I have been a member of this forum now for almost 3 years, as I have now been living in Taiwan since 2010 (well, half the time has been in Japan, but still, it counts). The boards have been full of very useful information that helped me get myself orientated here and have been a great place to lurk to soak up information about the island. One thing I read many times and keep coming back to even now, are the posts on psycho xiaojies (there’s one here: https://www.forumosa.com/taiwan/viewtopic.php?f=92&t=97085 and there’s another one here to get you started: https://www.forumosa.com/taiwan/viewtopic.php?t=107652 ).
When I first read them in 2010, I dismissed them as complete tosh. Sure, I thought, there’s psychotic women everywhere and maybe people have just had a little too much bad luck in Taiwan. At the time, I was living with someone who seemed to be the nicest, sweetest and most amazing person I’d ever been with. We’d gotten engaged to get married and her parents approved, so all was good and I thought that these psycho xiaojies must really be in a minority or just someone’s bad reading of a bad situation.
Before I begin though, warning (!), this is long. The events in here mainly happened a year and half ago, but psycho xiaojies are so psychotic and cruel, that you can still rant about them for such a long time so many months / years later!
But fellow Forumosans, what I’m about to tell you is real, it is completely true and shocked me so much that I could not bring myself to write about it or even really try to confront it in my head for more than a year. Yes, the psycho xiaojie thing happened to me and what I’m attempting to do this post is share my experience so that people thinking of coming over here to Taiwan to be with / meet a Taiwanese girl think twice about it (or more than twice!), companies looking into setting up over here factor it into their thinking and know that this happens so that they do not make the same rash decisions my previous company made and more. In brief, this is a warning about psycho xiaojies, their innate evilness and is written in the hope that people stay the hell clear from them!
So to begin with, I got with a girl in 2010 who was from Taiwan. She was great, appeared really loving, appeared to be highly intelligent, had a great sense of humor, was great looking and we got on really well. Things seemed perfect. As a result of meeting her in Japan (I’m British, not Japanese, BTW), I followed her back over here to Taiwan and ended up staying here, and as much as I hated Taiwan (I got to like Taiwan better in the intervening years, but still it’s not a patch on Japan) we were living together here and looking at having a long and happy future together.
As at the time I worked for a UK company, I had to go back to the UK in January 2011 for a series of meetings and review as to how we were going to develop Asia further. The end result of the meetings was that I was to set up an office in Taiwan or Japan for this company and run it from there. The girl came over to visit for a week (I was there three weeks) and we got engaged, I got the ring, hid it and proposed and everything - we were really happy, we came back to Taiwan together and I set about getting things in place to set up an office in Japan whilst she set about registering and getting things in place to register for a Japanese language school in Tokyo. She was going to quit her job and move over with me and things seemed really perfect… until March 2011 and the Tohoku earthquake happened. I was then given the choice by my UK company to set up an office in Taiwan or Singapore. Now, as much as I was tempted by Singapore, I decided it was too small and would be harder for the girl to get a resident visa in a short space of time, so as much as I hated it at the time, I decided to set up an office in Taiwan, as it was the only option I had that allowed me to do what my company wanted me to do and to allow me and this girl to be together and plan for our future.
Anyway, as she had quit her job, she helped me a lot with the paperwork and applications for setting up an office in Taiwan (as I don’t speak Chinese - my Japanese is fine though). She was really good at it and after the office was finalized, my company employed her for two days a week as a PA for me on a wage much higher than the average Taiwanese would get in a full time job! Even people with masters degrees. Anyway, I digress, as a result of this she was very happy, her family seemed happy and everything was going well.
Indeed it was, we travelled a lot, travelled to Europe to the UK for every Christmas and Spain for every New Year to see her sister and her fiancé in Madrid. And things were great. Things were perfect. For a couple of years things were perfect and even though I didn’t much like being in Taiwan, I can honestly say that those years were the happiest of my life. We did everything together, work, live, bought an SLK and a lovely golden retriever who I miss so much.
Even towards the inevitable end, in 2012 when she came over to visit me on a trip I had to Japan and then we met up back in Taiwan where she’d decided she’d get me the only thing I wanted for my b’day that year - an iPhone 5 that had just been released in Taiwan. She’d arranged everything with the phone company (as we were an active company with lots of calls, specialized internet lines etc. we had a dedicated account manager who helped facilitate this). All I needed to do was go with her to the shop, stamp things where she told me to stamp them and she’d pay for the handset and we’d go. Easy peasy. She was super-effiicent at things like that.
Anyway, things were great over X’mas and New Year in Europe again over 2012 and 2013 and then they were super good too when we got back to Taiwan. I had to go to Japan for work towards the end of January and… that was the end of normal. As it was just before CNY (around the 14th Feb that year), she’d gone down to Tainan to see her family early and… suddenly out of the blue I get an email (and couple of Line messages) saying that it would be difficult to be together any more. Why? No reason given, only that she was with her parents. Oh yes, and her parents run a travel agency and they’d booked our tickets to Europe over X’mas and New Year and as we’d got back in mid-Jan and I was scooting off to Japan, I’d not had time to actually physically go to the bank, set them up as a payee and make a payment. I’d tried over the phone when I was in Japan, but I couldn’t, as Taiwanese banking is so lame. So anyway, I told her at the time if that was the issue (and I honestly thought that it was her parents saying stuff and trying to control her because of this), there was absolutely nothing I could do right then, even though I’d tried, but I would sort it out as soon as I was back in Taiwan. Indeed, the plan was to arrive a few days before CNY and go down to spend it with her family… BUT, she continued saying she didn’t want to see me over CNY and that if I turned up it would be awkward etc. etc., so I decided to stay in Japan a little bit longer. I felt bad I was missing CNY food and stuff, as I’d not taken part in previous years, but at least I could console myself that I was in a country where I am literate and not mute and actually prefer the food a lot more. So I told her that I would go back to Taiwan around the 14th…
…only to be told that if I did come back, she didn’t want to see me at home. So I flew back on the 14th and got a hotel and persuaded her eventually to come out for a ‘talk’ on the Saturday.
We met up in central Taipei and had the ‘talk’ which was mainly her talking at me in a restaurant we went to. And as I had correctly deduced, this was all about the money I hadn’t had time to set up a wire for to her parents. And like I said in the restaurant to her, she (and her parents) were letting this get far too much out of control, making more of a mountain out of a molehill than it should be and I’d sort it on the Tuesday or Wednesday.
After all of that crap on the Saturday, she eventually let me come back to the house (yes, we had a house) on the Monday evening, as I needed to get my bank book anyway. We were together, but she was still talking about it and making a fuss out of nothing. But I felt like things could sort out. I had meetings all of Tuesday, so went to the bank on Wednesday to sort this out. Payee was set up and I was told to come back the following day to make the payment, as my salary wasn’t clearing until Thursday. All good, it would seem.
And then came Thursday. My friends in Taipei had been worried about me and what was going on and, just as we were about to finish work for the day, I told her I was going to see my friends. She flew off the side of the fence screaming and waxing lyrical about ‘not being able to drive in the rain’ (erm… I’d seen her drive in the rain many times before) and that I shouldn’t go and see my friends this week out of all weeks. I reminded her that I’d already resolved the problem and that after going around in circles with her for pretty much five evenings solid, I just needed a breather for a few hours.
So she got a taxi home with the dog and I drove to see my friends. About an hour after meeting them, I got a long winded email calling me ‘irresponsible’ incapable of thinking of her and just not thinking at all. It ended with her saying that she has no choice but to break up because she can’t be with someone irresponsible who ‘drinks all the time’ (yes, if you call all the time once a week, when she actually let me out to see people I know). That completely gutted me, as I felt like I’d completely wasted 5 days trying to fix things with her and everything I’d said had fallen on deaf ears, as she had decided to do this already, probably told to by her parents (long story about them too actually, but that’s for a completely different post). I didn’t drink, even though I’d wanted to, as I had to drive back. But when I did drive back, I was upset and wasn’t really concentrating and hit a concrete bollard in the dark on a back alley I was using as a shortcut.
So the next morning when I got up, I find she’s not there, the dog’s not there and there’s a note on the table telling me to leave immediately because I am totally irresponsible, drove home drunk and caused NT$ 100,000 worth of damage to the car (my car, in terms of registration, but never mind…). I was completely gutted, as it seemed that from the time I went to Japan until the time I’d got back she’d turned from the most amazing, sweetest person I’d ever known in my life, loved completely and couldn’t wait to finally marry to the most evil, two-faced pyscho woman on the planet.
Of course I left, I wanted to let her stew for a few days. But here’s where it gets super-psycho.
On the Monday evening after all of this, after she had not been in the office all day, I got a call from the head office in the UK. It was the company’s chairman and CEO both having a massive go at me, insinuating I had been doing a lot of wrong things and that I had one day to pull together a spreadsheet and power point to show them why we should stay operational in Taiwan. All of this going on at the same time as this girl had kicked me out and I’d arranged to go with the police (as I was worried she’d gone completely psycho xiaojie after reading stuff here) to get a suitcase of my stuff and my own personal laptop.
Notwithstanding all that stuff going on, the next day after I’d sent all this stuff (after working on it all night) the chairman and CEO gave me the option to either resign or come back and work on the UK, taking a final written warning based on what they’d heard about my behavior. Now, given that pretty much all my life since 18 has been in Asia and I’d just had these problems with the missus that I wanted to fix, the only realistic option I had was to resign. After all, they were not very specific about what this ‘behavior’ was…
…and it was the next day that I found out. I got a bunch of emails sent through to my account once a week (work account) from people temping and working in the office just to check whether they were using work email mainly for work or for personal stuff. And one of the emails came through from her - this is ahead of a telephone meeting she had on Friday with my line manager, the chairman and the CEO. And this is what she wrote:
- She cannot come into the office any more because she is scared of me because I am acting out of character
- One big way I had acted out of character was driving home drunk, crashing, damaging the car and injuring 2 people on mopeds
- Since I had been back from Japan, I had tried to kill her twice
- I now owed the company a lot of money because I’d changed my mobile account from a personal account to a company account
- I owed her and her family a lot of money because they had been supporting things in Taiwan
and - They really ought to get me some psychiatric help
Right… Well, if I’d been driving home drunk and injured two moped riders, where is her evidence, why have I never been arrested and erm… more importantly, how come I was not hauled out of the car at two separate police drunk-drive roadblocks? How did I try to kill her when I was not there most of the time and would never harm her? How do I owe her and her parents money when I’d paid her parents for the ticket and that was the only money outstanding? And how did I know I was changing my mobile account to a company account - I don’t speak / read Chinese and she set it up as a ‘birthday present’ so was in control the whole time? So, did she set it up on purpose like that? And also, why do I need psychiatric help?? I’m not the psycho here!!!
Anyway, needless to say, this was a UK company I was working for and with her being a woman (and a co-worker as well as my fiancee) they took her seriously and believed everything. Even though they accused me of some of these things, they refused to listen to any thing I had to say about it, as I’d already chosen to resign (like I said, mainly so I could stay over here and try to fix things with her). They also accused ME of refusing to follow company protocol and not getting permission to change the mobile account to a company account (one of the reasons for a final written warning apparently). And resigning was a hard thing to do, as I’d no savings, I’d spent everything on her and me (and the dog) and the agreement we had was that she saved her salary as our joint savings, if I was responsible for everything from household bills to petrol for the car, to our food, to the dog’s vet bills etc. etc. So by resigning and having to pay my salary away onto hotel bills, I was very soon, after a month, in a situation where I had absolutely no money at all.
Luckily I was able to escape back to Japan and grew my business from there (I set up my own business), but actual work was suffering because I still wanted to know why things had ended the way they did, I’d been given no reason, and why she had to tell all of those lies to my old company. On top of this, she still had more than half of my clothes, all my books / CDs / DVDs, my iMac, my flat screen TVs, a few more electronic things, my blood pressure monitor (and data on the iMac - I have high blood pressure and need to monitor it constantly), my dog and of course my car. I’ve been contacting her ever since just before going to Japan to get my things, I’ve offered to have them shipped to me in Japan if she will allow someone or a company to go pick them up, I’ve since been back in Taiwan and offered to do it myself and… she will not answer emails, phone calls, SMS messages, Line messages or anything. Even though she has most of my clothes and most of my things. I’ve tried going to the police about it, but they said it’s a civil matter and I can’t accuse her of theft (surely I can, it’s been over a year and she’s not responding to anything I’ve sent her). I want my stuff back and it will be really great to get back, but more than anything else, I really miss my dog.
Sometimes I’m really angry with her for what she’s done, sometimes I feel sorry for her because of what she’s done and how that’s messed things up for her too, sometimes I absolutely hate her, sometimes I absolutely love her. And that’s the problem, by being psychotic like this, she’s completely messed me up. It never normally takes a year and a half to pick the pieces up and move on, but because she’s done so much to mess things up, because she’s left me being a complete penniless nobody, going up to two weeks at a time without eating (I’ve lost 28 kgs since all this happened), practically stuck in the ether in Taiwan, that’s what’s happened to me. I don’t even know if getting all my things back or even fixing things with her would ever fix it, that’s too much damage I think to take. It’s taken me from Feb / March 2013 just to be able to write about it.
So going back to the title of this post, PSYCHO XIAOJIES ARE REAL!!! I’ve seen the most loving, amazing girl I’ve ever known turn into one practically overnight. They completely mess with your head, rip your heart out and leave you bleeding and messed up by the side of the road and still blame you for making a mess, even though they pulled your heart out. So, from my history and SO MANY people I’ve spoken to here in Taiwan, if you’re with a TW girl now and she’s super cute, super lovely and you’re not in Taiwan, take my advice, don’t move back with her to Taiwan, as she will mutate into a Pyscho Xiaojie. If you’re in TW with a TW girl now, get the hell away from her now before she does mess you up. There are plenty of nice girls a short plane ride away in Japan, Korea or even mainland China!
And I think it’s true, sadly, that most Taiwanese girls are like this. Since I’ve been back in Taiwan this time, a female friend of mine (who is Japanese) went to have a chat with one of her female friends (who is Taiwanese) to try to figure out what was / is going on and to see if she can find a way to help. But from talking (without mentioning specific names) about what had happened to her TW friend, she was left shocked and speechless by what her TW friend said. The response? Apparently what my psycho xiaojie ex did was exactly the right thing to do. When splitting up, you should always damage the other party as much as possible and if that means that they lose their possessions, place to live and job, then that’s their problem. After all, you need to make sure that you get what you can from them to make yourself into more of a princess for the next person. So said this TW woman (according to my JP friend who has absolutely no reason to lie).
And if you’re a company looking to set up an office or operations in Taiwan? Then I really recommend you take on board what I’ve written here, as well as reading up on all the other threads dealing with psycho xiaojies, as this is something that is highly likely to affect employees you send over here, especially if they’re single (or if they’re with a Taiwanese girl already). The girl will probably lie to you, do things in the office / outside the office (read the other threads on this!) to try to get you to fire your employee. It’s happened to me and so many other people. Please read all of this and take it into consideration before setting up here. There are plenty of great places in Asia to set up an office. Singapore has great tax breaks for office set up, Japan and South Korea both have blisteringly fast internet access, Hong Kong is more international than either the mainland or Taiwan and is a great place to be a bridge into the mainland. And, if you’ve already set up in Taiwan, then please read this and bear it in mind, along with other posts about this. As I can probably guarantee that if some girl is having a rant / being a psycho about things and she’s Taiwanese and she’s in Taiwan, 9.99 times out of 10 she’ll be just being a psycho xiaojie and you should just call security or the police.
Sorry that this has been so long people, but I think that it’s very important to get this message out there as sooner or later these Psycho Xiaojies are going to completely ruin the image of Taiwan everywhere and ruin a lot more innocent lives. And because nothing is being done about them by society in Taiwan, then as far as I’m concerned, tough poo poo for Taiwan, you should’ve sorted it! As a result of this, I’m getting on a plane back to Japan as soon as I’ve got my things back, whenever that is, and never coming back to this hellhole, that probably wouldn’t be such a hellhole if psycho xiaojies didn’t exist. I’m pretty sure I’ll find someone much better in Japan - indeed, my experiences there for 20 years have been much better with the fairer sex there than here - avoid TW girls at all costs people, they should come with a health warning!!
