[rant]Not all cultures are equal. This point has been driven home to me again after my recent return to Taiwan from British Columbia, Canada.
Evidence A:
Whilst browsing some year-old Readers Digest magazines at the camp I was staying at, I happened upon an article listing the most polite cities in the world, as well as the most impolite. This was based on such criteria as opening doors in public places for people in wheelchairs, giving up seats for the elderly and pregnant women on public transportation, saying “thank you” for services/favours rendered - from buying an item in a department store to holding a door open for someone. New York and Toronto were at the top of the list, and Taipei was somewhere down at the very bottom - second or third last out of 30-something cities polled.
Evidence B:
Returning to the mainland (British Columbia) from Vancouver Island, I was browsing the magazine shelf in the bookstore when I noticed that Reader’s Digest had another poll- this one on the world’s most honest cities. The criteria they used was returning lost cell phones that were deliberately lost, as well as wallets with a small amount of money inside, along with contact information. Again, western cities polled very high, and again, Taipei was somewhere down at the very bottom.
Evidence C:
As we were getting ready to leave one of the hotels we were staying at, my wife noticed that one of our students’ suitcases wasn’t closed properly and discovered that the girl had swiped all the towels from her room. Vanessa asked the girl if she didn’t know it was wrong to do so, and the girl replied that her mother (a successful Taipei businesswoman) always took the towels from hotels. I understand that a lot of people from all cultures probably swipe hotel property, but I can’t imagine letting one’s kids be aware of it.
Evidence D:
The eating behaviour of our students also had to be seen to be believed. Having never eaten with them before, it hadn’t even occurred to me that this was something I was going to have to teach, but nevertheless, within a day, I had to sit down with them and tell them that they must not take multiple bites of food before chewing and swallowing, that they must not chew with their mouths open, that they must not let food fall out of their mouths when they spoke, that they must not spit bones or food they didn’t like onto the tablecloth, that once food enters their mouths, it must not be seen again. It took them all about a day to get these rules down, except for one boy who couldn’t remember any of these rules for the entire trip. I asked them if these table manners had ever been introduced to them before, and some of them had some vague recollections of being taught table manners, but they all said that no one in any of their families had ever enforced them. FWIW, my students go to some of the best elementary and junior high schools in Taipei, and they’re almost all from upper-middle class/wealthy families.
Evidence E:
I have observed for some time the behaviour of Taiwanese people on airplanes, particularly the condition they leave the bathrooms in. Despite the signs written in three languages (English, Chinese, and Japanese), asking passengers to rinse and dry the basin as a courtesy to the next person, I have yet to find a single occurrence of this happening. On the few occasions where I’ve had the good fortune to enter the bathroom after a foreigner, I’ve found the bathroom to be clean, with the basin wiped.
It came as no surprise then, that last Saturday when I was returning to Taiwan from Canada, that when I entered the airplane lavatory after a Taiwanese obasan finished using it that it was a disgusting mess. There was an inch of dirty water in the basin, along with the airline’s complimentary hand lotion bottle rolling around in the dirty mess. I had just gone in to clean my baby’s milk bottles, so I grabbed some towels, wiped off the lotion bottle, replaced it, drained the basin, and wiped it dry. I then proceed to push the dirty towels into the trash compartment next to the sink, but after my hand touched the metal “trapdoor” thingy covering the hole, it came up brown and sticky. It was smeared with shit. I could see the chunks of undigested food still in the shit, and the way it clung to the hairs on the back of my hand. Obviously someone, in all probability the old obasan using the washroom before me, thought better of flushing the used toilet paper, and decided to dispose of it by pushing the trapdoor down with the shit-covered toilet paper. I gagged, and then spent the next ten minutes scrubbing obasan excrement off of my hand. Then I cleaned the sink and counter, and washed my baby’s milk bottle, but left the shit-smeared trapdoor for the steward to clean up. I went back to my seat, and alerted the (Taiwanese) chief steward. He told me not to be angry. I asked him what the appropriate response should be, if not anger. He then told me that he hated his job, that Taiwanese passengers had no “level” (I think he meant standards), and that he would never have taken the job if he had known how terrible they were. I said that I sympathized with him, but no offense, I didn’t really care about his troubles with Taiwanese passengers. I asked him why they had educational videos to tell people how to put on their seatbelts, how to fasten their life preservers, how to use the oxygen masks, and how to stretch after long flights, but there were no instructional videos telling passengers to leave the bathrooms in a clean condition. He replied that he would pass along the suggestion, but I’m sure no action will be taken. He came back a few minutes later with some alcohol swabs for me to rub my hand with, and I thanked him and used them, but I had already scrubbed my hand pretty thoroughly in the bathroom, so it didn’t really do much.
Evidence F:
My wife was chatting with a friend of hers, the Taiwanese wife of another Forumosan. Apparently, wife, husband, and baby in stroller were waiting in line at a department store elevator. The doors opened, and they let the people get out. Then a mother and her teenage daughter stepped over the front of the stroller which was first in line to the elevator, and squeezed past into the elevator. When my friend the husband protested (in Mandarin), she replied hotly that she didn’t zhuang dao (knock into/collide with) his baby, so what was the big deal? He asked her if she didn’t see that they had lined up, and she replied in English “This is Taiwan”. My friend couldn’t believe his ears.
Evidence G:
Dining with the inlaws at their favourite dim sum place in Ximending, my wife politely asks one of the waitresses for a large glass or small bowl of very hot water, so she can warm the baby’s bottle. The waitress replied that they didn’t have any hot water in the restaurant. Vanessa asked them how they could make tea if that were so, and she scowled, stomped off and brought the water to the table, put it down none too gently, and wordlessly spun away. We thanked her back for her effort.
Yes, this is a rant, and I’m sure that aggravations like this abound in other places as well. To be honest though, they didn’t occur in the two weeks that we were in Canada. Bathrooms were clean, even in public restrooms in gas stations and on ferries, waitstaff in restaurants were always friendly and patient with us and our students, the Canadian kids at the summer camp we brought our students to were welcoming and friendly, as were the staff, and everyone tripped over themselves to help out Vanessa with whatever baby-related needs she had. People were friendly and soft-spoken, and everybody treated everybody with decency.
~sigh~ Under other circumstances, I’d say that I just needed a vacation, but I’ve just had a lovely one. I’m sure that I’m somehow seeing things wrong, and that there is a deep wellspring of civilized behaviour in Taiwan that I’m somehow missing, and that things are just as bad or worse in other countries, but all evidence I encounter points to the contrary. I know that I’m not racist, because the lack of manners and crass behaviour I deplore has nothing to do with skin color or DNA, but has living in Taiwan made me a culturalist? And is culturalism evil? Is it wrong to be discriminating when you are presented with things of unequal value or worth? I believe that it isn’t, it’s just calling things as you see them.[/rant]