East vs. West? Not much of a contest, really

[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]

I bet there was background music in the toilet stall scene, wasn’t there. Like the shower scene in Psycho.
In other news: Eeew! Maoman’s got a shitty hand! I’m glad you didn’t come over to mine last night now. I don’t want none of your damn cooties.

Yeah, England was great. I think I’m pretty much done with Taiwan.

Great things I will miss:

The food (no jokes please, yes it is just a stereotype)
The clothes’ shops
The architecture
The libraries and cinemas and music and cultural stuff
The beautiful countryside
The people; the general friendliness and good manners

The things I won’t miss are the crappy transportation, and the appearance of more crime.

There was! There was!

I’m still considering an amputation. :sick:

Yikes.

Next year we’ll be getting married back home and some Taiwanese friends and family will be there. I’ve been thinking about a number of points you raise… how to avoid culture shock and horror when East and West meet.

ć°´ćş– or ć°´ĺął

Yeah, it means “standards”. 水準 is more commonly used in Taiwan while 水平 is more common in China.

The paper in toilet thing… I understand it’s mostly, because people in China are taught to dump used toilet paper into the garbage bag, and not into the toilet (maybe the old toilets weren’t made for paper waste?), but I only see this in the PRC.

Evidence F: elevator etiquette: I now tend to block or elbow people who try to jump the line, because “this is Asia”, and Asians respond better to force and authority than reason.

Maoman, you need to spend a few days in China. After that, you will find Taiwan to be quiet, clean and civilized… at least for a few weeks. :wink:

The shitty hand story: :sick:

Maoman, a damning list, but I can assure you that in a straight shoot out between Taiwan and HK the Taiwaners come out clear champions of decency.

As for the turd in the bin, you didn’t happen to notice if there were foot prints either side of it? I mean she might not have seen a sit down toilet before. She probably kicked the conditioner into the sink as she was climbing down after washing her arse and bits. You didn’t put your hand in the water too?

HG

Anyway, if you want to experience true filth, you should take a British Airways flight from London to Bangkok during tourist season.

After two months in Tibet I was amazed how orderly, clean and modern Taipei is.

I will miss the kids beside me in the Internet cafes wearing headphones and singing at the top of their lungs as they listen to Mando-pop and play violent video games. Funniest moment, kid is humming the melody to some song then breaks out into “…and making love to you…” gives me a big smile and goes back to blasting the heads off people.

couldn’t agree more with Maoman’s appraisal of the situation at hand [snigger :wink: ], although I’d hasten to add that all of his valid comparisons were made against Taipei and as I’ve said it a million times before, one more can’t hurt, Taipei is like a different country compared to the rest of Taiwan… in terms of manners, class, education, civility, hygiene, consideration for others, cleanliness etc. the gulf between Taipei and the rest of Taiwan is almost as marked as the gulf between Taiwan and Japan or Taiwan and Switzerland ie. different worlds light years apart… I fairly regularly have overseas customers come down to Taichung County / ZhangHua / TaiPing / YuanLin and the ones who’ve only ever been to the Taipei bike shows at the WTC are without fail shocked and appalled by the filth and stench and noise and extremely low caliber of humanity that infest the south central parts of the island and always say, “but Taipei seemed so nice”… every time I hear long term foriegn residents who live in Taipei waxing lyrical about how pleasant and cultured the Taiwanese are I think of the Matrix style horrors I could show them conducting tours of the blue collar semi industrial neighbourhoods/slums of central and southern Taiwan counties…

I actually look forward to flying HongKong-Taipei despite the extra hassle and distance since I know my fellow passengers will be a marked improvement over the loud, belching, farting, shouting in Taiwanese with their mouths full, smoking in the bathroom, magazine stealing neanderthals that invariably make up the HongKong-Taichung passenger lists… Redwagon may be right about the depths of depravity you can find in mainland China, but that it seems is exactly the favourite one stop absolver of responsibility for low class Taiwanese, no matter how boorish and crass their behaviour is they just say “China is worse” and pat themselves on the back… talk about Taiwan proudly pushing the boundaries of low standards, and at least mainland China seems to be in a state of extremely slow improvement whereas outside of Taipei, Taiwan seems to take another huge stride backwards every day… :idunno:

After reading this and after having watched most of the tour the France online, mostly for the nice views not the race … I start longing for Europe again … Taiwan may have beautiful nature but around every corner or over the edge of a road side cliff you always find a dirty surprise …

GROSS GROSS , YECH ! WISH I had not read this post !!! BLEAAAAAAAAAA !

Wow Maoman,

My hand hairs are crinkling in defense. That is probably the most disgusting descriptive account I have ever read. It makes me want to go wash my hand even though I did already. Nice job on the description completely poignant like a shitty handed wine.

I think all of us had similar experiences. It might not make you fell better, but when I’m coming back to Taiwan from mainland, I always realize that people are more civilized in Taiwan then they are in China. Much less noise in the airplane, no standing up while the plane still moving, less rude behavior in front of elevators, etc. And, some people actually realize bad behavior of others, something which never happens in mainland.

Indeed, it seems you’re not seeing the $$$ you could make teaching these kids some manners!

BTW, can we please have a NSWE (not safe while eating) icon?

A Taiwanese woman stepped on me on the airplane. She was trying to climb over me because I was asleep. Not sure if she was being polite by not waking me or rude for standing on my thighs…

Maoman, it doesn’t sound like you are culturalist. It sounds like your priorities have changed since you had a kid. Now you don’t find it easy to ignore the filthy habits of the Taiwanese as you don’t want your child to adopt these behaviours. You don’t want your kid to be rude, badly mannered, filthy and common. In the past you knew these things existed but could shrug them off as they didn’t have any relevance to you. Now they do.
Welcome to the understanding that Taiwan is a shithole full of rude, dirty, ignorant wankers.

[quote=“TomHill”]Maoman, it doesn’t sound like you are culturalist. It sounds like your priorities have changed since you had a kid. Now you don’t find it easy to ignore the filthy habits of the Taiwanese as you don’t want your child to adopt these behaviours. You don’t want your kid to be rude, badly mannered, filthy and common. In the past you knew these things existed but could shrug them off as they didn’t have any relevance to you. Now they do.
Welcome to the understanding that Taiwan is a shithole full of rude, dirty, ignorant wankers.[/quote]

Heh. :laughing:

I don’t know about that, TH. Having a kid certainly changes one’s perspective, but I would be very surprised if Maogirl ended up exhibiting any of these objectionable behaviours, regardless of where she grows up. Her parents will see to that. No scientific basis for my opinion here, mind, just my own anecdotal observation of the children of fellow Forumosans that I’ve met – who overwhelmingly seem like absolutely great kids. I suspect that Maoman knows this as well, and has justifiable confidence that Maogirl will not grow up to be a rude, badly mannered, filthy, common, ignorant wanker.

So I doubt that’s where his “change of heart” is coming from. Doubt it’s a change of heart at all, actually. I think he just spent some time in a place where people were more polite, and so it was something of a shock coming back. Seems a normal enough response to me. shrug I doubt there is any Grand New Understanding involved… :slight_smile: