Longtermers- How do you feel about living in Taiwan now?

Taiwan Living in Taiwan
1

I’ve been in Taiwan about 13 years give or take. It’s time to take a bit of stock.
When I first came here the place still had a bit of raw buzz about it, left over from the 90s. It was raw and messy but energetic.
Now I feel it has lost a lot of energy and buzz. Taipei has got better infrastructure and the nation has got it’s high speed rail and Chinese tourists have come but much of the country is run down and dilapidated and people just living day to day existences.

Of course I myself settled down and started a family, which can be a very different experience than somebody just off the boat and milling around having a good ole time.

The country went through a very tumultuous period during the CSB/KMT face off of 8 years which I was glad to see finished with, only because it was so messy. Now it’s stable but moving very steadily into China’s orbit and becoming a vassal state.

But most things haven’t really changed a whole lot, hardly at all in fact. People still drive around on noisy polluting cheapo scooters, the island is still almost all natives given the almost invisible presence of the 500,000 caregivers and labourers.
The working conditions are the same, even the pay is the same! The companies are the same, the businesses are the same. The public holidays are the most boring in the entire world (Chinese New Year/ 10-10). The most exciting holiday of all is Zhong Qiu Jie when people bbq on the pavement. Last month the big ‘thing’ was a giant duck in Kaoshiung. This month the big ‘thing’ are plastic teddy bears in Taichung. It’s just a grind on kind of life.

I used to get pissed off at the shitty buildings and noise, and that still bothers me a little, but nowadays I’m more pissed off at the lack of progress on cleaning up their environment and the crappy food and crappy education system. People here are still very superstitious and also not able to see the big picture. Most of the younger generation just hope to get money from the older generation through inheritance (and maybe it is the only hope for some). They have kids and farm them off the grandparents or to buxibans.
The government here still send all their kids overseas to get an education and a passport. The rich kids annoy me, the middle class feel empty and broken down to me and the working class are rough nuts although they’ll generally leave you be :sunglasses: .

So what keeps you in Taiwan, family, job, business, worse options overseas, or is it mainly inertia? I’m thinking I need more reasons to base out of Taiwan than inertia! I don’t think the place is really going to change much in the next 15 years either. How can it, with the same people doing the same ole thing? I think Taiwan’s main modus operanda is to keep the people’s earning down to keep it ‘competitive’ (and import more foreign labourers to make sure that happens), throw the locals a few bones in the media every now and then and let the rich get richer and the public officials retire and get a good pension. That’s it. Where’s the optimism going to come from?

The place doesn’t stand for anything anymore, there’s no democratic independence fervour, there’s no cultural renaissance, no economic boom, no influx of foreign people or ideas, there’s no nothing, just a bunch of individuals and families thrown together on an island grinding out day by day looking only to look after themselves.

2

Yes, HH, I concur with a whole lot of that post. The hard part,as you say, is the fact that I can’t see a whole lot of change coming :frowning:
my GF was very happy today to find out that her salary has gone up (7k a month) to 43k, however she works very hard and the pay for average jobs is a long way behind. She is probably one of the luckier ones as I suspect many are still on 22k a month.
This system of the super rich /Poor divide seems short-sighted (in PRC also) as the USA,for instance, will bounce back BECAUSE workers have disposable income to support the Economy. Taiwan can not continue on it’s build,build, build policy . It should have invested far more in the longer term issues like Education , technical advancement and new technologies, and building own brands instead of just trying to be the cheapest. I know there are exceptions but this seems to be the ethos here.

I am lucky, in that I am involved in some exciting ( to me at least) projects ,which I enjoy. I am also very lucky to get paid pretty well, so although my life can feel like work/sleep, at times, I am quite optimistic in the longer term. I keep reminding myself of UK taxes and weather :slight_smile: All in all, Taiwan is not fantastic but I do like most of the People,weather,scenery (excluding man -made) taxation and ,for me, opportunity that exists here. :2cents:

3

The place I’m in (NanKan) has improved considerably in the 8 years I’ve been here. However, I am only staying for family reasons.

Taiwan isn’t an exciting place in terms of opportunities, but it’s steady and comfortable. Can I say convenient?

4

[quote=“tomthorne”]The place I’m in (Nankan) has improved considerably in the 8 years I’ve been here. However, I am only staying for family reasons.

Taiwan isn’t an exciting place in terms of opportunities, but it’s steady and comfortable. Can I say convenient?[/quote]

You mean it’s like your favourite Spoon? It still does the job even if it’s a bit rusty and bent out of shape. :popcorn:

5

I’m here because I can’t go anywhere else, but as soon as any doors open I’m taking the first boat/plane out of here.

I have never managed to make more than 19,000nt a month in Taiwan, mostly because I’m not Taiwanese enough, and not American enough and I can’t seem to get the best of both worlds. Maybe it’s personality but Taiwan seems to get increasingly chaotic. Traffic has not improved, if anything it seems to get worse. Taxi drivers and truck drivers seem to lose their awareness every year, driving with less and less regard for anyone outside their vehicle, and law enforcement doesn’t seem to care (do they have guanxi or protection from the government that allows them to drive recklessly?)

The duck thing is about the last straw. Culture here is nonexistant, other than all the weird superstitions that seems to change every year and all the new gods they worship (I heard one temple actually worships Iron Man) and nobody takes anything seriously except for making money.

I’m here because I can’t just get up and move somewhere else without a solid job offer, and you can’t really get that applying from overseas. I wouldn’t really know what to apply for anyways because I don’t really have real world experience, and companies hiring foreigners only wants people with more than 5 years of experience.

Now that I don’t have any real family in Taiwan (grandparents just passed away, relatives might as well be strangers), I have absolutely no reason to stay.

6

In the year I’ve been here the bouncy castle guy don’t come to the night market anymore… but in they brightside the build a house 2 blocks from here so…

7

I will not stand for you talking about JimiP’s phallus in this manner! He gets enough flak from the wife. Are there no depths you will not sink to?

8

My main issue is that Taiwan is a place where you can live year by year quite easily but is that good enough for most people? I guess it is according to your individual setup. Its fine if you are bankrolled by family or have a good business and then can get the hell out of dodge regularly. I’m actually working on launching an interesting business now and when I look into things running it from China may be easier BUT China is not that different than Taiwan, in some ways worse , in some ways better, but probably mostly more of the same. Pollution is bad there though.

China and Taiwan bores me now more than excites me. Ducks and fecking teddy bears!

9

In ten years none of the things that make me like Taiwan have really changed. The scenery, the weather, the abundance of genuinely good people, and the generally unfettered (by taxes, inconvenient laws, etc) nature of life are all as great as they ever were. Day to day, riding my cheap motorbike along the riverside roads between offices or smoking on the roof and looking out at the mountains a few miles away, or eating excellent cheap food, things are pretty good.

I’m also not sure I agree about the culture thing. The duck was certainly irritating, but no more so than watching every single person on the London commuter train doing Sudoku this week, or reading 50 Shades the next week. Most people are just vapid. There’s a lot of great music, art, outdoorsmanship, and whatever else in Taiwan if you go look for it, and I’m pretty sure you have to go look for it anywhere in the world.

That said, I do wonder what my (two-year-old) son’s life is going to be like, especially the awful, soul-crushing education. That’s one thing that might make us leave if we can’t find an alternative. And I still have little fantasies about buying a cabin in Pennsylvania (or somewhere) and just working online, but that would be hard on the wife.

10

Honestly I have no idea why people would want to buy a house in Taiwan… for the same price you could buy a villa anywhere else in the world. No way I’m paying 10 million USD for a concrete box.

11

I’ve been here about as long as the OP, and - as I assume is the same with everyone - I’ve got mixed feelings about the place.

Basically I like my day to day life in Taiwan. I’ve got a university job that I mostly like: I make what is in Taiwan a decent income, my daily commute is a ten-minute walk, the vacation time is great. Very few people worldwide are lucky enough to be in a situation like that. Some students are great, and some are crap - but that’d be no different anywhere in the world. Of course there are annoyances with the job, but there are annoyances with every job. Yeah, some people have jobs that they love, but I’ve never believed there are really THAT many people who love their jobs. I figure being mostly happy with work is fine. We’ve got an affordable mortgage on an apartment we nervously bought five years ago - but the bubble has continued.

Living in Taipei: the driving here continues to horrify and disgust me. I don’t think it’s getting better. I definitely wish there were more places around to just sit and chill: places where I can sit and read or chat and enjoy the view. But it’s all so indoors and department store-focussed. I wish there were more opportunities to see authors on book tours, or bands on tour, but it’s not a big deal for me. The Golden Horse Film Festival can be fantastic, but for the past couple of years I’ve unfortunately been too busy to make use of it. There’s certainly plenty of classical music, at really good prices. Living in an Asian city stopped being interesting long, long ago for me; it’s more the norm now, while I often find North American cities somewhat sterile, and designed far too much around cars.

These past few months I’ve been a bit down on Taiwan: partly due I think to all the food scandals, and in the past month to the awful pollution. Yesterday’s clear unpolluted skies should be normal, and not a cause for celebration! Plus, a scheduling fluke has me teaching every weekday (a complaint that will likely garner no sympathy here!), so I’m not taking the occasional day trips that can lighten the mood.

But retiring here worries me, a lot. The decent money I make here is worth very little in Canada. I’m mostly happy with my working life in Taiwan - and my working life is busy enough that, during the school year, I don’t really care about the near-absence of a social life. But then in summer my (Taiwanese) wife and I visit Canada, and see everyone else’s social lives - and we think, hey, shouldn’t we be trying to develop that too? I’m not part of a social community here at all, and while that doesn’t exactly bother me, I wonder if it should bother me, and if in twenty years I’ll be regretting it.

HH, you make good points about how the country seems to be stagnating, or going in the wrong direction, but to be honest I don’t think it’s that different in North America or Europe - people in those places aren’t exactly optimistic these days either. At least those countries don’t have the coming demographic collapse, of course.

I admit I to some extent feel stuck here. I’ve got a humanities graduate degree, and I like being an academic; pretty much from my first month of university, I knew I wanted to spend my life on a campus. However, I’m a lazy academic (well, a lazy researcher, but not a lazy teacher) - as a native English speaker in Taiwanese university, I can to some extent coast along, but there’s no way that’d cut it in North America. I really doubt it’d be possible for me to get an equivalent job in North America - and even if I did, I’m sure it’d require at least a few years of sessional part-time work, with semester after semester of driving all over the city to different teaching gigs. There’s no way I want to do that again.

So, yeah, a lot of inertia. I have a nice stable middle-class existence with a moderately enjoyable job and a moderately enjoyable lifestyle in a city that, all things considered, isn’t bad: in many ways I’m in an enviable situation. If I could move to a condo ten minutes of walking away from a full-time job at UBC in Vancouver? I’d move in a heartbeat. But I wouldn’t be moving to that - I’d be moving to a precarious part-time life teaching at a college in Thunder Bay or something. I don’t want to move to that, and I certainly don’t want to put my wife through that kind of experience.

As the above post probably makes clear, disentangling routine middle-age angst from attitudes towards Taiwan can be difficult!

12

Ok, I think I’ve been pessimistic enough in the last post so it’s time for the good:

As for work life I am loving what I do. I really love taking a guitar otherwise destined to the dumpster and to the amazement of the owner, make it playable and looking good at the same time. I also love doing repairs that most in Taiwan don’t think it’s possible. It’s frustrating sometimes that not enough people are impressed enough with what I do to keep knocking the door or calling up, but if I got really busy fixing guitars I would be really happy, and very few people can say that about their job.

The food is great, because one of the first thing I complained about Germany is the food (it’s awlful, all they eat is sandwich or sausages, don’t they eat anything else??), but all the food scandals can be really scary. But then again this could happen anywhere in the world and the US isn’t as good as people like to think when it comes to food safety too. Companies literally pay the FDA to look the other way. You never get tired of things like danbing, louwan, that fried thing with oysters in them, dumplings, etc… Street foods are great although I’m not sure how healthy they are. You go to America and want some danbing, salty soy milk soup, and loubogao (a 60nt meal in Taiwan) you’ll pay over $10 for the meal! Wages are low here although PPP seems to be about the same as America/South Korea…

I hate to say it but there’s probably lot more to do in Taiwan than there is in America. I remember being bored out of my mind in America because I didn’t have a car, which means I needed to bum a ride from friends if I wanted to go anywhere. Can’t take the bus because an average American suburb don’t even have buses, let alone any other mass transit. Now I realize you can have those in any big cities like NYC but who wants to live there? They charge a ton of rent for a rundown concrete box there. You might be able to get by on 22,000nt a month in Taiwan but you need at least 50,000 USD a year to have comparable standards of living in any major US cities (which isn’t easy to get BTW). True bands/authors/artists often pass by Taiwan and it seems it’s hard to have hobbies, but then you have to get creative. Chemistry experiments are easy in Taiwan because there are no silly laws so anyone could walk in and buy any chemical (well nearly any chemical) without problems. Some chemicals do require ID’s but it’s not a problem as long as you have nothing to hide, and chem stores usually reserve some judgment on chemicals with higher potential of harm (like Potassium Dichromate) but do you think you could walk into a chem supplier and buy Yellow Phosphorous? I don’t think so (you’ll end up on a DEA list if you try). Of course if you have the money any lab glassware/equipment is available, whereas in Texas they have silly laws because of meth labs…

13

[quote=“Brendon”]
I’m also not sure I agree about the culture thing. The duck was certainly irritating, but no more so than watching every single person on the London commuter train doing Sudoku this week, or reading 50 Shades the next week. Most people are just vapid. There’s a lot of great music, art, outdoorsmanship, and whatever else in Taiwan if you go look for it, and I’m pretty sure you have to go look for it anywhere in the world.[/quote]

Hold on a second. Are you saying people in London are Vapid? Or just people in general. Because I find the majority of locals in Taipei are soulless creatures living paycheck to paycheck with absolutely nothing to offer.

I also don’t get this ‘Fall in Love’ with Taiwan because of the scenery, the weather, nature e.t.c. Unless you got your own company or better yet unemployed, you just can’t experience these things. I also have a kick ass roof smoking area where I have a fantastic backdrop of mountains and greenery. But a backdrop is what it is. You can see it but being tied down at the office I just can’t experience it. Sure you can go hiking on the week-ends and “experience nature” but then you got a whole bunch of other stuff to get done too.

Like Taiwan Luthiers, I have no choice but to remain here. Once some kind of door opens, I’ll Hulk SMASH! the living sh*t out of it and barge in guns blazing and won’t come back until i’m 70. :2cents:

14

I’m close to 11 years here now, and am pretty much a lifer. When I was back in Aust for two weeks last year (after quite a few years away), I found that I just couldn’t relate at all to the culture anymore. I’ll be back there again this Xmas so will be interested to see it that’s changed.

The last couple of years in Taipei I’ve seen somewhat of an attempt at a cultural revival with lots of funky cafes, art, music, food. I don’t know if that’s the same elsewhere in Taiwan though - my first few years were in Changhua city (which I loved) but it was definitely a cultural wasteland.

Business-wise, I don’t think I’d have been able to successfully start mine if I were in Oz, so that’s a big advantage to Taiwan. That said, I’d likely have more opportunities if I were in Bangkok or Shanghai.

We may go to Australia for a few years in the future for our kids (which we don’t have yet) to go to high school there, and so my wife can quality for Aust citizenship. But that’s for the future. And retirement would likely be in Taiwan.

15

Changhua is great for food but I agree I wouldn’t want to live there!

16

I loved living there. I was on the edge of the city near the Christian Hospital and would just jump on my mountain bike and go riding through the rice fields, or out toward Nantou, or out to the coast. There was always lots to do, it just didn’t have much in the way of music or art.

17

Zhanghua is a place that has slowly grown on me, when I first moved to Taichung I never visited it but it actually has a lot more old stuff than Taichung and some decent enough countryside and forest in places. In places! Large parts are of it are the usual craphole assortment of dirty houses.

Nantou is a stunningly beautiful county, if anybody has ever gone to Puli and looked around on a clear day it is surrounded by verdant green mountains and blue skies. Really just stop and look around. :cactus: But then you see Puli city itself and it’s a complete dump. Ahhhhh.

The first time I visited Kending was about 12 years ago, I remember thinking this place could be something if they put a pavement in, cleaned it up a bit. I still go there every now and then, but the place is basically the same, last year I went and there was some kind of sewage stream running past the guesthouses on the main strip, I was disgusted.

I come from quite an unspoilt part of the world and a fairly vibrant European capital that’s a 1000 years old, so you are just not going to get that kind of feeling in Asia except for perhaps Japan. You’ll meet people from all over the world living, working and travelling around. There’s no ingrained us versus them mentality like here even though they are both peripheral islands (it was like Taiwan but the mentality changed about 20 years ago, here the mentality of locals is still to be afraid of foreigners…!!). It has it’s problems but it’s got a lot more soul than here. This place sometimes feels like a pit where people scrabble around for money and then spend the money to jump back into the pit again. They are waking up from the daze and going ‘what the fuck’? our food and water and air is polluted and we earn the same as 15 years ago.

Yeah well what the fuck where you thinking when this was going on? It’s somebody else’s problem (and I’m talking about the educated people here as much as the poorer folks). You think it was okay to build an MRT for yourselves in Taipei and to ignore where and how your food was made and grown or your water or your air quality or how every river and piece of coastline has been concreted or got a refinery or power station on it as long as your property went up in price and you fly to Thailand once a year? They are so dumb they can’t even figure out coal power station in Taiwan are already causing massive damage, but no they are like sheep and jump on nuclear without learning anything about their own country! But then they worry so much about how a nuclear accident near Taipei will affect them…or rather their property prices.

The best most of us can say about Taiwan is that it’s convenient, cheap, warm, safe, but again if you don’t have a well paid gig or business you have to start facing Taiwan like the average local and it ain’t a fun life. No siree.

The last well paid gig I had in Taiwan I found it myself overseas (almost double the highest offer of people who were going out of their way to hire me in Taiwan) and now I’m working on my own business, even if my business works out I intend to do like the locals and spend more time overseas. If it doesn’t we’ll be gone for sure. It’s too hard to make a good income here and I’m pretty much done working for local employers and zero paid holidays a year on the first year type of gig!

Taiwan is a place best enjoyed from afar or in medium doses not in your face all the time.

18

The sweet spot here in Taiwan in my view is to be a business owner selling products or services to a Western market and having some kind of country getaway somewhere to shake off life in the concrete jungle from time to time. I’ve got those boxes checked so life is good. Outside that sweet spot and you’re just subsisting Taiwan style. Couple of caveats. One is education for the chillins. International school is the only option and it costs an arm and a ball but local educational options amount to child abuse so you just have to swallow the high costs. Another is that, in my tec line of work, the local talent can only rise to about the 70 percentile level so I have to cover the remaining 30% myself or with the help of engineers in North America. Not a show stopper though because of the ease of networking these days but if I had to try to find technologists locally to cover that last 30% I’d be a bridge jumper. Final caveat is my biggest customer is trying to hire me, which would require a move to North America, and hinting I may have no choice, but I really don’t want to go. That’s my only real dilemma now.

19

Taiwan is a cycle of delights and disappointments, and has been for the 13-plus years I have lived in-country over the last 23 years. In some ways it has advanced… I remember Taipei in 1990, dirty, ugly, polluted, eternal gridlock. No MRT, of course, and to get anything Western (e.g. cheeses) you would have to make a trek out to Tianmu. It’s a far better place to live, now. Very comfortable, and it is home to me.

Yet it continues to disappoint: the school system is still locked in rote memorization and teaching to the test, despite years of talk of reform and meeting hundreds of budding, idealistic teachers-in-training saying they want to change the system. Just when you think Taiwan is one of the most progressive societies in Asia (and it is, which sadly isn’t saying much… and to think there’s gay marriage in Africa and South America, but not in Asia), you see bigots come out in droves to protest gay marriage despite the lack of a Religious Right. Just when you think they have made serious strides in food safety, out come all these food scandals. Just when you think they’ve made great strides in attacking the problem of pollution, you find that Taiwan has one of the dirtiest coal-fired plants on the planet. Just when you think people are growing out of their superstitions, you see people reverting back to them under the pressures of cultural inertia.

But I love the markets, the mountains, the festivals, the Internet access, and so much more. When I go home to the US, I have a good time, but I don’t really want to live there… it’s expensive and the telecom situation is a byzantine mess there.

I’m very happy to live in Taiwan, warts and all.

20

I have been here as long as long as the OP has, 13+ years and counting, and have settled into a comfortable life. I have only worked for two employers, one for the first 10+ years, a trading company, and my current employer, an IT manufacturer. I’m guessing I’ll be retiring with this company, since the work environment is great, pay and benefits are unbelievable (some sort of bonus almost every two months!!!) and a pro-family culture (promotes quality time with family by sponsoring company tours every month). And I am just a rank-and-file- employee!

I have also settled down (married someone from my own country), and now have two kids.

How do I feel about living here? Well, I am happy to have been given an opportunity to live a good life here in Taiwan! What I like most here is you can walk or roam around in the streets of Taipei at 3 AM in the morning and you will still feel safe. I doubt you can do that in the big cities anywhere else. I also love the convenience the public transport here provides. You can go almost anywhere in Taipei just using the MRT. And, as Taiwan Luthiers has posted, if you know how to manage your finances, you can subsist on the minimum wage alone.

Yes, we have also farmed our two kids to the buxiban, since my wife is also working. But we make sure every night that the kids tell detailed stories of what happened that day in school. And of course weekends are always reserved for Family Day. Believe it or not, in my 13+ years here in Taiwan, there are still so many places I haven’t visited, restaurants I haven’t tried, and even Forumosa Happy Hour I have not attended hahaha So you see, I still have a lot of things to-do list to get bored or be pessimistic.

Would I leave Taiwan if an opportunity abroad comes knocking in my door? There were opportunities before, one in Australia (Doric Products), and one in the US (Adams Rite). But my wife and I loved the easy laid back life of Taipei, plus it is only a 2 hour flight to our “real” home. So here we are, not just longtermers, but maybe LIFERS.