Let the Rude White Person on Subway Hysteria Begin

Taiwan Living in Taiwan
41

台北捷運有不少外國人搭乘，就怕語言不通讓外國朋友無所適從，所有的告示都採中英對照，不過仍有白目的老外，不但在車廂喧譁，還大搖大擺坐上博愛座，完全無視應該禮讓給老弱婦孺的提醒，更誇張的是被同車乘客勸阻時，反嗆對方英文講得不賴。

說說笑笑，手還一邊揮舞比畫，台北捷運車廂裡，一群外國人聊著天，撥撥頭髮、摳摳鼻子，當成自家客廳，聊得可開心了，音量之大，讓同車乘客實在受不了，開口勸阻，得到的卻是這樣的答案。設計師王艾莉：「我就直接跟他們說，不好意思，可不可以小聲點，你們有點吵，結果他就看著我說，喔，英文不錯嘛，他們一進來就坐在博愛座上，後來一些年紀比較大的，反而要走到比較遠才有座位。」

氣得拍下影片，因為這群吵吵鬧鬧、旁若無人的外國朋友，其中兩個人一屁股坐下的，正是該禮讓給老弱婦孺的博愛座。TVBS記者鍾沛君：「台北捷運上的博愛座，其實用了不同顏色來區分座椅，上面寫優先席，一旁的告示也是中英對照。」

設計師王艾莉：「不管他在自己的國家有多麼自由，但是今天你來到別人國家，就是該尊重別人的規定和習慣。」

就怕外國朋友不懂乘車規則，台北捷運所有標誌都是中英對照，遇上不守規矩的，北捷還有招，請同車乘客拿起車廂話筒，國語也好，英文嘛ㄟ通，站務人員幫你主持公道，不過雙語告示寫給文明人看，公德心還是取決個人素養。

Anyone wanna do this line by line? My Chinese is “OK”, but not enough to totally and accurately translate this whole article.

42

Ok, so it is the same originally quoted article. I thought it was a different one.

43

Don’t understand why this article is so enraging. The media reports a lot about rude people all the time, about people getting in fistfights because some Taiwanese kid didn’t yield the seat to a TAIWANESE elder, etc. This is the kind of thing the media would be likely to report anyway, even if the two rude people were not white.

If someone does something wrong or uncouth and they’re publicly disgraced… serves them right. Doesn’t seem particularly unjust to me. And no more racist than all the “WTF, Taiwanese cannot drive!” “WTF, Taiwanese cannot queue” threads here on Forumosa. Probably less racist, even.

Boo rude people. Leave the priority seats to old people, disabled people, pregnant women and children when all seats are occupied and don’t disturb others by being really loud in an enclosed space. People should refrain from talking loudly on their phones too.

44

The universal place of love…sounds like a place too many people may have already sat. I used to be quite open to this kind of thing, but I just don’t swing that way anymore… :grandpa:

Actually, I avoid those seats for precisely this reason; even if you do pay attention and do your best to offer it up to those in need, there’s always the potential local with a chip on their shoulder that could see an opportunity to call you out.

On a humorous note, I was on the train recently and an old lady strode right up to the two people sitting in the universal love seat and said “Which one on you is getting up?” Gotta love the old ladies in TW; no bones about anything. :bravo:

45

Lupillis is right. The media constantly reports on rowdy Taiwanese youth who fail to give up priority seats on the MRT. I’ve never seen it happen myself by the way. That foreign kids were doing it just adds novelty value to a stock story. Another standard trope in the story was increased confidence in the use of English. By golly, passengers used English to communicate with real, live furriners.

Another subtext in the story is actually a backhanded compliment. A surprising number of middle class Taiwanese like the self-righteous designer in the story expect that foreigners will conform to a vague but higher standard of conduct. They are surprised and disappointed when we follow the example of ordinary Taiwanese people in doing things like sitting in priority seats and being noisy in public. It’s like we are letting their side down.

The whole hyper-enforcement of priority seats has to do with the modern Confucian desire to enforce morality as law and all the confusion that gives rise to.

Xenophobia is not really at work in this story in any meaningful way.

[quote=“lupillus”]Don’t understand why this article is so enraging. The media reports a lot about rude people all the time, about people getting in fistfights because some Taiwanese kid didn’t yield the seat to a TAIWANESE elder, etc. This is the kind of thing the media would be likely to report anyway, even if the two rude people were not white.

If someone does something wrong or uncouth and they’re publicly disgraced… serves them right. Doesn’t seem particularly unjust to me. And no more racist than all the “WTF, Taiwanese cannot drive!” “WTF, Taiwanese cannot queue” threads here on Forumosa. Probably less racist, even.

Boo rude people. Leave the priority seats to old people, disabled people, pregnant women and children when all seats are occupied and don’t disturb others by being really loud in an enclosed space. People should refrain from talking loudly on their phones too.[/quote]

46

I agree. Seeing as how we’re free to bitch about the crap we see here, it’d be hypocritical to act all indignant when one of “us” gets called out by the locals. I can’t see how a white person can walk around here with a persecution complex when the Filipinos, Indonesians, Thais, and the wai-gi-pay-o’s are routinely treated far worse.

[quote=“Feiren”]Lupillis is right. The media constantly reports on rowdy Taiwanese youth who fail to give up priority seats on the MRT. I’ve never seen it happen myself by the way. That foreign kids were doing it just adds novelty value to a stock story. Another standard trope in the story was increased confidence in the use of English. By golly, passengers used English to communicate with real, live foreigners.

Another subtext in the story is actually a backhanded compliment. A surprising number of middle class Taiwanese like the self-righteous designer in the story expect that foreigners will conform to a vague but higher standard of conduct. They are surprised and disappointed when we follow the example of ordinary Taiwanese people in doing things like sitting in priority seats and being noisy in public. It’s like we are letting their side down.

The whole hyper-enforcement of priority seats has to do with the modern Confucian desire to enforce morality as law and all the confusion that gives rise to.

Xenophobia is not really at work in this story in any meaningful way.

[quote=“lupillus”]Don’t understand why this article is so enraging. The media reports a lot about rude people all the time, about people getting in fistfights because some Taiwanese kid didn’t yield the seat to a TAIWANESE elder, etc. This is the kind of thing the media would be likely to report anyway, even if the two rude people were not white.

If someone does something wrong or uncouth and they’re publicly disgraced… serves them right. Doesn’t seem particularly unjust to me. And no more racist than all the “WTF, Taiwanese cannot drive!” “WTF, Taiwanese cannot queue” threads here on Forumosa. Probably less racist, even.

Boo rude people. Leave the priority seats to old people, disabled people, pregnant women and children when all seats are occupied and don’t disturb others by being really loud in an enclosed space. People should refrain from talking loudly on their phones too.[/quote][/quote]

47

I don’t care much about this news story specifically. But it’s always disturbing when frequently occurring, incredibly minor incidents like this are randomly reported (be the subject locals or foreigners) because it’s emblematic of the impotent level of journalism in Taiwan which literally serves to retard national progress. Same kind of degradation has been going on more frequently in the U.S. over the past decade or so, and it’s ugly to watch.

Regarding the comment about people criticizing things like queuing or driving, that is obviously a cultural criticism and not one directed at race, and it’s disingenuous to invoke the word racism there. I guess if you want to be all semantic about it and take the words “can’t queue or drive” literally then you could more fairly use the term ‘racist’, but I think we all know the intent more often than not is to say that “locals often don’t want to queue or drive properly”. That is to say they are actions of choice. From my experience, this is simply a true statement.

48

In some ways, I think the news should be about more important things, but then, what exactly are those things? International affairs? Politics? Isn’t all of that just a bigger version of someone not yielding a seat to someone who needs it? Isn’t it more of the same petty moralising? I don’t know. I’m a little bit cynical about what serious news even means these days.

Having reflected upon this and other events (both in the news and personally) lately, in some ways, I really don’t have a problem with the obsession with values in this country. It only seems like an obsession because in some ways, in the West, we’ve largely given up on these things. Certainly living in Melbourne, and even more when living in London, I regularly witnessed a couple of people (not always teenagers) literally holding a whole train carriage or bus of passengers hostage with their antics and on the very rare occasions when anyone intervened, it was usually me.

What frustrates me about this kind of petty bitching about morality though is that there’s so much really fucked up behaviour that does get a massive free pass in this country. People unashamedly running red lights and other blatantly illegal behaviour, not to mention all of the corruption and barely veiled criminal activity that goes on here rarely, if ever, seems to get called out.

A few years ago, in Sanxia in Taipei County, a guy was throwing around and beating the shit out of his girlfriend in broad daylight on the main street. Then, she was trying to get into his car to retrieve something and he kept trying to drive off with her dangling out the window. A huge crowd of onlookers gathered to gawk at the spectacle, but until my wife (then girlfriend) and I stepped in, no one so much as lifted a finger to stop it. When the cops eventually rocked up, the guy took what my wife said was approximately 10,000NTD out of his wallet (I couldn’t see because I was around the back of the car, having moved the scooter there so he couldn’t move his car and run over his girlfriend) and threw it on the ground. Apparently, he openly taunted them about wanting a bribe and they didn’t immediately cuff him. My wife gave her details to the police as a witness, but of course, they never contacted her. There had also been a teenage kid who had also told the guy off, but had he left before the police arrived because he didn’t want to get in trouble from his father.

As long as that kind of stuff, and more that I have witnessed, takes place here, people bitching and moaning about seats on the MRT just really sounds incredibly hypocritical to me.

49

Was this story on the news before or after their in-depth look at Libya? Or did they have no idea about that at the news desk?

50

The fact is that we’re a minority so any negative news story about any other white or black foreigner reflects on the rest of us in Taiwanese eyes, but when there’s a negative story about a local, it’s different; they don’t suddenly think “Oh those Taiwanese are so rude” because they ARE Taiwanese.

51

can anyone tell me how this story got to the newsie’s desk?

52

Deuce,
If you ever watch the news, you will see it mostly comes from youtube.

53

[quote=“Puppet”]Deuce,
If you ever watch the news, you will see it mostly comes from youtube.[/quote]

So before the TW newsies were too lazy to fact check or edit, now they are also too lazy to go find stories? pathetic. Maybe this country needs state run media, at least that might institute some discipline and accountability…

54

You’re a funny guy, Deuce! :smiley:

55

In Taiwan, it’s the ordinary people who receive public humiliation, not the government so much.
This is not directed against foreigners only. It is the Taiwanese way of educating the public and setting new social standarts.
Let’s make a list of foreigners being exposed on TV.

  1. foreigner destroying parking meter because of relation ship issues. not me!
  2. foreigner shoplifting in a 7/11. not me either.
  3. foreigner tell his girlfriends that he was a prince making big profits by doing so. What do you think? Do I look like a prince? Not me either.
  4. foreigner getting caught with pot.
    and so on.

I am sure the list can be much longer. When my wife says hey there is a foreigner on TV I tell her most of the time to shut up and keep doing my work.
Yawn

56

In response to the last comment, I just have to quote myself.
It doesn’t matter if they do it to Taiwanese too. Taiwanese can’t tell the difference between foreigners… They just think “Wow, a foreigner robbed 7-11. Better watch out for foreigners.” If a Taiwanese robs 7-11 they just think something like “Stupid hobo.”

57

If you can read Chinese, click the link provided by OP and see what other news are provided by this new agency in the link. You will find a lots of “news” mostly written in inflammantory first-person narratives. I would read these “news” nothing more than entertainment peice at best. Please rest assure that there are many more news, articles and TV programs in Taiwan showing how " foreigners" are much more civilized, advanced, polite, helping and friendly, etc.

There is an interesting similarity between how sensitive the " foreigners" are to Taiwanese media’s report and how sensitive the “immigrants” ( the most common type of “foreigners” in North America, anyway) are about how news media protrait them. Being both Taiwanese (the local) and an immigrant (the foreigner) who live in North America, it is very interesting to see the sentiment behind the words that has amazing similarity. Maybe we all want acceptance in the societies that we live?

Just my 2 cents!

58

I’ve lived in quite a few countries, and Taiwan is so far the worst place in terms of singling foreigners out for ridicule, rude treatment etc. The problem is it’s actually getting worse, perhaps because their diplomatic isolation makes them increasingly clueless about the rest of the world. Of course, they’re not helped by media that spend 98 percent of their resources on local news. In Asia, probably only North Korea has a more parochial worldview.

59

While there are better things to report on, and while it does show bias, Taiwan’s not going to stop reporting on delinquent foreigners anytime soon. This is sad, but such is life. Why don’t we take the initiative and put a stop to it? Could you guys all (for a week or two at least) just stop making a ruckus on trains, stop robbing 7-11s, stop beating up parking meters, and hide your drugs better? Put in some effort, dammit.

60

Just look at the comments on this board about “how Taiwanese this…how Taiwanese that”, I would say it is not any better on the other side of the coin.

Want to find the proof? Just read through the threads in this board and you will find endless stereotyping, negative comments on Taiwanese as a group (or should I say racist?) and superiority shown by “Foreigners VS. Locals” which I have no idea where it should come from.

Appreciate the land and the country that you are living in and don’t be a “foreigner” forever.