I think there is something to be said for both “bababa” and “bob’s” perspectives. It is true that Taiwanese will speak very frankly about you in your presence, stupidly assuming you don’t understand them. On the other hand, people here can be very kind. I think that is worthy of focus. People who say really offensive stuff are pretty rare, at least I have found.
That wasn’t aimed at you, but at the strain of “If you don’t like it go home” that seemed to creep into the conversation.
I never said I wasn’t living in such a hothouse! You read that into what I wrote.
Vorkosigan
I didn’t read into what you wrote. I simply disagree with your position. I do not think I live in a bubble here. You can list the gangster realities like you did on another site when you made a similar claim about all foreigners’ lives here, but most of us are aware of such things; we choose not to partake, as most Taiwanese do. I am not leading a sheltered life, I can tell you that much. My employer takes care of my visa issues, but that is it. If I go to a restaurant, I deal with this culture. If I go to the bank, I deal with this culture. If go to the store, I deal with this culture. Basically, if I leave my home, I deal with this culture. When I go to my girlfriend’s grandfather’s house during Chinese new year, I am definitely dealing with this culture. I think every individual’s relationship with this place and its people will be different. But I don’t think a nether-worldly, bubble hothouse metaphor will suffice to describe everybody’s condition vis-a-vis this culture. Finally, when you state that we all live in a hothouse, you are at the same time implying you are not; or, at least, you have some perspective we somehow lack. It’s not about reading into anything; it’s simply following the logic pattern of what you wrote. If you think I’m merely reading into your post, how about answering this question: how do you know that I’m living in a hothouse? Try to answer it without claims to perspectives we supposedly don’t have, knowledge of the so-called “real Taiwan” and the like.
When you go to a restaurant, the bank, the store, and your girlfriend’s grandfather’s house, you are being treated as a foreigner. No matter how long you live here, no matter how well you speak Chinese, you will always be just that … a foreigner. And you will be treated with more deference (I’m not sure that’s the best word choice) than the average Taiwanese. As long as you don’t look like the rest of the 23 million people here, you will always be on the “outside.” I think that may be part of what Vork is getting at.
I don’t believe it. In my neigbourhood there are at least two caucasians who don’t speak a word of “English.” They were born here and from what I can see are treated like anybody else.
I also don’t believe it. Treated as part of the racial “other” is not the same as living in a bubble. Deference, I agree, is certainly not the best word. Tolerance may be, in positive interactions at least.The metaphor (and I’ve seen it used elsewhere as well) eslcafe.com/forums/job/viewt … sc&start=0 basically means we are living a sheltered existence, ignorant to the “real” realities of this place. I respectfully disagree with this point of view.
[quote=“Vorkosigan”]
As for prefering “cultures” you don’t live in a “culture” but in a hothouse of deference that treats foreigners very well. You live in an artificial reality created for foreigners. Of course it is nice!
Vorkosigan[/quote]
Wow, thanks Vorko, now that explains everything! I do not live in a culture here, right. So … let’s see… what about my wife: unreal, right. Her family … right, unreal and artificial. Those first/third daughter fights … just stuff they pretend to have to make time a bit more amusing for me, right?
Consideration? Can you give me an everyday example of a Taiwanese person showing consideration for others? For every one I will give you ten examples of selfishness and total absence of community spirit / good neighbourliness / or gongde xin, or whatever you want to call it.
Thanks for saying what I wasn’t brave enough to say! 
I forget which level of culture shock it is when you think everything in the foreign country you reside in is all nice and dandy and back home is a debauched culture full of arrogance and ignorance even when the reality may very well be quite different.
That’s a strawman. No one position is “sufficient” to describe any experience. Nevertheless, the term hothouse describes an important component of it.
No it’s not. There’s no logical relationship there. I live in the same hothouse you do. I don’t need some outside perspective to be able to identify it as a hothouse, anymore than I need to fly out to outer space to see that I live inside an atmosphere composed of oxygen and nitrogen. I experience it every day, same as you.
Because you’re a foreigner in Taiwan. It’s not about “the real Taiwan” or anything like that. Being a foreigner means living in a different reality here in Taiwan than the locals do. It does not mean “not dealing with the culture” because part of that culture is creating that reality you swim in and which you deal with. It does not mean that your children do not fight or that you and your wife do not have a real marriage as the other poster said. These are strawmen.
It DOES mean things like the other day, where the CEO of a major Taiwan firm had me over for coffee and a chat. That would simply never happen in the US. It DOES mean thing like young women blushing and giggling when they see me. It DOES mean being “onstage” quite a bit as the representative foreigner. It DOES mean a extra bit of attentive service that Taiwanese here do not experience. It DOES mean a higher status in some ways, certainly more so than other “foreigners” likes SE Asians. It DOES mean access to jobs and other things locals will never be offered, like the radio show I did for a while, getting the opportunity because I was a foreigner. It DOES mean that people listen to your opinion more than they should. It DOES mean that people sometimes smile and apologize when they bump into you, which they do less often for each other. It DOES mean getting brought to parties and things, because bringing a foreigner gives one face. It DOES mean being able to drive a motorcycle illegally because the police will never bother to check, or working with a fake degree because locals simply aren’t experienced enough to spot it. It DOES mean getting more attention from women than you otherwise might. It DOES mean making more money than you could at home with much less work, simply because you speak English. It DOES mean that your familiy will make allowances for you because you have never been to X or don’t like to eat Y that they might not make for a Chinese. It DOES mean that they may not expect you to support your in-laws in their old age (though of course each family will be different). Etc etc etc. In countless ways your path is smoothed as a foreigner, especially if you are white and not from one of the despised darker ethnicities. Of course, if you are one of the latter, than things may well be different, though some of that will still be extant.
Vorkosigan
Thanks for saying what I wasn’t brave enough to say!
I forget which level of culture shock it is when you think everything in the foreign country you reside in is all nice and dandy and back home is a debauched culture full of arrogance and ignorance even when the reality may very well be quite different.[/quote]
And I forget at which level of culture shock it is when you start holding the foreign country you reside in at a higher standard than back home, pretending things like discrimination, etc. never occur back home but only here. Or that foreigners back home are treated exactly the same as citizens…duh, get real. 
No, sorry. I am not living in your bubble/hothouse. Perhaps you are. Speak only for yourself. I take strong exception to one-upmanship type foreigners trying to tell me about my reality or-- as you so patronizingly describe mine-- artificial reality in Taiwan. You have no clue. Follow your own advice: You say no position is sufficient to describe every situation… Isn’t that exactly what you do when you put forward such broad sweeping generalizations as your hothouse theory of faux cultural existence? Stay away from categorizing my relationship with this culture. You necessarily know nothing about it.
Hexuan I doubt that I could win that kind of argument with you, but I’ll bet that if you took a break from this place for a while you would find that on your return it would be easier to see the positive that exists here. If I am right about that then those positives were there all along no?
I am not “speaking for” anyone but making a general observation about la vida loca in Taiwan…
How is it “patronizing” to describe it in ways that try to isolate what kind of construction it is? Perhaps we should veer into a discussion about what terminology should be used to describe the cultural niche created for foreigners.
…Now there’s a sweeping generalization…
…but some positions nevertheless capture certain aspects of reality better than others, eh? in any case, I was responding to your strawman construction of my position.
How is it “faux?” Seems pretty real to me. It seemed pretty real when I had coffee with the CEO and it seemed pretty real today when two pretty girls said hello to me outside 7-11, giggling and blushing. Saying something is ‘artificial’ or a ‘hothouse’ highlights how it is a construction of the culture we reside in (which is also artificial, culture being a made thing, but in a different way). How does being “artificial” make it unreal? I could have used another term, but other oft-heard terms like “ghetto” don’t, to me, capture well the positive discrimination one encounters. Again, perhaps you’d can find another term that captures the Cloud Cuckoo Land of foreign life here?
You’re right. Each foreigner lives 100% in their own reality with no overlap, and there is simply no way two of us could have any point of comparison in our very different lives. Generalization is impossible, and we should all probably quit posting to the forum, since there is nothing that we can say that another person here can possibly understand.
Even if you are the one exception, the one foreigner who not once has ever received even a single benefit by virtue of his/her foreignness, and did everything Horatio Alger style, fighting the Real Taiwan the whole way, that would not invalidate even one thing I’ve said. Hint: a generalization, even a sweeping one, is only a general statement.
Vorkosigan
Seems a bit mean since Vork just spent so long typing his replies, but still …
TS, if you think you’re not treated different to the locals here by the locals here then you’re off your head. Crazy as a loon.
Foreigners here – yes, that’s right – ALL foreigners here, every man-jack of them – are living in a separate reality to the locals. If you think otherwise, you’re fooling yourself.
There are positive and negative aspects to this culture and foriegners occupy a strange place in it. Sometimes we are granted more respect than we deserve, sometimes less. The situation does leave a lot of room to manuvere though and if it is your hope that you can perhaps contribute in some small way, then I think you can have an interesting enjoyable time here without completely losing your sense of proportion.
I do think I’m treated differently, and that that’s to be expected because I am in fact different. I’m a geeky-looking, middle-aged white guy who only knows a handful of Chinese words. Here, that’s pretty different. But so far, that thought hasn’t cured me from being crazy as a loon.
I think I was “living in a separate reality to the locals” in my home country, and that may go a long way towards explaining how I wound up in Taiwan.
As for civilization: My reading on the subject is far from extensive, but I think the basic deal is, if a society has got population centers of 5,000 or more, writing, and stone monuments, it’s made the cut. I’m pretty sure washing one’s hands with soap after peeing, not cutting in line, dog hygiene, or even making sure all dogs are accounted for, aren’t on the checklist.
And anyway, I think I’ve pretty much lost the habit of necessarily equating “civilization” with “good.”
As to how the Taiwanese treat people: In my heart of hearts, I would like everyone to do everything possible for me, and only me, and that as soon as possible, preferably right now. But after a little over half a century on the planet, it’s slowly begun to dawn on my heart of hearts that that ain’t gonna happen.
So I’m stuck with watching a young woman, with a strikingly lovely face and the grace of a small bird, practice her taichi in the park. I find it odd but understandable that she keeps her handbag on her shoulder while she practices. Or watching the two arthritic, old dogs near my school, one black and one white, charge into the middle of the street on another one of their occasional, spontaneous barking, chasing, snapping assaults on passing cars, scooters, and sometimes pedestrians. I wonder what causes it (this evening I found out that horn-honking is one of the triggers).
Then there was the guy in Toufen, so far away I could barely see him from my apartment window. He was standing on his roof, a flag in his hands, directing a huge flock of pigeons that were flying in a wide circle around his house. The house was surrounded by rice fields of such a bright green it almost hurt the eyes to look at them. Finally, the pigeons made their way back to the huge cage on top of the man’s house. He seemed to be exactly right, exactly as he was supposed to be.
Anyway, none of these people, dogs, pigeons, or brilliant, green rice fields did anything for me except exist where and when I could observe them. I hope to see more.
And whatever Taiwan is, there doesn’t appear to be much I can do about it. The most I can hope for is to be able to do a little bit about myself.
And with that, I think, the good guys just won. 
Man, I could seriously go for reading more posts like that last one. Well done!
LOL Bob and I have posted the exact same sentiment at almost exactly the same time, without having read one another’s post first. The good memes are in the air… 