Because that’s how the OP described it (or, specifically, her role at the camp). In the absence of any other information, we can only take her at her word.
What aboriginal community? The OP mentioned nothing about that.
I wasn’t passing judgement on people who volunteer for cleanups etc., but I don’t see how that has anything to do with the OPs situation. It was a summer camp, not a volunteer group or a cultural exchange.
No, you were the one who said it was ‘futile’, not the OP. The OP said her parents didn’t want her to go, it was not safe, and inconvenient.
And the OP did in fact supply us with some skerricks of ‘other information’. For example: his or her classmates and the Professor had a strong contrary view. My question is: Why can you ‘only take her at her word for it’? Why the rush to dismiss ‘the word’ of everyone else, including the Professor, and label them as ‘12 year-olds idiots, typical Taiwanese, and lemmings’? Is it just because they are Taiwanese? Is that seriously the depth of your critical thought processes? And from that platform of predjudice you feel qualified to be dishing out advice to a young person?
As for whether or not it was an aboriginal community and the group did volunteer to help out with post-typhoon reconstruction, yes, we don’t know for a fact. And i’ve said that before. Those questions have been asked of the OP but he or she seems to have decided to take the 5th at this point.
I didn’t have any kind of tasks or responsibilities, I just had a marginal role in one game and that’s it.
That sounds like the definition of ‘futile’ to me.
The fact is, 90% of what we do in life is ‘futile’. We have to ascribe meaning to it because we’d go mad if we didn’t. In the 70s there was a TV show about that (“The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin”).
We joke that the one thing people don’t say on their deathbed is: “I wish I’d spent more time at work”.
It’s important that some of us say ‘no’ to the everyday nonsense of life; it’s a critically important lesson for young people. Those who don’t learn it become depressed, full of regret, or silently resentful in later life.
Because if we didn’t start from the assumption that people tell the truth most of the time (because, in fact, they do), the whole of civilization crumbles. Try visiting the Philippines if you want proof of that.
The professor offered them the choice not to turn up. She took that choice. There is no conflict here between the OPs word and the Professor’s.
I think what we have here is a culture clash. As others have pointed out (sometimes rather tactlessly) decisions in Taiwan are more likely to be made on the basis of what everybody else does.
In various English-speaking countries, mothers say to their children from an early age, “if everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?”. I’m guessing that one has no equivalent in Taiwan.
Put it this way: assuming the OP has said all there is to be said (that it was just a summer camp, presumably one with foreigners dressing up and throwing balls around), do you think that:
a) The camp has some value in and of itself?
b) In the context of a no-power-and-water situation, do you think it still has some value that outweighs the unpleasantness of attending?
The OP thought not.
Interestingly enough, the OPs “excuse” is not just an excuse:
My parents asked me not to go. I know I’m 20ish and I’m an adult but I never see my parents and this was the only thing they asked me in a long time, I didn’t want them to be worried sick.
Pleasing her parents was a major factor in her decision, although she’s embarrassed to say so because that’s not the Western tradition.
Are you saying, then, that the duty to one’s classmates to engage in meaningless activities is more important than 孝順? If so, as a non-Chinese person, I’m appalled. I’m heading for 50, and I still place significant weight on my parents’ concerns.
Did you tell your classmates about not going beforehand?
Hi 
, sorry for the late reply but I was busy in these few last days. Thank you for all the advises, I’ll try to clarify things as best as I can.
I didn’t take the 5th 
, I just don’t know much of what happened there because communication with my classmates have been sparse and mostly limited to the classes we have now. I already told you what I know, that they want there to teach some general culture classes, that they had to be helped first but that they probably worked with the staff who was helping them. They didn’t join in rebuilding Taidong or in taking away fallen trees, for example.
Since the beginning my role in the summer camp was decided to be limited because I was told that the kids there speak more 台语 than Chinese, and also because of my Chinese itself. I had to help in one game and that was it. Maybe the kids would have been happy to see a foreigner or curious, but for the organization I don’t think my absence changed anything at all.
My classmates decided to go and I have nothing against that, I do hope that most of them went with a genuine wish to help and not because they were forced to by social pressure. But would I call it volunteering? For me volunteering it’s not “you have to go because this is a mandatory class, you will lose two credits and your classmates’s approval if you don’t go” kind of job. I also speak sincerely when I say that most of my classmates didn’t enjoy the preparation of the summer camp exactly for these same reasons. Volunteering should be with no grades and credits.
I did and I also informed the teacher directly.
In the end the reason why I didn’t want to go it was because, held and organized as it was, the summer camp became to be something too distant from my morals and culture. I had to say no because, as Finley said, I would have probably been resentful. What I regret now is that my point of view was so different from my Taiwanese classmates that one decision changed our relationships. And I’m sorry if it sounds like whining to some of you 
but I’m just trying to understand where to put my limits. I would love to hear some other experience from you guys, too.
In my country we also used to say “many enemies, much honor” 
The bit you don’t get is that the circumstances changed. What was a school camp and cultural exchange exercise (perfectly fine in itself) became something else when the typhoon hit. The hosts could have cancelled if they had wanted to. They didn’t. Knowing first-hand the devastation that Nepartak caused, it’s reasonable to assume they were glad to get some young people down to help out. I certainly was - and i respect them for it. As i said, it just wouldn’t have been possible to carry on with the normal schedule 48hrs after the typhoon. They knew that before they went in there. Most of them took up the challenge anyway. Good for them. Why does that cut you to the quick so much?
You label them:
‘12 year-old, incompetent idiots, silly, typical Taiwanese miserable lemmings (that you would tell) go f- yourself’?
And you say your advice is meant to make people not resentful? Give us a break!
Finley, you have got some writing ability, but if you dropped the snideness towards those who actually get stuck in and do something, it would come across much better.
I am just defending the choices of those that did go - against weird, even racist criticism.
I am not attacking the OP. She posed the questions:
Am i behaving like a child?
Should i just accept that i made a mistake?
If they were just rhetorical questions then it would have been better if she stated that.
No, it didn’t. The OP made this pretty clear in her post today.
Obviously. Which means it was rather foolish to attempt it.
What challenge? You’re just inventing something that never actually happened: i.e., a bunch of strapping young teenagers helping out with disaster relief. It’s a safe bet they were mostly stuck indoors complaining about the lack of water to make 泡麵.
Do you not think that, perhaps, they spent the entire time wondering why the hell they bothered turning up, and are simply jealous that the OP made a more informed decision?
I’ve no doubt there were other groups of teenagers who were doing good work in Taidong. This group was (as far as we know) not.
You’re stringing my words together out of context. You didn’t work as a journalist in a former life, did you? 
Just to be absolutely clear: I have no time for people who guilt-trip others into compliance with a group norm simply to assuage their own feelings of self-doubt when complying with a group norm. These people scare me. They tend to get bullied, until they’re let of the leash, at which point they bully other people.
Again, you’re quoting out-of-context. She made that remark in connection with her deference to her parents’ wishes. And I notice you completely ignored my question:
It only needs a yes or a no.
Sure, I know. Politics 101. If you can’t answer the question as asked, just answer a different one. Or deflect the question with a different question.
Oh please. You are doing exactly that. You made a backhanded attack in the sentence following this one. In previous posts you suggest condescendingly that she made a mistake and should learn from it. Learn what, exactly? The value of mindless compliance when trying to win peer-group approval?
The OP said:
She doesn’t know what happened.
I didn’t answer your question coz it’s based on an erroneous premise. It’s unanswerable.
You’re trying to back-peddle off your bigoted abuse towards ‘typical Taiwanese’ that litters your posts - that’s good - but they are your words. If you don’t want to own them, don’t write them. You won’t admit this, i know, but privately i hope you will see that by resorting to boorish, racial abuse, you only diminish yourself and weaken your argument.
How can i be taking it out of context!? It’s not a remark, it’s a question, that she posed, in her opening post! On an open forum! If she didn’t want it answered, then why ask it?
And btw, to her credit, ii don’t think she has got any problem with that. It’s just you. There has been a range of feedback and she can take that onboard and make a reckoning. That’s exactly as it should be.
OP, I’ll say it again. I don’t mean you any ill-will whatsoever. I just read what was veering towards racial vilification in the responses (not from you) and felt compelled to proffer a counter-point. (a) because i’ve really enjoyed the company of young Taiwanese uni students on my farm, and (b) i don’t think a knee-jerk racial response is the best way for you to resolve this issue.
Seriously? You want me to spell it out to you?
In the original post, she was clearly asking “is it childish for a 20-year-old to defer to her parents’ wishes?”, thus:
I thought that was quite poignant. You then took that phrase and deleted the first half of it, to imply that she was somehow admitting that it’s childish not to follow the crowd, thus:
If they were just rhetorical questions then it would have been better if she stated that.[/quote]
Sneaky and dishonest, IMO.
I’m not backpedalling from anything. If someone’s being childish - as these students are - then I don’t see why I’m not allowed to call them childish simply because they’re Taiwanese. If someone thinks I deserve to be socially ostracized for failing to agree with him, I’ll tell him to go f- himself. It’s true: I’m a grouchy old curmudgeon these days, with very little tolerance for humanity’s failings.
Now, there are many aspects of Chinese culture, historical and modern, that I find objectively superior to my own. There are others I have little time for, and excessive compliance with majority opinion is one of them.
Be careful how you throw around accusations of racism. If you were to assert that (for example) too many British students are lazy, entitled, and so poorly educated that they are virtually unemployable, I’d probably agree with you and we could have an interesting discussion about why that should be so. Just because the statement is negative doesn’t mean its racist.
Spoken like a true politician.
What ‘erroneous premise’ are we talking about here? Are you still insisting that the OPs fellow students descended on Taidong with muscles flexed and water canteens full, ready to do battle with fallen trees? I suppose they might have done. The OP said specifically that they didn’t. We don’t know how she knows. However, I suspect, if that had actually happened, they would have told the OP about it, quite forcefully.
In any case, you apparently still think the opinion of the OP’s parents can be dismissed out-of-hand. This is the main reason I took issue with your post, and the reason we’re having this, erm, discussion now.
You may be an official, but you don’t know much about how it is to be an outgroup member trying to make it in Taiwan.
You aren’t Taiwanese. Full stop.
You can live there, even for a long time. You can have Taiwanese friends (and you will, or still do – maybe not the whole group, but the entire country does not hate you.) You can eat Taiwanese food, take Taiwanese public transportation, go to school at a Taiwanese school.
But your value system, your way of thinking, the simple realities of what you regard as normal and sensible – those are already set. They may change a little after exposure to another culture, but basically, you are not Taiwanese.
And there is NOTHING WRONG WITH THAT. You did not act disrespectfully to your host culture or its people. You simply made a reasoned decision based on common sense. You’re dealing with a heavily group-oriented culture and an age group where members have had little opportunity to act independently in the past. They are still figuring out how to do this whole relationships-with-people-who-aren’t-just-like-me thing. It sucks, when you’re the outsider, but it’s not your fault unless you are deliberately setting out to be an asshole, and you obviously are not.
Taiwanese and foreigners think differently. Sometimes it’s valuable (as a coping mechanism) to think of cross-cultural encounters as a game. If you want to follow one track, you have to do things you find unusual at best or downright stupid/silly/senseless at worse. Doing that, you gain Group In-Points but you lose Sanity Points. Refusing to do those things, you go along another path, gaining Sanity Points but losing Group In-Points.
In the end, it’s all about being able to live comfortably in YOUR OWN HEAD. Not anyone else’s. And everyone has a different balance of Group In-Points and Sanity Points that makes that possible.
Yeah yeah that’s all true to some degree but doesn’t change the fact that OP is stuck in the same room same academic groups and activities with these people and it can be brutal
Then again, it doesn’t get any easier.
Great advice, thank you! As an avid The Sims player I also like the metaphor 
I met the professor today and he was quite nice. He just told me that I should do some hours of volunteer work, I can choose what but i have to give him some documents. Seems fair enough to me.
Man being a foreigner in a collectivized culture is a double-edge sword. Everyone likes you, you mess up, then they hate you. You cant do much as you will always really be out-group. Just get on with your life. Maybe the borg mind will come around if they see you working really hard.
I think that you need to engage in some self-reflection and needs to figure out exactly what your objectives are in life and how to go about achieving them so that in the next situation like this (and there will be many), you do not end up merely reacting. Having to make decisions on the spot puts a person in a weaker position. Feeling as though you have willingly and consciously chosen your response (or even better, whether you even find yourself in a situation), and thus, have control, can be quite a liberating experience.
A word on culture. Culture does not exist in a vacuum, nor does it exist for purely arbitrary reasons. Different cultures may be more or less functional, which is a whole other discussion (and I would suggest that many Western cultures are actually quite dysfunctional once you scratch the surface), but culture exists as a method for creating in-group cohesion, which is a survival strategy (again, with differing levels of success).
I would suggest that there are three approaches that could be taken to this kind of situation.
Be a revolutionary. If you go into a situation using terms like “unfair” or “unjust” then you are really talking about some fairly fundamental aspects of a culture, with the implication that they should be changed. This is probably going to be a fairly lonely and frustrating road to travel. Most revolutionaries aren’t successful. Read up on those who are, perhaps? Regardless, I don’t think that terms such as “unfair” or “unjust” are particularly useful by themselves; you’ll end up with a lot angst if you think like that without taking concrete steps to do something.
Accept that you want to be part of the group, that you want to play the game. As such, learn how to be successful at playing the game, as absurd as that might seem. See something like the Gervais Principle.
Decide that the game is not worth playing or even paying attention to, such that things that are “unjust” or “unfair” become completely irrelevant because they don’t affect you. Of course, in order to do this, you have to put yourself in a position where no one can force you to play the game. One version of this is what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls “F U money”. It goes without saying that in order to reach this point, you have to carefully engineer your life and live quite deliberately.
I have spent the last few years working fairly deliberately (though not as much or as well as I perhaps could have) on option 3., such that I don’t really have to worry very much at all about who says or does what. It is a very rewarding option, but it requires a certain mindset and set of actions. Of course, there is also the drawback that it can be quite a lonely option at times, so you have to be willing to deal with that. Age can also be a factor. At your age, you may have to play the game to some extent, but if your objective is to get out of it, then you may be able to do so much sooner than I could by doing this much earlier and being more deliberate.
Anyway, good luck with this sort of thing in the future.
you seemed pretty happy with your decision so you should probably try to accept what comes with it.
wanting to fit in here is usually a good way to end up disappointed and bitter somewhere a long the line.