Our nearly 1 year old kid sometimes cries at night, when he is hungry; perhaps for 10 seconds or even up to 2 minutes.
One neighbour does not like it and starts spreading malicious gossip. F.i.: we would hit our child. The neighbour even seems to have reported it to the police.
We are currently considering how to deal with this situation.
The police stated that a recording of any kind, recording the neighbour’s voice, would be a first step.
Finding any possible witnesses of similar defamating facts would be a second stap. Then, we could have a case.
Have you had any experiences with gossiping neighbours, spreading malicious rumours?
What did you do?
How would you settle this kind of problem?
Details, please. How has this gotten back to you? Have the police contacted you?
Why do you care? In my experience, most people pay no attention to these kinds of busybodies. The ones that do believe what they say are are idiots, and of little import. Is this affecting your daily life in any way?
Sure, it’s unpleasant if you suspect a neighbor is gossiping about you, but at the end of the day if it doesn’t affect your life, forget about it. Those kind of people are simply not worth your time. You don’t give a shit about them, right? So don’t sweat it. There’s lots of locals here who have too much time on their hands and like to cause trouble where there is none.
I’m the only foreigner in my small apartment building, and despite being a friendly guy, I know there are some neighbors who don’t like me for whatever reasons. Probably just because I’m a foreigner and they occasionally hear Western noise coming from my apartment rather than Mandarin husband/wife quarrels or KTV blaring on at all hours. But I don’t give a shit. Taipei is a noisy city. I deal with, and they have to as well.
I remember having this twice when our kid was 1 or 2, each time it was a couple of gossiping a-ma’s, although we were travelling both times and it was easier to confront. They’ve got nothing better to do, presumably their own kids (if they had anyway) have grown up, and they feel obliged to comment on the parenting skills of the big-nose and his wife.
On the one plane, this woman was really pissing off my wife, loudly saying that we obviously weren’t feeding our daughter properly, and we should be doing this, shouldn’t be doing that, on and on. In the end, I went over and politely told her to STFU. She did (or at least I couldn’t hear her after that).
It’s trickier if it’s around home, but I think you still got to confront him/her. Tell them to mind their own business, don’t mince your words. Impose yourself on the neighbourhood. Have the wife and child there as back-up.
Wouldn’t even consider legal stuff right now. This should be in Parenting forum. Just throw your weight around.
Taiwan has laws that allow action against persons who spread slander about you or who file false complaints to the police. However, based on the information in the original post, evidence to prove any of that might be a problem. Typically, even very nice other neighbors are not about to stick their necks out to testify to some sort of awful lies that were told about you. And if the bad neighbors called the police, it’s likely that little to no record of what they said was really taken down in a formal way – or that they hedged by merely saying “I think my foreigner neighbor is murdering his child.” Based on what you’ve written, I can’t tell if confronting the bad neighbors directly would be dangerous or productive.
And so I recommend a different path for this. Chinese New Year is coming up – go make the rounds with your beautiful kid and a few affordably priced cakes of the sort that people give out during that time of year. If your building is small, you can give something to each neighbor. If your building is one of the huge ones, you can give something to the neighbors nearby. What they’ll see is a reasonable, nice guy with a tremendously cute toddler giving them cake – and that, for whatever reason, actually goes a long way toward countering anything bad that people might say about you. I’ve lived in “local” neighborhoods the whole time I’ve been in Taiwan, which has meant being the only foreigner most of my neighbors have ever lived near. Getting friendly with the other neighbors in the building is a good way to cancel out and isolate people spreading dumb lies – it forces people to see you as a person instead of some abstract notion of “foreign child-beating monster”.
I’ve been living in a fairly old building for a couples of months now, and had a huge fight with my room-mate not too long ago (she’s now moved out… I’d love to tell you what the fight was about, but I really don’t get it myself).
I’ve always been friendly with the neighbours, greeting and smiling at the people going in and out of the building and chatting to the shopkeepers near where I park the scooter. Everybody heard us going at it and the next day everyone was asking if I was OK, what happened, and a few days later everybody was telling me that she’s a bit unstable, goes out late all the time, it was unfair that she brought people over to argue with me and effectively just saying ‘You’re a better person, don’t worry about it! You don’t have to live with her anymore!!’
Which would be LOVELY if they knew us both equally well and could speak from actual knowledge XD It’s comforting anyway though!
But basically, I talked to the neighbours, and my room-mate just walked in and ignored everybody, and people seemed to judge her off that.
