Well, the problem is that I heard or read it so many years ago, so I don’t think I will ba able to find back to the original source of this claim.
That’s why I am posting the question here, to learn if this is “normal” or just a myth.
HOTTALA!!
Interesting then X3M … if people do come back what does that say
- Taiwan has changed them to the point where they see things here as normal
2 When they go home you feel out of the loop so long it is hard to get back in… things have changed… you don’t have that friendship base you would have bult up in your 20’s if you had worked or lived at home
I know several people who left and have come back … but I also know several people who left and said “what ever kept me there?”
I guess at the end of the day … where makes you happy is the place to be
Mixer,
By “formative years” I meant having spent (in my case) my chldhood.
I was 15 when I returned to Canada so virtually all of my early years were spent in Taiwan. As for reverse culture shock, X3M - you betcha! Although much of my education was in American schooling in Taiwan I had a terrible time acclimating to standards and the culture here in Canada. I had no idea of how to function in a world I really never knew and it took me years to adjust. It has been 27 years now since I came here and literally not a day has gone by where I didn’t think about going back. One of the things which I had a hard time with was telling people where I was from. The first thing people asked me to do was to “Say something”! I never knew what to say and if I did respond with something in Mandarin or Taiwanese I felt really centered out. For many years I felt as though I didn’t know just who or what I was! Two of my brothers are Chinese by birth and have never spoken any language other than english. For them, it was the same - but opposite in that they looked Chinese, but weren’t. I looked Anglo, but wasn’t… :?
This journey to Taiwan for me is a journey of self discovery. I don’t know how long I will stay… if it will feel “right”… etc. etc. etc. - I do know that I need to explore my roots though! Time will tell what is to happen…
in the meantime I intend to explore and celebrate my “cultural confusion”!
[quote=“X3M”]We have a kind of trading company for 3C (Computer, Communication and Consumer) electronic products. We also manufacture and/or coordinate manufacturing here in Taiwan for our customers (clients?).
The money is what you have left in you pocket (or bank account) after you have paid all taxes, and other necessary stuff.
For my country of origin, and the language stuff, I think it is sufficient to reveal: “a small county with extremely high living cost and tax-burden”, and the kids’ languages, according to fluency: Mandarin, my native language, English, Taiwanese (is that 3 or 4?).
There is no expat package here, I started off for a company that went bankrupt after I came here, so me and my wife started up with “two bare hands” (and a product-, supplier- and customer-portfolio).
HOTTALA![/quote]
Can you get me a job? 
I’ve returned to the US twice, each after 2.5 years in Taiwan. So, you see, I came back to Taiwan once already!
When you move “back home”, you need to quickly build reasons for staying where you are, and that can be difficult. As someone else noted, when you return you likely won’t have any social connections. You probably won’t have a job either. No job means no money and no money means no social life and that makes it tough to build connections. Vicious cycle. No job, no money, no social ties: this also gives one too much free time to miss what you had in Taiwan - a job, money in the bank, low taxes, health insurance, interesting friends from all over. For me, after months of not finding satisfactory employment in the US, paying so much for car insurance and rent (more than Taipei for sure!), watching my savings shrink day by day, having no health insurance and no solid social ties, returning to Taiwan was just so easy.
My second return to the US has been much easier, and I credit that to my Taiwanese husband. With him, it wasn’t such a drastic change. We can share about people and places in Taiwan. We can go out to the Chinese markets and cook familiar food. And he got a job almost immediately upon his arrival! It took me almost six months to get full-time employment in the field I wanted. Without him, I would’ve needed a different strategy to get past the tough transition stage.
[quote=“X3M”]Have anyone heard about, or have first hand experience about moving back to the home-country after spending more than 5 years or so in Taiwan?
How was it? Reversed culture shock? How long “back home” before you settled, or decided to move back again to Taiwan?[/quote]
It wasn’t five years in Taiwan, but a couple in China and a couple in Taiwan. Moved back for about four - five years, together with my Taiwanese wife. Took me about two years to feel “home” back home, call it reverse culture shock or what you will, (have had a couple of pals with the same experience, one of them winding up returning to Asia, Hong Kong).
I actually think it was easier for my wife - after all, she was supposed to feel out-of-place, so that was just fine, but people in general (and maybe I myself, which didn’t make it any easier) seemed to have great difficulty in understanding that a native could feel out-of-place in his home country.
In the end, I/we could never really settle down properly, so we left, but not with the intention to return to Taiwan. One of the things that make life interesting, however, is the way you can never really plan it, and so we ended up back here in Taiwan via a year or so in a third country, in 96. I guess we might conceivably move back to Europe some time in future, but it’ll probably not be my home country - I have no longing for the same acclimatization period and the feeling of not belonging where you’re supposed to belong all over again. A place were we both are allowed to feel out-of-place would be great.
By the way, when we came back here in 96, after five or six years away, it took my wife a year or two to become Taiwanese again.
That’s an interesting point about not feeling at home where you’re “supposed” to feel at home. After all, it WAS your home for a long time, right? But I agree that for me it’s easier to make a new place feel like home than to try to make my place of origin home for me now.
As previously stated, there’s no expectation that you’ll fit right in and there’s also the stimulating experience of discovery, the intriguing differences and the surprising similarities. When returning to your hometown, it can be discovering disturbing changes (worse traffic, open areas crammed with new housing tracks) and frustrating constants (useless public transit, astronomical healthcare costs).
Finally, being from an area that draws lots of immigrants, it was also a little disconcerting to come “home” to a place where I find myself surrounded with so much foreign. Even “at home” I still can’t communicate well with a large part of the community because of language differences (and there are so many different languages!). On the bright side, I can get good “ethnic” food here, including Chinese!
[i] the early voice of sardonic modern man
~ recalling some elegies by Donne[/i]
the poet fought a pitched battle with faith
and sought penitence, confidence and peace
in the sheer advance that language made of him.
that he doubted others
[quote=“Popo”][i] the early voice of sardonic modern man ~ recalling some elegies by Donne[/i]
the poet fought a pitched battle with faith
and sought penitence, confidence and peace
in the sheer advance that language made of him. etc, etc…
copyright March 11, 2003 by DJA[/quote]
Don’t you have your own website for this kind of stuff? Are you not getting enough hits over there and now you want to torment an even wider audience? How does this relate to the topic at hand? And it’s nice that you’ve copyrighted your stuff. Wouldn’t want anyone else taking credit for it, right? 
:mrgreen: Sheesh.
My poem answers the question:what keeps you here…?
the early voice of sardonice modern man – keeps me here, my friend… I think you should stop giving orders, Maoman, it makes you look like a bit of a bully… Wink, wink…
These questions of revelance and authority that seem to concern your quest for pertinent focus are responsible for inspiring an awful lot of fascist behavior during the twentieth century… but you probably don’t and won’t want to understand that…
so, okay, but I will never ever do as I am told… take care and be cool if they let you! Wink, wink, again!
I always wondered what keeps people here when they have to drive scooters in the rain to their job that wouldn’t cut it back at home? What keeps people here when they have to put up with not being able to communicate effectively and being stared at all of the time?
What keeps other types of people here that own their own home that back in their own country would be considered tiny and not worth the money. What about the over priced cars and no where to drive them properly. What about the black dust that comes in when you open the windows.
Sometimes, when I go back home I think that it is rather boring compared to the average renao Asian city. Perhaps that keeps me here as well as everyday being a new experience in a culture that I will never quite figure out or a language that the more I know the more I realize that I don’t know. Having a business here helps too. When business is bad, I might go home, or just start a different business. Did anyone mention TAXES yet? If we went back home we would have to pay so much more taxes, so I suppose the tiny over priced house without any land to speak of and the overpriced cars with no where to drive them, don’t look so bad compared to giving out 30% or more to your government.
PS: Did anyone mention the traffic and the selfish way that people drive, does that keep anyone here?
PPS: The food? I am sure that keeps some people here. I love the food.
For most it probably boils down to the 3 g’s
Gold
Girls
Glory
3G’s! LOL
I like that!
I think you are right.
I like it here because the culture doesn’t define me. If I see something about the culture I don’t like, I don’t get depressed. In my native land, the culture of the lowest common denominator gets me down a lot, whether it’s from looking at the ugly houses of suburbia (each with a miniature spruce in the front yard) or the strip malls with store front parking that totally kills the look of a street.
If I were Taiwanese, I’d be outta here in a heartbeat, but as a spectator/visitor, this place is great - even for the longterm…
yes, it really is an ugly shithole, except for the tree lined streets, of which there are too few, oh…
I think I have been here too long. Feel like you are talking about my own country when you call it an ugly shithole. Watch it buddy! 
Parts are quite beautiful.
[quote=“Hobart”]I think I have been here too long. Feel like you are talking about my own country when you call it an ugly shithole. Watch buddy!
Parts are quite beautiful.[/quote]
I share this feeling. Although my own country IS beautiful
I hear ya, Puddleglum!
Anywhere outside of the city is beautiful, but Taipei IS an ugly shithole, and if you pretend otherwise, you would have to be someone who knows nothing and sees nothing…
Pass me an encyclopedia…in Braille.