to merit an express trip, this subtropical isle does have more than enough natural and historic attractions to keep a foreign resident occupied; moreover, its major cities have a fine range of expat services, from restaurants and grocers, to travel agents and notaries. It is not as good as South Korea for plain old saving money to the bank back home, but it is far more pleasant, albeit with all the exasperations of life in the orient. These include, inter alia, noise pollution, air pollution, rampant littering, spitting, madcap traffic in which painted lanes are purely decorative, computer viruses galore, plus malfunctioning computers, printers and anything mechanical, cockroaches, humidity, expensive aircon, inability or refusal to communicate, and much more.

Many foreign residents in northeast Asia think that learning some Mandarin will give them practical assistance in everyday affairs, and it does--only a little, and only sometimes. Chinese frequently cannot understand each other, let alone a foreigner attempting to pronounce homophonic syllables with their four tones, so an expat has to repeat every request for directions several times, always knowing that orientals often do not know what is in their own neighborhoods. Therefore, a foreigner may find him- or herself walking around within a five-hundred square metre area asking two dozen residents where something is, before accidentally stumbling upon it, and realizing that it would have been better to have just walked around and around, without asking anyone anything. Chinese cannot give or follow directions on how to get to a place to save their lives, even in a classroom with a textbook map and sidebars full of examples.

Once, in a real instance, a class of adult students astonished me by inviting me to an end-of-semester party. Amazed that they had thought of such a thing, I was amazed again when they even gave me the address of the venue. In order to get there, I had to call the restaurant on my mobile phone and hand that device to the cabbie, since taxi drivers here seldom know where a place is, unless other Chinese frequently go there. When I was finally dropped at the location of the party, which, though situated on a major artery, presented a mystery tour to my cabbie, I realised that it was in fact a restaurant I had seen before: situated one block south of the science museum, it was opposite a McDonald's, and catty corner to a major luxury hotel. Despite their being major landmarks in the city, not a one of my students had mentioned them to me, even after all those years of studying English. Furthermore, the restaurant had an orange sign with the English name "Tasty" on it in white letters. Now, if any of my students were to take a multiple-choice test on paper to identify the words "block," "south," "opposite," "catty corner," "orange sign," etc., there would be no trouble. It is connecting all these vocabulary items oneself to fit a real situation that confounds orientals.

Conversely, when I have taken Mandarin lessons, I have never had the slightest problem inventing sentences or speaking them in that language, although, naturally, I have made learning mistakes. My trouble has always been in getting a native speaker to understand. Chinese seldom know where things are in their own hometowns, which makes rendezvous with them a tad difficult. This is the reason why, after some period of reconnoitering their surroundings, western residents stick to expat venues, such as four-star hotels, plus pubs, restaurants, discos, and so forth, that are run by foreigners, or individuals in the Chinese population who can communicate normally.

Much of expats' leisure time is spent in their apartments, eating western food and surfing the net, or watching DVD's and cable television. Despite all the hype about the stimulation provided by intercultural experiences, there is, quite simply, not much to commend them out east. Confucian society has little in it beyond a human anthill, unless you find some unusual Chinese or have a particular turn of mind that is fascinated by it. Surf the expat net for commentary, and you will find little but corroboration for the above. It will be quite obvious to you, if you ever venture there, that orientals are only capable of limited copying of technology and services which they never could have invented; why, in antiquity, their civilization achieved some heights, while they cannot now drive cars in lanes, is one of the great mysteries of this place.

Sent by Hal Swindall (1-04-08)

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