I have a PhD (you wouldn’t believe the kind of riff-raff getting ’em these days) in the humanities from what claims to be a top 50 uni. Glowing reference letters from professors keen to make sure their most eccentric student stay put on a distant island where they can enjoy him from a safe distance. I even have a clean police record! (if you’re gonna bump someone off and bury ’em in a pine forest, cover your traces. That’s my motto.) I have a contract for the obligatory pear-reviewed deathly dull monograph as well as other publications.
I’ve applied for a few academic positions here in Taiwan and have had no reply (I’ve applied for a couple more recently, but I’m not holding my breath). Trying to ingratiate myself with the natives, I submitted papers to a number of crappy but allegedly pear-reviewed Taiwanese journals but didn’t even get a rejection email. I applied to 中央研究院 (Academentia Cynica) for their postdoc program, into which I really would’ve loved to be accepted, but didn’t make the reserve list (it wasn’t personal: with the exception – if I remember correctly – of an Indian name or two in Chemistry, there were no successful applicants with non-Chinese names (i.e. presumably they were all Taiwanese).
Taiwan is what it is. I realise that in the name of misguided internationalism, Taiwanese universities are unlikely to allow a foreigner to lecture in Chinese and that, given the English comprehension ability of most Taiwanese university students, a foreign professor in the humanities in Taiwan is therefore above all an ESL teacher. And as an ESL teacher, it’s true, I’m not very competitive. I haven’t taught much ESL and don’t have any ESL qualifications. On these criteria, an experienced Taiwanese or foreign candidate with an ESL-related Masters is objectively much stronger. Not being an American, and not having a PhD from a famous uni like Harvard or Cambridge, might also be factors (but I have no idea what goes through their minds). Of course I could just bugger off and get a job in the West or in China, but for certain reasons I’m stuck here for the time being, alas, like a sad sad stick in the mud.
Is there anything I could do to make myself sexier in the eyes of Taiwanese universities? Are there other foreigners here who have pulled off the feat? Should I enclose nude photos of myself with my applications? A signed cheque? Publish another boring book or two? Or should I just resign myself to working in the booshy barns, although I really don’t want to? I don’t care about money or prestige (not much of that in Taiwanese academia, anyway). I do like kids (but couldn’t eat a whole one). It’s just that I don’t think I’d make an outstanding kindy or primary teacher (loud noises startle me) and as for teaching English to older students – as a polyglot and strictly free-range intellectual chickadee myself, I really dislike classroom language instruction and the dreadful barns in particular. I’d much rather work at 7-11 (I’m a hundred percent serious) but I don’t speak Taiwanese and a Caucasian working at a 7-11… they’d have to call the riot police to control the crowd of gawking onlookers.
(stands on barrel, weeping with emotion, addressing an indifferent crowd: but without the humanities, wouldn’t we all be just that little bit less human?__