Recently, the staff at the school where I work all went out for dinner (not a social thing, but something organised by the school itself). Now, being rather important myself (one of only 2 english teachers), and undoubtedly being a staff member, shouldn’t I have been invited? :?
Maybe I’m just over-reacting, but I’m quite sure that I’m on the payroll, and that I get on very well with the other staff members… is this just another case of ‘he’s a foriegner; he doesn’t like chinese food’, or should I call home and cry to my mother that I’m not a person to them, just an english-speaking tool?
What if they’d asked you and you didn’t want to go but couldn’t refuse and they knew you didn’t want to go but felt obliged to insist you do go and and aaaaaaaaaargh
You should really be more concerned with what they were saying about you behind your back. They were probably doing things like sticking their chopsticks up their noses, pulling Western-style “round-eye” expressions:
“Hey, hey, guess who I am! Snork! Poot! Honk! Come on, guess! Here’s a clue! He has a big nose! Here’s another! There are only two of them in our office!”
sometimes it works the other way round too. Years ago, me and a bunch of other foreign teachers (male and female) were making plans for our weekly Sat night on the town while we were prepping for class, as we did every Sat.
A chinese member of staff sitting nearby asked me how come we never invited her along. It was a good question because she was a nice person and a well liked colleague. I spose we just didnt think of it, just like Lazy’s chinese colleagues didnt with him.
they could be total parsimonious inconsiderate bastards but more likely for some reason they just thought you wouldn’t be interested in going. if it bothered you i’d talk to your manager about it.
come on, cliques are normal in most work places. If you work in a very international invironment, you will notice that Honkies hang out with honkies, westerners down beer with each other, Taiwanese have lunch together and that there is a fair bit of mingling going on. Don’t let that destroy your day.
TW people are in general afraid of speaking English. Make them feel stupid. But they understand ok. They probably thought it would be too much of a hassle to entertain you or worst case make you feel left out.
Now if your Chinese is perfert, it is probably because they don’t like you.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. There have been several occasions that the foreign teachers at the school I worked for weren’t even invited to wei-ya, even though some of us worked full-time. I remember one guy who had been working there for years showed up unexpectedly and they asked him to leave. Don’t ever expect to get invited to anything, and if you are, count your blessings.
Well, the differences between companies here is big. We all go to our weiya, I spend a lot of time talking to a Singaporean co-worker, eat lunch with a few aussie coworkers (even fellow poster Huang Guangsheng ). However, I rarely have any out of office events with my Taiwanese coworkers.
Every year at the Taipei Times, only the senior TT managers get invited to the wei ya at the Liberty Times. The peons at the Taipei Times instead had a party at around Christmas time.
Until last Christmas that was, when the TT management decided that there would be no more Christmas parties. No announcement was made and no explanation was given to the staff. I remember asking the president’s secretary what was up, and she said the old mand cancelled them becasue they “Cost too much.”
Kind of funny really, as the previous parties had cost the company nothing as the venues and snacks were paid for by advertising barter, and we had to buy our own drinks.
I guess when you look beneath the lies, there really is no other reason than the Christmas party was canceled last year out of sheer spite toward the foreign workers. I wonder what’s in store this year?
). However, I rarely have any out of office events with my Taiwanese coworkers.