Monthly Archives: November 2019

General

A Guided Tour

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.

Expat Life, Society & Culture

White Privilege in Asia

I am aware that my entire life I’ve benefited from being white. Certainly it was advantageous being white in Canada, but I was also part of Generation X. When I came of age my entire generation was receiving an inter-generational boot-fucking of legendary proportions. It didn’t matter too much what race, color, creed, or sex you were—everyone was being bent over the hood of the same car. Was I offered lube because I’m white? Sure. I was, of course, relatively privileged, but it’s hard to feel it when you can’t spend that entitlement on anything of economic value.

Weirdly, I’ve never felt my white privilege more overtly than in Asia. There are real economic benefits to being Caucasian here. The entire ESL teaching profession is built on selling your whiteness. We get paid more money for doing less work than an equally or better qualified Asian. Straight-up white privilege. At the buxiban end of the profession, cram schools need foreign faces for marketing, traditionally this has meant pink complected. Other colors need not apply, no matter if you’re a native speaker. Parents like to see their children being taught “real English” by “real English people” (read white). Taiwan has slowly become more sophisticated and willing to employ a wider range of races as English instructors, but every school still wants a disproportionate number of albinos in their stable. My first year of full-time teaching, in Korea, was shite. I still find it hard to believe I managed to get paid for that. I had no skills. All I had to offer were a white face and a personable attitude. Good enough: many manage with just the former.

The economic benefits of being white in Asia extend into business. It is not uncommon for white people to exceed their natural corporate positions upon arrival in Asia. If the person turns out to be competent at their new level, the arrangement can be mutually beneficial. But if not, it’s like taking the Peter Principle, shoving it in a penis pump, and really enlarging the situation’s knobbiness. Of course it is part of the reason people come—overemployment in Asia beats underemployment back home. This is particularly notable in areas of Asia that are developing and booming. At one time that was Japan, later Taiwan and Korea, then China, now Vietnam and India. During rapid growth businesses want white visages on the payroll. It gives them face. Part of the foreigner’s job is to show up at company events and be on display. “Who’s that? Oh, that’s our white guy”. It’s a bit like being Donald Trump’s black guy. Tokenism on crack cocaine, but God bless us whities—we’ve really leaned into it.

From the company’s perspective, the practice is not unreasonable. Asia’s super heated growth has been based on manufacturing and export to the Western market. It is sensible to have some supervisors and representatives from those markets. That’s also why having a small stable of foreigners on staff gives face, it makes the company look like an international concern, busily slicing and dicing those foreign markets. If the price of such PR is paying a white guy to play solitaire on his computer—so be it. Those gold rush days inevitably fade, the companies stop needing a white figurehead, and those people either have proven themselves useful, or they’re down the road to the next booming area.

Probably the most notable expression of white privilege in Asia can be seen in the foreigner’s licence. It is a direct application of privilege. Using your foreigner’s licence is when you either feign ignorance, or just directly use your foreignness to get something you don’t deserve. My foreigner’s licence has done everything from getting me a last-second seat on a fully booked plane—and some other poor schmuck thrown off the plane—to getting me out of traffic tickets. Often it is not necessary to do anything, it just happens—sometimes against my will. It worked much better thirty years ago, but it’s still a thing.

Of course there’s also racism in Taiwan, and yes it can be directed towards white people, but often it takes an oddly pleasant form. It’s a racial fetishism where white people are regarded as “advanced”, “clean”, and “prosperous”. I believe this is some sort of residue of imperialism, us Asian-based whities are the vestigial tail of European imperialism. We lack the real power of that bygone era, but retain a whiff of privilege. I don’t want to talk too much about this as it’s the topic of an upcoming article.

Expat Life

F@cking the Dog in Taiwan: Inter-Expat Variance

The expat lifestyle’s greatest pleasure for me is meeting and interacting with people of diverse backgrounds. The Salty Egg normally discusses this in terms of interactions with the dominant culture. However, Taiwanese is not the only culture here that is alien to me. Expats themselves are drawn from all over the world. Taiwan-based expats are a heterogeneous soup of races, cultures, and creeds. It gives expat friendships some of their zest. Cultural misunderstandings among expats are almost as likely as Taiwanese-foreigner mix-ups.

I used to work in a school that had a nice mix of Americans, Canadians, Australians, Kiwis, South Africans, and a Brit. Every Monday morning, as colleagues will do, someone would ask me what I’d done over the weekend. I’d usually breeze by, and say something like, “Not much, you know, I just fucked the dog”.  Apparently my standard answer was causing vexation and concern among coworkers. Who knew fucking the dog isn’t a universal English idiom? My colleagues apparently imagined I (might) have had a canine sex slave chained, spread-eagle, to the bed.

I didn’t.

I still can’t believe I have to explain this, but fucking the dog means laying about. I suppose it started as doing the dog, meaning to lounge around, like a dog. Inevitably doing became fucking, and thus this eloquent phrase was born. (Dog Fucker is the noun form—use it well). I now know that despite it being extremely commonplace where I’m from, many other English speakers don’t know the colloquialism. All it took was a single visit from Taiwan’s SPCA to banish that piece of Canadiana from my lexicon. The potential for inter-expat misapprehensions is high, not surprising when you consider the expat diaspora.

By volume, the largest expat groups come from South-East Asia. They do all the work; build Taiwan’s buildings, catch the fish, work as maids, care for the sick and infirm, and become wives.  They’re a common sight on the streets, but other expats don’t generally rub elbows with them. Their concerns and lifestyle are different from the average Western or Japanese expat. You’re unlikely to meet them at the normal foreigner hangouts. They usually have less time, less expendable income, and in terms of where they socialize, there’s a tendency towards ghettoization. The potential for intercultural gaffs between these expats and others abound, but lack of proximity makes it unlikely.

It used to be, if you saw a white face in the crowd, it was an English teacher. The primacy of English teaching among Western expats is a thing of the past, but we’re still a very large component of the Western expat community. There’s often misunderstandings between English teachers (the lumpenproletariat) and English speaking businessmen, technical specialists, diplomats, engineers, etc. The groups exist in Taiwan and are drawn from the same countries, but experience Taiwan and expat life differently. I spend most of my time with English teachers, but of these exogenous groups I personally spend time with diplomats and corporate managers. Their experiences of expat life are so remote from mine as to be almost useless as a common reference point. We share the same watering holes and interests, but there’s plenty of room for internecine culture shock.

Opportunities for mutual misunderstanding among expats grows as the home cultures become more divergent. There are a lot of Japanese expats here, mostly Japanese businessmen and the wives of Japanese businessmen. The former work and drink (normally in establishments catering to the Japanese), the latter shop. There aren’t many points of commonality between us. Usually expats of such dissimilar backgrounds only have one common denominator—Chinese class.

Taiwan also has lots of non-English speaking crackers [along with whitie, I’m trying to bring back this racial epithet]. By a series of circumstances I have quite a few francophone friends and acquaintances. They’re generally not here to teach English, or French for that matter, a lot are businessmen, and there’s a surprising number of artists, writers, and other creative folk. I enjoy hanging out with them—they’re totally different than my normal expat crowd.

When the Russian economy tanked approximately fifteen years ago, there were lots of Russians in Taipei. That was a particular treat. They may not have sent their best, but they did send their models. Taipei was lousy with leggy, lithe, angular Russian women, each sporting a Melania Trump moue. Good times. Good times.

The kaleidoscope of foreigners in Taiwan gives life and friendship here its piquancy. I truly love it, but I must admit that my very best friends are usually Canadian (and Aries). I suppose it is more familiar, comfortable—with a lower chance of misunderstanding. Even there, though, Canada is a large variegated country with lots of room for regionalism. Cultural misunderstandings are common even among Canadian expats. Misconception and misinterpretation are a big part of expat life; whether from the host culture or other expats, you just have to deal with it. I choose to find it charming.