General

A Guided Tour

Sticky

The Salty Egg is getting a bit large and unwieldy. [That’s what she said]. Please feel free to surf around the back catalog—they’re all diamonds. If the serendipitous approach doesn’t appeal, here are a few starting points.

It was a surprise to me, but my most popular post by a very wide margin is Don’t Marry a Foreigner. One of my earliest posts, Marrying Taiwanese, is a perennial favorite, garnering daily views. It is unsurprising that intercultural dating/marriage are popular topics among my expat readers, but there are a few articles on the subject that are less widely trafficked: The Hot-Crazy-Taiwanese Matrix and Taiwan’s Marriage Market.

If you’re more of a tourist than a resident of Taiwan, you could try Snakes & Whores, or some of my food writing; The Taiwanese Hamburger, Oyster Omelette, or Oyster Vermicelli. One of my favorite food articles is actually Gross-Out Porn for the Armchair Traveler.

But, I’m not a very serious guy, and tend to like the lighter things. Three of my favorite pieces have no deeper meaning than a chuckle; Sperm Donation and the White Guy, Harmonicas and Public Humiliation, and Are You Gay? A very fun, if off-topic, read is Profound Musings. Check it out.

For those times when you’re not feeling quite so irreverent, try my articles on cultural linguistics. There’s quite a few, but the starting point is The Unified Field Theory of Culture Shock and A Low-Context Dude in High-Context Places.

Or, if you’re just looking for information on intercultural interaction and culture shock, try these; Guanxi, Humor’s Intercultural Perils, Taiwan’s Social Hierarchy, and Symbolic, Parabolic, Metaphorical,  Allegorical,... The entire blog’s theme is culture shock, so just surf around. There are lots of good things to find.

I’ve found the Internet enjoys nothing more than to be morally indignant. If being outraged floats your boat (no judgement) try: The Whiny Women of Taiwan, Humor’s Intercultural Perils, White Privilege in Asia, and The Problem with Asian Christians. Each has created a kerfuffle in its own way. The article that’s caused the most copious outpouring of cyber-acrimony is The Hot-Pot Conundrum Explained. It’s about soup.

Culture Shock, Off-Topic, Shorts

The 沒那麼 Au Courant Chronicles #3: They’re Just Sneakers!

Continuing my tribute to the potent combination of old age and long-term reverse culture shock may I present….

The weirdest damn thing that’s happened since I left Canada is that someone, somewhere, for undoubtedly monetary reasons, somehow—totally unintelligible to me—managed to convince people that running shoes are a valid hobby. Not running! The shoes. People collect them, join running shoe groups and chats, deal them, restore them, try to be active in the “running shoe lifestyle”.… That shit is just plain nuts. How are runners a hobby, let alone a lifestyle? What is there to even chat about vis-à-vis sneakers?

That’s like if you asked someone what their hobby is and they were to reply “toasters”. It’s nonsensical. I guess there’s probably someone in the world that has a weird affinity for toasters—maybe they own a few more models than strictly necessary. Maybe they’re even into the “toaster lifestyle”. They could chat about how different models brown their toast with like-minded toasterophiles. But, it is not a cultural phenomena, like collecting sneakers.

What the Hell?!?

Culture Shock, Expat Life, Off-Topic, Shorts

The 沒那麼 Au Courant Chronicles #2: Why’d Westerners Go Crazy?

Here’s one that weirds me out: Why is everyone in the West in therapy? And, why are they all talking about it? It’s like you can’t have a conversation with anyone if you don’t have some sort of psychological or emotional disorder to share. What’s a Sane-y to do? I’ve thought of making up some crazy, just to be sociable.

It’s a phenomena that developed after I left. Don’t get me wrong, I’m honored Canadians decided life without Darren is enough to drive them bonkers. I understand, truly, but still it seems a mite overwrought.

The experience I’m addressing likely varies a lot according to where you’re from. Therapy may, traditionally, have been a more common feature of life in your geographic locale/socioeconomic strata. I come from a farming region where everyone was at most two generations away from the farm. Nobody was in therapy. We all just made friends with voices in our head. Now, sheee-it, everyone is like, “I think I might have had an errant thought about my great-aunt’s boob, I better get intensive therapy to figure out what’s going on.” We had the medical advice of parents and guidance counselors to guide us through those hard times; give your head a shake, pull up your socks, straighten up and fly right. If none of those worked—well then science couldn’t help you. Where I come from, the difference between when I left an now is stunning.

Of course, this post is concurrently insightful and facetious (my standard setting), if you need help—get help. But if the color red freaks you out, and you fear you might have Ocular Rouge Hypertrophic Disorder with possible Blue-Green Syndrome, maybe, just maybe, you don’t need therapy. Maybe you should get off WebMD.  Instead of a therapist, make a friend (a real honest-to-God face-to-face friend) and talk with them.

Now when I interact with Westerners in a Western setting, I find myself in conversations where I’m not sure what my role is—I think I’m meant to be supportive, but unfortunately I was born with a finely-honed bullshit meter, and I’m like: Jesus, there’s nothing wrong with you, at most you have a quirk, and quirks are charming. Of course, if you’re clinically quirky, you might benefit from counseling. Most of you aren’t nearly as uniquely idiosyncratic as you seem to think.  Most of you are just little quirky, and that makes your personality more interesting.

It’s gotten so bad, last trip to Canada I didn’t just listen to several of my friend’s psychological diagnosis, one of them, when he finished talking about his perceptions of his own mental health, then—I shit you not—he talked at length about his dog’s mental health issues. Apparently his dog suffers from Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) and assorted other mental health conditions. The dog…..a dog(!)….was on psychotropic medication. Prozac,…I think. That’s crazy. As a voyageur from past-Canada to present-day-Canada, I can offer a lesson from the past: learn to deal. If you don’t like your quirks—they’re easily changed. Get a friend, pull up your socks, shake your head, and fly right.

Expat Life, General, Society & Culture

The 沒那麼 Au Courant Chronicles #1: What’s Wrong with Bullying?

I have mentioned before that being a long-term expat causes a phenomenon where you are more out of touch with current trends then you should be for someone your age. [See: The Expat Time Warp]. It is like taking Oldfartitis and putting it on crack cocaine—chronologically 33 years old, ontologically 103 years old.

Pre-Internet, if you lived your life in a foreign language, then you had very limited access information on current events and cultural trends around the world, and probably—because of limited linguistic ability—you wouldn’t really understand happenings in your host country. The Internet has helped, it’s possible to follow trends back home and around the world, but the longer you’re an expat, the less you’re attached to what’s happening back home, and the less likely you are to keep up.

In a sense, you’re hermetically sealed, dated and stamped, at the time you left home—a walking-&-talking cryogenically frozen cultural time capsule. Giving you unique insights into changes and trends that others back home, mired deep within the culture, may lack. [Yeah. It’s as charming as it sounds]. In this little series, I’m going to share a few of these cultural insights.

One of the first things I noticed early on in my expat career was that child rearing changed not that long after I left Canada. It got quite a bit softer and gentler. This would’ve been when Millennials were preteens and teenagers.

They babied the babies. Ridiculous! I couldn’t believe how soft society became. They weren’t throwing Millennials into the deep end of the pool like Gen X. Society was collectively trying to solve Millennial problems. I know! It’s crazy! Society never gave a flying-fuck when those exact same problems were Gen X problems—no one knew about, cared about, or acknowledged them. But, when those problems transitioned from GenX problems to Millennial problems, suddenly they became societal problems that needed to be fixed. There are a lot of examples of this, but today I choose to talk about bullying.

Let me ask those of you in the West: When did bullying become wrong?

It used to be part of life. Part of how parents and schools toughened you up and taught you to stand up for yourself. I’m not joking, it was literally part of the academic curriculum in high school. Does anyone remember Hell Week, or Frosh Week, or whatever your school called it? For those of you too young and coddled to know, that was when your high school encouraged the bullying of freshman at the start of the school term. They gave it a whole special week of its own. During that week, as long as the bullying stayed within reasonable limits, i.e. no one died, school administration, and teachers, either turned a blind eye to what was happening, or encouraged it.

Now schools and society, not only are failing to turn a blind eye, they’re outright discouraging bullying. I suppose maybe they haven’t read enough parenting manuals—has Lord of the Flies been removed from mandatory reading lists? How are children raised this way supposed to learn how to interact with others and solve their own interpersonal problems? I suppose if you’re from a generation younger than Gen X you think I’m joking. I’m not. Ask any boss who manages Millennials and younger what it’s like. They are constantly called on to deal with interpersonal kerfuffles that should not be management’s problem.

Gen X learned how to interact with other people, how to solve their own interpersonal problems, at least partially by dealing with bullies. Was it tough? Sure. That’s why they called it tough love (the entire philosophy of child rearing at the time). But now we as a generation do not need our bosses or HR to solve petty little interpersonal snits. We can do that on our own. And if we can’t solve it, we know how to live with it. We’ve been doing it since we were in diapers.

Bullying is part of what has made the greatest generations so cool. Why has society abandoned one of the tried-and-true tools of childrearing? As a total cultural outsider this is one of the things I ponder when I go back to Canada. The pussification of society really stands out, and I am positive that it has had a deleterious effect on society. It seems they’re trying to create a dream world, where gravity makes boobs perkier, and chocolate cake is made from Ozempic, but ask an outsider, a repository of prior cultural norms, like me, and you’ll get the truth—you’re all deluded. Children need to learn to figure it out for themselves, or they become a half-assed version of an adult.

Look at me: I sound like everyone’s great-grandfather—and that there’s the expat time warp. Charming, n’est-ce pas?

 GenX-pat hits some of the same points as this article, but from a different angle. 

Expat Life, Humor, Language, Shorts

“Get Yo’self a Pillow Dictionary…”

If you’ve been here long enough, you may have heard the advice that the best way to learn Chinese is to get yourself a pillow dictionary. A Taiwanese lover with whom to converse in Chinese. Someone to help you navigate your cultural dysphoria. Seems like sound advice. Not always.

I had one of those. When we were dating, I was so proud. Not because she was beautiful. She was. I was prideful of my amazing Chinese language ability.

I hadn’t been in Taiwan very long and had not studied Chinese very much, yet I had a girlfriend who I exclusively spoke Chinese with. Two or three days a week I spoke nothing but Chinese. Sometimes she would phone in the night, and from a dead sleep, I would wake up and speak Chinese before even beginning to think. I thought: Wow, Chinese is surprisingly easy to learn. How about that I’m not just gifted in the bedroom, I’m excellent at languages too.

I was awesome!

After we broke up, I started speaking Chinese with more Taiwanese people than just her. I was shocked by how bad their Chinese was. Most of them didn’t understand a single word of their own language.

I would be talking to them in my perfect Chinese and they would look at me like they couldn’t tell if I was speaking English, German, or Russian—but they were positive I wasn’t speaking Chinese. I was truly shocked and genuinely thought, what the fuck is wrong with these people? I could not believe how bad Taiwanese people‘s Chinese language skills were…

… because my ex-girlfriend never told me I hadn’t really been speaking Chinese…

…I’d been speaking English using Chinese words—a coded language only she understood.

Educational value…nil.

Society & Culture

I Ain’t Marrying No Ghost

I came to Taiwan in the mid-1980s to study Chinese folk religion. I still have a fascination with the topic, and recently saw something, in the folk culture vein, I never thought I’d see—someone seeking a husband for their deceased daughter.

Ghost marriages, or spirit marriages, used to be fairly common in northern Taiwan. When I came here for school I was cautioned against picking up any red envelopes that I might see laying around, as this is the mechanism used to find a spouse for the dead. The ghost will cause their choice to pick up the red envelope, and then the family of the deceased—hiding nearby—leaps out to announce the pending betrothal to the surprised passerby. Refusal to wed would result in the man being haunted by the woman’s crying spectre until he agrees to the marriage.

Here in Taiwan, ghost marriages are almost always between a living man and a deceased woman. The marriage is normally contracted by the parents of the departed. The purposes of a ghost marriage are variable. Historically it allowed the woman’s family to increase their guanxi by establishing a quasi-familial link with another family, increasing their kinship/patronage ties, much as a temporal marriage might have. There were, and continue to be, more ephemeral reasons for ghost marriages. Traditionally, so strong was the social imperative to find a good matrimonial match for your daughters, that the social necessity to marry continued even into the grave. Families, even now, may find closure knowing the soul of their beloved has found peace by crossing this important milestone. I have a friend whose family lost a young child, decades later the father began to be visited in his dreams by his dead daughter asking to be wed. The father found the experience upsetting and wanted to seek a ghost marriage, but they were living in Canada, so that wasn’t realistic. It is an example of why a family might seek closure through a ghost marriage even in the modern era.

There is also a religious element to ghost marriages, many Taiwanese homes have an altar housing their family’s ancestral spirit tablets. Offerings and prayers to the ancestors are made before the altar. Traditionally the daughter’s spirit tablet does not stay with her birth family, but instead is transferred to her husband’s family, where she receives prayers and offerings as part of the patrilineage. If she dies unwed, her tablet remains with her natal family, but then there are no heirs to properly worship her tablet. So a ghost marriage can provide the woman’s tablet with a home where it will receive its due veneration. In present day Taiwan, I believe families might be more flexible about how they honor a deceased unmarried woman, but undoubtedly this varies a lot by family

As a cultural voyeur I love seeing funky weird cultural things, but despite having lived here for decades, and having studied folk religion,  I’ve never seen anything related to a ghost marriage. That’s logical. The marriage ceremony itself is solemn, kind of a mix of a wedding and a funeral, with only close family involved. It’s not like friends and extended family would be invited to join in the joyous event. Most Taiwanese would shy away from attending such a spirit marriage. (You don’t wanna fart around with phantoms & spooks). Also ghost marriages have become quite uncommon, thus there’s not many opportunities to witness anything related to this practiced. So, imagine my surprise when I walked up on this….

Well, tickle me pink. I couldn’t believe it. Husband bait. Right there in front of me. No, I don’t think that someone just accidentally dropped two red envelopes so neatly on the street. Pretty sure someone was looking for a marriage partner for their deceased daughter.

I stopped to take pictures of the envelopes and as a joke texted the pictures to a Taiwanese friend, asking if I should pick them up. She went apeshit. No, no, no,…STOP,…don’t do it,…you’ll be forced into a ghost marriage. She was very worried for me. Taiwanese believe the spirit might sometimes be malignant and cause problems for its spouse, possibly even their death. [You know what it’s like to fight with your wife—now imagine your wife is a malevolent supernatural wraith]. It’s not something to be fucked around with. I have some western friends who think a ghost marriage might be fun, maybe get a dowry, have a story to tell,…. They’re not superstitious and are unconcerned by the impact of a ghost on their lives. [FAFO]. My motto is: when living in Taiwan, if in doubt, do as the Taiwanese do—and they do not willingly marry a ghost. Even if you’re not superstitious, it’s a real pain in the ass to have a ghost marriage. There are a lot of the same traditions and requirements as for a real-life marriage. Just on a logistical level alone you don’t want to deal with it.

After examining the red envelopes, I photographed them while very carefully avoiding touching them. I was intrigued, and looked for family hiding nearby, but I didn’t want to linger too long, for fear of looking too interested and marriable. I don’t want to marry no ghost. That’d give me all the responsibilities of two wives with none of the sex. Mama didn’t raise no fools.