Tag Archives: foreigners in Taiwan

The Taiwanese Racial Slur

I like the racial epithet Whitey, it’s succinct and pithy. As great as it is, my favorite racial slur is the Taiwanese word adoah, 阿啄仔 or the alternate form 阿卓仔. The word means “big nose” or “tall nose”, the in 阿啄仔 means beak/beaky, while the alternate form’s means tall, while indicates closeness (it’s a familiarizing particle) and is a diminutive suffix. Add it all together and you’ve got foreigner, Caucasian more specifically. Since transliterating oral Taiwanese to written Chinese allows for some interpretation sometimes you’ll see 阿兜仔 or 阿凸仔 used. These are kind of funky ways of writing adoah, but I kind of like them as looks like a big nose in the center of a face, while looks like a nose. Semantics aside you got to admit “big nose” just kind of nails it.

Some take offense at being called adoah, while for others it just slides off them like a Big Mac all-beef patty off the bun. But is it racist? Well, it’s an almost perfect parallel to the English racial slur “slant-eyes”, so yeah, it’s hard to deny the insensitivity, but let me try, just to be a contrarian 混蛋 .

Don’t get me wrong, adoah can be overtly racist. I’ve had the word hurled at me in very aggressive and intimidating ways. But, in those cases even if the guy had said, “most honorable gentleman of the Caucasian persuasion”, tone and context would’ve ensured a scary—racially charged atmosphere—that’d have left my sphincter dancing.

So adoah can be used in a them’s fight’n’words kinda way, but it also may have no more implied negativity than “foreigner”. When I first came to Taiwan as a student in 1987, foreigners were either 美國人 [Americans] or 阿啄仔 [big noses]. I actually have some pretty warm memories of crowds of little kids skipping circles around me singing “big nose, big nose,….” Less amiable, but not unpleasant, are the memories of obasans pointing at me and telling their grandchildren to look at the big nose. In these contexts, personally, I find adoah neutral if not somewhat affable and was more put out by being called American.

Still times have changed and adoah is less commonly heard among Taipei’s urbane, who are reasonably aware of the sensitivities of foreigners. Outside Taipei the word gets bandied around more frequently. I’m mildly impressed though, despite not believing the word to be insulting—which many Taiwanese don’t—in the time I’ve been here the use of adoah has noticeably declined.

It’s required a shift from traditional Asian values that don’t particularly seek a broad ranging society of different ethnicities living together in respect and harmony. Most Asian societies prefer to stress homogeneity, consequently racial sensitivity is not the default setting. For people from societies that aspire to inclusivity this can be hard to accept. In multicultural Canada, where I’m from, there’s an official policy of empowering and promoting social, economic, and political inclusion, achieved partially through a constant process of navel-gazing, self-policing, and changing acceptable terms. Most Asian countries haven’t had to deal with such concerns, and so can be linguistically insensitive. Simply not much thought has been given to what words are used to refer to different races.

Taiwanese sometimes claim ignorance of the meaning of adoah, seeing it only as a word referring to foreigners. Many foreigners regard these claims with disbelief and occasionally anger. The vexation comes from a linguistic misunderstanding. We tend to learn Chinese character-by-character, building words from the individual characters we’ve learned. Multisyllabic words being regard—more often than would be correct—as collections of characters, each a word/meaning in its own right, thus allowing words to be deconstructed into deeper “real” meanings.

My explanation of the meaning of 阿啄仔, breaking the word down into characters and explaining the meaning of each character was a foreigner-type explanation. Taiwanese learn the language more holistically. Though they might be capable of breaking the word down into individual characters and examining the semantics, that’s not necessarily how they conceptualize the word. As I was writing this article my wife was surprised by the meaning of 啄. She knew the word 阿啄仔, but imprecisely understood the possible meanings of 啄. Do you continually think of the roots and stems of English words? No. It’s a word with a meaning more relevant than its Latin/Greek/Gaelic/… roots. My name is 達仁, to which my Canadian friends usually ask its meaning, and I’ll dutifully reply that it means kindhearted humanitarian or some such. Really that’s wrong. It means me. It’s a name. My name. My English name is Darren. No one asks what it means.  It means keeper of the oak grove or some such, but it doesn’t make sense to think of words in these terms.

Does your grandmother realize the Latin or Greek roots and their nuances as she uses a word? It’s unreasonable to expect more from Grandma Wang. After all, these things are rarely as simplistic as my explanation of how adoah is written implied.  Some Taiwanese assert that adoah is a sign of respect. The history and linguistics justifying this position are that the character not only means tall, but also more commonly means outstanding. Some note adoah may derive from the Taiwanese honorific title for priests during the early days of contact. Also, adoah may come from a story attributed to Zhuangzi,  an influential Chinese philosopher from the Warring States Period. It doesn’t really get much more venerable. At the same time referencing body characteristics doesn’t have the same prohibitions as in the West. [See: “Hello Fatso” And Other Taiwanese Greetings].

It’s valuable to understand where people are coming from, but ultimately it doesn’t matter whether the Taiwanese believe adoah is derogatory . Ethnic terms are insulting or neutral depending who says it and the context—those that the word is directed at get to decide. Personally I don’t see it in absolutes. I cut granny and the kids some slack, while with country folks it really depends how country. For the more cosmopolitan I have a higher standard. I also take into account facial expression and tone, can I perceive cognizance of an implied insult? If not, I’m likely to regard it as slightly funny and let it roll off me. But that’s just me, you get to decide for yourself.

I’m Kinda Racist

I recently caught myself being racist against myself. I was sitting at a Taipei intersection watching a crowd of white people, with varying degrees of success, trying to negotiate traffic. There were tourists, seemingly confused by the flurry of vehicles, looking hopelessly maladroit. They reminded me of the punchline to a joke popular when I first arrived 流浪狗都會過馬路了 [even a stray dog can cross the street], an allusion to foreigners being too stupid to use a crosswalk. There were also long term residents confidently riding bicycles and scooters through the intersection. I hated it. I felt like a crotchety old man, wanting to yell at the kids to get off the lawn, or in my case: “Get out of my Asia. Go home, Whitey!”

Taiwan was the first Asian country I ever visited, approximately 35 years ago. I came to study Chinese folk religion. I spent about a month traveling Taiwan, and a week in Taipei. In the entire time, I spotted one foreigner. How could I not cross the street and talk with him? It was exciting. He was a foreign businessman, and the only foreigner, not part of my class, I saw that month.

I began my ESL career around 25 years ago in Yeosu (여수시), South Korea. At that time Yeosu was a small city relying primarily on fishing. When I first went there television news cameras followed me for a period of days. I was—almost—the first white person to live there, at least in living memory, a real novelty. There had been a white woman that arrived a couple months before me, but for some reason didn’t elicit quite that level of excitement. Possibly it was a problem of misogyny, or that she was unlikable. It gave me a sense of why celebrity sucks—those damn paparazzo.

When I started teaching in Taiwan, almost a quarter century ago, there were some foreigners around, especially in Taipei. However, we were still a small community of outsiders. If I didn’t know you then I’d probably seen you around and recognized your face. It was de rigeur to say hi or wave at any foreigner you bumped into. I enjoyed summer in Taipei back then, because foreign students would come to Shida (師大) to study Chinese. Also, the American born Taiwanese would come back to visit their relatives. There’d be a lot more English on the street. A chance to learn new slang. There would be more foreign faces in the crowd. It created a festival atmosphere and was fun, but—and this is important—then they would leave.

I’m aware there are a lot of advantages to me personally in Taiwan’s foreigner community having expanded (see: The WTO and My Waistline). I sometimes miss being unique, the feeling that I’m a special little flower. There were some distinct advantages. My favorite was that police would go out of their way to avoid you. If you did something they couldn’t just ignore, all you had to do was talk really fast at them in English. They’d let you go. They just didn’t want to deal with it. That’s not true anymore.

Beyond that there was the camaraderie of being part of a handful of foreigners against the world. It was like living in a small town and had a similar know-your-neighbor mentality. The other day I was walking down the street and out of the corner of my eye I caught a puff of blond hair. I turned, smiled, waved and said “hello”. The young woman, in her mid-20s, stared at me like a piece of shit on her shoe. She didn’t say hi, smile, nod, or wave,… nothing. This has become the norm. I guess I could understand if it looked like I might accost them, or try to talk, but I have always been clearly walking or riding past. Foreign guys are only marginally better. Coldness amongst foreigners is the inevitable consequence of the expansion of Taiwan’s foreigner community. Random friendliness is increasingly met with the stink eye.

Yep, I miss it when white people were a little less common.